after her, she hasn’t given you a tumble, has she?”
“I don’t have to put up with this-this Quatsch,” Rudel said with such dignity as he could muster. Dieselhorst’s laughter pursued him like antiaircraft fire.
He did have it bad. When his rear gunner wasn’t teasing him, he knew that for himself. Which didn’t stop him from going into Bialystok to find out if Sofia would give herself to him this time around.
“You again!” she said in mock surprise when he walked into the tavern. A couple of Germans who’d been regulars there longer than he had chuckled. He ignored them; they were foot soldiers, not flyers, so their opinions didn’t matter to him.
Sofia’s did. He sat down at a table, so she’d have to come over. If he’d perched on a stool at the bar, the bored-looking man behind it would have taken care of him. That was the last thing he wanted.
“Two bottles of vodka, right?” she said in Yiddish. She knew-she couldn’t very well not know-he steered clear of booze.
“Tea, please,” Hans-Ulrich said tightly. Ordering milk in a dive like this only made people laugh at you… more than they did anyhow. Besides, he’d found that milk you bought in Poland had at least a fifty-fifty chance of being sour.
“Tea.” Sofia rolled her eyes, but she didn’t laugh, not out loud. She came back a few minutes later with a glass-Poles drank tea Russian-style-and a pot that had probably come to Bialystok from England when Queen Victoria still sat on the throne disapproving of things. Hans-Ulrich, who disapproved of a good many things himself, felt more than a little sympathy for the late Queen.
But he didn’t disapprove of Sofia. On the contrary. As she poured the tea, he slipped an arm around her waist. She made as if to pour some in his lap. He let go, the feel of her still warm on his fingers.
She set the teapot on the table. “What is it with you, anyway?” she demanded.
“What do you think it is? You drive me crazy.”
“You must be crazy.” She followed his German well enough, but the word she used, meshuggeh, was one he’d had to figure out from context. She pointed to the Luftwaffe eagle on his chest-the eagle holding a swastika in its claws. “You’re wearing that, and you think I’d want anything to do with you? Maybe you don’t drink, but I bet you smoke an opium pipe.”
“I’m here-Germans are here-to defend Poland against the Reds,” Rudel said. “Is that so bad? Does it make me so awful?”
“That’s not so bad,” Sofia said. She pointed to the swastika-carrying eagle again. “ That makes you awful.”
“Would you rather see Russian commissars buying drinks here?”
“Or not buying drinks.” This time, she pointed to the teapot. “So you can quit hokking me a chynik about that.” One more Yiddish phrase he’d picked up-literally, banging on a teapot, but stretched to mean making a fuss in general. “The Russians wouldn’t come down on us because we were Jews. They’d just come down on us because we were here.”
“Is that better?” Hans-Ulrich asked. Only afterwards did he think to add, “We aren’t coming down on you. We’re being correct.” That was the best face he could put on it.
“It’s better,” Sofia answered. “In the last war, you people came here, too, and there were Jews in the Kaiser’s army. Where are they now?”
“They… don’t support the Fuhrer. ” Again, that was the best he could do.
“Can you blame them?” Sofia said.
“I don’t care about such things,” he said, which was a good long stretch from the truth. “All I care about is you.” He came closer to veracity there, at least for the moment.
Sofia spelled it out in words of one syllable: “All you want to do is lay me.”
“That’s not all I want to do. I mean-” Hans-Ulrich broke off in confusion.
“What else? Do I want to find out?” she said. Before he could answer-and probably dig himself in deeper-she stalked off to tend to the ground pounders and locals at some of the other tables.
But she came back. She kept coming back. Hans-Ulrich thought she had to have some interest in him. If she didn’t, she’d take his order, take his money, and ignore him the rest of the time. Or she really would pour hot tea on his crotch. He knew he was dense about such things, but that would get the message across.
“More tea?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“All right. If you won’t get in trouble because you had a Mischling bring you your teapot.” She knew the word the Party used to describe half- and quarter-Jews. Away she went.
Hans-Ulrich felt the question as if a round of flak had burst under his Ju-87. Even if Germans couldn’t treat Polish Jews the way they treated Jews back in the Reich, they weren’t supposed to go out of their way to be friendly. He didn’t just want to be friendly, either. He wanted to… But, as he’d told her, that wasn’t the only thing he wanted, which complicated things further.
Before this latest failed coup against the Fuhrer, he wouldn’t have worried about it so much. Everything was tighter now, though. People who’d done fine in the field had disappeared because the security organs didn’t think they were politically reliable. Rudel had always approved of that. Now he discovered the English poet’s bell tolling for him.
“Here you go.” Sofia plunked another teapot, steam rising from the spout, on the table.
“Thanks. You asked if I’d get in trouble for liking you.” That wasn’t exactly what she’d asked, but it was what she’d meant. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re worth taking the chance on.”
“Maybe you’re brave. More likely, you’re just stupid,” Sofia said, which was a shrewd guess on both ends.
“What’s so stupid about liking you?” Hans-Ulrich said plaintively.
That plaintiveness finally reached her. She’d started to turn away, but she swung back with a sharp gesture. “Wait a minute,” she said, suspicious and wary as a cat. “When you say you like me, you don’t just mean you want to go to bed with me. You mean you really like me.” She might have been accusing him of some horrible perversion. For all he knew, she was.
He nodded anyway. His heart hadn’t thumped like this when he was diving on panzers with his experimental guns to win the Ritterkreuz. The French might have killed him, but they wouldn’t have left him alive and embarrassed. “That’s right,” he said.
“You are stupid,” she said. Then she bent down and gave him a kiss that would have melted all the wax in his mustache if only he’d worn one. The German infantrymen whooped. Before he could grab her and pull her down onto his lap, she skipped back with a dancer’s grace. “Be careful what you wish for. You’re liable to get it.”
And wasn’t that the truth? All through the mud time, he’d wanted the chance to hit back at the Russians. Now he’d got it. The front would roll east. And when and how would he get back to Bialystok to see Sofia again?
There was a joke they told even in the God-fighting Soviet Union. It had to do with the atheist’s funeral. There he lay, all dressed up with no place to go. It wasn’t a very good joke, but when did that ever stop people?
Anastas Mouradian felt like that atheist in his coffin. He’d crossed the whole vast breadth of the USSR. He’d flown a couple of missions against the Japanese besieging Vladivostok. And now the city had surrendered. The war against Japan wasn’t over, but the little yellow men had what they wanted. Now it was up to the Red Army and Air Force to take it back… if they could.
If Japan were the Soviet Union’s only enemy, Stalin likely would have massed an army and an air fleet up around Khabarovsk for a drive down the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway toward Vladivostok. How was he supposed to do that, though, when the war with the Hitlerites was about to heat up ten thousand kilometers to the west?
“They’ll send us back when the balloon goes up!” Nikolai Chernenko seemed excited at the prospect.
Whether he was or not, Stas wasn’t. “That’ll be halfway around the world for me, just to get back where I started.”
His copilot didn’t want to listen to him-no surprise, not when Chernenko was as young as he was. “Are the Germans better in the air than the Japs?” the kid asked.
