Tilting the Balance

“Without Rivka and Reuven, I won’t go.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Russie realized how selfish and boorish they sounded. These men had risked their lives to save him; their comrades had died. Who was he to set conditions on what they did? But he didn’t apologize, because however selfish what he’d said sounded, he also realized he’d meant it.

He waited for Goldfarb to scream at him, and for the other man-who looked tough enough for anything, no matter how desperate to pound him senseless and then do whatever he chose. Instead they just kept walking along, easygoing, as if he’d made a remark about the weather. Goldfarb said, “That’s taken care of. They’ll be waiting for us along the way.”

“That’s-wonderful,” Moishe said dazedly. Too much was happening too fast for him to take it all in. He let his cousin and the other fighter lead him through the streets of Lodz while he tried to adjust to the heady joys of freedom. It made him giddy, as if he’d gulped down a couple of shots of plum brandy on an empty stomach.

A tattered poster with his face on it peered down from a wall. He rubbed his chin. The Lizards hadn’t let him use a razor, so his beard was coming back. It wasn’t as long as he’d worn it before, but pretty soon he’d look like his pictures again.

“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb said when he fretted out loud. “Once we get you out of town, we’ll take care of things like that.”

“How will you get me out?” Moishe asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb repeated.

His nameless friend laughed and said, “Asking a Jew not to worry is like asking the sun not to rise. You can ask all you like, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you ask for.” That was apt enough to make Moishe laugh, too.

Before long, they walked into a block of flats. Lodz was already beginning to boil around them. The sound of explosions and gunfire carded a long way; rumor rippled out from around the prison almost as fast as the racket. The two women who went into the building just behind Moishe and his companions were already wondering who had escaped. If only they knew, he thought dizzily.

They climbed stairs. The fellow without a name rapped on a door-one, two, one again. “Spy stuff,” David Goldfarb muttered. The other fellow poked him in the ribs with an elbow, hard enough to make him give back a pace.

The door opened. “Come in, come in.” The skinny little bald man who greeted them looked like a tailor, but tailors did not commonly carry submachine guns. He looked them over, lowered the weapon. “Just you three? Where are the rest?”

“Just us,” Goldfarb answered. “A couple scattered off to the other hidey-holes, a couple others won’t be going anywhere any more. About what we figured.” The casual way he said that chilled Russie. His cousin went on, “We’re not hanging around here, either, you know. You have what we need?”

“You need to ask?” With a scornful sniff the bald little man pointed to bundles on the couch. “There-change your clothes.”

“Clothes are only part of it,” Goldfarb’s tough-looking friend said. “The rest is taken care of, too?”

“The rest is taken care of.” The bald fellow sniffed again, this time angrily. “We wouldn’t be good for much if it weren’t, would we?”

“Who knows what we’re good for?” the nameless fighter answered, but he shrugged off his shabby wool jacket and started unbuttoning his shirt. Moishe had no jacket to shrug off. He shed with a long sigh of relief the clothes he’d been wearing since he was captured. Their replacements didn’t fit as well, but so what? They were clean.

“Good thing the Lizards haven’t figured out prison uniforms; they’d have made it harder for us to do a vanishing act with you,” Goldfarb said as he, too, changed. His Yiddish was plenty fluent, but full of odd turns of phrase he didn’t seem to notice, as if he was using it to express ideas that came first in English. He probably was.

“You’re staying here, right, Shmuel?” asked the nondescript little Jew who kept the flat. The nameless fighter, now nameless no more, nodded. So did the little fellow, who turned to Moishe and Goldfarb. He handed each of them a thin rectangle of some shiny stuff, about the size of a playing card. Moishe looked at his. A picture that vaguely resembled him looked back from it. The card gave details of a life he’d never led. The bald little man said, “Don’t pull these out unless you have to. With luck, you’ll be away before they do a proper job of cordoning off the city.”

“And without luck, we’ll buy a plot,” Goldfarb said, holding up his own card “This bloke looks more like Goebbels than he does like me.”