Upsetting the Balance полностью

Friedrich shrugged. “Shall I tell you I’m sorry? Would it do me any good?” He shrugged again; he hadn’t intended that second question to be taken seriously. After a moment, he went on, “I’m not particularly sorry. I did what my officers told me to do. They said you Jews were enemies of theReich and needed eliminating just like our other enemies. And so-” Yet another shrug.

Anielewicz had heard that same argument from Nazis the Jews had captured when they helped the Lizards drive the Germans out of Warsaw. Before he could say anything, Pinchas Silberman hissed, “My Yetta, my boys, my baby-these were enemies? They were going to hurt you Nazi bastards?” He tried to spit in Friedrich’s face, but missed. The spittle slid slowly down the brick wall of the fire station.

“Answer him!” Anielewicz barked when Friedrich kept silent for a moment.

“Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!”Friedrich said, clicking his heels with exquisite irony. “You have me. You will do as you like with me, just as I did as I liked before. When England dropped bombs on us and blew up our women and children, they thought those women and children were enemies. And, before you start shouting at me, when we dropped bombs on the English, we did the same thing,ja. How does that make me any different from a bomber, except I did it retail with a rifle instead of wholesale with a bombing plane?”

“But the Jews you murdered had never done anything to you,” Mordechai said. He’d run into that peculiar German blind spot before, too. “Parts of Poland used to be Germany, and some of the Jews here fought for the Kaiser in the last war. What kind of sense does it make to go slaughtering them now?”

“My officers said they were enemies. If I hadn’t treated them as enemies, who knows what would have happened to me?” Friedrich said. “And let me ask you another question, Shmuel-if you could make a giant omelet out of all the Lizards’ eggs, would you do it so they’d never trouble us again?”

“A Nazitzaddik we don’t need,” Silberman said. “Answer me this, Nazischmuck — what would you do if you found the man who’d killed your wife and children? What would you do if you found himand he didn’t even remember doing it?”

“I’d kill the motherfucker,” Friedrich answered. “But I’m just a Nazi bastard, so what the devil do I know?”

Silberman looked at Mordechai. “Out of his own mouth you heard it. He puts the noose around his neck-and if he didn’t, I would.”

Friedrich looked at him, too, as if to say,We fought together, and now you’re going to kill me? You already knew part of what I was a long time ago. How much were you pretending so we didn’t go for each other’s throats?

Anielewicz sighed. “Friedrich, I think we’d better go over to the Balut Market square.” The square didn’t hold the market alone; the administration offices for the Lodz ghetto were there, too. Some of the Jewish fighting men there would know Mordechai was not Shmuel, a simple partisan. With some of those who knew who he really was, that would work to his advantage. Others, though, might be inclined to reveal his true name to Chaim Rumkowski-or to the Lizards.

“So you’re going to tell them to hang me, too, eh?” Friedrich said.

“No,” Anielewicz said slowly. Pinchas Silberman let out an outraged howl. Ignoring it, Mordechai went on, “Silberman here will tell what you did before the Lizards came. I’ll tell what you’ve done since, or what I know of it. It should tilt the balance toward-”

Friedrich laughed in his face. “You Jews took it when you were on the bottom. You think I believe you won’t give it now that you’re on top?”

“We believe in something you Nazis never heard of,” Anielewicz answered. “It’s called justice.”

“It’s calledScheisse, is what it’s called,” Friedrich said. “So in the name of justice, you’re going to-” In the middle of the sentence, without shifting either his eyes or his feet to give warning, he hit Anielewicz in the belly and ran.

“Oof!” Mordechai said, and folded up like a concertina.Shlemiel, he thought as he gasped for air his lungs didn’t want to give him. Friedrich might have started out in a police battalion, but he’d picked up a real soldier’s skills from somewhere-and a partisan’s, as well. Not letting your foe know what you were about to do until you did it ranked high on both lists.