In the Balance

After a long spell of tossing and turning and twisting-and once almost rolling onto the floor-he managed at last to fall asleep. When he woke, he almost fell off the pew again before he remembered where he was. He looked at his wrist The luminous dial on his watch said it was half past one.

The inside of the church was absolutely dark. It was not, however, absolutely quiet. He needed a few seconds to identify the noises floating up from a few rows behind him. When he did, he was surprised his ears didn’t glow brighter than his watch. People had no business doing that in church!

He started to sit up and see who was screwing on the pews, but paused before he’d even leaned onto one elbow. For one thing, it was too dark for him to tell anyway. And was it any of his business? His first shock had sprung straight from the heart of his upper Midwestern Lutheran upbringing. But when he thought about it a little, he wondered how long most of these people had been cooped up together and where else they were supposed to go if they wanted to make love. He lay back down.

But sleep would not return. The whispered gasps and moans and endearments, the small creaking of the pew itself, shouldn’t have been enough to keep him awake. They weren’t, not really, not by themselves. Listening to them, though, smote him with the realization of how long it had been since he’d slept with Barbara.

He hadn’t even looked at another woman in his erratic journey back and forth across the eastern half of the United States. Pedaling a bicycle a good many hours a day, he thought wryly, was liable to take the edge off other physical urges. Besides, it was cold. But if just then Sal or one of the other women in here had murmured a suggestion to him, he knew he would have pulled his pants down (if not off) without a moment’s hesitation.

Then he wondered what Barbara was doing about such matters. He’d been gone a long time, a lot longer than he’d thought when he set out in: the late, lamented Plymouth. She might think he was dead. (For that matter, she might be dead herself, but his mind refused to dwell on that).

He’d never imagined he needed to worry about whether she’d stay faithful. But then, he’d never thought he needed to worry about whether he would, either. The middle of the night on a cold, hard pew was hardly the time or place for such thoughts. That didn’t keep him from having them.

It did keep him from going back to sleep for a long, long lime.

“So,” Zolraag said. Moishe Russie knew the Lizard’s accent was the main thing that stretched the word into a hiss, but the knowledge didn’t make it sound any less menacing. The governor went on, “So, Herr Russie, you will no longer for us speak on the radio? This is your measure of-what is the Deutsch word-gratitude, is that it?”

“Gratitude is the word, yes, Excellency,” Russie said, sighing. He’d known this day was coming. Now it had arrived. “Excellency, not a Jew in Warsaw is ungrateful that the Race delivered us from the Germans. Had you not come when you did, there might be no Jews left in Warsaw. So I have said on the radio for your benefit. So much I would say again.”

The Lizards had shown him the extermination camp at Treblinka. They’d shown him the much bigger one at Oswiecim-the Germans called it Auschwitz-which had just been starting up when they came. Both places were worse than anything he’d imagined in his worst nightmares. Pogroms, malignant neglect: those were standard tools in the anti-Semite’s kit. But murder factories… his stomach twisted whenever he thought of them.

Zolraag said, “If you are gratitudeful, we expect you to show this in ways of usefulness to us.”

“I thought I was your friend, not your slave,” Russie answered. “If all you want of me is to repeat the words you say, better you should find a parrot. There must be one or two left in Warsaw.”

His defiance would have been more impressive, even to himself, if he hadn’t had to go back and explain to Zolraag what a parrot was. The Lizard governor took a while to get the whole idea. “One of these animals, then, would speak our message in your words? This could be done?” He sounded astonished; maybe Home didn’t have any animals that could learn to talk. He also sounded excited. “You Tosevites would listen to such an animal?”

Russie was tempted to say yes: let the Lizards make laughing-stocks of themselves. Reluctantly, he decided he had to tell the truth instead; that much he owed to the beings who had saved his people. “Excellency, human beings would listen to a parrot, but only to be amused, never to take it seriously.”

“Ah.” Zolraag’s voice was mournful. So was the Lizard’s whole demeanor. His office was heated past what Russie found comfortable, yet he still draped himself in warm clothing. He said, “You know our studio has been repaired after the damage the Deutsch raiders caused.”

“Yes.” Russie also knew the raiders had been Jews, not Nazi. He was glad the Lizards had never figured that out.