Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  He stared at her, his mouth falling open. Then he reached under the table that held his wares. By the time he’d pulled out a knife, Liu Han had a Japanese pistol pointed at his midsection. “You don’t want to try that,” she said. “You don’t even want to think about trying that.”

  The man gaped foolishly, eyes and mouth wide and round as those of the goldfish in their ornamental ponds not far away. Liu Han turned her back and walked away. As soon as a few people got between her and him, he started screaming abuse at her.

  She was tempted to go back and put a bullet in his belly, but shooting every man in Peking who mocked her would have wasted a lot of ammunition, and her peasant upbringing made her hate the idea of waste.

  A minute later, another merchant recognized her. He followed her with his eyes but didn’t say anything. By the standards she’d grown used to, that was a restrained response. She paid him the compliment of ignoring him.

  Before, I had only Hsia Shou-Tao to worry about, she thought bitterly. Thanks to the little scaly devils and their vile cinemas, I have hundreds. A great many men had watched her yield to the desires of Bobby Fiore and the other men aboard the airplane that never came down. Having seen that, too many of them supposed she would be eager to yield to their desires. The little devils had succeeded in making her notorious in Peking.

  Someone patted her backside from behind. She lashed out with a shoe and caught him in the shin. He howled curses. She didn’t care. Notorious or not, she refused to vanish into a hole. The scaly devils had done their best to destroy her as an instrument of the People’s Liberation Army. If they succeeded, she would never see her daughter again.

  She had no intention of letting them succeed.

  They had made her an object of derision, as they’d planned. But they had also made her an object of sympathy. Women could tell that she’d been coerced in some of the films the little devils had taken of her. And the People’s Liberation Army had mounted an aggressive propaganda campaign to educate the people of Peking, men and women alike, as to the circumstances in which she’d found herself. Even some men were sympathetic to her now.

  Once or twice, she’d heard foreign devil Christian missionaries talking in their bad Chinese about martyrs. At the time, she hadn’t understood the concept—what point to suffering when you didn’t have to? These days, she was a martyr herself, and exploiting the role for all it was worth.

  She came to the little stall of a woman who was selling carp that looked like ugly goldfish. She picked one up by the tail. “Are these fish fresh?” she asked dubiously.

  “Just caught this morning,” the woman answered.

  “Why do you expect me to believe that?” Liu Han sniffed at the carp. In grudging tones, she said, “Well, maybe. What do you want for them?”

  They haggled, but had trouble coming to an agreement. People watched them for a while, then went back to their own concerns when they didn’t prove very interesting. Lowering her voice, the carp seller said, “I have the word you were looking for, Comrade.”

  “I hoped you would,” Liu Han answered eagerly. “Tell me.”

  The woman looked around, her face nervous. “How you hear this must never be known,” she warned. “The little scaly devils have no idea my nephew understands their ugly language as well as he does—otherwise they would not talk so freely around him.”

  “Yes, yes,” Liu Han said with an impatient gesture. “We have put many like that in among them. We do not betray our sources. Sometimes we have even held off from making a move because the little scaly devils would have been able to figure out where we got the information. So you may tell me and not worry—and if you think I will pay your stinking price for your stinking fish, you are a fool!” She added the last in a loud voice when a man walked by close enough to eavesdrop on their conversation.

  “Why don’t you go away, then?” the carp seller shrilled. A moment later, she lowered her voice once more: “He says they will soon let the People’s Liberation Army know they are willing to resume talks on all subjects. He is only a clerk, remember; he cannot tell you what ‘all subjects’ means. You will know that for yourself, though, won’t you?”

  “Eh? Yes, I think so,” Liu Han answered. If the scaly devils meant what they said, they would return to talking about giving her back her daughter. The girl would be approaching two years old now, by Chinese reckoning: one for the time she’d spent in Liu Han’s womb and the second for the time since her birth. Liu Han wondered what she looked like and how Ttomalss had been treating her. One day before too long, maybe, she’d find out.

  “All right, I’ll buy it, even if you are a thief.” As if in anger, Liu Han slapped down coins and stalked away. Behind her angry façade, she was smiling. The carp seller was almost her own personal source of news; she didn’t think the woman knew many others from the People’s Liberation Army. She would get credit for bringing news of impending negotiations to the central committee.

  With luck, that would probably be enough to ensure that she got her own seat on the committee. Nieh Ho-T’ing would back her now; she was sure of that. And, once she had her seat, she would support Nieh’s agenda—for a while. One of these days, though, she would have occasion to disagree with him. When she did, she’d have backing of her own.

  She wondered how Nieh would take that. Would they be able to go on being lovers after they had political or ideological quarrels? She didn’t know. Of one thing she was sure: she needed a lover less than she had before. She was her own person now, well able to face the world on her own two feet without requiring a man’s support. Before the little scaly devils came, she hadn’t imagined such a thing possible.

  She shook her head. Strange that all the suffering the little devils had put her through had led her not only to be independent but to think she ought to be independent. Without them, she would have been one of the uncounted peasant widows in war-torn China, trying to keep herself from starving and probably having to become a prostitute or a rich man’s concubine to manage it.

  She passed by a man selling the conical straw hats both men and women wore to keep the sun off their faces. She had one back at the roominghouse. When the little scaly devils first began showing their vile films of her, she’d worn the hat a lot. With its front edge pulled low over her features, she was hardly recognizable.

  Now, though, she walked through the streets and hutungs of Peking bareheaded and unashamed. A man leered at her as she left the Small Market. “Beware of revolutionary justice,” she hissed. The fellow fell back in confusion. Liu Han walked on.

  The little scaly devils had one of their movie machines playing on a streetcorner. There, bigger than life, Liu Han rode astride Bobby Fiore, her skin and his slick with sweat. The main thing that struck her, looking at her somewhat younger self, was how well fed and well rested she seemed. She shrugged. She hadn’t been committed to the revolutionary cause yet.

  A man looked from the three-dimensional image to her. He pointed. Liu Han pointed back at him, as if her finger were the barrel of a gun. He found something else to do—and found it in a hurry.

  Liu Han kept walking. The little devils were still doing their best to discredit her, but they were also coming back to the negotiating table, and coming back to talk about all subjects. As far as she was concerned, that represented victory.

  The year before, the little scaly devils hadn’t been so willing to talk. The year before that, they hadn’t talked at all, just swept all before them. Life was harder now for them than it had been, and they were starting to see that it might grow harder yet. She smiled. She hoped it would.

  New fish came into camp utterly confused, utterly dismayed. That amused David Nussboym, who, having survived his first few weeks, was no longer a new fish but a zek among zeks. He was still reckoned a political rather than a thief, but the guards and the NKVD men had stopped using on him the blandishments they aimed at so many Communists caught in the web of the gulag:

  “You’re still eager to h
elp the Party and the Soviet state, aren’t you? Then of course you’ll lie, you’ll spy, you’ll do whatever we say.” The words were subtler, sweeter, but that was what they meant.

  To a Polish Jew, the Party and the Soviet state were more attractive than Hitler’s Reich, but not much. Nussboym had taken to using broken Russian and Yiddish among his fellow prisoners and answering the guards only in Polish too fast and slangy for them to understand.

  “That’s good,” Anton Mikhailov said admiringly after yet another guard went off scratching his head at Nussboym’ s replies. “Keep it up and after a while they’ll quit bothering you because they’ll figure they won’t be able to get any sense out of you anyway.”

  “Sense?” Nussboym rolled his eyes. “If you crazy Russians wanted sense, you never would have started these camps in the first place.”

  “You think so, do you?” the other zek answered. “Try building socialism without the coal they get from the camps, and the timber, without the railroads zeks build and without the canals we dig. Why, without camps, the whole damn country would fall apart.” He sounded as if he took a perverse pride in being part of such a vital and socially signflicant enterprise.

  “Maybe it should fall apart, then,” Nussboym said. “These NKVD bastards work everybody the way the Nazis work Jews. I’ve seen both now, and there isn’t much to choose between them.” He thought a moment. “No, I take that back. These are just labor camps. You don’t have the kind of assembly-line murder the Nazis had started up just before the Lizards got there.”

  “Why murder a man when you can work him to death?” Mikhailov asked. “It’s—what’s the word I want?—it’s inefficient, that’s what it is.”

  “This—what we do here—you call this efficient?” Nussboym exclaimed. “You could train chimpanzees to do this.”

  The Russian thief shook his head. “Chimpanzees would fall over dead, Nussboym. They couldn’t make ’em stand it. Their hearts would break and they’d die. They call ’em dumb animals, but they’re smart enough to know when things are hopeless—and that’s more than you can say about people.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Nussboym said. “Look what they’ve got us doing now, these barracks we’re making.”

  “Don’t you bitch about this work,” Mikhailov said. “Rudzutak was damn lucky to get it for our gang; it’s a hell of a lot easier than going out to the forest and chopping down trees in the snow. This way you go back to your bunk half dead, not all the way.”

  “I’m not arguing about that,” Nussboym said impatiently. Sometimes he wondered if he was a one-eyed man in the country of the blind. “Have you paid any attention to what we’re building, though?”

  Mikhailov looked around and shrugged. “It’s a barracks. It’s going up according to plan. The guards haven’t said boo. As long as they’re happy, I don’t care. If they wanted me to make herring boats, I wouldn’t complain about that, either. I’d make herring boats.”

  Nussboym threw down his hammer in exasperation. “Would you make herring boats that didn’t hold herring?”

  “Careful with that,” his partner warned. “You break a tool and the guards will give you a stomping whether they can talk to you or not. They figure everybody understands a boot in the ribs, and they’re mostly right. Would I make herring boats that didn’t hold herring? Sure. If that’s what they told me to do. You think I’m the one to tell ’em they’re wrong? Do I look crazy?”

  That sort of keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you’re-told attitude had existed in the Lodz ghetto. It didn’t just exist in the gulags, it dominated. Nussboym felt like yelling, “But the Emperor has no clothes!” Instead, he picked up the hammer and drove a couple of nails into the frame of the bunk bed on which he and Mikhailov were working. He hit the nails as hard as he could, trying to relieve some of his frustration that way.

  It didn’t work. As he reached down into the bucket for another nail, he asked, “How would you like to sleep in these bunks we’re making?”

  “I don’t like sleeping in the bunks we’ve got now,” Mikhailov answered. “Give me a broad who’ll say yes, though, and I don’t care where you put me. I’ll manage fine, thank you very much.” He drove a nail himself.

  “A broad?” Nussboym hesitated. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  His fellow zek stared at him in pity. “Then you’re a fool, aren’t you? They go and run up these new barracks. They put enough barbed wire between them and the ones we sleep in to keep the Nazis from crossing the border, and I hear we’re supposed to get a trainload of ‘special prisoners’ before long. Do I have to draw you a picture, chum?”

  “I hadn’t heard about the special prisoners coming in,” Nussboym said. He knew a lot of the gossip on the camp grapevine went right by him because his Russian really wasn’t very good.

  “Well, they are,” Mikhailov said. “We’ll be lucky even to catch a glimpse of ’em. The guards, though, they’ll get fucked and sucked till they can’t stand up straight, the stinking sons of bitches. The cooks, too, and the clerks—anybody with pull. You’re just a regular zek, though, forget it.”

  Nussboym hadn’t thought about women since he ended up in Soviet hands. No, that wasn’t true: he hadn’t thought about them in any concrete way, simply because he figured he wouldn’t see any for a long, long time. Now—

  Now he said, “Even for women, these bunks are awfully small and awfully close together.”

  “So the guards climb in and do it sideways instead of on top,” Mikhailov said. “So what? It doesn’t matter to them, they don’t care what the broads think, and you’re a stubborn kike, you know that?”

  “I know that,” Nussboym said; by the other’s tone, it was almost a compliment. “All right, we’ll get it done the way they tell us to. And if there are women here, we don’t have to admit we made this stuff for them.”

  “Now you’re talking,” the other zek said.

  The work gang met its norms for the day, which meant it got fed—not extravagantly, but almost enough to keep body and soul together. After his bread and soup, Nussboym stopped worrying about his belly for a little while. It had enough in it that it was no longer sounding an internal air-raid siren. He knew that klaxon would start up again all too soon, but had learned in Lodz to cherish these brief moments of satiety.

  A lot of the other zeks had that same feeling. They sat around on their bunks, waiting for the order to blow out the lamps. When that came, they would fall at once into a deep, exhausted sleep. Meanwhile, they gossiped or read the propaganda sheets the camp muckymucks sometimes passed out (those generated plenty of new gossip, most of it sardonic or ribald) or repaired trousers and jackets, their heads bent close to the work so they could see what they were doing in the dim light.

  Somewhere off in the distance, a train whistle howled, low and mournful. Nussboym barely noticed it. A few minutes later, it came again, this time unmistakably closer.

  Anton Mikhailov sprang to his feet. Everybody stared at this unwonted display of energy. “The special prisoners!” the zek exclaimed.

  Instantly, the barracks were in an uproar. Many of the prisoners hadn’t seen a woman in years, let alone been close to one. The odds that they would be close to one now were slim. The barest possibility, though, was plenty to remind them they were men.

  Going outside between supper and lights-out wasn’t forbidden, though the weather was still chilly enough that it had been an uncommon practice. Now dozens of zeks trooped out of the barracks, Nussboym among them. The other buildings were emptying, too. Guards yelled, trying to keep the prisoners in some kind of order.

  They had little luck. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the men made a beeline for the wire that separated their encampment from the new one. The barracks there were only half done, as no one knew better than Nussboym, but that, from everything he’d heard, was a typical piece of Soviet inefficiency.

  “Look!” someone said with a reverent sigh. “They’ve put up a canopy to keep the poor
darlings from getting the sun on their faces.”

  “And then they have them come in at night,” somebody else added. “If that isn’t the gulag, I don’t know what is.”

  The train pulled to a stop a few minutes later, iron wheels screaming as they slid along the track. NKVD men with submachine guns and lanterns hurried up to the Stolypin cars that had carried the prisoners. When the doors opened, the first people off the cars were more guards.

  “The hell with them,” Mikhailov said. “We don’t want to see their ugly mugs. We know all about what those bastards look like. Where are the broads?”

  The way the guards were shouting and screaming at the prisoners to come out and hurry up about it set the zeks laughing fit to burst among themselves. “Better be careful, dears, or they’ll send you to the front, and then you’ll really be sorry,” someone called in shrill falsetto.

  A head appeared at the doorway to one of the Stolypin cars. The prisoners’ breath went out in one long, anticipatory sigh. Then what was left of it went out again, this time in dozens of gasps of astonishment. A Lizard jumped out of the car and skittered toward the barracks, then another and another and another.

  David Nussboym stared at them as avidly as if they were women. He spoke their language. He wondered if anyone else in the whole camp did.

  IX

  Mutt Daniels eyed the boat with something less than enthusiasm. “Damn,” he said feelingly. “When they said they weren’t shippin’ us back to Chicago from Elgin, I reckoned they couldn’t do no worse to us than what we seen there. Shows how blame much I know, don’t it?”

  “You got that right, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Herman Muldoon said. “This whole mission, the way they talk about it, it’s a ‘deeply regret’ telegram just waitin’ to happen. Or it would be, I mean. If they still bothered sending those telegrams any more.”

  “That will be enough of that, gentlemen,” Captain Stan Szymanski said. “They tapped us on the shoulder for this job, and we are going to do it.”