Tilting The Balance (7 page)

“That might work, sir, I honestly don’t know,” Goldfarb said. “We weren’t any too keen on experimenting, not up above Angels Twenty, if you know what I mean.”

“No quarrel there,” Roundbush assured him. “We’d have to try it on the ground first: if a transmitter there survived by shifting frequencies, the result might be worth testing in aircraft as well.”

He paused to scribble some notes. Goldfarb was delighted research and development had not stopped because of wartime emergencies, and even more delighted to be a part of the effort at Bruntingthorpe. But he’d already promised himself that, when the radar-equipped Meteors flew, he’d be in the rear seat of one of them. Having become part of an aircrew, he knew he’d never again be content to stay on the ground.

Moishe Russie was tired of staying underground. The irony of his position hit him in the teeth like a rifle butt in the hands of an SS man. When the Lizards came to Earth, he’d thought they were the literal answer to his prayers; absent their arrival, the Nazis would have massacred the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and in the others they’d set up throughout Poland.

The Jews had been looking for a miracle then. When Moishe declared that he’d had one, he gained enormous prestige in the ghetto; before, he’d been just another medical student slowly starving to death along with everyone else. He’d urged the Jews to rise, to help throw the Germans out and let the Lizards in.

And so he’d become one of the Lizards’ favorite humans. He’d broadcast propaganda for them, telling – truthfully – of the horrors and atrocities the Nazis had committed in Poland. The Lizards came to think he would say anything for them. They’d wanted him to praise their destruction of Washington, D.C., and say it was as just as the devastation that had fallen on Berlin.

He’d refused… and so he found himself here, hiding in a ghetto bunker that had been built with the Nazis, not the Lizards, in mind.

His wife Rivka picked that moment to ask, “How long have we been down here?”

“Too long,” their son Reuven chimed in.

He was right; Moishe knew he was right. Reuven and Rivka had been cooped up in the bunker longer than he had; they’d gone into hiding so the Lizards couldn’t use threats against them to bend him to their will. After that, the Lizards put a gun to his head to make him say what they wanted. He did not think of himself as a brave man, but he’d defied them even so. They hadn’t killed him. In a way, what they did was worse – they killed his words; broadcasting a twisted recording that made him seem to say what they wanted even when he hadn’t.

Russie had had his revenge; he’d made a recording in a tiny studio in the ghetto that detailed what the Lizards had done to him, and the Jewish fighters had managed to smuggle it out of Poland to embarrass the aliens. After that, he’d had to disappear himself.

Rivka said, “Do you even know, Moishe, whether it’s day or night up there?”

“No more than you do,” he admitted. The bunker had a clock; both he and Rivka had been faithful about keeping it wound. But the clock had only a twelve-hour dial, and after a while they’d lost track of which twelve hours they were in. Even by candlelight, he could see the dial from where he stood: it was a quarter past three. But did that mean bustling afternoon or dead of night? He had no idea. All he knew was that, at the moment, everyone here was awake.

“I don’t know how much longer we can stand this,” Rivka said. “It’s no fit life for a human being, hiding down here in the darkness like a rat in its hole.”

“But if it’s the only way we can go on, then go on we will,” Moishe answered sharply. “Life in wartime is never easy – do you think you’re in America? Even if we are underground, we’re better off now than when the Nazis ruled the ghetto.”

“Are we?”

“I think so. We have plenty of food-” Their other child, a daughter, had died during the Nazi occupation, of dysentery aggravated by starvation. Moishe had known what he needed to do to save her, but without food and medicine he’d been helpless.

But now Rivka said, “So what? We could see our friends before, share our troubles. If the Germans beat us on the streets, it was just because we happened to be there. If the Lizards spy us, they’ll shoot us on sight.”

Since that was manifestly true, Moishe chose the only ploy left to him: he changed the subject. “Even now, our people are better off under the Lizards than they were under the Germans.”

“Yes, and that’s thanks in large part to you,” Rivka retorted. “And what have you got for it? Your whole family, buried alive!” So much anger and bitterness clogged her voice that Reuven started to cry. Even as he comforted his son, Moishe blessed the little boy for short-circuiting the argument.

After he and Rivka got Reuven calmed down again, Moishe said carefully, “If you feel you must, I suppose you and Reuven can go back above ground. Not that many people knew you by sight; with God’s help, you might go a long time before you were betrayed. Anyone who wanted to curry favor with the Lizards could gain it by turning me in. Or a Pole might do it for no better reason than that he hates Jews.”

Rivka sighed. “You know we won’t do that. We won’t leave you, and you’re right, you can’t come up. But if you think we’re well off here, you’re meshuggeh.”

“I never said we were well off,” Russie answered after a brief pause to search his memory and make sure he really hadn’t said anything so foolish. “I only said things could be worse, and they could.” The Nazis could have shipped the whole Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka or that other extermination camp they were just finishing when the Lizards came, the one they called Auschwitz. He didn’t mention that to his wife. Some things, even if true, were too horrific to use as fuel in a quarrel.

The argument petered out. Reuven got sleepy, so they put him to bed. That meant they needed to go to bed themselves not much later; they couldn’t get much sleep when the boy was awake and bouncing off the walls of the cramped bunker.

Noises woke Rivka first, then Moishe. Reuven snored on, even when his parents sat up. Noises in the cellar of the block of flats that concealed the bunker were always frightening. At times, Jewish fighters whom Mordechai Anielewicz led came down with fresh supplies for the Russies, but Moishe always wondered if the next appearance would be the one that brought the knock on the plasterboard panel hiding the doorway.

Rap, rap, rap! The sharp sound echoed through the bunker. Russie started violently. Beside him, Rivka’s lips pulled back from her teeth, her eyes widened, and the skin all over her face tightened down onto the bones in a mask of fear. Rap, rap, rap!

Russie had vowed he wouldn’t go easily. Moving as quiet as he could, he slid out of bed, grabbed a long kitchen knife, and blew out the last lamp, plunging the bunker into darkness blacker than any above-ground midnight.

Rap. rap. rap! Shoving and scraping noises as the plasterboard panel was dislodged and pushed aside. The bunker door itself was barred from the inside. Moishe knew it wouldn’t hold against anyone determined to break it down. He raised the knife high. The first one who came through – Jewish traitor or Lizard – would take as much steel as he could give. That much he promised himself.

But instead of booted feet pounding on the door or a battering ram crashing against it, an urgent Yiddish voice called, “We know you’re in there, Reb Moishe. Open this verkakte door, will you? We have to get you away before the Lizards come.’

A trick? A trap? Automatically, Moishe looked toward Rivka. The darkness he’d made himself stymied him. “What to do?” he called softly.

“Open the door,” she answered. “But-”

“Open the door,” Rivka repeated. “Nobody in the company of the Lizards would have sworn at it that way.”

It seemed a slim reed to snatch. If it broke, it would pierce more than his hand. But how could he hold the invaders at bay? All at once, he realized they didn’t have to come in after him. Suppose they just stood back and sprayed the bunker with machinegun bullets… or started a fire and let him and his wife and child roast? He let the kitchen knife clatter to the floor, fumbled blindly for the bar, lifted it out of its rest, and pushed the door open.

One of the two Jews in the cellar carried an oil-burning lantern and a pistol. The lantern wasn’t very bright, but dazzled Moishe anyhow. The fighter said, “Took you long enough. Come on. You have to hurry. Some mamzer talked where he shouldn’t, and the Lizards’ll be here soon.”

Belief took root in Russie. “Get Reuven,” he called to his wife.

“I have him,” she answered. “He’s not quite awake, but he’ll come – won’t you, dear?”

“Come where?” Reuven asked blurrily.

“Out of the bunker,” Rivka said, that being all she knew. It was plenty to galvanize the boy. He let out a wild whoop and bounded out of bed. “Wait!” Rivka exclaimed. “You need your shoes. In fact, we all need our shoes. We were asleep.”

“At half past eight in the morning?” the Jew with the lantern said. “I wish I was.” After a moment, though, he added, “Not down here, though, I have to admit.”

Moishe had forgotten he wore only socks. As he pulled on shoes and tied the laces, he asked, “Do we have time to take anything with us?” The books on a high shelf had become more like siblings than friends.

But the other Jew impatiently waiting outside, the one with a German Mauser slung on his back, shook his head and answered, “Reb Moishe, if you don’t get moving, you won’t have time to take yourself.”

Even the low-ceilinged cellar seemed spacious to Moishe. He started to pant on his way up the stairs; he’d had no exercise at all in the bunker. The gray, leaden light at the top of the stairwell made him blink and set his eyes to watering. After so long with candles and oil lamps, even a distant hint of daylight was overwhelming.

Then he walked out onto the street. Thick clouds hid the sun. Dirty, slushy snow lay in the gutters. The air was hardly less thick and smoky than it had been in his underground hideaway. All the same, he wanted to throw his arms wide and dance like a Chasid to let loose his delight. Reuven did caper, coltlike; with a child’s compressed grasp of time, he must have felt he’d been entombed forever. Rivka walked steadily beside him, but her pale face was alight with joy and wonder, too.

Pale – Moishe looked down at his own hands. Beneath dirt, they were white and transparent as skimmed milk. His wife and son were just as pale. Everyone grew pallid through a Polish winter; but if he and his family lost any more color, they’d disappear.

“What’s the date?” he asked, wondering how long he’d been cooped up in the bunker.

“Twenty-second of February,” the Jew with the lantern answered. “A month till spring.” He snorted. Spring seemed more likely a year away than mere weeks.

The first Lizard Moishe saw on the street made him want to run back to the bunker. The alien, though, paid him no special attention. Lizards had as much trouble telling humans apart as people did with Lizards. Moishe glanced over to Reuven and Rivka. The aliens’ difficulties in that regard had helped the Jews spirit the two of them away from right under their snouts.

“In here,” the fighter with the pistol said. The Russies obediently went up a stairway and into another block of flats. The halls smelled of cabbage and unwashed bodies and urine. In an apartment at the back of the third floor, more of Anielewicz’s warriors waited. They whisked Moishe and his family inside.

One of them grabbed Moishe by the arm and hustled him over to a table set out with a bar of yellow-tan soap, an enameled basin, a pair of shears, and a straight razor. “The beard, Reb Moishe, has to come off,” he said without preamble.

Moishe drew back in dismay. A protective hand rose to cover his chin. The SS had cut off the beards – and sometimes the ears and noses – of Jews in the ghetto for sport.

“I’m sorry,” the fellow – bearded himself – said. “We’re going to move you, we’re going to hide you. Look at yourself now.” He picked up a fragment of what might once have been a full-length mirror, thrust it in Moishe’s face.

Moishe perforce looked. He saw – himself, paler than usual, his beard longer and fuzzier than usual because he hadn’t bothered trimming it while in the bunker, but otherwise the same rather horse-faced, studious-looking Jew he’d always been.

The fighter said, “Now imagine yourself cleanshaven. Imagine a Lizard with a photograph of you as you are now looking at you – and walking on to look at someone else.”

The closest Moishe could come to seeing himself beardless was remembering what he’d looked like before his whiskers sprouted. He had trouble bringing the youth across the years and putting that face on the man he’d become.

Then Rivka said, “They’re right, Moishe. It will make you different, and we need that. Please, go ahead and shave.”

He sighed deeply, a token of surrender. Then he took the mirror from the fighter and leaned it on a shelf so he could see what he was doing. He picked up the shears and rapidly clipped as short as he could the beard he’d worn his whole adult life. What he knew about shaving was all theoretical. He splashed his face with water, then lathered the strong-smelling soap, and spread it over cheeks and chin and neck.’

Reuven snickered. “You look funny, Father!”

“I feel funny.” He picked up the razor. The bone grip molded itself to his hand, like the handle of a scalpel. The comparison seemed even more apt a few minutes later. He thought he’d seen less blood flow at an appendectomy. He nicked his ear, the hollow under his cheekbone, his chin, his larynx, and he made a good game try at slicing off his upper lip. When he rinsed himself, the water in the basin turned pink.

“You look funny, Father,” Reuven said again.

Moishe peered into the scrap of mirror. A stranger stared back at him. He looked younger than he had with the beard, but not really like his earlier self. His features were sharper-edged, bonier, more defined. He looked tougherthan he’d expected. The dried blood here and there on his face might have had something to do with that; it gave him the air of a boxer who’d just lost a tough match.

The fellow who’d handed him the mirror patted him on the back and said, “Don’t worry, Reb wasn’t speaking from experience; his own gray-brown beard reached halfway down his shirtfront.