In the Balance (27 page)

Jäger looked at Georg Schultz. Schultz was looking at him, too. He suspected he looked as unhappy as the gunner did. If there were Lizards between them and the bulk of the
Wehrmacht …
Jäger didn’t care to follow that thought to its logical conclusion. For that matter, if there were Lizards over that way, the
Wehrmacht
might not have much left in the way of bulk.

The
kolkhoz
chief gave him another piece of bad news: “Berlin
kaput
, Germanski.
Yasheritsi.”
He used those expressive hands of his to show the city going up in a single huge explosion.

Schultz grunted as if he’d been kicked in the belly. Jäger felt hollow and empty inside, himself. He couldn’t imagine Berlin gone, or Germany with Berlin gone. He tried not to believe it. “Maybe they’re lying,” Schultz said hoarsely. “Maybe it’s just the God-damned Russian radio.”

“Maybe.” But the more Jäger studied the
kolkhozniks
, the less he believed that. If they’d gloated at his reaction to the news, he would have doubted them more, have thought they were trying to fool him. But while a few looked pleased at his discomfiture (as was only natural, when his country and theirs had spent a year locked in a huge, vicious embrace), most looked at him and his companion with sympathetic eyes and somber faces. That convinced him he needed to worry.

He found a useful Russian word:
“Nichevo.”
He knew he pronounced it badly; German had to use the clumsy letter-group
tsch
even to approximate the sound that lay at its heart.

But the
kolkhozniks
understood.
“Tovarisch, nichevo,”
one of them said: Comrade, it can’t be helped, there’s nothing to be done about it. It was a very Russian word indeed: the Russians were—and needed to be—long on resignation.

He hadn’t quite meant it that way. He explained what he had meant: “Berlin
da, yasheritsi—”
He ground the heel of his boot into the dirt. “Berlin
nyet, yasheritsi—”
He ground his heel into the dirt again.

Some of the Russians clapped their hands, admiring his determination. Some looked at him as if he was crazy.
Maybe I am
, Jäger thought. He hadn’t imagined anyone could hurt Germany as the Lizards had hurt it. Poland, France, and the Low Countries had gone down like ninepins. England fought on, but was walled away from Europe. And though the Soviet Union remained on its feet, Jäger was sure the Germans would have finished it by the end of 1942. The fighting south of Kharkov showed the Ivans hadn’t learned much, no matter how many of them there were.

But the Lizards—the Lizards were an imponderable. They weren’t the soldiers they might have been, but their gear was so good it didn’t always matter. He’d found that out for himself, the hard way.

A faint buzz in the sky, far off to northward. Jager’s head whipped around. Any sky noise was alarming these days, doubly so when it might come from an almost invulnerable Lizard aircraft. This, though, was no Lizard plane. “Just one of the Ivans’ flying sewing machines, Major—not worth jumping out of your skin for.”

“Anything that’s up there without a swastika on it makes me nervous.”

“Can’t blame you for that, I guess. But if we aren’t safe from the Red Air Force here in the middle of a
kolkhoz
, we aren’t safe anywhere.” The tank gunner ran a hand along his gingery whiskers. “Of course, these days we really
aren’t
safe anywhere.”

The Soviet biplane didn’t go into a strafing run, although Jäger saw it carried machine guns. It skimmed over the collective farm, a couple of hundred meters off the ground. Its little engine did indeed make a noise like a sewing machine running flat out.

The plane banked, turned in what looked like an impossibly tight circle, came back over the knot of people gathered around the two Germans. This time it flew lower. Several
kolkhozniks
waved up at the pilot, who was clearly visible in the open cockpit, goggles, leather flying helmet, and all.

The biplane banked once more, now north of the collective farm again. When it turned once more, it was plainly on a landing run. Dust spurted up as its wheels touched the ground. It bounced along, slowed to a stop.

“Don’t know as how I like this, sir,” Schultz said. “Dealing with the Russians here is one thing, but that plane, that’s part of the Red Air Force. We shouldn’t have anything to do with something connected to the Bolshevik government like that.”

“I know we shouldn’t, Sergeant, but everything’s gone to hell since the Lizards got here,” Jäger answered. “Besides, what choice have we?” Too many
kolkhozniks
carried guns to let him think about hijacking the toy plane with the red star on its flank, even assuming he knew how to fly it—which he didn’t.

The pilot was climbing out of the plane, putting his booted foot in the stirrup on the side of the dusty fuselage below his seat.
His
boot,
his
seat? No, Jäger saw: a blond braid stuck out under the back of the flying helmet, and the cheeks under those goggles (now shoved up onto the top of the flying helmet) had never known—or needed—a razor. Even baggy flying clothes could not long conceal a distinctly unmasculine shape.

Schultz saw the same thing at the same time. His long jaw worked as if he were about to spit, but he had sense enough to remember where he was and think better of it. Disgust showed in his voice instead: “One of their damned girl fliers, sir.”

“So she is.” The pilot was coming their way. Jäger made the best of a situation worse than he really cared for: “Rather a pretty one, too.”

Ludmila Gorbunova skimmed over the steppe, looking for Lizards or anything else interesting. No matter what she found, she wouldn’t be able to report back to her base unless the emergency was great enough to make passing along her knowledge more important than coming home. Planes that used radios in flight all too often stopped flying immediately thereafter.

She was far enough south to start getting alert—and worried—when she spotted a crowd around a collective farm’s core buildings at a time when most of the
kolkhozniks
should have been in the fields. That in itself wasn’t so unusual, but then she caught a glint of light reflecting up from a couple of helmets. As the angle at which she viewed them shifted, she saw they were blackish gray, not the dun color she had expected.

Germans. Her lip twisted. What the Soviet government had to say about Germans had flip-flopped several times over the past few years. They’d gone from being bloodthirsty fascist beasts to peace-loving partners in the struggle against imperialism and then, on June 22, 1941, back to being beasts again, this time with a vengeance.

Ludmila heard the endless droning propaganda, noted when it changed, and changed her thinking accordingly. People who couldn’t do that had a way of disappearing. Of course, for the past year the Germans themselves had been worse than any propaganda about them.

She wished that meant no one in the Soviet Union had anything good to think about the Nazis. The measure of Hitler’s damnation was that imperialist England and the United States joined the Soviets in the struggle against him. The measure of the Soviet Union’s damnation (though Ludmila did not think of it in those terms) was that so many Soviet citizens—Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, Byelornssian, Tatars, Cossacks, even Great Russians—collaborated with Hitler against Moscow.

Were these
kolkhozniks
collaborators, then? If they were, a quick pass with her machine guns would rid the world of a fair number of them. But the line from Radio Moscow on Germany had changed yet again since the Lizards came. They were not forgiven their crimes (no one who had fled from them would ever forgive their crimes), but they were at least human. If they cooperated with Soviet forces against the invaders from beyond the moon, they were not to be harmed.

So Ludmila’s forefinger came off the firing button. She swung the
Kukuruznik
back toward the collective farm for a closer look. Sure enough, those were Germans down there. She decided to land and try to find out what they were up to.

Only when the U-2 was bumping along the ground to a stop did it occur to her that, if the
kolkhozniks
were collaborators, they would not want a report going back toward Moscow for eventual vengeance. She almost took off again, but chose to stay and see what she could.

The farmers and the Germans came toward her peacefully enough. She saw several weapons in the little crowd, but none pointed at her. The Germans kept their rifle and submachine guns slung.

“Who is the chief here?” she asked.

“I am, Comrade Pilot,” said a fat little fellow who stood with his back very straight, as if to emphasize how important he was. “Kliment Yegorevich Pavlyuchenko, at your service.”

She gave her own name and patronymic, watching this Pavlyuchenko with a wary eye. He’d spoken her fair and called her “comrade,” but that did not mean he was to be trusted, not with two Germans at his elbow. She pointed at them. “How did they come to your collective farm, comrade? Do they speak any Russian?”

“The older one does, a word here and there, anyhow. The one with the red whiskers knows only how to eat. They must have been straggling a good while—they hadn’t even heard about Berlin.”

Both Germans looked at Pavlyuchenko when they heard the name of their capital. Ludmila studied them as if they really were a couple of dangerous beasts; she’d never before been close enough to see Hitlerites as individuals.

Rather to her surprise, they looked like neither the inhuman-seeming killing machines that had swept the Soviet armies east across a thousand
kilometers of Russia and the Ukraine nor like Winter Fritz of recent propaganda, with a woman’s shawl round his shoulders and an icicle dangling from his nose. They were just men, a little taller, a little skinnier, a little longer-faced than Russian norms, but just men all the same. She wrinkled her nose. They smelled like men, too, men who hadn’t bathed any time lately.

The younger one, the bigger one, had a peasant look to him despite his foreign cast of feature. She could easily imagine him on a stool milking a cow or, on his knees plucking weeds from a vegetable plot. The unabashed way he leered at her was peasantlike, too.

The other German was harder to fathom. He looked tired and clever at the same time, with pinched features that did not match the lined and sundarkened skin of an outdoorsman. Like the red-whiskered one, he wore a helmet and an infantryman’s blouse over the black trousers of panzer troops. The blouse had a private’s plain shoulder straps, but she did not think it was part of the gear he’d started out with. He was too old and too sharp to make a proper private.

In secondary school, a million years before, she’d had a little German. This past year, she’d done her best to forget it, and hoped her transcript had perished when Kiev was lost: knowing the enemy’s language could easily make one an object of suspicion. If these soldiers had little or no Russian, though, it would prove useful. She dredged a phrase out of her memory:
“Wie heissen Sie?”

The Germans’ worn, filthy faces lit up. Till now, they’d been nearly mute, tongue-tied among the Russians (which was also the root meaning of
Nemtsi
, the old Russian word for Germans—those who could make no intelligible sounds). The ginger-whiskered one grinned and said,
“Ich heisse
Feldwebel
Georg Schultz, Fräulein,”
and rattled off his pay number too fast for her to follow.

The older one said,
“Ich heisse Heinrich Jäger Major,”
and also gave his number. She ignored it; it wasn’t something she needed to know right now. The
kolkhozniks
murmured among themselves, either impressed she could speak to the
Wehrmacht
men in their own tongue or mistrustful of her for the same reason.

She wished she recalled more. She had to ask their unit, by clumsy circumlocution: “From which group of men do you come?”

The sergeant started to answer; the major (his name meant “hunter,” Ludmila thought; he certainly had a hunter’s eyes) cleared his throat, which sufficed to make the younger man shut up. Jäger said, “Are we prisoners of war, Russian pilot? You may ask only certain things of prisoners of war.” He spoke slowly, clearly, and simply; perhaps he recognized Ludmila’s hesitancy with his language.

“Nyet,”
she answered, and then,
“Nein,”
in case he hadn’t understood the Russian. He was nodding as she spoke, so evidently he had. She went on, “You are not prisoners of war. We fight the”—she perforce had to say
yasheritsi
, not knowing the German word for “Lizards”—“first. We fight Germans now only if Germans fight us. Not forget war against Germany, but put it to one side for now.”

“Ah,” the major said. “Yes, that is good. We fight the Lizards first also.”
(Eidechsen
was what the German said. Ludmila made a mental note of it.) Jäger went on, “Since we have this common foe, I will tell you that we are from Sixteenth Panzer. I will also tell you that Schultz and I have together killed a Lizard panzer.”

She stared at him. “This is true?” Radio Moscow made all sorts of claims of Lizard armor destroyed, but she had flown over too many battlefields to take them seriously any more. She’d seen what was left of German panzer units that tried to take on the Lizards, too: not much. Were these tankmen lying to impress her with how masterful the Germans remained?

No, she decided after a moment of watching and listening to them. They described the action in too much vivid detail for her to doubt them: if they hadn’t been through what they were talking about, they belonged on the stage, not in the middle of a collective farm. Most convincing of all was Jäger’s mournful summary at the end: “We hurt them, but they wrecked us. All my company’s tanks are gone.”

“What are they saying, Comrade Pilot?” Pavlyuchenko demanded.

She quickly translated. The
kolkhozniks
gaped at the Germans as if they were indeed the superior beings they claimed to be. Their wide eyes made Ludmila want to kick them. Russians always looked on Germans with a peculiar mixture of envy and fear. Ever since the days of the Vikings, the Russian people had learned from more sophisticated Germanic folk to the west. And ever since the days of the Vikings, the Germanic peoples had looked to seize what they could from their Slavic neighbors. Teutonic Knights, Swedes, Prussians, Germans—the labels changed, but the Germanic push to the east seemed to go on forever. Though latest and worst, Hitler was but one of many.