Fallout

11

“Fire and fall back!” Sergeant Gergely shouted.

Istvan Szolovits popped up out of his foxhole like a malevolent jack-in-the-box. He fired a couple of rounds at the advancing Americans-or maybe they were Englishmen or Germans-and then, satisfied he’d made them put their heads down, trotted east through the war-shattered Ruhr.

War-shattered or not, this town (whichever town it happened to be) still had people living in it. “Look at the Russian pigdogs run!” one of them said to her equally elderly friend.

I’m not a Russian, you ugly German twat, Istvan thought. He laughed. Anger, under the circumstances, seemed absurd. Well, war was nothing if not absurd. He’d already found that out, over and over again.

The other old lady scrounging with a stringbag clucked like a laying hen. She pointed right at Istvan as he loped by. “Look at that one, Ilse!” she shrilled. “His whole face is peeling. How did he get a sunburn this late in the year?” He counted himself lucky. That was the burn scar healing, not radiation sickness. His unit hadn’t got it nearly so bad as others closer to the bomb.

Bullets were still cracking along the street, some from the Hungarians, others from the soldiers pushing forward against them. They bothered the two German crones no more than they did the men in uniform. Then again, it wasn’t as if the old ladies weren’t veterans at this kind of thing, too.

As for Istvan, he trotted around a corner and ducked into a recessed doorway. From there, he could shoot at anybody coming after him.

Some of the real Russians who’d come back from nearer to where the bomb went off had their noses and ears melted into their faces and the sides of their necks. He’d seen some things that gave him new nightmares. Just when you started to think you were hardened to horror, horror went and showed you you didn’t know so much after all.

More boots thumped on the shattered pavement. Istvan leaned forward. He still didn’t like shooting at Americans, but he’d seen they didn’t mind shooting at him one bit. You did what you had to do to stay alive. Everything else, you could worry about later.

But these weren’t Americans. They were comrades from the Hungarian People’s Army. My countrymen, Istvan thought, not without bitterness. It was less than even money that they would think of him that way. They were Magyars. He was just a damned Jew who chanced to live in Hungary and to speak Magyar as if he’d learned it while he was a baby-which, of course, he had.

One of them trotted past the doorway without even noticing Istvan in its shadow. The other, more alert, started to swing his PPD that way. Then he recognized the uniform, if not the Jew wearing it. He lowered the machine pistol, waved, and ran on.

Istvan waved back. He didn’t want the other man having doubts about what he was and which side he belonged to. From short range like this, there wasn’t much that was deadlier than a PPD.

Then the door opened behind him. He whirled, sure he was dead. There stood Sergeant Gergely, a cigarette in his mouth, his own submachine gun cradled in his arms, a wicked grin on his face. “Hi, there,” he said.

“Fuck you!” Istvan blurted, his heart still pounding like a runaway hippo.

“That’s ‘Fuck you, Sergeant!’?” Gergely clucked in mock reproof. “You have to respect the rank.”

“Fuck you, Sergeant! All right? Happy now?” After a ragged breath, Istvan managed to go on, “How the devil did you get there?”

“I was on the landing, one floor up, and I saw you coming. So I thought I’d bake you a cake.” The sergeant was still grinning. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

It didn’t seem that way to Istvan. Saying so, though, would only make Gergely laugh at him. What he did say was, “What are we supposed to do now?”

“Keep fighting. Slow the enemy down as much as we can. Make him pay for everything he gets.” Gergely would have listened to German officers talking that way in 1944 and 1945-talking that way about the Red Army, the army now on the same side he was. He went on, “And hope Stalin pulls some wonder weapons out of his back pocket, or maybe out of his asshole.”

He spoke the key word in German: Wunderwaffen. There was irony, if you chanced to be looking for some. The Germans had talked about wonder weapons in the last war. They’d talked about them more than they’d produced them, as a matter of fact. The ones they did produce-the long-range rocket, the jet fighter-were too little and came too late.

Now the Americans and the Russians had the wonder weapons, with the atom bomb topping the list. And where did they trot out their fancy new toys? Why, on what was left of Germany. If Hitler had a grave, wasn’t he bound to be spinning in it?

“Bet your balls he is, Jewboy,” Gergely said when Istvan brought out that conceit. Somehow, the insulting name seemed like an endearment from him. He went on, “The guys who invented the fucking gyroscope got the idea by watching the way old Adolf spun.”

Istvan gaped at him. “Bugger me blind if you aren’t crazier than I am, Sergeant.”

“I’ve seen way more shit than you have, kid,” Gergely answered. “If that doesn’t drive you round the bend, well, Christ, you ain’t half trying.” His eyes narrowed. In less than a heartbeat, he went from storyteller to wary soldier. No, he hadn’t stayed alive to see all that shit by accident. “Something’s coming,” he said. “Sounds like trouble.”

“Uh-huh.” Istvan heard it, too: the rumbling clatter of a tracked vehicle. It was moving from west to east, which meant the people inside wouldn’t be friendly. He ducked into the doorway Gergely’d come out of. The sergeant followed, closing the door after him. If those unfriendly people didn’t see them, they wouldn’t start shooting at them. Or Istvan hoped they wouldn’t.

He and Gergely hotfooted it up to that landing and peered out through a glassless square that had been a window. An American self-propelled gun clanked around the corner. It carried a 105mm gun and a couple of machine guns. It didn’t have as much armor as a tank, but it was fine for knocking down buildings or shooting up soldiers and trucks it caught in the open.

Or it would have been. It never got the chance. Istvan had seen less than Sergeant Gergely, but he knew armor inside a built-up area was hideously vulnerable. Somebody in a block of flats across the street had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. A roar, a blast of fire, and that self-propelled gun turned into a blazing oven to cook its crew. It burned with savage ferocity. Flames and black, greasy smoke rose from the murdered machine.

“Stupid cocksuckers,” Gergely said. “You send one of those babies up a street without an infantry screen, you’re asking for something like that. It’s blocked the road so nothing else can get through, too.”

“They must have thought we’d thrown in the sponge,” Istvan said. “After all, we’re only Hungarians, right?”

The Americans would think he was a Hungarian. They’d kill him if they could because they thought he was a Hungarian. But how about Sergeant Gergely? What did he think? Somehow, the answer mattered very much to Istvan.

If Gergely had laughed and said something like You, a Hungarian? You’re a Hungarian like I shit angels, Istvan might have shot him right there. But the sergeant just grunted and replied, “Yeah, well, in the last war the Russians got that kind of surprise a time or three, too. You have any smokes?” Istvan gave him a cigarette and lit one himself, feeling better about his small piece of the world.

–

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. A captain Ihor Shevchenko’d served under during the Great Patriotic War used to say that all the time. He’d said it all the time till a German bouncing mine blew off his balls, anyhow. If he still said it, he said it soprano.

Which might not have kept the Chekists from sucking him back into the Red Army. They might figure a guy who’d had balls once upon a time still did whether that was literally true or not. Or, if he helped them make their quota, they might not even care.

What brought the thought back to Ihor’s mind now was the AK-47 he carried through northwestern Germany. As long as he had it, he could use it to get whatever he wanted. The front seemed to have broken down. No one gave him any orders after he got kicked out of the aid station. The docs there expected him to hook up with his old regiment again.

And so he would have, had he thought anything was left of it. But it had been in the trenches the Americans atom-bombed. He was one of the few people who’d watched two A-bombs delivered in anger go off and was still around to talk about it. A dubious distinction, yeah, but his own.

Only he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to rejoin the war, either. He went where he pleased. The A-bomb seemed to have blown up the MGB pukes behind the line, one of the few good things he could say about it. Nobody Soviet tried to dragoon him into the trenches.

And nobody German wanted to argue with him, not when he had Sergeant Kalashnikov’s finest creation as a persuader. Using it and the bits of Deutsch he remembered from the last war, he had no trouble getting all the food and booze he wanted. Who would argue with an assault rifle?

He and the men he’d joined up with weren’t the only Red Army soldiers roaming the countryside on their own. Soviet military discipline was stern, but not always stern enough to stand up to a good dose of radiation. Plenty of men who hadn’t wanted to be in Germany to begin with had had all the war they wanted, thank you very much.

Loosely banded together as they were, they could pull off bigger heists than one man could on his own. Then they’d drink themselves into a stupor. Schnapps worked as well as vodka for that.

A corporal named Feofan hoisted a bottle and said, “Pretty soon the Americans will push forward and butcher all of us like hogs.” He laughed till tears ran down his dirty face. He was very drunk.

Well, so was Ihor. So were all of them. And they all laughed. Ihor said, “We lived through the atom bomb. You think ordinary soldiers can do for the likes of us?”

“No fucking way!” Three Russians said the same thing at the same time. Or Ihor thought so. He was already drunk enough to be seeing double. Why shouldn’t he be drunk enough to be hearing triple? That was the last thing he remembered before passing out.

He woke up the next morning feeling exactly like death. He lay under a blanket out in the open under chilly drizzle. And one thing about schnapps: it hurt you worse than vodka did. The only medicine Ihor could think of that might dent his jimjams was the hair of the wolfpack that had its teeth in him. Not all the bottles lying around the sodden soldiers could be empty…could they? Fate wouldn’t be so cruel!

He found one with some life in it and swigged like a man in the desert who’d stumbled across an oasis. His stomach didn’t like the dose, but the rest of him did.

The others were no happier as they came back to consciousness. They ran out of restorative before they ran out of men who needed it. Then, weapons at the ready, they descended on the nearest village to take more. Ihor feared his head would fall off if he had to fire his AK-47, but the Germans didn’t know that.

What the Germans hereabouts did know was that Russians had done horrible things to their countrymen farther east. (Some were bound to know those horrible things were in revenge for what the Germans had done in the USSR, but that made them more nervous, not less.) When grimy, nasty Red Army men with assault rifles and machine pistols descended on them, they didn’t do anything to try to provoke the invaders.

Schnapps? Food? Cigarettes? They were happy to cough those up, as long as the Russians didn’t start shooting their men and gang-raping their women. Nothing could have stopped the Red Army soldiers from doing that, but they didn’t. They’d get in trouble for it, either from their own officers if the USSR pulled itself together or from the enemy if their own country couldn’t. However much he wanted to, Ihor couldn’t get drunk enough to forget about the enemy.

Artillery fire said the Americans were moving forward not far south. The only reason Ihor could find that they weren’t moving forward here, too, was that this wasn’t the main axis of their advance. They’d push hard where they wanted to, and clean up backwaters later.

Backwaters like this one.

It wasn’t till two days later that an American jeep nosed down the road to see what was going on. Like many jeeps, this one carried a pintle-mounted heavy machine gun: a lot of firepower for such a little vehicle.

The powerful machine gun did the Yankees in the jeep no good at all. They were gum-chewing teenagers, conscripts who had no idea what war was about. Since their very first lesson was the cruelest one possible, they never got the chance to learn.

They had no idea any Russians were within five kilometers of them, either, when they drove into the village. Like Ihor, most of his pals had picked up their warcraft against the Fritzes the last time around. Setting ambushes was second nature to them. Guys who couldn’t learn that stuff lay in unmarked graves all up and down the western USSR, when they weren’t just bones under bushes somewhere.

Because he had the Kalashnikov, Ihor took out the man behind the machine gun with a single head shot. The range wasn’t long for him, but it would have been for somebody with a submachine gun. The driver just had time to turn in alarm toward his stricken comrade when a burst from a PPD cut him down. He didn’t die right away, so another burst finished him. The jeep rolled on till it hit a telephone pole. Then it stopped.

“Too easy!” Feofan said scornfully.

“They won’t always be that blind,” Ihor said. “We should grab the machine gun. That’s one hell of a weapon for as long as we can keep it fed.”

“Go ahead, if you’ve got a hard-on for it,” Feofan told him.

So he did. It came off the pintle easily enough. But it weighed close to twenty kilos, not counting the box of bulky cartridges it fired. Using it without a tripod wouldn’t be easy.

A sentry-Ihor had said he’d kick the man’s ass if he didn’t get over to the western edge of the village-sang out: “More Americans on the way!”

And there were, too many for the Red Army men to dispose of them all so easily. After an exchange of fire, the Yanks pulled back. Then they started lobbing mortar bombs into the village. That was no fun at all. By the local Germans’ shrieks, they enjoyed it no more than Ihor did.

Before long, he and his friends had only two choices: stay where they were and get cut off and killed or pull out. Before he left, Ihor fired a belt of ammo from the heavy machine gun. He didn’t aim, or need to. Not only was it loud fun, it made the Americans move up slower than they would have otherwise.

Three or four kilometers east of the village, the Red Army men ran into their own side’s military police. “What are you slackers doing running around without orders?” a sergeant asked ominously.

“Slackers, my dick,” Ihor retorted. “Didn’t you hear the firefight? We were defending that village from the capitalist imperialists.”

“Huh.” The sergeant wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t try to arrest them all. Back under military control they went. Freedom had been fun while it lasted, but nothing lasted forever. Most things didn’t even last very long.

–

Aaron Finch scowled at the 1946 Chevy that had replaced his stolen Nash. The car was okay. Whoever’d owned it before had taken decent care of it. The payments…He scowled again. He hated paying on time; interest sucked money the way leeches sucked blood. But if you couldn’t afford to write a check, you did what you had to do.

He’d made the best deal he could. Almost the best deal-a pretty nice Ford a year newer had cost about the same. But Aaron was damned if he’d buy a Ford, even a secondhand one. Old Henry hated Jews and he hated union men. With two strikes like those, he didn’t need a third one to be out in Aaron’s book.

He unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel. He thought he’d locked the Nash the night before it disappeared, but he wasn’t sure. He made sure all the time now. Locking the barn door after the horse is gone, he thought as he turned the key and pulled out the choke.

Off to Blue Front he went. At least he didn’t have to bother people for a lift any more. He never would have been able to do that if he hadn’t lived close to the warehouse. Still and all, he’d be buying the guys who’d gone out of their way for him lunch and cigarettes for weeks to show he was properly grateful. The scales had to balance. His father had knocked that into him with a heavy hand.

If only his old man had really been even half as smart as he thought he was. Back around the time of the First World War, Mendel Finch had run a moving and hauling business up in Oregon. In his wisdom, he’d decided that trucks were just a fad, while horses and wagons would stay around forever.

Not surprisingly, he’d gone broke about a year after the Armistice was signed. And, somehow, he’d avoided honest work ever since. Well, he was within two years of his ninetieth birthday now. But to this day he wouldn’t admit he’d made a mistake with his business. He had to be right, always right, right no matter what.

There in the car with nobody else to laugh at him, Aaron laughed at himself. “Wonder where I got that from?” he said. Yeah, Marvin had it worse, but neither of them was in the same league as their father.

Here was the intersection where that Russian came parachuting down from his bomber after it sent downtown Los Angeles up in smoke. Had Aaron cut his throat with a pocket knife or caved in his skull with a tire iron instead of capturing him, chances were he wouldn’t have that letter from Harry Truman on his wall now.

He laughed again, mirthlessly this time. Whether he had it or not, Roxane and Howard would still think he got his kicks oppressing the proletariat. Aaron was a good union man and a good Democrat, and that was plenty for him. To some people in his wife’s family-and to some in his own-that meant he might as well have worn a swastika button on his lapel.

When he pulled into the Blue Front parking lot, Jim Summers was just getting out of his Hudson. It was dirty. The paint was starting to peel. Jim didn’t give a damn. He paused outside the car to light a Camel and blew a stream of smoke up into the air.

Aaron parked two spaces away. He nodded to his partner. “How’s it going?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” Summers said. “How about you?”

“I’m hanging in there.” Aaron lit a Chesterfield of his own. Camels were too harsh for him-unless the choice was smoking Camels or not smoking at all. He couldn’t imagine doing without coffin nails.

“You listen to Joe McCarthy on the radio last night?” Summers asked.

“Afraid I missed him.” Aaron tried to keep that as diplomatic as he could. He thought the junior Senator from Wisconsin was a blowhard with delusions of grandeur, and he thought anybody who didn’t think so was out of his tree. But he also thought fighting with the people you had to work with wasn’t the smartest thing you could do.

Jim, by contrast, liked Senator McCarthy himself, and so couldn’t imagine that any right-thinking American wouldn’t. “You shoulda tuned him in,” he said. “He ripped into old Harry Falseman somethin’ fierce. If we’d smoked out all the damn Reds we got poisoning the country a lot sooner’n we did, we wouldn’t be in the mess where we’re at now. That’s what he said-I boiled it down a little, y’understand, but there it is.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” That and How about that? were the only two phrases Aaron had ever found that you could drop in almost anywhere without making anybody want to grab for a broken bottle.

Or he’d always thought so, anyway. Jim’s furry eyebrows zoomed up toward his hairline. “Interesting? It’s important, is what it is! He says he’d got hisself a list as long as my arm of all the Commies and traitors we need to get rid of so’s we can straighten up and fly right from now on.”

Aaron wondered whether the list was real or a figment of McCarthy’s imagination. If by some chance it was real, he wondered how many of Ruth’s relatives, and of his own, were on it. To him, that seemed more an honor than a point against them.

He kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. Glancing at his watch, he said, “We’d better go on in and punch the clock. I don’t want to get docked for being late.”

Jim Summers’ mouth twisted. “Yeah, Weissman’d do that, sure as hell. Crummy Hebe squeezes ever penny till he can make flour out of the wheat on the back.” He ground out the Camel under his heel as if wishing it were his boss’ head. Then he said, “Plenty o’ that kind on ol’ Senator McCarthy’s list, I betcha.”

“Jim-” Aaron wondered whether going on was worth the tsuris. They’d worked side by side since not long after the end of World War II, and Jim had no idea he was Jewish. No one would ever accuse Summers of being the brightest bulb in Times Square.

“What?” he said as they walked to the door. “C’mon. You started to say somethin’. Spill, goddammit.”

“Okay.” Aaron didn’t think it would be, but he spilled anyway: “What the devil do you think I am, a Chinaman?”

“You? You’re-” Summers broke off. Maybe he could spell CAT if you spotted him the C and the A. He grinned a rather sickly grin. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Aaron. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Hey, some o’ my best friends is Jews.”

Bad grammar aside, Aaron had never heard that said when it wasn’t a lie. Had Jim Summers been born a Bavarian, he would have been a brownshirt. Here, he was only a bigot-just the kind of guy Joe McCarthy was looking for.

They walked inside and punched their cards in the time clock. In spite of gabbing in the parking lot, they were on time. Jim stumped over to the big percolator in one corner and filled a waxed-cardboard cup with coffee. The java was still good now; it would be battery acid by the afternoon.

Still muttering and shaking his head, Jim went into the little cubicle he and Aaron shared while they were in the warehouse. The pinups and nudies decorating the walls were all his (which didn’t mean Aaron didn’t sometimes glance their way). He slammed the door behind him.

“What’s his problem?” Herschel Weissman asked Aaron.

“Believe it or not, he just found out I’m a Jew,” Aaron said.

His boss looked at him. Aaron knew what Weissman saw: the same very Jewish-looking mug that peered back from the bathroom mirror every morning. The older man raised an eyebrow. “Ripley wouldn’t believe that,” Weissman snorted, shaking his head.

“It’s true anyway. Now he has to figure out how much grief he’ll get from Goebbels and Himmler for working with me.” Not at all apropos of nothing, Aaron went on, “Did I ever tell you the guy we rent our house from has a number on his arm?”

“No. Well, at least he lived.” Weissman set a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “And you can’t expect a shlemiel not to be a shlemiel. It’d be a better world if you could, but you can’t, dammit.” Aaron nodded. He knew that, too, however much he wished he didn’t.

–

Whenever Vasili Yasevich went to sleep, he wondered if he’d wake up smelling smoke. Grigory Papanin and his hooligan friends didn’t seem to have the balls to challenge him openly. (That Vasili still carried Papanin’s pistol was bound to be another reason they didn’t want to mess with him when he could mess back.)

Asleep, though, he was vulnerable. He dossed in a long wooden building the people of Smidovich called a dormitory for single men not otherwise lodged. In Harbin, it would have been a flophouse. However you named it, it made even the shack he’d lived in after the Americans bombed Harbin seem a palace by comparison.

Compared to the Chinese, Russians were not a cleanly people. Vasili had seen that in nothing flat. Being more used to the Chinese way, he found Soviet grubbiness worse than someone accustomed to it would have. Living with other bachelors, some of them real refugees from Khabarovsk, didn’t help. Even young Chinese men with no women to keep them in line could be slobs. Young Russians…

Vasili wondered why the people who hired him to do their carpentry didn’t have him make a pigpen for the men who shared the dormitory. It smelled of unwashed Russians-who stank worse than Chinese-and stale food. The other bachelors left their junk wherever it happened to fall. The only two besides him who made up their cots were veterans of the Great Patriotic War. Nobody changed his bed linen. Vasili’s guess was, the dormitory had no spare sets.

People in the dormitory stole from one another whenever they saw the chance. They treated it as a game, something you did to amuse yourself or to make your life a little better. Vasili rapidly learned to keep everything that mattered to him in his pockets.

But if Papanin and his friends poured gasoline by the doors and windows and threw down three or four matches, what could he do? Cook was the first thing that occurred to him.

The second thing that occurred to him was Do unto others before they do unto you. If he roasted Grigory Papanin about medium-well, he wouldn’t have to worry about him any more. How hard would the militia work to find out who did it? They might put in some effort to pin a medal on the right guy, but that was about it.

All he wanted to do was go on about his business in Smidovich without having anybody pay much attention to him. Drawing notice was dangerous. If the government officials decided to investigate him, they’d find that nobody who really was from Khabarovsk had ever set eyes on him. Then…Then he’d find out why his father and mother thought swallowing poison was a better bet than letting the Chekists get hold of them.

In the meantime, he wandered through the village, looking for things other people would pay him to do. After he shored up a cabin’s sagging wall, the babushka who lived there said, “You did that faster than I thought you would, and it looks like a good job.”

“Thanks very much, Gospozha,” he answered, and bit his tongue a split second later. Ma’am was one of those un-Soviet words people weren’t supposed to use.

The old woman noticed, too. She wagged a blunt, work-roughened finger at him. “Where did you learn to talk, sonny?” she asked. “Not around here, that’s for sure. Around here it’s all mat and filth.” But she seemed more pleased than affronted. Unlike people Vasili’s age, when she was a girl Gospozha had been something you’d want to hear, not a slip that could land you in a gulag.

“I must have been raised by wolves,” Vasili said with a wry grin.

“Very polite wolves.” The babushka also grinned, showing off a mouthful of gold teeth. If she ever found herself in big trouble, she might bribe her way out of trouble by parting with them. She went on, “Heaven knows you’ve got better manners than that Papanin item. And you work harder than he ever did, not that that’s hard.”

“I’m just trying to get by, that’s all,” he replied. People here kept telling him how hard he worked. He’d never heard any such thing in Harbin. There, he’d felt like a man on a treadmill, running as hard as he could just to stay in one place. The Chinese had been desperately poor, but they’d all done everything they could to escape their poverty. If you didn’t do the same, you’d go under.

“You seem to be doing pretty well for yourself.” Her gray eyes, nested in a taiga of wrinkles, were disconcertingly shrewd. “And have you seen that Papanin lately?”

“Lately? No.” There, Vasili told the truth. The less he saw of the fellow who had been Smidovich’s handyman before he got here, the happier he was.

“You haven’t missed much-I’ll tell you that,” the babushka said. “He never was what you’d call pretty, but these days he looks like somebody threw him into a stone wall face-first. His snoot leans to one side and it’s flatter than a Chinaman’s, the Devil’s uncle grab me if I’m lying. And he walks like a truck ran over him.”

“Well, what do you know?” Vasili said. Did she think he’d brag about ruining Papanin? He wasn’t that dumb. He hoped he wasn’t, anyway.

“What do I know? I know what I’ve seen, or I wouldn’t’ve said anything about it.” She knew, all right, whether he bragged or not. What he’d done wasn’t a secret, however much he wished it would have been.

All the same, he gave back his most stolid, most Russian shrug. “I don’t care a kopek for Papanin. I’ll go my way, and he can go his.”

“His almost took him to the undertaker,” the old woman said. Vasili shrugged again. After a moment, so did she. She was twenty centimeters shorter than he was, but her shoulders might have been broader. “Khorosho. Those wolves who raised you must have known how to keep their mouths shut. Pretty smart wolves, hey? Don’t you go away, now.” She ducked back into the cabin for a moment.

When she came out, she was carrying two jars of pickled mushrooms. She handed them to Vasili. “Thanks very much,” he stammered, caught by surprise. “You already paid me, you know. You don’t have to do this.”

She waved his words aside. “Enjoy them. I picked them myself, and I put them in the jars. They’re good.” She stuck out her chin, daring him to make something of it.

He didn’t have the nerve. He knew he’d have to share them with the other guys at the dormitory, but that was all right. Without an icebox, they wouldn’t keep after he opened the jars. He tapped one with his thumbnail and said, “I’ll bring them back after they’re empty.”

“Thank you. Everything costs so much these days. I remember when…” She slowed to a stop and then laughed at herself. “That was years and years before you were born, so it wouldn’t matter to you.”

Vasili maintained a prudent silence. Prices in Smidovich were cheap compared to what he’d been used to in Harbin. China had too many people clamoring after not enough stuff. As soon as you crossed the Amur, all of that changed. There wasn’t much stuff here, either, but there was hardly anybody around to go after it.

“Oh, and the next time you tangle with Grigory Papanin, hit him harder, why don’t you?” the babushka said.

So much for making like I’m innocent, Vasili thought. “If I hit him any harder than I did before, I’ll kill him.”

“No loss.” She might be a Russian, but no Chinese could have sounded more callous.