untouched, since the beginning of time.
Or so he thought till the trucks stopped in a clearing gouged out of the woods a couple of hundred kilometers north and east of Harbin: not far from what had been the Siberian border, in other words. Wind whistled cold through the trees. Fujita had unhappy memories of fighting in country like this. So, no doubt, did Hayashi, and several other common soldiers. For all he knew, so did the Red Army men. Winter was on the way, all right.
The bacteriologists had memories of their own. They’d used this place before. Poles had been driven into the ground in rough circles around a central open space. One of the white-coated men spoke to Lieutenant Ozawa, who nodded and relayed orders to the other ranks: “We tie a Russian to each pole, facing toward the middle there.”
“Yes, sir,” Fujita said. He didn’t have to do the tying himself. He just supervised: the advantage of being a sergeant. One of the maruta tried to run away. A soldier shot him in the back, then walked over and bayoneted him. The men in white coats scribbled in their notebooks: they would be working with forty-nine, not fifty.
They set up something that looked like a bomb casing made of pottery in the central open area. Then they put on gauze masks and handed one to each of the soldiers. At their orders, all the Japanese retreated to the edge of the woods. The scientists got behind trees. So did the soldiers, a beat or two later.
The bomb, or whatever it was, went off. It sounded louder than a hand grenade, softer than a bursting shell. “Now we take the prisoners back and await developments,” one of the bacteriologists said. No one asked him what the developments would be. He did condescend to add, “You would be wise to leave your masks on. Yes-very wise.”
Some of the Russian prisoners were wounded by flying pottery-mostly the ones close to the burst. The others didn’t seem to have been harmed. The soldiers herded them all into the trucks again. They rolled south, back toward Pingfan.
They got there in the middle of the night. The prisoners went into the walled-off compound instead of back to the pens. “They won’t come out of there-not alive, they won’t,” Senior Private Hayashi said in a low voice.
Sergeant Fujita nodded-the other man was bound to be right. “Well, who’ll miss ’em?” Fujita said, and Hayashi’s head went up and down in turn.
As long as the war dragged on, Sarah Goldman was positive things wouldn’t get any better for Germany’s Jews. Rather more to the point, she was positive things wouldn’t get any better for her or her family. And she was positive she would start screaming about that any minute now.
Of course, she’d been positive of the same thing ever since the war started. Two years ago! Was that really possible? It was, however much she wished it weren’t: not only possible but true.
She nodded to remind herself that the war had been going on for so long. Neither the radio nor the newspapers mentioned the anniversary. When she did remark on that, her father said, “The powers that be don’t want you to remember, because then they’ll also remember the fighting hasn’t all gone the way some people promised it would.”
Samuel Goldman chose his words with care. Sarah feared he wasn’t careful enough, not if the Gestapo really was monitoring what they said in the house. There’d never been any proof of that, not in all the time since Saul killed his labor-gang boss, but the worry never went away.
Hanna Goldman’s view of things was less political and more pragmatic: “Ever since we really started banging heads with the Russians, rations have gone to the devil. They were bad before, but they’re a lot worse now. When they start taking coupons for potatoes and turnips…”
“Did they do that even in the last war?” Father asked. “I was at the front, and there was usually enough there. It wasn’t very good, but we got fed. And we took everything we could from the countryside. I’m sure some of the bunnies we stewed meowed, but we weren’t fussy.”
He’d brought home a rabbit from somebody in his work gang the year before. He’d hoped it was a rabbit then, anyhow. No matter what it was, he’d eaten it without a qualm. So had Sarah and her mother. Sarah’s mouth filled with spit as she remembered the rich, meaty taste. She hadn’t got to enjoy it much since.
“What happened to that fellow who sold you one here?” she asked. “Could you get more from him?”
“Gregor?” Regretfully, Father shook his head. “He disappeared not too long after I bought the last one. Well, maybe he disappeared and maybe he was disappeared, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t tell you whether he’s on the lam or in a camp.”
“I hope…” Sarah paused and thought before she spoke. “I hope he’s in a camp, getting what he deserves.”
If some bored Gestapo technician did chance to be listening in on her right now, he was probably fighting nausea. She couldn’t imagine anyone saying one thing while more obviously meaning the other. Father’s eyes twinkled. “Aber naturlich,” he said. “So do I. So does any right-thinking person.”
“That’s the truth,” Mother chimed in. They beamed at one another in companionable hypocrisy.
To Sarah’s amazement, a few days later Father brought home not a rabbit but half a dozen dressed pigeons wrapped in bloody newspaper. He had to hold one arm pressed against his jacket to keep them from falling out. Together with the limp from his war wound, that made him seem more crippled than he was.
“Where did you get them?” Mother exclaimed when he set the prize package on the kitchen counter.
“You’d better not tell the Pigeon-Racers’ Association, but it turns out there’s a sly fellow who traps them,” Father answered. “He lives out on the edge of town, so nobody’s going to catch him at it. If I lived out there, I would, too. It can’t be very hard. Pigeons aren’t the smartest birds God ever made. A few bread crumbs and you can probably get as many as you want.”
As she had with the rabbit, Mother asked, “What did you pay for them?”
As he had with the rabbit, Father looked pained and didn’t give her a straight answer. “It’s not as though we’re spending money on nightclubs or Strength through Joy cruises,” he said.
“Yes, yes,” Mother said. “But we are spending money on food and fuel and rent, and we aren’t made of gold. So what did you pay?”
“We won’t go to the poorhouse tomorrow on account of them,” Samuel Goldman told her.
“How about the day after tomorrow?” Sarah suggested.
Her father sent her a reproachful look. “Doesn’t the Bible say something about ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’?”
“I’m not an ungrateful child,” Sarah said. “I’ll never be ungrateful when you bring meat home.” She just hoped her rumbling stomach didn’t embarrass her in front of her parents. If it didn’t, that would only be because theirs were rumbling, too.
“All right, not ungrateful,” Father said. “Difficult, though. Let’s see you talk your way out of ‘difficult.’ ”
“Why should she?” Mother said. “Only right that someone in the family should take after you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Father replied with dignity.
But he did. Sarah was sure of that. So did she. Her mother was much more easygoing than her father. Saul was a purely physical being; strength and speed served him the way rational thought did for Father. Sarah was rational, or hoped she was. She was also prickly and impatient with other people’s foolishness. That too marked her as her father’s daughter.
So did her hunger. Eagerly, she asked her mother, “How are you going to cook them?”
“Does it matter?” Hanna Goldman said.
“As long as they’re hot and not too burnt, no,” Father said. Sarah nodded-that summed things up for her, too.
Her mother stuffed the squab with bread crumbs and roasted them. They were wonderful. “I don’t dare tell Isidor how good that was,” Sarah said after crunching through the smaller bones and sucking all the meat off the larger ones. “Bread may be the staff of life, but meat is the gold crown on the end of the staff.”
Her father raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t come from the Bible or the Greek philosophers, but it sounds as though it should.”
“Just out of my own mouth. Sorry,” Sarah said.
“Don’t be,” Father told her. “Old wisdom gets-well, old. We need new wisdom, too. Here and now, we really need it.”
“We have new wisdom. It comes from the Fuhrer,” Mother said brightly. “The Fuhrer is always right. That’s what everybody says.”
