Bombs Away - Страница 3

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Marian got in, too. She laid her purse on the seat between them, set the choke, and started the car. It was a postwar model, with the windshield a single sheet of glass, not two divided and held in place by a strip of chromed metal. She liked that. She liked the automatic transmission, too. She could drive a stick-who couldn’t? — but she didn’t believe in working any harder than you had to.

Keeping her eye on the rear-view mirror to watch for kids on bikes or silly dogs or grownups who weren’t paying attention, she backed out into the street. The cobbler’s was only a few blocks away.

The shop window had a shoe and a cobbler’s small hammer painted on it, and a legend: FAYVL TABAKMAN-COBBLER. REPAIRS amp; RESOLING. Under the shoe was another legend in smaller letters from an alphabet Marian couldn’t read. She supposed it said the same thing in Yiddish, but it might have been Russian or Armenian or Greek for all she could prove.

Inside, the shop smelled of the cheap cigars Tabakman smoked. One was in his mouth. He was about fifty, skinny, with a graying mustache. He wore a cloth cap and short sleeves. A number was tattooed on his arm. He knew more about horror than most people who lived in America.

What he knew, though, he didn’t peddle. He just touched the brim of his old-fashioned cap and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Staley. Hello, little girl.” He had an accent, but not a thick one. If he’d learned English since the war, he’d done a bang-up job.

“My name is Linda!” Linda said.

“Hello, Linda,” Tabakman said gravely. “I had a little girl about your age.”

“You had one?” Linda caught the past tense. “What happened? Did you lose her?”

“Yes. I lost her.” Behind gold-rimmed glasses, the cobbler’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. With an effort, he came back to the here-and-now. “Both pairs you left are ready to take home, Mrs. Staley. If you want to see them…”

“I’m sure they’re great,” Marian said. He showed them to her anyway. He did fine, neat work; you could hardly see where the half-sole ended and the older leather picked up. Both pairs together came to seventy-five cents. She gave him a dollar and waved away the change.

“You are very kind,” he murmured, touching his cap again. “Have a happy New Year, both of you.”

Marian only shrugged. She knew the tip wouldn’t blot out the memories Linda had stirred up. It was what she could do, though, so she did it.

The wide aisles and abundant food at the supermarket made her smile. Riding in the welded-wire shopping cart made Linda smile. The prices…The prices made Marian wish she were on a military base. But Bill had been a bookkeeper for Boeing till the new war sucked him back into uniform. They’d bought the house with the idea that they’d keep it for a long time. Trying to do that on military pay wasn’t easy, but Marian had made it work so far.

She bought ground chuck instead of ground round, margarine instead of butter, and pot roast instead of steak. If it came to beef hearts and chicken giblets and lots of macaroni and cheese, then it did, that was all. She’d eaten that kind of stuff as a little girl during the Depression. She could do it again if she had to. So far, she hadn’t had to.

She splurged a little-a whole nickel-on a Hershey bar for Linda. After a moment fighting temptation, she lost and spent another nickel on one for herself, too. When she spread her bread with something that tasted like motor oil, she could look back on the chocolate and smile.

When they got home, she took Linda inside first with a stern, “Now you stay here till I finish bringing in the groceries, okay?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Linda said. If she messed that one up, her Teddy bear spent the night on a high shelf and she had to sleep without it. That had happened only a couple of weeks earlier, so the tragic memory was still fresh.

Marian hated carrying shopping bags in the rain. The miserable things turned to library paste and fell apart as soon as water touched them. Chasing escaped cans down the driveway wasn’t her idea of fun.

She got everything into the house. Linda didn’t feel the urge to play explorer-maybe the rain outside held her back. Whatever the reason, Marian put the groceries away and then let out the sigh of relief she always saved for when she’d done the things she had to do.

A cup of Lipton’s would be nice now, she thought. She could watch whatever happened to be on the one channel the new TV in the front room got. As long as she let it grab hold of her eyes, she wouldn’t worry-so much-about how Bill was doing over there on the far side of the Pacific.

Before she could even start boiling water, Linda carried in a copy of Tootle and said, “Read to me.”

Bill always called those the magic words. Whatever he was doing, he’d stop and read when she asked. He went through books like popcorn himself, and wanted a kid who’d do the same thing. Marian wasn’t quite so dedicated, but she was pretty good-not least because she didn’t want Linda squealing on her when Bill got home.

“Let me fix some tea first, okay?” she said. “Then I will.”

“Okay!” Linda said.

–

The Ivans were giving the Wehrmacht hell on the Eastern Front again. Gustav Hozzel cowered in his trench. He knew too well that that wouldn’t save his sorry ass. Three different T-34/85s were bearing down on the weakly held German lines in eastern Poland. An antipanzer round had just hit one of them-and glanced off the monster’s cleverly sloped armor.

Lances of fires in the air. Screams as the Katyushas rained down on the German earthworks. Sweet suffering Jesus, there’d be nothing left of the company after those fuckers blew.

Screams…

Gustav Hozzel’s eyes opened wide, wider, widest. All he saw was blackness. He was sure he was dead…till he spied a thin strip of moonlight that slid between two misaligned slats on the Venetian blinds covering the bedroom window.

Luisa set a soft hand on his shuddering shoulder. “You did it again, Liebchen,” his wife said sadly.

“I…I guess I did.” Gustav’s voice was hoarse. When you screamed yourself awake, and your wife with you, no wonder you tried to talk through a raw throat afterwards. Little by little, his heart slowed from its panicked thundering. “I’m sorry,” he managed.

“Was it the same dream?” Luisa asked.

“It’s always the same dream. The panzers, the rockets…” Gustav shuddered. That dream, and the death it held, seemed more real, more true, than his waking life. He’d never told that to his wife. It would only have scared her-and who could blame her for being scared? He took what comfort he could from saying, “It doesn’t come as often as it used to. I haven’t had it for a couple of months now.”

Luisa nodded; Gustav felt the motion rather than seeing it. “That’s good,” she said. “Please God, in a while years will go by between one time and the next.”

“Please God,” Gustav agreed. He’d fought the Russians from late 1942 to the end of the war. When the collapse finally came, he’d fled west out of Bohemia and managed to surrender to the Amis. If the Red Army’d grabbed him, he would still be in one of Stalin’s prison camps-unless they’d decided a bullet in the back of the neck was easier than dealing with him.

Here he was in Fulda, safe in the American zone even if it did lie close to the part of Germany Russia still held. Except when he shrieked himself awake in the middle of the night, he was an ordinary printer with an ordinary clerk for a wife. Yes, he had a wound badge and a marksman’s badge and the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class and the medal for the Iron Cross First Class in a drawer under his socks. But he hadn’t taken them out and looked at them more than twice in the past five years. And it wasn’t as if most other German men in their late twenties and early thirties didn’t have their own little collections of medals.

“Do you think you can go back to sleep this time?” Luisa asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll try. What time is it, anyhow?”

The alarm clock ticking by Luisa’s side of the bed had glowing hands. She rolled over to look at it. “Half past two,” she said.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” To Gustav, that was about the worst time there was. Everything in him was at low ebb-except his fear. He sighed. “The only good news is, I don’t remember the last time I had those nightmares twice in one night.”

“Fine. So sleep.” Luisa’s yawn said she intended to try again, too, even if getting jerked awake like that had to be as horrible for her as it was for him.

Sleep Gustav did. The alarm clock woke him at a quarter to seven. It didn’t seem nearly so bad-or so loud-as the explosions inside his head. He ate black bread and jam and drank a big cup of coffee almost white with milk. Then he put on a hat and his beat-up tweed jacket and headed for work.

His breath smoked when he left the block of flats. It was cold out there-what else, at the end of the first week of January? — but not a patch on what he’d known in Russia and Poland. And he could come in from this cold whenever he wanted, and no one would shoot him if he did. It was still dark, too-darker than it had been before, in fact, because the moon was down.

Fulda had come to life even in the long winter night. The noises of carpentry rose from the Dom. An American air raid had damaged the cathedral six or eight months before the end of the war. The same raid had smashed the square that housed the vegetable market. One day before too long, though, and you’d look things over and have no idea that bombers had ever struck here. So many German cities got hit far harder than Fulda. A town of only 40,000 or so, it couldn’t have been an important target. Bit by bit, those ravaged places were getting back on their feet, too.