Two Fronts (49 page)

The Spaniard yelled for stretcher-bearers for Carroll. Then he said, “And I will take you back to an aid station. Can you walk?”

“I don’t know. We’ll both find out, won’t we?” Chaim said. What would they do with his left hand? No—what would they do
to
it? Would he keep it? If he didn’t, how would he, how could he, get along without it? The morphine made all the questions seem much less urgent than they would have without it. He got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m sorry as hell.” He draped his good arm over the Spaniard’s shoulder. “Let’s go. We’ll see how far I get.”

He made it all the way to the aid station. That surprised him, and seemed to surprise his helper more. By the time he got there, though, the shot was wearing off. But a doctor took one look at the blood all over his face and at the dripping bandage on his hand and stuck him once more. The pain receded again.

Morphine or no morphine, he whimpered when the man peeled off the bandage and examined the ruin of his hand. “Can you save it?” Chaim asked.

“
No sé, Señor
,” the man replied. “It does not looked good, but … Well, perhaps.”

By the way he spoke, Chaim realized he hadn’t even intended to try till he heard the question. “Do what you can, please,” Chaim said. “I don’t think I can use a rifle one-handed, and I want to get even with Sanjurjo’s
putos
.”

The ghost of a smile briefly bent the doctor’s lips. “Let me do what I can here. Then I will send you back to Madrid. Dr. Alvarez there has done some things that surprised more than a few people.”

“
Gracias. De la corazón de mi corazón, gracias
.” Chaim did the best he could with his clumsy Spanish.
From the heart of my heart?
He wouldn’t have said it that way in English.

He got the message across. “
De nada, Señor
,” the doctor said. This time, his smile lingered long enough to let Chaim be sure he really saw it. The man went on, “Now I will give you ether and make some preliminary repairs. Then—Madrid.”

“Madrid,” Chaim echoed. The ether rag came down on his face.

He thought he would go back to Madrid in an ambulance. He rode in the back of a beat-up Citroën truck with three other wounded men. He was groggy and dopey and hurt a lot in spite of the dope. His hand was swaddled in thick white bandages that got redder and redder as the truck rattled along. His scalp, he discovered, was also properly bandaged. He’d had his hair clipped or shaved off, too. No doubt he looked stupid as hell.

When they got to the hospital, a male nurse asked, “Which is Dr. Alvarez’s patient?”

“
Aquí estoy
,” Chaim answered.
Here I am
.

Dr. Alvarez proved to speak English with an accent much more elegant than Chaim’s. He’d studied medicine in London. He cut off the bandages and examined the wound and what the sawbones at the aid station—a man whose name Chaim had never learned—had done to it. Thoughtfully, the English-trained Spaniard rubbed his thin, dark mustache with a forefinger.

“What do you think, Doc? Can it stay on?” Chaim asked. Speaking English was a relief. Half addled by pain and morphine, he suspected he would have made an even worse hash of Spanish than usual.

“Oh, yes. I am certain of it—as long as we can avoid an infection in the wound, anyway,” Dr. Alvarez said. “And I hope … No, I believe … I believe that, once the surgical repairs are complete, you will have some function in it. Not full function, perhaps, but you will be able to use your thumb and some of your fingers.”

“Surgical repairs?” Chaim repeated. “You’re gonna carve on me some more?”

“It is necessary,” Alvarez replied. Maybe he thought Chaim didn’t want more surgery and he had to talk him into it.

If he did, he was dead wrong. “Let’s get on with it, then,” Chaim said. The operating room was spotless and had the antiseptic smell of carbolic acid. As long as Nationalist planes didn’t bomb the hospital, Chaim figured he’d come through fine. He smiled at the nurse who put the ether cone over his nose and mouth, and she had gray hair and a face like a horse. Oblivion swallowed him.

ANASTAS MOURADIAN PLAYED
indifferent chess. Even if it wasn’t the microcosm of war people who didn’t know much about war (or, sometimes, about chess) often claimed, it was a way to make time go by when you weren’t flying. It was less popular than swilling vodka, but easier on the liver.

He found himself playing more now that he was flying with Isa Mogamedov. The Azeri not only didn’t drink like a Russian, he didn’t even drink like an Armenian. He hardly drank at all, in fact. Stas wondered if he was a pious enough Muslim to find alcohol sinful.

Mogamedov didn’t say he was, not even when Russian pilots and bomb-aimers teased him for his abstemiousness. Stas didn’t tease him and did play chess with him. Isa would have been an idiot to admit he was a serious believer. The war had put a damper on the Soviet Union’s aggressive atheism, but hadn’t stifled it altogether. Mogamedov just smiled and shrugged and said things like, “If I drink a lot, I get sick, so I don’t drink a lot.”

He played better than Stas did, but not so much better that Stas had no hope of beating him. He managed a victory about one game in five, which encouraged him to keep playing even though he got trounced most of the time. He sometimes wondered whether Isa threw a game every now and then to keep him interested, but asking about that might have been even less polite than inquiring about religion, so he didn’t.

Naturally, all the flyers who played fancied themselves as reincarnations of Botvinnik or Tal. Mogamedov beat most of them as easily as he handled Stas. Pretty soon, instead of asking for games, they contented themselves with kibitzing when he and Mouradian sat on opposite sides of the board.

As far as Stas was concerned, kibitzers were only slightly more welcome than German flak. Most of their advice and criticism came his way, because even the dullest of them could see that Isa didn’t need much help—if that was what it was—from them.

Stas managed to get into a complicated, crowded midgame position while only a pawn down. He felt moderately pleased; as often as not, the writing was already on the wall by this time. He scratched behind one ear while pondering what to try next. After some thought, he moved a knight.

“Oh, you wood-pusher!” exclaimed one of the vultures hovering over the board.

“When I want your opinion, Arkady, I’ll beat it out of you,” Stas said with his sweetest smile.

Isa sat corpse-still while he was studying a game. His face might have been carved from limestone for all it gave away. When he’d made up his mind, he reached out and took hold of a bishop. It slid across the board and assassinated Stas’ king’s rook’s pawn.

“See?” Arkady said. “What did I tell you?”

“Noisy in here, isn’t it?” Stas said to nobody in particular. Expecting the Russian to take a hint was like expecting the Second Coming day after tomorrow. You could do it, but you’d soon end up disappointed. Braining Arkady with a vodka bottle might have won his attention. It would have made people talk about Stas, though.

He moved the knight again. This time, the move served some obvious purpose: it threatened the bishop that hadn’t gone pawn-killing. Isa pulled it back one square. Stas’ knight advanced again, this time to threaten a rook. Isa slid the rook along the rear rank till it protected the bishop from behind. Of itself, Stas’ hand moved the knight yet again. This time, it forked Isa’s rook and his queen.

Mogamedov smiled, something he hardly ever did during a game. “You saw all that from the beginning, didn’t you?” He didn’t sound angry or accusing: more like a father who’d just watched a boy do something important on his own, and do it well.

“I did.” Stas, by contrast, sounded amazed, because he was. “It was like … like … the sky opening up in front of me, or something.”

Isa nodded. “It feels that way, yes, when you get the long sight of the board. You should try for it more often.”

“I didn’t try this time,” Stas said. “It just happened, that’s all.” He felt like an innocent bystander, the way he might have if he were suddenly to witness a highway smashup.

“You
planned
all that?” Not so innocent bystander Arkady, by contrast, sounded like someone who didn’t believe it for a minute.

“
Da
. I did,” Mouradian answered. He’d seen something like ten moves ahead. He’d never done anything like that before. No matter what Isa said, he doubted he ever would again, either. His head wasn’t geared that way—only it had been, this glorious once.

Isa Mogamedov raised an eyebrow in Arkady’s direction. “Just because you can’t do something yourself, Comrade, that doesn’t necessarily mean other people aren’t able to.”

The other, less obnoxious, kibitzers whooped. One of them whistled softly, which might have stung Arkady more. The Russian’s face and ears went hot and red. He stormed away. Without any fuss, Isa moved his queen. Stas took the rook. The game went on. He managed to hang on to the advantage the knight’s tour had given him and to win.

Afterwards, though, when the board was put away and the kibitzers had disappeared, he spoke in a low voice: “You made an enemy there, I’m afraid.”

“Who? Arkaday?” Mogamedov snapped his fingers. “That’s how worried about it I am.”

“He’s a Russian. He’ll know more Russians.” Stas spoke with the resigned annoyance of a nominally equal citizen in a Soviet state where Russians still dominated by weight of numbers and weight of history.

Mogamedov shrugged. “If they stick me in a gulag, I’ll probably die pretty soon. If I keep flying against the Nazis, I’ll probably die pretty soon, too. So what difference does it make? Chances are it won’t be any fun either way.”

Stas opened his mouth. Then, realizing he had nothing much to say to that, he closed it again. After a moment, he managed, “Well, you’ve got me there.”

“We’re fucked, is what we are,” Isa said.

“Can’t argue with that, either,” Stas said. “But if that’s the way you feel, you ought to drink more.”

“I don’t enjoy it,” the Azeri answered. “I feel like an idiot while I’m drunk. I act like an idiot while I’m drunk, too. And the next morning I feel like dogshit. So what’s the point?”

He didn’t say anything about how sinful alcohol was, or about how the Prophet had forbidden it. No, his reasons were rational, the kind of reasons a Russian teetotaler (assuming such a furry fish existed) might advance. His reasons were also the kind a Muslim might bring forth when he was talking with a Christian he didn’t fully trust.

They’d flown together. They’d relied on each other for their lives. They’d had to, or the NKVD would have disposed of them if German fighter pilots or flak gunners didn’t beat the Chekists to the punch. But Mogamedov didn’t think Stas wouldn’t grab the chance to feed him to the men who ran the camps.

That saddened Stas. It made him mad. It didn’t surprise him one bit. He wasn’t sure he could count on Isa Mogamedov that way, either. The fewer chances a Soviet citizen took, the less he revealed himself to the wider world, the better off he was likely to stay. If he made fewer friends than he might have otherwise, what was that but one more part of the price he paid for survival?

PEGGY DRUCE WONDERED
whom the Republicans would run against Franklin Delano Roosevelt when the leaves turned in 1944. She assumed FDR would run again if the war was still on, and the war didn’t look like stopping any time soon.

She shrugged, there alone in the front room of her comfortable Main Line house. The question seemed important and unreal at the same time. With the election at the tail end of next year, there wasn’t a GOP field to start betting on yet. Even if there had been, somebody was still liable to pop out of nowhere, the way Willkie had in 1940. Almost a year and a half away? That was a couple of eternities in politics.

She wished Herb were at home. They could hash things out together. He was bound to have an opinion about what kind of candidate the Republicans would field, and about what the fellow’s chances might be. Whatever Herb’s opinion was, he would have some good, solid reasons to give it weight. He always did.

But Herb was in … where was Herb this time? Texas, Peggy thought. Or was it Alabama? Wherever he was, he was slashing red tape and saving Uncle Sam money. Uncle Sam ought to be grateful, but Peggy didn’t labor under the illusion that he would be. Chances were the government would be so amazed anyone could save it money that it wouldn’t believe such a thing was really happening.

Peggy still wondered what all the ivory-tower chemists or physicists or whatever they’d been were doing now that their gravy train was derailed. Billions of dollars? Billions of dollars on a super-duper bomb that might not work and would take years and years to build even if it did?

You had to be practical. Herb understood that, understood it down to the ground. You couldn’t expect people like Einstein to. He lived in the ivory tower, not just in it but on the very top floor. Okay, he was good at throwing equations around. Fine. Wonderful. Equations cost nothing but paper and ink, or maybe a blackboard and chalk. When you started dealing with the real world, you needed people like Herb Druce.

No, the government would never give him the credit he deserved for slaying the vicious boondoggle. Peggy did. Some money was bound to get wasted. Wasting money was one of the things governments were for. That only got worse during wartime. But you had to do what you could to keep from wasting more than you could help.

She smiled as she lit a cigarette. Feeling good for Herb, feeling good about him, was good. She needed that; she could feel herself needing it. They still weren’t where she wished they would be.

Blowing a stream of smoke up at the ceiling, she wondered if they’d ever get there again. No way to know. There might be a scab over the wound in their trust, but the wound remained. One of these days, it might heal up and turn into a scar. She kept hoping it would.

She smoked the cigarette down to a very short butt, then stubbed it out in the brass baseball-glove ashtray that Herb liked. Then she turned on the radio. The dials lighted up right away. She knew she would have to wait for the tubes inside the big wooden cabinet to warm up before sound came out.