Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

She eventually did stagger forth from the car. Marian took her to the stinking latrine tent and then to breakfast. The guy behind the counter gave each of them a bowl of cornflakes with reconstituted milk. “Yuck!” Linda said.

“You’ve got to eat it. So do I,” Marian sad. She had instant coffee with it: a meal without a single natural ingredient anywhere in sight. No, that wasn’t true-she did sweeten the coffee with sugar, not saccharine.

“Yuck!” Linda said again, but she emptied her little bowl. She wasn’t fussy about food, for which Marian thanked heaven.

Marian had more trouble choking down her own cereal. As far as she was concerned, powdered milk was as much a chemical weapon as poison gas. It was cheap, and it was much easier to transport than whole milk. That made it ideal for feeding people in refugee camps. It tasted horrible? It was even worse than powdered mashed potatoes (a suppertime unfavorite)? So what? As long as the people stuck in refugee camps got fed at all, the government didn’t care if they hated everything they ate.

She got Linda to the kindergarten on time. Then, without anybody to look after, she had no idea what to do with herself. Those bad thoughts that watching Linda kept her too busy to notice clamored for attention now. She mooched along with her head down, hardly caring where she was going. If not for her little girl, her gloom might have taken an even darker, more self-destructive turn. What really scared her was that it might anyhow.

“Good morning!”

That was so plainly aimed at her, she had to look up. From the guttural r, she already knew it was Fayvl Tabakman. “Hello,” she said to the cobbler.

He studied her with narrowed, worried eyes. “How you are doing?” he asked. His English was quite good, especially since he’d had only a few years speaking it, but perfect it wasn’t.

Marian started to say Fine, the way you did when anybody asked how you were. Only the note of genuine concern she heard in his voice made her answer honestly instead: “Not so hot, Mr. Tabakman. Not so hot.”

He nodded. “I believe you. It is still very new for you, too new to take it all in. You have no notion how such a thing could have happened to you. ”

What do you know about it? The angry thought fell to pieces as soon as it formed. He knew all about it. He’d known for years. His loved ones hadn’t died in combat, the way Bill had. They’d been murdered, for no reason at all that anyone sane could find.

“How…How did you get through it without going crazy?” she asked.

“Being at Auschwitz, that was almost a help,” the Jew answered. “I had so much work to do, and I was so busy trying to stay alive my own self, when did I have time to grieve? And I was starving. Everything shuts down then-the feelings, too. So when I was freed and I could start thinking about what happened, time had gone by. Time is a blessing. Every day further away is a blessing.”

“I-suppose so.” It wasn’t so much that Marian didn’t believe as that she hadn’t had enough days go by yet.

“It’s true.” He nodded again, and touched the brim of his cloth cap. “Well, I don’t trouble you no more.”

“You’re not troubling me,” she said quickly. “You know what I’m going through. You know better than I do-you’ve been through it yourself already.”

“Today, tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, one at a time,” Tabakman said. “It’s all you can do. It’s all anybody can do. You want somebody to talk to, I can maybe listen.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Not a whole bunch of things to do in this place, you know?”

I’m more interesting than twiddling his thumbs, Marian thought. But she couldn’t stay miffed. She didn’t try very hard. Her wound was still fresh and raw. His might have scarred over, but, say what he would, how could it not still fester underneath?

Pain drew pain. Shared pain drew understanding. Or it might, anyhow. She could hope. A little while earlier, she hadn’t been able to imagine even so much. You took what you could get, if you could get anything at all.

–

The mirror in the bathroom of the ground-floor flat Gustav Hozzel was defending hadn’t broken. He couldn’t guess why not; almost everything else in the place had. But he got his first good look at himself for a couple of weeks.

He looked like an Ami, but that was the uniform’s fault. It was filthy and badly worn. So was he. Aside from looking like an American, he looked like hell. His whiskers were at that haven’t-shaved-in-five-days stumblebum stage. More of the ones on his chin were coming in white.

His eyes…It wasn’t that the bags under them would hold enough to take him to Brazil. That just meant he was desperately short on sleep. No Frontschwein ever got enough or, too often, any. The look in them worried him more. They were the eyes of a man who’d seen too much, done too much, and knew he had too much more to see and do.

A lot of Landsers on the Eastern Front had had eyes like that from the end of 1943 on. They knew they wouldn’t whip the Ivans. And they knew they had to keep fighting anyway. It wasn’t despair. Damnation came a lot closer.

No doubt he’d had that look himself in the old days. Now he had it again. He’d been a kid then. He’d seen all the hideous things that could happen, but somehow he’d been sure they would always happen to someone else. He wasn’t sure of that any more. He knew too well anything could happen to anybody.

“Surrender!” a Red Army soldier shouted in German. “We’ll treat you well if you do!”

All the emergency militiamen in the block of flats burst out laughing. They wouldn’t have believed that Quatsch in the last war, let alone this one. “Yob tvoyu mat’!” one of them shouted back. As some of the Ivans could Deutsch sprechen, so a good many Germans had picked up bits of filthy Russian. What other kind was worth learning?

Of course, yelling Fuck your mother! at people with guns had a price. The Russians started hosing down the building with four heavy machine guns on the same mount. They hadn’t played with that kind of toy the last time. The Germans had; the Americans, too. It made a dandy light flak weapon to chase off low-flying raiders or maybe even shoot them down.

And, if you pointed it at a ground target, it also did a grand job of chewing that to pieces, along with anyone unlucky enough to be inside. When the mechanized death rattle started outside, Gustav threw himself flat. That was all he could do, that and pray. Hiding behind something wouldn’t help. What could you hide behind to keep off a slug as big as your thumb?

The one drawback to the monster was that it gobbled ammo at a rate even industrial giants like the Russians and Americans found ridiculous. A minute went through a couple of thousand cartridges. On the other hand, the bullets from those cartridges went through anything this side of a tank out to a kilometer and a half.

They were shooting a little high. Part of the upper stories of the block of flats collapsed with a rending crash-luckily, not the part right above Gustav. And he’d never look in that mirror again. The Russians must have bought themselves about seven hundred years of bad luck.

He hoped like anything they had. As soon as the quad gun stopped, he started shooting. He wasn’t the only one, but the return fire was thinner than it would have been before the Russians turned their creature loose. Unless your men were all hiding down in the cellar, they’d take casualties.

He got a glimpse of somebody with fancy shoulder boards sending soldiers forward. A burst snarled from his PPSh. The Russian officer clutched at himself as he fell over. Dead or wounded, Gustav didn’t care. The bastard was out of the fight. With luck, whoever took over for him wouldn’t know what the plan was. Russians without plans panicked at any little thing. With plans, they would trample you and mash you flat.