Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

Marian hated carrying shopping bags in the rain. The miserable things turned to library paste and fell apart as soon as water touched them. Chasing escaped cans down the driveway wasn’t her idea of fun.

She got everything into the house. Linda didn’t feel the urge to play explorer-maybe the rain outside held her back. Whatever the reason, Marian put the groceries away and then let out the sigh of relief she always saved for when she’d done the things she had to do.

A cup of Lipton’s would be nice now, she thought. She could watch whatever happened to be on the one channel the new TV in the front room got. As long as she let it grab hold of her eyes, she wouldn’t worry-so much-about how Bill was doing over there on the far side of the Pacific.

Before she could even start boiling water, Linda carried in a copy of Tootle and said, “Read to me.”

Bill always called those the magic words. Whatever he was doing, he’d stop and read when she asked. He went through books like popcorn himself, and wanted a kid who’d do the same thing. Marian wasn’t quite so dedicated, but she was pretty good-not least because she didn’t want Linda squealing on her when Bill got home.

“Let me fix some tea first, okay?” she said. “Then I will.”

“Okay!” Linda said.

–

The Ivans were giving the Wehrmacht hell on the Eastern Front again. Gustav Hozzel cowered in his trench. He knew too well that that wouldn’t save his sorry ass. Three different T-34/85s were bearing down on the weakly held German lines in eastern Poland. An antipanzer round had just hit one of them-and glanced off the monster’s cleverly sloped armor.

Lances of fires in the air. Screams as the Katyushas rained down on the German earthworks. Sweet suffering Jesus, there’d be nothing left of the company after those fuckers blew.

Screams…

Gustav Hozzel’s eyes opened wide, wider, widest. All he saw was blackness. He was sure he was dead…till he spied a thin strip of moonlight that slid between two misaligned slats on the Venetian blinds covering the bedroom window.

Luisa set a soft hand on his shuddering shoulder. “You did it again, Liebchen, ” his wife said sadly.

“I…I guess I did.” Gustav’s voice was hoarse. When you screamed yourself awake, and your wife with you, no wonder you tried to talk through a raw throat afterwards. Little by little, his heart slowed from its panicked thundering. “I’m sorry,” he managed.

“Was it the same dream?” Luisa asked.

“It’s always the same dream. The panzers, the rockets…” Gustav shuddered. That dream, and the death it held, seemed more real, more true, than his waking life. He’d never told that to his wife. It would only have scared her-and who could blame her for being scared? He took what comfort he could from saying, “It doesn’t come as often as it used to. I haven’t had it for a couple of months now.”

Luisa nodded; Gustav felt the motion rather than seeing it. “That’s good,” she said. “Please God, in a while years will go by between one time and the next.”

“Please God,” Gustav agreed. He’d fought the Russians from late 1942 to the end of the war. When the collapse finally came, he’d fled west out of Bohemia and managed to surrender to the Amis. If the Red Army’d grabbed him, he would still be in one of Stalin’s prison camps-unless they’d decided a bullet in the back of the neck was easier than dealing with him.

Here he was in Fulda, safe in the American zone even if it did lie close to the part of Germany Russia still held. Except when he shrieked himself awake in the middle of the night, he was an ordinary printer with an ordinary clerk for a wife. Yes, he had a wound badge and a marksman’s badge and the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class and the medal for the Iron Cross First Class in a drawer under his socks. But he hadn’t taken them out and looked at them more than twice in the past five years. And it wasn’t as if most other German men in their late twenties and early thirties didn’t have their own little collections of medals.

“Do you think you can go back to sleep this time?” Luisa asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll try. What time is it, anyhow?”

The alarm clock ticking by Luisa’s side of the bed had glowing hands. She rolled over to look at it. “Half past two,” she said.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” To Gustav, that was about the worst time there was. Everything in him was at low ebb-except his fear. He sighed. “The only good news is, I don’t remember the last time I had those nightmares twice in one night.”

“Fine. So sleep.” Luisa’s yawn said she intended to try again, too, even if getting jerked awake like that had to be as horrible for her as it was for him.

Sleep Gustav did. The alarm clock woke him at a quarter to seven. It didn’t seem nearly so bad-or so loud-as the explosions inside his head. He ate black bread and jam and drank a big cup of coffee almost white with milk. Then he put on a hat and his beat-up tweed jacket and headed for work.

His breath smoked when he left the block of flats. It was cold out there-what else, at the end of the first week of January? — but not a patch on what he’d known in Russia and Poland. And he could come in from this cold whenever he wanted, and no one would shoot him if he did. It was still dark, too-darker than it had been before, in fact, because the moon was down.

Fulda had come to life even in the long winter night. The noises of carpentry rose from the Dom. An American air raid had damaged the cathedral six or eight months before the end of the war. The same raid had smashed the square that housed the vegetable market. One day before too long, though, and you’d look things over and have no idea that bombers had ever struck here. So many German cities got hit far harder than Fulda. A town of only 40,000 or so, it couldn’t have been an important target. Bit by bit, those ravaged places were getting back on their feet, too.

They were in the zones the Americans and British and even the French held, at any rate. But something like a third of Germany had gone straight from Hitler to Stalin: a bad bargain if ever there was one. Reconstruction on the other side of the Iron Curtain moved slowly when it moved at all. The Russians were more interested in what they could pry out of their new subjects than in giving them a helping hand.

A jeep with two American soldiers in it rolled past Gustav and east toward the border with the Russian zone. The German veteran kept his head down and glanced at it only out of the corner of his eye. He’d fought the Ivans his whole time in the Wehrmacht, but that didn’t mean he loved the Amis. If they hadn’t decided Stalin made a better ally than Hitler did, the world would look different today.

Another jeep passed him a minute or two later. This one sported an American heavy machine gun on a post fixed to the floorboards. Those damn things could kill you out to a couple of kilometers. U.S. fighter planes also carried them. He’d got strafed by an American fighter the day before he surrendered. He didn’t remember it fondly, but it hadn’t given him wake-up-screaming nightmares.

He opened the door to the print shop. Max Bachman, who owned the place, looked up from some proofs he was reading. “Morning, Gustav. Was ist los? ”

“Not much.” Gustav didn’t talk about his nighttime horrors with anyone. He wouldn’t have talked about them with Luisa if they hadn’t jolted her awake, too. For all he knew, Bachman also had them. He’d been a Frontschwein himself. If he did, though, he didn’t let on, either. But then Gustav held up a forefinger. “I take that back. Are the Americans jumpy about the border? Two jeeps went by me heading that way.”