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The rest of the cabbage, chopped, went into the soup pot with potatoes and a big white onion from a vegetable basket by the counter. Moishe wished for a roasted pullet or barley and beef soup with bones full of marrow. Cabbage and potatoes, though, you could live a long time on that, even without meat.
“It certainly seems like a long time, anyhow,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Rivka asked.
“Nothing,” he answered loyally, thinking of all the vitamins and other nutrients in potatoes and cabbages and onions. But man did not live by nutrients alone, and the soup, however nourishing the medical part of him knew it to be, remained uninspiring despite Rivka’s best efforts.
She put a lid on the soup pot. The hot plate would eventually bring it to a boil. Moishe had given up on quickly cooked food-not that soup cooked quickly any which way. Rivka said, “I wonder how long Reuven will play outside.”
“Hmm.” Moishe sent her a speculative look. She smiled back. Just for a moment, the tip of her tongue appeared between her teeth. He did his best to sound severe: “I think you’re just trying to butter me up.” He listened to himself. Severe? He sounded eager as a bridegroom.
As a matter of fact, he was eager as a bridegroom. He took a couple of quick steps across the kitchen. Rivka’s arms went around him at the same time his went around her. After a few seconds, she said, “For this, I may even like you better clean-shaven. Your mustaches used to tickle my nose when we kissed.”
“If you like it so well-” he said, and resumed. His hand cupped her breast through the wool of her dress. She made a small noise deep in her throat and pressed herself tighter against him.
The door opened.
Moishe and Rivka jumped away from each other as if they had springs in their shoes. From the doorway, Reuven called, “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry.”
“There’s a heel of bread in here you can have, and I’m making soup,” Rivka answered. “Your father brought home a couple of lovely cabbages.” Her shrug to Moishe was full of humorous frustration.
He understood the feeling because he shared it. In the insanely overcrowded Warsaw ghetto, concerns about privacy had fallen to pieces, because so little was to be had. People did what they did, and the other people crammed into a flat with them, no matter how young, pretended not to notice. But decorum had returned to the family as soon as they were out of that desperate overcrowding.
Reuven wolfed down the bread his mother gave him, then sat on the kitchen floor to stare expectantly at the soup pot. Above him, Rivka said “Tonight” to Moishe.
He nodded. His son let out an indignant squawk: “The soup won’t be ready till tonight?”
“No, I was talking about something else with your father,” Rivka said.
Partway appeased, Reuven resumed his pot watching. The idea of privacy had come back after they were no longer stuffed into a flat like sardines. But food… they all still worried about food, even though they weren’t starving any more. If they hadn’t, Moishe wouldn’t have noticed Rivka throwing out the wilted cabbage leaves, wouldn’t have counted that as a sign of their relative affluence.
“Do you know,” he said out of the blue, “I think I understand Rumkowski better?”
“Nu?” Rivka said. “Tell me. How he could go on dealing with the Lizards, and with the Nazis before them-” She shivered.
Moishe explained his thoughts about the cabbage leaves, then went on, “I think Rumkowski’s the same way, only about power, not food. However he thought of it when this was a Nazis ghetto, he can’t change his mind now. He’s-fixated, that’s the word.” It came out in German; Yiddish didn’t have a term for the precise psychological concept Moishe was trying to get across. Rivka nodded to show she followed.
Reuven said, “You threw out some cabbage leaves, Mama?” He got up and went over to the garbage can. “May I eat them?”
“No, just leave them there,” Rivka said, and then again, louder, “Leave them there, I told you. You’re not going to starve to death before the soup is done.” She stopped with a bemused look on her face.
Progress, Moishe thought. He shook his head. To such had he been reduced that he measured progress by the existence of garbage.
Rasputitsa-the time of mud. Ludmila Gorbunova squelched across the airstrip, her boots making disgusting sucking and plopping noises at every step. Each time she lifted one, more mud clung to it, until she thought she was carrying half a kolkhoz’s worth on each foot.
The mud came to Russia and the Ukraine twice a year. In the fall, the rains brought it. The fall rasputitsa could be heavy or light, depending on how much rain fell for how long before it turned to snow and froze the ground.
The spring rasputitsa was different. When the spring sun melted the snow and ice that had accumulated since last fall, millions of square kilometers turned into a bog. That included roads, none of which was paved outside the big cities. For several weeks the only ways to get around were by panje wagons, which were almost boat-shaped and had wheels high enough to get down through the glop to solid ground, and by wide-tracked T-34 tanks.
That also meant most aviation came to a halt during the rasputitsa. The Red Air Force flew off dirt strips, and all the dirt was liquid for the time being. Taxiing for takeoffs and landings wasn’t practical; just keeping aircraft from sinking into the swamp wasn’t easy.
As usual, one model proved the exception: the U-2. With skis of the same sort the little biplane used to operate in heavy snow, it could skid along the surface of the mud until it gained enough speed to take off, and could also land in muck… provided the pilot set it down as gently as if eggs were under the skis. Otherwise it dug its nose into the ground and sometimes flipped, with unfortunate results for all concerned.
The mud in the revetment that housed Ludmila’s U-2 was heavily strewn with straw, which meant she didn’t even sink to her ankles, let alone to midcalf as she had outside. She didn’t squelch as much, either.
Georg Schultz was adjusting one of the struts that joined the U-2’s upper and lower wings when she came into the revetment. “Guten Tag,” he said cautiously.
“Good day,” she returned, also in German, also cautiously. He hadn’t made any unwelcome advances since she’d rounded on him for trying it, and he had kept on maintaining her Kukuruznik with his usual fanatic attention to detail. They still weren’t easy around each other: she’d caught him watching her when he didn’t think she’d notice, while he had to be nervous she’d speak to her fellow Russians about what he’d done. A thoroughgoing fascist, he was tolerated only for his mechanical skills. If the Russians found a reason not to tolerate him, he wouldn’t last long.
He stuck a screwdriver into a pocket of his coveralls, came to attention so stiff it mocked the respect it was supposed to convey. “The aircraft is ready for flight, Comrade Pilot,” he reported.
“Thank you,” Ludmila answered. She did not call him “Comrade Mechanic” in return, not because it sounded unnatural to her in German, but because Schultz used for sarcasm what should have been a term of egalitarian respect. She wondered how he’d survived in Hitlerite Germany; in the Soviet Union that attitude would surely have seen him purged.
She checked the fuel level and the ammunition loads herself: no such thing as being too careful. When she was satisfied, she stepped out of the revetment and waved for groundcrew men. She, they, and Schultz manhandled the Kukuruznik out onto the runway. It stayed on top of the mud more easily than they did.
When Schultz yanked at the prop, the little Shvetsov five cylinder radial began to buzz almost at once. The engine’s exhaust fumes made Ludmila cough, but she nodded approvingly at its note. Nazi and lecher though he was, Georg Schultz knew his work.
Ludmila, released the brake, applied the throttle. The U-2 slid down the airstrip, mud splattering in its wake. When she d built up the speed she needed (not much), she eased back on the stick and the biplane abandoned the boggy earth for the freedom of the sky.
With
the rasputitsa below her, Ludmila could savor the beginnings of spring. The slipstream that slid over the wind-screen no longer turned her nose and cheeks to lumps of ice. The sun shone cheerily out of a blue sky with only a few plump white clouds, and would not disappear below the horizon when later afternoon came. The air smelled of growing things, not of the mud in which they grew.
She wished she could fly higher to see more. This was a day when flying was a joy, not a duty. But just when, for a moment, she was on the verge of forgetting why she flew, she skimmed low over the rusting hulks of two T-34s, one with its turret lying upside down fifteen meters away from the hull. She wondered whether the Germans or Lizards had killed the Soviet tanks.
