“I picked it up from the Army guys I was with for a while,” he answered. “It stands for ‘fouled’-but that’s not what they usually say-‘up beyond all recognition.’ ”
“Oh, like snafu,” she said, neatly cataloging it.
After that, silence stretched between them. Jens wanted to ask the one question he hadn’t put to her-“Will you come back to me?”-but he didn’t. Part of him was afraid she’d say no. A different part was just as much afraid she’d say yes.
When he didn’t say anything, Barbara said: “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, which was honest enough to make her nod soberly. He went on, “In the end, it’s more or less up to you, isn’t it?”
“Not altogether.” Her left hand spread over her belly; he wondered if she knew it had moved. “For instance, do you want me back-under the circumstances?”
Since he’d been asking himself the same thing, he couldn’t exclaim Yes! the way he probably should have. When a couple of seconds passed without his saying anything, Barbara looked away. That frightened him. He didn’t want to throw her out, either. He said, “I’m sorry, dear. Too much landing on me all at once.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” She shook her head wearily, then got to her feet. “I’d better get downstairs and help with the work, Jens. I’ve sort of turned into assistant Lizard liaison person.”
“Wait.” He had work, too, a load that was going to quadruple now that the Met Lab was finally here. But that didn’t have to start at this precise instant. He got up, too, hurried around the desk and took her in his arms. She held him tight; her body molded itself to his. It felt so familiar, so right. He wished he’d had the sense to lock his office door: he might have tried to drag her down to the floor then and there. It had been so long… He remembered the last time they’d made love on the floor, with Lizard bombs falling all over Chicago.
She tilted her face up, kissed him with more warmth than she’d shown down on East Evans. But before he could try dragging her down to the floor even with the door unlocked, she pulled away and said, “I really should go.”
“Where will you stay tonight?” he asked. There. That brought it out in the open. If she said she’d stay with him, he didn’t know what he’d do-not go back to the BOQ, that was for sure.
But she just shook her head and answered, “Don’t ask me that yet, please. Right now I don’t even know which end is up.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly; he’d been up when they held each other.
Barbara walked out of the office. He listened to her footsteps receding down the hallway and then in the stairwell. He went back to his desk, looked out the window behind it. There she came, out, of Science Hall.
And there she went, over to Sam Yeager. No doubt who he was, even from three floors up: plenty of men in Army uniforms standing around, but only one of them stayed by the two Lizard prisoners. Jens felt like a Peeping Tom as he watched his wife hug and kiss the tall soldier, but he couldn’t make himself tear his eyes away. When he compared the way she held Yeager to how she’d embraced him, a cold, inescapable conclusion formed in his mind: wherever she slept tonight, it wouldn’t be with him.
At last Barbara broke free of the other man, but her hand lingered affectionately at his waist for an extra few seconds. Jens made himself turn away from the window and look at his desk. No matter what happens to the rest of my life, there’s still a war on and I have a ton of work to do, he told himself.
He could make himself lean forward in the chair. He could make himself pull a report from the varnished pine IN basket and set it on the blotter in front of him. But, try as he would, he couldn’t make the words mean anything. Misery and rage strangled his brains.
If that was bad, pedaling back to the BOQ with a silent Oscar right behind him felt ten times worse. “I won’t take it,” he whispered again and again, not wanting the guard to hear. “I won’t.”
Normal life. Moishe Russie had almost forgotten such a thing could exist. Certainly he’d known nothing of the sort for the past three and a half years, since the Stukas and broad-winged Heinkel 111s and other planes of the Nazi war machine began dropping death on Warsaw.
First the bombardment. Then the ghetto: insane crowding, disease, starvation, overwork-death for tens of thousands, served up a centimeter at a time. Then another spasm of war as the Lizards drove the Germans from Warsaw. And then that strange time as the Lizards’ mouthpiece. He’d thought that was close to normal; at least he and his family had had food on the table.
But the Lizards were as eager to put shackles on his spirit as the Nazis had been to squeeze work out of his body and then let it die… or to ship him away and just kill him, regardless of how much work was left in him.
Then God only knew how long underground in a dark sardine tin, and then the flight to Lodz. None of that had been even remotely normal. But now here he was, with Rivka and Reuven, in a flat with water and electricity (most of the time, at least), and with no sign the Lizards knew where he’d gone.
It wasn’t paradise-but what was? It was a chance to live like a human being instead of a starving draft horse or a hunted rabbit. This, by now, is my definition of normal? Russie asked himself as he strode down Zgierska Street to see what the market had to offer.
He shook his head. “Not normal,” he insisted aloud, as if someone had disagreed with him. Normal would have meant going back to medical school, where the worst he would hate had to endure was hostility from the Polish students. He itched to be able to start learning again, and to start practicing what he’d learned.
Instead, here he came, ambling along down a street in a town not his own, clean-shaven, doing his best to act like a man who’d never had a thought in his life. This was safer than the way he’d been living, but… normal? No.
As usual, the Balut Market square was packed. Some new posters had gone up on the dirty brick walls of the buildings surrounding the square. Bigger than life, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski looked down on the ragged men and women gathered there, his arms and hands outstretched in exhortation. WORK MEANS FREEDOM! the poster cried in Yiddish, Polish, and German.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI. A shiver ran down Russie’s back when he saw that in German. The Nazis had put the same legend above the gates of their extermination camp at Auschwitz. He wondered if Rumkowski knew.
He got in line to buy cabbage. More of Rumkowski’s posters stood behind the peddler’s cart. So did other, smaller ones with big red letters that announced WANTED FOR THE RAPE AND MURDER OF A LITTLE GIRL in the three most widely spoken languages of Lizard-held Poland.
Who could be such a monster? Russie thought. His eyes, drawn by those screaming red letters, looked to the picture on the poster. It was one of the fancy photographs the Lizards took, in full color and giving the effect of three dimensions. Moishe noticed that before he realized with horror that he recognized the face on the poster. It was his own.
The poster didn’t call him by his proper name-that would, have given the game away. Instead, it styled him Israel Gottlieb. It said he’d committed his ghastly crimes in Warsaw and was being sought all over Poland, and it offered a large reward for his capture.
His head whipped wildly back and forth. Were people staring at him, at the poster, getting ready to shout at him or grab him and drag him to the cobblestones? He’d never imagined the Lizards would come up with such a devilish way of trying to bring him back into their hands. He felt as if they’d set the mark of Cain on his forehead.
But none of the men in hats or caps, none of the women in head scarves, acted as if the mark were visible. Few even glanced at the poster, of those who did, none looked from it to Russie.
His eyes went to it once more. On that second examination he began to understand. The Lizards’ photo showed him as he had been when he was speaking on the radio for Zolraag: in other words, bearded and in a dark homburg rather than clean-shaven and with a flat gray cloth cap of the sort he wore these days. To him, the
difference seemed minuscule: it was, after all, his own face. But nobody else seemed to have the faintest suspicion he was the alleged monster whose visage would undoubtedly be used to frighten children.
Bristles rasped under his fingers as he rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. From here on out, he’d shave every day, no matter what: putting it off till tomorrow was liable to make him resemble himself too much.
He finally reached the head of the line, bought a couple of cabbages, and asked the price of some green onions the peddler had in a little wicker basket on his cart. When the fellow told him, he clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “Ganef! You should grow like an onion-with your head in the ground.”
“An onion should grow from your pippuk,” the vegetable seller retorted, answering one Yiddish execration with another. “Then it would be cheaper.”
They haggled for a while, but Russie couldn’t beat the man down to a price that wouldn’t leave Rivka furious at him, so he gave up and left, carrying his cabbages in a canvas bag. He thought about stopping to buy a cup of tea from a fellow with a battered tin samovar, but decided that would be tempting fate. The sooner he got out of the square, the fewer eyes would have a chance to light on him.
Going out, though, was swimming against the tide. The Balut Market square had filled even fuller when he stood in line. Then, abruptly, the swarm of people coming in slowed. Russie looked up just in time to keep from being run over by Chaim Rumkowski’s coach.
The horse that drew the four-wheeled carriage snorted in annoyance as the driver, a hard-faced man in a gray greatcoat and quasimilitary cap, hauled back on the reins to stop it. The driver looked annoyed, too. Russie touched the brim of his own cap and mumbled, “Sorry, sir.” He’d had plenty of practice fawning on the Germans, but doing it for one of his own people grated even harder on him.
Mollified, the driver dipped his head, but from behind him came the querulous voice of an elderly man:
“You up there-come here.” Heart sinking, Russie obeyed. As he walked back toward Rumkowski, he saw that the driver’s bench still sported a neat sign left over from the days of German domination: WAGEN DES AELTESTEN DER JUDEN (coach of the Eldest of the Jews), with the same in smaller letters in Yiddish below.
He wondered if the Eldest still wore a yellow Star of David on his right breast, as the Nazis had required the ghetto Jews to do. No, he found to his relief, although he could still see where the star had been sewn onto Rumkowski’s herringbone tweed overcoat.
Then Moishe stopped worrying about small things, for sitting beside Rumkowski, almost hidden by his bulk, was a Lizard. Russie didn’t think he had ever seen this particular alien, but he couldn’t be sure. He felt as if all the posters with his picture on them were growing hands and pointing straight at him.
Rumkowski pointed straight at him, too, with a stubby forefinger. “You should be careful. You were almost badly hurt.”
“Yes, Eldest. I’m sorry, Eldest.” Russie looked down at the ground, both to show humility and to keep Rumkowski and the Lizard from getting a good look at him. The aliens had as much trouble telling people apart as people did with their kind, but he did not want to find himself an exception to the rule.
The Lizard leaned forward to see him without being blocked by Rumkowski’s body. Its eye turrets swiveled in a way Russie knew well. In fair German, it asked him, “What do you have in that bag?”
“Only a couple of cabbages.” Russie had the presence of mind not to add superior sir, as he had learned to do back in Warsaw. That would just let the Lizard know he was familiar with the usages of its kind.
“How much did you pay for these cabbages?” Rumkowski asked.
“Ten zlotys, Eldest,” Moishe said.
Rumkowski turned to the Lizard and said, “You see, Bunim, how we have flourished under your rule. A few months ago, these cabbages would have been many times as dear. We are always grateful for your aid, and will do whatever we can to continue deserving your favor.”
“Yes, of course,” Bunim said. Had he been a human, Russie would have thought his voice full of contempt: how could one not feel contemptuous of such an abject thing as Rumkowski had become? Yet the Lizards, even more than the Germans, assumed themselves to be the Herrenvolk, the master race. Perhaps Bunim accepted sycophancy from the Eldest simply as his due.
Rumkowski pointed to his own propaganda posters on the walls of the market square. “We know our debt, Bunim, and we work hard to repay it.”
Bunim swung one eye toward the posters while keeping the other on Russie. Moishe made ready to fling the cabbages at his scaly face and flee. But the Lizard just said, “Continue on this course and all will be well.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Rumkowski said in the hissing language of the Race. Moishe had all he could do to keep his face blank and stupid; if he was just an ordinary shlemiel on the street, he had no business understanding the Lizards’ speech. The Eldest seemed to remember he was there. “Take your food home to your family,” he said, dropping back into Yiddish. “We may not be so hungry as we once were, but I know the memory lingers.”
“You’re right about that.” Russie touched the brim of his cap. “Thank you, Eldest.” He scuttled away from the carriage as fast as he could without seeming to be running for ms life. Acrid sweat dripped from his armpits and down his back.
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 sons 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 carri
age 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.
Tilting the Balance w-2 Page 27
