In the Balance

Both Germans looked at Pavlyuchenko when they heard the name of their capital. Ludmila studied them as if they really were a couple of dangerous beasts; she’d never before been close enough to see Hitlerites as individuals.

Rather to her surprise, they looked like neither the inhumanseeming killing machines that had swept the Soviet armies east across a thousand kilometers of Russia and the Ukraine nor like Winter Fritz of recent propaganda, with a woman’s shawl round his shoulders and an icicle dangling from his nose. They were just men, a little taller, a little skinnier, a little longer-faced than Russian norms, but just men all the same. She wrinkled her nose. They smelled like men, too, men who hadn’t bathed any time lately.

The younger one, the bigger one, had a peasant look to him despite his foreign cast of feature. She could easily imagine him on a stool milking a cow or, on his knees plucking weeds from a vegetable plot. The unabashed way he leered at her was peasantlike, too.

The other German was harder to fathom. He looked tired and clever at the same time, with pinched features that did not match the lined and sun-darkened skin of an outdoorsman. Like the red-whiskered one, he wore a helmet and an infantryman’s blouse over the black trousers of panzer troops. The blouse had a private’s plain shoulder straps, but she did not think it was part of the gear he’d started out with. He was too old and too sharp to make a proper private.

In secondary school, a million years before, she’d had a little German. This past year, she’d done her best to forget it, and hoped her transcript had perished when Kiev was lost: knowing the enemy’s language could easily make one an object of suspicion. If these soldiers had little or no Russian, though, it would prove useful. she dredged a phrase out of her memory: “Wie heissen Sie?”

The Germans’ worn, filthy faces lit up. Till now, they’d been nearly mute, tongue-tied among the Russians (which was also the root meaning of Nemtsi, the old Russian word for Germans-those who could make no intelligible sounds). The ginger-whiskered one grinned and said, “Ich heisse Feldwebel Georg Schultz, Fraulein,” and rattled off his pay number too fast for her to follow.

The older one said, “Ich heisse Heinrich Jager Major” and also gave his number. She ignored it; it wasn’t something she needed to know right now. The kolkhozniks murmured among themselves, either impressed she could speak to the Wehrmacht men in their own tongue or mistrustful of her for the same reason.

She wished she recalled more. She had to ask their unit, by clumsy circumlocution: “From which group of men do you come?”

The sergeant started to answer; the major (his name meant “hunter,” Ludmila thought; he certainly had a hunter’s eyes) cleared his throat, which sufficed to make the younger man shut up. Jager said, “Are we prisoners of war, Russian pilot? You may ask only certain things of prisoners of war.” He spoke slowly, clearly, and simply; perhaps he recognized Ludmila’s hesitancy with his language.

“Nyet,” she answered, and then, “Nein,” in case he hadn’t understood the Russian. He was nodding as she spoke, so evidently he had. She went on, “You are not prisoners of war. We fight the”-she perforce had to say yasheritsi, not knowing the German word for “Lizards”-“first. We fight Germans now only if Germans fight us. Not forget war against Germany, but put it to one side for now.”

“Ah,” the major said. “Yes, that is good. We fight the Lizards first also.” (Eidechsen was what the German said. Ludmila made a mental note of it.) Jager went on, “Since we have this common foe, I will tell you that we are from Sixteenth Panzer. I will also tell you that Schultz and I have together killed a Lizard panzer.”

She stared at him. “This is true?” Radio Moscow made all sorts of claims of Lizard armor destroyed, but she had flown over too many battlefields to take them seriously any more. she’d seen what was left of German panzer units that tried to take on the Lizards, too: not much. Were these tankmen lying to impress her with how masterful the Germans remained?

No, she decided after a moment of watching and listening to them. They described the action in too much vivid detail for her to doubt them: if they hadn’t been through what they were talking about, they belonged on the stage, not in the middle of a collective farm. Most convincing of all was Jager’s mournful summary at the end: “We hurt them, but they wrecked us. All my company’s tanks are gone.”

“What are they saying, Comrade Pilot?” Pavlyuchenko demanded.