Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

They met at Kaplan’s, a delicatessen that had been around at least as long as Flora had. David was waiting for her when she came in. That was probably just as well; she didn’t have to watch the rolling gait required by an artificial leg that started above the knee.

“Hello, there,” he said as she joined him. “So how does it feel to be slumming in your old stomping grounds?”

“Kaplan’s isn’t slumming,” Flora said. “Don’t be silly. Not a place in Philadelphia comes close to it.” The waiter was bald and had a gray mustache. Flora ordered corned beef on rye. Her brother chose pastrami. They both ordered beer. The waiter nodded and hurried away. “How have you been?” Flora asked.

“Not too bad-middle-class, or somewhere close.” David shrugged. “My son’s too little to conscript in this war, so that’s good.”

“Yes,” Flora said tonelessly. Her own son was heading toward eighteen, and Joshua wouldn’t hear of her doing anything to keep him out of the conscription pool. Having a nephew in harm’s way was bad enough. Having a son on the front lines would be ten thousand times worse.

The food and the beers came quickly. Flora took a long pull at hers. David drank more slowly. He pulled a dill pickle from the jar on the table and nibbled it with his sandwich and his beer. After a bit, he said, “Looks like you’ll be away for another couple of years.”

“Well, I hope so,” Flora said.

“You’ve done a good job, and Vogelman’s meshuggeh, ” David said. “Between the two, that ought to do the job. If it doesn’t, this district is even more verkakte than I give it credit for-and I didn’t think it could be.”

Hearing the Yiddish made Flora smile. Like her brothers and sisters, she’d grown up speaking it more often than English at home. Now, though, she never heard it, never spoke it, unless she came back to the district. No one she knew in Philadelphia used it. Her husband, a gentile from Dakota, had learned a few phrases from her, but that was all. Joshua knew a few phrases, too. He couldn’t begin to speak it. Flora wasn’t so sure she could speak it herself anymore.

She thought, and then did bring out a Yiddish sentence: “What’s going to happen to this language in a couple of generations?”

“I don’t know,” David answered, also in Yiddish. He dropped back into English to go on, “And I won’t lose much sleep over it, either. We brought Yiddish from the old country. Now we’re Americans. They speak English here. So, fine-I’ll speak English.”

“I suppose so,” Flora said. “Joshua doesn’t seem much interested in learning it, anyhow. But I can’t help wondering whether my grandchildren or great-grandchildren won’t think they missed out on something special because they didn’t get the chance to learn it.”

“Well, if they do, there’s always night school,” David said, and Flora nodded. How many immigrants had learned all sorts of different things in night school? Hundreds of thousands, surely. Some were accountants, some were lawyers, because of the courses they’d taken in hours snatched from sleep and rest. Still…

“It won’t be the same,” she said. “What you learn in school isn’t like what you pick up around the house.”

“I can’t do anything about it.” David pulled another pickle spear out of the jar and aimed it at her like a bayonet. “I can’t-but you can. You can pass the Preservation of Yiddish Act and make it a crime for all the alter kackers ”-he tacked the English plural onto the Yiddish word-“who can still yatter away in the old language to use English instead. And you can make it another crime for anybody Jewish not to listen to them and talk back in Yiddish.”

Flora laughed so hard, she almost choked on her sandwich. “You,” she said severely, “are ridiculous.”

“Thank you,” her brother answered, which only made her laugh harder. “And while you’re at it, you can have them make the Lower East Side a national park. Buffalo have Yellowstone. Why shouldn’t people who speak Yiddish have their own game preserve, too? And if we get too crowded, you could issue hunting licenses to anti-Semites, and they’d come in here and thin us out. Only difference between us and the buffalo is, we might shoot back.”

“You-” Flora stopped. She had to reach into her purse for a handkerchief to wipe her streaming eyes. She tried again: “You ought to sell that routine to the Engels Brothers. If they wouldn’t pay you for it, I’m a Chinaman.”

“You could do the same thing for Chinamen, here and in San Francisco,” David said, warming to his theme. “And think of the chances Jake Featherston’s missing. If he charged fees to get into the hunting preserves for shvartzers, he could probably cut taxes in half.”

That killed Flora’s laughter. “It isn’t hunting down there,” she said. “It’s slaughter, nothing else but.”

“They might as well be Mormons, eh?” David insisted on being difficult.

“It’s worse,” Flora insisted. “We’re fighting the Mormons, but we aren’t murdering the ones in the land we’ve taken. The Confederates are emptying out one town after another, taking the Negroes off to camps and killing them once they get there. It’s… about as bad as it can be down there.”

“And it’s just pretty bad up here,” David said. “Well, nice to know we’ve still got room for improvement.”

That wasn’t funny, either-or, if it was, only in the blackest way. When Flora laughed this time, it was only to keep from sobbing.

Some lovely rubble lay between Sergeant Michael Pound’s barrel and the advancing Confederate armor. Once upon a time, the rubble had been homes and shops and people’s hopes. All things considered, Pound liked it better as rubble. If you knocked a wall down in a neighborhood that hadn’t been trampled, the enemy would notice right away. If you rearranged what was already wreckage, though, so what?

Not many Pittsburgh neighborhoods had gone untrampled. The United States were making a stand here, defying the Confederates to drive them out. Jake Featherston seemed willing, even eager, to try. He keep feeding men and barrels and artillery and airplanes into the fight. No matter who held Pittsburgh by the time the battle here was done, one thing was clear: it wouldn’t be worth holding.

Pound tapped Lieutenant Don Griffiths on the leg. “Sir, do you think we could crawl inside that ruined-garage, I guess it used to be-over there? We’ve got a nice field of fire where the window was, and the shadows inside’ll keep the bastards in butternut from spotting us.”

The barrel commander stuck his head out of the cupola for a good look. He had nerve; nobody could say he didn’t. And he seemed to own more in the way of sense than the late Lieutenant Poffenberger, anyway. When he ducked back down again, he said, “Good idea, Sergeant,” and spoke to the driver by intercom. Jouncing over shattered brickwork, the barrel took its new position.

Another reason Pound liked the ruined garage was that he’d seen U.S. infantrymen huddled in the ruins not far away. Your own foot soldiers were the best insurance policy you had in a barrel. They kept the other side’s foot soldiers away. No sneaky bastard could plant a magnetic mine on your side, chuck a grenade through an open hatch, or throw a Featherston Fizz at your engine compartment so the flaming gasoline dripped down through the louvers and set you on fire, not if you had pals around.

He spotted motion up ahead through the gunsight. Not the dinosaurian shape of a Confederate barrel rumbling into position, but… “Sir, they’re moving infantry up.”

“Yes, I saw them, too,” Griffiths answered. “Hold fire for now. Let our own infantry deal with them if they can. We’ve got this good position. I don’t want to give it away for something as small as a few soldiers on foot.”