Upsetting the Balance

Mordechai Anielewicz strode down the sidewalk, as if enjoying every moment of his morning outing. That the temperature was far below freezing, that he wore a fur cap with earflaps down, two pairs of wool trousers one inside the other, a Red Army greatcoat and felt boots, and heavy mittens, that his breath smoked like a chimney and crystals froze in his beard and mustache-by the way he strolled along, it might have been spring in Paris, not winter in Lodz.

He was far from the only person on the street, either. Work had to get done, whether it was freezing or not. People either ignored the weather or made jokes about it “Colder than my wife after she’s talked with her mother,” one man said to a friend. They both laughed, building a young fogbank around themselves.

The Lizards were busy on the streets of Lodz, too. Alien police, looking far colder and more miserable than most humans Mordechai saw, labored to get traffic off the main east-west streets. They had their work cut out for them, too, for as fast as they shooed people away, more spilled onto the boulevards they were fighting to clear.

Not all of that was absentminded cussedness; quite a few men and women were being deliberately obstructive. Anielewicz hoped the Lizards didn’t figure that out. Things might get ugly if they did.

Finally, the Lizards cleared away enough people and wagons to get their armored column through. The males peering out of the cupolas of tanks and armored personnel carriers looked even more miserable than the ones on the street. They also looked absurd: a Lizard wearing a shaggy wolfskin cap tied on under his jaws resembled nothing so much as a dandelion gone to seed.

Four tanks, three carriers… seven tanks, nine carriers… fifteen tanks, twenty-one carriers. He lost track of the lorries, but they were in proportion to the armored vehicles they accompanied. When the parade was done, he whistled softly between his teeth. West of Lodz, the Lizards had something big laid on. You didn’t have to be Napoleon to figure out what, either. West of Lodz lay… Germany.

Still whistling, he walked down to the Balut Market square and bought a cabbage, some turnips, some parsnips, and a couple of chicken feet. They’d make a soup that tasted meaty, even if it didn’t have much real meat in it. Next to what he’d got by on in Warsaw, the prospect of a soup with any meat in it-the prospect of a soup with plenty of vegetables in it-seemed ambrosial by comparison.

He wrapped his purchases in an old ragged cloth and carried them back to the fire station on Lutomierska Street. His office was upstairs, not far from the sealed room where people took refuge when the Nazis threw gas at Lodz. If they’d known what he knew, their rockets would have been flying an hour earlier.

He fiddled around with the draft of a letter for Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski to present to the Lizard authorities, asking them to release more coal for heating. Having to rely on the Lizards’ dubious mercy grated on him, but every so often Rumkowski did win concessions, so the game was worth playing. Rumkowski had begged Himmler for concessions, too, and won a few. As long as he could be a big fish in the little pool of Jewish Lodz, he’d debase himself for the bigger fish in the bigger pools.

People wandered in and out. Bertha Fleishman’s sister had had a baby girl the night before; along with everyone else, Anielewicz saidmazeltov. Even as people kept blowing one another to bits, they were having babies, too. He’d seen that in the ghetto. In the midst of horror worse than any he’d imagined, people kept falling in love and getting married and having children. He wondered if that was absolutelymeshuggeh or the sanest thing they could possibly do.

Finally, three o’clock rolled around. That hour corresponded to a change of shift at the telephone exchange. Anielewicz picked up the phone and waited for an operator to come on the other end of the line. When one did, he called his landlady, Mrs. Lipshitz, and told her he’d be working late. She bore up under the news with equanimity. He tried again. When he heard the operator’s voice, he asked her to put him through to Rumkowski’s office. He asked a meaningless question about the upcoming request for more coal, then hung up.

Muttering under his breath, he picked up the telephone once more. When the operator answered, he brightened. “Is that you, Yetta?” he said. “How are you this afternoon, darling?”

“Saul?” she asked, as she’d been trained to do. Yetta wasn’t her real name. Mordechai didn’t know what it was, or what she looked like. The less he knew, the less he could give away if he fell into the Lizards’ hands.

“The same. Listen, sweetheart, I need to talk to Meyer the baker. You know the one-his shop is right next to the Balut.”

“I’ll try to put you through,” Yetta said. “We’ve been having some trouble with the wires down there, so it may take a while. Please be patient.”