Tilting the Balance

He knew that, too. Had he gone straight from the Warsaw bunker to close confinement in this flat, he could have borne it easily enough. But a taste of freedom left him hungry for more. It had been the same in Warsaw. If the Lizards had treated its Jews the same way the Germans had, people there might well have accepted it, simply because it was what they’d grown used to. After a spell of mild rule, though, tough strictures would have been hard to reimpose. He’d certainly rebelled when the Lizards tried to make him into nothing but their mouthpiece.

Rivka inspected the cabbages, peeled off a couple of wilted outer leaves, and threw them away. That was a measure of how far they’d come. In the days when the Nazis ruled the ghetto, wilted cabbage leaves would have been something to fight over. Their being just garbage again showed that the family wasn’t in the last stages of starving to death any more.

The rest of the cabbage, chopped, went into the soup pot with potatoes and a big white onion from a vegetable basket by the counter. Moishe wished for a roasted pullet or barley and beef soup with bones full of marrow. Cabbage and potatoes, though, you could live a long time on that, even without meat.

“It certainly seems like a long time, anyhow,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Rivka asked.

“Nothing,” he answered loyally, thinking of all the vitamins and other nutrients in potatoes and cabbages and onions. But man did not live by nutrients alone, and the soup, however nourishing the medical part of him knew it to be, remained uninspiring despite Rivka’s best efforts.

She put a lid on the soup pot. The hot plate would eventually bring it to a boil. Moishe had given up on quickly cooked food-not that soup cooked quickly any which way. Rivka said, “I wonder how long Reuven will play outside.”

“Hmm.” Moishe sent her a speculative look. She smiled back. Just for a moment, the tip of her tongue appeared between her teeth. He did his best to sound severe: “I think you’re just trying to butter me up.” He listened to himself. Severe? He sounded eager as a bridegroom.

As a matter of fact, he was eager as a bridegroom. He took a couple of quick steps across the kitchen. Rivka’s arms went around him at the same time his went around her. After a few seconds, she said, “For this, I may even like you better clean-shaven. Your mustaches used to tickle my nose when we kissed.”

“If you like it so well-” he said, and resumed. His hand cupped her breast through the wool of her dress. She made a small noise deep in her throat and pressed herself tighter against him.

The door opened.

Moishe and Rivka jumped away from each other as if they had springs in their shoes. From the doorway, Reuven called, “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry.”

“There’s a heel of bread in here you can have, and I’m making soup,” Rivka answered. “Your father brought home a couple of lovely cabbages.” Her shrug to Moishe was full of humorous frustration.

He understood the feeling because he shared it. In the insanely overcrowded Warsaw ghetto, concerns about privacy had fallen to pieces, because so little was to be had. People did what they did, and the other people crammed into a flat with them, no matter how young, pretended not to notice. But decorum had returned to the family as soon as they were out of that desperate overcrowding.

Reuven wolfed down the bread his mother gave him, then sat on the kitchen floor to stare expectantly at the soup pot. Above him, Rivka said “Tonight” to Moishe.

He nodded. His son let out an indignant squawk: “The soup won’t be ready till tonight?”

“No, I was talking about something else with your father,” Rivka said.

Partway appeased, Reuven resumed his pot watching. The idea of privacy had come back after they were no longer stuffed into a flat like sardines. But food… they all still worried about food, even though they weren’t starving any more. If they hadn’t, Moishe wouldn’t have noticed Rivka throwing out the wilted cabbage leaves, wouldn’t have counted that as a sign of their relative affluence.

“Do you know,” he said out of the blue, “I think I understand Rumkowski better?”

“Nu?” Rivka said. “Tell me. How he could go on dealing with the Lizards, and with the Nazis before them-” She shivered.

Moishe explained his thoughts about the cabbage leaves, then went on, “I think Rumkowski’s the same way, only about power, not food. However he thought of it when this was a Nazis ghetto, he can’t change his mind now. He’s-fixated, that’s the word.” It came out in German; Yiddish didn’t have a term for the precise psychological concept Moishe was trying to get across. Rivka nodded to show she followed.

Reuven said, “You threw out some cabbage leaves, Mama?” He got up and went over to the garbage can. “May I eat them?”

“No, just leave them there,” Rivka said, and then again, louder, “Leave them there, I told you. You’re not going to starve to death before the soup is done.” She stopped with a bemused look on her face.