Bombs Away

20

Vasili Yasevich shook his head in what he hoped was a convincing show of regret. “No, sir. I am very sorry, sir, but I have no opium to sell,” he said. “Use of opium is not allowed any more, not under the just laws of the People’s Republic.”

“But you are a druggist. You can get medicines like this.” The man was about fifty. His clothes were as plain as Vasili’s. No one flaunted wealth in China these days. His voice, though, had the self-assured growl that said he was used to getting whatever he wanted.

He wasn’t going to get opium from Vasili. “I am very sorry, sir,” the Russian expatriate repeated. “Having the poppy is a capital crime. It is not the kind of chance a poor man, an honest man, wants to take.”

“Comrade Wang’s wife told me you could get her whatever she needed,” the man said.

“Comrade Wang’s wife never asked me for opium,” Vasili said, which was true. “I got her ma huang. That’s legal.”

“She didn’t talk about what you got her. She talked about what you could get her.” The man bore down hard on the word that made the difference.

Bitch! Cunt! Whore! Fucking whore! When Vasili swore inside his own head, he swore in Russian, not Chinese. Maybe that was because he’d learned the one language slightly ahead of the other. Maybe it was just because Russian sounded and felt earthier, more obscene, to him.

The bow he gave the important man, though, was Chinese. It was so Chinese, getting it from a round-eyed barbarian, even one who spoke the language of the Middle Kingdom, visibly surprised the fellow. “Comrade Wang’s wife is a wise woman,” Vasili said. “I am sad to have to tell you, though, that even the wisest is sometimes mistaken.”

“Curse you, I need the poppy!” the man said. He wasn’t telling Vasili anything Vasili hadn’t guessed. If the fellow had had the habit for a while, even laws that threatened death to people who used the drug wouldn’t get its claws out of his head. He went on, “You want money? I’ll give you money! I’ve got plenty of money.”

He reached into a trouser pocket. When he opened his hand, gold coins from Russia and England and Austria-Hungary gleamed like the sun.

He had plenty of money, yes. What he lacked was sense. The shabby streetcorner where they stood talking hadn’t seen that much gold in all the centuries Harbin was there. “Put it away!” Vasili hissed. “Do you want somebody to knock you over the head?”

“Who would dare?” The man had the arrogance of a high official, of someone who was likely to know Comrade Wang and his wife. Again, though, arrogance was no substitute for caution.

“Who? There are people in this part of town who would kill you for that many coppers.” At various times in Vasili’s life, he might have been one of them. Not mentioning that seemed smart.

“I can have everyone in this part of town machine-gunned tomorrow morning,” the man snapped. “Don’t play games with me.”

“Do you think they care what you can do, Comrade Commissar?” Vasili didn’t know the man’s title, but that seemed a good bet. “They’ve had an atom bomb fall on them. After that, what are some machine guns?”

For a wonder, what he said seemed to get through to the Chinese. To Vasili’s relief, the man closed his hand and got the intoxicating gold out of sight. He also seemed to slump a little. How bad were the demons in his head? How soon before his brain felt emptied from the inside out, before every muscle in his body knotted, before snot flooded out of his nose, before he started shitting himself?

“You have to get me the poppy,” he said, but now with the first touch of doubt and pleading in his voice.

“Sir, please forgive this unworthy one, but he cannot do what he cannot do,” Vasili said. “Before the glorious People’s Republic triumphed, the eastern dwarfs”-a snide Chinese gibe at the Japanese-“wanted people to use opium, because it made them tame. Not many of those people still walk under the sun. Mao’s justice is fast and sure.”

The commissar slapped him in the face. Vasili had the straight razor in his pocket and a knife in his boot top. Had he thought he could pay back the commissar without being seen, he would have done it. On a street corner in a Chinese city, though? No. He made himself stand still.

“You stinking turd!” The man’s voice rose to something close to a scream. He wheeled and stormed away. Vasili didn’t follow him. With any luck, before long the man’s own body would do worse to him than he’d done to the Russian.

A skinny fellow with a tray of millet cakes held to his front by a rope around his neck said, “That guy didn’t like you.”

“Da,” Vasili agreed absently. The skinny fellow nodded; everybody in Harbin followed that. Vasili went on, “But he’s a big man, so what can you do?” The phrase meant an important person.

“What did he want from you?” the cake-seller asked.

“Something I don’t have. Something I can’t get,” Vasili said.

“Not so good when a big man wants something like that from you,” the skinny fellow said shrewdly. “Especially when you’re a round-eye. You stand out in a crowd.”

Other Russians did still live here, but not so many of them. Vasili shrugged. “Nothing I can do about how I look.”

“No, but if he wants to make you sorry, his friends won’t have much trouble finding you.”

Vasili bowed to him, too. “Thanks a lot, pal. You just made my day.” It wasn’t that the man who sold millet cakes was wrong. From now on, Vasili would have to worry every time somebody knocked on the door of the tumbledown shack where he was staying.

He did have some poppy juice there. He told himself he’d have to stash it somewhere else for a while. The commissar might come after it himself. Or he might send the secret police to search. If they found any, Vasili was out of business for good.

He decided to take care of that right away. He kept ducking into doorways on his way home, checking to see whether anyone was tailing him. As best he could tell, nobody was. He stopped at a little teahouse and drank a cup, watching Harbin go by in front of the shop. Harbin didn’t seem to care at all about Vasili Yasevich. That suited him fine.

“Do you want another cup?” the serving girl asked. She was pretty, even if she only came up to the bottom of Vasili’s chin. He’d hardly noticed her when he asked for the first cup. He’d just wanted to keep an eye on things for a few minutes.

He noticed her now. With regret, he shook his head. “Sorry, dear. I have to get somewhere. Maybe I’ll come back.”

“Khorosho,” she said, so she knew a bit of Russian. She smiled after him as he left.

He stayed careful all the way to his place. He made sure he barred the door after he went inside. The opium was in a glass jar with a ground-glass stopper. His father had had dozens like it. He’d got this one in a junk shop. He stuck it in his pocket and left.

His hiding place wasn’t wonderful, but it would do: a hollow under half a brick in a blacksmith’s place that had been falling in on itself since before Harbin belonged to puppet Manchukuo. He didn’t think anyone saw him go in. He left through a hole in the side wall. It was three blocks to his shanty. That was far enough, he hoped, to keep secret policemen from coming here when they didn’t find anything in the place.

Of course, if they wanted him enough, they could plant their own opium and kill him on account of it. He couldn’t do anything about that. With luck, he was too unimportant for them to bother. He headed back to the teahouse. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “What do I call you?”

–

Bill Staley mooched away from yet another mail call with no card or letter from Marian. He wished she’d write. They had paper and pens in refugee camps…didn’t they?

Or maybe she had written, but the Air Force hadn’t figured out that he was in Japan, not at the field north of Pusan. One of the things he’d learned was that stuff could go south a million different ways. The poor sap for whom they went south wouldn’t know which. He’d just know the world was fubar’d.

The field outside of Fukuoka was more like a base behind the lines and less like a forward airstrip than the one his B-29 hadn’t been able to land at. The runways were paved. People slept in Quonset huts and prefab wooden barracks, not under canvas. A radar dish did spin to warn of trouble, but far fewer flak guns poked snouts toward the sky.

Hank McCutcheon noticed the same thing. “We’re back in the peacetime Air Force,” he said.

“Cripes, we’ve earned it,” Bill answered. “We came way too close to buying a plot on that last run to Pyongyang.”

“Place got bombed,” McCutcheon said. “That’s all Harrison and the other guys who give the orders care about. Lose some bomber crews? Hell, that’s just the cost of doing business, like new spark plugs on a delivery truck.”

“Cripes,” Bill said again, on a different note this time. “Man, I don’t like the idea of putting casualties on one side of the ledger.”

“That’s what those guys do. That’s what they’re supposed to do,” the pilot said. “They go, ‘if we can do this much damage and only lose that many men, then hey, it’s worth a shot.’ ”

“How many cities have we lost? How about the Russians?” Bill said. “Whoever was working the cost-benefit analysis, he should have taken off his shoes so he could get the decimal point straight.”

“Not like you’re wrong,” McCutcheon said. “But you were the one who reminded me a while ago that we haven’t exactly been washing our hands with Ivory. Some of those mushroom clouds, we raised the mushrooms.”

“Uh-huh. You try not to think about it. Sometimes I feel like Lady Macbeth just the same.”

“Planning that shit is the generals’ job. Doing it’s ours,” McCutcheon said. “The other choice is getting shot down. Bombing’s better.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bill nodded. “I don’t think I was ever so scared as I was on the last run over Pyongyang. How many Superforts did we lose that night?”

“Half a dozen,” McCutcheon said, as if Bill didn’t know that as well as he did. “And those two Twin Mustangs. And the airport down in the south. We didn’t pay cheap for anything. But we plastered the target, and I promise we hurt Kim Il-sung worse’n he hurt us.”

“Sure we did. We can blow up tons and tons of gooks. But they can only blow up one Bill Staley, and they came too goddamn close to doing it. I felt the goose walking over my grave.”

McCutcheon studied him the way he might have looked over a nose wheel with a slow leak, wondering whether he could take off on it. “Bill, old son, you think maybe you ought to sit out a few missions? You don’t sound like you’re in A-number-one shape right this minute.”

“I’m not eager any more-I’ll tell you that. I’ll go, though,” Bill said. “Yeah, I will. For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou fliest, I will fly: thy crew shall be my crew, and thy Superfortress my Superfortress.”

He hadn’t thought he would-or could-go on butchering the Book of Ruth so long, but he got all the way through to the end of the passage. Hank McCutcheon eyed him with a mix of admiration and horror. “You’re crazy as a fucking bedbug, Staley, you know that?”

“Marian always tells me so, yeah,” Bill answered, not without pride. “ ’Course, she must be nuts herself, or she wouldn’t’ve married me.”

“I was gonna point that out in case you didn’t,” the pilot said. “Seriously, though, man, are you good to fly? I don’t want you in that seat if you aren’t up to doing the things you need to do.”

Bill examined himself as he would have examined the instrument panel in front of the copilot’s seat. Some of his internal dials didn’t register as they would have if everything were running smoothly, but none was in the red. “Like I said, I’m not gung-ho these days. I’ve been shot at in two wars, and it never was any fun. I’ve got a wife and a little girl Stateside, and I want to see them again. I’m an old copilot, but I’m not an old, bold copilot. So I can do it. You want me to jump up and down about doing it, that ain’t gonna happen.”

“I wanna watch animals jumping up and down, I don’t need you,” Hank McCutcheon said. “I can look at the fucking Jap monkeys instead. Ain’t they a kick in the nuts?”

“They’re something, all right,” Bill agreed. Most of the animals and birds and plants here didn’t look too different from the stuff back home. They weren’t identical, but you had to look twice to notice; the overall effect was similar. And then, in the middle of all that similarity-monkeys! He continued, “You could put ’em in uniform and they’d take over for our top brass without missing a beat. Nobody’d even notice.”

“Like hell, nobody would,” the pilot said. “The orders would start making more sense if the monkeys gave ’em.”

“Yeah, you’re right. And only a few of our generals have tails now, so people might spot that, too.”

Chain-link fencing kept unwanted humans away from the runways. It didn’t bother the Japanese macaques one bit. As Bill watched, a monkey swarmed up one side and down the other, grabbing the wire with hands and thumbish feet. Watching something the size of a dog climb nimbly as a squirrel told him he wasn’t in Kansas any more. The monkey steered clear of him and McCutcheon. They were wary around men, though not too afraid of them.

“Wonder what it’s after,” Bill said.

“Anything that isn’t nailed down,” McCutcheon replied. “And if it wants something that is, it’s liable to pry out the nails. Whatever else they are, the damn things are pests. If we had ’em back in the States, there’d be a bounty on ’em.”

“No kidding!” Bill said. Macaques raided garbage cans. They sneaked into kitchens and storerooms and stole food from them. They were like giant rats with hands that worked. Not long before the B-29s that bombed Pyongyang had to land here, one of them had swiped an MP’s.45. With its clever, curious fingers, the monkey managed to release the safety. That was its next to last mistake. It was pointing the pistol at itself when it found out what the trigger did….

“You don’t want to mess with ’em. Rile ’em up and they’ll bite your face off,” McCutcheon said.

That was also the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A macaque could look amazingly manlike with its mouth closed. But when it yawned or screeched or did anything else with its mouth open, you saw that a man might be a monkey’s nephew, but he sure wasn’t a monkey’s son. The chompers in there would have made a coyote think twice.

“I suppose it’s because we don’t have those teeth that we started hitting things with sticks, and then throwing rocks at things, and then making spears and bows and arrows and…and like that,” Bill said vaguely. He glanced over toward the camouflaged revetment that held the B-29 McCutcheon and he flew. “If we’d kept our teeth, we wouldn’t be dropping bombs on each other right this minute.”

“No-we’d be a bunch of lousy, flea-bitten monkeys on the prowl for whatever we could scrounge,” McCutcheon said.

Bill grinned a crooked grin. “And this would make us different from the way we are how exactly?”

“Hey, we aren’t lousy and flea-bitten,” McCutcheon said. “DDT takes care of that. We make the stuff that goes boom, but we make the stuff that lets life be worth living, too.”

“Mm…maybe. Can I scrounge a butt off you, Major Monkey, sir?”

“Ook,” McCutcheon said, and handed him a pack.

–

Marian had never seen Daniel Philip Jaspers after he tried to rob her car. She knew that was his name because a camp policeman pulled the would-be burglar’s wallet out of his pocket while he was still groggy. Marian and Fayvl Tabakman and a couple of other people all told the cop what he’d been up to.

Glorying in his own self-importance, the policeman took Daniel Philip Jaspers away, poking him in the ribs with a billy club whenever he staggered. He staggered quite a bit. Marian was sure she would have, too. The rock Fayvl got him with hadn’t been small, and he’d thrown it hard.

She didn’t know exactly what happened to camp criminals. If you put them in a jail, would they notice? The whole camp was too much like a jail. Maybe they went into labor gangs, clearing wreckage on the fringes of the blast area. Wreckage like what had been the house where she and Linda lived, for instance. Those labor gangs had plenty of work. They were about the only kind of workers in these parts that did.

When Marian remembered, she did keep an eye out for Daniel Philip Jaspers. He might want to get even for not being able to steal from her. She peered every which way the first few days. After that, he began to move into the background of her worries.

Two big questions stayed in the foreground. Would Bill come back from the fighting in one piece? And, what the devil would she and Linda do till he did? She couldn’t do anything about the first one but pray, and she wasn’t much good at praying. The other…

She could drive out of the camp. The trouble was, she didn’t know what she’d do then. The bombs that hit Seattle and Portland shot the whole Pacific Northwest’s economy right behind the ear. She could type; she’d been a clerk-typist at Boeing during the war. That was about the only kind of job this side of waiting tables or sweeping floors she could do. She’d been glad to walk away from it when Bill got his ruptured duck. Linda came along shortly afterwards.

If she drove away, she might find a job, not that there were many around to find. If she did, who would take care of Linda while she worked, though? Where would she stay while she looked for work? Her bank account had gone up in smoke with her bank.

All of those questions felt like more than she could handle. And so she drifted from day to day in what seemed both a no-place and a no-time. She was just kind of going along.

She wasn’t the only one at the camp who felt that way. Some people accepted it and joked about it. Nobody ever found out who first tagged the place Camp Nowhere, but the name spread like wildfire as soon as someone came up with it. Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three, the camp’s official handle, couldn’t compete. Jokes helped, a little.

They helped some people, anyhow. More and more victims of radiation sickness went into the graveyard alongside the camp. It got bigger and bigger.

More and more inmates who killed themselves found final resting places there, too. Guns, nooses, and poison ran a close, if ghoulish, race for most popular method. There were no tall buildings to jump off, or that would have been another favored choice.

When you were stuck in limbo like this, were you really living? The ones who took the long road out evidently thought not. Marian wondered herself. But wonder was all she did, or aimed to do. Whatever happened to her, she also had Linda to worry about. She wasn’t selfish enough to leave a little girl all alone in the world.

The suicides bewildered Fayvl and his friends. “I seen plenty worse places than this,” Yitzkhak said. “Hardly anybody kill himself in those. They die, yeah-they die like flies. They get killed. They don’t kill themselves. Is crazy.”

“You saw,” Moishe told him. “You didn’t seen. You saw.”

“Afen yam,” Yitzkhak said without heat. When Marian asked him what that meant, he pretended not to hear.

“People give up,” Fayvl said, puzzlement in his voice. “I don’t understand it. In the other camps, the Nazi camps, people didn’t give up. They tried to keep going as long as they could.”

“Not the Mussulmen,” Moishe said. To Marian, he explained, “This is what we called the goners, the ones who would die soon and knew it and didn’t care.”

“But they were goners,” Tabakman said. “They were starving, they were sick, they were beat up like you wouldn’t believe, like you hope you never see. If somebody with radiation sickness, he wants out of his pain, that I understand. But we got plenty food. We don’t got guards with Schmeissers and whips. Don’t gotta work sixteen hours a day. Don’t gotta work at all. So what’s to do yourself in for?”

“Americans is soft,” Yitzkhak said.

“Americans are soft,” Moishe said. Having corrected the phrase, he tasted it in his mouth and nodded. “Americans are soft. They never have to go through the things we went through. They don’t know what it’s like.”

“Hitler’s soldiers didn’t think they were soft,” Marian said.

Fayvl Tabakman lit a cigarette. “I watched Americans shoot SS guards,” he said after a puff or two. “I watched them herd Germans from the town next door through my camp so they couldn’t say they never knew what Hitler did. You’re right, Mrs. Staley. That was not soft.” Another puff. “I weighed forty-one kilos then.”

Whatever Marian had learned of the metric system in school, she’d long since forgotten. “How much is that in pounds?” she asked.

The three middle-aged Jews went back and forth, fingers flashing as they worked it out. Finally Tabakman said, “Ninety-about ninety, anyways. And I was one of the healthy ones.”

He wasn’t a big man. He probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred fifty pounds now. At ninety, though…She’d seen photos from the liberated concentration camps. Who hadn’t? Men with fingers like pencils, arms and legs like broomsticks, necks too thin and weak to hold up the heads with skin stretched drumhead tight over skulls. Women so starved you couldn’t tell them from men. You didn’t want to believe photos like that. You didn’t want to think people could do that to other people. You didn’t want to-but there were the pictures.

Marian glanced over at Linda, who was happily chomping on a cracker from her ration pack while the grownups talked grownup talk she didn’t care about. Marian asked the question she’d wondered about as long as she’d known the cobbler: “Did you have a family…before the war?”

“My wife and me, we had a boy and a girl,” he said, looking down at the table. “We were partisans in the woods for a while after the fighting started. When we got caught, the Germans sent us to Auschwitz. We got there, the SS doctor, he told them to go one way and me the other. And that was the last I saw of them.”

It was the last anybody saw of them, he meant. They would have gone to the gas chambers. Some German engineer would have designed false showerheads that didn’t do anything but lull the people herded into those rooms. Some German chemical firm would have sold the SS the poison gas. Some German funeral-supply company would have sold the crematoria, to deal with what the gas chambers turned out. How could you contemplate any of that without going mad?

Marian didn’t want to contemplate it. It made all her unhappiness here seem like a small child’s temper tantrum. Maybe Americans were soft. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” he said, which was gracious of him. What was I’m sorry against the memory of watching your wife and children, everything that mattered most to you, go off to be murdered while you stood there unable to do a thing about it? How could you go on after that?

Fayvl had. Marian glanced at Moishe and Yitzkhak. Their faces were both closed, inward. What were they remembering? Nothing very different, she feared.

No wonder seeing her and Linda sometimes seemed to sadden Tabakman. They had to remind him of what the Nazis had stolen. She wondered what the Jew’s wife and children had looked like before…

Her mouth tightened. She shook her head a little, as if she were warning Linda to behave herself (not that Linda needed warning right now-she was fine). Whatever she asked Fayvl Tabakman, she would never ask him that.

–

“Attention, Moscow is speaking.” No, it wasn’t Yuri Levitan, even if it was his signature opening. And it wasn’t Moscow, either, even if it was Radio Moscow. Ihor Shevchenko had no idea where the signal originated. The Soviet Union was a vast place. There were plenty of possibilities.

He didn’t think much of the new chief newsreader. Roman Amfiteatrov had an annoying southern accent. He pronounced the letter O as if it really sounded like an o, rather than with the ah sound most Russian-speakers used. Ihor had fought alongside a few men like that. The other Russians said they sounded like mooing cows. Russian wasn’t quite Ihor’s language, but that accent seemed funny to him, too.

Amfiteatrov went on, “Today is Tuesday, May the first, 1951-the glorious holiday of oppressed peasants and workers all over the world. Red Army victories continue unabated, the troops fighting with great courage and passion for Marshal Stalin. Milan has now fallen to the Fifth Guards Tank Army, which is proceeding westward in the direction of Turin. Fierce fighting in Germany has also yielded further advances against the Fascists and imperialists.”

He named places in Italy. That meant there was some chance he was telling the truth about how things were going there. Further advances, by contrast, could mean anything. Or it could mean nothing. It could, and odds were it did. Anyone who got his news from Radio Moscow learned to read between the lines.

“In the North Atlantic, heroic Red Fleet submarines have struck heavy blows against the convoys sailing from America to its jackal lackey, England,” Amfiteatrov mooed triumphantly. “Ships have been sent to the bottom and convoys scattered. The naval link between the continents is being broken.”

Again, he was longer on claims than details. Ihor wondered how much the men in the submarines could actually see. He also wondered whether there actually were any men in submarines in, or under, the North Atlantic. No one here in the USSR would know if there weren’t.

He glanced around the common room. The other kolkhozniks were all listening attentively. They all looked happy about the victories Roman Amfiteatrov reported. Well, so did Ihor. Whatever doubts you might have inside the fortress of your mind, your face couldn’t show them. If it did, somebody would report you.

Fewer people had gone into the gulags after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Well, fewer Soviet citizens had. German and Japanese prisoners of war took up a good part of the slack. Had Ihor felt more sympathy for them, he might have wondered how many would ever see their motherlands again. Since he didn’t, his attitude was more along the lines of Better those sons of bitches than me.

“The bestial American aggressors, still slavering to spill the blood of innocent and peace-loving Soviet citizens, have sent their terror bombers over Kharkov and Rostov-on-the-Don,” Amfiteatrov intoned. “In the latter city, bombs fell on a child-rearing collective. More than a dozen young lives were snuffed out.”

Ihor’s first thought was that Kharkov (as a Ukrainian, he thought of it as Kharkiv) and Rostov-on-the-Don had already suffered enough, or more than enough. Both went back and forth between Hitlerite and Soviet forces twice in the last war. He knew not much of Kharkiv was left standing. He’d never been to Rostov-on-the-Don, but he didn’t think it would be in tip-top shape, either.

As for the child-rearing collective…Radio Moscow had made those claims before, too. Maybe they were true, maybe not. Ihor wasn’t in Kharkiv now. Since he wasn’t, how could he know for sure?

He couldn’t, and knew he couldn’t. He did remember that, in the last war, each side claimed the other made a point of massacring women and children. In the last war, the Nazis had really done it. So had the men of the Red Army, when they’d advanced far enough to get their hands on German women and children. Revenge spiced killing the way caraway seeds spiced pickled cabbage.

In the last war, the Americans hadn’t had that kind of reputation. If anything, they were supposed to be softies then, too slow to start the Second Front and too easy on the Fritzes. But they’d been allies then. Now they were the enemy, with Harry Truman playing the role of Hitler.

Roman Amfiteatrov blathered on. Truman had dropped atom bombs-a large number; Ihor didn’t know just how many-on the Soviet Union’s biggest cities. Even so, the kolkhoznik wasn’t sure whether they or the Germans had killed more of its people. Hitler hadn’t had the weapons Truman used, but no one could deny the force of his will. He kept the Germans fighting for a year and a half after more sensible people would have seen they had no chance.

Ihor consoled himself by remembering all the extra fighting had cost the Hitlerites millions of casualties they wouldn’t have taken had they surrendered. The trouble was, it had cost the USSR even more.

He’d heard the Nazis had killed 20,000,000 Soviet citizens. He’d also heard they’d killed 30,000,000. He had no idea which number to believe. He suspected no one else did, either.

He also had no idea how a country that had lost so many people-whichever enormous number came closer to truth-was supposed to pick itself up, dust itself off, and go on about its business. With Hitler’s savage regime shattered and prostrate at its feet, the USSR had actually done a decent job.

Now it was at war again. Now somewhere close to the same number of Soviet citizens, men and women who’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, were suddenly gone. So were the cities where they’d dwelt. More still died in the fighting in Germany and Italy.

Could any country that had lost somewhere between one in five and one in three of the people who’d been alive on 21 June 1941 stand on its own two feet here ten years later and still be a country? The USSR was doing it. How the USSR was doing it, Ihor had no idea.

He glanced over at Anya. She was chatting with the kolkhoz chairman’s wife. She must have said something funny, because Irina Hapochkova laughed till her plump cheeks turned even redder than usual. Anya’d almost gone to Kiev. She’d almost become part of the monstrous, murderous statistics. But she hadn’t, and because she hadn’t Ihor’s life still meant something to him.

Now Amfiteatrov was talking about how foresters and factory hands had smashed production norms all over the Soviet Union. The factory hands labored in places like Irkutsk, which was hard for American bombers to reach, and in towns like Vyazma, which wasn’t big enough for the bombers to waste A-bombs on it.

“And finally,” the newsreader said, “on this great day Comrade Stalin, the beloved leader of the people’s vanguard of revolutionary socialism, assures Soviet workers and peasants that, despite all the troubles we have had to overcome on the road to true Communism, the world-the entire world-will see it, and sooner than most people expect. The struggle continues. The struggle will be victorious. So the dialectic assures us. Thank you, and good evening.”

“Moo!” Three different people in the common room said the same thing at the same time. Everyone giggled, even though Radio Moscow followed the news with Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the one he wrote in response to the Hitlerites’ siege of Leningrad. Normally, you wouldn’t want to laugh while that music poured out of the speaker.

Normally…but not this minute. Everyone in the kolkhoz lived in the shadow of things more terrible, or at any rate more instantaneously terrible, than Shostakovich had known while penning his great symphony. And when you lived in that shadow, you laughed when you could, to help hold it at bay. Any excuse would do. A newsreader mouthing silly slogans with a silly accent was as much as anyone needed.

Once upon a time, people had believed in the silly slogans. People had died for their sake, they’d believed with such passion. They’d gone to the gulag for them.

In the world of true Communism, there would be no gulags. Ihor chuckled again. That was pretty funny, too.