Tilting the Balance

The island wasn’t having an easy time trying to feed itself. Perhaps in the long run it couldn’t not if it wanted to keep on turning out war goods, too. But if the English knew they were beaten, they didn’t let on.

All through the park, trenches, some bare, some with corrugated tin roofs were scattered among the garden plots. Like Warsaw, London had learned the value of air raid shelters no matter how makeshift. Moishe had dived into one of them himself when the sirens began to wail a few days before. The old woman sprawled in the dirt a few feet away had nodded politely as if they were meeting over tea. They d stayed in there till the all clear sounded, then dusted themselves off and gone on about their business.

Moishe turned and retraced his steps down Oxford Street. He explored with caution; wandering a couple of blocks away from the streets he’d already learned had got him lost more than once. And he was always looking the wrong way, forgetting traffic moved on the left side of the street, not the right. Had more motorcars been on the road, he probably would have been hit by now.

He turned right onto Regent Street, then left onto Beak. A group of men was going into a restaurant there-the Barcelona, he saw as he drew closer. He recognized the tall, thin figure of Eric Blair in the party; the India Section man must have finished his talk and headed off for lunch.

Beak Street led Russie to Lexington and from it to Broadwick Street, on which sat his block of flats. As with much of the Soho district, it held more foreigners than Englishmen: Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Greeks-and now a family of ghetto Jews.

He turned the key in the lock, opened the door. The rich odor of cooking soup greeted him like a friend from home. He shrugged out of his jacket; the electric fire here kept the flat comfortably warm. Not sleeping under mounds of blankets and overcoats was another reward of coming to England.

Rivka walked out of the kitchen to greet him. She wore a white blouse and a blue pleated skirt that reached halfway from the floor to her knees. Moishe thought it shockingly immodest, but all the skirts and dresses she’d been given when she got to England were of the same length.

“You look like an Englishwoman,” he told her.

She cocked her head to one side, giving that a woman’s consideration. After a moment, she shook her head. “I dress like an Englishwoman,” she said, with the same precision a yeshiva student might have used to dissect a subtle Talmudic point. “But’ they’re even pinker and blonder than the Poles, I think.” She flicked an imaginary bit of lint from her own dark curls.

He yielded: “Well, maybe so. They all seem so heavy, too.” He wondered whether that perception was real or just a product of so many years of looking at people who were slowly-sometimes not so slowly-starving to death. The latter, he suspected. “That soup smells good.” In his own mind, food had grown ever so much more important than it seemed before the war.

“Even with ration books, there’s such a lot to buy here,” Rivka answered. The pantry already bulged with tins and jars and with sacks of flour and potatoes. Rivka didn’t take food for granted these days, either.

“Where’s Reuven?” Moishe asked.

“Across the hall, playing with the Stephanopoulos twins.” Rivka made a wry face. “They haven’t a word in common, but they all like to throw things and yell, so they’re friends.”

“I suppose that’s good.” Moishe did wonder, though. In Poland, the Nazis-and the Poles, too-had cared too much that Jews were different from them. No one here seemed to care at all. In its own way, that was disconcerting, too.

As if to ease his mind over something he hadn’t even mentioned, Rivka said, “David’s mother telephoned this morning while you were at the studio. We had a good chat.”

“That is good,” he said. Working phones were another thing he was having to get used to all over again.

“They want us over for supper tomorrow night,” Rivka said. “We can take the underground she gave me directions on how to do it.” She sounded excited, as if she were going on safari.

Moishe suddenly got the feeling she was adapting to the new city, the new country, faster than he was.

Teerts felt bright, alert, and happy when Major Okamoto led him into the laboratory. He knew he felt that way because the, Nipponese had laced his rice and raw fish with ginger-the spicy taste still lay hot on his tongue-but he didn’t care. No matter what created it, the feeling was welcome. Until it wore off, he would feel like a male of the Race, a killercraft pilot, not a prisoner almost as much beneath contempt as the slops bucket in his cell.

Yoshio Nishina came round a corner. Teerts bowed in Nipponese politeness; no matter how much the ginger exhilarated him, he was not so foolish as to forget altogether where he was. “Konichiwa, superior sir,” he said, mixing his own language and Nipponese.