Upsetting the Balance

“I had it-a girl,” she answered. If Nieh thought she was a slut for bedding Bobby Fiore, he didn’t show it. That by itself was enough to earn her gratitude. She continued, “You may know the little scaly devils do things to try to understand how real people work. They took my baby from me when it was just three days old, and they keep it for themselves.”

“This is a great wickedness,” Nieh said seriously. He looked up at the ceiling again. “Liu Han, Liu Han…” When they swung back to her, his eyes had brightened. “You are the woman who learned the scaly devils had machines that could see heat.”

“Yes-they used one of those machines on me, to help see inside my womb before the baby was born,” Liu Han said. “I thought they would use it for other things as well.”

“And you were right,” Nieh Ho-T’ing told her, his voice full of enthusiasm. “We have used this to give us a tactical advantage several times already.” Hewas a soldier, then. He went back from tactics to her. “But if you want revenge against the little scaly devils for their heartless oppression and exploitation of you, you shall have your chance to get it.”

Not just a soldier, a Communist. She easily recognized the rhetoric now. It came as no surprise: the poultry seller, after all, had been a Communist, and passed on her information to his comrades. If the Communists were best at resisting the scaly devils, then she didn’t see anything wrong with them. And she owed those little devils so much. If Nieh Ho-T’ing would help her get her own back… “Tell me what you want me to do,” she said.

Nieh smiled.

Razor wire. Huts. Cots. Cabbage. Beets. Potatoes. Black bread. The Lizards no doubt intended it to be a prison camp to break a man’s spirit. After the privations of the Warsaw ghetto, it felt more like a holiday resort to Mordechai Anielewicz. As gaolers, the Lizards were amateurs. The food, for instance, was plain and boring, but the Lizards didn’t seem to have thought of cutting back the quantity.

Mordechai felt on holiday for another reason as well. He’d been a leader of fighting men for a long time: of Jews against Nazis, of Jews for the Lizards. Then he’d been a fugitive, and then a simple partisan. Now the other shoe had dropped: he was a prisoner, and didn’t need to worry about getting captured.

In their own way, the Lizards were humane. When the Germans captured partisans, they shot them without further ado-or sometimes with further ado, if they felt like trying to squeeze out information before granting the grace of a bullet. But the Lizards had taken him and Jerzy and Friedrich across Poland to a POW camp outside Piotrkow, south of Lodz.

No one here had the slightest idea who he was. He answered to Shmuel, not to his own name. As far as Friedrich and Jerzy knew, he was just a Jew who’d fought in their band. Nobody asked a would-be partisan probing questions about his past. Even in the camp, the freedom of anonymity was exhilarating.

One morning after roll call, a Lizard guard official read from a list: “The following Tosevites will fall out for interrogation-” His Polish was bad, and what he did to the pronunciation of Anielewicz’s alias a caution.

Nonetheless, Mordechai fell out without a qualm. They’d already interrogated him two or three times. To them, interrogation meant nothing worse than asking questions. They knew about torture, but the idea appalled them. There were times when Anielewicz savored the irony of that. They hadn’t even questioned him particularly hard. To them, he was just another Big Ugly caught with a rifle in his hands.

He started to sweat as soon as he went into the wooden shed the Lizards used for their camp headquarters. That had nothing to do with fear; the Lizards heated their buildings to their own comfort level, which felt to him like the Sahara.

“You, Shmuel, you go to room two on the left,” one of his guards said in execrable Yiddish.

Mordechai obediently went to room two. Inside, he found a Lizard with medium-fancy body paint and a human interpreter. He’d expected as much. Few Lizards were fluent enough in any human language to be efficient questioners. What he hadn’t expected was that he’d recognize the interpreter.

The fellow’s name was Jakub Kipnis. He had a gift for languages; he’d been translating for the Lizards in Warsaw, and he got on better with them than most people did.

He recognized Mordechai, too, in spite of the curly beard he’d grown and his general air of seediness. “Hullo, Anielewicz,” he said. “I never thought I’d see you here.” Mordechai didn’t like the look on Kipnis’ thin pale face. Some of the men the Germans had set up as puppet rulers of the Warsaw ghetto had fawned on their Nazi masters. Some of the Lizards’ helpers were all too likely to fawn on them, too.

The Lizard sitting next to Kipnis spoke irritably in his own language. Anielewicz understood enough to know he’d asked the interpreter why he’d called the prisoner by the wrong name. “This is the male Shmuel, is it not?”