Harry Turtledove - Bombs Away

Ice ran up her back when one of the Ivans peered in after her. But then he staggered after his friends. She breathed again.

“Can I show you anything?” asked the shopkeeper, a woman-probably-too old to need to worry about Russian attentions.

“Thank you, no,” Luisa said. “I’m sorry, but I just wanted to get away from those…people.” She didn’t know the woman wouldn’t report her, so she used a neutral word.

“Oh.” The shopkeeper nodded. “Well, it’s not as if you’re the first one. They’ve made me worry about them a couple of times. Me!” She laughed. She knew she was no spring chicken. Lowering her voice, she went on, “The Führer was right, you know. They really are Untermenschen. ”

Didn’t she remember anything from the Nazi days about keeping her mouth shut? She’d just put her life in Luisa’s hands. “I think I’d better go,” Luisa said. “I want to see what the grocery has left.” She didn’t say I want to see if the grocery has anything left. Whether this foolish woman did or not, she knew better than to come out with anything so suicidal.

“Auf wiedersehen,” the shopkeeper said wistfully as Luisa left. She couldn’t have got much business even before the Russians came. She was bound to have even less now.

The grocer’s was another two and a half blocks along the street. Several more Red Army men passed Luisa as she walked. They were all more or less sober, and none of them bothered her. Maybe her hideous disguise was working. Maybe they just had orders not to fraternize.

No, it couldn’t be just that. The first couple of years after the last round of fighting stopped, the Amis had orders like those. Orders or not, they’d done their best to pick up anything in a skirt.

“ Guten Tag, Frau Hozzel,” the grocer said when she walked in.

“ Guten Tag, Horst,” Luisa answered. “Wie geht’s?”

He shrugged and waved at the half-empty shelves. “It goes like this, that’s how. Whatever I can get, I put out.”

“It’s not as bad as it was in ’44 or ’45,” Luisa said. There’d been nothing on the shelves then. People got by with turnips and cabbages. And older folks, the ones from her parents’ generation, claimed even those bad times were nothing next to 1917 and 1918.

She picked up a tin of pickled beets. The label was in German, but it was no brand she’d ever seen before. It was no brand at all, in fact: it said Canned at State Canning Plant Number Fourteen. “Where did this come from?” she asked.

“Somewhere in the east,” the grocer answered. “It’s not very good, but the Russians want to get rid of them, so I have lots.”

“It’s food.” Luisa put three tins in the stringbag. She walked along till she came upon sardines in smaller, flatter tins. Their label said they’d come from State Canning Plant Number Three. “How about these?”

“I won’t lie to you. They’re pretty bad,” Horst said.

“Well…” Luisa hadn’t seen anything like them since the invasion. “How bad is pretty bad?”

“My cat wouldn’t touch them-that’s how bad,” the grocer told her. “You might want to use them if you’re fertilizing a garden in your yard. Otherwise? Not a chance.”

“They’re expensive for fertilizer. We’ll see.” She put one tin in the stringbag. She chose some potatoes that didn’t seem too wretched. Horst’s spinach actually looked good. Up and down the aisles, doing the best she could.

When she came to the counter to pay, he took a box out from under it. “Want some of these? I save them for my good customers.” The box held strawberries.

“You bet I do! How much?” She winced when he told her, but nodded.

He wrapped them in brown paper and string so no one could see what they were. She paid him and walked out the door happier than she’d dreamt she would be. Strawberries! Something nice when you didn’t expect it made even life under the Russians worth living.

–

When Marian Staley woke up, all she saw was fog. Sleeping in the Studebaker with Linda always made the windows steam up on the inside. She rolled one of them down and looked out. It was foggy on the outside, too. She couldn’t see farther than fifty feet or so. Summer might be only three weeks away, but northern Washington hadn’t got the news.

Linda was snoring in the front seat. She was getting over a cold she’d probably picked up from one of the other children in her class. Packs of kids produced swarms of germs. Marian remembered that from her own elementary-school days. When somebody came down with chicken pox or measles or mumps or scarlet fever, pretty soon the whole class-sometimes the whole school-did.

These days, penicillin flattened scarlet fever. The others kept turning up like the bad pennies they were. They were less common than Linda’s ordinary cold, but not enough less.

Pretty soon, Marian would have to get Linda up, get her breakfast, and take her back to the infectious world of other children. If she thought about things like that, she wouldn’t have to think about the A-bomb crater-and it was exactly that-in her own life.

She’d known going to war was dangerous. You couldn’t help knowing that, in an intellectual way. When countries fought wars, some people didn’t come home again. You built statues to commemorate them, you felt sorry for their widows and other loved ones, and you thought how lucky you were that such a horrible thing hadn’t happened to you.

Only this time it had.

Bill wasn’t coming home again. He’d never take them to a Rainiers game again (not that there’d be any Rainiers games for a while, either). He’d never teach Linda how to tie her shoes. He’d never change a flat tire or install new spark plugs with his usual matter-of-fact competence. He’d never turn off the bedroom light, put his face between her legs, and brazenly flutter his tongue right there, oh God right there….

Marian shied away from that thought hard, like a skittish horse sidestepping and almost rearing when a piece of paper blew across the path in front of it. She was supposed to miss her dead husband because he’d been a good daddy and a good provider, dammit, not because he’d made her feel things she’d never imagined before the first time he got her girdle down and her panties off.

Well, wasn’t she?

She’d been a good girl before she met Bill. Looking back, that felt like a lot of wasted time and wasted fun. It was what they told you to do, though, so you did it-till one day you got so horny, or somebody got you so horny, that you didn’t any more. She’d never do that with him again. He’d never do that with her, do it to her….

She puddled up at the same time as she wanted to touch herself. She missed her dead husband almost every conscious moment. She hadn’t missed him quite like this before, though. Till she woke up this morning, she’d blotted out all thoughts about that part of their life together.

Why? she wondered. Making love, especially making love with somebody you really wanted to make love with you, was the best thing in the world you could do with your time. You couldn’t do it all the time, but didn’t that make the times you could all the sweeter?

When she looked down at her wristwatch, she let out a loud, long, this-is-the-world-and-I’m-stuck-with-it sigh. Then she leaned over the back of the front seat and shook her daughter. “Linda? Linda, honey? Time to get up, sweetie. It’s a school day.”

“I don’t wanna,” Linda muttered, still three-quarters asleep. Kindergarten had gone from exciting, different, new fun to boring routine in nothing flat. Linda was a human being, in other words-still on the small side, but unmistakably one of the tribe.