Upsetting the Balance

But instead of shouting something like,You stinking sack of shit of a Jew, he politely nodded and in soft tones asked, “You are Mr. Moishe Russie?”

“Yes,” Moishe said cautiously. “Who are you?”

“Captain Donald Mather, sir, of the Special Air Service,” the blond young soldier answered. To Russie’s surprise, he saluted.

“C–Come in,” Moishe said, his voice a little shaky. No SS man would ever have saluted a Jew, not under any circumstances. “You have met my wife, I think.”

“Yes, sir,” Mather said, stepping past him. He nodded to Rivka. “Ma’am.” Social amenities apparently complete, he turned back to Moishe. “Sir, His Majesty’s government needs your help.”

Alarm sirens began going off in Moishe’s mind. He slipped from English back into Yiddish: “What does His Majesty’s government think I can do for it? And why me in particular and not somebody else?”

Captain Mather answered the second question first: “You in particular, sir, because of your experience in Poland.” He left English, too, for German. Moishe’s hackles did not rise so much as they might have: Mather made an effort, and not a bad one, to pronounce it with a Yiddish intonation. He was plainly a capable man, and in some not-so-obvious ways.

“I had lots of experience in Poland,” Moishe said. “Most of it, I didn’t like at all, not even a little bit. Why does anyone think I would want to do something that draws on it?”

“You’re already doing something that draws on it, sir, in your BBC broadcasts,” Mather replied. Moishe grimaced; that was true. The Englishman continued, making his German sound more Yiddish with every sentence: “I will admit, though, we have rather more in mind for you than sitting in front of a microphone and reading from a prepared script.”

“What do you have in mind?” Moishe said. “You still haven’t answered what I asked you.”

“I was coming round to it, sir; by easy stages,” Donald Mather said. “One thing you learned in Poland was that cooperating with the Lizards isn’t always the best of notions, if you’ll forgive your understatement.”

“No, not always, but if I hadn’t cooperated with them at first, I wouldn’t be here arguing with you now,” Moishe said.

“Saving yourself and your family-” Mather began.

“-And my people,” Russie put in “Without the Lizards, the Nazis would have slaughtered us all.”

“And your people,” Captain Mather conceded. “No one will say you didn’t do what you had to do when you joined the Lizards against the Nazis. But afterwards, you saw that mankind as a whole was your people, too, and you turned against the Lizards.”

“Yes to all of this,” Moishe said, beginning to grow impatient. “But what does it have to do with whatever you want from me?”

“I am coming to that,” Mather answered calmly. No matter how well he spoke, that external calm would have marked him as an Englishman; in his place, a Jew or a Pole would have been shouting and gesticulating. He went on, “Would you agree that in His Majesty’s mandate of Palestine, no effort to exterminate the Jews is now under way, but rather the reverse?”

“In Palestine?” Moishe echoed. The mention of the name was enough to make Rivka sharply catch her breath. Moishe shook his head. “No, you aren’t doing anything like that.Nu?” Here, the multifarious Yiddish word meantcome to the point.

He would have explained that to Mather, but the captain understood it on his own. Mather said, “The nub of it is, Mr. Russie, that there are Jews in Palestine who are not content with British administration there and have been intriguing with the Lizards in Egypt to aid any advance they might make into the Holy Land. His Majesty’s government would like to send you to Palestine to talk to the Jewish fighting leaders and convince them to stay loyal to the crown, to show them that, unlike yours, their situation is not so bad as to require intervention by the aliens to liberate them from it.”

“You want to send me to Palestine?” Moishe asked. He knew he sounded incredulous, but couldn’t help it. Beside him, Rivka made an indignant noise. He corrected himself at once: “You want to send us-me and my family-to Palestine?” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. Occasionally, in Poland, he’d thought of emigrating, of makingaliyah, to the Holy Land. But he’d never taken the notion seriously, no matter how hard the Poles made life for a Jew. And, once the Nazis came, it was too late.

Now this Englishman he’d known for five minutes was nodding, telling him the long-hopeless dream of his exiled people could come true for him. “That’s just what we want to do. We can’t think of a righter man for the job.”

With a woman’s practicality, Rivka asked the next question: “How do we get there?”