After the Downfall

Rautat made sure he had plenty of beer and mead and even wine. Gishte liked that; she got lit up whenever she saw the chance. That told Hasso some of what she really thought of him, though she didn’t slip even when she was drunk.

“What good does drunk do you?” he asked her one morning before she started drinking hard.

“What good does sober do me?” Gishte returned, a counter-question for which, like so many here, he had no good answer. He did hope she wasn’t drinking because she was going to bed with a Lenello – or somebody who looked like one. When he came right out and asked her about that, she shook her head. “No, you’re not so bad, and the priestess told me I didn’t have to screw you if I didn’t care to. I just like to get drunk, that’s all.”

What was he supposed to say to that? Plenty of Lenelli liked to get drunk, too – Scanno came to mind. So did plenty of Germans. As for the Russians, the less said about that, the better. It didn’t stop them from beating the snot out of the Wehrmacht. Sometimes it even helped. Waiting in the trenches, you’d hear them getting plowed and yelling and shouting and carrying on, and then they’d come at you not caring if they lived or died. An awful lot of them did die, which too often didn’t stop the rest from overrunning your position.

He’d seen so many drunken Grenye in Drammen, he’d figured all drunken Grenye drank to avoid comparing themselves to Lenelli. Didn’t Indians do that kind of thing in the United States? Drinking because you liked to get drunk seemed too … ordinary to fit in with being a native.

Maybe I have to start thinking of them as people, Hasso thought. Short, squat, dark, mostly homely people who don’t look like me.

Gishte wasn’t homely, though she was a long way from gorgeous. He’d bedded gorgeous – he knew about that. The thought of Velona, and of losing Velona, stabbed at him again.

Next to Velona, Drepteaza wasn’t gorgeous, either. Well, who was, dammit? Velona turned movie stars plain. With Drepteaza, it didn’t seem to matter so much. That was partly because Drepteaza had one hell of a shape of her own, as Hasso had every reason to know.

And it was partly because Drepteaza was interesting. She didn’t have the live-wire aura that Velona wore like a second skin, but who did? She also didn’t go off like nitro-glycerine if she got angry. She was … good people.

Yeah, she’s good people, Hasso jeered at himself. And she doesn’t want thing one to do with you, not that way, even if you have seen her naked.

“Hey, don’t pour down all of that by yourself,” he told Gishte, and he got drunk, too. Why the hell not? He couldn’t think of a single reason. Making love with Gishte when they were both smashed was fun, too. He thought so at the time, anyway. And, when you were smashed, you didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything but right then.

The bad news about a bender was, you had to come down from it. Drepteaza eyed Hasso as if he were something the cat was trying to cover up. “Have a good time yesterday?” she asked at breakfast the next morning.

“Gnurf,” he answered, squinting at her through eyes as narrow as he could make them. Wan winter sunlight and torches he usually wouldn’t have tried to read by seemed much too bright today.

“You need something better than porridge,” she said, and spoke in Bucovinan to a serving woman. The woman came back with a bowl of strong-smelling soup.

“What is it?” Hasso asked suspiciously.

“Tripe and spices,” Drepteaza told him. “It takes the edge off things.”

Feeling like a man defusing a bomb, he tried it. But the bomb had already gone off, inside his head. The soup did help calm his sour stomach. He thought the mug of beer he downed with it went further toward reconciling him to being alive. To his own surprise, he did get to the bottom of the bowl of soup. “Thanks,” he said to Drepteaza in Bucovinan. “Better.”

She looked at him like a Feldwebel eyeing a private fresh from the Russian front who’d just painted Paris red … before Paris fell again. “You’re not going to be worth much the rest of the day, are you?” She sounded more resigned than critical.

“Sorry.” Hasso was sorry about how he felt – that was for sure.

She startled him with a smile. “It happens,” she said. “You’re a human being, too.”