Last Orders

CHAPTER 5

Getting pulled out of the line for a while felt wonderful to Theo Hossbach. As soon as you got beyond range of the Red Army’s guns, the food improved. You didn’t need to worry about waking up dead in the morning. Well, you didn’t need to worry so much, anyhow. You wanted to keep a Schmeisser handy, in case of partisans.

Mechanics who weren’t hampered by front-line tool shortages and frantic rush went over the Panzer IV from muzzle brake to exhaust pipe. Any time in the field was hard time for a panzer. This one would run a lot better for a while after it went back into combat. When you could count on your machine to do what you needed, you fought more boldly.

Some of the crew visited an army whorehouse. Theo stayed away. Shy among men, he was even more so with women. Adi Stoss didn’t go, either. “I don’t mind buying it, as long as the girl’s there for the money,” he said. “But when they use bayonets to drag ’em out of the village …” He shook his head. “That’s not my idea of a good time.”

“Nope. Not mine, either.” Theo gave forth with a few words.

Instead of fornication, they had football. Some Polish troops were getting in a little rest and recuperation not far from the German encampment. Among their supplies, they had goals and nets-they used football to keep fit. When they challenged the panzer crews to a match, national pride forbade turning them down.

Theo was a goalkeeper-fittingly, the loner on the pitch. And Adi was a center-forward: a striker. A pretty decent player himself, Theo knew Adi outclassed him … and almost everyone else. The Poles didn’t know it yet. Well, they’d find out.

The pitch was the flattest stretch of nearby field they could find. German and Polish soldiers gathered by the touchlines to watch and to bet. A lot of the Poles spoke German (some of the Polish soldiers spoke Yiddish, one of the more interesting complications in a war full of them). To most of the Wehrmacht men, Polish was just as much mooing and barking as Russian was. Not to Theo, who came from Breslau, not far from the border. Lots of Poles lived and worked in Breslau. He would never be fluent in their language, but he understood bits and pieces of it.

He said no more about that than he did about anything else. What the Poles didn’t know wouldn’t help them.

The referee was a German. Both linesmen were Poles. With a little luck, their biases would offset each other. Without that luck, they might turn the spectators and gamblers into brawlers.

No one on either side or in the crowd expected the referee to call the match closely. Army football was a different beast from the game the professionals played on close-cropped grass. You bumped, you shoved, you elbowed, you got away with whatever you could. It wasn’t quite rugby, but you could see rugby from there.

As soon as the match started, the Poles discovered that Adi was faster and more nimble than any of them. They started roughing him up to slow him down. That was how army football worked. Then one of the Poles staggered away from him with blood streaming from his nose.

“Sorry, buddy,” Adi said. “Didn’t mean to do that.” If they elbowed him, he’d elbow them right back. If he claimed he didn’t do it on purpose, well, that was how army football worked, too.

He scored a lovely goal a couple of minutes later-or he thought he did. But the linesman’s flag was up, signaling offside. The goal didn’t count. He thought he’d been onside when the ball was kicked. So did Theo, though he had to admit the linesman was closer and had a better viewing angle than he did.

Even without any one player who could match Adi, the Poles were good. They seemed to have played together more than their German foes. They ran plays: one guy knew where the other guy was going, and did his best to put the ball there. Their greenish khaki uniforms were always down close to the German goal.

A slick pass put the ball at the feet of a Pole in the penalty box. Theo ran toward him, spreading his arms. Make yourself big was a ’keeper’s first commandment. It made the shot harder for the attacker.

“Far post!” another Pole yelled.

Guessing the guy with the ball would follow the advice, Theo flung himself to his left. The ball took a deflection off his hand and bounced wide of the post. The Poles got a corner kick, but not a goal.

“Gowno!” the shooter said loudly, the way a German would have said Scheisse! He sent Theo a suspicious stare. “Did you understand him?” he asked in Polish, as if that would have been cheating. Theo gave him a high-grade idiot stare. The man asked the same thing auf Deutsch. Theo looked just as blank. Shaking his head, the Pole jostled for position for the corner.

When Theo punched the ball away, another German booted it farther down the pitch. The Poles had brought up their backs in hopes of converting the corner; their defense was in momentary disarray. Adi Stoss got to the ball a split second ahead of a Pole. He faked right, went left, and squirted past him. The Pole tried to knock him down, but he jumped over the fellow’s upraised leg.

The Polish ’keeper ran out to close down the angle. Adi softly chipped the ball over the luckless man’s head. It bounced once in front of the goal, then rolled into the net.

Not even the Polish linesman down there could find any way to disallow the score. He looked as impressed as everybody else, in fact. The German soldiers watching the match whooped and cheered like maniacs. Even some of the Poles applauded. The goal was that pretty.

Two Polish forwards stood catching their breath in the German penalty area. “Not bad,” one of them said to the other, “but let’s see the fucker do it again.” His friend nodded.

It was 2–2 at the half. One of the Poles’ scores was an own goal-a cross bounced off a German defender’s behind. It was past Theo and into the net before he could do anything about it.

After the break, they switched ends and went at it again. The Poles scored-that one went right through Theo’s spraddled legs. He was mad, because he thought he should have stopped it. A few minutes later, the Germans leveled. Adi made a sweet pass into the area, and another German headed it home.

There things stuck. Theo made a good save. So did the Poles’ goalkeeper, who jumped as if on springs to tip a rifle shot of Adi’s just over the crossbar. Adi waved to him, paying his respects. The ’keeper sketched a salute in return. He’d seen what he was up against.

As they neared the final whistle, Theo grew just about sure the match would end in a draw. He wanted a win, but a draw wasn’t so bad. Nobody’s national pride would be damaged that way. He did wish he hadn’t let in the last goal.

The Polish ’keeper must also have decided it was safe to relax a little. He took a couple of steps forward, away from the frame of the net. Why not? Safe as houses. The ball was out near the halfway line.

Theo could have told him nowhere on the pitch was safe when Adi was around. He could have, but he didn’t need to. Adi showed the Pole instead. He launched a howitzer shot with his right foot, high and looping and dropping down straight toward the goal. The ’keeper staggered back, desperately throwing up his arms. He got the fingertips of his right hand on the ball. Theo hadn’t thought he could even do that. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t flip the ball over the bar this time. It went in. Adi’d done it again, all right-in spades.

When the referee blew the whistle a couple of minutes later, the triumphant Germans carried him off the field on their shoulders. He was grinning like a fool and laughing like a lunatic. Part of that might have been triumph, too.

Part of it, Theo judged, was something else altogether. Had the Wehrmacht men knew more, they likely would have celebrated less. Adi had more in common with some of the soldiers in Polish uniform than he did with them. Most of the Poles wouldn’t have been happy about that, either. Theo cracked a smile. Not only had his side won, he shared a joke with only one other man out of the whole crowd.

Dr. Alvarez clucked like a laying hen. “You really should not leave hospital so soon,” he insisted.

He’d been trained in England, all right; any American would have said leave the hospital. Chaim Weinberg noticed, but he didn’t care. “Doc, you’ve said you’re not gonna do any more carving on me, right?” he said.

“Yes,” the hand surgeon answered with a reluctant nod. “But you have not done enough exercises to give you the full strength and dexterity possible in your hand.”

“So I’ll keep doing ’em once I get to the front,” Chaim answered. “And I’ll do other stuff with it, too. You gotta understand, Doc-I’m just sick to death of laying around here on my butt.”

“Lying,” Alvarez said.

“No, honest to God, it’s the truth.” Then Chaim realized what the doctor meant. He started to laugh. Wasn’t it a hell of a note when a foreigner knew more about your language’s grammar than you did? He went on, “I’ll be okay-I really will. You can’t tell me the Republic doesn’t need another soldier who doesn’t halfway know what he’s doing, either. ¡Viva la República!”

“¡Viva!” Dr. Alvarez echoed. He had to do that much. If he didn’t, somebody was liable to report him as a Sanjurjo sympathizer. If his actual politics lay on the Nationalist side, Chaim no more wanted to know about it than Alvarez wanted him to find out.

One way the surgeon could have kept him in Madrid would have been not to give him any clothes. The filthy, bloody uniform in which he’d come here had long since been thrown away-or, more likely, burned to prevent contagion. But they fitted him with a pair of dungarees and a peasant’s collarless cotton shirt. That would do to get him to the front. They’d issue him a new uniform there … or maybe they wouldn’t, if they didn’t happen to have one. If they didn’t, he could wear this in the trenches till it got too ragged to stand. It wasn’t as if he’d never been ragged before.

When he stuck his good hand in the pocket of the dungarees, he found a small roll of pesetas in there. He started to thank the surgeon, then clamped down on it. By the look in his eye, Alvarez wanted no thanks and would have denied putting the money in there. Some people were like that: they didn’t care to admit, maybe even to themselves, that they could be nice.

A couple of the nurses kissed Chaim before he left. One of them was halfway cute, or more than halfway. Why couldn’t they have been a little more friendly when all he could do was lay there-no, lie there-in bed like a sack of peas, dammit?

He was sweating before he’d walked even a block. Part of that was Madrid’s fierce summer heat and the blazing sun overhead. And part of it was that he’d spent too goddamn long lying there like a sack of peas. He hadn’t realized how far out of shape he’d got.

Madrid itself kept the hectic gaiety he’d always found here. Buildings without damage were scarce, glassed windows scarcer. Nationalist, Italian, and German bombers had pounded the Republican stronghold since the civil war started in 1936. Madrileños repaired, rebuilt, and carried on.

Chaim needed a little while to orient himself. He hadn’t been at his best when they brought him to the hospital, which was putting things mildly. And the building, like most here, had boarded-up windows. So he hadn’t known where he was. Now that he did …

Luckily, Party headquarters was only a few blocks away. The first person he saw when he walked in there was La Martellita. She was hurrying across the lobby with a fat folder of papers squeezed between her arm and her sweetly curved side. She saw him, too-with no great delight. “What?” she said. “They turned you loose?”

“Afraid so,” he answered.

“And so you came over here to bother me?” She jumped to a natural conclusion.

But he shook his head with more dignity than he could usually muster. “Sorry, querida, but no. I came over here to ask where I could get a ride up to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”

“Oh,” La Martellita said in a different tone of voice. That was business. She told him what he needed to know. The bus depot wasn’t far, either, for which he was glad. Then she asked, “And your hand-it’s better?”

“It’s good enough.” He showed her he could bring thumb and forefinger together. He tried not to show her it still hurt. His pride was of a different sort from the Spaniards’ flashy variety, which didn’t mean he had none.

“It’s still not pretty,” she said.

He shrugged. “It’ll never be pretty. Así es la vida. You, now, you’re pretty.”

Flattery got him nowhere. He hadn’t expected it would. Hoped, sure, but not expected. “Go find your bus,” she told him. “If you stay here very long, you won’t find anything but trouble.”

He blew her a kiss as he turned to go. “Hasta la vista. Say hello to my son for me.”

She headed for the stairway without answering. He suspected Carlos Federico Weinberg wouldn’t get the hello. Sighing, he walked out and trudged over to the depot.

Every last bus in the Republic would have been junked for spare parts in the States-except the ones old and strange enough to go straight into a museum. The ancient French ruin he boarded might have rushed troops from Paris to the Marne in the darkest days of 1914. It wouldn’t have been fresh from the factory then, either.

It rattled. It farted. It stank of gasoline-something was leaking somewhere. At least half of what should have been teeth on the gears in its transmission were only memories. Its shocks weren’t even memories, because Chaim didn’t think it had ever had any.

But it still ran. The maniac behind the wheel drove with a cheerful disregard for life and limb: his own, his handful of passengers’, and those of anyone else unfortunate enough to come anywhere near him.

Heading north and west was getting a picture of how the war had gone. The Nationalists came within a whisker of taking Madrid. They pushed into the northwestern suburbs, and onto the campus of the university. Little by little, the Republican forces had driven them back, till now the front lay well out of artillery range. As the bus clattered along, craters in the ground-sometimes craters in the road-got fresher and deeper. Less grass grew in them. The rusting hulks of burnt-out armored vehicles from both sides grew more modern and dangerous-looking.

After a while, brakes screeching, the bus shuddered to a stop. “The sector of the Internationals!” the driver shouted. He undid the wire around the handle that held the door closed. Chaim got out.

A lot of so-called Internationals nowadays were Spaniards. Casualties and time had thinned the foreign Marxists’ ranks, and the bigger European war meant few new volunteers came here. But the ones who were left, Europeans and Americans, were uncommonly hard to kill.

“What do you need?” asked a man who spoke Spanish with some kind of guttural Central European accent.

Chaim held up his much-scarred, much-repaired left hand. “I’m just over a wound,” he answered. If the other fellow had trouble with his crappy Spanish, he figured Yiddish would be the next thing to try. If you knew German, you could cope with it. “Where do I find the Abe Lincolns these days?”

The Central European followed him. The guy pointed up and to the left. “They’re over there. So you’re back for more fun, are you?”

“Fun? Oh, of course.” Chaim flexed the fingers that still worked. “Any more fun and I’d be dead. Round that got me killed one of my friends.”

“I’m sorry,” the other man said. “We all have stories like that by now. Well, go on. Buena suerte.” Chaim nodded as he headed up toward the line. Good luck was as much as you could hope for, and more than you usually got.

A groundcrew sergeant regretfully spread his hands. Anastas Mouradian eyed the callused palms with the dirt ground into the ridges of leathery flesh. “I’m very sorry, Comrade Lieutenant, but the hydraulics on your bomber are totally shot to shit,” the noncom said.

“How long will you need to fix things?” Mouradian demanded. “We’ll be flying again tomorrow as long as the weather stays good.”

Before answering, the groundcrew man used a strip torn from Pravda and some makhorka he took out of a pouch on his belt to roll himself a cigarette. After he scraped a match on the sole of his boot and lit the smoke, he courteously offered Mouradian the makings. When the pilot shook his head, the mechanic blew out a stream of smoke and said, “We’ll do the best we can. I don’t know what else to tell you right now.”

“Khorosho,” Stas replied, although it wasn’t good or even close to good. The longer he served in the Red Air Force, the more time he spent among Russians, the better he understood why they’d raised profanity to an art form practiced by virtuosos. The reason was simple: they had to deal with other Russians practically all the time. And if dealing with Russians all the time didn’t make you want to swear, nothing ever would.

He went back to the officers’ tent and gave Isa Mogamedov the news. Armenians and Azeris had been rivals, usually enemies, since time out of mind. All the same, Stas understood his copilot in ways he would never understand a Russian. The two peoples had lived in-and picked-each other’s pockets for so long, they’d rubbed off on each other.

Mogamedov’s tiny shrug meant Well, what can you hope for when Russians are working on something? Aloud, the Azeri said, “Maybe someone will come down sick and we’ll fly even if the plane can’t go.”

“You never can tell,” Stas said. “We serve the Soviet Union.”

“We serve the Soviet Union!” Mogamedov agreed loudly. You could never go far wrong saying that where plenty of other people heard you. He went on, “If we fly, we fly. If we don’t, it’s … that we don’t, is all.”

“Sure,” Mouradian said. What had his crewmate almost come out with before changing course? If we don’t, it’s God’s will, maybe? Something like that, Stas guessed. Something that sounded not only religious but Muslim. Something you didn’t want to say where plenty of other people heard you, in other words.

Stas let his eyes very casually flick around the tent. He didn’t think any of the Russians in here had noticed Mogamedov’s tiny hesitation. Even if they had noticed it, chances were they would be too dim to understand what it likely meant. They were only Russians, after all. A lot of things men from the Caucasus took for granted sailed right over their heads.

When Stas’ eyes came back to Mogamedov, he noticed that the Azeri was watching him. An instant later, Mogamedov wasn’t any more, at least not in any noticeable way. But the copilot would know that he knew; Mouradian knew that much himself. And he knew Mogamedov would worry, knowing that he knew. You could drown in all the permutations of knowing and knowing-about-knowing and worrying-about-knowing-about-knowing and …

“Nichevo, Isa. Nichevo,” Stas said. There was a useful Russian word, a Russian Russian word. It meant What can you do? or You can’t do anything or It can’t be helped. Russians had put up with a lot over the years. Their language showed it.

He hoped Mogamedov also understood he didn’t intend to do anything with what he thought he knew. A word whispered where it would find its way to an NKVD man’s ear could land the Azeri in water hot enough to boil him. Stas didn’t love Azeris. He didn’t suppose he ever would. But Azeris were wonderful fellows when measured against informers.

Late that afternoon, the groundcrew sergeant hunted down Mouradian and said, “Comrade Lieutenant, the work crew has overhauled the hydraulics. Everything is good as new.”

Which might mean they’d really done it. Or which might mean somebody’d told the sergeant that Pe-2 was going to fly no matter what. His broad, stubbly face betrayed nothing of what went on behind it. He was a Russian, all right.

“For sure, Comrade Sergeant?” Stas said. “Yob tvoyu mat’?” The all-purpose obscenity literally meant Fuck your mother, but, like any good curse, it stretched and twisted like a rubber band. Here, Mouradian had in mind something like You’re not shitting me?

“Yob tvoyu mat’, Comrade Lieutenant,” the groundcrew man said firmly. No shitting around. I really mean it. Stas had to be content with that. He wouldn’t get any stronger assurance if he dragged the noncom into court. Considering how strongly the Party put its thumb on the scales of justice, this was probably better than any testimony on oath.

When they did fly out at sunrise the next morning, the hydraulics retracted the landing gear. He didn’t have to crank it up by hand. He had Fyodor Mechnikov check the bomb-bay doors. “Fuckers work like they’re supposed to,” the bombardier reported.

“He wasn’t kidding,” Stas said to Mogamedov, impressed in spite of himself. “They really did fix things.”

“You hope. Don’t jinx it,” the copilot said. Stas nodded. That was good advice.

They flew on. Getting to the front took a while. Pretty soon, they’d have to move up to an airstrip farther west. The Nazis were falling back. They devastated the country from which they retreated. Not even Red Army men, notorious for foraging like wild animals, would find much to eat in this burnt-out terrain.

Somewhere not far ahead lay the border between the RSFSR and Byelorussia. Maybe the Germans and Poles would try to hold on to White Russia. Maybe they’d move back all the way to the Polish border. If they didn’t do that of their own accord, the Soviet Union would have to kick them out.

German flak guns fired at the Pe-2s. Most of the shells burst behind them. The Russian bombers were faster than the men on the ground gave them credit for. Somewhere up ahead lay the target: a Hitlerite artillery concentration that had held up a Red Army advance in this sector for days.

We’re artillery ourselves-flying artillery, Stas thought. The Luftwaffe’s Stukas had pioneered the idea. They dropped more explosives farther away than guns could reach, and softened up the opposition so the men on the ground could slice through it. Stavka had grabbed the notion with both hands. Now the Red Air Force and Red Army were using it against its inventors.

More German antiaircraft guns protected the 105s and 155s in their pits. The flak seemed thick enough to walk on now. Near misses buffeted Mouradian’s Pe-2. He clung to the yoke as he tipped the plane nose-down for his attack run.

“Let ’em go!” Mogadmedov shouted to Mechnikov, and the bombs fell free. Stas zoomed back toward Soviet-held territory at just above barn-roof height. He watched one startled German soldier start to dive for a foxhole, but was gone before the Fritz made it in.

“You know,” Mogamedov said after they got back to their own side of the front, “I think we are starting to gain on it.”

Stas was beginning to think the same thing. Even so, he answered, “Weren’t you the one who was talking about not jinxing it?” Mogamedov’s oxygen mask didn’t show much of his face, but the Azeri wagged a wry finger.

Now, Stas thought, let’s see if the landing gear works going down, too. And damned if it didn’t. He’d have to find that groundcrew sergeant a bottle of vodka or some good tobacco-not that crappy makhorka, which wasn’t worth smoking if you had anything better.

They bounced once when they hit the airstrip. Riding the brakes, Mouradian brought the Pe-2 to a stop. He pulled off his flying helmet. Beside him, Isa Mogamedov followed suit. “Another one down,” the Azeri said.

“We’ll probably go out again tomorrow,” Stas answered. He’d read Shakespeare only in Russian, which he figured put him level with the poet: it wasn’t his language, and it wasn’t the Englishman’s, either. Even in translation, though, he remembered some tolling lines:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

He remembered them, yes. He only wished he could forget them.

Ropes and sawhorses with boards across them kept civilians out of the square in front of Münster’s cathedral. In a way, that annoyed Sarah Bruck. Now she had to take a long detour to get from the shops back to her house. Life was hard enough for Jews without any more added tsuris.

In another way … She’d called things when she hoped out loud that RAF bombs would land there. They’d damaged the cathedral. That was a shame because it was a handsome building that had stood for centuries. But they’d done worse to the SS men garrisoned in the square to hold the cathedral against Münster’s Catholic community.

Those barricades weren’t there just to keep people from falling and hurting themselves in bomb craters. They were there so civilians wouldn’t see what had happened to the Nazis’ Übermenschen and their tools of war.

The bodies were gone now. Sarah’s father hadn’t taken them away, but he’d been cleaning rubble in the square when the people who were in charge of such things came to do their jobs. His comment was, “I’ve seen bad things in bombed-out houses. I saw worse things in the trenches during the Kaiser’s war. But I never saw anything that bad before.”

Here and there, glancing in as she hurried past, Sarah could still make out bloodstains on stones and bricks. Once the blood soaked in, you had a devil of a time washing it out. You had to paint over it, and even then you could sometimes see it, like the ghost of death.

You could smell it, too. Sarah’s nostrils twitched at that faint odor, like a pork roast that hadn’t gone into the icebox. She didn’t think she’d ever smelled death till the war started. She knew that stench much too well now.

Speaking of paint … Someone had daubed a graffito on a wall. God’s vengeance for Bishop von Galen, it said. The letters ran into one another, and paint dripped down from them. The commentator must have sneaked out in the dead of night and written while he couldn’t see what he was doing. He managed to get his message across even so.

If anyone had caught him doing it … Sarah didn’t like to think what would have happened after that. The Gestapo had all kinds of ingenious tools for making people unhappy.

That people were already unhappy with the regime, she knew. That they were unhappy enough to keep showing their unhappiness was new. The authorities’ response seemed to be that, if they killed enough unhappy people, and killed them publicly enough, the rest would either stop being unhappy or stop daring to show they were unhappy. The first struck Sarah as unlikely. The second? Maybe not.

She hurried away from the graffito. If a policeman or a blackshirt saw she was near it, he’d also see the yellow Stars of David on her clothes. He’d put two and two together and get five. But would he care? Not even a little bit, not when he’d nabbed a Jew.

She’d done better shopping than she often managed these days. She had a pretty good head of cabbage in her stringbag, along with some parsnips and rhubarb that cattle wouldn’t have turned up their noses at. Considering what was usually in the shops, especially in the late-afternoon hours when the Nazis let Jews get what the Aryans hadn’t bought, it was something of a triumph.

A tram rattled past. It was as sorry as everything else in civilian Münster these days. Its iron wheels were rusty. Rust streaked the fading paint on the side of the car, too. No one had touched it up since the fighting started, and that was a long time ago now. The whining electric motor sounded as if it would turn up its toes and die any day now. Of course, it had sounded that way for the past year and a half, so maybe it wouldn’t.

She watched it go without trying to flag it down: one more thing that would land a Jew in hot water. Public transport was for Aryans only. Jews had to hoof it.

She wouldn’t have got far with this one, anyhow. So she told herself, and not all in the attitude of the fox convinced the grapes had to be sour. The Aryans would be getting out three or four blocks ahead. A labor gang had filled in a big bomb crater in the middle of the street, but no one had laid replacement tracks yet.

Sarah wondered whether the new tracks would ever come. They were made of steel, after all, and steel went into panzers and U-boats and big guns and helmets and a host of other things soldiers and sailors and flyers needed. What soldiers and sailors and flyers needed, the Reich gave them.

Civilians in Münster? They were a different story. They would eat whatever the soldiers didn’t want. If they needed to get off the tram, walk past the damaged stretch in the line, wait for another car, and board again, Party Bonzen didn’t care. It was all part of the war effort, wasn’t it? After Germany won, civilians wouldn’t need to do things like that any more.

After Germany won. If Germany won.

Quietly, people were starting to wonder what would happen if Germany lost. People a generation ahead of Sarah remembered what things had been like after the last war: the shortages, the humiliation, the crazy inflation that turned years of savings into pocket change. Everybody seemed convinced it would be worse this time around.

Sarah’s mother seemed pleased at the vegetables she’d brought home. “They’ll go fine with the barley cakes in the oven,” she said.

“Yes, they will.” Sarah worked hard to hide her lack of enthusiasm. Barley cakes were uninspiring. And even what claimed to be barley flour probably had peas and beans ground up in it. They were easier to disguise there than they would have been with wheat, since barley rose less on its own than the more costly grain did.

Samuel Goldman came home with a tin can whose label had come off. “I found it in the gutter,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s not rusty. It’s not dented. It’s not bulging. Open it up and see what’s in it. If it smells all right, we can try it.” His mouth twisted. “Isn’t life grand, when we get to be guinea pigs?”

“With our luck, it’ll be beets, or maybe sauerkraut,” Hanna Goldman said.

“Just the same, it’ll be food we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” her husband replied. He smiled that lopsided smile again. “Always assuming we live through it, of course.” Even talking about scavenged canned goods, he sounded like a professor.

“I’ll get the can opener,” Sarah said. Before she used it, she washed the can and inspected it herself. Father was right-it looked fine. She let out a little yip even before she got the lid all the way off. “Chicken!” she exclaimed, as overjoyed as Lancelot might have been when he first beheld the Holy Grail.

Father picked up the can and sniffed it. He smiled and nodded. “Smells great,” he said. Sarah nodded, too-it did. Father handed Mother the can. “Why don’t you cook it on the stove?” he told her. “That will help kill anything bad that may be in there.”

“I’ll do it,” Mother answered, and reached for a frying pan.

“In America, I hear, they even put meat for dogs and cats in cans,” Father said. That was something to think about in a country where people were starting to eat dogs and cats. He went on, “If this were dog food, I think I’d eat it anyway. If I barked afterwards, I’d bark on a full stomach.”

“If you think I’ll argue with you, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” Sarah said. Her father looked suitably pained.

The canned chicken tasted as good as it looked. Sarah went to bed happy. The RAF didn’t come over Münster. She didn’t wake up puking. It was a fine day.