Striking the Balance

“That is most interesting,” Nussboym said. “Thank you for telling me.” Women who knew what was good for them accommodated themselves to the powerful people in the camp: first to the NKVD men, then to the prisoners who could help make their lives tolerable… or otherwise. The ones who didn’t know what was good for them went out and cut trees and dug ditches like any otherzeks.

Nussboym smiled to himself. Surely a man as… practical as he could find some equally… practical woman for himself-maybe even one who spoke Yiddish. Wherever you were, you did what you could to get by.

A Lizard with a flashlight approached the campfire around which Mutt Daniels and Herman Muldoon sat swapping lies. “That is you, Second Lieutenant Daniels?” he called in pretty good English.

“This here’s me,” Mutt agreed. “Come on over, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook. Set yourself down. You boys are gonna be pullin’ out tomorrow mornin’-did I hear that right?”

“It is truth,” Chook said. “We are to be no more in the Illinois place. We are to move out, first back to main base in Kentucky, then out of this not-empire of the United States. I tell you two things, Second Lieutenant Daniels. The first thing is, I am not sorry to go. The second thing is, I come here to say good-bye.”

“That’s mighty nice of you,” Mutt said. “Good-bye to you, too.”

“A sentimental Lizard,” Muldoon said, snorting. “Who woulda thunk it?”

“Chook here ain’t a bad guy,” Daniels answered. “Like he said when we got the truce the first time, him and the Lizards he’s in charge of got more in common with us than we do with the brass hats way back of the line.”

“Yeah, that’s right enough,” Muldoon answered, at the same time as Chook was saying, “Truth,” again. Muldoon went on, “It was like that Over There, wasn’t it? Us and the Germans in the trenches, we was more like each other than us and the fancy Dans back in Gay Paree, that’s for damn sure. Show those boys a louse and they’d faint dead away.”

“I have also for you a question, Second Lieutenant Daniels,” Chook said. “Does it molest you to have me ask you this?”

“Does it what?” Mutt said. Then he figured out what the Lizard was talking about. Chook’s English was pretty good, but it wasn’t perfect “No, go ahead and ask, whatever the hell it is. You and me, we’ve got on pretty good since we stopped tryin’ to blow each other’s heads off. Your troubles, they look a lot like my troubles, ‘cept in a mirror.”

“This is what I ask, then,” Chook said. “Now that this war, this fighting, this is done, what do you do?”

Herman Muldoon whistled softly between his teeth. So did Mutt. “That’s the question, okay,” he said. “First thing I do, I reckon, is see how long the Army wants to keep me. I ain’t what you’d call a young man.” He rubbed his bristly chin. Most of those bristles were white, not brown.

“What do you do if you are not a soldier?” the Lizard asked. Mutt explained about being a baseball manager. He wondered if he would have to explain about baseball, too, but he didn’t. Chook said, “I have seen Tosevites, some almost hatchlings, some larger, playing this game. You were paid for guiding a team of them?” He added an interrogative cough. When Mutt agreed that he was, the Lizard said, “You must be highly skilled, to be able to do this for pay. Will you again, in time of peace?”

“Damfino,” Daniels answered. “Who can guess what baseball’s gonna look like when things straighten out? I guess maybe the first thing I do, I ever get out of the Army, I go home to Mississippi, see if I got me any family left.”

Chook made a puzzled noise. He pointed west, toward the great river flowing by. “You live in a boat? Your home is on the Mississippi?” Mutt had to explain about the difference between the Mississippi River and the state of Mississippi. When he was through, the Lizard said, “You Big Uglies, sometimes you have more than one name for one place, sometimes you have more than one place for one name. It is confused. I tell no great secret to say once or twice attacks go wrong on account of this.”

“Maybe we’ll just have to call every town in the country Jonesville,” Herman Muldoon said. He laughed, happy with his joke.

Chook laughed, too, letting his mouth fall open so the firelight shone on his teeth and on his snaky tongue. “You do not surprise me, you Tosevites, if you do this very thing.” He pointed to Daniels. “Before you become a soldier, then, you command baseball men. You are a leader from hatching?”

Again, Mutt needed a moment to understand the Lizard. “A born leader, you mean?” Now he laughed, loud and long. “I grew up on a Mississippi farm my own self. There was nigger sharecroppers workin’ bigger plots o’ land than the one my pappy had. I got to be a manager on account of I didn’t want to keep walkin’ behind the ass end of a mule forever, so I ran off an’ played ball instead. I was never great, but I was pretty damn good.”