In the Balance (5 page)

As the fire brightened ahead of her, her gut clenched. She bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip, using pain to fight fear. “I am not afraid, I am not afraid, I am not afraid,” she said. But she was afraid, every time she flew.

No time for the luxury of fear, not any more. The men lounging in the circle of light round the fire swelled in a moment from ant-sized to big as life. Germans sure enough, in dirty field-gray with coal-scuttle helmets. They started to scatter an instant before she thumbed the firing button mounted on top of her stick.

The two ShVAK machine guns attached under the lower wing of the biplane added their roar to the racket of the five-cylinder radial engine. Ludmila let the guns chatter as she zoomed low above the fire. As it dimmed behind her, she looked back over her shoulder to see what she had accomplished.

A couple of Germans lay sprawled in the dirt, one motionless, the other writhing like a fence lizard in the grasp of a cat.
“Khorosho,”
Ludmila said softly. Triumph drowned terror.
“Ochen khorosho.”
It
was
very good. Every blow against the fascists helped drive them back—or at least hindered them from coming farther forward..

Flashes from out of the darkness, from two places, then three—not fire, firearms. Terror came roaring back. Ludmila gave the
Kukuruznik
all the meager power it had. A rifle bullet cracked past her head, horridly close. The muzzle flashes continued behind her, but after a few seconds she was out of range.

She let the biplane climb so she could look for another target. The breeze that whistled in over the windscreen of the open cockpit dried the stinking, fear-filled sweat on her forehead and under her arms. The trouble with the Germans was that they were too good at their trade of murder and destruction. They could have had only a few seconds’ warning before her plane swooped on them out of the night, but instead of running and hiding, they’d run and then fought back—and almost killed her. She shuddered again, though they were kilometers behind her now.

When they’d first betrayed the treaty of peace and friendship and invaded the Soviet Union, she’d been confident the Red Army would quickly throw them back. But defeat and retreat followed retreat and defeat.
Bombers appeared over Kiev, broad-winged Heinkels, Dorniers skinny as flying pencils, graceful Junkers-88s, Stukas that screamed like damned souls as they stooped, hawklike, on their targets. They roamed as they would. No Soviet fighters came up to challenge them.

Once in Rossosh, out of the German grasp, Ludmila happened to mention to a harried clerk that she’d gone through
Osoaviakhim
flight training. Two days later, she found herself enrolled in the Soviet Air Force. She still wondered whether the man did it for the sake of the country or to save himself the trouble of finding her someplace to sleep.

Too late to worry about that now. Whole regiments of women pilots flew night-harassment missions against the fascist invaders.
One day, Ludmila thought, I will graduate to a real fighter instead of my U-2
. Several women had become aces, downing more than five German planes apiece.

For now, though, the reliable old Wheatcutter would do well enough. She spotted another fire, off in the distance. The
Kukuruznik
banked, swung toward it.

Planes roared low overhead. The red suns under their wings and on the sides of their fuselages might have been painted from blood. Machine guns spat flame. The bullets kicked up dust and splashed in the water like the first big drops of a rainstorm.

Liu Han had been swimming and bathing when she heard the Japanese fighters. With a moan of terror, she thrust herself all the way under, until her toes sank deep into the slimy mud bottom of the stream. She held her breath until the need for air drove her to the surface once more, gasped in a quick breath, sank

When she had to come up again, she tossed her head to get the long, straight black hair out of her eyes, then quickly looked around. The fighters had vanished as quickly as they appeared. But she knew the Japanese soldiers would not be far behind. Chinese troops had retreated through her village the day before, falling back toward Hankow.

A few swift strokes and she was at the bank of the stream. She scrambled up, dried herself with a few quick strokes of a rough cotton towel, put on her robe and sandals, and took a couple of steps away from the water.

Another drone of motors, this one higher and farther away than the fighters, a whistle in the air that belonged to no bird … The bomb exploded less than a hundred yards from Liu. The blast lifted her like a toy and flung her back into the stream.

Stunned, half-deafened, she thrashed in the water. She breathed in a great gulp of it. Coughing, choking, retching, she thrust her head up into the precious air, gasped out a prayer to the Buddha: “Amituofo, help me!”

More bombs fell all around. Earth leapt into the air in fountains so perfect
and beautiful and transient, they almost made her forget the destruction they represented. The noise of each explosion slapped her in the face, more like a blow, physically felt, than a sound. Metal fragments of bomb casing squealed wildly as they flew. A couple of them splashed into the stream not far from Liu. She moaned again. The year before, a bomb fragment had torn her father in two.

The explosions moved farther away, on toward the village. Awkwardly, robe clinging to, her arms and legs and hindering her every motion, she swam back to the bank, staggered out onto land once more. No point drying herself now, not when her damp towel was covered with earth. She automatically picked it up and started home, praying again to the Amida Buddha that her home still stood.

Bomb craters pocked the fields. Here and there, men and women lay beside them, torn and twisted in death. The dirt road, Liu saw, was untouched; the bombers had left it intact for the Japanese army to use.

She wished for a cigarette. She’d had a pack of Babies in her pocket, but they were soaked now. Water dripped from her hair into her eyes. When she saw columns of smoke rising into the sky, she, began to run. Her sandals went
flap-squelch, flap-squelch
against her feet. Ahead, in the direction of the village, she heard shouts and screams, but with her ears still ringing she could not make out words.

People stared as she ran up. Even in the midst of disaster, her first thought was embarrassment at the way the wet cloth of her robe molded itself to her body. Even the small swellings of her nipples were plainly visible. “Paying to see a woman’s body” was a euphemism for visiting a whore. No one so much as had to pay to see Liu’s.

But in the chaos that followed the Japanese air attack, a mere woman’s body proved a small concern. Absurdly, some of the people in the village, instead of being terrified and filled with dread like Liu, capered about as if in celebration. She called, “Has everyone here gone crazy, Old Sun?”

“No, no,” the tailor shouted back. “Do you know what the eastern devils’ bombs did? Can you guess?” An enormous grin showed his almost-toothless gums.

“I would say they missed everything, but …” Liu paused, gestured at the rising smoke. “I see that cannot be so.”

“Almost as good.” Old Sun hugged himself with glee. “No, even better—nearly all their bombs fell right on the yamen.”

“The yamen?” Liu gaped, then started to laugh herself. “Oh, what a pity!” The walled enclosure of the yamen housed the county head’s residence, his audience hall, the jail, the court that sent people there, the treasury, and other government departments. Tang Wen Lan, the county head, was notoriously corrupt, as were most of his clerks, secretaries, and servants.

“Isn’t it sad. I think I’ll go home and put on white for Tang’s funeral,” Old Sun said.

“He’s dead?” Liu exclaimed. “I thought a man as wicked as that would live forever.”

“He’s dead,” Old Sun said positively. “The ghost Life-Is-Transient is taking him to the next world right now—if death’s messenger can find enough pieces to carry. One bomb landed square on the office where he was taking bribes. No one will squeeze us any more. How sad, how terrible!” His elastic features twisted into a mask of mirthful mourning that belonged in a pantomime show.

Yi Min, the local apothecary, was less sanguine than Old Sun. “Wait until the eastern dwarfs come. The Japanese will make stupid dead Tang Wen Lan seem like a prince of generosity. He had to leave us enough rice to get through to next year so he could squeeze us again. The Japanese will keep it all for themselves. They don’t care whether we live or die.”

Too much of China had learned that, to its sorrow. However rapacious and inept the government of Chiang Kai-shek had proved itself, places under Japanese rule suffered worse. For one thing, as Yi Min had said, the invaders took for themselves first and left only what they did not want to the Chinese they con-trolled. For another, while they were rapacious, they were not inept. Like locusts, when they swept a province clean of rice, they swept it
clean
.

Liu said, “Shall we run away, then?”

“A peasant without his plot is nothing,” Old Sun said. “If I am to starve, I would sooner starve at home than somewhere on the road far from my ancestors’ graves.”

Several other villagers agreed. Yi Min said, “But what if it is a choice between living on the road and dying by the graves of your ancestors? What then, Old Sun?”

While the two men argued, Liu Han walked on into the village. Sure enough, it was as Old Sun had said. The yamen was a smoking ruin, its walls smashed down here and there as if by a giant’s kicks. The flagpole had been broken like a broomstraw; the Kuomintang flag, white star in a blue field on red, lay crumpled in the dirt.

Through a gap in the wrecked wall, Liu Han stared in at Tang Wen Lan’s office. If the county head had been in there when the bomb landed, Old Sun was surely right in thinking him dead. Nothing was left of the building but a hole in the ground and some thatch blown off the roof.

Another bomb had landed on the jail. Whatever the crimes for which the prisoners had been confined, they’d suffered the maximum penalty. Shrieks said some were suffering still. Villagers were already going through the
yamen, scavenging what they could and dragging out bodies and pieces of bodies. The thick, meaty smell of blood fought with those of smoke and freshly upturned earth. Liu Han shuddered, thinking how easily others might have been smelling her blood right now.

Her own house stood a couple of blocks beyond the yamen. She saw smoke rising from that direction, but thought nothing of it. No one willingly believes disaster can befall her. Not even when she rounded the last corner and saw the bomb crater where the house had stood did she credit her own eyes. Less was left here than at the county head’s office.

I have no home
. The thought took several seconds to register, and hardly seemed to mean anything even after Liu formed it. She stared clown at the ground, dully wondering what to do next. Something small and dirty lay by her left foot. She recognized it in the same slow, sluggish way she had realized her house was gone. It was her little son’s hand. No sign of the rest of him remained.

She stooped and picked up the hand, just as if he were there, not merely a mutilated fragment. The flesh was still warm against hers. She heard a loud cry, and needed a little while to know it came from her own throat. The cry went on and on, seemingly without her: when she tried to stop, she found she couldn’t.

Slowly, slowly, it stopped being the only sound in her universe. Other noises penetrated, cheerful
pop-pop-pops
like strings of firecrackers going off. But they were not firecrackers. They were rifles. Japanese soldiers were on the way.

David Goldfarb watched the green glow of the radar screen at Dover Station, waiting for the swarm of moving blips that would herald the return of the British bomber armada. He turned to the fellow technician beside him. “I’m sure as hell gladder to be looking for our planes coming back than I was year before last, watching every German in the whole wide world heading straight for London.”

“You can say that again.” Jerome Jones rubbed his weary eyes. “It was a bit dicey there for a while, wasn’t it?”

“Just a bit, yes.” Goldfarb leaned back in his uncomfortable chair, hunched his shoulders. Something in his neck went
snap
. He grunted with relief, then grunted again as he thought about Jones’s reply. He’d lived surrounded by British reserve all his twenty-three years, even learned to imitate it, but it still seemed unnatural to him.

His newlywed parents had fled to London to escape Polish pogroms a little before the start of the first World War. A stiff upper lip was not part of the scanty baggage they’d brought with them; they shouted at each other, and eventually at David and his brothers and sister, sometimes angrily,
more often lovingly, but always at full throttle. He’d never learned at home to hold back, which made the trick all the harder anywhere else.

The reminiscent smile he’d worn for a moment quickly faded. By the news dribbling out, pogroms rolled through Poland again, worse under the Nazis than ever under the tsars. When Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia, Saul Goldfarb had written to his own brothers and sisters and cousins in Warsaw, urging them to get out of Poland while they could. No one left. A few months later, it was too late to leave.

A blip on the screen snapped him out of his unhappy reverie. “Blimey,” Jones breathed, King’s English cast aside in surprise, “lookit that bugger go.”

“I’m looking,” Goldfarb said. He kept on looking, too, until the target disappeared again. It didn’t take long. He sighed. “Now we’ll have to fill out a pixie report.”

“Third one this week,” Jones observed. “Bloody pixies’re getting busier, whatever the hell they are.”

“Whatever,” Goldfarb echoed. For the past several months, radars in England—and, he gathered unofficially, the United States as well—had been showing phantom aircraft flying impossibly high and even more impossibly fast; 90,000 feet and better than 2,000 miles an hour were the numbers he’d heard most often. He said, “I used to think they came from something wrong in the circuits somewhere. I’ve seen enough now, though, that I have trouble believing it.