Harry Turtledove: Fallout

For now, though, he was golden. Sukhanov signed an official-looking document, stamped it in red ink with a hammer-and-sickle rubber stamp, and slid it across the table. “Here is a temporary identity card,” he said. “Keep your nose clean while you’re in these parts and everything will be fine. If you cause trouble…” He let that hang.

“I’m no troublemaker, Comrade,” Vasili said. He even meant it. Why not? He had a place here, and he didn’t any more in China. Now he was a Russian among Russians. What would come of that?

Russian tanks rumbled past Luisa Hozzel’s flat in Fulda. She was close to a window, so she looked out. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen tanks before.

During the days when Hitler ruled the Reich, there’d been military parades through town. Goose-stepping soldiers in Stahlhelms and panzer crewmen in black coveralls and black berets ornamented with the Totenkopf were plenty to set a girl’s heart aflutter.

She’d married one of those soldiers. Gustav had gone off with millions of others to knock the Soviet Union over the head. Unlike so many of those millions, he’d come home again after the Russians-with American and English help-knocked Germany over the head instead. Fulda became part of the American occupation zone, though the border with what the Russians still held didn’t lie far to the east.

She’d seen plenty of American tanks over the next few years. The Amis said they were protecting this part of Germany from the Red Russians. They even seemed to mean it. The Marshall Plan helped western Germany get up off its knees after the war, the same way it helped the rest of shattered Western Europe.

Then this horrible new war started. If Russian tanks were going to make any progress in western Germany, they had to break out through the flat country of what people called the Fulda Gap. The Americans fought hard to hold them back, but couldn’t do it.

So now the red flag with the gold hammer and sickle flew here, not the black, red, and gold of the new Federal Republic of (West) Germany and of the old Weimar Republic. The black, red, and white of Hitler and, back in the day, of the Kaiser didn’t mean Germany any more.

Like everybody else, she’d heard stories about the Russians’ rapes and murders when they swarmed into the Reich at the end of the last war. She was one of the lucky ones. She couldn’t judge those stories from personal experience. She’d never seen a Russian in her whole life till this past winter.

The Ivans in Fulda didn’t drag women off the streets or shoot people for the fun of it. That was about as much good as any of the locals could find to say about them.

But when the knock on Luisa’s door came, a few minutes after those tanks clattered by, she didn’t panic. She just went to the door and opened it. Two Soviet officers stood out there. She still didn’t panic. She didn’t know what their blue Waffenfarb meant. Had it been a German arm-of-service color, she would have, but the Ivans used a different system. She didn’t know blue meant MGB.

“You are Frau Luisa Hozzel?” one of them asked in palatal German.

“Yes, that’s right.” Luisa admitted it. Why not?

“Your husband is Gustav Hozzel?” the Russian persisted.

“Yes.” She nodded. “Why?” Fear seized her-was he going to tell her Gustav was dead?

He didn’t. He asked, “Where is Gustav Hozzel now, please?”

“I don’t know,” Luisa said truthfully. “I haven’t seen him since the war started.” A Russian bomb or bullet might have killed him right outside of Fulda half an hour after he left the flat then. But if none had, he probably had a rifle in his hands right now. He’d left intending to fight the Reds again, in the German auxiliary force that rapidly turned into a German army.

Luisa didn’t say that. She still owned a working sense of caution. She thought the Russians were asking questions about her husband, though, not about her.

They talked to each other in their own language for a moment. Luisa didn’t know any Russian, though Gustav had. They both drew their pistols at the same instant and pointed them at her. The one who spoke German said, “You are under arrest. Come with us. Immediately!”

“What?” she blurted. She understood him, all right. She just didn’t, or didn’t want to, believe him. “I haven’t done anything!” That was true, too.

True or not, it did her no good. The Russian slapped her in the face. “Immediately, I said!” he snapped. “Come now, or you will be even sorrier later on.”

Numbly, she preceded him and his silent chum down the stairs. The slap didn’t hurt her so much as it left her stunned. Whatever Gustav did in the war, he’d never laid a hand on her like that. No one had, not so callously, as if she were nothing but an animal that needed a smack to get it going. She was going, all right, straight into a nightmare.

A captured American jeep sat waiting, half on the street, half on the sidewalk. No German would have parked it in such a disorderly way. The Russians had painted red stars on it in place of the white ones the Amis used. The two officers waved for her to get into the passenger seat. The one who’d been quiet slid behind the wheel. The other fellow, pistol still ready, took the back seat.

As they jounced away, he said, “The charge is counterrevolutionary activity.”

“That’s insane!” Luisa said. “All I’ve done is stayed here and tried to keep out of trouble.”

“We have reason to believe your husband is fighting against the progressive vanguard of the workers and peasants,” he said implacably. “This also shows your own political unreliability.”

“But I haven’t done anything!” Luisa said again. “What are you going to do to me?”

“You will go into the authority of the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps,” the Russian officer replied. In German, it sounded impressive and bureaucratic, even pompous. The Russian acronym was gulag . He didn’t mention it to Luisa, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to her if he had.

Whether she knew now what it meant or not, she’d find out.

The jeep bounced along. All those tank tracks had torn up Fulda’s streets, and no one had bothered fixing potholes. The Russians didn’t care what happened to German towns.

They didn’t bother with jail. They took her straight to the train station. As things turned out, they had what amounted to a jail there, in what had been a storeroom. A bored-looking soldier with a machine pistol guarded the door. But for him, you could walk past it without having any idea it was there.

Half a dozen other dejected women stood in there or sat on the floor, that being the only place to sit. A slops bucket in the corner made do for a toilet. Luisa vowed to hold everything as long as she could. She didn’t want to have to use it.

She wasn’t altogether astonished to discover she knew one of the other women the Russians had grabbed. Trudl Bachman’s husband ran the print shop where Gustav had worked. Like Gustav, Max was an old Frontschwein who’d fought the Red Army as long as he could before.

“I bet they went off together to play soldiers again,” Trudl said bitterly.

“I bet you’re right,” Luisa said. Max had vanished from Fulda at about the same time as Gustav.

“And then they left us behind to catch the devil for whatever they’re up to.” Yes, if Trudl had got her hands on her husband just then, she would have made him sorrier than the Ivans ever could. Or so she imagined, anyhow.

Luisa had a better grip on things. “They aren’t just playing at soldiers, remember. For them, it’s real, especially if…if things go wrong.”