Coup d'Etat

Chapter 16

Nothing in Central Europe or France had braced Vaclav Jezek for summer outside Madrid. Dust. Blazing sun. Air that sucked moisture from your body like a vampire. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stink of death. That stayed the same everywhere. It was bound to be the same in hell, assuming this battlefield wasn’t one of Satan’s ritzier suburbs.

Vaclav wasn’t the only one to feel the heat, either. Several of his countrymen got carried off the field with sunstroke. He heard later that one of them had died.

Through it all, Benjamin Halevy went about his business as calmly as if it were an April day in Paris or Prague. He might have been made of metal. Whatever he was made of, the savage Spanish heat couldn’t melt him.

“Why aren’t you baked like the rest of us?” Vaclav snarled. The weather left him short-tempered, too.

“It’s hot,” Halevy said. “But my people came out of the desert, remember. I guess the memory of it’s still in my bones.”

He sounded serious. As Jezek had seen, though, he often sounded that way when he was anything but. “Desert, my ass,” the sniper said.

“Well, if your ass seems cooler than the rest of you, maybe it came out of the desert, too.” Halevy eyed him. “Have to say you don’t look like you’ve got any Jews in the woodpile.”

What first sprang to Vaclav’s mind was something about Halevy’s mother. But he could see for himself how Halevy would parry that. You didn’t want to get into a manure fight with a guy who ran a fertilizer factory. Halevy thought faster and nastier than he did, and that was all there was to it. Instead of being bitchy, Jezek asked, “Have you heard anything about when Marshal Sanjurjo will inspect the trenches again?” He waved toward the Nationalist lines, taking care not to raise any part of his arm above parapet level.

Benjamin Halevy grinned crookedly. “I’ve finally sucked you in, huh? You want him?”

“Bet your sweatless ass I do,” Vaclav answered, and the Jew laughed out loud. Undeterred, Vaclav continued, “If I pot the fat old bastard, they’ll pin a medal on me. They’ll promote me, so I get some extra pay for real and more besides in promises. They’ll send me back to Madrid and let me drink and fuck as much as I want. Maybe they’ll even pay for the spree. So, yeah, if Sanjurjo shows up, I’ll punch his ticket for him.”

“You’ve got all kinds of good reasons,” Halevy allowed. “And, on top of it, it might even help the war effort.”

“That, too,” Vaclav agreed. The damned Jew started laughing again. Vaclav couldn’t see why. If it had provoked him enough, he might have taken a swing at his buddy. Halevy was an officer now, so that could have been a capital crime. Worrying about it wasn’t what held Vaclav back. The sensible concern that he’d wake up in the bottom of the trench with a sore jaw and maybe a couple of broken teeth had much more to do with it.

Instead of decking the Jew, Jezek lugged his antitank rifle down the line and spied on the Nationalist positions. The enemy soldiers carried on in plain sight of him. He could have killed some of them, but to what end? They’d tighten up and get more wary. That was the last thing he wanted.

Almost the last thing… A Spanish sharpshooter had hunted him for a little while. The would-be marksman was now of concern only to his next of kin. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been brave. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t been a good shot. But he must have got what he knew about concealment out of some badly translated manual from the last war. The Nationalists wore German-style helmets, which made them familiar-looking enemies. Those helmets were pretty good. But they wouldn’t stop an ordinary bullet, let alone the fat ones Vaclav used. That sniper got only one lesson in the art, a very final one.

There were steel loopholes along the line from which Vaclav could inspect the enemy’s trenches. As was his habit, he stayed away from them. An ordinary soldier couldn’t put a bullet through one except by luck, and from what he’d seen Spanish soldiers were often less than ordinary. But you never could tell. The Nationalists might have a few real experts. Or they might talk to their Italian allies or to the Germans of the Legion Kondor. For someone who knew what he was doing, a loophole was a challenge, not something too tough to bother with.

He crossed into the trenches the International Brigades held. They greeted him in several languages, some of which he understood. A-probable-Magyar spoke in German: “Haven’t seen any elephants around here for a long time.”

“I keep snapping my fingers-that’s why,” Vaclav answered in the same language. The International made a horrible face. Vaclav trudged on down the line.

The Americans in the Abe Lincoln Battalion (or maybe it was a brigade; even they didn’t seem sure) had more trouble talking to him than most of the other Internationals. They knew English, and some of them had picked up enough Spanish to get by. Neither of those did him much good, and they were unlikely to speak any other tongue.

One exception was-surprise! — a Jew from New York City. Chaim understood Vaclav’s German, and Vaclav usually managed to cope with his Yiddish. The Abe Lincoln didn’t look very happy right now.

“What’s up?” Vaclav asked.

“My girl and me-it’s gonna go down the drain.” Chaim mimed a little whirlpool in case Vaclav didn’t get it.

But he did. “It’s gonna go down the drain?” he echoed. “It hasn’t happened yet? Maybe it won’t.”

“It’s gonna,” Chaim repeated gloomily. “Some stuff you see coming way ahead of time. You can’t stop it, not unless you’re Superman. Maybe not even if you are.”

“Not unless you’re who?” Vaclav asked.

“Superman. Ubermensch, it’d be in German, but the English doesn’t make you sound like a fucking Nazi. The guy’s a comic-book hero. Lemme show you-a buddy sent me a couple from the States, and they honest to God got here, would you believe it? They’re pretty good.” Chaim rummaged in his pack till he grunted in victory and pulled out a gaudily printed comic book.

The text was in English, of course. Vaclav knew even less English than Spanish-he could get beer and some food in Spanish now, and was starting to be able to swear when he didn’t get them fast enough to suit him. But there wasn’t a whole lot of text, anyway. The pictures carried the action, and pictures were a universal language. For what he couldn’t get from them, Chaim made an enthusiastic translator and explainer.

“See, Metropolis is pretty much like New York City,” the American Jew said. “Not exactly, but pretty much. I’m from New York City, so I should know, right?”

“New York City is like that?” Vaclav pointed to one of the panels. Superman was rescuing a scantily clad girl with one hand and picking up an enormous locomotive in the other. The bad guys’ Tommy-gun bullets ricocheted off his chest as if he were armored like a tank.

“Well, not exactly.” Chaim sounded a little embarrassed. “But the look of the place-the skyscrapers and the cars and the clothes and all-that’s pretty close. And the newspaper office where Superman works when he’s being Clark Kent, that looks like a newspaper office. I mean, it’s bigger and cleaner than a real one-I’ve been in ’em, so I know-but it’s got the idea right, anyway.”

Vaclav had been in a newspaper office in Prague. It was tiny and airless and dark, housed in some building left over from the eighteenth century. It smelled of ink and beer and tobacco and unwashed people. How it turned out a newspaper every day, God only knew; the editor plainly had no idea. Next to that, even a rougher version of what the comic book showed seemed very much like heaven.

“America must be a strange place,” Vaclav said.

“Man, you got no idea,” Chaim answered.

“If you lived there, why did you come here?”

“For freedom. For adventure. For love.” The Jew’s face twisted. “And I got ’em all, and they ain’t worth shit. Women are crazy, you know? You can’t live with ’em and you sure as hell can’t live without ’em.”

Not much originality there, but great feeling. Carefully, Vaclav said, “You aren’t the first guy who ever found this out.”

“I guess not, but that don’t make it hurt any less,” Chaim replied, and Vaclav found himself without a comeback for that.

Willi Dernen sewed his pip onto a patch with a chevron, then sewed the chevron onto the left sleeve of his uniform tunic. Not just a Gefreiter — an Obergefreiter. The promotion gods had smiled on him again, presumably because he’d stayed lucky enough not to stop anything. He was a very senior private indeed.

He found it obvious that, if and when a bullet finally found Arno Baatz, he could step right up and do Awful Arno’s job better than Arno did himself. Corporal Baatz, unsurprisingly, held a different opinion. “You think you’re such hot shit, don’t you?” Baatz said. “Well, puff and blow all you want. They won’t make you an Unteroffizier if you live to be a million.”

Blow me, Arno, Willi thought. Aloud, he said, “How about that?” It was a pretty safe phrase any old time.

“Well, they won’t, dammit,” Awful Arno insisted. “You have to go to noncoms’ school to learn to do all the stuff an Unteroffizier has to do. It takes weeks. You’d never hack it-no way in hell.”

As far as Willi was concerned, if Awful Arno had made it through noncoms’ training school, anything this side of Hans the counting horse could probably do the same. Telling him as much was a great temptation. Regretfully, Willi held back. Life was too short… he supposed.

So all he said was, “I notice you’re wearing your shoulder straps upside down so the Ivans don’t spot the pips on them.”

“I should hope I am,” Baatz said importantly. “Most noncoms do, you know. The Reds understand that we’re what makes the army tick. They’d sooner shoot a corporal than a private any old day.”

Willi had never dreamt he would sympathize with the Red Army, but all of a sudden he did. Again, letting Baatz know everything on his mind struck him as less than a good idea. He hoped he sounded patient as he answered, “I understand that. But my pip’s on my sleeve, where I can’t hide it. And the chevron only makes it stand out more.”

“Shall I cry for you?” Awful Arno said, and Willi sympathized with the Russian sharpshooters more than ever. Luckily not understanding that, Baatz went on, “Anyway, you’ve only got it on one side. From the right, the Russians will just figure you’re an ordinary, miserable, no-account private.”

“Wunderbar,” Willi said. At least Baatz hadn’t added instead of an ordinary, miserable, no-account Obergefreiter. He was probably thinking it, though, the same way Willi was having unexpected kind thoughts about the Ivans.

No matter what he thought about them, they didn’t love the Wehrmacht. Several batteries of 105s opened up on the German positions southwest of Smolensk. Willi and Corporal Baatz both dove for a foxhole. It was big enough to hold the two of them, though Willi would have bet Baatz was no happier about being cheek-to-cheek with him than he was smelling Awful Arno’s stale sweat.

If a shell came down on top of them, they’d both head for the Pearly Gates at the same instant. Willi looked forward to passing through while demons with pointy pitchforks dragged the Unteroffizier down to a warmer place. He would cherish the look on Baatz’s face, damned if he wouldn’t. That was an un-Christian thought; he knew as much. Knowing and caring were two different beasts.

Somebody a couple of hundred meters away shrieked for an aid man. That sobered Willi. No, he didn’t want a 105 round to come down on them after all, not when he had no guarantee of dying instantly. He’d seen too many slow, anguish-filled ways of passing to want to experiment. Baatz’s cheese-pale face said he wasn’t thrilled about what was going on, either.

“Damn Russians have too many guns,” Baatz yelled through the din.

“Too right they do!” Willi agreed with great feeling.

And then things got worse. He hadn’t dreamt they could. Something screamed down out of the sky, trailing a tail of fire. No, not one something, but dozens of them spread through a square kilometer or so, all screaming the way Willi’d imagined Arno Baatz’s damned soul doing. And then, over no more than a few seconds, they all slammed into the ground and they all exploded.

“Gott im Himmel!” Willi shouted, as loud as he could. He hadn’t a prayer of hearing himself. Awful Arno’s lips were moving, too, but Willi couldn’t hear him, either. He had trouble breathing, and tasted blood when he coughed to try to clear his ears. He suspected he was lucky-if he was lucky-the blast hadn’t finished him altogether.

He looked around. The Russian rockets-he supposed they couldn’t be anything else-had left the ground a smoking moonscape. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay scattered at random across it. And the German soldiers who survived were panicking like a bunch of Dutchmen suddenly up against panzers.

Mouths wide open to let out cries of terror Willi couldn’t hear, Landsers raced toward the rear. Some still carried their rifles or machine guns. Others had thrown them away so they could run faster-or else just forgotten all about them. Here and there, officers and Feldwebels tried to stem the tide. They had as much luck as King Canute.

Willi might not have heard those frightened yells, but even his battered ears caught the rising screams in the air to the northeast. “Oh, no! Not again!” he wailed, and curled up in a ball like a pillbug.

The second rocket salvo caught too many panicked Germans out in the open. Between shattering blasts and scything shards, a man standing up without shelter didn’t have a chance. Side by side with Willi, Arno Baatz also tried to squeeze himself into as small a space as he could. Willi could read his lips as he howled, “Make it stop, Jesus! Make it stop!”

Jesus, unfortunately, wasn’t in charge of that. The Soviet high command was. The rockets didn’t come again. But a wave of Red Army foot soldiers surged out of their trenches and swarmed toward the battered German line. Willi supposed they were yelling “Urra!” — they always did when they charged. He sure as hell couldn’t hear them, though.

If they got close enough, they would kill him. No matter how blast-stunned he was, he could see that. His fine new sniper’s Mauser found its way to his shoulder without his quite realizing how it got there. He could hear the report, and the kick helped bring him back to himself. An Ivan fell over. Willi swung the rifle a little to the left. He potted another Russian.

Arno Baatz uncoiled and started shooting, too. So did other Landsers here and there. The rockets hadn’t taken out or terrorized everybody. But that khaki Russian wave kept coming. There weren’t enough Germans left to stop it, and wouldn’t have been even if the discombobulated ones were still able to fight.

Willi could see that. Could Awful Arno, or would he get sticky? Mouthing exaggeratedly, Willi shouted, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

“What?” Baatz mouthed back. Willi repeated himself. The corporal’s eyes showed white all around the iris. Baatz bit his lip. Then he nodded.

They both scrambled out of the foxhole and staggered toward the rear-toward a place where, God willing, things like this didn’t happen. They weren’t the only ones, either. Something in Willi’s chest loosened when he saw Adam Pfaff. He first recognized his buddy by his rifle’s gray paint job. Pfaff himself was too filthy to put a name to. Willi guessed he was no cleaner himself.

Pfaff waved. A Russian bullet cracked past, between him and Willi. They both ducked. Pfaff said something. Willi held a cupped hand to his ear to show he couldn’t hear. Pfaff mimed shock, horror, and disbelief. Then he turned and fired a couple of shots to slow down the oncoming Ivans. That struck Willi as a brilliant idea. He did the same thing himself. Corporal Baatz also sent a round their way. Arno might be awful, but he did have balls.

Then a chattering machine gun really slowed the Russians. Cannon shells burst among them, too. Panzers to the rescue-and Willi hadn’t even realized they were around till they started firing. He wondered if his hearing would ever come back. Or had the rockets scrambled it for good?

Right this minute, he didn’t care. It looked as if he might get out of here pretty much in one piece. Next to that, nothing else mattered.

Ivan Kuchkov had never gone to the Ukraine before. Now that he was here, he wouldn’t have minded getting the devil out. The locals talked funny. A lot of them were anti-Soviet, and hardly bothered to hide it. They seemed to be waiting for the Nazis to run the Red Army out of their neighborhood. As far as Kuchkov was concerned, they could all go…

For once, he and the politruk were on the same side. “Show traitors no mercy!” Lieutenant Vasiliev said furiously. “Think what they’ll do to you if they get half a chance. And don’t give it to them!”

The men listening to the political officer nodded. By their wide eyes, some seemed not to have had any such notions on their own. Were they really so wet behind the ears? Kuchkov feared they were. Milk-fed, too damn many of them. If you didn’t learn to watch out for yourself, you could bet somebody would jump on you. With both feet, too. In hobnailed boots.

And Vasiliev added, “One thing you don’t need to worry about. The victory of the glorious Soviet Union over the debased and degenerate jackals who nibble at her is certain. Certain, I tell you!”

Was it? As far as Kuchkov was concerned, the only certain thing was that, sooner or later, somebody would screw you. Or sooner and later, more likely. And, if victory was so bloody certain, why had his division been shipped south to try to slow down the Nazis here? And how come all the fighting these days was on Soviet soil? Shouldn’t things be moving the other way?

“Questions?” the politruk added.

One of the reasons he asked was to see what kind of questions he got, and from whom. Kuchkov kept his right arm down by his side. What kind of idiot were you if you gave them extra rope to hang you with? They could build a case against you out of nothing if they wanted to. It was a million times worse if they really had something. The Germans would kill you. But so would the people you were supposed to be fighting for.

That had to be why so many Ukrainians were ready to raise a hand in the Nazi salute. Ivan Kuchkov grunted to himself. Well, at least now it made sense. He knew he still had to plug the worthless bastards without hesitation if he thought they had anything to do with the Feldgrau boys.

There were Romanians in the neighborhood, too, but he didn’t worry about them. The Poles farther north hadn’t had as much fancy equipment as the Germans, but they meant it when they fought you, and that counted for more. Marshal Antonescu’s swarthy soldiers? Nah. The only reason they were here was that they’d get it in the neck if they tried to bail out. You did have to be careful not to mistake them for your own guys, because they wore khaki, too. But their uniforms had a different cut, and they used funny helmets, easy to recognize since they were so long fore and aft.

The Germans were the trouble, though, and the Ukrainians, and his own superiors. Fuck it, he thought. Nobody’s done for me yet.

He and half a platoon of soldiers cautiously entered a village the next day, not long after sunup. The peasants stared at them with expressionless faces. Ivan didn’t quite point his submachine gun at a guy with a cloth cap and a big, bushy white mustache. “How you doing, Grandpa?” he said. “Seen any Fritzes around here?”

Grandpa came back with a paragraph of Ukrainian. For all the good it did Kuchkov, it might as well have been Portuguese. He glanced at his own men to see if any of them made sense of it. Some Russian dialects were closer than his to the crap they spoke down here. A private said, “I think he says there haven’t been any around.”

That was what Ivan thought the old geezer’d said, too, but he hadn’t been even close to sure. He nodded-unpleasantly. “Search the houses, boys. We find any Nazi propaganda shit, we’ll clean out this whole whore of a place.” He rather looked forward to it.

One of the Ukrainian women screeched like a cat after a door got slammed on its tail. Grandpa put his head together with some of the other old farts. Only a couple of young men here. Maybe the rest were in the Red Army. Or maybe they’d run off to join the Hitlerite swine. You never could tell.

All at once, though, Grandpa spoke Russian an ordinary human being could understand: “Pavel here, he says maybe the Germans are that way, not too far.” He pointed west, then toward one of his drinking buddies. Pavel looked as if he didn’t need to be singled out.

Too bad, cocksucker, Kuchkov thought. “How do you know?” the sergeant growled. Pavel looked blank. That failed to impress Kuchkov. “How do you know, cuntface? You better sing out, ’cause you’ll be fucking sorry if you don’t.”

Pavel did: “In the fields yesterday afternoon, I saw dust from their tanks and trucks. Had to be theirs. None of yours in that direction.”

Yours should have been ours. Ivan could have nailed him for that. He would have, too, but he had bigger worries. “Just dust?” he snapped. “No soldiers?”

“Nyet,” Pavel said. “No soldiers.”

Ivan considered. If there had been Fritzes in eyeball range then, chances were his half-platoon would have had to clear them out of this pissy hole in the ground-or would have walked into an ambush, one. So chances were the local wasn’t bullshitting: not right this minute, anyhow.

“All right.” Kuchkov turned back to his men. “Georgi, you and Avram go half a kilometer out that way, see what the fuck you find. Go on. Get your sad asses moving. If you see Fritzes, Georgi, you come back and tell us. Otherwise both of you hang on there.”

Avram sent him a wounded look. Ivan pretended not to notice. Avram was a Hebe. You could count on him to fight the Germans. And he made a damn good point man, not least because he was so jumpy. If anybody could stay out there and not draw the enemy’s notice, he was the guy. Georgi was pretty good in the field, but not as good as the Jew. If the Nazis were coming up, Avram was the man to keep an eye on them.

Off they went, both glum. And well they might have been, because a Mauser barked almost as soon as they left the village. One of them-Ivan didn’t see which-fell. The other dove for cover. “We’ll fight ’em in here,” Kuchkov declared. “House to house if we have to. Misha, go back and tell the captain we need help doublemotherfucking quick. Scram!”

The Ukrainians started screeching again. They didn’t want their village smashed up. Well, how often in this lousy old world did you get what you wanted? He wanted to have a mortar team here, for instance. Wouldn’t that make the Fritzes howl!

He dashed into a tavern at the west end of the village. As soon as he did, he grabbed a bottle. This was a hell of a lot better than the Red Army’s daily hundred grams. He swigged and whistled. The vodka was better than the gasoline-tasting stuff the army issued, too.

He peered out through a knothole. Sure as hell, the Germans were coming up. Life sucked sometimes. He sucked, too, at the vodka bottle. Best thing in the world, except maybe a pretty girl’s tit. Smooth fire ran down his throat. He grabbed another bottle, just in case. In case of what? The Nazis had a Panzer II with them. Maybe he could turn the virgin bottle into a Molotov cocktail. Or maybe he’d go ahead and drink the son of a bitch.

The Panzer II sprayed the village with machine-gun bullets. Kuchkov had hoped the Fritz commanding it would be dumb enough to drive inside, but no such luck. One of his men fired at the tank from another house. The round clanged off steel, but so what? The enemy tank’s cannon fired several rounds into that house. No more rifle fire came from it. Maybe the soldier had learned his lesson. Maybe he wouldn’t need to learn any more lessons from now on.

But you couldn’t not shoot, not with the German foot soldiers advancing. They’d sure as hell shoot you. Kuchkov stuck the muzzle of his PPD-34 out through the knothole and gave them a burst. Then he threw himself flat on the rammed-earth floor.

Sure as shit, machine-gun bullets stitched through the woodwork half a meter above his head. Vodka bottles shattered noisily. “Fucking waste,” Ivan mourned.

Then he heard a noise like an accident in a machine shop-a bad accident. He put an eye up to one of the brand new holes in the wall. The Panzer II was blazing as if it had just gone to hell. The Fritzes on foot had stopped and were staring in the same horrified dismay he’d felt a moment earlier. Machine-gun bullets stitched through them from right to left. They all went down, some dead or wounded, others just sensibly hitting the dirt.

Sometimes your officers actually knew what they were doing. Sometimes you got lucky instead. A pair of brand new T-34s stopped the German advance on the village. The Nazis couldn’t do anything against the latest Soviet tanks. A Panzer II was nothing but a snack for their 76mm guns. The Fritzes who could legged it back to the west at top speed. And Ivan Kuchkov drank from his liberated vodka bottles till the newly ventilated tavern spun dizzily around him.

The Nazi official at the Munster Rathaus couldn’t have looked more disgusted if he’d found rotten, stinking fish on his supper plate and been compelled to eat it. Sarah Goldman didn’t care. If anything, she enjoyed seeing that look on his face. She wasn’t rash enough to show what she was thinking, of course.

Beside her stood Isidor Bruck. His features also stayed carefully blank. Behind him stood his parents, as Sarah’s mother and father stood behind her. Despite everything the Reich ’s bureaucracy could do to make things difficult for them, Sarah and Isidor had finally finished all their paperwork. They’d won the state’s very grudging permission to marry.

“Moses Isidor Bruck and Sarah Sarah Goldman”-the pen-pusher with the swastika armband used the first names the Nazis had forced all Jews to adopt (Sarah’s renaming with her own name never failed to make her giggle, at least inside)-“you have conformed with the requirements the Reich and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party place on marriages for persons of the Hebrew religion. You have also paid all the necessary fees to complete the process.”

Sarah somehow felt her father stir behind her. She could tell what he was thinking. It wasn’t on account of the fees, which were fat. The professor in him wanted to correct the Nazi flunky for calling the religion “Hebrew.” For a heartbeat, she feared he would. He didn’t. Odds were no Jew in the Reich would have been so rash. But she knew he wanted to.

Scowling, the official went on, “This being so, the Reich recognizes and permits the marriage.” He glanced Sarah’s way. “You are now Sarah Sarah Bruck. Your identity card and records will be altered to reflect the new situation.”

She made herself nod. She made herself hold her face straight while she did it. Beside her, Isidor nodded, too. He even smiled a little. That was more than she had in her.

She waited for the man in the armband to congratulate them. She should have known better. He seemed surprised to discover the half-dozen Jews were still standing there in front of him. With a brusque, impatient nod, he said, “That is all. You may go.” It wasn’t quite Now drop dead, but it might as well have been.

They left in a hurry, before the fellow changed his mind. Isidor pulled something out of his pocket-a thin gold band. He put it on the index finger of her right hand, the place where Jewish women traditionally wore wedding rings. She took it off and put it on the fourth finger of her left hand. Both her mother and Isidor’s kept their rings there, too. They wanted to fit in with the German majority. That wasn’t so easy when you wore a yellow star that screamed Jew! at the world.

“I love you,” Isidor said.

“I love you.” Sarah wondered if she really did. This wasn’t a fairy tale where you got married and lived happily ever after. But it was a world where you had to grab whatever happiness you could. If you didn’t, you knew you’d never see it again. She added, “Let’s go home.”

From now on, home would be the flat over the Brucks’ bakery. Her folks had made the mistake of asking for permission to put that door through between her room and Saul’s abandoned one. New construction? For Jews? Impossible! The arrangement wouldn’t be ideal, but nothing in Munster was ideal for Jews.

There should have been a reception, with music and dancing. There should have been more food than a regiment could eat, and more liquor than a division could drink. There should have been all kinds of things. There was… a loaf of bread from the bakery, and a couple of stewed rabbits Samuel Goldman had unofficially and expensively obtained from one of the other men in his labor gang. The way things had gone for Jews in Germany the past couple of years, that would do for a feast.

And there was schnapps. Somehow there was always schnapps, no matter how bad things got. It wasn’t the best schnapps, perhaps-it wasn’t the best schnapps, certainly-but it was schnapps.

Sarah drank enough to let her know she’d been drinking. She evidently drank enough to let other people know she’d been drinking, too. Isidor’s father said, “You don’t want to get too shikker, you know.”

He laughed in a peculiar, almost goatish way. To Sarah’s surprise, and to her mortification, her own father’s laugh sounded identical. Her mother, and Isidor’s, sniffed at their husbands. But then they laughed, too. Sarah stuck her nose in the air. That only made the older people laugh harder. Isidor put his arm around her, as if defending his new bride. Their parents laughed some more.

It wasn’t as if the older Goldmans and Brucks weren’t drinking with her and Isidor. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her father’s cheeks turn pink. His hard work and bad diet usually left him sallow. Pink he was, though. And the meat he cut from the rabbits made him looked remarkably content. Sarah understood that. She had trouble remembering the last time her own belly had felt so happy.

“Well…” Puffing on a pipe charged with the same kind of nasty tobacco her own father smoked, David Bruck stretched the word out. He gathered his wife and Sarah’s father and mother by eye. “What do you say we go downstairs for a while, maybe take a little walk, hey?”

“Now why would we want to do that?” Samuel Goldman said, for all the world as if he couldn’t think of any reason. Everybody except Sarah laughed again. She was sure her cheeks weren’t just pink-they had to be on fire.

All the older people left. Isidor stared as the door closed behind them. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen my mother go out after we eat without washing dishes first,” he said.

She looked at him. “Do you want to think about your mother now?” she asked. Then she blushed again. Had that really come out of her mouth? As a matter of fact, it had.

And the way Isidor looked at her left her with no doubts his mother wasn’t the first thing on his mind. She thought she would blush one more time, but the warmth spreading through her started lower down. “Come on,” Isidor said.

When they got to the doorway to his room, he picked her up and carried her over the threshold. She squeaked. He silenced that by kissing her as he put her down. Then he shut the door behind them, even though they were alone in the flat. The door had a hook and eye to keep it from being opened from the outside. Isidor fastened that, too.

He looked on what he’d done and found it good. In very short order, he and Sarah were officially man and wife. “You’re squashing me,” she said.

“Sorry.” Isidor didn’t sound sorry. He couldn’t have sounded much happier if he’d tried. Sarah was pretty happy, too-maybe not quite so happy as she’d imagined she would be on her wedding day, but her imagination hadn’t taken into account the way things were for Jews in Germany these days.

After apologizing, Isidor rolled off her. That also made her happy. He didn’t roll far. He couldn’t, not without falling off the narrow bed. They would have to get a bigger one… somewhere, somehow, sometime.

His hand roamed her. She let it happen. Pretty soon, she started enjoying it and the other things he did. Before long, they were making things official again. Sweat beaded on Sarah’s skin. She was doing a warm thing, it was a warm summer’s day, and the room was above the ovens.

After a while, she said, “Again?” in surprise.

“Again,” Isidor answered proudly.

“What if they come back?”

“What if they do? The door’s shut. They won’t come barging in. And even if they break down the door or something, you’re my wife, right? We don’t have to sneak any more.”

He sounded like a boy with a new toy. Too much like that? Sarah wasn’t sure. She liked the new toy, too. But… three times? Things wouldn’t go well if she said no on her wedding day. She turned toward him and kissed him instead. That seemed to be the right thing to do, at least for the moment. And three times it was, even if the third round wasn’t so easy as the first two had been.

If he tried for four, she was going to tell him no. Enough was enough, and she was getting sore. He didn’t. He fell asleep instead, quite suddenly and quite deeply.

Sarah was miffed-till she fell asleep herself, even though she hadn’t expected to. When she woke up, she and Isidor were entangled almost as intimately as they had been before. Noises outside the closed door said Isidor’s parents-and, she recognized a moment later, hers as well-were back.

What do I do next? she wondered. For now, nothing seemed a good answer. Her new husband-her new husband! — was still snoring. But her life had just changed forever. Much too soon, she’d find out how.