Two Fronts (39 page)

Carlos Federico Weinberg stared gravely at his father. “Papa,” he said. “Yes, I’m your papa,” Chaim agreed. He thought the toddler’s voice held a note of doubt. Maybe he was too sensitive, and imagining things. Then again, maybe he wasn’t. The only times he got to see the kid were when he came into Madrid on leave.

He supposed he ought to be glad La Martellita let him see Carlos Federico at all. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to have a baby, or to stay married to him one second longer than she needed to give Junior a last name.

Seeing the kid also meant seeing the mother. La Martellita looked tired. Well, anybody bringing up a child by herself had a right to look tired. Chaim knew he looked tired, too. Soldiering was one of the few things on God’s green (at the moment, hereabouts, God’s brown) earth that could make a man as tired as a woman with a baby.

Tired or not, La Martellita also looked gorgeous. Chaim didn’t, never had, and never would. He eyed Carlos Federico again, this time with a new perspective. “He’s lucky,” he remarked to La Martellita.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“He looks like you,” Chaim said. “When he grows up, the girls will all fall at his feet. He won’t be a tough, homely scoundrel like his old man.”

“If you think you can sweet-talk your way back into bed with me, forget it,” La Martellita said. Chaim hadn’t really thought so, even if he had had certain hopes along those lines. She went on, “By the time he grows up, we will enjoy full social equality in the Republic. Looks won’t matter as much as they do in bourgeois society.”

“
Puede ser
,” Chaim replied. But why did he say
maybe
to La Martellita instead of
bullshit
, which is what he would have told anyone else? Why? Because she was beautiful, that was why.

People who looked good had things greased for them. Chaim guessed they always would, come the revolution or not. People like him always had to jump and scramble to get anywhere. A lot of the time, people like La Martellita and Mike Carroll (who would be getting back to the front soon—the docs had done a better job on his leg than Chaim had dreamt they could) didn’t even need to reach out and grab. Things fell into their laps whether they reached or not.

La Martellita’s black eyes sparked. She was about to demonstrate dialectically why looks wouldn’t matter when true Communism arrived. Chaim didn’t feel like getting into a screaming row with her, which was what would happen if he presumed to doubt. Sometimes forearmed was forestalled. Instead of doubting, he said, “How about I take you somewhere for something to eat?”

He still spoke Spanish with the syntax of a New York Jew. Well, he damn well
was
a New York Jew. The locals could follow him, which was all that mattered when you were a damn furriner. La Martellita decided not to give him an ideological flaying after all. With a nod, she said, “We can do that.”

Soldiers didn’t make much. Neither did Party functionaries. But, unlike her, he gambled with what he did make. What else was he supposed to do with it? Sometimes the dice and cards ran your way for a while. He carried a good-sized wad of banknotes in a front pocket. Only a fool asking to meet a pickpocket carried his cash on his hip.

He pushed the buggy that held his son. He was proud to push it. He beamed when people looked inside and cooed at Carlos Federico. They did that more often here than they would have back in New York City. Whatever prosperity this poor, miserable world had left was concentrated in the place where he’d been born. Maybe that was why, like misers, so many New Yorkers hoarded friendliness as if it were gold.

Some of the Madrileños gave him odd looks as they went by. He was used to that, and didn’t resent it … too much. It rarely happened when he walked through the city by himself. But when he was a homely guy with a gorgeous woman pushing a baby buggy that proved he’d got the gorgeous woman’s knickers down—oh, yes, he got the odd looks then.

And he would have bet dollars to dog-ends that he’d go right on getting them once true Communism came, assuming it ever did.

He sighed. He wished like anything he were still getting La Martellita’s knickers down.
Wish for the moon, too
, he thought mournfully.

She wasn’t married to him any more, which didn’t mean she’d given up on trying to improve him. “Don’t get into any brawls, all right?” she said as they walked into a café and wine shop not far from her block of flats.

“Who, me?
¿El narigón loco?
” He brought out the nickname with pride.

“Try,” La Martellita urged. Chaim gave forth with a resigned nod. Spaniards were allowed, even expected, to have a fiery temper. In a foreigner, it seemed an exotic affectation. In a foreigner who also chanced to be a Jew … Well, that was how he’d got the nickname.

He’d been in this joint before. La Martellita had been here a lot more often than he had. The waiter who showed them to their table—a guy with a limp and a gray mustache, which explained why he wasn’t at the front—bowed and scraped over her. You weren’t supposed to do that in the Republic, which was about radical egalitarianism if it was about anything. Maybe it was force of habit, more likely a tribute to La Martellita’s looks. She didn’t ream him out about it, but accepted it as no less than her due. Gorgeous people took such attentions for granted. They might, but Chaim sure didn’t.

He ordered paella for both of them. They drank white wine while they waited for the guy in the kitchen to work his magic. Carlos Federico started to fuss. La Martellita nursed him. Chaim gallantly looked away. He remembered those breasts too well. The little boy fell asleep. La Martellita gently set him back in the buggy.

“Pan is very hot,” the waiter warned as he set it down. Several crayfish sat atop the yellow rice. They were
treyf
on the hoof, of course, as if he cared. He sucked the meat and the juices out of their shells with as much gusto as if he’d been born in Madrid.

La Martellita sighed when she tasted the rice. “Turmeric,” she said, “not saffron.”

“What do you expect? There’s a war on, you know.” Chaim wasn’t inclined to fuss. Compared to the slop and the monkey meat he ate in the trenches, the paella was terrific, ersatz spices or not.

She gave him a severe look. “Things should be done properly. Rules are there for a reason.”

“If you say so.” He really was trying hard not to fight. He was a Marxist, even a Marxist-Leninist. She was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. It made a difference, all right. She liked telling other people what to do more than he did. He told her what to do anyhow: “Here. Have some more
vino
.”

She let him pour for her, but she said, “You won’t get me drunk enough to go to bed with you, either.”

“Who, me?” he replied, as if that were the farthest thing from his mind. He never would have got to sleep with her the first time if she hadn’t been gassed to the gills.

They scraped off the rice that had stuck to the iron pan. A lot of Spaniards thought that was the best part of the paella. Chaim didn’t, but it was miles from bad. He set money on the table. Bills over here were a lot fancier than boring American greenbacks. Greenbacks spent better than pesetas, though, even if they weren’t so pretty.

Was that also true of homely people. He thought about it while they walked back to La Martellita’s apartment. He’d had enough wine to make it seem important on the cosmic scale of things.

La Martellita had had enough to let him kiss her in the blackout darkness outside her building. But she slapped his hand away when he tried to slip it into her blouse and cup one of those perfect breasts. “No, I told you.”

A no from her meant
no
, not
maybe
or
try again later
. Swearing in several languages, Chaim mooched dejectedly back to the café and got very drunk.

ADI STOSS POURED
oil into the Panzer III. “This is better shit than they gave us when we first came to Russia,” he allowed, praising the lubricant with a very faint damn. “I don’t
think
it’ll turn to mucilage when the weather gets really cold.”

“The new and improved—again!—antifreeze won’t freeze up, either … I hope,” Hermann Witt more or less agreed.

“I hope so, too, Auntie Freeze,” Adi said sweetly.

Theo Hossbach bent down and scooped up enough snow for a snowball in his mittened hands. He delivered the editorial to the back of Adi’s neck, so that a lot of it slithered down inside the driver’s coveralls. Adi did an excellent impression of a man with ants in his pants.

A snowball fight was more fun than servicing the engine any old day. The whole crew joined in. They pelted one another with snow till their black panzer outfits might have been winter camouflage smocks. Theo also got a snowball smack in the snoot. Fortunately, whoever threw it hadn’t squeezed it down real tight. Otherwise, he might have needed to see the medics on account of some stupid horseplay. They wouldn’t have liked that, and neither would he.

Of course, the work didn’t go away just because you ignored it for a while. Theo greased the bow machine gun with lubricant that also promised not to turn to sludge when the mercury in thermometers froze solid (which, to any German’s horror, was known to happen during Russian winters). What the manufacturers’ promises were worth … Well, they’d all find out.

If Sergeant Witt was an optimist, he concealed it very well. “The bosses of the companies that make this junk, they’re back in the
Reich
, drinking champagne and stuffing their faces with roast goose and pinching the chambermaid’s ass.”

“They can kiss
my
ass,” Adi declared. “And the crap they sent us that first winter almost cooked our goose when it didn’t do what they promised.”

The panzer commander nodded. “They should come up to the front for a while. That would be an education for them, by Jesus!”

“Our field marshals should come up to the front for a while, too,” Kurt Poske put in. “The orders they give, it’s plain enough they don’t know what the hell it’s like up here.”

Adi favored the loader with a crooked grin. “Look out, world! Another one’s going Bolshevik on us!”

He pitched his voice so no one outside the tight-knit crew could possibly hear him. That word made Theo nervous all the same. Did joking Red Army men call their buddies Nazis and give forth with salutes Hitler would have loved? If they did, they had to be as careful as Adi was. Some ways of tweaking authority could prove more dangerous than they were worth.

Stolidly, Kurt answered, “I’m no fucking Bolshie. I just don’t want some numbnuts with gold braid all over his collar tabs getting my dick blown off on account of he thinks we can work miracles.”

“It’s the season for miracles, all right.” Adi launched into “Silent Night.” His baritone came close to professional quality.

Hermann Witt looked up from the radiator. “Where the devil did
you
learn that song?” The same question had occurred to Theo, but he wouldn’t have asked it.

But nothing seemed to faze Adi today. “Why, in the convent, Auntie Freeze. The nuns taught me all kinds of fascinating things.” The drama critic in Theo said Adi’s leer was overdone.

Sergeant Witt snorted. “Did they teach you how to bolt the carburetor back on?”

“
Aber natürlich
,” Adi replied. “Where’d the eight-millimeter wrench go?”

After they slammed down the armored engine cover, Adi climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It fired up right away, which said the new lubricants were indeed better than the old—and also said Russian winter hadn’t yet clamped down with full authority. The rest of the crew came aboard. Before long, the heater made Theo as uncomfortably warm as he had been chilly. The happy medium was as extinct for him as it was in the world generally.

Witt’s panzer and the other two runners from the platoon went out to patrol the German lines. Every white lump left Theo worried. Was that a whitewashed T-34, sitting there in ambush waiting for some unwary German crew—this one, for instance—to trundle by?

Half an hour into the patrol, a signal came in from battalion HQ: “Return to your base at once.”

“Acknowledged,” Theo said; his voice sounded rusty in his own ears. He wanted to ask what was up, but figured the guy back there somewhere safer wouldn’t tell him. Instead, he relayed the order to Sergeant Witt. Doing that wasn’t so bad. He was just a phonograph record, passing on someone else’s words. He wasn’t doing anything dangerous, like initiating speech on his own.

Witt swore. “Why are we supposed to do that? We’ve still got a pretty fair stretch of ground to cover.”

“Don’t know.” When Theo did have to speak for himself, he tried to get the maximum from the minimum.

This time, Sergeant Witt swore some more. “Why didn’t you ask them, for Christ’s sake?” He answered his own question before Theo could: “Because you’re you, that’s why.… The other panzers are heading back. We’d better follow them—sure don’t want to stay out here by my lonesome. Go with ’em, Adi.”

“I’m doing it, Sergeant.” Adi Stoss turned the Panzer III toward the west.

When they got back to the battered village that housed their company, it was boiling like a pot forgotten over a big fire. “What the hell is going on?” Sergeant Witt shouted from the panzer’s cupola: or perhaps something rather more pungent than that.

The engine was still growling. Buttoned up inside the iron shell, with earphones on his head, Theo couldn’t make out whatever answer the sergeant got. He did hear Witt come out with some more fancy profanity. He looked a question across the radio set to Adi. Maybe the driver knew what was going on.

Sure enough, Stoss said, “We’re pulling back to make a shorter defensive line.”

“Oh, yeah?” Amazement jerked the words out of Theo. The
Wehrmacht
had gone toe-to-toe with the Red Army ever since the Germans came to Poland’s rescue.
Landsers
never gave back any territory unless the Ivans drove them off it. Retreat without orders was a capital crime. And orders like that didn’t come.