Two Fronts by Harry Turtledove

Who made us bake without yeast. It wasn’t Pharaoh,” Mother pointed out.
    “Well, what if it wasn’t?” Father returned. “You don’t think Hitler thinks he’s God—and expects his good little Aryans to think so, too?”
    A tram rattled past. It needed paint. One of the iron wheels clicked against the track as it went round and round. Repairs weren’t coming any time soon, not with the war on. Sarah wasted no time worrying about that—or about getting on the tram. The motorman would have thrown her and her folks off the trolley had they tried. The yellow star made it easy for Aryans to follow laws against Jews to the letter.
    In normal times, in sane times, Sarah would have had a claim on some of Isidor’s estate. But facing Nazi bureaucrats again was too revolting for her even to think about, much less to do. If David Bruck’s brother wanted to take them on, he was welcome to whatever he could pry out of them.
    “All that time with Isidor—it might as well never have happened,” she said in slow wonder. “He’s—gone.” She still wore her wedding ring. That and a little bit of dirt on her hand from where she’d tossed earth into the grave were almost the only signs she’d ever been married.
    To her surprise, her mother shook her head. “You loved him, and that changed you, too,” Hanna Goldman said. “Love is never wasted. You should always cherish it when you find it, because you never find it often enough.”
    “Listen to your mother.” Samuel Goldman sounded serious to the point of solemnity. “More truth in that than in Plato and Aristotle and both Testaments all lumped together.”
    Was there? Sarah had no idea. Right now, she had no idea about anything. She didn’t even know how much she’d truly loved Isidor. Not so much as she should have—she was pretty sure of that. He hadn’t swept her off her feet: nowhere close. He’d never been a sweeping-off kind of guy. She’d liked him. She’d cared about him. She’d enjoyed the things he did when no one else was around, and she’d liked doing such things for him.
    Did all that add up to love? One more thing she didn’t have the faintest idea about. What she knew was, she wouldn’t get the chance to find out now, not with Isidor she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even have a child to remember him by—one more thing of which she was no longer in any doubt. When you got right down to the bottom of things, life was pretty rotten, wasn’t it?
    VERY LITTLE THAT Aristide Demange had seen in Russia impressed him. Very little that the veteran lieutenant had seen anywhere impressed him. He made a point of not being impressed. He’d done it for so long, it was second nature to him by now.
    You couldn’t help noticing Russia’s vastness, though, even if you made your point of doing no more than noticing. You couldn’t help noticing the fine tanks Russian factories turned out, either. Nor could you help noticing the frigid con of a winter Russia had. Well, hell, even Napoleon had noticed the Russian winter, though chances were he’d also done his goddamnedest not to let it impress him.
    And you couldn’t help noticing what a pack of thumb-fingered oafs the Ivans were. Half the time, they didn’t know what to do with all those fancy tanks. Their tactics would have had to loosen up to seem rigid. They drank like swine. Of course, if Demange had had leaders like theirs, he would have drunk that way himself.
    So here was Murmansk. Murmansk had but one raison d’être : to get men and things into and out of Russia the year around. Thanks to the last gasp of the Gulf Stream as it slid past the northern tip of Scandinavia, the local harbor never iced up. It was the only port in the USSR that could make such a boast.
    But it was at best tenuously connected to the rest of the country. A single rickety rail line led down to Leningrad and ultimately to Moscow. Odds were no one knew how many men had died building that line during the last war, or how