Tilting the Balance

Anielewicz doubted that. Sandwiched between Germany and Russia, Poland was going to get walloped every so often. Before he could come up with a polite way to disagree with his host, Emilia Sawatski turned to her daughters and said, “Why don’t you go and bring in the food now?” Alone in the family, she hadn’t cared about tales of conflict.

In came supper, mountains of it: boiled potatoes, boiled kielbasa sausage, big pork steaks, headcheese, fresh-baked bread. Warsaw might be hungry, but the countryside seemed to be doing pretty well for itself.

As Maria, the older girl, plopped a length of sausage onto Anielewicz’s plate, she gave him a sidelong glance, then spoke in silky tones to her father. “You’re not going to send a hero like Janusz out onto the road after supper, are you, Papa? He’ll sleep here tonight, won’t he?”

She wants to go to bed with me, Anielewicz realized with some alarm. That alarm had nothing to do with Maria’s person: she was eighteen or nineteen, and quite pretty in a wide-faced, blue-eyed way. Anielewicz didn’t particularly worry about angering her father either. But if he took off his trousers for her, he wouldn’t be able to hide being a Jew.

Wladyslaw Sawatski looked from Maria to Mordechai and back again. The glance was full of understanding: whatever else he might be, Sawatski was no fool. He said, “I was going to let him rest in the barn, Maria, but as you say, he is a hero, and too good for straw. He can sleep on the sofa in the front room there.”

He pointed to show Anielewicz where that was. Mordechai was not surprised to discover it lay right outside the doorway to a bedroom that would surely be Wladyslaw’s. You’d have to be crazy to try to screw there.

He said, “Thank you, sir. That will be excellent.” Sawatski might figure he was lying, but he meant every word of it. Maria had to nod-after all, her father had given her just what she’d said she wanted. Anielewicz hadn’t expected to find rabbinic wisdom in a Polish farmer, but there it was.

The meat on his plate smelled delicious. Then Ewa Sawatski asked, “Don’t you want any butter on your potatoes?”

He stared at her. Mixing meat and dairy products in the same meal-? Then he remembered the meat was pork. If he was eating pork, how could another violation of dietary law matter? “Thank you,” he said, and took some butter.

Wladyslaw filled his mug when it got empty. The farmer gave himself a refill, too. His cheeks were red as if he’d rouged them, but that was all the brandy did to him. Mordechai’s head was starting to swim, but he didn’t think he could decline the drink. Poles poured it down till they couldn’t see, didn’t they?

The women went into the kitchen to clean up. Wladyslaw sent Jozef off to bed, saying, “We have plenty of work tomorrow.” But he still lingered at the table, politely ready to talk as long as Anielewicz felt like it.

That wasn’t long. When Mordechai yawned and couldn’t stop, Sawatski got him a pillow and a blanket and settled him on the sofa. It was hard and lumpy, but he’d slept on worse in the ghetto and during the fighting afterwards. No sooner had he taken off his boots and stretched himself out at full length than he was asleep. If Maria sneaked out bent on seduction in the night, he didn’t wake up for her.

Breakfast the next morning was an enormous bowl of oatmeal flavored with butter and coarse salt. Emilia Sawatski waved away Mordechai’s thanks and wouldn’t even take the turnips he tried to give her. “We have enough here, and you may need them in your travel,” she said. “God keep you as you go.”

Wladyslaw walked out to the road with Anielewicz. He too said, “God keep you,” then added quietly, “Friend Janusz, you do a good job of pretending to be a Pole rather than a Jew, but not always good enough. You’re awkward when you cross yourself, for instance”-in a single swift motion, the farmer showed how it should be done-“and you don’t always do it at quite the right time. At another man’s house, you might put yourself in danger.”

Mordechai stared at him. Finally, he managed, “You knew, yet you took me in anyway?”

“You looked like a man who needed taking in.” Sawatski slapped Anielewicz on the back. “Now go on. I hope you stay safe to wherever you’re headed.”

He asked no questions about that; Anielewicz noticed so much. Still dazed (no man, and especially no young man, cares to be shown he is not as clever as he thought he was), he started down the road away from Warsaw. He’d had so much bitter experience with anti-Semitic Poles that he’d come to think the whole nation hated its Jews. Being reminded that wasn’t so made him feel good all the rest of the day.

XI

Ussmak hated the barracks at Besancon. Because they’d been made for Big Uglies, they were by his standards dark and dank and cold. But even if they’d been a section of Home miraculously transplanted to Tosev 3, he would not have been happy in them, not now. To him, they stank of failure.