Tilting The Balance (50 page)

Instead, he yawned and said, “Let’s go to bed.”

Rivka put down the sock again. She hesitated, then said, “Do you want me to look for the flat? The fewer people who see you, the smaller the risk we run.”

Moishe knew that was true. Nonetheless, his pride revolted at hiding behind Rivka every day – and he had no evidence whatever to back up his hunch. So he said, “It shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll be only a moment crossing the Balut, and I don’t look like my poster picture anyhow, not cleanshaven.”

Rivka gave him her best dubious look, but didn’t say anything. He reckoned that a victory.

And, indeed, no one paid him any mind as he crossed the market square and turned east into the heart of the ghetto. The shabby brick buildings cast the narrow streets into shadow. Though the Lizards had driven the Germans out of Lodz nearly a year before, the atmosphere of the hellishly crowded ghetto still clung to the place, maybe more strongly than in Warsaw.

Maybe it’s the smell. Russie thought. It was a smell of despair and stale cabbage and unwashed bodies and more garbage and sewage than the trash collectors and sewers could handle. Not all the people the Nazis had crammed into Lodz had been able to go home. Some had no homes, not after the Germans had fought Poles and Russians, and the Lizards fought the Germans. Some, carried into the ghetto in cattle cars from Germany and Austria, had homes outside Lizardheld territory. Even now, the ghetto was a desperately crowded place.

Posters of Chaim Rumkowski shouted at people from every blank wall surface. As far as Moishe could tell, people weren’t doing much in the way of listening. In all those teeming streets, he saw only a couple of persons glance up at the posters, and one of those, an old woman, shook her head and laughed after she did. Somehow that made Russie feel a little better about mankind.

His own poster still appeared here and there, too,

now beginning to fray and tatter a bit. No one looked up at that any more, either, to his relief.

When he got to Mostowski Street, he started poking his nose into blocks of flats and asking if they had any rooms to let. At first he thought he would have no choice but to stay where he was or else leave town. But at the fourth building he visited, the fellow who ran the place said, “You are a lucky man, my friend, do you know that? I just had a family move out not an hour ago.”

“Why?” Moishe asked in a challenging voice. “Were you charging them a thousand zlotys a day, or did the cockroaches and rats make alliance and drive them out? It’s probably a pigsty you’re going to show me.”

From one Jew to another, that hit hard a couple of ways. The landlord, or manager, or whatever he was, clapped a hand to his forehead in a theatrical, display of injured innocence. “A pigsty? I should kick you out of here on your tokhus to talk like that. One look at this flat and you’ll be down on your knee begging to rent.”

“I don’t get down on my knees for God and I should do it for you? You should live so long,” Moishe said. “Besides, you still haven’t said what ridiculous price you want.”

“You shouldn’t even see it, with a mouth like yours.” But the landlord was already walking back toward the stairway, Moishe at his heels. “Besides, such a deadbeat couldn’t pay four hundred zlotys a month.”

“If he lived in Lodz, King Solomon couldn’t pay four hundred zlotys a month, you ganef.”Moishe stopped. “I’m sorry I wasted my time. Good day.” He didn’t leave. “A hundred fifty I might manage.”

The landlord had one foot on the stairs. He didn’t put the other one with it. “I might manage to starve, if I didn’t have better sense than to listen to an obvious shlemiel like you. I would be giving this lovely flat away at 350 zlotys.”

“Then give it away, but not to me. I have better ways to spend my money, thank you very much. A hundred seventy five would be too much, let alone twice that.”

“Definitely a shlemiel, and you think I’m one, too.” But the landlord started climbing the stairs, and Moishe climbed with him. The stairwell reeked of stale piss. Moishe didn’t know a stairwell in the ghetto that didn’t.

By the time they got to the flat, they were only a hundred zlotys apart. There they stuck, because Moishe refused to haggle any further until he saw what he might be renting. The landlord chose a key from the fat ring on his belt, opened the door with a flourish. Moishe stuck in his head. The place was cut from the same mold as the one he was living in: a main room, with a kitchen to one side and a bedroom to the other. It was a little smaller than his present flat, but not enough to matter. “The electricity works?” he asked.

The manager pulled the chain that hung down from the ceiling lamp in the living room. The light came on. “The electricity works,” he said unnecessarily.

Moishe went into the kitchen. Water ran when he turned the faucet handle. “How is the plumbing?”

‘Verkake.”the landlord answered, which made Russie suspect he might have some honesty lurking in him. “But for Lodz, for now, it’s not bad. Two seventy-five is about as low as I can go, pal.”

“It’s not that bad,” Moishe said grudgingly. “If I let my little boy go hungry, I might make two twenty-five.”

“You give me two twenty-five and my little boy will starve. Shall we split the difference? Two fifty?”

“Two forty,” Moishe said.

“Two forty-five.” “Done.”

“And you call me a ganef.”The landlord shook his head. “Gottenyu, you’re the toughest haggler I’ve run into in a while. If I told you how much more money I was getting out of the last people in here, you’d cry for me. So when are you and your family coming in?”

“We could start bringing, our things in today,” Moishe answered. “It’s not that we have a lot to move, believe me.”

“This I do believe,” the landlord said. “The Germans stole, the Poles stole, people stole from each other – and the ones who didn’t had to burn their furniture to cook food or keep from freezing to death last winter or the one before or the one before that. So fetch in whatever you’ve got, nil? But before one stick of it goes in there, you put your first month’s rent right here.” He held out his hand, palm up.

“You’ll have it,” Moishe promised, “Mister, uh-”

“Stefan Berkowicz. And you are who, so I can tell my wife the name of the man who cheated me?”

“Emmanuel Lajfuner,” Russie answered without hesitation, inventing an easily memorable name so he wouldn’t forget it before he got home. He and Berkowicz parted on good terms.

When he described the haggle to Rivka, he proudly repeated the landlord’s praise for his skill and tenacity. She shrugged and said, “If he’s like most landlords, he. says that to all the people who take a flat in his building, just to make them feel good. But you could have done worse; you have, often enough.”

Praise with that faint damn left Moishe feeling vaguely punctured. He let Rivka go downstairs and hire a pushcart in which to haul their belongings. Then it was just carrying things down to the cart till it was full, manhandling it over to the new building, and lugging them up to the flat (Berkowicz got his zlotys first). Except for the bedraggled sofa, there wasn’t anything one man couldn’t handle by himself.

Two small sets of dishes and pans, moved in different loads; some rickety chairs; a pile of clothes, not very clean, not very fine; a few toys; a handful of books Moishe had picked up now here, now there; a mattress, some blankets; and a wooden frame. Not much to make up a life, Moishe thought. But while he was alive, he could hope to gain more.

“It will do,” Rivka said when she first set foot in the new flat. Having expected worse sarcasm than that, Moishe grinned in foolish relief. Rivka stalked into the bedroom, prowled the tiny kitchen. She came back nodding in acceptance if not approval. “Yes, it will do.”

Without talking about it, they arranged such furniture as they owned in about the same places it had occupied in the flat they were leaving. Moishe looked around the new place. Yes, that helped give it the feeling of home.

“Almost done,” he said late that afternoon. He was sweaty and filthy and as tired as he’d ever been, but one of the good things (one of the few good things) about moving was that you could see you were making progress.

“What’s left?” Rivka asked. “I thought this was just about everything.”

“Just about. But there’s still one more stool, and a couple of old blankets that went up on the high shelf when spring finally got here, and that sack of canned goods we hid under them for whenever, God forbid, we might be really hungry again.” As Moishe knew only too well, he was imperfectly organized. But he had a catchall memory which helped make up for that: he might not put papers,

say, in the pile where they were supposed to go, but he never forgot where he had put them. So now he knew exactly what had been moved and what still remained in the old flat.

“If it weren’t for the food, I’d tell you not to bother,” Rivka said. “But you’re right-we’ve been hungry too much. I never want to have to go through that again. Come back as fast as you can.”

“I will,” Moishe promised. Straightening his cap, he trudged down the stairs. His arms and shoulders twinged aching protest as he picked up the handles of the pushcart. Ignoring the aches as best he could, he made his slow way through the crowded streets and back to the old flat.

He was just pulling the sack of cans down from the shelf in the bedroom when someone rapped on the open front door. He muttered under his breath and put the sack back as quietly as he could, so the cans didn’t clank together – letting people know you had food squirreled away invited it to disappear. He wondered whether it would be one of his neighbors coming to say goodbye or the landlord with a prospective tenant for the flat.

He’d be polite to whoever it was and send him on his way. Then he’d be able to get on his own way. Fixing a polite smile on his face, he walked into the living room.

In the doorway stood two burly Order Service men, both still wearing the red-and-white armbands with black Magen Davids left over from the days of Nazi rule in the Lodz ghetto. They carried stout truncheons. Behind them were two Lizards armed with weapons a great deal worse.

“You Moishe Russie?” the uglier Order Service ruffian asked. Without waiting for an answer, he raised his club. “You better come with us.”

Flying over the Russian steppe, traveling across it by train, Ludmila Gorbunova had of course known how vast it was. But nothing had prepared her for walking over what seemed an improbably large chunk of it to get where she was going.

“I’ll have to draw new boots when we get back to the airstrip,” she told Nikifor Sholudenko.

His mobile features assumed what she had come to think of as an
NKVD
sneer. “So long as you are in a position to draw them, all will be well. Even, if you are in a position to draw them with none to be had, all will be well enough.”

She nodded; Sholudenko was undoubtedly right. Then one of her legs sank almost knee-deep into a patch of ooze she hadn’t noticed. It was almost like going into quicksand. She had to work her way out a little at a time. When, slimy and dripping, she was on the move again, she muttered, “Too bad nobody would be able to issue me a new pair of feet.” ‘

Sholudenko pointed to water glinting from behind an apple orchard. “That looks like a pond. Do you want to clean off?”

“All right,” Ludmila said. Since she’d flipped her U-2, the time when they returned to the airstrip, formerly so urgent, had taken on an atmosphere of nichevo. When she and Sholudenko weren’t sure of the day on which they’d arrive, an hour or two one way or the other ceased to mean anything.

They walked over to the orchard, which did lie in front of a pond. Ludmila yanked off her filthy boot. The water was bitterly cold, but the mud came off her foot and leg. She’d coated both feet with a thick layer of goose grease she’d begged from a babushka. If you were going to get wet, as anyone who traveled during the rasputitsa surely would, the grease helped keep rot from starting between your toes.

She washed the boot inside and out, using a scrap of cloth from inside her pack to dry it as well as she could. Then she splashed more water on her face: she knew how dirty she was, and had in full measure the Russian love of personal cleanliness. “I wish’ this were a proper steam, bath,” she said. “Without the heat first, I don’t want to take a cold plunge.”

“No, that would be asking for pneumonia,” Sholudenko agreed. “Can’t take the risk, not out in the field.”

He spoke like a soldier, not like someone who’d surely enjoyed a comfortable billet in a town until the Nazis invaded the
SSSR
, and maybe till the Lizards came. Ludmila had to admit he performed the same way: he marched and camped capably and without complaint. She’d viewed the secret police as birds were supposed to view snakes – as hunters, almost fascinating in their deadliness and power, men whose attention it was far better never to attract. But as the days went by, Sholudenko seemed more and more just another man to her. She didn’t know how far she could trust that.

He knelt by the side of the pond and splashed his face, too. While he washed, Ludmila stood watch. What with Lizards and collaborators and bandits who robbed indiscriminately, not a kilometer of Ukrainian territory was liable to be safe.

As if to drive that point home, a column of half a dozen Lizard tanks rolled up the road the pilot and
NKVD
man had just left. “I’m glad they didn’t see us carrying firearms,” Ludmila said.

“Yes, that could have proved embarrassing,” Sholudenko said. “For some reason, they’ve developed the habit of firing machinegun bursts first and asking questions later. A wasteful way to conduct interrogations, not that they asked my opinion of it.”

The casual way he talked about such things made the hair prickle up on Ludmila’s arms, as if she were a wild animal fluffing out its fur to make itself look bigger and fiercer. She wondered what sort of interrogations he’d conducted. Once or twice she’d almost asked him things like that, but at the last minute she always held back. Even though he was
NKVD
, he seemed decent enough. If she knew what he’d done instead of having to guess, she might not be able to stomach him any more.