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“The towns around here, most of them are Judenfrei,” he said. “We’d stick out. We don’tlook Polish. We can t look Polish, I don’tthink.” He sighed. “Litzmannstadt”-the name the Germans gave Lodz-“would have been Judenfrei, too, If the Lizard hadn’t come.”

“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?”

That argument would have been more persuasive, Moishe thought, before 1939. Since then, how many of His people had God allowed to die? Moishe didn’t say that to his wife; he didn’t even care to think it himself. His own faith was shakier these days than he wished it were, and he didn’t want to be guilty of troubling hers.

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.

Maybe it’s the smell, Russie thought. It was a smell of despair and stale cabbage and unwashed bodies and more garbage and sewage than the trash collectors and sewers could handle. Not all the people the Nazis had crammed into Lodz had been able to go home. Some had no homes, not after the Germans had fought Poles and Russians, and the Lizards fought the Germans. Some, carried into the ghetto in cattle cars from Germany and Austria, had homes outside Lizard-held territory. Even now, the ghetto was a desperately crowded place.

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 tokhus to talk like that. One look at this flat and you’ll be down on your knee begging to rent.”

“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.”

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Все книги серии Worldwar

In the Balance
In the Balance

War seethed across the planet. Machines soared through the air, churned through the seas, crawled across the surface, pushing ever forward, carrying death. Earth was engaged in a titanic struggle. Germany, Russia, France, China, Japan: the maps were changing day by day. The hostilities spread in ever-widening ripples of destruction: Britain, Italy, Africa… the fate of the world hung in the balance. Then the real enemy came. Out of the dark of night, out of the soft glow of dawn, out of the clear blue sky came an invasion force the likes of which Earth had never known-and worldwar was truly joined. The invaders were inhuman and they were unstoppable. Their technology was far beyond our reach, and their goal was simple. Fleetlord Atvar had arrived to claim Earth for the Empire. Never before had Earth's people been more divided. Never had the need for unity been greater. And grudgingly, inexpertly, humanity took up the challenge. In this epic novel of alternate history, Harry Turtledove takes us around the globe. We roll with German panzers; watch the coast of Britain with the RAF; and welcome alien-liberators to the Warsaw ghetto. In tiny planes we skim the vast Russian steppe, and we push the envelope of technology in secret labs at the University of Chicago. Turtledove's saga covers all the Earth, and beyond, as mankind-in all its folly and glory-faces the ultimate threat; and a turning point in history shows us a past that never was and a future that could yet come to be…

Гарри Тертлдав

Боевая фантастика
Tilting the Balance
Tilting the Balance

World War II screeched to a halt as the great military powers scrambled to meet an even deadlier foe. The enemy's formidable technology made their victory seem inevitable. Already Berlin and Washington, D.C., had been vaporized by atom bombs, and large parts of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Germany and its conquests lay under the invaders' thumb. Yet humanity would not give up so easily, even if the enemy's tanks, armored personnel carriers, and jet aircraft seemed unstoppable. The humans were fiendishly clever, ruthless at finding their foe's weaknesses and exploiting them. While Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Togo planned strategy, the real war continued. In Warsaw, Jews welcomed the invaders as liberators, only to be cruelly disillusioned. In China, the Communist guerrillas used every trick they knew, even getting an American baseball player to lob grenades at the enemy. Though the invaders had cut the United States practically in half at the Mississippi River and devastated much of Europe, they could not shut down America's mighty industrial power or the ferocious counterattacks of her allies. Whether delivering supplies in tiny biplanes to partisans across the vast steppes of Russia, working furiously to understand the enemy's captured radar in England, or battling house to house on the streets of Chicago, humanity would not give up. Meanwhile, an ingenious German panzer colonel had managed to steal some of the enemy's plutonium, and now the Russians, Germans, Americans, and Japanese were all laboring frantically to make their own bombs. As Turtledove's global saga of alternate history continues, humanity grows more resourceful, even as the menace worsens. No one could say when the hellish inferno of death would stop being a war of conquest and turn into a war of survival-the very survival of the planet. In this epic of civilizations in deadly combat, the end of the war could mean the end of the world as well.

Гарри Тертлдав

Боевая фантастика

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