Harry Turtledove: Fallout

Cade wished somebody would bash in that poor GI’s head with a brick. The man’s shrieks made him want to stuff his fingers into his ears till his fingertips met between them. The awful cries just wouldn’t stop.

“Sorry bastard,” Klein said, which only went to show how useless words were at times like that.

“Yeah.” Cade’s nod felt every bit as inadequate. General Sherman had known what he was talking about, even if he was a damnyankee (Cade grew up in Tennessee). War was hell.

–

Vasili Yasevich looked around the hamlet of Smidovich with unbridled curiosity and amazement. It was a tiny little place compared to Harbin, where he’d lived his whole life up till now. Before the Americans dropped an atom bomb on it, Harbin had held three quarters of a million people. No more than three or four thousand lived here.

But that wasn’t what was amazing about the place. What was amazing was that everybody here looked like him. In Harbin, he’d been part of a tiny, dwindling Russian minority drowning in a rising tide of Chinese. The past few years, he’d used Mandarin far more often than his birthspeech.

Here, though, everybody-well, everybody male-grew a thick beard. Everybody’s skin was pink or swarthy, not golden. Some people had black hair. Some people, not just about everyone. Some people had brown hair, some straw-colored like Vasili’s, some even red. There were brown eyes and blue ones and green. Everybody had a big, strong-bridged nose.

For the first time in his life, then, Vasili didn’t look like a foreigner-a round-eyed devil, as the Chinese so charmingly put it. You couldn’t tell by looking that he hadn’t been born and raised here.

Which was funny, only the joke was on him. No matter what he looked like, he’d never felt so alone, so different, so foreign, in all his life.

He’d been a baby when his father and mother brought him to Harbin after the Reds won the Russian Civil War against the Whites. They’d lived through the Japanese occupation, when Manchuria turned into Manchukuo. Japan and the USSR stayed neutral through the Second World War, which suited them both. Japan worried about China and America, while Stalin was in the fight of his life against Hitler.

Then Hitler shot himself, the Germans gave up, and Stalin finally turned on the Japanese. After smashing the Nazis flat, the battle-hardened Red Army found them easy meat. Soviet tanks roared through Harbin, bound for Korea and other points south.

And the NKVD followed the troops. The Chekists didn’t care that the scores they were settling were a quarter of a century old. They had their lists, and they used them. Uncounted thousands of Harbin’s Russians disappeared, either into the gulags or into shallow, unmarked graves.

Vasili’s parents hadn’t waited for the midnight bang on the door. His old man was a druggist, and knew what to take. They died almost as soon as the poison hit their stomachs.

For reasons known only to them, the Soviet secret police hadn’t bothered with Vasili. He’d stayed in Harbin, doing carpentry and bricklaying and compounding medicines on the side…till he fell foul of a Chinese big shot when he wouldn’t sell him opium. Mao’s camps were just as delightful as Stalin’s. So Vasili ran away.

He trudged toward the town hall near the center of Smidovich. He had no Soviet papers, but he was in the process of getting them. Normally, the MGB-the NKVD by a new set of initials-would have jugged or shot any Russian it caught without proper documents. But these weren’t normal times. Atomic fire had fallen on Khabarovsk, not far east of Smidovich. Even the secret police recognized that people might have escaped from the city on the Amur without waiting to gather their paperwork.

Although Vasili hadn’t, he might have. The Chekists seemed willing to believe he had. A couple of the ones he’d dealt with even seemed like halfway decent human beings. He wondered what they were doing working for the MGB. Then again, Smidovich wasn’t the kind of place where hotshots were employed.

“Good day, Vasili Andreyevich,” one of those functionaries said when Yasevich walked into the building, which looked like nothing so much as an overgrown log cabin.

“Good day, Gleb Ivanovich,” Vasili replied. No, he’d never expected to be on familiar terms with an MGB man.

Gleb Ivanovich Sukhanov waved toward a samovar bubbling on a corner table. “Fix yourself a glass of tea. Then we’ll talk.”

“Spasibo.” Vasili did. He was used to drinking tea from a handleless cup and without sugar, Chinese-style. But he remembered how his folks had done things when he was small and they still clung to Russian ways as tightly as they could. He brought the tea over to Sukhanov’s table and sat down in the chair on the opposite side. The MGB man’s chair was padded; the one people who saw him used was of plain wood. One way or another, the Reds let you know who ran things.

Sukhanov pulled a manila folder off a pile. “So let me see,” he said. “You tell me your flat was on Karl Marxa Street near Lenin Square.”

“That’s right.” Vasili hoped it was. What Soviet city wouldn’t have a street named for the founder of Communism and a square named for the founder of the USSR?

Frowning a little, Sukhanov said, “It’s a wonder you survived. The bomb went off right above the square, I am told.”

“I wasn’t home when it went off, sir.” Vasili tried to sound faintly embarrassed. He did have his backup story ready.

But Gleb Sukhanov’s frown deepened. “Don’t call me sir . I’m just a comrade like everybody else.”

“Sorry, Comrade Sukhanov.” Vasili cursed himself for his slip. He might speak Russian, but he didn’t speak Soviet Russian. The exiles in Harbin kept gospodin and gospozha, sir and madam . In the USSR, those were counterrevolutionary. Everybody was a tovarishch , a comrade. Even the written language looked funny to Vasili-the Reds had simplified the alphabet, getting rid of several characters.

“Hmp,” the MGB man said. “Where exactly were you, then?”

“Comrade”-Vasili did his best to look shamefaced-“I was coming back from visiting a woman on the edge of town. A building shielded me from the worst of the flash and the blast, or I wouldn’t be talking with you now.”

He could talk with conviction about what happened when an A-bomb went off. He’d been working near Pingfan, outside of Harbin, when the Americans hit the Chinese city. However much he wished he didn’t, he knew what happened at a time like that.

“You should have kept your identity card with you,” Sukhanov said severely.

“Have a heart, Gleb Ivanovich,” Vasili said. “She was somebody’s wife, but she wasn’t mine. I wanted to keep everything as quiet as I could. How was I supposed to know the Yankee sons of bitches would choose that particular night to murder people?”

“?‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’?” Sukhanov sounded like a man quoting something, but Vasili had no idea what. He must have looked puzzled. The MGB functionary let out a self-conscious chuckle and said, “Now I know I’ve worked in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast too long.”

Vasili had had Jews for friends in Harbin, though times got harder for them after the Japanese seized the city. Here in Smidovich, some of the shop signs were in Yiddish instead of or along with Russian. It made less sense to him than Chinese would have: he read that language less well than he spoke it, but he could manage.

He could manage a chuckle of his own for the Chekist, too. He wanted Gleb Sukhanov to like him. If Sukhanov did, maybe he’d quit asking so damn many questions and making Vasili tell so many lies. If anyone who really did live in a block of flats near Lenin Square on Karl Marxa showed up in Smidovich, he was screwed.