Upsetting the Balance

“By ship,” Donald Mather answered. “We can get you down to Lisbon without any trouble. Outbound from Lisbon, your freighter will meet a submarine to take you through the Straits of Gibraltar. From the submarine, you’ll board another freighter for the journey to Haifa. How soon can you be ready to leave?”

“It wouldn’t be long,” Moishe said. “It’s not as if we have a lot to pack.” That was, if anything, an understatement. They’d come to England with only the clothes on their backs. They had more than that now, thanks to the kindness of the British and of their relatives here. But a lot of what they had wouldn’t come with them-why bring pots and pans to the Holy Land?

“If I came for you day after tomorrow this same time, you’d be ready, then?” Captain Mather asked.

Moishe almost laughed at him. If they had to leave, he and Rivka could have been ready in half an hour-assuming they found Reuven and dragged him away from whatever game he was playing or watching. A couple of days’ notice struck him as riches like those the Rothschilds were said to enjoy. “We’ll be ready,” he said firmly.

“Good. Until then-” Mather turned to go.

“Wait,” Rivka said, and the Englishman stopped. She went on, “For how long would we be going to-to Palestine?” She had to fight to say the incredible word. “How would you bring us back, and when?”

“As for how long you’d stay,Frau Russie, it would be at least until your husband completed his mission, however long that might take,” Mather answered. “Once that’s done, if you want to return to England, we’ll arrange that, and if you want to stay in Palestine, we can arrange that, too. We do remember those who help us, I promise you that. Have you any other questions? No?” He saluted, did a smart about-turn, and headed for the stairwell.

Moishe and Rivka stared at each other. “Next year in Jerusalem,” Moishe whispered. Jews had been making that prayer since the Romans sacked the Second Temple almost nineteen hundred years before. For almost all of them, it expressed nothing more than a wish that would never be fulfilled. Now-

Now Moishe seized Rivka. Together, they danced around the inside of the flat. It was more than exuberance; he felt as if he could dance on the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. Rivka slowed sooner than he did. She kept a firm grasp on the essentials of the situation, saying, “They are not doing this for you, Moishe-they’re doing it for themselves. Who are these Jews conniving with the Lizards, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” Moishe admitted. “What could I know of what goes on in Palestine? But I know this much: if they want to play games with the Lizards, they’re making a mistake. The British aren’t starving them and killing them for sport, and that would be the only possible excuse for choosing the Lizards.”

“You’ve seen that for yourself,” Rivka agreed, and then turned practical once more: “We’ll have to leave a lot of these clothes behind. The Holy Land is a warmer country than England.”

“So it is.” Moishe hadn’t been thinking about such mundane things. “To pray at the Wailing Wall-” He shook his head in wonder. The idea was just starting to sink down from the front of his mind to the place where his feelings lived: he’d gone from stunned to joyful, and the joy kept growing. It was the first thing he’d ever imagined that might improve on being in love.

It had seized Rivka, too. “To live the rest of our lives in Palestine,” she murmured. “England here, this is not bad-next to Poland even before the Nazis came, it’s a paradise. But to live in a land with plenty of Jews and no one to hate us-that would really be paradise.”

“Who else lives in Palestine?” Moishe said, once again realizing his ignorance of the wider world was both broad and deep. “Arabs, I suppose. After Poles and Germans, they can’t be anything but good neighbors. If Reuven grows up in a country where no one hates him-” He paused. To a Polish Jew, that was like wishing for the moon. But here, even though he hadn’t wished for the moon, Captain Mather had just handed it to him.

“They speak Hebrew in Palestine along with Yiddish, don’t they?” Rivka said. “I’ll have to learn.”

“I’ll have a lot of learning to do myself,” Moishe said. Men read the Torah and the Talmud, so he’d learned Hebrew while Rivka hadn’t. But there was a difference between using a language to talk to God and using it to talk with your fellow men.When I get to Jerusalem, I’ll find out what the difference is, he thought, and shivered with excitement.