that.
He woke the next morning with a headache that pounded behind his eyes like a piledriver. Strong tea did next to nothing to fix it. One more mug of beer helped some. The headache dulled, even if it didn’t disappear. Shouting at conscript privates let him work off more of his discomfort. He wasn’t especially proud to remember that the next day, but consoled himself with the thought that he hadn’t slugged anybody.
Odds were Sergeant Hirabayashi wouldn’t have been so fussy. Noncoms like Hirabayashi would have led Japanese troops into action in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Back in samurai days, men like him would have been loyal retainers to their overlords, even if they wouldn’t have worn collar tabs back then.
If I stay in the Army as long as he has, will I end up like that? Fujita wondered. He didn’t want to be a career noncom. He wanted to go back to the family farm and spend the rest of his days there. If he never saw another rifle or another porcelain bomb casing full of germs, that suited him fine.
No matter what he wanted, though, the Army wouldn’t turn him loose till the war ended, if it ever ended. And even after he escaped its clutches, he sometimes wondered uneasily how he would fit down on the farm. He wasn’t the person he had been before conscription got him. He was harder, tougher, less patient. He’d seen more of the world than he’d even imagined while he was still a civilian. He didn’t like a lot of what he’d seen, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, his horizons had broadened. A farm off in the middle of nowhere was likely to seem a farm off in the middle of nowhere, not an unquestioned home for the rest of his life.
He didn’t know what he could do about that. No, actually he did know; he couldn’t do anything about it. Now that he’d seen the wider world, he couldn’t very well forget about it, even if he wished he could.
His father had carried a rifle in the Russo-Japanese War. Had he felt some of the same thing after he came home again? If he had, he’d managed to stifle it. Or maybe he’d just never talked about it with his family. He must have realized they wouldn’t understand.
I do now, Fujita thought. Young men all over Japan would understand after the war. The country would be different then, because they’d changed. How it would be different, Fujita wasn’t sure. But it would be.
Of course, not all of Japan’s young men in uniform would go home again. Fujita wasn’t thinking about the ones who would die in battle. Their spirits would return to the Home Islands, to live forever at the Yasukuni Shrine. But, after the war was done, how many soldiers would Japan need to protect her conquests in China and Russia and the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia and the East Indies?
Did Japan have that many soldiers? Could she maintain them without ruining herself? Fujita was tempted to laugh at himself. How could he know, when he was just an ignorant peasant bumped up to sergeant? He was surprised even the question had occurred to him.
Then he wondered if it had occurred to the people who were supposed to worry about such things. That, though, was another kind of question altogether.
Sarah Bruck soon settled into the routine of marriage and of bakery work. If not much time seemed available for romance, well, she was usually too busy to miss it. And romance during wartime, at least for a Jew in the Reich, was a pallid, harried thing to begin with.
She did eat better than she had when she was living with her parents. But, when she wasn’t too tired, she missed the talk at their house. All the Brucks ever talked about was baking. Sarah treasured the weekend visits she and Isidor made. She was glad they intrigued her husband, too. He sensed a wider, deeper world there than the one he was used to at home.
She didn’t treasure the air raids. As nights got longer, the RAF came over Germany more and more often. Munster, in the far northwest near the Dutch border, took more than its share of pounding: it lay within easy range of England, and bombers didn’t need to fly through French airspace to reach it. Sarah could have done without the honor.
Fear iced through her every time the sirens’ screams jerked her headlong out of sleep. The Brucks had no proper shelter to go to, no more than her parents or any other German Jews did. They-and Sarah-huddled downstairs, between their shop counter and the ovens. That gave them some protection if a bomb hit above them. If one blew up in the street outside, though… She resolutely refused to worry about that. If it happened, odds were she’d be too dead to do any more worrying, anyhow.
Her father gave forth with a gravedigger’s good cheer when she and Isidor visited after a raid. “Here for a while I thought they were going to throw me off the labor gang for lack of work,” Samuel Goldman said, his eyes twinkling even though he had dark bags under them. “But we’ve had plenty to do lately.”
“I’ll bet you have!” Sarah exclaimed. “It’s been terrible.”
“An awful lot of houses knocked to smithereens,” Isidor agreed.
“Well, so there are.” Sarah’s father didn’t sound so cheery when he said that. He paused to light a cigarette. For a moment, Sarah took that for granted-but only for a moment. He didn’t roll the smoke himself, with newspaper for a wrapper and tobacco scrounged from other people’s dog-ends. No: this one was machine-made, whole and new. Seeing her stare, he nodded. “We clear the wreckage, you know. Whatever we find that we can carry away, we keep. I’m not what you’d call proud of it, but I do it just like everybody else.”
“Good for you!” Isidor answered before Sarah could. “If that’s the only choice you’ve got, you have to take it.”
“That’s what I tell myself.” Samuel Goldman nodded again. “I scavenged the same way in the trenches when we went forward. The French and the Tommies always had so much more than we did. We ate better after every advance. Mother and I are eating a little better now, too. But it feels different when you’re scavenging from the neighbors, not the enemy.”
“What else can you do?” Sarah asked sympathetically.
“I could do nothing. Then we’d starve. This is better-I suppose.” Father’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He looked up toward the ceiling, or maybe toward whatever lay a mile beyond the moon, as he continued, “A lot of the time, we’re the ones who pull the bodies out of the rubble, too. I didn’t mind bodies much, you know, when they wore horizon-blue or khaki. I even got used to bodies in Feldgrau. Lord knows we saw enough of them. But bodies in pajamas or nightgowns? That’s a lot harder.”
Sarah and Isidor looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to know what to say to that. At last, Sarah asked, “Have you… found anyone you know? Uh, I guess I mean knew?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “You remember Friedrich Lauterbach?”
“Sure. He studied under you. He’s in the Wehrmacht now, isn’t he?” Sarah left it there. Had the world gone down a different path, she might have been more likely to marry him than the husband she had now. He’d stayed decent even after the Nazis took over, getting Father money for writing articles that would see print under his byline rather than a Jew’s. Sarah hoped he hadn’t stopped anything.
Her father nodded. “That’s the fellow. His older brother was a doctor here. Was.” He repeated the past tense. Something in the way his jaw set made Sarah fight shy of asking just what had happened to the luckless Dr. Lauterbach.
Isidor yawned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ll stay very late,” he said. “You have air raids two or three days in a row, you get so sleepy you can’t see straight.”
“That’s the truth!” Sarah’s mother exclaimed; she hadn’t had much to say till then. “And the horrible ersatz coffee and tea you can get nowadays don’t have any kick in them at all.” Everybody nodded at that. People grumbled about it all the time.
“They make pills for pilots and other people who’ve got to stay awake,” Father said. “Not the stuff that goes into coffee, but the real strong stuff, benzedrine and the like. Plenty of times I’ve wished I could get my hands on some of those. I could use them, believe me.”
“Who couldn’t?” Isidor said. “Dr. What’s-his-name-Lauterbach-didn’t have any at his house?”
“If he did, somebody else beat me to them. What can you do?” Samuel Goldman spread his hands. Sarah remembered when they were soft and smooth and impeccably manicured, with only a writer’s callus on one middle finger. Now they were scarred and battered, with filthy nails and with hard yellowed ridges across the palms. Well, her own hands were a lot harder than they had been, too.
She and Isidor got back to the flat over the bakery well before curfew. In lieu of benzedrine pills, they went to bed early. Sarah thought she could sleep the clock around if she got the chance. Tired by bad food and nighttime air raids, she wanted to hibernate like a dormouse.
She didn’t get the chance that night. The RAF came over again, a little before midnight. The sirens wailed like
