once snow started coming down. They were soft pussies, the Germans. All the good weather in Western Europe spoiled them rotten.
As far as Ivan was concerned, the Ukraine had pretty easy winters. It got a hell of a lot colder and snowed a hell of a lot more farther north. But even the weather here was plenty to screw up the Fascist bastards. Their tanks didn’t want to run. Sometimes even their gun oil froze up.
When you killed a guy who couldn’t shoot back because the bolt on his Mauser was stuck tight, you had to feel a little sorry for him. But you blew his head off anyway, and you were a jackass if you felt more than a little sorry while you did it. What was he doing hundreds of kilometers inside your country except trying to murder you and fuck your sister and steal everything you ever had or would have? Ivan was a jackass all kinds of ways-he even recognized some of them-but he wasn’t a pitying jackass.
West of Kiev, the German and Soviet positions looked more like interlaced fingers than anything resembling a line. A Stavka officer who planned and proposed dispositions like those would have got sent to the gulag or a punishment battalion in nothing flat. None of this had been planned; like a lot of war, it just happened. The Russians had gone ahead where they could. The Germans hung on to villages, and to the roads that let them keep the villages supplied.
To complicate things even more, Ukrainian bandits in the woods bushwhacked Russians and Germans almost impartially. A lot of them would have been pro-Nazi if only the Nazis gave them the chance. But the Germans liked Ukrainians no better than they liked Russians. More often than not, they couldn’t even tell them apart, or didn’t bother trying. So the bandits took potshots at them, too.
One of the reasons so many of the bandits would have gone over to the German side if only the Germans wanted them was that they hated Jews even more than most Russians did. Kuchkov had no great love for Zhids himself. Guys like Avram Davidov, though, got more useful in this kind of country. Avram knew what to be nervous about. The short answer was, everything. And when the short answer was everything, the long answer didn’t matter.
The Ukrainian nationalists’ big disadvantage was that they didn’t have an actual country on their side. No factories made rifles and mortars and hand grenades just for them. No trains and trucks made sure weapons reached them in-literally-carload lots. They had to make do with hunting rifles and whatever they could steal from the Germans and Russians.
On the other hand, they were desperately in earnest. The only reason most of the Red Army men and their foes in Feldgrau wore their country’s uniform was that they would have got it in the neck if they’d tried to say no to the fat sons of bitches who’d conscripted them. The bandits went out to fight because they felt like fighting. They didn’t have a country on their side, but they sure wanted to. It made a difference.
Right now, Ivan and his men crouched in amongst some trees that wanted to be a proper forest but didn’t quite know how. Avram’s eyes flicked across a field to some more trees that might have been an orchard before Stalin started tearing the Ukraine a new asshole but had plainly stood forgotten ever since. The little Jew didn’t point; the Red Army men’s cover wasn’t all that great.
“ Somebody’s in there, Comrade Sergeant.” Davidov sounded as spooked as a guy wandering the corridors of a haunted castle in some bad horror film.
“German cunts?” Kuchkov asked. That was his first guess because his officers said there were supposed to be Nazis around here somewhere. He let them do his thinking for him. He knew he wasn’t real good at it himself.
Unhappily, Avram shook his head. “I think they’re Banderists.” He was hardly ever cheerful. Now he looked and sounded even gloomier than usual. Stepan Bandera was the bandit chief in charge of most-not all, but most-of the jerks who wanted to fly the gold-and-blue flag, stamp their stupid trident on everything that didn’t move, and go around grunting in their almost-Russian language.
“Fuck,” Kuchkov said. “You sure?”
“Two or three of them showed themselves there for a few seconds.” Davidov still didn’t point. He did add what he plainly thought was a clincher: “One of ’em was wearing a cloth cap.”
“Fuck,” Kuchkov repeated. Real soldiers would wear helmets, or maybe service caps or berets. Only a yokel off a farm would dress like a yokel off a farm. Ivan went on, “We don’t need this extra fucking shit, you know?”
“Sorry, Comrade Sergeant.” Sasha sounded as if he meant it. He was like anybody else: getting shot or ripped to pieces by artillery fire didn’t appeal to him one hell of a lot. After a moment, he asked, “What shall we do?”
Ivan only grunted. He had no idea how many Ukrainians were lurking over there. He didn’t want to have to attack them across open ground. If they had a machine gun, or maybe even if they didn’t, they could murder every one of the men who’d come at them.
He grunted again. Then he picked up a branch not quite as long as he was and tied his snow smock to it by the arms: not much of a flag of truce, but he had to hope it would do. “I’ll parley with the bitches,” he said. “If they don’t turn me loose, or if anything else gets fucked up, send somebody back to regimental artillery and have ’em blast the living shit out of those trees. Got it?”
The Jew nodded. If anybody in this section could be counted on to take care of something like that, he was the guy. Waving the improvised white flag, Ivan started across the field toward the forgotten orchard. It was a long, slow, lonely walk. They could kill him if they wanted to. No-they wanted to kill him, and they could. It wasn’t the same thing.
After a while, a shout came from the leafless fruit trees: “Hold it right there, you cocksucking Red!”
“Ah, fuck your mother. You haven’t got a cock big enough to suck,” Ivan answered without much rancor. But he did stop.
“You’ve got some nerve, talking like that out in the open.” The Ukrainian in the orchard made enough of an effort to speak Russian that Kuchkov could follow him well enough. “What do you want?”
“My guys have a radio.” Ivan lied without compunction. “All we have to do is call, and the big guns’ll fuck your position over. If you cunts clear out peaceable-like, we won’t call. I’ll give you half an hour.”
“Why should I believe a guy who licks Stalin’s balls?” The Ukrainian was almost as foul-mouthed as Kuchkov himself.
“ ’Cause I’m standing here, that’s why,” Kuchkov answered. “You think I’d let you shoot my dick off for nothing better’n bullshit?”
“With a Russian, who the hell knows what you’d be dumb enough to do?” the bandits’ spokesman said darkly. Ivan stood out there in the cold wind. He’d figured he would have to wait. The bandit couldn’t just give orders, the way a proper sergeant could. He had to talk his buddies into doing shit.
Ivan made as if to look at a watch he wasn’t wearing. “Twenty-eight minutes now,” he called. “Don’t sit there jerking off. Get your nuts in gear.”
He waited some more, occasionally checking that nonexistent wristwatch. After a while, the Ukrainian said, “All right. Keep your old galoshes on. We’re leaving.” Ivan chuckled. Old galoshes was Russian slang-not quite mat, but close-for a used rubber. Hearing it made him think the bandit meant what he said.
When Ivan did wave his section forward, only half his men came out of their positions. If that wasn’t Avram’s doing, he would have been amazed. You always wanted somebody in reserve. They occupied the orchard with no trouble-the bandits really had gone away. Kuchkov swigged vodka and lit a papiros to celebrate. A bloodless victory was the best kind.
Chapter 26
Like the Goldmans, the Brucks had a radio set. If anything, they listened to it more than Sarah’s mother and father did. Books meant less to them than they did to the Goldmans. Isidor and his folks used the radio to fill in the spaces where the Goldmans would have been reading.
Which would have been all right, if Dr. Goebbels weren’t the fellow giving the orders about what went out over the airwaves. Oh, not even Hitler’s club-footed propaganda boss could screw up everything. Sarah had no problems with Handel and Bach and Beethoven. They didn’t belong to the Nazis alone. They were part of every halfway cultured person’s baggage.
Wagner… Wagner was more complicated. Sarah had been a girl in the days back before the Fuhrer came to
