“What’s in there?” Bagnall asked, pointing. By now, his German was fluent enough that, for a few words or a few sentences at a time, he could be mistaken for a native speaker, though not one from his listener’s home region, whatever that happened to be.
The fellow in the coal-scuttle helmet grinned at him. “Water,” he answered.
“If you don’t want to tell me, then just don’t say,” Bagnall grumbled. The German laughed at him and set the next barrel, identically stenciled, on its end beside the first. Irked, Bagnall stomped away, his feet clanging on the steel plates of the deck. The Nazi, damn him, laughed louder.
He and his comrades stowed away the barrels somewhere down in the cargo hold, where Bagnall didn’t have to look at them. He told the story to Embry and Jones, both of whom chaffed him without mercy for letting a German get the better of him.
Thick, black coal smoke poured from the stack of theHarald Hardrada as it pulled out of Kristiansand harbor for the journey across the North Sea to England. Even if Bagnall was going home, it was a voyage he could have done without. He’d never been airsick, not in the worst evasive maneuvers, but the continual pounding of big waves against the freighter’s hull sent him springing for the rail more than once. His comrades didn’t twit him for that. They were right there beside him. So were some of the sailors. That made him feel. If not better, at least more resigned to his fate: misery loves company had a lot of truth to it.
Lizard jets flew over the freighter a couple of times, so high that their vapor trails were easier to see than the aircraft themselves. TheHarald Hardrada had ack-ack guns mounted at bow and stern. Along with everyone else aboard, Bagnall knew they were essentially useless against Lizard planes. But the Lizards did not come down for a closer look or on a strafing run. Cease-fires, formal and otherwise, held.
Bagnall had spied several cloudbanks off to the west, identifying each in turn as England: he was seeing with a landlubber’s eye, and one half blinded by hope. Before long, the clouds would shift and destroy his illusion. Then at last he caught sight of something out there that did not move or dissolve.
“Yes, that is the English coast,” a sailor answered when he asked.
“It’s beautiful,” Bagnall said. The Estonian coast had gained beauty because he was sailing away from it. This one did so because he was approaching. Actually, the two landscapes looked pretty much alike: low, flat land slowly rising up from a sullen sea.
Then, off in the distance, he spotted the towers of Dover Castle, right down by the ocean. That made the homecoming feel real in a way it hadn’t before. He turned to Embry and Jones, who stood beside him. “I wonder if Daphne and Sylvia are still at the White Horse Inn.”
“Can but hope,” Ken Embry said.
“Amen,” Jones echoed. “Would be nice to have a lady friend who wouldn’t just as soon shoot you down as look at you, let alone sleep with you.” His sigh was full of nostalgia. “I remember there are women like that, though it’s been so long I’m beginning to forget”
A tug came out to help nudge theHarald Hardrada up against a pier in a surprisingly crowded harbor. As soon as she’d been made fast in her berth with lines fore and aft, as soon as the gangplank snaked across to the dock, a horde of tweedy Englishmen with the unmistakable look of boffins swarmed aboard at a dead run and besieged every uniformed German they could find with a single question, sometimes in English, sometimes in German:
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Bagnall asked one of the men.
Hearing an undoubtedly British voice, the fellow answered without hesitation: “Why, the water, of course.”
Bagnall scratched his head.
One of the cooks ladled soup into David Nussboym’s bowl. He sank the ladle all the way down to the bottom of the big iron pot. It came out full of cabbage leaves and bits of fish. The ration loaf he handed Nussboym was full weight or even a trifle over. It was still black bread, coarse and hard to chew, but it was warm from the oven and smelled good. His tea was made from local roots and leaves and berries, but the glass the cook gave him had plenty of sugar, so it was palatable enough.
And he had plenty of room in which to eat. Clerks and interpreters and other politicals got fed ahead of the common run ofzek. Nussboym recalled with distaste the mob scenes in which he’d had to defend with his elbows the space in which he was sitting, and recalled a couple of times when he’d been elbowed off a bench and onto the planks of the floor.
He dug in. With every mouthful of soup, well-being flowed through him. It was almost as if he could feel himself being nourished. He sipped at his tea, savoring every morsel of dissolved sugar that flowed over his tongue. When your belly was full, life looked good-for a while.
“Nu,David Aronovich, how do you like talking with the Lizards?” asked Moisei Apfelbaum, Colonel Skriabin’s chief clerk. He spoke in Yiddish to Nussboym but used his name and patronymic anyhow, which would have been an affectation anywhere in the USSR but seemed particularly absurd in thegulag, where patronymics fell by the wayside even in Russian.
Nevertheless, Nussboym imitated his style: “Compared to freedom, Moisei Solomonovich, it is not so much. Compared to chopping logs in the woods-” He did not go on. He did not have to go on.
Apfelbaum nodded. He was a skinny little middle-aged fellow, with eyes that looked enormous behind steel-rimmed spectacles. “Freedom you do not need to worry about, not here. Thegulag has worse things than logging, believe me. A man could be unlucky enough to dig a canal. One can be unlucky, as I say, or one can be clever. Good to be clever, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Nussboym answered. The clerks and cooks and trusties who made thegulag function-for the whole system would have fallen apart in days if not hours had the NKVD had to do all the work-were better company in many ways than thezeks of the labor gang to which he’d formerly been attached. Even if a lot of them were dedicated Communists(plus royaliste que le roi ran through his mind, for they upheld the principles of Marx and Engels and Lenin after other men espousing those same principles had sent them here), they were for the most part educated men, men with whom he had far more in common than the common criminals who were the dominant force in his work gang.
He did easier work now. He got more food for it. He should have been-well, not happy; you’d have to bemeshuggeh to be happy here-as contented as he could be in the context of thegulag. He’d always been a man who believed in getting along with authority, whatever authority happened to be: the Polish government, the Nazis, the Lizards, now the NKVD.
But when thezeks with whom he’d formerly worked were shambling out to the forest for another day of toil, the looks they gave him chilled his blood.Mene, mene, tekel upharsin floated up from his days at thecheder-thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting. He felt guilty for having it easier than his former comrades, although he knew intellectually that interpreting for the Lizards made a far greater contribution to the war effort than knocking down yet another pine or birch.
“You are not a Communist,” Apfelbaum said, studying him through those greatly magnified eyes. Nussboym shook his head, admitting it. The clerk said, “Yet you remain an idealist.”
“Maybe I do,” Nussboym said. He wanted to add,What business is it of yours? He kept his mouth shut, though; he was not such a fool as to insult a man who had such easy, intimate access to the camp commandant. The calluses on his hands were starting to soften, but he knew how easily he could once more grow accustomed to the feel of axehandle and saw grip.