Striking the Balance

He wolfed down the bread, but stuck his bony fragment of herring in a pocket. He’d learned to wait for water before he ate the fish. It was so salty, thirst would have driven him mad till he got something to drink. Sometimes the guards brought a bucket of water after they brought food. Sometimes they didn’t. Today they didn’t.

The train rumbled on. In summer, having two dozen men stuffed into a compartment intended for four would have been intolerable-not that that would have stopped the NKVD. In a Russian winter, animal warmth was not to be despised. In spite of being cold, Nussboym wasn’t freezing.

His stomach growled again. It didn’t care that he would suffer agonies of thirst if he ate his herring without water. All it knew was that it was still mostly empty, and that the fish would help fill it up.

With a squeal of brakes, the train pulled to a halt Nussboym almost slipped down onto men below. Ivan had done that once. They’d fallen on him like a pack of wolves, beating and kicking him till he was black and blue. After that, the fellows perched on the baggage racks had learned to hang on tight during stops.

“Where are we, do you think?” somebody down below asked.

“In hell,” somebody else answered, which produced laughs both more bitter and more sincere than the ones the guard had got for himself.

“This’ll be Pskov, I bet,” azek in the middle bunk declared. “I hear tell we’ve cleared the Lizards away from the railroad line that leads there from the west. After that”-he stopped sounding so arrogant and sure of himself-“after that, it’s north and east, on to the White Sea, or maybe to the Siberiangulags.”

Nobody spoke for a couple of minutes after that. Winter labor up around Archangel or in Siberia was enough to daunt even the heartiest of spirits.

Small clangs and jerks showed that cars were either being added to the train or taken off it. One of thezeks sitting on the bottom bunks said, “Didn’t the Hitlerites take Pskov away from therodina? Shit, they can’t do anything worse to us than our own people do.”

“Oh yes, they can,” Nussboym said, and told them about Treblinka.

“That’s Lizard propaganda, is what that is,” the big-mouthedzek in the middle bunk said.

“No,” Nussboym said. Even in the face of opposition from the powerful prisoner, about half thezeks in the car ended up believing him. He reckoned that a moral victory.

A guard came back with a bucket of water, a dipper, and a couple of mugs. He looked disgusted with fate, as if by letting the men drink he was granting them a privilege they didn’t deserve. “Come on, you slimy bastards,” he said. “Queue up-and make it snappy. I don’t have all day.”

Healthy men drank first, then the ones with tubercular coughs, and last of all the three or four luckless fellows who had syphilis. Nussboym wondered if the arrangement did any good, because he doubted the NKVD men washed the mugs between uses. The water was yellowish and cloudy and tasted of grease. The guard had taken it from the engine tender instead of going to some proper spigot. All the same, it was wet. He drank his allotted mug, ate the herring, and felt, for a moment, almost like a human being instead of azek.

Georg Schultz spun the U-2’s two-bladed wooden prop. The five-cylinder Shvetsov radial caught almost at once; in a Russian winter, an air-cooled engine was a big advantage. Ludmila Gorbunova had heard stories aboutLuftwaffe pilots who had to light fires on the ground under the nose of their aircraft to keep their antifreeze from freezing up.

Ludmila checked the rudimentary collection of dials on theKukuruznik’s instrument panel. All in all, they told her nothing she didn’t already know: the Wheatcutter had plenty of fuel for the mission she was going to fly, the compass did a satisfactory job of pointing toward north, and the altimeter said she was still on the ground.

She released the brake. The little biplane bounced across the snowy field that served as an airstrip. Behind her, she knew, men and women with brooms would sweep snow over the tracks her wheels made. The Red Air Force tookmaskirovka seriously.

After one last jounce, the U-2 didn’t come down. Ludmila patted the side of the fuselage with a gloved but affectionate hand. Though designed as a primary trainer, the aircraft had harassed first the Germans and then the Lizards.Kukuruznik’s flew low and slow and, but for the engine, had almost no metal; they evaded the Lizards’ detection systems that let the alien imperialist aggressors hack more sophisticated warplanes out of the sky with ease. Machine guns and light bombs weren’t much, but they were better than nothing.

Ludmila swung the aircraft into a long, slow turn back toward the field from which she’d taken off. Georg Schultz still stood out there. He waved to her and blew her a kiss before he started trudging for the pine woods not far away.