“Hey, you’ve already had your fun and games with those blackshirt cocksuckers,” Adam Pfaff answered. He threaded a bit of cloth through his gray rifle’s barrel with a cleaning rod. “You’re not gonna turn me in if I open my mouth and say what everybody can see.”
“You’re all right, you know that?” Willi lit a papiros looted from the same shack where he’d got the sheepskin vest. The tobacco wasn’t the greatest, and there wasn’t a whole lot of it at the end of the long paper holder. Why the hell did the Ivans make their smokes that way? Any cigarettes, though, were better than none.
Pfaff examined the cloth after finishing with the pull-through. He nodded to himself. “Yeah, that needed doing, all right,” he muttered. Then he sounded more hopeful: “Let me have one of those, will you?”
“I’ll let you have it, all right,” Willi said in mock anger. A friend wasn’t just somebody with whom you could speak your mind. A friend was somebody who could bum smokes off you, and who’d let you do the same when you were out. Willi handed Pfaff a papiros.
“Obliged,” Pfaff said. And so he was. One of these days-probably one of these days soon-he’d pay Willi back.
Artillery rumbled, not too far behind them. Those were German 105s hitting the Russians up ahead. Before long, the Russians started shooting back. To Willi’s relief, it was counterbattery fire. As long as the gunners went after one another, the infantry could breathe easy-well, easier. When the big guns started tearing up the front line, Landsers didn’t enjoy it so much.
The Red Army had plenty of cannon, and used them as if they were going out of style. The Ivans also had an abundance of 81mm mortars. Willi particularly hated those. Every platoon of Russian infantry seemed to lug one along. They didn’t have the range of ordinary cannon, but the Reds could drop a couple of bombs into your foxhole and shred you before you even knew they were around.
“Orders from the regiment!” Arno Baatz yelled, as if he were the one who’d issued them. “We advance under cover of the artillery barrage!”
“Oh, boy,” Adam Pfaff said in hollow tones. “Into the meat grinder one more time.” He managed a raspy chuckle. “Well, we aren’t hamburger yet.”
“Me, I’m from Breslau,” Willi said, deadpan.
Pfaff sent him a reproachful look. “When you get your sorry ass shot off, chances are it’ll be somebody from your own side.”
“Nah, that’s Awful Arno.” Willi chambered a round and scrambled out of his shallow hole. “C’mon-let’s go.”
German soldiers loped across snow-streaked fields. Willi spotted Corporal Baatz trotting along with everybody else. And Baatz’s eye was also on him, as it was all too often. Willi resisted the impulse to send an obscene gesture Awful Arno’s way. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. Military discipline, he told himself.
Occasional rifle shots came from the Ivans’ lines a kilometer or so up ahead, but no more, not at first. Then the guys in those scrapes woke up and realized the Germans were serious about this business. A machine gun started spitting out death rattles: industrialized murder at its finest. Willi hit the snowy dirt. He wished he had a white camouflage cape and hood, so he’d be harder to spot.
He wasn’t the only Landser going down. Shrieks said not everybody was taking cover. Some of the men had been hit. Medics and stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands and smocks rushed up to tend the wounded. The Russians shot at them the same way they shot at everybody else. Ivan didn’t play by any of the rules. And if the Reds caught you, it was your hard luck. On the other side of the coin, captured Russians often got short shrift from the Germans who took them prisoner.
German MG-34s came forward with the assault troops. They spat their own curtain of death at the men ahead. Officers’ whistles screeched. The soldiers got up and advanced once more. The Russians didn’t have much barbed wire in front of their position: only a few halfhearted strands. Getting in among them was easier than it should have been. Some died. Some threw up their hands-most of those were actually allowed to surrender. And some fled to fight again somewhere else later on.
“Hot damn,” Pfaff said, going through a dead Ivan’s pockets. “We do this another couple thousand times, we win the fucking war.”
Willi set a hand on his shoulder. “Anybody ever tell you you’re beautiful?” Pfaff knocked the hand away. They both laughed. But it wasn’t as if Willi didn’t mean it. His friend understood how things worked altogether too well.
A Sunday-morning knock on the door made Sarah Goldman flinch. Any knock on the door could make a Jew in the Third Reich flinch. This didn’t sound fierce enough to be the Gestapo, but you never could tell.
“I’ll get it.” Father limped toward the door. He opened it. Whoever was outside spoke in a low voice. No, that wasn’t any Nazi official. As soon as the people in uniform saw a Jew, they all started shouting at the top of their lungs. And Samuel Goldman turned around with an odd smile on his face. “We’ve got company,” he announced. His voice sounded funny, too. Amused? Pleased? More knowing than it should have? All of those, and a couple of more besides-ones Sarah couldn’t place so easily.
“Who is it?” she asked. Then her own voice rose to a surprised squeak: “Oh! Isidor!”
“Hello, Sarah.” Isidor Bruck sounded nervous. She had no trouble figuring that out. He was wearing his best suit-possibly his only suit. The yellow Star of David on the left breast didn’t disfigure the dark wool too much. Or maybe, by now, Sarah had just got used to the mark of shame. He gulped and had to try twice before he managed to go on: “I need to talk to you, and to your mother and father, too.”
Somehow Sarah wasn’t surprised to discover her mother standing right behind her at the back of the living room. Hanna Goldman said, “Well, come all the way in, Isidor. Whatever you’ve got to say, you don’t need to say it standing in the front hall.”
“Oh. Right. Sure.” Isidor did take a couple of steps forward. That let Father close the door behind him. Now the neighbors wouldn’t be able to see what was going on. Chances were they’d be disappointed. Well, too bad.
“Can I get you something to eat, Isidor? Something to drink?” Mother was automatically courteous. They had next to nothing in the house, but she would come up with whatever Isidor said he wanted. It would be tasty, too, whatever it was.
But he shook his head. “No, thank you, Frau Goldman.” Asking was good form. So was declining. Everybody in the Reich knew how little everybody else had these days. And that little was bound to be even less if you were a Jew. Again, Isidor needed to gather himself before adding, “That’s not what I came for.”
“Well, what did you come for, then?” Father still sounded suspiciously genial, as if he already knew the answer.
“I came because-” Isidor paused to cough. To say he was nervous as a cat would have been unfair to every cat Sarah had ever met. He had to gather himself one more time before he could go on at all. Then he blurted, “Well, Herr Goldman, I came because I’m in love with your daughter and I want to marry her and I hope she wants to marry me. That’s what I came for!”
“Oh,” Father said, and not another word. Isidor looked as if he wanted to sink through the floor.
“What do you say, Sarah?” Mother asked.
Sarah knew what she would say, and she said it with as little hesitation as she could-she didn’t want poor Isidor going any greener than he was already. “Of course I’ll marry you, Isidor.” The words came out as smoothly as if she’d rehearsed them. And so she had, to herself, many times. No, he wasn’t taking her by surprise. She didn’t think he surprised her folks, either.
Her answer at least half-surprised Isidor. “You will?” he exclaimed. “Wonderful!” He rushed up to squeeze her hands in his.
She squeezed back. But was it wonderful? She wasn’t nearly so sure. Wasn’t love, the kind of love you got married for, supposed to be a grand, consuming passion that swept away everything in its path like red-hot lava pouring down from Mount Vesuvius? (She might have accepted a baker’s son, but she was a classical scholar’s daughter.)
She didn’t feel anything like that for Isidor. But she liked him well enough, and she couldn’t very well say she felt nothing for him. His gently insistent hands were more clever than anything she’d ever imagined. And he certainly seemed happy when she returned the favor.
So what if it wasn’t perfect? When it came to Jewish life in the Third Reich, the mere notion of perfection was
