Fallout

23

Aaron Finch lifted paper bags from the shopping cart and put them into the Chevy’s trunk. Ruth tried to help, but he wouldn’t let her. “Keep an eye on Leon,” he said.

Keeping an eye on Leon was always a good idea. For the moment, he was still in the little makeshift seat by the cart’s handle. Look away from him for a second, though, and he was liable to go out headfirst before you looked back again.

“There,” Aaron said a minute later. He slammed down the trunk lid. “We’ve got groceries, and Vons has our money.”

Leon pointed to the big red letters that identified the supermarket. “Vons!” he said. “Vons!”

“He just read the sign.” Aaron could hear the disbelief in his own voice. But he’d seen it. He’d heard it.

“He sure did.” Ruth lifted Leon out of the shopping cart. Once she put him down on the asphalt, she held on to his hand to make sure he didn’t do anything she’d regret. “He’s a smart thing.”

“Smart!” Leon agreed enthusiastically. He didn’t know quite what that meant, but he’d heard it applied to himself a lot, and he thought it was something good.

“I feel like the hen that hatched the waddayacallit in that kid’s book we got him,” Aaron said.

“The Churkendoose!” Leon knew what you called it.

“He’s so smart, he’ll be rich. He can support us when we’re old,” Ruth said.

“If somebody doesn’t pinch his little head off before we get old, yeah,” Aaron said. His wife made a face at him. He used the key to open the Chevy-he was getting into the habit of locking it all the time. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

A couple of blocks from the Vons stood a big billboard that at the moment sported a smiling portrait of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Aaron thought McCarthy looked even scarier with a phony grin on his mug than with his usual scowl. The slogan beside his face said REPUBLICANS! VOTE MCCARTHY JUNE 3 FOR FREEDOM AND VICTORY!

“I want to climb up there in the middle of the night and paint a Hitler mustache on him,” Ruth said. “I can’t stand that man.”

“I never would have guessed,” Aaron said. His wife poked him in the ribs. He didn’t flinch; he wasn’t ticklish. As he stopped at a light-Ruth’s foot hit the imaginary brake, as usual-he went on, “That’s not what I was thinking.”

“Nu, what were you thinking?” she asked.

“I was thinking it’s a good thing Leon can’t read that yet because he doesn’t spot lies the way grown-ups do,” Aaron said.

“Don’t be silly,” Ruth told him. “If grown-ups could spot lies, McCarthy would be selling hot dogs from a pushcart, not running for President.”

That was so cynical, Aaron might well have come out with it himself. “Well, it’s not like you’re wrong,” he said. “But he can’t take California in the primary, or I don’t think he can. Looks like Earl Warren’s got it sewed up. The pro-Taft delegation that Congressman’s heading isn’t going anywhere, either.”

“I’m not worried about Taft. I don’t like him much, but he doesn’t scare me,” Ruth said. “McCarthy, now, McCarthy scares me. The worse the war gets, the more he scares me, too. Whenever something blows up, he gets more votes.”

She sounded like her cousin Roxane. Aaron started to say so, then thought better of it. For one thing, Ruth might well have been right here. For another, he was discovering, part of what went into staying happily married was not always saying the first thing that popped into your head. If it made your wife mad or hurt her feelings, you were better off keeping your big trap shut.

That wasn’t easy for a Finch to figure out. It was even harder for a Finch to do. Marvin liked using Sarah for a punching bag. His and Aaron’s father and mother had fought all the time till they finally separated. After staying single till he was middle-aged, though, Aaron had discovered he enjoyed domestic tranquility.

He turned left, right, and then left again. The last turn put him on the little street where the house was. He parked in front of it, set the hand brake, put the car in neutral, and killed the engine.

Ruth got out on the passenger side, then reached into the back seat to extract Leon. Leon plucked a dandelion on the front yard. “Flower!” he said. Just yesterday, it seemed, Leon had gone Flarn! because he couldn’t say it right. Now he could. Kids made you feel old, old, old.

His wife took Leon into the house. She left the front door open behind them. Leon knew he wasn’t supposed to run outside while his father brought in groceries. Ruth kept an eye on him just in case, but he really was good about that.

Aaron opened the trunk, picked up a bag of groceries with each hand, and carried the stuff into the house. Then he went back and did it again. When he came out for one more trip, he saw a Mexican-looking kid, maybe fourteen, quickly walking down the street with one of the sacks from the trunk.

“Hey!” Aaron yelled, and took off after him. Empty-handed, the kid would have got away with the greatest of ease. Burdened by the groceries he was swiping, he didn’t have the speed or the moves he needed. Aaron caught up with him just before the corner.

As he did, he wondered what would happen if the kid dropped the bag of groceries and pulled out, say, a switchblade. Aaron had a pocket knife in his pocket, but it was a tool, not a weapon. Against six inches of steel with a real point, a paper clip would have done about as much.

But the kid had no switchblade, just a scared, scrawny, miserable face. “I’m sorry, Mister,” he said, looking on the point of tears. “I been so hungry since the fuckin’ bomb came down an’ made us clear out….”

He’d probably lived in Chavez Ravine, just north of downtown. That had been a solidly Mexican, and terribly poor, part of town till the A-bomb fell. The people from there who’d lived through the blast had come farther north yet, into Glendale. Maybe this guy’s older brother was the so-and-so who’d made the family Nash disappear.

But how could you stay mad at a skinny fourteen-year-old who so badly needed the stuff he’d walked off with? Aaron tried. He couldn’t do it. “Give me back the groceries, son,” he said.

As the kid handed over the Vons bag, he really did start to snuffle. “Mierda,” he said, more to himself than to Aaron. “I can’t even steal right.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Holding the bag in the crook of his elbow, Aaron dug his billfold out of his back pocket. He pulled out a five and handed it to the kid. “Buy yourself some chow with this. Nobody should have to steal for food. Go on, beat it.”

The kid looked at the bill as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “You don’t gotta do that, Mister!” he blurted.

“Never mind what I’ve gotta do. Get lost. Amscray,” Aaron said. The kid stuck the fin in the pocket of his faded, ragged jeans and took off like Jackie Robinson swiping second. No, Aaron never would have caught him if he hadn’t had a burden.

Shaking his head, he started back to the house. Ruth was standing on the walkway. She must have come out when he didn’t bring in the next load.

“What was that all about?” she asked as he drew near.

“A hungry kid,” he said, and hefted the sack. “I don’t care how hungry he is, he’s not gonna eat what we bought.”

“No, huh? How much did you give him there?”

She’d seen more than Aaron had figured. “Five bucks,” he answered sheepishly. He would have kept quiet about it, but he didn’t like to lie point-blank.

“That’s more than what’s in the sack is worth,” Ruth said, which was true. She started to laugh. “You’re such a softy! I didn’t think so when we got married, but I know better by now.”

As he had with the kid, Aaron tried to get mad. As he had then, he failed. How could he do it when she was so obviously right?

–

Marian Staley took a copy of the Weed Press-Herald from the stack on the counter at the Rexall. She slid the druggist a nickel. “There you go, Mr. Stansfield,” she said.

“Thanks,” he answered. “Want to read about poor Leroy, do you? That was a terrible thing.”

“Everybody in town is talking about it,” Marian said. Leroy van Zandt had driven a truck for National Wood and Timber, another logging outfit based in Weed. He’d swerved on a twisting road to try to miss a deer, and gone down a steep slope. His rig caught fire when it hit the bottom. He dragged himself out of the upside-down cab, but not soon enough. He died in the back of Doc Toohey’s car on the way to the hospital in Redding.

Heber Stansfield pursed his lips. “He might’ve been lucky to peg out at the end, you know what I’m saying? If Doc had got him to the hospital, chances are he just would’ve suffered longer and then died.”

“I won’t try to tell you you’re wrong,” Marian replied. “But it’s still a crying shame there was no ambulance to pick him up and no hospital here to bring him to. That might have done him some good.”

The druggist nodded. “You don’t hardly got to read the Press-Herald now,” he said. “You and Dale Dropo, the two of you’re on the same page.”

“We need those things. I’m new in town, and I can see it. I’m not surprised the guy who runs the paper can, too,” Marian said. “The lumber-company bosses get rich off the loggers. They ought to take care of them better when they get hurt.”

“That’s a fact, and I won’t try and make like it isn’t,” Stansfield said. “But I will tell you, you better be careful who you say it to. It gets back to the people you work for, you won’t work for ’em no more.”

“I understand that. Oh, boy, do I ever!” Marian said. “They’ve got Weed sewn up tighter than Boeing did in Seattle before the bomb hit. But if nobody ever tells them what they need to hear, another Leroy van Zandt is just waiting to happen.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Heber Stansfield’s bespectacled stare reminded Marian of that of an old, old tortoise that had seen too much of this wicked old world. He went on, “But you got yourself a young ’un-pretty little thing, she is. You ever tell her the fairy tale about the mice what voted to bell the cat? They’re still waiting for a volunteer, an’ so’re we.”

On that cheerful note, Marian took the paper and the bottle of aspirin she’d gone in there to buy and walked back to the Studebaker, which was parked three stores down the street. Linda was waiting inside. She…

Marian stiffened. Linda had rolled down her window. In spite of all Marian’s warnings about never talking to strangers, she was in animated conversation with a man. Marian broke into a run.

And then, three steps later, she slowed again. Panic faded. Only one man in town wore an old-fashioned tweed cap, what they called a newsboy cap. And Fayvl Tabakman, while he might be a great many things, wasn’t a stranger to Linda. Except for Marian, she’d known him longer than anybody here.

The cobbler turned. He touched the brim of the cap in his familiar greeting gesture. “Hallo,” he said. “I saw your little girl, and I thought I would keep an eye on her till you got back.”

“Thanks.” Marian believed him. She still didn’t know whether she felt anything for him, and what it was if she did, but she was sure she didn’t worry about him near Linda. Weed was a pretty safe place. She wouldn’t have left her daughter alone for even a few minutes if it hadn’t been. But an adult eye didn’t hurt.

Tabakman pointed at the newspaper in her hand. In the sunlight, Marian saw that his forefinger had more scars than she could count-marks of how he’d learned his trade and of slips after he did. He said, “It’s a terrible thing about that poor van Zandt man.”

“It is.” Marian nodded. “Mr. Stansfield and I were talking about that in the drugstore just now.”

“Terrible,” Tabakman repeated: and if anyone here knew about terrible, he was the man. “And it doesn’t got to be this way. A hospital? A hospital, I don’t know about. Is expensive, a hospital.”

“I know,” Marian said sorrowfully.

“But an ambulance, an ambulance we could do,” Fayvl Tabakman said-or maybe it was Weed could do. “An ambulance is what? A few t’ousand taler? Can’t be more. We got lots lumber companies here. They split the cost, not so real much for anyone. A few hindert taler, a t’ousand tops. They could. Only they don’t want.”

“You’re right.” Marian hadn’t looked at it from that angle. “It wouldn’t take more than a fleabite out of their bottom line.”

“Mommy,” Linda said, “can we go home now? I have to tinkle.”

“Okay.” Marian realized that listening to grown-ups talk about things that didn’t matter to her couldn’t be very exciting for a little girl. She said her good-byes to Fayvl Tabakman and got into the Studebaker.

Even after she made dinner-lamb chops, which she could do quickly on top of the stove-Tabakman’s idea stayed in her mind. The more she thought about it, the better it seemed.

Except for one thing. Who’ll bell the cat? Heber Stansfield’s question stayed in her mind, too. Whoever did try to bell the cat wouldn’t just be belling one cat, either. That person would have to go to all the lumber bosses in town. The more who said no, the more each of the rest would have to pay. How soon would that be enough to scupper the project?

And if her own boss said no, she might very well be tossing her own job down the drain. She didn’t want to take the chance. Anyone who was a kid during the Depression learned that, when you had work, you hung on to it the way an abalone hung on to a rock.

So, instead of talking to Mr. Cummings or the other big shots, she spent two or three days contemplating ways and means. Then she paid a call on Dale Dropo. “A friend of mine said that, if all the lumber companies chipped in on an ambulance, it wouldn’t cost any one of them too much,” she told the editor of the Weed Press-Herald.

He scratched his cheek. “You’ve got a smart friend,” he said after a moment. “Who is he, she, whatever, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Fayvl Tabakman, the cobbler,” she said. “But talk to him before you put his name in the paper, okay?”

“I will, honest injun,” Dropo said. “It’s a better scheme than trying to get any one outfit to cough up the dough, that’s for sure. Who does the dirty work, though?”

“Here’s what I was thinking,” Marian said-the result of her contemplation. “If you put petitions in the paper and almost everybody in town signed them, wouldn’t the lumber companies have to notice that?”

“Lumber companies don’t have to do a darn thing,” Dropo replied. “But the people who run them, if they don’t want their neighbors smearing dog poop on their windshields or slashing their tires in the middle of the night, they’ve got to think about it, anyway.”

“That’s how it looked to me, too,” Marian said. “I’m glad you see it the same way.”

“Worth a try. If they ignore the whole thing, we’re no worse off than when we started-and maybe they will get their tires slashed. What the heck? I can probably find a knife or an ice pick myself.” Dale Dropo eyed her. “I know you and that Tabakman guy both came out of the camps by Seattle. This town may be lucky you decided to stop here.”

“Thank you. It’s a nice place,” Marian answered. “If we can make it a little better, well, good.”

“No guarantees,” Dropo warned.

“Oh, I know. When are there ever?” No guarantees your house doesn’t get blown up, Marian thought. No guarantee your husband comes home. No guarantees at all.

–

American 105s and 155s howled down on the Soviet positions. Ihor Shevchenko huddled in his foxhole, praying inexpertly but with great sincerity. The last time around, the Nazis hadn’t enjoyed this kind of artillery support. The Red Army was the one that lined up guns hub to hub and blasted its foes to jam and sausage meat.

Red Army gunners had done the same thing this time…till the A-bombs in far western Germany and along Soviet supply lines gave the edge back to the imperialists. The Hitlerites hadn’t had the atom bomb, either. A good thing, too, or Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and Russia at least to the Urals would have turned into a radioactive wasteland.

Well, here it was, only a few years after the Fascist beasts were ground into the dirt. Here it was, only a few years after fraternal socialist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe gave the USSR a giant glacis against any future invasion from out of the west. And…?

And Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and Russia at least to the Urals had turned into a radioactive wasteland. Hitler might have been more thoroughly, more savagely, destructive than Truman. But Truman was doing fine on his own.

Ihor dug the foxhole deeper. He flipped the dirt up onto the western side. When the shelling let up, he’d use bushes and branches to camouflage the foxhole’s lip. For now, that could wait. Sticking any part of himself above ground was asking to get that part mutilated.

Anya’d been lucky. Without her horrible cold, she would have gone into Kiev the day the Yankees visited fire upon it. Ihor had been lucky himself. If he hadn’t sat on that stupid broken bottle, he would have been at the front, not behind it, when more atomic fire fell from the sky.

His entrenching tool clanked against something. He dug more carefully than he needed for ordinary excavation. His amateur archaeology unearthed a sharp, curved chunk of rusty shell casing from the last war. Was it German or American? Or had the English dueled with the Nazis in this part of Germany? He didn’t know. Even if he had, it wouldn’t matter now.

After all, what did one more shell fragment prove? Only that this war wasn’t the first time people had tried to kill one another here. A musket ball would have shown him the same thing, in case he didn’t already know it. So would an arrowhead. So would a spear point, or an axe blade, or a club made from a stone fastened to a length of wood by sinews. People had been trying to kill one another here for as long as people had lived here.

Had he done some digging in the black soil of his collective farm outside Kiev, he would have come up with the same kind of lethal hardware going back to the dawn of time. People there had tried to kill one another for as long as people dwelt in those parts, too.

People everywhere had done their damnedest to kill one another for as long as they’d been around. The story of Cain and Abel distilled a lot of truth down into a teacup.

These days, though, the would-be murderers had better tools than they’d enjoyed in Biblical days. Even as Ihor dug to strengthen and deepen his hole, nearby shell bursts threatened to collapse it on him. Earth tortured by high explosives sprang into the air in anguish. Clods and pebbles came clattering down onto his helmet. He rubbed at his nose and wasn’t surprised to find it bloody. Had one of those 155s hit a little closer, blast might have killed him without leaving a visible mark on his carcass.

And, of course, everything didn’t turn to sunshine and roses the instant the shelling stopped. In case any of the men in the company were too stunned to remember that or too stupid to know it, Lieutenant Kosior called, “Be ready to fight! They’ll be coming now!”

Ihor heard him as if from five kilometers away. He wondered how far his ears would recover. He made sure he had a round chambered in his Kalashnikov. That wouldn’t help his hearing, either. It would help him stay alive, though, which also counted.

Or it might. The Americans knew how to play this game. They sent tanks forward with their foot soldiers. German panzers, all slabs of steel and sharp angles, looked more frightful than these beasts. But thick armor and a high-velocity 90mm gun were nothing to sneeze at. If that gun sneezed at you, there’d be nothing left.

Against the panzers, though, Russian foot soldiers hadn’t had any weapons but magnetic mines and Molotov cocktails. To use either, you had to sneak suicidally close to your target. If the bastards inside the panzer didn’t get you first, the infantry shepherding them would.

The game was different now. A Red Army man launched an RPG at an oncoming Pershing. The rocket fell short, and the tank fired two rounds of HE at his foxhole. Ihor hoped he stayed alive. Whether he did or not, though, that trail of fire would make all the Yankee tank crews who saw it thoughtful.

They came on anyway. Like their Soviet counterparts, they had their orders. They’d catch it if they didn’t follow them. And they paid the price for courage or obedience or whatever it was. Another Red Army man waited till the American tanks reached the forwardmost Soviet foxholes. Then he launched his RPG. It burned through a Pershing’s side armor and set off the shells inside the steel box.

Flame and smoke shot out of the turret. The tank stopped. It would never go again. The crew probably died fast. All the questions that had vexed philosophers and prophets since men wore skins? Whatever the answers were, those Americans had just discovered them.

Ihor squeezed off a quick burst in the direction of the advancing infantry. When he came up to shoot again, he wasn’t quite in the same place. A good thing, too, because a bullet cracked past his head. He ducked down again in a hurry.

A crashing clang told of an RPG deflecting off a tank it didn’t hit squarely. HE rounds from the tank’s cannon said that the man who’d loosed the rocket-propelled grenade was paying the price for failure.

Maybe he’d be able to talk it over with the crew from the incinerated Pershing. Or maybe there was just nothing. One way or the other, he knew now. Ihor didn’t. Nor was he anxious to find out, not in any final way.

Another American tank brewed up, and then another, both of them spectacularly. Soviet artillery woke up to the idea that the sons of bitches on the other side were attacking. Shells started falling among them-and short rounds started falling among the forward Red Army troops.

“You stupid cocksuckers!” Ihor screamed when a shell from his own side left him stunned and deafened. Your friends could kill you every bit as dead as the enemy could. He laughed as he tried to shake himself back to usefulness. Anatoly Prishvin might be telling the Yankee tank crew and the RPG man all about that right now.

Someone peered over the edge of the foxhole. Evidently all the artillery fire had chewed up the ground enough so the spoil Ihor had thrown out didn’t seem anything special. The shape of that helmet was wrong-too much dome, not enough brim. Ihor fired a burst at point-blank range. The American groaned and sagged. Barring Resurrection Day, he wouldn’t rise again. When things calmed down a bit, Ihor would rifle his pockets.

One more Pershing went up in fire and smoke. The Yanks seemed to decide that, if they were going to move forward, they weren’t going to do it right here. Sullenly, competently, firing as they went, they pulled back.

“Urra! for the rodina! Urra! for the great Stalin!” Lieutenant Kosior shouted. “They shall not pass!”

“Urra!” Ihor said. He had schnapps in his canteen. He drank greedily.

Like vodka, schnapps was good for what ailed you. It might not fix anything, but making you not care worked just as well. Ihor wondered how the great Stalin would have done in one of these foxholes. Not so well, was his guess, even if he couldn’t tell anyone about it.

He’d solved the problem of peace! Put the leaders in the trenches and the war wouldn’t last five minutes! The only problem with that was, who could do it? But if you wanted to worry about every little detail…

–

Luisa Hozzel’s stomach growled. She was so worn by another day out among the pines, she was ready to fall over during the evening count. She wanted to eat. She wanted to go back to the barracks. She wanted to sleep. Since the Russians threw her into the gulag, her horizon had shrunk to that. Supper. Her bunk. They would both be bad, but bad was better than none.

The guards prowled up and down. They looked angry and jumpy. The count kept coming out wrong. Luisa hated days like this. Piling the stupid guards’ incompetence on top of all the other Schweinerei here just seemed like too much.

Beside her, Trudl Bachman murmured, “They should take off their boots so they can count with their toes.”

“No.” Luisa almost imperceptibly shook her head. “One of them will have got a toe shot off in the war, and that will mess things up worse than ever.”

Even though a nervous guard prowled past not three meters away from them, he didn’t turn his head or snarl at them to shut up. By now, practice and need had turned them both into fine ventriloquists. Give me a dummy-one of these guards, say-and I’ll go on stage, Luisa thought.

“I hate it when they have kittens over nothing,” Trudl said.

“I know. Doesn’t anybody here know how to count?” Luisa answered. They weren’t the only zeks grousing, either. As time wore on and the women still weren’t allowed in to eat, grumbles in both German and Russian grew more and more audible. Even the bitches were getting angry.

The two top guard sergeants put their heads together. At last, one of them slowly and unhappily clumped off to the administrative office, so it wasn’t over nothing after all.

The man came back with a lieutenant: a man who had a hook where his left hand should have been and whose eye patch didn’t come within kilometers of covering all the scars on the left side of his head. He looked fearsome enough when he wasn’t irked. When he was, as he was now, he would terrify children. He scared Luisa. She hadn’t seen many men in Germany more horribly mutilated. He was lucky to be alive, though she wasn’t so sure he would call it luck.

“We have had an escape,” he said. Something was wrong with his voice, too. It sounded more like the scraping of sandpaper on hard-wood than anything that should have come from a human throat. He went on, “The count is five short. You will be interrogated to discover who helped the criminals abscond with themselves. For now, go to your barracks at once.”

“What about supper?” Nadezhda Chukovskaya spoke for all the hungry, weary women. Since she was neither a political nor a German, she thought she could get away with the question.

“We have had an escape, you stupid, worthless cunt,” the mangled officer said in tones of cold fury. “I don’t give a fuck if all of you starve to death. Then we can count you, anyway. Dismissed to your barracks! Now, damn you!”

“I hope they get away,” Luisa said as they dejectedly did what the lieutenant ordered them to do.

Like her husband, Trudl Bachman was a very practical person. “I hope they weren’t from our work gang,” she said.

“Five? They couldn’t have been-could they?” Luisa said.

“I don’t think so. But would I swear?” Trudl shook her head. “I didn’t pay any attention on the way in tonight. I was so worn out, all I could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

“Same here,” Luisa agreed. “You’d think the guards would have noticed, though. That’s what they’re there for.”

“Maybe they were too stupid,” Trudl said. “Or maybe the women who escaped paid them off.”

With what? Luisa started to ask. She didn’t come out with the question. Not much in the way of cash or valuables circulated in the gulag. Most of what there was was in the hands of the bitches and the inside workers, the people with the least incentive to flee. But a woman who was desperate enough to do anything to get away always had a coin she could offer a man. All it would cost her was her self-respect. If losing that meant getting out of this horrible place, it might be a small price to pay.

She guessed she’d be too hungry to sleep. She wasn’t, as she hadn’t been too tired to eat a few times after tough days in the taiga. As soon as she lay down on her bunk, her eyes sagged shut. The next thing she knew, a guard was banging on the shell casing to summon the women for the morning count.

Then she realized how hungry she was. She did notice that two of the escapees came from her barracks: a German and a Russian political. They didn’t belong to her work gang.

Once the guards were satisfied no one else had flown the coop during the night, all the gangs except the one from which the five women had fled were allowed to go to breakfast. Luisa ate every scrap of the nasty fare set before her, and felt as hungry afterwards as she had before. The luckless members of that work gang who’d got kept out there had to be hungrier yet. The guards would be grilling them-and, no doubt, their comrades who’d taken more women out into the woods and brought fewer back.

No one went into the woods after the quick and noisome latrine call. The guards separated the women into their gangs, but they stayed on the flat ground where they lined up.

Some of the women from the first gang came out of the administrative building. Some didn’t, at least not where Luisa could see. She guessed they went straight to the punishment cells.

Her gang got summoned next. She drew the mutilated lieutenant as her interrogator. He started in Russian, but soon saw she didn’t have enough of the language to follow his questions. She also acted dumber than she was, which turned out not to help. He switched to rasping German: “Bauer and Nekrasova were from your barracks, nicht wahr?”

“If those were their names, sir,” Luisa answered. “I didn’t know either of them, really. They were just-faces.” That wasn’t altogether true, but the less she admitted, the better off she was.

Or so she thought. “Then you don’t need to worry about betraying them,” the lieutenant said. “Did you hear them conspiring to steal themselves from Soviet custody?”

Luisa thought that a peculiar way to put it, one more thing she didn’t say. She did say, truthfully, “No, sir. I paid no attention to either one of them.”

“Then you should have. Ignorance is no excuse,” he said, glowering at her with his surviving eye. “Five days in a punishment cell to remind you to respect the Soviet state and its regulations.” He raised his ruined voice: “Guard!”

The guard hustled her to the punishment block. The cells there were too low to stand up in and too small to lie down in. She had to fold herself up in a corner. There wasn’t even a bucket. When she needed to ease herself, she’d have to use a different corner. The stench in the cell said she wouldn’t be anywhere close to the first who had.

She got water and black bread-precious little of either. The guards yelled abuse at her and the other luckless women in the cells both day and night. She’d never been through anything like that before. It made ordinary camp life seem like a Kraft durch Freude cruise by comparison. In her maddest nightmares, she’d never imagined anything could do that.

When they opened the cell’s door to let her out, she had trouble crawling out. She had even more trouble standing up. The outside world was too big, too wide, too open.

Three doors down from her, Trudl Bachman also came forth. The two women from Fulda nodded to each other. Before her confinement, Luisa had hoped the escapees got away, but she hadn’t hoped they had. Now she did, with all her might. Let them be gone for good! She was sure Trudl felt the same way.