Upsetting the Balance полностью

“Youare a Jew!” The newcomer clapped a hand to his forehead, almost knocking the cap from his head. He pointed at Friedrich. “Do you know whom you’re walking with? Do you knowwhat you’re walking with?” His hand quivered.

“I know that if there’s a fire, the engine is going to come out of there and smash us flat as a couple oflatkes,” Anielewicz answered, nodding over toward the fire station in front of which they stood. The ghetto fire engine still had petrol. As far as he knew, it was the only vehicle in the Jewish quarter of Lodz that did. He gently took the Jew by the elbow. “Come on, let’s go over on the sidewalk.” He gathered in Friedrich with his eyes. “You come, too.”

“Where else would I go?” Friedrich said, his voice easy, amused. It was not an idle question. A lot of the young men on the street had rifles slung over their shoulders. If he ran, a shout of “Nazi!” would surely get him caught, and likely get him shot.

The Jew with the scarred cheek seemed ready to give that shout, too. His features working, he repeated, “Do you know what you’re walking with, you who say you are a Jew?”

“Yes, I know he’s a German,” Mordechai answered. “We were in a partisan band together. He may have been a Nazi soldier, but he’s a good fighting man. He’s given the Lizards many a kick in the arse.”

“With a German, you might be a friend. With a Nazi, even, you might be a friend,” the Jew answered. “The world is a strange place, that I should say such a thing. But with a murderer of his kind-” He spat at Friedrich’s feet.

“I said I was his comrade. I did not say I was his friend,” Anielewicz replied. The distinction sounded picayune even to him. He stared at Friedrich with a sudden, horrid suspicion. A lot of men in the partisan band had been reticent about just what they’d done before they joined it. He’d been reticent himself, when you got down to it. But a German could have some particularly good reasons for wanting to keep his mouth shut.

“His comrade.” Now the Jew spat between Mordechai’s feet. “Listen to me,comrade.” He freighted the word with the hate and scorn a Biblical prophet might have used. “My name is Pinchas Silberman. I am-I was-a greengrocer in Lipno. Unless you are from there, you would never have heard of it: it is a little town north of here. It had a few Jews-fifty, maybe, not a hundred. We got on well enough with our Polish neighbors.”

Silberman paused to glare at Friedrich. “One day, after the Germans conquered Poland, in came a-platoon, is that what you call it? — of a police battalion. They gathered us up, men and women and children-me, my Yetta, Aaron, Yossel, and little Golda-and they marched us into the woods. He, your precious comrade, he was one of them. I shall take his face to the grave with me.”

“Were you ever in Lipno?” Anielewicz asked Friedrich.

“I don’t know,” the German answered indifferently. “I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns.”

Silberman’s voice went shrill: “Hear the angel of death! ‘I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns,’ he says. No doubt he was, and left not a Jew alive behind him, except by accident. Me, I was an accident. He shot my wife, he shot my daughter in her arms, he shot my boys, and then he shot me. I had a great bloody head wound”-he brought a hand up to his face-“so he and the rest of the murderers must have thought I was dead along with my family, along with all the others. They went away. I got up and I walked to Plock, which is a bigger town not far from Lipno. I was half healed before the Germans emptied out Plock. They didn’t shoot everyone there. Some, the able-bodied, they shipped here to Lodz to work-to slave-for them. I was one of those. Now God is kind, and I can have my revenge.”

“Policebattalion?” Anielewicz stared at Friedrich with undisguised loathing. The German had always acted like a soldier. He’d fought as well as any soldier, and Anielewicz had assumed he’d been aWehrmacht man. That was bad enough, but he’d heard of and even known a few decentWehrmacht men even before the Lizards came. A lot of them were soldiers like any other country’s, just doing their jobs. But the men in the police battalions-

The most you could give them was that they didn’t always kill all the Jews in the towns and villages they visited. As Silberman had said, some they drafted into slave labor instead. And he’d fought beside Friedrich, slept beside him, shared food with him, escaped from the prison camp with him. He felt sick.

“What can you say for yourself?” he demanded. Because he’d done all those things with Friedrich-and because he was, in part, alive thanks to the German-he hesitated to shout for one of those armed Jews right away. He was willing, at least, to hear how the German defended himself.