seized for themselves. In a way, that made military sense. In another way…
“They know how to make people love ’em, don’t they?” Luc said after tramping through a village full of hollow-eyed peasants.
“Oh, maybe a little,” Lieutenant Demange said. Somehow, he’d managed to keep himself in Gitanes. Luc, these days, was smoking anything he could find. Russian tobacco was bad; German, worse.
“Tell you one more thing?” Luc went on. Demange nodded and raised an eyebrow, waiting for whatever the one thing was. Luc said, “I’ve always been glad I’m not a Jew, you know? I mean, who isn’t? But what with the way the Boches and the Poles treat ’em here, now I’m really fucking glad I’m not a Jew.”
“I dunno. If you’d got your cock clipped right after you were born, you wouldn’t’ve had to come here. For some reason or other, the brass doesn’t think Jews and Nazis mix so well,” Demange said.
“Wonder why that is,” Luc said. “Maybe they aren’t as dumb as they look.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” the older man answered. “But the other funny thing is, the Germans aren’t doing anything to the kikes in Poland. They can’t stand ’em, and neither can most of the Poles, like you said. But the government there doesn’t want the Nazis fucking with ’em, on account of they’re Poland’s kikes. Politics can spin your head around faster’n absinthe.”
“You ever drink that shit?” Luc asked. It had been illegal about as long as he’d been alive, but Demange was old enough to have tried it before it was outlawed… and afterwards, if he respected the laws against it the same way he respected everything else.
“Oh, sure,” the veteran said casually. “Take some mighty strong brandy and smoke some hashish while you’re pouring it down. That’ll give you the idea.”
“Got you.” Luc had no more smoked hashish than he’d drunk absinthe, but he wasn’t about to let on. Demange would have been as ready to scorn lower-middle-class respectability as he was with anything else that drew his notice. Strong brandy Luc did know. He’d heard about the kinds of things hashish did, so he could make what he thought was a halfway decent guess about absinthe.
If Demange saw through him, the veteran didn’t let on. He didn’t have much time to let on: the Russians started shelling the French positions. They might have most of Europe in arms against them, but they showed no signs of giving up. Holland and Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark had fallen down on their backs with their legs in the air and their bellies showing when the Germans invaded them. Czechoslovakia and Norway hadn’t lasted much longer. Now that they were conquered, they weren’t giving the Nazis much trouble any more.
Only France had fought back hard (with, Luc grudgingly admitted to himself, some help from England). France… and now Russia. France hadn’t-just barely hadn’t, but hadn’t-let the Wehrmacht nip in behind Paris. Moscow was a hell of a lot farther from the German, or even the Polish, border than Paris was from the Rhine. The same held for St. Petersburg-no, it was Leningrad these days-and Kiev. The Russians could trade much more space for time than France had been able to.
Luc wished he hadn’t had such thoughts with Red Army 105s crashing down all around him. He wanted to hope he’d go home one day, not to know he’d be stuck in this goddamn Russian icebox forever and a day. What he wanted and what he was likely to get no doubt weren’t even related to each other.
Chaim Weinberg had seen Czechs in Spain before. There were more than a few of them in the International Brigades, along with men from just about every other country in Central Europe. That’s why they call ’em Internationals, smart guy, he jeered at himself. He admired what he’d seen of them, too. They had the same solid virtues as most Germans, without being such assholes about it. Almost all of them spoke German, and they could make out his Yiddish, so he could talk with them. He approved of talking. Plenty of people said he did it too fucking much.
He’d never seen so many Czech soldiers all at once, though. And he’d never seen so many who weren’t all solidly Marxist-Leninist, either. But the Popular Front was alive and well in Republican Spain. These Czechs might not be Communists, but nobody could say they weren’t anti-Fascist. They’d hated the Nazis enough to keep shooting at them even after their own country went under.
Chaim rapidly discovered they were damn fine soldiers, too. Nothing they saw outside of Madrid fazed them, not even a little bit. On the contrary: they’d learned their trade in a harder classroom than any Spain offered. One guy used an antitank rifle as a sniper’s piece. That struck Chaim as swatting flies with an anvil, but the Czech was a damn maestro with the brute. Anything that moved, out to a mile away from him, maybe farther, was liable to stop moving very suddenly.
His name was Votslav, or something like that. He looked down his rather blunt nose at Marshal Sanjurjo’s men. “They don’t know much about taking cover, do they?” he said in slow, deliberate Deutsch.
“They’re brave. They’re Fascist pishers, but they’re brave.” Chaim admired the courage of the Spaniards on both sides. As far as he was concerned, they carried it to, and sometimes past, the point of insanity.
But Votslav, a military pragmatist, only shrugged. “A fat lot of good it does them. They wouldn’t be so easy to kill if they didn’t parade around like a bunch of dumbheads left over from Napoleon’s time.”
It wasn’t the first time Chaim had heard a European talking about Napoleonic tactics when he meant something old and outdated. The guys from the Abe Lincoln Battalion who thought about history (some cared no more about it than Henry Ford did) spoke of the Civil War the same way.
The other Civil War, Chaim reminded himself. A redheaded guy in a new-looking tunic with Czech’s sergeant’s pips came up to them in the trench. He spoke to Votslav in Czech, but Chaim needed no more than the blink of an eye to realize what he was. “Vos macht a Yid?” Chaim said.
And the other fellow needed only a moment to size Chaim up. “You’d know the mamaloshen, all right,” he said. “Who are you? Where are you from?”
“I’m Chaim Weinberg, out of New York City. You?”
“Benjamin Halevy. Paris. My folks came from Prague, so I grew up with a bunch of different languages. I was liaison for the free Czechs till Daladier decided to turn into Hitler’s tukhus-lekher. Now I’m here.” His wave didn’t get higher than the parapet-the Nationalists would have snipers, too. “The verkakte Garden of Eden, right?”
“ Verkakte is right, anyway.” Chaim didn’t need to look around to know how abused the landscape was.
“Go slow,” Votslav said. “I have trouble keeping up when you guys jabber like that. It’s not the German I learned in school.”
“Bet your putz it’s not, buddy,” Chaim said, not without pride. Benjamin Halevy chuckled. The real Czech only sighed and scratched his head. Both he and Halevy wore Adrian helmets. They covered less of the head than the ones the Spanish army issued. Chaim liked them better even so. Spanish helmets looked too much like the German Stahlhelms they were modeled on. He didn’t like looking like a Nazi storm trooper-no way, nohow. He sometimes did it; he’d seen too many men dead from a piddly little fragment that happened to pierce their skull to want to avoid that if he had any chance at all. Nothing could make him happy about it.
Halevy waved again, this time toward Sanjurjo’s lines. “Jezek’s right-those guys aren’t such hot stuff. We ought to advance and clean ’em out.”
Was I that eager when I first got here? Chaim supposed he had been. He was still willing. He wouldn’t have stood in this chilly trench if he weren’t. But he doubted he’d ever be eager again. He said, “The French must have been feeding you a lot of raw meat.”
Benjamin Halevy’s crooked smile was all Jew. “Because we’re new here, we think everything’s easy, you mean?”
“Yup.” That was English-of a sort. Halevy and-Jezek, was it?-understood anyhow.
“Maybe this is true. And maybe we have reason for it.” The Czech soldier’s German could be awkward, but it worked. It was a hell of a lot better than Chaim’s Spanish. Jezek explained, “Now that we cannot shoot Nazis any more, we have to make do with people who get into bed with Nazis.”
“People who dance the mattress polka with Nazis,” Halevy amended. Chaim grinned. The Yiddish phrase had more bounce than the polite German, both literally and figuratively.
Thinking about dancing the mattress polka naturally made him think about La Martellita. He’d got what he wanted from her, all right. And he’d also got much more than he’d bargained for when he first jumped on her shikker bones. She didn’t want to see an abortionist. Even under the Republic’s liberal laws, they were illegal, which didn’t mean business ever went bad for them, here or anywhere else.
That she didn’t want to find one had surprised Chaim. La Martellita seemed such a perfect Red, somebody who wouldn’t think twice about something like that. Maybe taking the girl out of the Catholic Church was easier
