In the Balance (72 page)

The fellow might have been thinking along with him. “I wouldn’t try that,” he said, now in accented German—or was it Yiddish? “Look behind you.” Jäger didn’t look. The man standing in the track laughed, leaned his rifle against the nearest tree. “No trick. Go ahead and look.”

This time, Jäger did. He could see two men, both with guns. He wondered how many he couldn’t see. He turned back to the fellow in front of him. “All right, you have me,” he said equably. “What happens now?”

He didn’t know which nonplussed the fellow more, his calm or his clear German. The man grabbed his rifle, a Mauser just like Jäger’s. “I thought you were one of those Nazi bastards,” he growled. “You don’t ride like a Pole or a Russian. I ought to shoot you now.” He
was
speaking Yiddish. Jäger’s heart sank.

“Hold on, Yossel,” called one of the men in back of the German. “We’re supposed to take him in to—”

“If you’re going to take me to the Lizards, do me the favor of shooting me instead,” Jäger broke in. Here was his worst nightmare coming to life around him. If the Lizards made him talk—and who knew what the Lizards could do along those lines?—he might imperil the Russians’ efforts with the stolen metal, and Germany’s would never be born.

“Why should we do any favors for a German?” Yossel said. Jäger heard snarls from behind him. Here indeed was pointless cruelty coming home to roost.

But Jäger had an answer. “Because I fought alongside Russian partisans, most of them Jews, to get what I’m carrying away from the Lizards and bring it back toward Germany.” There. It was done. If these were truly the Lizards’ creatures, he’d just done himself in. But he was done in anyhow, the instant the Lizards found what his saddlebags held. And if his captors were men …

Yossel spat. “You’re a fast liar, I give you that much. Where was this, on the road to Treblinka?” Seeing that that meant nothing to Jäger, he spoke a
word of pure German:
“Vernichtungslager.”
Extermination camp.

“I don’t know anything of extermination camps,” Jäger insisted. The men behind him growled. He wondered if they would shoot him before he could go on. He spoke quickly: “I never heard of this Treblinka. But one of the Jews in the partisan band came back alive from a place called Babi Yar, outside Kiev. He and I worked together for this common good.”

Something changed in Yossel’s face. “So you know of Babi Yar, do you, Nazi? Tell me what you think of it.”

“It sickens me,” Jäger answered at once. “I went to war against the Red Army, not—not—” He shook his head. “I am a soldier, not a murderer.”

“As if a Nazi could tell the difference,” Yossel said scornfully. But he did not raise his rifle. He and the other—well, what were they? soldiers? partisans? merely bandits?—talked back and forth, partly in Yiddish, which Jäger could follow, and partly in Polish, which he couldn’t. Had the Jew in front of him looked less alert, Jäger might have made a break. As it was, he waited for his captors to figure out what to do with him.

After a couple of minutes, one of the men behind him said, “All right, off the horse.” Jäger dismounted. His back itched uncontrollably. He was ready to whirl and start shooting at the least untoward sound; they would not find a passive victim, if that was what they wanted. But then the fellow he could not see said, “You can sling that rifle, if you care to.”

Jäger hesitated. The invitation could have been a ruse to relax him for easier disposal. But the Jews already had him at their mercy, and no fighting man with even a gram of sense left an enemy armed. Maybe they’d decided he wasn’t altogether an enemy, then. He slid the sling strap over his shoulder, asked, “What do you intend to do with me?”

“We haven’t decided yet,” Yossel said. “For now, you’ll come with us. We’ll take you to someone who can help us figure it out.” Jäger’s face must have said something, for Yossel added, “No, not a Lizard, one of us.”

“All right,”, Jäger said, “but bring the horse, too; what he has in those saddlebags is more important than I am, and your officer will need to know of it.”

“Gold?” asked the fellow who’d told Jäger to get off the horse

He didn’t want the Jews to think he was just someone to be robbed. “No, not gold. If the NKVD doesn’t miss its guess, I have there some of the same kind of stuff as the Lizards used to bomb Berlin and Washington.”

That got a reaction, all right, “Wait a minute,” Yossel said slowly. “The Russians are letting you take this—this stuff to Germany? How does that happen?”

Why don’t they keep
it
all themselves?
he meant. “If they could have kept it all, they would have, I’m sure,” Jäger answered, smiling. “But as I said, it was a joint German-Soviet combat group that won this material, and
however much reason the Russians have to dislike us Germans, they know also our scientists are not to be despised. And so …” He slapped a saddlebag.

Further colloquy, now almost entirely in Polish, among the Jews. Fmally Yossel said, “All right, German; if nothing else, you’ve confused us. Come along, you and your horse and whatever he’s carrying.”

“You have to keep me out of the Lizards’ sight,” Jäger insisted.

Yossel laughed. “No, no, we just have to keep you from being noticed. It’s not the same thing at all. Get moving, we’ve already wasted too much time here on jabber.”

The Jew proved to know what he was talking about. Over the next few days, Jäger saw more Lizards at closer range than he ever had before. Not one even looked at him; they all assumed he was just another militiaman, and so to be tolerated.

Encounters with armed Poles were more alarming. Although he’d grown a gray-streaked beard, Jäger was ironically aware he looked not the least bit Jewish. “Don’t worry about it,” Yossel told him when he said as much. “They’ll think you’re just another traitor.”

That stung. Jäger said, “You mean the way the rest of the world thinks of you Polish Jews?” He’d been with the band long enough now to speak his mind without fearing someone would shoot him for it.

“Yes, about like that,” Yossel answered calmly; he was hard to rile. “Of course, what the rest of the world still doesn’t believe is that we had good reason to like the Lizards better than you Nazis. If you know about Babi Yar, you know about that.”

Since he did know about that, and didn’t like what he knew, Jäger changed the subject. “Some of those Poles looked like they’d just as soon start shooting at us as not.”

“They probably would. They don’t like Jews, either.” Yossel’s voice was matter-of-fact. “But they don’t dare, because the Lizards have given us enough in the way of weapons to hurt them bad if they play their old games with us.”

Jäger chewed on that for a while. The Jew frankly admitted his kind depended on the Lizards. Yet he’d had endless chances to betray Jäger to them and hadn’t done it. Jäger admitted to himself that he didn’t understand what was going on. With luck, he’d find out.

That evening, they came to a town bigger than most of the others through which they’d passed. “What’s the name of this place?” Jäger asked.

At first he thought Yossel sneezed. Then the Jew repeated himself: “Hrubieszów.” The town boasted cobblestone streets, three-story buildings with cast-iron awnings, and a central boulevard that had a median strip planted with trees, perhaps to achieve a Parisian effect. Having seen the
real Paris, Jäger found the imitation laughable, but kept that to himself.

Yossel went up to one of the three-story buildings, spoke in Yiddish to the man who answered his knock. He turned to Jäger. “You go in here. Take your saddlebags with you. We’ll get your horse out of town—a strange animal that stays around is plenty to make people start asking questions.”

Jäger went in. The gray-haired Jew who stood aside to let him pass said, “Hello, friend. I’m Lejb. What shall I call you while you’re here?”

“Ich heisse Heinrich Jäger.”
Jäger answered. He’d grown resigned to the looks of horror he got for speaking German, but it was his only fluent language—and, for better or worse, he
was
a German. He could hardly deny it. Stiffly, he said, “I hope my presence will not disturb you too much, sir.”

“A Nazi—in my house. They want to put a Nazi—in
my
house?” Lejb was not talking to Jäger. The German didn’t think he was talking to himself, either. Whom did that leave? God, maybe.

As if wound into motion by a key, Lejb bustled over and shut the door. “Even a Nazi should not freeze—especially if I would freeze with him.” With what seemed a large effort of will, he made himself look at Jäger. “Will you drink tea? And there’s potato soup in the pot if you want it.”

“Yes, please. Thank you very much.” The tea was hot, the potato soup both hot and filling. Lejb insisted on giving Jäger seconds; the Jew apparently could not force himself to be a poor host. But he would not eat with Jäger; he waited until the German finished before feeding himself.

That pattern persisted over the next two days. Jäger noticed he got the same chipped bowl, the same cup, at every meal; he wondered if Lejb would throw them away once he’d left, along with his bedding and everything else he’d touched. He didn’t ask, for fear the Jew would tell him yes.

Just when he started to wonder if Yossel and the rest of the Jewish fighters had forgotten about him, his first captor returned, again under cover of darkness. Yossel said, “Somebody here wants to see you, Nazi.” From him, unlike from Lejb, the word had somehow lost most of its sting, as if it were a label and nothing more.

An unfamiliar Jew stepped into the living room of Lejb’s house. He was fair and thin and younger than Jäger would have expected for someone obviously important enough to be sent for. He did not offer to shake hands. “So you’re the German with the interesting package, are you?” he said, speaking German himself rather than Yiddish.

“Yes,” Jäger said. “Who are you?”

The newcomer smiled thinly. “Call me Mordechai.” By the way Yossel started in surprise, that might even have been his real name.
Bravado
, Jäger thought. The more the German studied Mordechai, the more impressed he
grew. Young, yes, but an officer all the way: those light eyes were hooded and alert, alive with calculation. If he’d worn German field-gray, he’d have had a colonel’s pips and his own regiment before he hit forty; Jäger recognized the type. The Jews had themselves a hotshot here.

The hotshot said, “I gather you’re a panzer soldier and that you’ve stolen something important to the Lizards. What I’ve heard from Yossel here is interesting, but it’s also secondhand. Tell it to me yourself, Jäger.”

“Just a minute,” Jäger said. Yossel bristled, but Mordechai only grunted, waiting for him to go on. He did: “You Jews cooperate with the Lizards, yet now you seem ready to betray them. Show me I can trust you not to hand me straight over to them.”

“If we wanted to do that, we could have done it already,” Mordechai pointed out. “As for how and why we work with the Lizards—hmm. Think of it like this. Back three winters ago, Russia swamped the Finns. When you Nazis invaded Russia, Finland was happy enough to ride on your coattails and take back its own. But do you think the Finns go around yelling ‘Heil Hitler!’ all day long?”

“Mmm—maybe not,” Jäger admitted. “And so?”

“And so we helped the Lizards against you Nazis, but for our own reasons—survival, for instance—not theirs. We don’t have to love them. Now I’ve told my story, and more than you deserve. You tell yours.”

Jäger did. Mordechai interrupted every so often with sharp, probing questions. The German’s respect for him grew at every one. He’d figured the Jew would know something of war and especially partisan operations—he had him pegged for a high military official. But he hadn’t figured Mordechai would know so much about the loot he carried in his saddlebags; he soon realized the Jew, though he’d never seen the mud-encrusted chunks of metal; understood them better than he did himself.

When Jäger was through (he felt squeezed dry), Mordechai steepled his fingers and stared up at the ceiling. “You know, before this war started, I worried more about what Marx thought than about God,” he remarked. His speech grew more guttural; his vowels shifted so Jäger had to think to follow him—he’d fallen out of German into Yiddish. He went on, “Ever since you Nazis shut me up in the ghetto and tried to starve me to death, I’ve had my doubts about the choice I made. Now I’m sure I was wrong.”

“Why now in particular?” Jäger asked.

“Because I would need to be the wisest rabbi who ever lived to decide whether I ought to help you Germans fight the Lizards with their own filthy weapons.”

Yossel nodded vehemently. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.

Mordechai waved him to silence. “I wish this choice fell on someone besides me. All I wanted to be before the war was an engineer.” His gaze and Jäger’s clashed, swordlike. “All I am now, thanks to you Germans, is a
fighting man.”

“That’s all I’ve ever been,” Jäger said. Once, before another war, he’d had hopes of studying biblical archaeology. But he’d learned in the trenches of France what he was good at—and how much the fatherland needed folk with talents like his. Set against that knowledge, biblical archaeology was small beer.

“And so on us the future turns,” Mordechai mused. “I don’t know about you, Jäger”—it was the first time he’d used the German’s name—“but I wish my own shoulders were wider.”

“Yes,” Jäger said.

Mordechai eyed him again, this time with a soldier’s calculation. “Simplest would be to shoot you and dump your body into the Vistula. So many have gone in that no one would notice one more. Toss your saddlebags in after you and I’d never have to wake up sweating in the night for fear of what you damned Nazis were going to do with this stuff you’ve stolen.”

“No—instead you’d wake up sweating in the night that no one could do anything to fight the Lizards.” Jäger tried to keep his voice and manner calm. He’d hazarded his life often enough on the battlefield, but never like this—it felt more like poker than war. He tossed another chip into the pot: “And no matter what you do to me, Stalin already has his share of the loot. Will you also sweat for what the Bolsheviks do with it?”