Two Fronts (9 page)

On Sarah went. A fire crew sprayed water on a burning building. Perhaps thanks to the smashed main, they didn’t have much water to spray. All they could do was try to keep the flames from spreading. They swore fierce, guttural oaths. Sarah admired the splendid profanity.

She’d thought of the ambulance a few minutes earlier. Its bell clanged on a note different from the fire engines’. A big splash of red against a wall said somebody hadn’t made it to any kind of shelter before the bombs fell. Whoever he was, he was unlikely to need an ambulance now—or ever again. Except for the blood, there was no sign of whoever’d got in the way of that bomb.

No smoke rose from the bakery. All the same, Sarah stopped short when she rounded the last corner. There was another new pond in the street right in front of the place, with water slopping out and pouring down the uncratered pavement. And the building … The building had fallen in on itself.

“No,” Sarah whispered, as if God could or would run the film of the world in reverse till this unhappened.

People were already attacking the wreckage with spades and with their bare hands. Not all of them were Jews, either. Germans could be decent. You just couldn’t count on them to act like that. Sarah ran forward to do what she could.

A man with a white mustache gaped at her. “You’re not in there,” he said foolishly.

“I was shopping.” Absurdly, Sarah felt guilty because she wasn’t buried by bricks and beams.

“Lucky you.” The man with the mustache lived half a block down. Right this minute, she couldn’t remember his name to save her life. She had bigger things to worry about. She dug through the wreckage like a badger.

“Here’s one of them,” another old man said. After a moment, with rough kindness, he added, “Well, he never would’ve known what hit him, anyway, poor bastard.”

That had to be David Bruck. Except, as the rescuers pulled the body free of the rubble, it wasn’t. It was Isidor. Someone draped a cloth over him, but not before Sarah saw how the left side of his head was all smashed in. The man who’d found him was right. That would have killed him right away.

Sarah made a half-choked noise, then started to cry. Within a couple of minutes, the would-be rescuers also found David and Deborah Bruck. They were dead, too. “It’s a shame, girlie,” the man with the white mustache said, offering Sarah a none-too-clean handkerchief so she could blow her nose. “They might’ve been Yids, but they were nice folks.” A Jew in Germany was unlikely to win a better epitaph.

“What’ll she do now?” a woman asked, and then aimed the question right at her: “What’ll you do now, dearie?”

“I don’t know.” Sarah was just getting used to being a wife. Now, all of a sudden, she found herself a widow. “I don’t have any idea. What
can
I do?” It was Hitler’s war, and he wouldn’t let Jews fight in it. It reached out and killed them just the same.

SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA
swaggered through the streets of Myitkyina. He was in town on a pass, and drunk as a lord. There were things a member of Unit 113 wasn’t allowed to talk about, no matter how drunk he got. That didn’t worry Fujita. It hadn’t worried him before he poured down a big skinful of the local rotgut, either. Germ warfare wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to sit down and gab about, not if you were in your right mind it wasn’t.

Sooner or later, he’d queue up at an enlisted men’s brothel and get the lead out of his pencil. That was an important reason to come into town, after all. But he wasn’t ready yet. He had more drinking to do first.

He wasn’t the only Japanese soldier wandering the Burmese town: nowhere close. He kept an eye out for his countrymen. No matter how drunk he got, there was no excuse for not saluting an officer. No excuse. Ever. If you didn’t show proper respect, you’d catch hell. In the Japanese Army, that was as much a law of nature as sunrise every morning.

He kept an eye on the Burmese, too. They looked like a pack of damned foreigners. They
were
a pack of damned foreigners. They were too skinny. They were browner than Japanese—not a lot, but enough to notice. Their features were softer than those of his countrymen. Their language sounded like barking dogs to him. It was even uglier than Chinese.

And he had other reasons for keeping an eye on them. Japan was running Burma at the moment because she’d chased out England, which had been running the place till the Japanese arrived. Some Burmese kissed their new overlords’ feet, glad the white men were on the run. Others, though … Well, some slaves would always stay loyal to their old masters.

For the English still lingered in India, not far enough to the west. And they did their best to aid the Chinese bandits who went on struggling against the Japanese drive to shake some order into their miserable country.

That was why Unit 113 was in business. Cholera and the plague had broken out in Yunnan Province. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, had died on account of the diseases. Let the English try to bring matériel into China from India. What good would it do them if the Chinese who were supposed to unload the guns and munitions were dead or sick or fled to escape pestilence? Not much.

A faded mug of beer on a sign outside a tavern made Fujita walk in. The place had started life as an imitation—no doubt a wretched imitation—of an English pub. It was dark and gloomy inside. The furniture was heavier than anything a Japanese would have made. There was a dartboard on the wall. Behind the bar hung a portrait of the Emperor of Japan in military uniform. Fujita would have bet everything he owned (not much at the moment, but even so) a picture of the King of England had hung there till Myitkyina suddenly changed ownership.

The bartender was Burmese. He’d learned enough of Japanese customs to bow to Fujita as the sergeant approached. Fujita nodded back, superior to inferior. “
Biru
,” he said gruffly.

“
Hai
.” The man behind the bar bowed again. He set a bottle of beer and a pint mug—another survival of the vanished English—in front of Fujita. Then he pointed to a price list the noncom hadn’t noticed. It was written in Japanese, and was bound to be as new as the photo of Hirohito.

Fujita pulled occupation money out of his pocket. He paid hardly any attention to how much he slapped down. Anna and rupees were fine for the Burmese. They meant nothing to him. Japan still did business in sen and yen.

As the bartender made the paper disappear, Fujita poured the pint full. He drank. It wasn’t great beer, or even good beer. He hadn’t expected anything different. Where would you get good beer in a third-rate colonial town in the middle of a war? This would keep him drunk and eventually make him drunker. He wasn’t worried about much else.

He got to the bottom of the pint in three long pulls. “Fill me up again,” he told the bartender.

“
Nan desu-ka?
” the Burmese said, sudden apprehension in his voice. “
Wakarimasen, gomen nasai
.”
What? I don’t understand, excuse me
.

“Another. Give me another beer.” Fujita spoke slowly and clearly. You had to make some allowance for stupid foreigners.

“Ah!
Hai!
” The barkeep bowed in relief. He got that, all right. Another beer appeared as if by magic. Fujita paid for it. He suspected he could have got away with just taking it after he’d scared the native. But it wasn’t worth fussing about. If he’d been paying with real money instead of this meaningless stuff, it might have been. In occupation cash, though, even a miserably paid Japanese sergeant could play the rich man.

He sat down at an empty table. A couple of other sergeants were boozing at the one next to it. They owlishly eyed his collar tabs to see whether he was safe to associate with. They must have decided he was, because one of them nodded and said, “Come join us if you want to.”

“
Arigato
.” Fujita got up and walked over. He gave his name. One of the other noncoms was called Suzuki; the second was named Ono. Fujita lifted his mug of beer. “
Kampai!
”

“
Kampai!
” They both echoed the toast and drank. Sergeant Suzuki was squat and looked strong. Sergeant Ono was thinner and quieter; Fujita guessed he was clever, at least when he wasn’t drinking. Right now, Ono and Suzuki had quite a start on him. He decided he needed to catch up.

After a while, Ono remarked, “Haven’t seen you around here before, I don’t think.”

“Probably not,” Fujita said. “My unit isn’t based in Myitkyina. I just managed to snag some leave.”

“Ah?” Sergeant Suzuki said. “Which unit is that? Where are you stationed?”

Fujita sat there and didn’t answer. Unit 113 not only didn’t advertise what it did, it didn’t advertise its existence. He was already starting to feel his beer, but he knew better than to run his big mouth.

Suzuki scowled. “I asked you a question,” he said, and started to get to his feet.
And I’ll knock the crap out of you if you don’t tell me
, that meant.

He was welcome to try. Fujita started to stand, too. He wasn’t scrawny himself, and he figured he knew how to take care of himself. The pub might get knocked around, but that wasn’t his worry.

But Sergeant Ono put a hand on his drinking buddy’s arm. “Take it easy, Suzuki-san,” he advised. “There are some units out there where the guys
can’t
talk about what they do.”

Suzuki grunted. Some people brawled for the fun of it. Fujita mostly didn’t, but he wouldn’t back down, either. Dying was better than losing face that way. Then the burly sergeant grunted again, on a different note this time. “Well, why didn’t he say so?” he growled. He looked right at Fujita. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Because when you can’t talk about something, you can’t say you can’t talk about it, because that makes people get snoopy about why you can’t,” Fujita answered reasonably.

He thought he was being reasonable, anyhow. Sergeant Suzuki scowled again. Fujita wouldn’t have wanted to serve under him. Sure as sure, he’d be the kind who knocked privates around. “You calling me snoopy?” he rumbled ominously.

“You
were
snoopy.” Fujita wasn’t about to back down.

And Sergeant Ono nodded. “
Hai
. You were. Come on. We’re here to relax, not to fight among ourselves.”

“I’ll take you both on.” But Suzuki sat down again and waved to the man behind the bar for another drink. Fujita also waved for a fresh beer. Like Ono, he wasn’t eager to fight, even if he was ready. Getting smashed hurt less—till the next day, anyhow.

MÜNSTER’S JEWISH CEMETERY
was a sad place, and not just because the dead were lain to rest there. Brownshirt thugs had tipped over a lot of headstones and taken sledgehammers to others. Long, dead grass crunched under the soles of Sarah Bruck’s shoes. The trees’ bare branches reminded her of bones.

They’d been alive. Then, like that—she hoped it was
like that
—they were dead. And now, two days later, graves waited for them. Her husband and his father and mother lay shrouded in cloth inside coffins even a pauper’s family would have been ashamed of before the war started. These days, the
Reich
felt Jews were lucky to get coffins at all. Of course, the
Reich
would have been happier if they all went into coffins, or at least into the ground.

Sarah huddled with her own parents near the caskets. A few of the Brucks’ relatives stood with them. Everyone wore the same dazed, shocked expression. Death was never easy. Unexpected death from the air—death at the hands of Hitler’s enemies—where was God, to let such things happen?

What did Elijah say about Baal?
Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is retiring, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked
. But Sarah wasn’t thinking about long-forgotten Baal. She aimed her cries at Elijah’s God. And He seemed as silent as the old Canaanitish idol.

A rabbi with a yellow star intoned prayers. Would God be more or less inclined to hear them because he wore the Nazis’ mark? Or was it all just a sham, much sound and fury signifying nothing? Shakespeare knew what he was talking about. Sarah wouldn’t say the same about Elijah.

Into the holes in the ground went the coffins. Sarah and David Bruck’s brother tossed earth onto them. The sound of the clods hitting the coffins’ thin wooden lids seemed dreadfully final.

As the gravediggers got to work to finish covering over the bodies, the rabbi led the mourners in the Kaddish. Sarah had learned little Hebrew and less Aramaic, but she knew the prayer by rote: she’d been saying it since her last grandparent died not long before the Nazis took over. She often thought the old people were lucky because they hadn’t lived to see what Hitler did to the Jews.

After the last
omayn
, people drifted away from the graveyard. The Brucks’ kin went their way, Sarah and her parents theirs, and the rabbi, his head down, trudged off by himself. Sarah didn’t even want to think about everything he must have put up with since the
Führer
came to power.

“I’m sorry, dear,” Samuel Goldman said, not for the first time. “Isidor was a good fellow, and too young to be gone.” He set a callused hand on her shoulder. “I know my being sorry doesn’t make you feel any better, but I am anyhow. Your mother is, too.”

“I am,” Hanna Goldman agreed softly.

Father was right, as usual—it didn’t make Sarah feel any better. With a sob that was at least half a hiccup, she shrugged his hand away. His mouth twisted, but he let his arm drop. He’d always believed reason and good sense would prevail against anything. The Nazis provided a horrible counterexample to that. Loss of a loved one gave another.

“What am I going to do?” Sarah said.

She knew what she’d do for the next little while: she’d stay with her parents, the way she had before navigating the shoals of Nazi bureaucracy to win permission to marry Isidor. All that work, all that
tsuris—
for what? For nothing. For a bomb howling down out of the sky and killing some Jews who hated Hitler but weren’t allowed to use shelters along with the
Reich
’s Aryan citizens.