"You got him!" the rear gunner said enthusiastically. "He's burning like billy-be-damned! It's easy-as long as there aren't any enemy fighters around, anyway."
"Ja." That reminded Hans-Ulrich to look around once more to make sure he had no unwelcome company. He didn't see any. Since he didn't, he gave the dive bomber more throttle and climbed up into the sky. "Let's do it again."
"Warum denn nicht?" Dieselhorst said. Rudel couldn't think of any reason why not. Down roared the Stuka. He picked his target. Muzzle flashes on the ground meant the Tommies were shooting at him, too. They always did that. The dive-bomber's engine was as well armored as the cockpit. Small-arms fire was unlikely to hurt the plane.
Two 37mm cannon, on the other hand… Blam! The Stuka staggered in the air. He clawed for altitude. "How about it, Albert?"
"You killed another one! Jesus Christ, sir, this is fun!"
Rudel wouldn't have taken the Lord's name in vain. Well, he hoped he wouldn't have. He'd been known to slip in combat… and every now and then when he wasn't in combat, too. He hoped God would forgive him, although his father's stern Lutheran deity was longer on retribution than forgiveness.
And Dieselhorst proved right yet again. This was not only easy, it was fun. The enemy panzers couldn't hide, and they were even slower running away from him than he would have been trying to flee a Spitfire. Dive… Blam!… Climb… Dive… Blam!… Climb… Fish in a barrel…
After they'd smashed half a dozen machines, the rear gunner said, "Sir, maybe we'd better get back. If they come after us in the air… Mm, that's not my notion of fun."
"Mine, either," Hans-Ulrich admitted. He wanted to keep right on doing what he was doing. No matter what he wanted, pretty soon the Tommies or the French would scramble fighters. Best not to stick around till that happened. And he could report that the twin cannon worked-worked even better than he'd hoped they would, in fact.
Colonel Steinbrenner would be pleased. He'd probably be astonished, too. But so what? Hans-Ulrich was more than a little astonished himself. No more climbs and swoops, not now. Whistling in the cockpit, he flew off toward the northeast. CHURCH BELLS PEALED in Munster, celebrating the Admiral Scheer's safe return to Kiel. Protestant, Catholic-it made no difference to the authorities. They wanted celebration. What the Nazis wanted, they ordered. What they ordered, they got. So it seemed to Sarah Goldman, anyhow.
The maddening thing was, most of the time the Nazis had little more use for pious Christians than they did for Jews. Believers had loyalties outside of the all-holy State, and the brownshirts and their grim, clever bosses hated that. Most Protestant ministers were so-called German Christians these days: Christians who leaned toward the Reich first, and only afterwards toward God. Catholics still looked to the Pope, but Pius was a long way off, the local Gauleiter very close.
Equally maddening was that her own family, like most Jews in Munster and throughout Germany, would have celebrated the Panzerschiff's return, too, if only the Nazis had let them. Sarah knew her father would have. In spite of everything, he still insisted he was a German as well as a Jew.
Much good that did him, or any other Jew in the Reich. He wore the yellow Star of David on his ever more shabby clothes when he went out to his work gang every morning. He hadn't said any of the goyim in the gang gave him trouble on account of it. Just because he hadn't said it didn't mean it hadn't happened, though. Sarah knew Samuel Goldman kept all kinds of things to himself. She knew she didn't know all of them. By the very nature of that kind of conundrum, she couldn't, could she?
Trying not to borrow trouble-she didn't have enough already?-she helped her mother fix supper. It wasn't exciting: boiled potatoes and something the label on the package insisted was cheese. If the label hadn't insisted, Sarah would have guessed it was half-dried library paste. You could eat it. Sarah had, many times. It tasted more like paste than cheese, too. Her mother was a good cook, much better than Sarah was herself. Even Hanna Goldman couldn't make the nasty ersatz appetizing.
"I think the rations are getting worse," Sarah said as she cut a potato into quarters so it would boil faster.
"How can you tell?" her mother asked. That kind of tart comeback usually emerged from her father's mouth. When her mother said such things, the rations really were going to the dogs… except dogs wouldn't want to eat them, either.
But Sarah went on, "They really are, Mother. Not just for Jews, either. For everybody. Haven't you heard the Hausfraus complaining in the shops?"
Her mother only sniffed. "Some people don't know when they're well off." If that wasn't bound to be so, Sarah didn't know what would be.
Her father came in then. He looked exhausted-clearing bomb damage and repairing roads didn't come easy for a middle-aged professor of ancient history. But he also looked pleased with himself, which didn't happen every day. With the air of a magician pulling a coin from a spectator's ear, he reached under his coat and displayed a small package wrapped in stained butcher paper. "Look what I found," he said. It wasn't as dramatic as Ta-da!, but it would do.
"What is it?" Mother exclaimed. She tore the paper open. At first, Sarah thought it was a chicken. Then she realized it wasn't. "Oh! A rabbit!" her mother said.
Rabbits weren't kosher. They were cute, at least when they had their fur on. Sarah cared about none of that. Spit filled her mouth. "Hassenpfeffer!" she said.
"The guy who had it said it was a rabbit," Samuel Goldman said. "It may meow when you stick a fork in it, though. How fussy are you? I ate all kinds of things in the trenches, and times are pretty hard now, too."
He was still proud of his service in the Kaiser's army. And the wound he'd got and the Iron Cross he'd won meant the Goldmans had it better than most Jews in Munster-not much better, but a little. Sarah didn't need long to give him an answer: "Right now, I'd eat it even if I thought it was a rat."
"Me, too," her mother said.
"We didn't eat those," Father said. "We knew they ate us when they got the chance. Damned fat hateful things." He shuddered.
It wasn't hassenpfeffer Sarah's mother made. She cut up the rabbit and put it into the boiling water with the potatoes. The less fuel they used, the less trouble they would land in. The smell of cooking meat made Sarah even hungrier than she already was. She hadn't thought she could get hungrier, which only showed how little she knew. When was the last time the Goldmans ate meat? She couldn't remember. Some sausage earlier in the year, she thought.
"What did you pay for the rabbit?" Mother asked Father.
"Isn't it a nice day today? Sunshine all day long," he answered.
She sent him a look, but asked no more inconvenient questions. She did turn to Sarah, saying, "Why don't you put the shredded cheese in the icebox? As long as we've got the rabbit to go with the potatoes, we won't need it tonight."
"Sure." Sarah was glad to do that. The less she had to do with the horrible cheese, the happier she'd be. She would have liked to toss it in the trash instead of putting it in the icebox. But rabbits didn't fall out of the sky every day. Too bad! she thought. If another rabbit didn't appear tomorrow, they would need the cheese again. Wanting it was another story.
"That was good," Samuel Goldman said when supper was over. From somewhere, he'd got himself a small leather tobacco pouch. He rolled himself a cigarette with casual aplomb. Sarah wondered where the tobacco came from. Right after they'd made Jews wear the yellow star, the Nazis had cut off the tobacco ration for them: one more way to make life unbearable. Was her father reduced to scrounging butts on the sidewalk and in the gutter? The idea was enough to make angry tears sting Sarah's eyes. Father was the very image of bourgeois dignity. He had to be dying inside whenever he bent to grab a dog-end. That evidently didn't stop him from doing it, though. Along with the smell, which she didn't like, all of a sudden Sarah had a new reason for being glad she didn't use tobacco.