In the Balance (25 page)

But the hot-tamale man just stared steadily back at Bobby Fiore. “Mister, I can’t sell you what I don’ got. An’ if you beat on me, maybe I won’t hit back, though you ain’t such a real big man as that. What I do, mister, I tell the Lizards. Y’all may be white, but them Lizards, they treats all kinds o’ folks like they was niggers. White, black, don’t make no never mind to them. We ain’t free no more, but we is equal.”

Fiore gaped at him. He looked back, steady still. Then he nodded, as peaceably as if they’d been talking about the weather, and started pushing his cart up Sycamore Street. The cowbell clanked. “Hot tamales! Git yo’ hot tamales!”

Fiore looked down at the two he’d bought. His father had known hard times. He thought he had, too, but till now he’d been wrong. Hard times were when, you ate cat and were happy you had it to eat. He ate both tamales, then deliberately licked his fingers clean.

He walked farther into town. Then he heard behind him the click of Lizards’ nails on asphalt. He turned around to look. That was a mistake. The Lizards all pointed their guns at him. One made an unmistakable gesture—
come here
. Gulping, he came. The Lizards surrounded him. None of them came up past his shoulder, but with their weapons, that didn’t matter.

They marched him back toward their razor-blade fence. When he passed the slow-moving tamale man, the fellow just grinned. “I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do!” Fiore shouted. The hot-tamale man laughed out loud.

6

Warsaw knew naked war again, the crack of rifles, the harsh, abrupt roar of howitzers, the screech and whine of incoming shells, the crash when they struck and the slow rumbling crumple of collapsing masonry afterward. Almost, Moishe Russie longed for the days of the sealed-off ghetto, when dying came slow rather than of a sudden. Almost.

Ironic that Jews could come and go in the whole city now, just when the whole city became a battlefield. As the Poles had fought to the last in Warsaw against vastly superior Nazi forces, so now the Germans, embattled in turn, were making Warsaw a fortress against the overwhelming might of the Lizards.

A Lizard plane screamed overhead, almost low enough to touch but too fast for antiaircraft guns to hit. Bombs fell, one after another. The explosions that followed were bigger than those the usual run of Lizard bombs produced unaided (like everyone else in Warsaw—German, Pole, or Jew—Russie had become a connoisseur of explosions); the Lizards must have set off some German ammunition.

“What shall we do,
Reb
Moishe?” wailed a man in the shelter (actually, it was only a room in the ground floor of a reasonably stout building, but calling it safety might make it so—names, as any kabbalist knew, had power).

“Pray,” Russie answered. He’d begun to grow used to the title with which the Jews of Warsaw insisted on adorning him.

More explosions. Through them, the man cried, “Pray for whom? For the Germans who would kill us in particular or for the Lizards who would kill everyone who stands in their way, which is to say, all of mankind?”

“Such a question, Yitzkhak,” another man chided. “How is the
reb
to answer a question like that?”

With the Jewish love of disputation even in the face of death, Yitzkhak retorted, “What is a
reb
for, but to answer questions like that?”

It was indeed the question of the moment. Russie knew that, only too well. Finding an answer that satisfied was hard, hard. Through the different-toned
roars and crashes of aircraft, shells, bullets, and bombs, the people huddled against one another and passed the terrifying time by arguing. “Why should we do anything for the
ferkakte
Nazis? They murder us for no better reason than that we’re Jews.”

“This makes them better than the Lizards, who would murder us for no better reason than that we’re people? Remember Berlin. In an instant, as much suffering as the Germans took three years to give us.”

“They deserve it. God made the Germans as a scourge for us, and God made the Lizards as a scourge for the Germans.” A near miss from a bomb sent chunks of plaster raining down from the ceiling onto the heads and shoulders of the people in the shelter. If the Lizards were God’s scourge on the Germans, they also chastised the Jews, Russie thought. But then, scourges were not brooms, and did not sweep clean.

Someone twisted the argument in a new direction: “God made the Lizards? I can’t believe that.”

“If God didn’t, Who did?” someone else countered.

Russie knew the answer the Poles outside the ghetto’s shattered walls gave to that. But no matter what the
goyim
thought, Jews put no great stock in the Devil. God was God; how could He have a rival?

But fitting the Lizards into God’s scheme of things wasn’t easy, either, even as scourges. The Germans had plastered Warsaw with posters of a
Wehrmacht
soldier superimposed over a photograph of naked burnt corpses in the ruins of Berlin. In German, Polish, and even Yiddish, the legend below read,
HE STANDS BETWEEN YOU—AND THIS
.

It was a good, effective poster. Russie would have reckoned it more effective still had. he not seen so many naked Jewish corpses in Warsaw, corpses dead on account of the Germans. Still, he said, “I will pray for the Germans, as I would pray for any men who sin greatly.”

Hisses and jeers met his words. Someone—he thought it was Yitzkhak—shouted, “I’ll pray for the Germans, too—to catch the cholera.” Cries of agreement rang loud and often profane—
no way to speak of prayer
, Russie thought disapprovingly.

“Let me finish,” he said, and won a measure, if not of quiet, then of lowered voices: the advantage of being thought a
reb
, someone whose words were reckoned worth hearing. He went on, “I will pray for the Germans, but I shall not aid them. They want to wipe us from the face of the earth. However badly these Lizards treat all mankind, they will treat us no worse than any other part of it. Thus I see in them God’s judgment, which may be harsh but is never unjust.”

The Jews in the shelter listened to Russie, but not all followed his way of thinking. Punctuated by blasts outside, the dispute went on. Someone tapped Russie on the arm: a clean-shaven young man (Russie was almost
sure the fellow had fewer years than his own twenty-six, though his beardless cheeks also accented his youth) in a cloth cap and shabby tweed jacket. He said, “Will you do more than simply stand aside while Lizards and Germans fight,
Reb
Moishe?” From under the stained brim of the cap, his eyes bored into Russie while he awaited his reply.

“What more can I do?” Russie asked cautiously. He wanted to shift his feet. He’d not been under such intense scrutiny since his last oral examination before the war, and maybe not then; this young, secular-looking Jew had eyes sharp and piercing as slivers of glass. “And who are you?”

“I’m Mordechai Anielewicz,” the smooth-faced young man answered, his offhand tone making his name seem small and unimportant. “As for what you can do …” He put his head close to Moishe’s—not, Russie thought, that there was much danger of anyone overhearing them in the noisy chaos of the makeshift shelter. “As for what you can do—you can help us when we hit the Germans.”

“When you what?” Russie stared at him.

“When we hit the Germans,” Anielewicz repeated. “We have grenades, pistols, a few rifles, even one machine gun. The
Armja Krajowa”
—the Home Army, the Polish resistance forces—“has many more. If we rise, the Nazis won’t be able to fight us and the Lizards both, and Warsaw will fall. And we will have our vengeance.” His whole face, thin and pale like everyone else’s, blazed with anticipation.

“I—I don’t know,” Russie stammered. “What makes you think the Lizards will make better masters than the Germans?”

“How could they be worse?” Every line of Anielewicz’s body was a shout of contempt.

“This I do not know, but after we have seen so much suffering, who knows what may be possible?” Russie said. “And the Poles—will they really rise with you, or sit on their hands and let the Nazis slaughter you? For every
Armja Krajowa
man, there’s another in the dark blue police.” The German-led Order Police wore uniforms of a shade nearly navy. Russie added, “Sometimes the
Armja Krajowa
man
is
in the dark blue police. There are traitors everywhere.”

Anielewicz shrugged, as if hearing nothing he didn’t already know. “Most of them hate Germans worse than Jews. As for those who don’t, well, we’ll have more guns after the rising than we do now. If we fight Germans, we can fight Poles, too. Come on,
Reb
Moishe—you’ve said all along the Lizards were God’s means of delivering us from the Nazis. Say it again when we rise, to hearten us and bring new fighters to our cause.”

“But the Lizards are not even human beings,” Russie said.

Anielewicz impaled him on another stare. “Are the Nazis?”

“Yes,” he answered at once. “Evil human beings, but human beings all the same. I don’t know what to tell you. I—” Russie stopped, shaking his head in bewilderment. Ever since God granted him a sign—ever since the Lizards came to Earth—he’d been treated as someone important, as someone whose opinion mattered.
Reb
Moishe: even Anielewicz called him that. Now, he discovered that with importance came responsibility; hundreds, more like thousands, of lives would turn on what he decided. All at once, he wished he were simply a starving onetime medical student once more.

But that was not the sort of wish God was in the habit of granting. Russie temporized: “By when must I decide?”

“We strike tomorrow night,” Anielewicz answered. Then, with a couple of quick wriggles, he slid away from Russie and lost himself in the packed shelter.

After a while, Lizard bombs stopped raining down. No sirens wailed to announce the all clear, but that proved nothing. Power was erratic in Warsaw these days. For that matter, power had always been erratic in the ghetto. People took advantage of the lull to make their escape, to try to rejoin their loved ones.

As he made his way to the door with the rest, Russie looked for Mordechai Anielewicz. He did not find him; one shabby Jew looked all too much like another, especially from behind. Russie came out onto Gliniana Street, a couple of blocks east of the overflowingly full Jewish cemetery.

He glanced toward the graveyard. The Germans had positioned a couple of 8.8-centimeter antiaircraft guns in it; their long barrels stuck up from among the tumbled headstones like monster elephant trunks. Russie could see the gun crews moving around now that the bombardment had eased up.

The sun sparked dully off the matte finish of their helmets.
Nazis
, Russie thought,
the source of endless misery and death and ruin
. A plume of cigarette smoke floated up from one of them. They were Nazis, but they were also human beings. Would life be better under things called Lizards?

“Send me a sign, God,” he begged silently, as he had on the night when the Lizards came. One of the gunners assumed a spraddle-legged stance Russie recognized: the fellow was urinating. Hoarse German laugher floated to Russie’s ears. It filled him with rage—how like the Nazis to piss on dead Jews and then laugh about it.

All at once, he realized he had his sign.

An intelligence officer set a new stack of documents in front of Atvar. As was his habit, he skimmed through the summaries till he found one that engaged his full attention. It didn’t take long this time. He read every word of the second report in the stack, then turned one eye toward the intelligence male. “This report is confirmed as accurate?”

“Which one do you have there, Exalted Fleetlord?” The officer peered down to see where Atvar had paused. “Oh, that one. Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, no possible mistake there. The Big Uglies in the town in the empire of Deutschland are fighting amongst themselves—quite ferociously, too.”

“And the radio intercepts? Those are reliable as well?”

The intelligence male nervously twitched his tailstump. “There we are less certain, Exalted Fleetlord. One of the languages seems close to Deutsch, the other rather further from Russki—these cursed Tosevites have altogether too many languages. But if we correctly understand the import of these signals, one faction in the city appears to be seeking our aid against the other.”