Everybody, that is, except people like Arno Baatz. “It’s fraternizing with the enemy,” he fumed. “There are regulations against things like that.”
“There’s a truce,” Willi said. “If they’re going to fight the Russians with us, they aren’t really the enemy any more, are they?”
“Don’t play barracks lawyer with me, Dernen,” Awful Arno snapped. “I’ll have that chickenshit pip off your sleeve so fast, you won’t know which way to look for it.”
“Zu befehl!” Willi said.
“That’s more like it,” Baatz growled. Fortunately for Willi, he completely missed the irony in that At your orders!
After a few days, the cease-fire began to seem more natural. Soldiers from both sides met and tried to talk with one another. They shared smokes and drinks. As best they could in each other’s languages, they swore at the officers who’d set them shooting at one another.
Willi had never particularly hated, or even disliked, France and England. His father came home from the last war with high respect for the poilus he’d fought. Even now, France seemed more… in the way than anything else. And the Tommies were as tough as anybody.
“Be funny, us fighting on same side,” said a French soldier who could muddle along in German. “Take orders from your generals. Funny, ja.” And he stumped around as he imagined a German general would walk.
To Willi, he looked like a self-important rooster. That wasn’t Willi’s take on his own generals, but it was funny. His French was much worse, so he stuck to German: “We’ll all clean out the Russians together.”
“Well…” A long pause from the poilu. “Maybe,” he said at last.
“What’s the matter?” Willi asked. “What else are we going to do? Why did you guys join up with us if that isn’t what you’ve got in mind?”
The poilu looked at him. “You don’t know me. You never find out who I am, ja?” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Willi.
“Sure, buddy.” Willi nodded anyway.
“You Germans, you do for your Communists.” The French soldier slashed a hand across his throat to show what he meant. Willi nodded again. The fellow in grimy khaki went on, “Us, we still have ’em. Not want to go fight against Russia.” He eyed Willi from under shaggy eyebrows. “Not want to fight for Hitler, neither. Fuck Hitler, they say.”
Had he been talking to Awful Arno, Baatz would have tried to deck him, and maybe started the war up again. Willi only shrugged. “What can you do about it?” he asked, wondering if he’d hear something his officers needed to know about.
But the poilu shrugged, too, a gesture more expressive, less impassive, than Willi’s. “We all find out, ja?” he said.
Cross the Soviet Union to fight Japan. Cross the country again, going the other way this time, to fight Poland and Germany and England and France and, for all Anastas Mouradian knew, Uruguay as well. He’d predicted that it would happen. Being right didn’t make him especially happy. On the contrary-it told him the people running the country had no more idea of what they ought to be doing than he did. The fate of the USSR didn’t pivot on his ideas. On theirs? That was a different story.
As far as he could tell, the Soviet government’s main business these days was bellowing defiance against the world. Whenever the Trans-Siberian Railway train (the almost Trans-Siberian Railway train, one wag put it) stopped to let passengers get out and stretch their legs, loudspeakers blared out promises of death and destruction to the Fascists and their reactionary capitalist running dogs. Posters, strident in red and black, showed angry clenched fists and determined workers in cloth caps carrying rifles.
It would have been impressive, had people paid more attention to the patriotic foofaraw. But the Soviet authorities had been yelling at the workers and peasants at the top of their lungs for the past generation. Who got excited about one more propaganda campaign?
The authorities seemed uneasily aware that they might have a problem. Mouradian’s train had almost reached the Urals when he saw new posters on walls and telegraph poles: REPORT COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITY! and BEWARE WRECKERS! Stalin and his henchmen suddenly seemed to realize some people might see the invaders from the West as liberators, not conquerors.
There was another Armenian on the train, a pilot named Hagop Balian. The two of them had enjoyed speaking their own language with each other. Mouradian was fluent in Russian, but that didn’t mean he liked using it. Russian, for him, was like a car that wouldn’t engage its top gear. He could get around with it, but something was missing. Balian felt the same way.
No matter how they felt, they both went back to Russian as soon as they saw those security posters. Stas didn’t want ethnic Russians staring at him while he used a language they couldn’t understand. They might decide he was plotting against the Soviet Union, or even that he was speaking German. That would be good for a trip to the gulag archipelago, all right! And some ethnic Russians were more ignorant-and prouder of being ignorant-than anyone had any business being.
The propaganda campaign only got louder and more strident as the train neared Moscow. Some of the men on the platform at every stop belonged to the NKVD. They so obviously belonged to the security apparatus, they would have been funny if they couldn’t have ruined a man’s life with a single gesture. The arrogant stare, the aggressive, forward-thrusting posture… They should have come out of a bad movie, but here they were in real life.
“Your papers!” one of them barked at Mouradian when he got out to buy food.
“Here you are, Comrade.” He showed the man his military ID card and the orders that sent him to Moscow.
The Chekist looked them over, then grudgingly handed them back. “Well, be on your way,” he said, his voice gruff.
“Thank you, Comrade,” Mouradian said as he stashed away the precious documents. A soft answer turned away wrath… except, of course, when it didn’t. He bought a fatty sausage in a roll and got back on the train.
“All right?” Balian asked-again, in Russian.
“Well, sure,” Mouradian replied in the same tongue. They didn’t need to look at each other. There was a certain tone to which Russians seemed deaf. People from the Caucasus and Jews and other semitrusted associates of the largest clan in the USSR could use it to say what they wanted right under their masters’ noses.
Of course, the NKVD was full of people from the Caucasus and Jews. The masters needed to have men who could hear that note around them, even if (no, especially since) they couldn’t do it themselves.
When they got to Moscow, they reported to a Red Air Force office in the shadow of the Kremlin. A bored lieutenant shuffled through papers till he found Mouradian’s dossier. “You served in the SB-2 in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, and against the Japanese,” he said.
Stas nodded. “That’s right.”
“And you were a pilot when you served in the Far East?”
“Yes, I was.”
“What do you think of the SB-2?”
There was a question Mouradian hadn’t expected. Cautiously, he answered with the exact truth: “It’s getting old for frontline action against modern fighters, but it can still do the job.”
The lieutenant grunted, which might have meant anything or nothing. He made a check mark on a form. Mouradian couldn’t read it upside down, so he worried. Had he come all this way to get purged because of an honest response? The man on the other side of the table looked up at him with eyes so pale, the irises were hardly darker than the whites-Russian eyes, eyes he never would have seen among his own people, dangerous eyes. “So,” the other fellow said, “you would prefer an aircraft with higher performance?”
If he said yes, was it off to the gulag for insulting what the Soviet Union already had? Dammit, he did want a plane like that, though. Still picking his words as carefully as he could, he said, “If such an aircraft is available, yes.” There were rumors that new bombers were in the works, but, so far as he knew, rumors didn’t yet translate into airframes.
Or did they? The other lieutenant checked a different box on that maddeningly upside-down form. “Very well,” he said. “You are assigned to pilot training on the new Pe-2 medium bomber. Go out the door you came in. Turn
