to be yes-it is too much to ask for,” Samuel Goldman said.
“They took over not long before my thirteenth birthday,” Sarah said. No need to wonder who they were. “I don’t even know what it’s like, being a grown-up without laws against me.”
“Neither did my great-grandfathers, but the laws against them weren’t as bad as these, and they came off one by one instead of getting piled on again and again.” Father sighed. “I used to believe in progress. I really did. Now? Now I wonder. How can you help wondering?”
“You think it’s progress that a professor of ancient history and classics at the university should become one of Munster’s finest pavement repairers?” Mother said.
Sarah stared at her. Father was usually the one who came out with those sardonic gibes. Mother was sunnier-except, all of a sudden, she wasn’t anymore.
Father chuckled self-consciously. “You give me too much credit, sweetheart. If you don’t believe me, ask my gang boss. If I’m anything more than one of Munster’s slightly below average pavement repairers, I’d be amazed.” He turned back to Sarah. “So what did the clerk say when you couldn’t give him the piece of paper that would have made his heart go pitter-pat?”
“I told him I was a Jew. Like I said, he could already see I was, but I told him anyhow.”
“Good. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. And then?”
“Then he told me he’d have to talk with-to consult with, he said-his superior, so he could get orders about what to do. And he slammed down the brass bars in front of his window thing, and he went away, and he didn’t come back.”
“He’ll be there tomorrow,” Mother said.
“I know.” Sarah was anything but delighted. “That means I have to go back there again, too. Just what I want!”
“Is Isidor having as much trouble getting his permission?” Father asked.
“He was the last time I talked to him, a couple of days ago.” Sarah still wondered whether she’d done the right thing when she said yes. Even though she and Isidor pleased each other in bed or wherever else they could find a little privacy, she couldn’t make herself believe they had a grand passion. And wasn’t that what marriage was supposed to be about? She made herself finish answering: “He makes it sound as though he’s having more tsuris than I am.”
“Well, you’re prettier than he is,” Father said. “If you think that doesn’t make a difference, you’re crazy.”
“It shouldn’t,” Hanna Goldman said.
“Which wasn’t what I said,” her husband replied, and so it wasn’t.
“The Nazis are harder on Jewish men than they are on women,” Sarah said. “They haven’t thrown Mother and me into a labor gang, for instance.”
“They’re soft on women any way you look at it,” Father said. “From bits and pieces I’ve heard, the other countries that are fighting have put a lot more women into war plants than the Reich has.”
“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” Mother said, with no irony a microphone was likely to pick up. That was what the Nazis wanted out of women, all right: children, cooking, and going to church. Anything else, anything more, was modern and degenerate-two words that often marched side by side in National Socialist propaganda.
“It will be interesting to see how long they can keep that up if the war against the Russians drags on and on.” Father might have been talking about a bacteriologist’s experiment, with cultures of germs growing on agar- agar in Petri dishes. But he wasn’t. The Nazis experimented with human beings, with whole countries, with whole continents.
So did the Communists. Maybe the war would show that one bunch of those gangsters or the other was wrong. Maybe it would end up showing that both bunches of gangsters were wrong. It looked that way to Sarah.
Which proved… what, exactly? She could almost hear her father’s dry voice asking the question. They might be wrong, but they were running things. And the past eight years she’d seen, without any room for doubt, that who had the whip hand carried more weight than who happened to be right.
Nobody’d come looking for Adalbert Stoss. Nobody’d come looking for anyone using another name, either. As far as Theo Hossbach was concerned, sometimes-hell, often-the very best thing that could happen was nothing at all.
He’d considered telling Adi it would be smart not to play football any more, for fear of giving himself away. But Adi had thought of that for himself. Besides, telling him not to play didn’t have a prayer of working. Whenever a match was on, the panzer men clamored for him because he played so well. How was he supposed to say no to them when they did?
So Theo did what Theo did best: he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t see the Munich man who’d recognized Adi from a Munster football pitch again. Maybe the fellow’d stopped a mortar bomb with his face. Maybe his unit had got shipped hundreds of kilometers away, to shore up the line against Russian counterattacks from the south. Maybe… Maybe a million things.
But that Landser wouldn’t be the only one. Sooner or later, somebody else would work out who-and, more to the point, what-Adi was. It might not matter. Despite the Nazis’ best efforts, not everybody cared. Theo certainly didn’t. Too many people did, though.
It also might not matter another way. Adi might end up slightly dead, or more than slightly, before any snoopy Germans cared about who he was. If he did, Theo had much too good a chance of ending up dead with him. The Russians didn’t really know how to fight with panzers. All the same, they had a lot of them, and they kept on trying. Not only that, but almost all of their machines mounted better guns and armor than a Panzer II.
And if the Ivans didn’t do for the aging machine’s crew, the Russian winter was liable to take care of it. Theo had never dreamt he would have to build a fire under the engine compartment to thaw out the lubricants before the panzer’s engine would turn over. You risked setting the panzer on fire and wrecking it. You also risked drawing Ivans with the flames. But if you didn’t build that fire, there you were, stuck in the snow without a prayer of starting. And so, morning after freezing morning, Theo helped get the beast going any way he could.
So did Adi. Like any soldier worth his boots, he pissed and moaned about it, too. “I bet the Russians don’t have to put up with this shit,” he grumbled, chopping wood almost as fine as kindling. The less gasoline they had to pour over the fuel to get it burning, the better.
Sergeant Witt threw a match on the fire. Such were the privileges of a panzer commander-not that there weren’t plenty of days when he’d done his own share of chopping wood and then some. Flames leaped up: fortunately, not too high. All three panzer men huddled close to the fire, soaking up as much warmth as they could. After a bit, the gasoline heated the wood so it dried out and caught, too.
“Now if we had some sausages to roast for breakfast…” Witt said.
“Then we’d be going from bed to wurst,” Adi put in.
Witt groaned. Theo winced. He’d loathe himself forever if he turned in a man for being a Jew. For a pun like that, though… Who could blame him? The panzer commander said, “Don’t be more ridiculous than you can help. When’s the last time you slept in a bed?”
“That brothel they set up for us… Only I wasn’t sleeping,” Adi said.
“I should hope not!” Witt studied the fire. “Why don’t you climb in and see if you can get her running?”
That sounded like a polite request, which was the way a good panzer crew worked together. It was in fact an order. Adi took it as such. That he said “Right, Sergeant!” instead of “Zu befehl!” changed things not a bit. He scrambled up and into the driver’s position. Theo hoped the self-starter would fire up the engine. If not, they’d have to crank it-hard labor even in frigid weather, and labor that could break your arm if you weren’t careful when the engine did catch.
Grinding noises came from the starter, as they would have from a car with a low battery. Witt rolled his eyes. Theo swallowed a sigh. Holding a charge when your battery cells froze up was no fun, either.
Adi tried again. The grinding noise was louder this time, and went on longer. A cough, a bang, and the Maybach engine burst into full-throated life. The exhaust blatting out of the tailpipes was the sweetest thing Theo’d smelled this morning-though he did still yearn for sausages.
He paused for a moment atop the Panzer II before sliding down into the radioman’s seat. The morning might be cold, but it was clear. Sunrise would come soon. The eastern sky near the horizon held no color at all-not gray, not white, not blue. It was as if God had left the window-shade up a little bit and let a mere man get a glimpse of
