Tilting the Balance

Whoever headed the Jewish fighters these days would have someone at the airport fluent enough at the Lizards’ speech to answer that for him. So would General Bor-Komorowski of the Polish Home Army. Anielewicz missed getting information like that, being connected to a wider world. He hadn’t realized his horizons would contract so dramatically when he left Warsaw for Leczna.

Contract they had. The town had had several radios, but without electricity, what good were they? Poland’s big cities had electricity, but nobody’d bothered repairing the lines out to all the country towns. Leczna probably hadn’t had electricity at all until after the First World War. Now that it was gone again, people just did without.

Anielewicz went back to work. He pulled out a weed, made sure he had the whole root, then moved ahead about half a meter and did it again. An odd task he thought: mindless and exacting at the same time. You wondered where the hours had gone when you knocked off at the end of the day.

A couple of rows over, a Pole looked up from his weeding and said, “Hey you, Jew! What does the creature that says he’s governor of Warsaw call himself again?”

The fellow spoke quite without malice, using Anielewicz’s religion to identify him not particularly to scorn him. That he might feel scorned anyhow never entered the Pole’s mind. Because he knew that, Anielewicz didn’t feel scorned, or at least not badly. “Zolraag,” he answered, carefully pronouncing the two distinct a sounds.

“Zolraag,” the Pole echoed, less clearly. He took off his cap, scratched his head. “Is he as little as all the others like him? It hardly seems natural.”

“All the males I’ve ever seen are about the same size,” Mordechai answered. The Pole scratched his head again. Anielewicz had worked with the Lizards almost every day; he knew them as well as any man could. Here in Leczna, Lizards were hardly more than a rumor. The locals might have seen them when they ran the Nazis out of town, or when they went to Lublin to buy and sell. Other than that, the aliens were a mystery here.

“They are as nasty as people say?” the Pole asked.

How was he supposed to answer that? Slowly, he said, “They aren’t as vicious as the Germans, and they aren’t as smart, either-or maybe it’s just that they don’t understand people any better than we understand them, and that makes them seem dumber than they are. But they can do more with machines than the Germans ever dreamed of, and that makes them dangerous.”

“you’reason like a priest,” the farmworker said. It wasn’t quite a compliment, for he went on, “Ask a simple question and you get back, ‘Well, sort of this but sort of that, too, because of these things. And on the other hand-’ ” He snorted. “I just wanted a yes or a no.”

“But some questions don’t have simple yes-or-no answers,” Anielewicz said. Though he’d been a secular man, his ancestry had generations of Talmudic scholars in it-and just being a Jew was plenty to teach you things were rarely as simple as they looked at first glance.

The Pole didn’t believe that; Anielewicz could see as much. The fellow took a flask of vodka off his hip, swigged, and offered it to Anielewicz. Mordechai took a nip. Vodka helped you get through the day.

After a while, the Pole said, “So what did you do to get yourself run out of Warsaw and show up in a little town like this?”

“I shot the last man who asked me a question like that,” Anielewicz replied, deadpan.

The farmworker stared at him, then let out a hoarse guffaw. “Oh, you’re a funny one, you are. We got to watch you every minute, hey?” He leered at Mordechai. “Some of the girls are watching you already, you know that?”

Anielewicz grunted. He did know that. He didn’t quite know what to do about it. As leader of the Jewish fighters, he hadn’t had time for women, and they might have endangered security. Now he was just an exile. His training in underground work insisted he still ought to hold himself aloof. But he was a man in his mid-twenties, and emphatically not a monk.

Grinning, the Pole said, “You go out to the backhouses at night, you have to be careful not to look toward the haystacks or under the wagons. Never can tell when you’re liable to see something you’re not supposed to.”

“Is that a fact?” Mordechai said, though he knew it was. The Poles were not only less straitlaced than the Jews who lived among them, they also used vodka or brandy to give themselves an excuse for acting that way. Anielewicz added, “I don’t see how anyone is up to doing anything except sleep after a day in the fields.”