Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

Now he walked into yet another different kind of building. In spite of a wonderful hot shower, in spite of getting his uniform cleaned, he still felt grubby going up the stairs. A woman typed at a desk in the lobby. He walked over to her.

She looked up and rattled rapid-fire Spanish at him. His own remained rudimentary. “Chaim Weinberg? What room, por favor? ” he asked.

She flipped through a card file. He felt like cheering-she’d understood him! She found the card she needed and answered him. The only trouble was, he couldn’t understand her.

“ ?Que? ” he said. She repeated herself. He still didn’t get it. Her nostrils flared in exasperation. Then she had a brainstorm. She wrote the number down: 374. He grinned and nodded. “ ?Gracias! ” he exclaimed. When you had only a few words, you’d better make them count.

“ De nada, Senor ,” she replied. He actually got that. She pointed him toward the stairway. There was also an elevator, but it didn’t seem to be working. Whether that was war damage or Spanish fecklessness, he couldn’t have said. He had no trouble ascending. Getting wounded men up there might not be so easy, though.

He found room 374. Weinberg had it to himself, which definitely made him a special case. He wore a white hospital gown. His left hand was decked out in as many bandages as a mummy. When Vaclav walked in, Chaim’s engagingly ugly mug, which had looked bored, lit up like an electric sign.

“Hey! What are you doing here, man?” The American International’s Yiddish was hard for Jezek to follow, but he got the drift.

And Weinberg would be able to make sense of his German, too: “I heard you got hurt. I have some leave, and I wanted to see how you were.”

“Thanks, pal. That’s nice-that’s mighty nice,” Weinberg said. His smile faded. “I’m lucky to be here at all. One of my oldest buddies was just back from another wound, and the same mortar bomb that wrecked my hand went and did him in.”

“I’m sorry. That’s very hard-I know.” Vaclav pointed to the shrouded hand. “How bad is it?”

“I’m damn lucky to have it at all. They almost took it off at the aid station. But one of the docs here, all he does is fix up hands. He’s putting it together one step at a time, like. When he gets done, he thinks it’ll be pretty good. Not like it’s fresh out of the box, but pretty good.”

“Glad to hear it.” Now Vaclav understood why Weinberg rated a private room. If he was a fancy sawbones’ pet guinea pig, they’d treat him well-when they weren’t cutting him open, anyhow. “So you have a little something to celebrate, anyhow.”

“I would’ve celebrated a dud a hell of a lot more, but yeah,” Weinberg said. “How come?”

Vaclav held up the bottle of alleged cognac. “I brought something to celebrate with.”

“I’m single again. You want to marry me?” the American said.

Laughing, Vaclav shook his head. “I’m not that desperate, thanks.” He pulled the cork out of the bottle and sniffed. Rotgut, sure as hell. Well, he hadn’t expected anything else. He raised the bottle. “Here’s to you!” He drank. It was strong, all right, strong enough to put hair on a nun’s chest.

“Let me have some!” Weinberg said. His larynx worked as he swallowed. “Whoo!” He eyed the bottle with respect as he gave it back.

“I would have liked something better, but this is what I could get,” Vaclav said.

“Hey, I’m not kvetching , believe me,” Weinberg answered. Vaclav figured out the word he didn’t know from context. The American went on, “This is the first booze I’ve had since I got hurt. It’s not exactly on the hospital menu.”

“I believe that,” Jezek said. “How good will your hand be, and when does the doctor here get through with it?”

“Good enough to use some, I guess. Better than the mess it was when I got here, I’ll tell you that. If I were a lefty, I really would’ve been yentzed ,” Weinberg said, and again the Czech worked out an unfamiliar word’s likely meaning. Weinberg continued, “Not as strong as it used to be, not as-as cunning, either. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.’ ”

“ You come out with that?” Vaclav stared at him. “You’re a Red, right?”

“Sure I’m a Red.” Weinberg sounded proud of it, too-proud and faintly embarrassed at the same time. “I haven’t thought about any of that shit since I got bar mitzvahed to shut my old man up and he let me quit going to cheder .”

“To what?” Vaclav couldn’t unravel that one.

“Hebrew lessons. Religious lessons,” Weinberg said. “But some of it stuck after all. What are you gonna do? Everybody’s mind is like a rubbish heap, and sometimes the crap at the bottom floats to the top some kind of way.”

Is my mind a rubbish heap? Vaclav wondered. He didn’t want to think so. When he considered some of the weird, useless stuff he remembered, though, while things he should have recalled slipped right out of his head, he couldn’t very well claim the American International was wrong. He didn’t even try. He took another slug of flamethrower fuel instead.

“Me?” Chaim Weinberg said plaintively. Vaclav gave him the bottle. He drank from it, coughed, thumped his chest with his good hand, and gave it back. “Thanks, friend. You’re good in my book. Y’know, this here is far and away the longest I’ve been out of the line since I got to Spain in ’36.”

Not many people had been fighting longer than Vaclav. Some Chinese and Japanese, some Spaniards, and a handful of Internationals like Weinberg. “It seems like I’ve carried a rifle my whole life,” Vaclav said. “If the fighting ever stops, I won’t know what to do with myself.”

“Me, neither,” Weinberg agreed. “That’s why I want to get patched up-so I can go on doing what I’ve been doing.”

?Viva la muerte! Here’s to death! One of Marshal Sanjurjo’s generals was supposed to have used that for a toast. Most people who heard it thought it was disgusting and barbarous. Vaclav did, too … after a fashion. But he also understood it in ways most people didn’t, never would, and never could. Plainly, so would Weinberg. Like that goddamn Fascist, by now they were both creatures of the war, shaped in its image.

Between them, the two creatures of the war ended up killing the bottle.

The Gestapo man reminded Julius Lemp of a wall lizard, even though he wasn’t green. He blinked very slowly, and he kept licking his thin lips with a pointed tongue. He made more trouble than a wall lizard ever dreamt of doing, though.

Blink. “You have aboard your ship, the U-30, an electrician’s mate named”-blink, lick-“Eberhard Nehring.” Blink.

“That’s right. What about it?” Lemp tried to hide his contempt. The wall lizard with the high-crowned cap didn’t even know submarines were styled boats, not ships.

“I will tell you what about it,” the Gestapo man answered coldly. Lick. Blink. “You are to leave him ashore here at Wilhelmshaven when your ship puts to sea on its next cruise.”

“What? What the hell for?” Lemp yipped. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen for squeezing extra time and extra juice from the batteries. I need him, dammit.”

“You may not have him.” Lick. “He is”-blink-“politically unreliable.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Lemp said. “What’s he going to do? Scuttle the boat?” He did it right, not that the blackshirt would notice. “Knock my radioman over the head with a spanner and signal the Royal Navy where we’re at?”

The Gestapo man eyed him as if he were a fat, foolish grasshopper just about within snapping-up range. “I am not required to explain to you the details. The fact is sufficient.” Blink.