"Joe Haldeman - Tool of the Trade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

freight train, bombed and strafed the children unmercifully. Nikola's
suitcase may have saved him; at any rate, the clothes and foodstuffs
inside absorbed two bullets while he cowered behind it in the screaming
dark. (Forty years later Nick Foley would still have trouble facing a
locker room, or any such crowded sweaty place. The source of the
small anxiety attacks was a mystery to him, which he accepted along
with other small mysteries.)
The Messerschmitts finally ran out of ammunition. A nearby
farming community took care of Nikola and the other surviving children
for a couple of weeks, and then a night convoy of blacked-out trucks
and ambulances took them back to Leningrad. The children were to be
rerouted east to Kirov and Sverdlovsk, and most of them did make it.
Nikola didn't. He found himself suddenly without a family, and while
that problem was being straightened out, the last train left.
His mother and father might have been alive at that time, but
Nikola would never know. They had been arrested by the NKVD,
imprisoned as spies for Nazi Germany.
It was not impossible. His father was a German citizen who had
immigrated to Russia in the twenties, declaring great sympathy for the
Revolution and even changing his name from Feldstein to Ulinov. He
had been a philology professor at Heidelberg; in due course he joined
the philology department at Leningrad State University.
So to a certain cast of mind, he was triply not to be trusted: an
intellectual, a German, a Jew. Why would a German Jew, however
lapsed in his religion, want to spy for Hitler? This was not the kind of
question that much bothered that cast of mind. Ulinov and his wife were
locked up pending transfer to Lubyanka, the forbidding prison in
Moscow, but they never made the trip. Sometime during the siege, they
either starved to death or were executed. The records claimed
execution but, perversely, that status was sometimes conferred after the
fact. An informal quota system.
It would be many years before Nikola would know any of this.
The authorities explained that his parents had been taken from him by
the Nazis, and he had no reason to question that.
Having missed the exodus, Nikola wound up living with Arkady
Vavilov, who had been his father's elderly boss, and the old man's wife.
He could hardly have found better surrogate parents man the Vavilovs.
Missing their own grown children, they showered love and attention on
him. What was more important to Nikola's tortuous future, though, was
the fact that Vavilov was a linguist and a language teacher. And both
the Vavilovs spoke English-American English, having spent years in
New York.
Foreign languages were nothing new to the boy. Nikola's parents
had brought him up to be equally fluent in German and Russian, and
found that he was a thirsty sponge for languages. Professor Ulinov had
amused himself by teaching the boy basic vocabularies in French,
Japanese, and Finnish. His surrogate father added a little to two of thos
e, but concentrated on the language of those strange folks who would
eventually bring the Soviet Union the Lend-Lease Act and other
problems.