damage your, your hooligans-your barbarians-have done?” the commandant snarled.
“Not to the pfennig, sir,” Lemp answered. “I do know”-expecting the summons, he’d made a point of ascertaining-“they weren’t the only U-boat’s crew in the scuffle. Are you calling in the other skippers, too?”
“Scuffle? Sweet Jesus Christ! It was about three centimeters this side of an insurrection! And never mind the other skippers. I’m talking to you.” But Eichenlaub suddenly didn’t sound so self-righteous. Lemp knew he’d made a shrewd guess.
“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice mild as boiled milk.
Eichenlaub told him he was a bad boy, and that he commanded a pack of savages. Lemp nodded, not without pride. The commandant fretted and fumed till he got it out of his system. Lemp knew it wouldn’t come to anything in the end. He saluted and left. As far as he was concerned, the unhappy sailors had made his point for him better than he could have done himself.
“It’s a boy!” Chaim Weinberg passed out cigars-harsh, twisted, coal-black cheroots, which were what he could get-to the Abe Lincolns in the trenches northwest of Madrid. The news had just come up from the city. He swigged from a flask of brandy, too, and offered it to his buddies along with the stogies.
“What are you gonna name the little bastard?” Mike Carroll asked.
“He’s no bastard. We did it by the numbers, La Martellita and me,” Chaim said.
“If you didn’t do it by the numbers, you wouldn’t’ve knocked her up,” Mike said. “And I don’t care if you and her did tie the knot. Any kid of yours is bound to be a bastard, right?”
“Ahh, your mother,” Chaim growled, and started on down the trench. He would have tried to murder a lot of guys who said anything like that. But he and Mike had been in Spain together a hell of a long time. If anybody’d earned the right to razz him, Carroll was the guy.
“Hey, wait a second!” he called after Chaim. “What are you gonna name him?”
“Carlos Federico Weinberg,” Chaim answered. “Isn’t that the goddamnedest handle you ever heard? His mother wanted to name him for Marx and Engels, and how could I tell her no?”
“Wouldn’t be easy,” Mike agreed. Unspoken in the air between them floated the thought that you’d probably get purged if you tried to tell a Party functionary she couldn’t name her son for Communism’s founding fathers. Carroll did ask, “What would you have called it if it was a girl?”
“Carla Federica.” Chaim spread his hands, as if to say What can you do? When La Martellita made up her mind, it was by God made up. Nothing this side of the end of the world would make her change it-and maybe not that, either.
“Well, mazel tov,” Mike said. Where did he pick up the Yiddish? Probably from Chaim. He found one more question before his buddy went away. “How come you don’t look happier, man?”
“Oh, I’m happy. I just didn’t tell my face about it.” As if to prove as much, Chaim took a big gulp from the flask. Then he got out of there in a hurry, before Mike could ask him anything else he didn’t want to answer.
La Martellita hadn’t married him because she loved him. No matter how drunk he got, he knew better than that. She’d married him so her kid would have a name-a curiously Catholic notion in a staunch Red, but there you were. And here Chaim was. Carlos Federico Weinberg had his name, all right.
Which meant… what? Chaim knew too goddamn well what it meant. It meant La Martellita didn’t need him for anything at all any more. Divorce had been next to impossible in pre-Republican Spain. In the parts of the country Marshal Sanjurjo ruled, it still was. In the Republic, it was easy as pie.
So Chaim figured the next piece of news he got from Madrid would be that La Martellita was dropping him like a live grenade. If she hadn’t got so drunk she needed him to get her back to her flat, if she hadn’t been so drunk she didn’t say no when things went on from there…
Ah, c’mon, you shlemiel. You knew this wasn’t gonna have a Hollywood ending even while you were shtupping her. Chaim nodded. Yeah, he’d known, all right. He just hadn’t given a rat’s ass. And he couldn’t think of any man who would have when he poised himself between her open legs, either.
So this is what you bought, dumbfuck. He nodded again, and answered his scolding self: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but now I’m doing the paying, goddammit.
Well off to the left, an enormous report rang out. Chaim nodded again, this time in mere recognition: that was the crazy Czech who went sniping with his antitank rifle. He was a pretty good guy, which didn’t mean he wasn’t meshuggeh. You had to be nuts to lug that huge, heavy hunk of almost-artillery across half of Europe. All the same, Chaim hoped he’d hit whatever he was aiming at. He also hoped the Fascist on the receiving end was at least a major.
The bastard must have been, and that Czech must have blown his reactionary head off, too. The Nationalists didn’t get their knickers in such a twist when a sniper exterminated one of their ordinary assholes. Machine guns sprayed sudden death toward the Republican positions. A moment later, Sanjurjo’s big guns started shelling the Republican trenches. The Fascists wanted payback, and they wanted it bad.
Chaim didn’t want to be part of the payback. He dove into a scrape someone had dug in the forward wall of the trench. It wasn’t a proper bombproof, but it was better than nothing. If a 105 came down right on top of it… Chaim made himself not think about that. Getting buried alive wasn’t the way he wanted to cash in his chips.
If the Nationalists followed up the shelling with an infantry attack, he was in more trouble than he knew what to do with. He didn’t have his rifle with him. He had the brandy and cigars instead. Would one of Sanjurjo’s men take a cigar in exchange for not bayoneting him? They didn’t make deals like that, sad to say.
But the Nationalists would have taken casualties in an infantry attack. They didn’t want that. They wanted to dish them out so they could avenge whichever officer the Czech had potted with his honking big rifle.
They got what they wanted, too. Wounded Abe Lincolns screamed and moaned. Some were Americans, some the Spaniards who filled out the ranks of all the International Brigades these days. All wounded men sounded pretty much the same, regardless of country or politics.
In a rational world, something like that would convince people all men were brothers. They wouldn’t try to kill one another any more. But who ever said the world was rational? And even being brothers might not make men like each other any better. Look what Cain did to Abel, after all.
Chaim shook his head. The Bible was just another book of myths and superstitions. There never were any such people as Cain and Abel. He had no trouble believing that with the top part of his mind. The part with roots down to the core of him, the part that wasn’t Marxist-Leninist, had other ideas.
If La Martellita heard about this bombardment, would she hope a shell killed him? Then she wouldn’t have to go through the paperwork of divorcing him. She could get on with her life as the widow of a heroic soldier. She could milk it for all it was worth.
After a moment, Chaim shook his head. His ladylove was no hypocrite. If she wanted him dead, she’d come right out and tell him so. She might do him in herself.
No, she just wanted to be rid of him. He hated that. And he hated the certain knowledge that he couldn’t do anything about it even more.
Almost everybody went through life wishing he could get what he most wanted. From the moment Chaim set eyes on La Martellita, she was what he most wanted. He’d got her, too, even if she was so smashed the first time he did that she hardly knew he was doing it.
And he’d made the all too common discovery that getting exactly what you wanted could hurt even worse than mooning after it forever. As long as you kept on mooning after it, you always thought it was perfect. Once you got it, you were much too likely to discover what a jerk you were for wanting it to begin with.
Beautiful women were there to be wanted, of course. To men, they often seemed to be there for no other reason. But how many of the men who actually got one stayed happy afterwards? Not many, unless Chaim missed his guess. He knew too well he wasn’t.
What were you supposed to do? Turn into a queer? Even if you could, wouldn’t you get into the same kind of stew about gorgeous guys? Besides, he wasn’t a queer. He liked women. He liked the beautiful kind better than the homely ones, too. He didn’t know anybody who didn’t. You couldn’t win. You didn’t have a chance.
The Czech with the antitank rifle fired again. Some Fascist shithead probably discovered he didn’t have a chance. Whether he laid beautiful women or homely ones, he’d be laid out now. Hasta la vista, fucker, Chaim thought.
No barrage followed. Maybe this time the sniper just blew out a corporal’s insides. If ever a movement prided itself on class consciousness, it was Sanjurjo’s, but for all the wrong reasons. Or maybe the Czech missed. Stranger
