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To Sholom, she said, “Tell him to come look at the damage, then, and see what he can do.”
Witold strutted along beside her, chest out, back straight, chin up. Ludmila was not a tall woman, and felt even smaller beside him. Whatever he might have hoped, that did not endear him to her.
He studied the biplane for a couple of minutes, then asked, “What is broken that takes a smith to fix?”
“The crankshaft,” Ludmila answered. Witold’s handsome face remained blank, even after Sholom translated that into Polish. Ludmila craned her neck to glare up at him. With poisonous sweetness, she asked, “You do know what a crankshaft is, don’t you? If you’ve worked on motorcars, you’d better.”
More translation from Sholom, another spate of fast Polish from Witold. Ludmila caught pieces of it, and didn’t like what she heard. Sholom’s rendition did nothing to improve her spirits: “He say he work on car springs, on fixing dent in-how you say this? — in mudguards, you understand? He not work on motor of motorcar.”
“Bozhemoi,”Ludmila muttered. Atheist she might be, but swearing needed flavor to release tension, and so she called on God. There stood Witold, strong as a bull, and, for all the use he was to her, he might as well have had a bull’s ring in his nose. She rounded on Sholom, who cringed. “Why didn’t you find me a real mechanic, then, not this blundering idiot?”
Witold got enough of that to let out a very bull-like bellow of rage. Sholom shrugged helplessly. “Before war, only two motor mechanics in Hrubieszow, lady pilot. One of them, he dead now-forget whether Nazis or Russians kill him. The other one, he licks the Lizards’ backsides. We bring him here, he tell Lizards everything. Witold, he may not do much, but he loyal.”
Witold followed that, too. He shouted something incendiary and drew back a massive fist to knock Sholom into the middle of next week.
The Jewish partisan had not looked to be armed. Now, with the air of a man performing a conjurer’s trick, he produced a Luger apparently from thin air and pointed it at Witold’s middle. “Jews have guns now, Witold. You’d better remember it. Talk about my mother and I’ll blow your balls off. We don’t need to takegowno from you Poles any more.” In Polish or in Russian, shit was shit.
Witold’s pale blue eyes were wide and staring. His mouth was wide, too. It opened and closed a couple of times, but no words emerged. Still wordlessly, he turned on his heel and walked away. All the swagger had leaked out of him, like the air from a punctured bicycle tire.
Quietly, Ludmila told Sholom, “You’ve just given him reason to sell us out to the Lizards.”
Sholom shrugged. The Luger disappeared. “He has reason to want to breathe more, too. He keep quiet or he is dead. He knows.”
“There is that,” Ludmila admitted.
Sholom laughed. “Yes, there is that. All Russia is that, yes?”
Ludmila started to make an angry retort, but stopped before the words passed her lips. She remembered neighbors, teachers, and a couple of cousins disappearing in 1937 and 1938. One day they were there, the next gone. You didn’t ask questions about it, you didn’t talk about it. If you did, you would disappear next. That had happened, too. You kept your head down, pretended nothing was going on, and hoped the terror would pass you by.
Sholom watched her, his dark, deep-set eyes full of irony. At last, feeling she had to say something, she answered, “I am a senior lieutenant in the Red Air Force. Do you like hearing your government insulted?”
“Mygovernment?” Sholom spat on the ground. “I am Jew. You think the Polish government is mine?” He laughed again; this time, the sound carried the weight of centuries of oppression. “And then the Nazis come, and make Poles look like nice and kindly people. Who thinks anyone can do that?”
“So why are you here and not with the Lizards inside Hrubieszow?” Ludmila asked. A moment later, she realized the question was imperfectly tactful, but she’d already let it out.
“Some things are bad, some things are worse, some things are worst of all,” Sholom answered. He waited to see if Ludmila followed the Polish comparative and superlative. When he decided she did, he added, “For Jews, the Nazis are worst of all. For people, the Lizards are worst of all. Am I a person first, or am I a Jew first?”
“You are a person first,” Ludmila answered at once.
“From you, it sounds so easy,” Sholom said with a sigh. “My brother Mendel, he is in Hrubieszow.” The Jew shrugged yet again. “These things happen.”
Not knowing what to say, Ludmila kept quiet. She gave her U-2 one more anxious glance. It was covered up so it would be hard to spot from the air, but it wasn’t concealed the way a Red Air Force crew would have done the job. She did her best not to worry about it. The guerrillas remained operational, so their camouflage precautions were adequate.
In some way, theirmaskirovka was downright inspired, with tricks like those she’d seen from her own experience. A couple of kilometers away from their encampment, large fires burned and cloth tents simulated the presence of a good-sized force. The Lizards had shelled that area a couple of times, while leaving the real site alone.
Fires here were smaller, all of them either inside tents or else hidden under canvas sheets held up on stakes. Men went back and forth or sat around the fires, some cleaning their weapons, others gossiping, still others playing with packs of dog-eared cards.
With the men were a fair number of women, perhaps one in six of the partisans. Some, it seemed, were there for little more than to cook for the men and to sleep with them, but some were real soldiers. The men treated the women who fought like any other fighters, but towards the others they were as coarse and scornful as peasants were to their wives.
A fellow who wore a German greatcoat but who had to be a Jew got up from his card games to throw some powdered herbs into a pot and stir it with a wooden-handled iron spoon. Catching Ludmila’s eye on him, he laughed self-consciously and said something in Yiddish. She got the gist of it: he’d been a cook in Hrubieszow, and now he was reduced to this.
“Better a real cook should cook than someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she answered in German, and set a hand on her stomach to emphasize what she meant.
“This, yes,” the Jew answered. He stirred the pot again. “But that’s salt pork in there. It’s the only meat we could get. So now we eat it, and I have to make it tasty, too?” He rolled his eyes up to heaven, as if to say a reasonable God would never have made him put up with such humiliation.
As far as Ludmila was concerned, the dietary regulations he agonized over transgressing were primitive superstitions to be ignored by modern, progressive individuals. She kept that to herself, though. Even the Great Stalin had made his peace with the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow and enlisted God on the side of the Red Army. If superstition would serve the cause, then what point to castigating it?
She was young enough that such compromises with medievalism still struck her as betrayals, in spite of the indoctrination she’d received on the subject. Then she realized the Jew undoubtedly thought cooking salt pork and, worse yet, eating it, was a hideous compromise with godlessness. He was wrong, of course, but that did not make him insincere.
When she got a bowl of the pork stew, she blinked in amazement at the flavor. He might have thought it an abomination, but he’d given it his best.
She was scrubbing out her bowl with snow when one of the camp women-not one of the ones who carried a rifle-came up to her. Hesitantly, in slow Russian, the woman (girl, really; she couldn’t have been more than seventeen) asked, “You really flew that airplane against the Lizards?”
“Yes, and against the Nazis before them,” Ludmila answered.
The girl’s eyes-very big, very blue-went wide. She was slim and pretty, and would have been prettier if her face hadn’t had a vacant, cowlike expression. “Heavens,” she breathed. “How many men did you have to screw to get them to let you do that?”
The question was innocent, candid. Somehow, that made it worse. L
udmila wanted to shake her. “I didn’t screw anybody,” she said indignantly. “I-”
“It’s all right,” the girl-Stefania, that’s what her name was-interrupted. “You can tell me. It’s not like it’s something important. If you’re a woman, you have to do such things now and again. Everybody knows it.”
