Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

“Why did you think that?” the captain asked. “Did you have a guilty conscience? Had you been undercutting the company political officer’s authority, as is much too common in underdisciplined front-line units?”

“Not me, Comrade Captain. You can ask the company commander. You can ask any of these assholes here, too. I don’t do shit like that,” Ivan said. I’m not that motherfucking stupid , was what he was thinking. You started badmouthing the politruk , somebody was bound to squeal on you. Then you were dogmeat waiting for a dog-or a pack.

What was interesting was that some front-line sergeants-maybe even officers-evidently did go around telling their men that politruks were dumb fucking blowhards. As if the men couldn’t see that for themselves! But what you could see mostly had nothing to do with what you could say.

“We have spoken to your company commander,” the major said.

“And?” Ivan pressed. He didn’t think Lieutenant Obolensky would sell him down the river, but you never could be sure what somebody would do when he was afraid his own nuts might wind up on the chopping block.

“His story largely matches yours,” the major said in grudging tones. “What this proves, however, is questionable at best. Front-line officers have an unfortunate tendency to preserve fighting strength irregardless of the cost in ideological purity.”

Ivan had trouble following that. He thought it meant They’d rather stay alive than make good Communists . He approved of staying alive. If you had to be dead to make a good Communist (for a while during the Great Terror, that seemed to be about what it took), wasn’t the price too high?

No price was too high if you were a Chekist. Ivan understood that the way he understood he needed air to breathe. He said, “Comrade Major, it was a fuckup. That’s all it was. Vitya’s a pretty fair soldier. The political officer, maybe he was farting around and thought he was funny. Shit, I don’t know. But he didn’t say what he was fucking supposed to say, and he paid the price for that. If Vitya’d plugged a real Ukrainian bandit the same way, you’d be here to pin a big old whore of a medal on him right now. You wouldn’t be knocking pears out of trees with your dicks on account of this crap.”

The NKVD officers looked at each other. Did they even know the mat phrase for wasting time? Ivan decided they had to. They were Chekists. That meant they naturally had a lot to do with zeks . What were Chekists for but putting zeks into camps and dealing with them once they were in there? And all the good, juicy mat, the mat with some flavor to it, came from zeks .

“We have to make sure no anti-Soviet activity is involved, that this was a genuine accident and not crime or rebellion disguised as one,” the captain said.

Ivan wanted to tell him to fuck his own cunt with his little pine needle of a dick. He swallowed that, too. Pissing off the NKVD men would make them discover anti-Soviet activity whether it was there or not. Kuchkov didn’t have to be any kind of big brain to see that. He just had to know what Chekists were like.

They rounded on Ryakhovsky again, trying to get him to admit he’d fired at the politruk on purpose. Vitya blubbered like a four-year-old after a spanking, but he didn’t admit anything of the kind. No matter how scared he was, he understood he’d get the shaft but good if they could pin that on him.

“Easiest way to solve the whole thing would be to toss them both in a penal battalion,” the NKVD captain remarked to the major.

That made Kuchkov’s eyes slide toward the PPD again. Going to a penal battalion was a death sentence without a quick, neat bullet to the nape of the neck to get things over with in a hurry. If they aimed to do that, he had nothing left to lose. Neither the Ukrainian nationalists nor the Nazis could do anything worse to him than that.

But the major said, “Their CO does strongly vouch for them.”

“We could throw him in, too,” the captain said.

“We could ,” the major allowed. “It’s a little more complicated with officers, though.” He talked about men’s fates the way a butcher talked about bacon and ham and chitterlings. All part of the day’s work to him. Would a butcher talk that way in front of swine who could understand him? Some might. They just wouldn’t care. This Chekist sure didn’t.

“I hate to leave these bastards alone,” the captain said. “Other fools will think they can get away with murder, too.”

“Could be worse. We’re pushing forward here. Chances are these cunts will get expended any which way.” Aside from the mat -which he wouldn’t have wasted on them-the major might have been talking about mortar bombs or belts of machine-gun ammunition, not human beings. He went on, “Besides, we don’t have to fill out as much paperwork this way as we would if we stuck them in one of those battalions.”

“Well, you’ve got something there.” The captain sighed. He couldn’t push his superior too hard. “All right, Comrade Major. We’ll do it like that.”

The major didn’t even waste time warning Ivan and Vitya to keep their noses clean from here on out. He just spat on the ground and walked away. The captain followed in his wake.

“Did I hear that right?” Vitya asked wonderingly. “They didn’t bother sending us to a penal battalion because … because …”

“Because filling out all the shitass forms’d be too fucking much trouble,” Ivan finished for him. He pulled his water bottle off his belt and drank. It was full of vodka, not water. Those lazy pricks! That was how Russia worked, all right. And it didn’t change one goddamn bit if you went and called it the Soviet Union instead.

“Move along, you stinking Jew!” shouted an angry-looking man in a black uniform with SS runes on his collar tabs.

Sarah Bruck ducked her head and scurried around a corner. Munster was full of men from the Gestapo and the SD and whatever other security agencies the Reich and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party boasted. They’d descended on the city the way vultures would spiral down toward a dead cow in a field. Munster had publicly protested against the regime and its policies not once but twice. Obviously, the local authorities couldn’t keep order-or keep the lid on, assuming there was a difference. So blackshirts from all over the country would take care of it for them.

Officially, nothing was going on. Not a word about the swarm of security men showed up in the papers or on the radio. Goebbels wasn’t about to let the rest of Germany know Munster had been kicking up its heels. That showed better sense than Sarah usually credited the Nazis with. If people in Munster could do it, people in other places might try to get away with it, too.

Sarah didn’t go into the square that fronted on the cathedral. Nobody could go into that square. It was indefinitely off-limits. To make sure the locals heeded the order, SS men had set up sandbagged machine-gun positions in front of the house of worship. They weren’t just ordinary blackshirts, either. They were from the Waffen -SS. They’d been fighting in Belgium or in Russia before Hitler and Himmler decided they could be counted on to shoot at ordinary Germans, too.

An old man came up the side street carrying a stringbag with a few wizened little potatoes and a head of cabbage in it. He limped the same way Sarah’s father did. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d also got shot in the last war.

Behind horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes flicked to the yellow star she wore. As they passed each other, he spoke in a low voice: “The SS is our misfortune!” He stumped on. Sarah stared after him in astonishment, but he didn’t look back. He just kept walking.