Fallout

16

“Rain, rain, rain!” Leon said happily from the back seat.

“Well, kiddo-shmiddo, you got that right.” Aaron Finch was less delighted than his son. He was driving, and Leon wasn’t. He was also more than two and a half. Rain to him wasn’t something exciting. It was a nuisance, and a dangerous nuisance at that.

It drummed down on the roof of the newly acquired Chevy and splashed from the windows and windshield. The Chevy’s wipers were lazier than Aaron would have liked. He hadn’t checked that when he bought the car, and grumbled to himself for not thinking of it. Next time, he told himself. When I buy my Rolls. That was ridiculous enough for him to stop giving himself a hard time.

The traffic light ahead changed. “It’s red, dear,” Ruth said.

“I know, dear,” Aaron said with heavy patience. He hit the brake. On the other side of the transmission hump, Ruth’s foot pressed down on an imaginary brake pedal. He thought that was funny…up to a point. As the Chevy smoothly stopped-he had checked the brakes-he glanced over at her and added, “This car drives from the left front seat only.”

“I’m not a backseat driver,” his wife said.

“Only ’cause you’re sitting in the front seat with me,” he answered. She made a face at him. He laughed. She didn’t drive at all, but she thought she could tell him how to do it. This wasn’t the first time he’d trotted out his left-front-seat maxim-nowhere close.

Anybody else who did that kind of thing would have driven him straight up the wall. That he could laugh about it when Ruth did it showed how much in love he was. Either that or it showed how many of his marbles had already dribbled out his ears. Senility didn’t run in his family, but maybe he’d prove an exception.

He put the car in gear just as Ruth opened her mouth to go, It’s green. She closed it again. If he called her on that one, she’d deny everything. Well, he would have denied it, too, if she tried to gig him for something he hadn’t actually said.

After a moment, she did speak up again: “I’m glad you’re burying the hatchet with Marvin.”

“You mean, and not in Marvin?” he asked, about three-quarters kidding. The remaining quarter was enough to make her look worried, or maybe scared. He took a hand off the wheel and waggled it to let her know she could relax. “I won’t start anything if he doesn’t, promise.”

“Okay.” She sounded relieved. If she knew one thing about her husband, she knew he kept his promises.

He was trying to get Leon to be as serious about them as he was. So far, the results were mixed. He kept reminding himself Leon was just a little kid. Not many his age were smarter, but his age wasn’t very big. He was still working out where his imagination stopped and the real world started.

Up into the hills Aaron drove. The way it looked to him, Marvin was still working out the same thing. The difference was, Aaron’s brother didn’t have the excuse of being a toddler.

When they got to Marvin’s house, Aaron and Ruth both popped open umbrellas. Leon paid no attention, but started to charge up the walk on his own. Then he discovered that raindrops were more fun when they were on the outside of something and you were on the inside. He came charging back to Daddy and Mommy and the shelter of their bumbershoots.

Aaron knocked on the front door. His brother opened it. “Look what washed up on our shore,” Marvin said. “Nice weather for ducks, hey?”

“Yeah, it’s not all it’s quacked up to be,” Aaron said. Marvin sent him a reproachful look. So did Ruth. She’d known Finches made bad puns before she met him, but she hadn’t known how bad they could get.

Marvin stuck the umbrellas in a brass boot. He was the kind of person who put a brass boot in the front hall in case of umbrellas. “Come on in,” he said, gesturing toward the living room. In Aaron and Ruth and Leon came.

“Surprise!” everybody yelled. Actually, Caesar the German shepherd barked, but he barked twice, so even that worked out.

There were Sarah and Olivia and Sarah’s mother, who lived with them. There were Ruth’s two brothers, Chaim and Ben-alike as two balding peas in a pod, except one was thin and the other chunky-and her sister Bernice, all in from the wilds of Reseda in the Valley. Bernice looked the way Ruth would have if she dyed her hair red and weren’t so pretty. There were Roxane and Howard and Roxane’s mother, Fanny Seraph. And there was Herschel Weissman, a martini in his hand.

Everybody but Caesar started singing “Happy Birthday.” By the way Ruth joined in, Aaron knew she’d been part of the plot. His actual birthday had been the Sunday before. Ruth had fixed a big mess of chicken pippiks and hearts, which he loved. And she’d got him a copy of The Caine Mutiny. He really wanted to read that one. He hadn’t been a Navy man, but he’d seen shipboard action himself. He’d figured that was as much of a celebration as he’d get. It was as much as he wanted. But he’d figured wrong.

“Happy fiftieth, you alter kacker,” Marvin said, clapping him on the back.

“Good God!” Aaron said. “I think the last time I had a birthday party, I was turning nine.” Everyone laughed.

Bernice kissed him on the cheek. Her breath smelled of whiskey. It often did. Aaron thought she was holding the bottle and not the other way around, but he wasn’t sure. She sold shoes at a store on Sherman Way, the Valley’s main drag. Chaim wrote bulletins and manuals at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys. Ben…Ben had come back from the South Pacific with malaria, and maybe with combat fatigue, too. He was bright, but he was also damaged. He had trouble finding a job and more trouble holding one.

People pressed presents on Aaron. He found himself awash in booze, which was nice, and in ties, which he could have lived without. No way in hell he would ever wear the gaudy one Howard Bauman gave him-he thought blue dress shirts were loud. He made grateful noises anyway.

Dinner was an enormous ham with candied yams-they were Sarah’s specialty. Marvin raised a glass. “Here’s to treyf!” he said. Almost all the Jews at the table drank. Leon didn’t, but his only drinking was a taste of Manischewitz at Passover. He ate ham and yams with great enthusiasm. And neither did Fanny Seraph, who clung to Old Country ways. There was chicken for her.

Two apple pies served as dessert. When Sarah’s mother brought them out of the kitchen, Aaron said, “What will the rest of you eat?” He got another laugh.

After dinner, the talk turned to politics. Everybody had an idea about who would run for the Democrats now that Truman had bowed out. Roxane and Howard, predictably, liked Hubert Humphrey, who stood furthest to the left. So did Sarah and Ben. Marvin was for Averell Harriman, and seemed offended that his wife dared have an opinion of her own. Aaron and Ruth and Bernice and Chaim spoke up for Adlai Stevenson.

“I’d like to like him,” Herschel Weissman said. “I do like him-as a man. But he’s not in touch with the people. He thinks too much. He doesn’t feel enough. He’d make a better professor than a President.”

That was more sensible than Aaron wished it were. Not caring to argue with his boss, he said, “Any of them would be okay. The real question is, Who will the Republicans run against our guy?”

“Before the war started, I would have bet on Taft or Eisenhower,” Weissman said. “Now…Now that McCarthy mamzer is making so much noise, he may grab it in spite of everything. Everything sane, I mean.”

“God forbid!” Aaron exclaimed, at the same time as his wife said the same thing in Yiddish.

“He’s a Nazi,” Roxane said. Howard nodded vigorously. He would, having made the acquaintance of the Un-American Activities Committee. But Aaron had trouble arguing with his wife’s cousin himself.

“Alevai it won’t happen!” Chaim said.

“Alevai omayn!” half a dozen people chorused.

“Alevai omayn!” Leon echoed. Sometimes you were lucky, not having any idea of what was going on.

–

“Here you go, Comrade Captain,” the Hungarian secret policeman said in German, the only tongue he shared with Boris Gribkov. “Drink this. It will put hair on your chest.”

This was a tumbler of strong red wine. Gribkov had never been much of a wine drinker. He chose beer for a little buzz, vodka when he was serious about pouring it down. Declining here, though, didn’t seem like a good idea, so he drank.

“Very tasty,” he said, putting the tumbler down half-empty. “Yes, very tasty.” His German wasn’t as good as the Hungarian’s. “What do you call it?”

“That, my friend, that is the famous Bull’s Blood of Eger,” the secret policeman replied. “It is a wine to send men roaring into battle. Then, after they have won the victory, they celebrate with sweet Tokay.”

When the Red Army wanted to send men roaring into battle, it fed them a hundred grams of vodka. That did the trick just fine, as any number of dead Germans-and Hungarians-might have testified. More vodka helped men descend from the peak of fighting madness.

Again, Boris kept his thoughts to himself. He took another swig of Bull’s Blood and said, “I thank you and your countrymen for your kindness.”

“It is our pleasure. It is our privilege,” the secret policeman said. His name was Geza Latos or Latos Geza; Gribkov wasn’t sure which. The Hungarians seemed to put surname first, which struck him as an odd thing to do. The man went on, “The Slovaks deserve everything you can drop on their heads. They’re nothing but rubes with shit on their boots, and we don’t want their trouble spilling over into the Hungarian People’s Republic.”

He talked about the Slovaks as a Russian would have talked about Uzbeks or Kazakhs. Socialist solidarity seemed moderately thin on the ground here. Gribkov drained the tumbler. The wine wasn’t vodka, but you could feel it when you drank enough. With a lopsided grin, the pilot said, “Instead, you got me spilling over into your country.”

“I’m just glad the militiamen found you before…anyone else did,” said Geza Latos or Latos Geza.

“So am I,” Boris said. Some of the troubles he’d tried to bomb away in Bratislava plainly had spilled over into northwestern Hungary. The secret policeman’s comment wasn’t what brought them to the Russian’s notice. The way the militiamen kept close together, as if against a hostile world, and pointed their machine pistols every which way spoke volumes about how nervous they were.

“Traitors. Traitors and Fascists. We’re hunting them down. When we catch them, they’re sorry they ever had anything to do with the decadent, reactionary West.” The secret policeman poured Gribkov’s tumbler full again. This time, he poured wine for himself, too. He raised his glass. “To the triumph of the world proletarian revolution!” He drank.

So did Boris. No Soviet fighting man could possibly fail to drink that toast. As he savored the Bull’s Blood, the Russian eyed the secret policeman. The Hungarian seemed more zealous than most Soviet Communists Gribkov knew. Maybe he had to be. Hungary was newly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. If you weren’t a zealot here, people were liable to take you for a backslider.

Gribkov’s head started to buzz. The wine wasn’t so strong as vodka, of course, but drink enough and you’d know it was there, all right. As inconspicuously as he could, he touched the tip of his nose. It was numb. That was a sure sign he was on his way to getting smashed.

He had to work harder to remember German. “How will I go back to the Soviet Union?” he asked, knowing he made a hash of the verb and the syntax. Well, Geza Latos or Latos Geza or whatever the hell his name was didn’t talk exactly like a Fritz, either. He had his own funny accent and turns of phrase.

“We’ve notified the Soviet embassy and the Soviet occupying forces that we recovered you,” the Magyar answered. “They are sending a convoy to bring you to the airport outside of Budapest. As far as I know, nothing has gone wrong with the convoy. It should come here to Magyarovar quite soon.”

“I see.” Boris wondered if he did. Magyarovar lay in the far northwest of Hungary, where a chunk of it stuck up between Austria and Czechoslovakia. “Why do they need a convoy? Wouldn’t a car do? Aren’t the roads safe?”

The secret policeman stared down into his half-empty glass of Bull’s Blood as if the crimson liquid held the secrets of the universe. After a long hesitation, he said, “Not…perfectly. Because of your value, Comrade Pilot, your countrymen don’t wish to take any chances with you. As I say, some trouble has spilled into the Hungarian People’s Republic from Slovakia. They want to be sure they can frighten off or beat back any bandits they may meet.”

“I see,” Gribkov said again. What he saw was anti-Soviet rebellion in Hungary as well as Czechoslovakia. Was there more in Poland? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Poles and Russians had always fought like cats and dogs. The Russian dog was bigger, so it won most of the brawls, but not without picking up scratches on its nose and ears.

“We will triumph in the end. True Communism will arrive. The dialectic shows how inevitable that is,” said Geza Latos or Latos Geza. He was about forty, with narrow green eyes and a cleft chin. Not quite idly, Boris wondered what he’d done and which slogans he’d mouthed during the last war.

It didn’t matter, really. As long as his bosses were happy with the man, Boris couldn’t complain. When you gave a country a whole new government, as the USSR had done all over Eastern and Central Europe, you used the tools that came to hand. You couldn’t do anything else. The ones who hadn’t been true believers before the Red Army thundered in were at least smart enough to see which side of their bread held the butter.

The convoy didn’t come when the secret policeman thought it would. He tried to telephone Budapest, but had trouble getting through. “I’m sorry,” he told Gribkov. “It can’t be helped.”

“Nichevo,” Boris replied, which meant the same thing in Russian.

They gave him a bowl of pork stewed in cream and peppers hot enough to make sweat burst out on his forehead. To cool his scorched mouth, they gave him more Bull’s Blood, enough so he stopped caring about the convoy.

It was dark by the time his escort did reach Magyarovar. Boris blinked when he saw it: it consisted of four tanks shepherding a BTR-152 armored personnel carrier. The tanks were only T-34/85s, but even so….

“Sorry we took so long, sir,” said the first lieutenant in charge of things. “We lost one tank to a mine in the roadway.”

“Bozehmoi!” Gribkov wondered how much lethal hardware left over from the last war was squirreled away here and there in countries like this. He also wondered who was taking it out of the hoards and using it against the USSR now that his country had bigger worries.

They loaded him into the armored personnel carrier and headed east, toward Budapest. Unlike the tanks, the BTR-152 was new. Though the Germans and Americans had, the Red Army hadn’t fielded a vehicle of this class in the last war. They’d made up for it since. The rear compartment could hold seventeen soldiers. Gribkov had it all to himself. He realized that his superiors really must have believed him valuable to the rodina.

An hour and a half out of Magyarovar, several bullets clattered off the BTR-152’s armor. Boris almost jumped out of his skin. He jumped again when the carrier’s machine gun fired back. One of the tanks’ cannons thundered. The convoy didn’t stop, or even slow.

That was the sole trouble they had on the way to Budapest. Gribkov saw only the stretch of ground between the personnel carrier and the Li-2 (a Soviet copy of the DC-3) that waited for him at the airfield. The plane took off, flying east. The little Boris had seen of Hungary was…interesting.

–

The POW camp where they stashed Istvan Szolovits was not far outside of Lyon. It held captured soldiers from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, plus a few Bulgarians and Romanians who had trouble talking with anybody else.

A colonel named Bela Medgyessy was the senior Hungarian officer in the camp. “Ah,” he said when they brought Istvan to him. As such things went, that was polite, but Istvan understood what it meant. Here’s a damned Jew. The colonel didn’t look like an old-fashioned Magyar aristocrat; he looked like a plumber. But he had the same prejudices as the men the new Communist regime had purged.

“Here I am, sir,” Istvan said resignedly. The soldiers who’d captured him had treated him better than his alleged countrymen were in the habit of doing.

“Here you are, yes.” Medgyessy showed a little more distaste than one of those smooth aristos would have, but only a little. “Since you’re here, tell me where you were and what you were doing when they caught you.”

“Yes, sir.” Istvan did, finishing, “They took me for a Russian at first, the stupid clodhoppers.”

No Magyar would have taken kindly to that. Of course, in Bela Medgyessy’s eyes a Hungarian Jew was no Magyar. The colonel looked him over. “You’re good-sized, anyhow. Do you play football?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Istvan answered at once.

“A back, I’d guess,” Medgyessy said, and he was a good guesser. Istvan wasn’t quick or nimble enough for midfield or forward, but he wasn’t afraid to bang in the penalty area, either. The officer went on, “We’ve got a league going with the Czechs and the Fritzes and the Polacks. We’ll see what you can do.”

“That should be, uh, interesting, sir.” Istvan wondered whether he’d got into a fiercer war than the one he’d got out of. Magyars and Czechs got along like water and sodium. Magyars and Poles weren’t a match made in heaven, either.

“They used to keep Russians here, too,” Medgyessy said. “They had to put them in a camp of their own. Too many fracases with everybody else.”

“Fraternal socialist allies united against the capitalist world,” Istvan said dryly.

“That’s right. They aren’t far away, though. And the International Red Cross has officially notified the Soviet Union that the two camps are very close.” The colonel paused expectantly.

Back before Istvan was conscripted, his trig teacher had had a mannerism like that when he was waiting to see whether the class got it. And, like a flash of lightning, Istvan did: “If we’re close to the Russians, they won’t drop an atom bomb around here!”

Bela Medgyessy eyed him with the same fond contempt he’d known from Sergeant Gergely. It was as close as Magyars of a certain stripe could come to liking people like him. “You are a smart Jewboy,” the officer murmured.

What did he expect? All over Eastern Europe, stupid Jews had been weeded out for centuries. Darwin could have used them to illustrate natural selection. Medgyessy was waiting. Istvan managed to murmur, “Thanks-uh, sir.”

The colonel took the deference as if he were an old-time aristocrat, too. “Go on and find yourself a bunk. Chow call pretty soon. The food’s shitty, but there’s plenty of it.”

Istvan found a bunk. The mattress was thicker and the blanket warmer and softer than the ones he’d used in basic training. But as soon as he looked at the blond guy across from him, he knew he’d found the wrong bunk. The Magyar was in his late twenties, with a scar on one cheek. He had an Arrow Cross tattooed on the back of his right hand and a Turul, a legendary bird of prey also beloved of Hungarian Fascists, on the back of his left. The Hungarian People’s Army had issued him a rifle anyway, probably because the recruiters knew an attack dog when they saw one.

He was looking at Istvan, too. He didn’t need long to add up what he saw. “Are you what I think you are?” he growled.

“Me? No, I’m a plate of stuffed cabbage,” Istvan answered. In the middle of the sentence, he threw himself at the tough guy. This fight was going to happen. He’d had plenty of brawls like this before. Better to get it over with now, and to enjoy the advantage of a tiny bit of surprise.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t stylish. The bastard with the Fascist tattoos was no coward. During the fight for Budapest, Istvan had seen that being a Fascist son of a bitch and being brave had nothing to do with each other. For that matter, there were plenty of Communist sons of bitches, too, and not all of them were cowards, either.

Pretty soon, Istvan couldn’t see out of his left eye. He tried to gouge out the Arrow Cross man’s right eye. The guy jerked his head away and did his best to bite off Istvan’s thumb. It was that kind of fight.

Fittingly for that kind of fight, it ended when Istvan brought up his knee, as hard as he could, into the blond guy’s crotch. The Fascist let out a shriek and folded up like a concertina. Istvan gave him a right and a left that made his nose lean to one side and fountain blood.

Then, painfully, he climbed to his feet. He booted the Arrow Cross POW in the ribs. “Well, you stinking sack of shit, am I what you think I am?” he choked out. His cut tongue found a broken front tooth. For that, he kicked the Magyar again.

Like him, the man with the tattoos could see out of only one eye. He peered blearily up at Istvan. “You’re a kike, all right,” he said in a thick voice-his mouth had taken damage, too. “But you’re sure as hell one motherfucking tough kike.”

Istvan glanced at the other Hungarian prisoners, who’d gathered to watch the free entertainment. Battered as he was, any one of them could have knocked him to pieces without breathing hard. If they mobbed him, he was dead.

One of them, a lance-corporal, nodded to him. “Miklos is right-you are a tough Jew,” the man said. “He should’ve found out sooner.”

“Does everybody get this kind of hello?” Istvan asked. He spat blood on the floor near Miklos, but not on him. The Arrow Cross man wasn’t close to trying to stand yet.

The lance-corporal shrugged. “Some people do, some people don’t. Miklos must’ve thought he needed to see if you could take care of yourself. Well, you gave him the old horse’s cock up the ass.”

A thousand years after the Magyars had settled in Hungary, their curses still showed that their ancestors once roamed the steppe as mounted warriors. My ancestors roamed the desert even longer ago, Istvan thought. He didn’t know any Hebrew curses, though. He hardly knew any Hebrew at all. His family had been secular, not that the Nazis and their Arrow Cross stooges gave a damn.

When he went to the kitchen to get lunch, he wondered whether the guards-he thought they were French, though they wore mostly U.S.-style gear-would notice his battered face. If they did, they didn’t care. They ignored Miklos, too, and he was even more banged up. Their attitude was, whatever the POWs did to each other was their own business as long as it didn’t involve firearms.

With his broken tooth and a wounded tongue, chewing hurt. The food came from American ration packs. Colonel Medgyessy had it right: none of it was anything a Hungarian really wanted to eat. But it did fill you up. Istvan had been hungry all the time as a conscript in training. He’d guessed a prisoner of war would have it even worse. Evidently not. The USA was so rich, it fed POWs better than his country fed its soldiers. How did the Hungarian People’s Republic-or Russia, for that matter-hope to win against such wealth and production?

–

Vasili Yasevich looked at the old Jew. “Yes, that’s opium, all right.” It was more than a hundred grams of opium, in fact. “Are you sure you want to get rid of it, David Samuelovich?” He couldn’t imagine anyone who used opium wanting to sell any. If you sold it, you couldn’t smoke it or eat it yourself.

But David Samuelovich Berman nodded. “I have no use for it,” he answered. “I bought it for Natasha when she was sick and in a lot of pain. It eased her better than anything else I could give her. But now she’s gone, so”-he spread his mittened hands-“I’ll get rid of what’s left.”

“I’m sorry,” Vasili said. He wore mittens, too, and a padded jacket and trousers, and a rabbit-fur cap with the earflaps down. Their breath smoked. It was almost as cold inside Berman’s little log hut as it was outside. It also looked as if he hadn’t cleaned in there for a long time. With Natasha-who must have been his wife-dead, he must have stopped caring about himself, too.

“So am I. She was…” Berman paused to think. “She was everything, is what she was.” After a moment, he seemed to recall why Vasili was there. “So what will you give me for the drug?”

“Two rubles a gram?” Vasili said tentatively. He still wasn’t sure about prices here. In Harbin, he would have known just what to pay, only he would have been afraid to pay it. Opium was illegal in Smidovich, too, but they wouldn’t shoot you for having some. This kind of chance, he was willing to take.

David Berman eyed him in surprise. At first, Vasili thought he’d been too low. He knew he could come up. But then the skinny man with the scraggly white beard murmured, “That’s more than I paid for it.”

“You’ll never make a haggler,” Vasili said.

“Shows what you know, pup,” the Jew replied. “But this, this I just want to get rid of. It reminds me of the bad times. So two rubles a gram is fine. I might have given it to you for nothing if you’d sung me a sad song.”

“Believe me, you don’t want to hear me sing.” Vasili had the small satisfaction of making David Berman smile. He took three hundred-ruble notes from his jacket pocket. Each bore Lenin’s fierce, scowling face on one side and the onion domes of the A-bombed Kremlin on the other.

“It’s too much. I’ll give you fifty back.” Berman started to dig into his own pocket.

“Don’t worry about it,” Vasili told him. “You need the cash worse than I do. Buy yourself something good to eat or some nice vodka.”

“I’m cheating you,” Berman said fretfully. “That’s not why I asked you to stop by. I heard you bought and sold things and didn’t steal too much, and so….”

“And so,” Vasili agreed. “I’m not stealing from you, either, and you aren’t cheating me. Go on, take the cabbage, for God’s sake!” He wished he could tell Berman to spend some on a pretty girl who’d make him forget his troubles for a little while. But he could tell the old man wouldn’t listen to him if he did.

He put the opium in the pocket from which he’d taken the money. Little by little, he was adding apothecary to carpenter and bricklayer and odd-job man. As David Berman knew, poppy juice was good for more than keeping addicts happy. It cut pain where nothing else would: a blessing in this world if ever there was one.

It occurred to Vasili that Marx hadn’t been joking when he called religion the opiate of the masses. Like opium, religion gave solace and took pain away. And not everybody could afford opium.

Wind bit his nose as soon as he stepped outside. His valenki sank into the soft, newly fallen snow. Walking was awkward, almost as if he were slogging through mud.

Slog he did, as did the others who lived in Smidovich. A few of them had snowshoes, and moved awkwardly in a different way. Everyone seemed resigned to the weather. It wasn’t as if people came to Siberia from the Riviera. If they weren’t born here, then, like Vasili, they already knew all they needed to know about hard winters. He lowered his head and turned away from the wind. It didn’t help much, but it might have done a little.

A woman came by with a wool scarf wrapped around her face so only her eyes showed. That was a good idea. Vasili had a wool scarf-who didn’t? He’d have to try her trick himself.

And there was Grigory Papanin. His smashed nose left him instantly recognizable. He moved with hunched-over care; he still wasn’t back to the swaggering cock-o’-the-walk he’d been before he made the mistake of messing with Vasili.

In the snowy cold, with everyone bundled up, he didn’t see that he was nearing his nemesis till they almost bumped into each other. His eyes widened a little. If that wasn’t from fear, Vasili had never seen it. Papanin owned some new reasons to fear him, as a matter of fact.

“Don’t just clump on by, smegma-lips,” Vasili said. “I need to talk to you.”

Papanin’s eyes went wide again. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he mumbled.

“I bet you don’t,” Vasili said. “Who tried to sell me to the Chekists? Was that a piece of shit who smelled like you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fuck your mother in the mouth if you don’t. They told me it was you.”

That brought Papanin up short. “They…told you?” he said, something not far from existential despair in his voice.

“Sure they did. Why wouldn’t they?” Vasili realized he’d struck a nerve. Like a dentist doing a root canal, he probed deeper: “You never did figure out what you were screwing with, did you? You aren’t just ugly. You’re stupid to go with it. If I have to have anything to do with you again, bet your balls it’s the last time you’ll be sorry.”

“I didn’t know you were-” Papanin broke off. He couldn’t make himself come out with it.

“I never said I was.” Vasili made sure he said that. He might imply he belonged to the MGB, but if he just went and claimed it they’d land on him with hobnailed jackboots as soon as they found out. “But do you want to have another go like the last one? We can take care of that right now.”

A younger, more innocent Papanin would have sailed into a fight without a thought in his thick head. A man who’d already taken one bad beating, though, wasn’t so anxious to risk another. Papanin seemed to shrink into himself. “Just leave me the fuck alone, why don’t you?” he whined.

“This time, cunt. Not the next.” Vasili went on his way. He didn’t look back. Had Papanin had the nerve, he could have jumped him. Vasili had got him that way.

All he did was mooch off through the blowing snow. He knew he was facing a beast meaner than himself. Vasili hadn’t thought of himself that way in China. There, he’d been an ordinary fellow getting along as best he could. He’d looked funny, but he’d known how things worked.

Here in Smidovich, he looked ordinary. But he still felt much more out of place than he ever had in Harbin. If he worked hard, these people suspected him. How was anybody supposed to guess that might happen? Why would anybody sneer at someone who tried to get ahead?

For a moment, he thought the question had no possible answer. Then he realized that, in Soviet terms, it did. Working hard for your own benefit was un-Communistic. Stalin and his henchmen wanted people to work hard for the state, to be what they called Stakhanovites and shock workers. The state and the state alone deserved such slavish devotion…or so you thought if you were Stalin or one of his henchmen.

Peasants who worked hard for themselves and didn’t want to give up to the state what they produced were called kulaks. Stalin had liquidated them when Vasili was still a kid. Reports leaked out of the USSR and into northern China. A few refugees got out. Their tales didn’t shrink in the telling.

And was the Soviet Union better off for the way it operated? Looking around Smidovich, Vasili had a hard time seeing how.