Along with the fear came anger. Rumkowski had chutzpah and to spare, if he thought to impress anyone by talking about how hungry “we” had been. His fleshy frame didn’t look to have missed many meals under German control of the ghetto, and he’d earned his food with the sweat and the blood of his fellow Jews.
But that, dreadful as it was, was also by the way. For now, the only thing that truly mattered to Russie was that he’d got away with the toughest test his flimsy disguise was ever likely to face. He wasn’t surprised the Lizard had failed to recognize him; the Lizard might not have known who he was even if he’d still had his beard.
But Chaim Rumkowski … Rumkowski was a Lizard puppet as Moishe had been a puppet. It wouldn’t have been too surprising if he’d seen Moishe’s face in a Lizard photograph or in one of the propaganda films Zolraag and his minions had taken back when he and Russie got along. But if he had, he didn’t associate it with a shabby Jew carrying cabbages home to his wife.
“And a good thing, too,” Moishe said.
When he got back to his block of flats, he waved to Reuven, who was kicking a ball around with a couple of other boys and dodging in and out amongst passersby on the street. That game would have been impossibly dangerous before the war, when whizzing motorcars killed children every week.
These days, even the Eldest of the Lodz ghetto rode in a carriage like a nineteenth-century physician on his rounds; the only motor vehicle in the ghetto that Moishe knew about was the fire engine. People got about on bicycles or in carts hauled by their fellow men, or most often, afoot. And so sport got safer for little boys. Even the worst wind blows in a little good with it, Russie thought.
He carried the cabbages upstairs to his apartment. Rivka pounced on them. She did no more than raise an eyebrow when he told her how much he’d paid, from which he concluded he hadn’t done too badly. “What else did they have down there?” she asked.
“Tzibeles—green onions—but I couldn’t get a decent price for them, so I didn’t buy any,” he said. Rivka positively beamed; by her expression, she’d expected him to spend all their money for one dried-up little onion. He went on, “That’s not all,” and told her about the posters.
“That’s terrible,” she said, before he even had a chance to let her know what they claimed he’d done. When he did, she clenched her fists and ground out, “It’s worse than terrible—it’s filthy.”
“So it is,” Moishe answered. “But the pictures show me the way I used to be, and I look different now. I proved it after I got these cabbages.”
“Oh? How?”
“Because the Eldest of the Jews and the Lizard he had in the carriage with him both spoke to me, and neither one of them had the least idea who I was even though my picture was plastered all over the market square.” Russie spoke as if he’d been through something that happened every day, hoping not to alarm Rivka. He alarmed himself instead; all the fright he’d felt came back in a rush.
And he frightened his wife. “That’s it,” she said in a voice that brooked no argument. “From now on, you don’t go out of the flat unless it’s a matter of life or death—any time you do go out, it turns into a matter of life or death.”
He could not disagree with that. He did say, “I had been thinking of going to the hospital and offering my services there. Lodz—and especially its Jews—still has far too much sickness and not enough people trained in medicine.”
“If you were only putting your own neck in the noose, that would be one thing,” Rivka said. “But if they catch you, Moishe, they catch Reuven and me, too. They won’t be very happy with us, either; remember, we disappeared right under their snouts when we went into hiding.”
“I know,” he answered heavily. “But after being cooped up so long under Warsaw, the idea of having to stay here leaves me sick.”
“Better you should be left sick than left dead,” Rivka said, to which he had no good reply. She went on, “I’m a better shopper than you, anyhow, and you know it. We’ll save money with you at home.”
He knew that, too. Had he gone straight from the Warsaw bunker to close confinement in this flat, he could have borne it easily enough. But a taste of freedom left him hungry for more. It had been the same in Warsaw. If the Lizards had treated its Jews the same way the Germans had, people there might well have accepted it, simply because it was what they’d grown used to. After a spell of mild rule, though, tough strictures would have been hard to reimpose. He’d certainly rebelled when the Lizards tried to make him into nothing but their mouthpiece.
Rivka inspected the cabbages, peeled off a couple of wilted outer leaves, and threw them away. That was a measure of how far they’d come. In the days when the Nazis ruled the ghetto, wilted cabbage leaves would have been something to fight over. Their being just garbage again showed that the family wasn’t in the last stages of starving to death any more.
The rest of the cabbage, chopped, went into the soup pot with potatoes and a big white onion from a vegetable basket by the counter. Moishe wished for a roasted pullet or barley and beef soup with bones full of marrow. Cabbage and potatoes, though, you could live a long time on that, even without meat.
“It certainly seems like a long time, anyhow,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Rivka asked.
“Nothing,” he answered loyally, thinking of all the vitamins and other nutrients in potatoes and cabbages and onions. But man did not live by nutrients alone, and the soup, however nourishing the medical part of him knew it to be, remained uninspiring despite Rivka’s best efforts.
She put a lid on the soup pot. The hot plate would eventually bring it to a boil. Moishe had given up on quickly cooked food—not that soup cooked quickly any which way. Rivka said, “I wonder how long Reuven will play outside.”
“Hmm.” Moishe sent her a speculative look. She smiled back. Just for a moment, the tip of her tongue appeared between her teeth. He did his best to sound severe: “I think you’re just trying to butter me up.” He listened to himself. Severe? He sounded eager as a bridegroom.
As a matter of fact, he was eager as a bridegroom. He took a couple of quick steps across the kitchen. Rivka’s arms went around him at the same time his went around her. After a few seconds, she said, “For this, I may even like you better clean-shaven. Your mustaches used to tickle my nose when we kissed.”
“If you like it so well—” he said, and resumed. His hand cupped her breast through the wool of her dress. She made a small noise deep in her throat and pressed herself tighter against him.
The door opened.
Moishe and Rivka jumped away from each other as if they had springs in their shoes. From the doorway, Reuven called, “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry.”
“There’s a heel of bread in here you can have, and I’m making soup,” Rivka answered. “Your father brought home a couple of lovely cabbages.” Her shrug to Moishe was full of humorous frustration.
He understood the feeling because he shared it. In the insanely overcrowded Warsaw ghetto, concerns about privacy had fallen to pieces, because so little was to be had. People did what they did, and the other people crammed into a flat with them, no matter how young, pretended not to notice. But decorum had returned to the family as soon as they were out of that desperate overcrowding.
Reuven wolfed down the bread his mother gave him, then sat on the kitchen floor to stare expectantly at the soup pot. Above him, Rivka said “Tonight” to Moishe.
He nodded. His son let out an indignant squawk: “The soup won’t be ready till tonight?”
“No, I was talking about something else with your father,” Rivka said.
Partway appeased, Reuven resumed his pot watching. The idea of privacy had come back after they were no longer stuffed into a flat like sardines. But food … they all still worried about food, even though they weren’t starving any more. If they hadn’t, Moishe wouldn’t have noticed Rivka throwing out the wilted cabbage leaves, wouldn’t have counted that as a sign of their
relative affluence.
“Do you know,” he said out of the blue, “I think I understand Rumkowski better.”
“Nu?” Rivka said. “Tell me. How he could go on dealing with the Lizards, and with the Nazis before them—” She shivered.
Moishe explained his thoughts about the cabbage leaves, then went on, “I think Rumkowski’s the same way, only about power, not food. However he thought of it when this was a Nazis ghetto, he can’t change his mind now. He’s—fixated, that’s the word.” It came out in German; Yiddish didn’t have a term for the precise psychological concept Moishe was trying to get across. Rivka nodded to show she followed.
Reuven said, “You threw out some cabbage leaves, Mama?” He got up and went over to the garbage can. “May I eat them?”
“No, just leave them there,” Rivka said, and then again, louder, “Leave them there, I told you. You’re not going to starve to death before the soup is done.” She stopped with a bemused look on her face.
Progress, Moishe thought. He shook his head. To such had he been reduced that he measured progress by the existence of garbage.
Rasputitsa—the time of mud. Ludmila Gorbunova squelched across the airstrip, her boots making disgusting sucking and plopping noises at every step. Each time she lifted one, more mud clung to it, until she thought she was carrying half a kolkhoz’s worth on each foot.
The mud came to Russia and the Ukraine twice a year. In the fall, the rains brought it. The fall rasputitsa could be heavy or light, depending on how much rain fell for how long before it turned to snow and froze the ground.
The spring rasputitsa was different. When the spring sun melted the snow and ice that had accumulated since last fall, millions of square kilometers turned into a bog. That included roads, none of which was paved outside the big cities. For several weeks the only ways to get around were by panje wagons, which were almost boat-shaped and had wheels high enough to get down through the glop to solid ground, and by wide-tracked T-34 tanks.
That also meant most aviation came to a halt during the rasputitsa. The Red Air Force flew off dirt strips, and all the dirt was liquid for the time being. Taxiing for takeoffs and landings wasn’t practical; just keeping aircraft from sinking into the swamp wasn’t easy.
As usual, one model proved the exception: the U-2. With skis of the same sort the little biplane used to operate in heavy snow, it could skid along the surface of the mud until it gained enough speed to take off, and could also land in muck … provided the pilot set it down as gently as if eggs were under the skis. Otherwise it dug its nose into the ground and sometimes flipped, with unfortunate results for all concerned.
The mud in the revetment that housed Ludmila’s U-2 was heavily strewn with straw, which meant she didn’t even sink to her ankles, let alone to midcalf as she had outside. She didn’t squelch as much, either.
Georg Schultz was adjusting one of the struts that joined the U-2’s upper and lower wings when she came into the revetment. “Guten Tag,” he said cautiously.
“Good day,” she returned, also in German, also cautiously. He hadn’t made any unwelcome advances since she’d rounded on him for trying it, and he had kept on maintaining her Kukuruznik with his usual fanatic attention to detail. They still weren’t easy around each other: she’d caught him watching her when he didn’t think she’d notice, while he had to be nervous she’d speak to her fellow Russians about what he’d done. A thoroughgoing fascist, he was tolerated only for his mechanical skills. If the Russians found a reason not to tolerate him, he wouldn’t last long.
He stuck a screwdriver into a pocket of his coveralls, came to attention so stiff it mocked the respect it was supposed to convey. “The aircraft is ready for flight, Comrade Pilot,” he reported.
“Thank you,” Ludmila answered. She did not call him “Comrade Mechanic” in return, not because it sounded unnatural to her in German, but because Schultz used for sarcasm what should have been a term of egalitarian respect. She wondered how he’d survived in Hitlerite Germany; in the Soviet Union that attitude would surely have seen him purged.
She checked the fuel level and the ammunition loads herself: no such thing as being too careful. When she was satisfied, she stepped out of the revetment and waved for groundcrew men. She, they, and Schultz manhandled the Kukuruznik out onto the runway. It stayed on top of the mud more easily than they did.
When Schultz yanked at the prop, the little Shvetsov five-cylinder radial began to buzz almost at once. The engine’s exhaust fumes made Ludmila cough, but she nodded approvingly at its note. Nazi and lecher though he was, Georg Schultz knew his work.
Ludmila released the brake, applied the throttle. The U-2 slid down the airstrip, mud splattering in its wake. When she’d built up the speed she needed (not much), she eased back on the stick and the biplane abandoned the boggy earth for the freedom of the sky.
With the rasputitsa below her, Ludmila could savor the beginnings of spring. The slipstream that slid over the windscreen no longer turned her nose and cheeks to lumps of ice. The sun shone cheerily out of a blue sky with only a few plump white clouds, and would not disappear below the horizon when later afternoon came. The air smelled of growing things, not of the mud in which they grew.
She wished she could fly higher to see more. This was a day when flying was a joy, not a duty. But just when, for a moment, she was on the verge of forgetting why she flew, she skimmed low over the rusting hulks of two T-34s, one with its turret lying upside down fifteen meters away from the hull. She wondered whether the Germans or Lizards had killed the Soviet tanks.
Either way, the melancholy sight reminded her someone would kill her, too, if she failed to remember she was in the middle of a war. With every second, Lizard-held territory drew closer.
After so many missions, flying into country the alien imperialist invaders controlled had begun to approach the routine. She’d dropped small bombs on them and shot at them, smuggled in weapons and propaganda for the partisans. Today’s mission was different.
“You are to pick up a man,” Colonel Karpov had told her. “His name is Nikifor Sholudenko. He has information valuable to the Soviet Union. What this information is, I do not know, only its importance.”
“I understand, Comrade Colonel,” Ludmila had answered. The more one knew, the more one could be … encouraged to tell if captured.
An apple orchard halfway between Konotop and Romni. That’s what he’d said, at any rate. It would have been easy if she’d been able to fly straight over Konotop on a course for Romni. Well, it would have been easier, anyhow. But the Lizards held Konotop in their little clawed hands. Flying over it would have resulted in the untimely demise she’d so far managed to forestall.
And so, as usual, she flew a track that reminded her of what she’d learned in biology of the twists of the intestines within the abdominal cavity, all performed less than fifty meters off the ground. If everything went perfectly, the last jink would put her right at the orchard. If things went as they usually did—well, she told herself, I’ll manage somehow.
Off to her left, she watched a Lizard tank struggling to pull three or four trucks from the morass into which they’d blundered. The tank wasn’t having a much easier time moving than the trucks, Ludmila’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a predator’s grin. If she hadn’t been under orders, she could have shot up the convoy. But deviating from the mission assigned would have caused her more grief than it was worth.
Another change of course and—if everything had gone right—the apple orchard should have been a couple of kilometers dead ahead. It wasn’t, of course. She began a search spiral, not something she was happy to do in broad daylight: too much chance of flying past Lizards who weren’t so preoccupied as that last bunch had been.
There! Bare-branched trees beginning to go green, with here and there the first white blossoms that before long would make the orchard look as if snow had fallen on it, though all the rest of the world was verdant with spring. A man waited in a
mongst the trees.
Ludmila looked around for the best place to land her plane. One stretch of boggy ground seemed no different from another. She’d hoped the partisans would have marked off a strip, but no such luck. After a moment, she realized no one had told her this Sholudenko was connected with the partisans. She’d assumed as much, but what were assumptions worth? Not a kopeck.
“As close to the orchard as I can,” she said, making the decision aloud. She’d landed on airfields which were just that—fields—so often that she took one more such landing for granted. Down she came, killing her airspeed and peering ahead to make sure she wasn’t about to go into a hole or anything of the sort.
She was down and sliding along before she saw the old gnarled roots sticking out of the ground. She realized then, too late, that the orchard had once been bigger than it was now. She couldn’t wrench back on the stick and take off again; she wasn’t going fast enough.
The Kukuruznik didn’t need much room to land. God willing (a thought that welled up unbidden through her Marxist-Leninist education and training), everything would be all right.
She almost made it. But just when she started to believe she would, the tip of her left ski caught under a root as thick as her arm. The U-2 tried to spin back around the way it had come. A wing dug into the ground; she heard a spar snap. The prop smacked the ground and snapped. One wooden blade whined past her head. Then the Kukuruznik flipped over onto its back, leaving Ludmila hanging upside down in the open pilot’s cabin.
“Bozhemoi—my God,” she said shakily. No, the dialectic somehow didn’t spring to mind when she’d just done her best to kill herself.
Squelch, squelch, squelch. Someone, presumably the fellow who’d been standing in the apple orchard, was coming up to what had been her aircraft and was now just so much junk. In a dry voice, he said, “I’ve seen that done better.”
“So have I,” Ludmila admitted. “… Comrade Sholudenko?”
“The same,” he said. “They didn’t tell me you would be a woman. Are you all right? Do you need help getting out?”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 99
