a cruel joke. It was good enough. These days, good enough was more than good enough. Father would laugh at her if she said it like that, but he’d know exactly what she meant.
What he said now was “Mazel tov!”
“Mazel tov!” Mother echoed. Isidor awkwardly kissed Sarah on the cheek. She kissed him the same way. She had to dodge a little at the last second, because he’d nicked himself shaving.
“Well, well,” Father said, and stumped back into the kitchen. A chair scraped across the floor. Creaking noises warned that he was climbing up onto it. Sarah shot Mother a look. What was he doing? Mother’s microscopic shrug said she didn’t know, either.
More creaking noises: Father descending. Then he pulled glasses out of a cabinet. He came out carrying a squat brown bottle Sarah didn’t remember seeing before. “Where did you get that?” Mother said, so she didn’t, either.
“I stashed it at the back of a high shelf seven years ago, for celebrations and other emergencies,” Father answered, not without pride. Seven years ago: that would have been when the Nazis took over. Father had known what he was doing, all right. He carefully set the glasses on the table in front of the sofa. Then he poured fine French brandy into them, one by one. He raised his. “L’chaim!”
“L’chaim!” Sarah and Isidor and Mother echoed. They all drank together. The brandy was smooth as a kiss- smoother than some of Isidor’s. It slid down Sarah’s throat with hardly a snarl. Warmth spread from her middle.
“To life,” Father said again, this time in German. He went on, “I don’t know how hard or how complicated it is for two Jews to get married these days. It was a little simpler when Hanna and I did it-just a little. But where there’s a will there’s a lawyer, or maybe a raft of lawyers.”
Isidor blinked. He wasn’t used to Father putting a cynical spin on cliches. Not yet, he wasn’t. But he was part of the family now, or becoming part of the family. He’d have to get used to it, and quick.
“Have you looked into it?” Sarah asked him.
“No. Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I’d be lucky enough to have you say yes, and I didn’t want to talk to the Nazis when it might be for nothing, if you know what I mean.”
Sarah nodded. Her knight in shining armor would have gone ahead, confident she would be his and confident he could overcome bureaucrats and Party flunkies. Well, she’d already figured out that Isidor wasn’t a knight in shining armor. This wasn’t a fairy tale, either. This was life. More often than not, keeping your head down was smart. If you stuck it up, something-something, say, wearing a black shirt and SS runes-was much too likely to knock it off.
“They’ll probably give you the runaround,” Father said. “As long as you don’t let them get you angry, you’re still ahead of the game.”
“As long as I don’t let them see they got me mad,” Isidor said.
“That’s right!” Father eyed him with more approval than he’d shown up till now. “That’s just right! People like that have their fun getting other people’s goats. Just do whatever they tell you, no matter how stupid you think it is.”
“My father says the same thing,” Isidor answered. “He has to deal with the morons who dole out the barley. He says they don’t know enough to grab their tukhus with both hands, but he can’t tell them so or they’d just come down on him even harder than they do already.”
“He sounds like a sensible man,” Father said: close to his highest praise. “Hanna and I have to meet your mother and father one of these days soon.”
“That would be good,” Isidor said. “They want to meet you, too.”
“Something to look forward to. I haven’t had anything-anything but tsuris -to look forward to for quite a while now,” Father said.
Isidor looked as if he didn’t know how to take that. Sensibly, he kept his mouth shut. Sarah also didn’t know how to take it. And she didn’t know how much to look forward to her own wedding. That also didn’t strike her as the way things should have been. She knew what she could do about it: nothing, now. She could have said no. She wondered if she should have said no. But no, the way it looked to her, would have been even worse than yes. So what could you do but go on and see what happened next? Again, nothing, not so far as she could see.
Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko slammed his fist down on the rickety table that did duty as his desk. Papers and a bottle of ink jumped. Sergei Yaroslavsky wondered if the table would fall down. It never had yet. It didn’t this time, either.
“We serve the Soviet Union!” Ponamarenko shouted.
“We serve the Soviet Union!” echoed the pilots and other flying officers assembled in front of him. Sergei brought out the phrase without conscious thought, as if he were responding to a priest’s celebration of the holy liturgy in church. A pretty good atheist, he didn’t think of it that way, which made the resemblance no less precise.
“We shall destroy the Fascists and imperialists!” the squadron commander yelled, as if working himself up into a frenzy.
“Destroy them!” Again, Sergei chorused along with everyone else.
Instead of falling down and rolling around on the ground and foaming at the mouth, Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko grew practical and cagey. “And this is how we’re going to do it,” he went on, pointing to a map. “The Nazis have gathered together a big supply dump west of Velikye Luki. Their forces are drawing on it, and so are the shameless French. If we can knock it out, we badly slow their movements in this sector. And so, Tovarishchi, that is what we shall do.” But for his shaved chin, he might have been Moses bringing the tablets of the Law down from Mr. Sinai.
Moses, however, didn’t have to worry about obsolescent, beat-up, unreliable SB-2s. Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko and his particular group of the children of the USSR damn well did. One of these days, the squadron would convert to Pe-2s and come back to fighting the war against the Luftwaffe on more or less even terms. In the meantime, they would do what night bombers could do.
How much that would be… Sergei had flown several night missions by now, before and after the rasputitsa, and he still wasn’t sure. The advantage of night flying was that enemy interceptors had only the Devil’s granny’s chance of finding you up there in the big, black sky. The disadvantage went right along with that. You had a rough time finding your target and an even rougher time hitting it if you did find it. (As Sergei knew too well, the same could also apply at high noon on a cloudless summer’s day.)
His breath smoked as he walked to his SB-2. Fur and leather flying togs kept him warm enough. Like most men lucky enough to have such gear, he also wore it a lot on the ground. Winter was just coming on, but in Russia you always had to treat it with respect.
Ivan Kuchkov waited for him and Vladimir Federov. “So-the motherfucking supply dump, is it?” the bombardier said.
“That’s right,” Sergei answered. The noncoms got briefings of their own, of course. But Sergei had the feeling Sergeant Kuchkov would know what was what even if nobody said a word to him. How? The same way a wolf tracked an elk through the forest. The wolf knew what supper smelled like, and Kuchkov… Kuchkov knew what trouble smelled like.
Groundcrew men started up the engines. The props blurred into invisibility. Sergei and Federov eyed the gauges and went through the checklist with uncommon care. The SB-2 was coming to the end of its useful life. Not to put too fine a point on it, the SB-2 had come to the end of its useful life quite a while ago. But there still weren’t enough Pe-2s to go around, so the older machines kept flying.
Pilot and copilot nodded to each other and exchanged thumbs-ups. Everything looked all right. Fuel, oil pressure, hydraulics… As long as the airplane didn’t fall apart five thousand meters off the ground, they were good for another mission.
Sergei taxied down the long runway, lit, at the moment, by a handful of electric torches. Red lanterns marked the end of the bumpy, frozen dirt strip. He yanked back hard on the stick. It felt as if he were hauling the SB-2 into the air by the scruff of its neck. He wasn’t inclined to be fussy. As long as the beast got airborne, he wouldn’t complain.
“All right, Comrade Navigator,” he said to Federov. “Tell me how to get to this miserable Nazi supply dump.”
