“The towns around here, most of them are
“All right, we’ll stay here, then,” Rivka said, accepting his oblique answer.
He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. Maybe they would be wiser to flee far from Lodz, even if that meant taking to the road to go to the eastern parts of Lizard-held Poland where the Nazis had not had time to root out all the Jews. But he couldn’t make himself flee like that for what might have been, as Rivka said, a case of the vapors.
To make himself feel he was doing something, he said, “I’ll start looking for a new flat tomorrow over by Mostowski Street.” That was about as far from where they were as one could go and remain in the Lodz ghetto.
“All right,” Rivka said again. She picked up the sock and put another few stitches in it. After a moment, though, she added meditatively, “We’ll have to keep on shopping in the Balut Market square, though.”
“That’s true:” Moishe started to pace back and forth. To go? To stay? He still couldn’t make up his mind.
“It will be all right,” Rivka said. “God has protected us for this long; would He abandon us now?”
Instead, he yawned and said, “Let’s go to bed.”
Rivka put down the sock again. She hesitated, then said, “Do you want me to look for the flat? The fewer people who see you, the smaller the risk we run.”
Moishe knew that was true. Nonetheless, his pride revolted at hiding behind Rivka every day-and he had no evidence whatever to back up his hunch. So he said, “It shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll be only a moment crossing the Balut, and I don’t look like my poster picture anyhow, not clean-shaven.”
Rivka gave him her best dubious look, but didn’t say anything. He reckoned that a victory.
And, indeed, no one paid him any mind as he crossed the market square and turned east into the heart of the ghetto. The shabby brick buildings cast the narrow streets into shadow. Though the Lizards had driven the Germans out of Lodz nearly a year before, the atmosphere of the hellishly crowded ghetto still clung to the place, maybe more strongly than in Warsaw.
Posters of Chaim Rumkowski shouted at people from every blank wall surface. As far as Moishe could tell, people weren’t doing much in the way of listening. In all those teeming streets, he saw only a couple of persons glance up at the posters, and one of those, an old woman, shook her head and laughed after she did. Somehow that made Russie feel a little better about mankind.
His own poster still appeared here and there, too, now beginning to fray and tatter a bit. No one looked up at that any more, either, to his relief.
When he got to Mostowski Street, he started poking his nose into blocks of flats and asking if they had any rooms to let. At first he thought he would have no choice but to stay where he was or else leave town. But at the fourth building he visited, the fellow who ran the place said, “You are a lucky man, my friend, do you know that? I just had a family move out not an hour ago.”
“Why?” Moishe asked in a challenging voice. “Were you charging them a thousand zlotys a day, or did the cockroaches and rats make alliance and drive them out? It’s probably a pigsty you’re going to show me.”
From one Jew to another, that hit hard a couple of ways. The landlord, or manager, or whatever he was, clapped a hand to his forehead in a theatrical, display of injured innocence. “A pigsty? I should kick you out of here on your
“I don’t get down on my knees for God and I should do it for you? You should live so long,” Moishe said. “Besides, you still haven’t said what ridiculous price you want.”