Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Anielewicz scowled at the posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski that stared down from every blank wall in the ghetto. Some of the posters were old and faded and peeling; others looked to have been put up yesterday. Rumkowski had run things here under the Nazis, and by all appearances was still running them under the Lizards. Mordechai wondered how exactly he’d managed that.

  Friedrich noticed the posters, too. “Give that old bastard hair and a little mustache and he could be Hitler,” he remarked, glancing slyly over at Anielewicz. “How does that make you feel, Shmuel?”

  Even now, surrounded by Jews, he didn’t leave off his baiting. Neither did Anielewicz. It wasn’t particularly vicious; it was the sort of teasing two workmen who favored rival football clubs might have exchanged. “Sick,” Mordechai answered. That was true, for before the war he’d never imagined the Jews could produce their own vest-pocket Hitlers. But he wouldn’t give Friedrich the pleasure of knowing he was irked, so he added, “Hitler’s a much uglier man.” As far as he was concerned, that was so both literally and metaphorically.

  “Ah, rubbish,” Friedrich said, planting a playful elbow in his ribs. One of these days, the Nazi would do that once too often, and then something dramatic would happen. He hadn’t done it quite often enough for that, not yet.

  Something dramatic happened anyhow. A Jew in a cloth cap and a long black coat stopped in the middle of Lutomierska Street and stared at Friedrich. The Jew had a wide, ugly scar across the right side of his face, as if a bullet had creased him there.

  He walked up to Anielewicz, waggled a forefinger in front of his nose. “Are you a Jew?” he demanded in Yiddish.

  “Yes, I’m a Jew,” Mordechai answered in the same language. He understood why the newcomer sounded a little uncertain. Even with the light brown beard on his cheeks, he looked more like a Pole than the swarthy, hook-nosed stereotype of a Jew.

  “Youare a Jew!” The newcomer clapped a hand to his forehead, almost knocking the cap from his head. He pointed at Friedrich. “Do you know whom you’re walking with? Do you knowwhat you’re walking with?” His hand quivered.

  “I know that if there’s a fire, the engine is going to come out of there and smash us flat as a couple oflatkes,” Anielewicz answered, nodding over toward the fire station in front of which they stood. The ghetto fire engine still had petrol. As far as he knew, it was the only vehicle in the Jewish quarter of Lodz that did. He gently took the Jew by the elbow. “Come on, let’s go over on the sidewalk.” He gathered in Friedrich with his eyes. “You come, too.”

  “Where else would I go?” Friedrich said, his voice easy, amused. It was not an idle question. A lot of the young men on the street had rifles slung over their shoulders. If he ran, a shout of “Nazi!” would surely get him caught, and likely get him shot.

  The Jew with the scarred cheek seemed ready to give that shout, too. His features working, he repeated, “Do you know what you’re walking with, you who say you are a Jew?”

  “Yes, I know he’s a German,” Mordechai answered. “We were in a partisan band together. He may have been a Nazi soldier, but he’s a good fighting man. He’s given the Lizards many a kick in the arse.”

  “With a German, you might be a friend. With a Nazi, even, you might be a friend,” the Jew answered. “The world is a strange place, that I should say such a thing. But with a murderer of his kind-” He spat at Friedrich’s feet.

  “I said I was his comrade. I did not say I was his friend,” Anielewicz replied. The distinction sounded picayune even to him. He stared at Friedrich with a sudden, horrid suspicion. A lot of men in the partisan band had been reticent about just what they’d done before they joined it. He’d been reticent himself, when you got down to it. But a German could have some particularly good reasons for wanting to keep his mouth shut.

  “His comrade.” Now the Jew spat between Mordechai’s feet. “Listen to me,comrade.” He freighted the word with the hate and scorn a Biblical prophet might have used. “My name is Pinchas Silberman. I am-I was-a greengrocer in Lipno. Unless you are from there, you would never have heard of it: it is a little town north of here. It had a few Jews-fifty, maybe, not a hundred. We got on well enough with our Polish neighbors.”

  Silberman paused to glare at Friedrich. “One day, after the Germans conquered Poland, in came a-platoon, is that what you call it? — of a police battalion. They gathered us up, men and women and children-me, my Yetta, Aaron, Yossel, and little Golda-and they marched us into the woods. He, your precious comrade, he was one of them. I shall take his face to the grave with me.”

  “Were you ever in Lipno?” Anielewicz asked Friedrich.

  “I don’t know,” the German answered indifferently. “I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns.”

  Silberman’s voice went shrill: “Hear the angel of death! ‘I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns,’ he says. No doubt he was, and left not a Jew alive behind him, except by accident. Me, I was an accident. He shot my wife, he shot my daughter in her arms, he shot my boys, and then he shot me. I had a great bloody head wound”-he brought a hand up to his face-“so he and the rest of the murderers must have thought I was dead along with my family, along with all the others. They went away. I got up and I walked to Plock, which is a bigger town not far from Lipno. I was half healed before the Germans emptied out Plock. They didn’t shoot everyone there. Some, the able-bodied, they shipped here to Lodz to work-to slave-for them. I was one of those. Now God is kind, and I can have my revenge.”

  “Policebattalion?” Anielewicz stared at Friedrich with undisguised loathing. The German had always acted like a soldier. He’d fought as well as any soldier, and Anielewicz had assumed he’d been aWehrmacht man. That was bad enough, but he’d heard of and even known a few decentWehrmacht men even before the Lizards came. A lot of them were soldiers like any other country’s, just doing their jobs. But the men in the police battalions-

  The most you could give them was that they didn’t always kill all the Jews in the towns and villages they visited. As Silberman had said, some they drafted into slave labor instead. And he’d fought beside Friedrich, slept beside him, shared food with him, escaped from the prison camp with him. He felt sick.

  “What can you say for yourself?” he demanded. Because he’d done all those things with Friedrich-and because he was, in part, alive thanks to the German-he hesitated to shout for one of those armed Jews right away. He was willing, at least, to hear how the German defended himself.

  Friedrich shrugged. “Shall I tell you I’m sorry? Would it do me any good?” He shrugged again; he hadn’t intended that second question to be taken seriously. After a moment, he went on, “I’m not particularly sorry. I did what my officers told me to do. They said you Jews were enemies of theReich and needed eliminating just like our other enemies. And so-” Yet another shrug.

  Anielewicz had heard that same argument from Nazis the Jews had captured when they helped the Lizards drive the Germans out of Warsaw. Before he could say anything, Pinchas Silberman hissed, “My Yetta, my boys, my baby-these were enemies? They were going to hurt you Nazi bastards?” He tried to spit in Friedrich’s face, but missed. The spittle slid slowly down the brick wall of the fire station.

  “Answer him!” Anielewicz barked when Friedrich kept silent for a moment.

  “Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!”Friedrich said, clicking his heels with exquisite irony. “You have me. You will do as you like with me, just as I did as I liked before. When England dropped bombs on us and blew up our women and children, they thought those women and children were enemies. And, before you start shouting at me, when we dropped bombs on the English, we did the same thing,ja. How does that make me any different from a bomber, except I did it retail with a rifle instead of wholesale with a bombing plane?”

  “But the Jews you murdered had never done anything to you,” Mordechai said. He’d run into that peculiar German blind spot before, too. “Parts of Poland used to be Germany, and some of the Jews here fou
ght for the Kaiser in the last war. What kind of sense does it make to go slaughtering them now?”

  “My officers said they were enemies. If I hadn’t treated them as enemies, who knows what would have happened to me?” Friedrich said. “And let me ask you another question, Shmuel-if you could make a giant omelet out of all the Lizards’ eggs, would you do it so they’d never trouble us again?”

  “A Nazitzaddik we don’t need,” Silberman said. “Answer me this, Nazischmuck — what would you do if you found the man who’d killed your wife and children? What would you do if you found himand he didn’t even remember doing it?”

  “I’d kill the motherfucker,” Friedrich answered. “But I’m just a Nazi bastard, so what the devil do I know?”

  Silberman looked at Mordechai. “Out of his own mouth you heard it. He puts the noose around his neck-and if he didn’t, I would.”

  Friedrich looked at him, too, as if to say,We fought together, and now you’re going to kill me? You already knew part of what I was a long time ago. How much were you pretending so we didn’t go for each other’s throats?

  Anielewicz sighed. “Friedrich, I think we’d better go over to the Balut Market square.” The square didn’t hold the market alone; the administration offices for the Lodz ghetto were there, too. Some of the Jewish fighting men there would know Mordechai was not Shmuel, a simple partisan. With some of those who knew who he really was, that would work to his advantage. Others, though, might be inclined to reveal his true name to Chaim Rumkowski-or to the Lizards.

  “So you’re going to tell them to hang me, too, eh?” Friedrich said.

  “No,” Anielewicz said slowly. Pinchas Silberman let out an outraged howl. Ignoring it, Mordechai went on, “Silberman here will tell what you did before the Lizards came. I’ll tell what you’ve done since, or what I know of it. It should tilt the balance toward-”

  Friedrich laughed in his face. “You Jews took it when you were on the bottom. You think I believe you won’t give it now that you’re on top?”

  “We believe in something you Nazis never heard of,” Anielewicz answered. “It’s called justice.”

  “It’s calledScheisse, is what it’s called,” Friedrich said. “So in the name of justice, you’re going to-” In the middle of the sentence, without shifting either his eyes or his feet to give warning, he hit Anielewicz in the belly and ran.

  “Oof!” Mordechai said, and folded up like a concertina.Shlemiel, he thought as he gasped for air his lungs didn’t want to give him. Friedrich might have started out in a police battalion, but he’d picked up a real soldier’s skills from somewhere-and a partisan’s, as well. Not letting your foe know what you were about to do until you did it ranked high on both lists.

  But the German, who knew Anielewicz was dangerous, had not reckoned that Pinchas Silberman might be, too. The Jew from Lipno dashed after him, screaming “Nazi murderer!” at the top of his lungs. Anielewicz made it up to his knees just in time to see Silberman spring on Friedrich’s back. They went down in a thrashing heap. That was a fight in which Silberman was bound to get the worse of it, and quickly, but Friedrich hadn’t beaten and kicked him into unconsciousness before a couple of Mauser-carrying Jewish fighting men put an end to the scrap with peremptory orders.

  Silberman gasped out his story. One of the fighting men asked Friedrich a one-word question:“Nu?”

  Friedrich gave a one-word answer:“Ja.”

  Two rifles barked, almost in the same instant. The gunshots made men who didn’t know what was going on cry out; a couple of women screamed. Pinchas Silberman burst into tears. Joy? Rage? Sadness that yet another death didn’t bring back his slaughtered family? Anielewicz wondered if he knew himself. One of the Jewish fighters said to the other, “Come on, Aaron, let’s get rid of this garbage.” They dragged Friedrich away by the heels. His body left a trail of blood on Lutomierska Street.

  Mordechai slowly got to his feet He still bent at the midsection; Friedrich was strong as a mule, and had hit the way a mule kicked, too. He’d been a pretty good companion, but when you set what he’d done before against that-Anielewicz shook his head. The German had probably deserved to die, but if all the people who deserved to die on account of what they’d done in the war dropped dead at once, there’d be hardly more people left alive than after Noah’s flood. The world would belong to the Lizards.

  He shook his head again. The Lizards didn’t have clean hands, either. He started slowly and painfully down the street. He was altogether on his own again. One way or another, though, he expected he’d manage to make a nuisance of himself.

  “God, I pity the poor infantry,” Heinrich Jager said, putting one foot in front of the other with dogged persistence. “If I haven’t lost ten kilos on this blasted hike, it’s a miracle.”

  “Oh, quit moaning,” Otto Skorzeny said. “You’re in the south of France, my friend, one of the prime holiday spots in all the world.”

  “Yes, and now you can ask me if I give a damn, too,” Jager said. “When you’re marching across it, it might as well be the Russian steppe. It’s just about as hot as the steppe was in summer, that’s certain.” He wiped the sleeve of his shirt over his face. He wore a workman’s outfit, none too clean. It wouldn’t fool a Frenchman into thinking he was French, but it had done well enough with the Lizards.

  “It’s not as cold as the steppe in winter, and that’s a fact” Skorzeny shivered melodramatically. “It’s not as ugly, either. Now shake a leg. We want to get to the next safe house before the sun goes down.” He lengthened his already long stride.

  Sighing, Jager kept up. “Were you in such a tearing hurry that you had to march us straight past that Lizard air base the other day?” he grumbled.

  “We got by with it, so quit your bellyaching,” Skorzeny said. “The bold line is always the way to go when you mess with those scaly bastards. They’re so cautious and calculating, they never look for anybody to try something risky and outrageous. They wouldn’t be that stupid themselves, so they don’t expect anyone else to be, either. We’ve taken advantage of it more than once, too.”

  “All very well, but one of these days you’re going to stick yourSchwantz on the chopping block, and I don’t fancy having mine there beside it,” Jager said.

  “Why not? How much use are you getting out of it now?” Skorzeny asked, laughing. He turned back toward the air base. “And did you see the pop-eyed stare that one pilot gave us?” As best he could, he imitated a Lizard’s swiveling eyes.

  Jager laughed, too, in spite of himself. Then he sobered. “How could you tell the Lizard was a pilot?”

  “Gold and blue bands on his chest and belly, yellow on the arms, and those red and purple squiggles on his head. He’s medium-senior, I’d say-otherwise he’d have fewer of the purple ones. I’ve been studying their paint for a long time, my friend. If I say something along those lines is so, you can take it to the bank.”

  “Oh, I will,” Jager said, with some irony but not much.

  They trudged on. To their right, the river Tarn chuckled in its banks. Sheep and cattle pulled up grass and shrubs in the fields. Every so often, a dog barked. A hammer rang on an anvil in a blacksmith’s shop in a tiny village, just as it might have done a thousand years before.

  “I’ll tell you what I like about this countryside,” Jager said suddenly. “It’s the first I’ve seen in the past four years that hasn’t been fought over to a fare-thee-well.”

  “Aber naturlich,”Skorzeny answered. “And when we find a cafe, you can order yourself some vichyssoise, too.”

  “Vichyssoise?” Jager said, and then, a moment too late. “Oh.Ja. The French gave up before we got down here, and this part of France wasn’t occupied. Then the Lizards came, and they gave up to them, too. They’re good at it.” He grunted. “And a whole lot of them are alive now who would be dead if they’d fought more. Does that make them cowards, or just smarter than we are?”

  “Both,” Skorzeny answered. “Me, though, I’d rather stand up
on my hind legs and not lie down till somebody knocks me over-and I’ll try and kick the feet out from under him as I’m falling, too.”

  Jager thought that over. He slowly nodded. A bell sounded behind him. He stepped aside to let a French policeman on a bicycle roll past. With his kepi and little dark mustache, the fellow looked like a cinema Frenchman. In the carrying basket under the handlebars, he had a couple of long, skinny loaves of bread and a bottle of red wine. Perhaps his mind was more on them than on anything else, for he rode by the Germans without a second glance.

  They strode past the little hamlet of Ambialet. A long time ago, a lord had built a castle on a crag that stuck out into the Tarn. Later, a church and a monastery sprang up close by. They were all ruins now, but the hamlet remained.

  Not far beyond it, they came to a farmhouse screened off from the road by a stand of willows. Ducks quacked in a pond close by. From off in a barn, a pig grunted. A stocky, stoop-shouldered Frenchman in a straw hat that almost made him look American put down the bucket he was carrying when the two Germans approached.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,”Jager said in his halting, heavily accented French.“Avez-vous une cigarette? Peut-etre deux?”

  “I regret,monsieur, that I have not even one, let alone two.” The farmer’s shrug was so perfectly Gallic that Jager forgot about the straw hat. The fellow went on, “You will be from Uncle Henri?”

  “Oui,”Jager said, completing the recognition phrase. He didn’t know who Uncle Henri was: perhaps a Frenchified version of Heinrich Himmler.

  “Come in, both of you,” the farmer said, waving toward the building. “My wife and daughter, they are staying with my brother-in-law down the road for a few days. They do not know why, but they are glad to visit Rene for a time.” He paused. “You may call me Jacques, by the way.”