The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [56]
She burst out laughing. "No, no! Marshal Zhukov is not my family. He is great man, we are no ones."
Ben wanted that to be true. Zhukov was the titan of the Eastern Front, reputedly able to stand up even to Stalin's midnight military whims, and with geography on his side he had held out until he could start bleeding the German invaders to a slow death. The glut of war on Soviet soil seemed beyond sane comprehension. Two years now since Hitler made Napoleon's old mistake and turned thousands of miles of Russian snow into the blood of both sides; Ben had access in the correspondents' pool reports to the riveting dispatches of the Red Army frontline daredevil Vasily Grossman and discerned from Grossman's crafty coverage that survivors of the struggle had been through hell from both the enemy and their fanatic rulers. His eyes slipped to Katya's right hand and the sacrificed fingers. The million-dollar wound, a piece of body exchanged for a grant of existence. Before he could ask her what kind of aircraft she had flown—he had a spooky feeling it was a P-39, but that very well might have been Cass on his mind—Jake interjected. "They use this place as a canteen after it shuts down. Get ready to toast Mother Russia, Benjamin my boy."
Vodka made an immediate appearance. Glasses were splashed full and hoisted in accompaniment to a unison cry of "Na zdrovya!" Jake winked across at him. "That much Russian I know. 'Good health,' buddy." Wary from Cass's coma cola elixirs, Ben tested what sat so innocently clear in his glass. It tasted like springwater that had been tampered with by a moonshiner. While the Russians tossed theirs down he took a medium swig and clamped his fist around the glass to hide the fact that he hadn't emptied it. Nonetheless the bottle was making the rounds again and another toast was necessary, this one Jake's "To bolshoya semnadtsi!" The Russians banged the table in homage to big bombers and gulped down. Here came the bottle again. Holy damn, they inhale the stuff.
Katya leaned toward him as if what she was about to say was vital. "Kheminveh. You have meet in the war?"
The Ernie question. He'd had it dozens of times. You'd think Hemingway invented the written word. "I met him once, yes." He did not say it had been in the bar of the Savoy in London. He hiked his shoulders up and huffed out his chest to show the Hemingway mien. "Built like a bull. He was on assignment for Collier's—"
"Coal? Kheminveh write about stove thing?"
"It's a magazine." Ben pantomimed flipping pages.
"With us magazin is on gun." Katya was impatient to reach her point. "Question. Kheminveh famous in Soviet Union, we all read. Hero in The Sun Up Again. Is he steer, not bull?"
Jake woke up to the topic. "Wait a minute. I read that. The guy lost the family jewels? Where'd it say so?"
"That's Hemingway for you," Ben sought to explain and realized the vodka wasn't helping. "He doesn't outright say—"
Jake shook his head in disbelief. "Weird. Did you ask him?"
"Of course I didn't ask him, the whole point of the goddamn book is—"
"Whoa. How can that be, the guy has lost his valuables and we're supposed to read it between the lines? I'd say that's news, it ought to be spelled out in black and white."
"Kheminveh is kid us, da?" Katya contributed. She shook her head censoriously. "We have saying: 'What is write in ink, axe cannot cut off.'"
It hit him then, along with whatever shot of vodka the count was up to by now. He chortled and couldn't stop, laughing himself silly while others around the table tittered in anticipation. Finally