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Then, suddenly, there was space. Anielewicz stopped hard. A squad of Lizards tramped past on patrol. They looked cold and miserable. One turned his strange eyes resentfully up toward the weeping sky. Another wore a child’s coat. He hadn’t figured out buttons, but held the coat closed with one hand while the other clutched his weapon.
As soon as the Lizards moved on, the crowds closed in again. Anielewicz said, “If those poor creatures think it’s cold now, what will they do come January?”
Freeze, was the answer that immediately sprang into Russie’s mind. But he knew he was probably wrong. The Lizards knew more than mankind about so many things; no doubt they had some simple way to keep themselves warm out in the open. That patrol certainly had looked chilly, though.
Anielewicz pulled up in front of the apartment block where Russie lived. “Can you make it up to your flat?” he asked.
“Let’s see.” Russie unfolded himself from the sidecar. He wobbled when he took a couple of tentative steps, but stayed on his feet. “Yes, I’ll manage.”
“Good. If I had to walk you up, I’d worry about the bicycle being here when I got back. Now I can worry about other things instead.” Anielewicz nodded to Russie and rode off.
Had Moishe felt more nearly alive, he might have laughed at the way people in the courtyard started to come up to greet him, then took a better look and retreated faster than they’d advanced. He didn’t blame them; he would have sheered off from himself, too. If he didn’t look horribly contagious, it wasn’t from lack of effort.
He turned the key, walked into his flat; one perquisite of his position was that his family had it all to themselves. His wife whirled round in surprise. “Moishe! What are you doing here so early?” Rivka said, starting to smile. Then she got a good look at him-and maybe a good whiff of him as well-and asked a better question: “Moishe! What happened to you?”
He sighed. “The Lizards happened to me.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide in a face that, while not skeletal as it had been a few months before, was still too thin. “The Lizards did-that-to you?”
“Not directly,” he answered. “What the Lizards did was to treat Washington, D.C., exactly as they had Berlin, and to expect me to be exactly as happy about it.”
Rivka did not much concern herself with politics; the struggle, for survival had taken all her energy. But she was no fool. “They wanted you to praise them for destroying Washington? They must be meshugge.”
“That’s what I thought, so I got sick.” Moishe explained how he’d manufactured his illness on short notice.
“Oh, thank God. When I saw you, I was afraid you’d come down with something dreadful.”
“I feel pretty dreadful,” Russie said. Though drugs rather than bacteria induced his illness, his insides had still gone through a wringer. The only difference was that he would not stay sick unless it proved expedient.
His little son, Reuven, wandered out of the bedroom. The boy wrinkled his nose. “Why does Father smell funny?”
“Never mind.” Rivka Russie turned briskly practical. “We’re going to get him cleaned up right now.” She hurried into the kitchen. The water had been reliable since the Lizards took the town. She came back with a bucket and a rag. “Go into the bedroom, Moishe; hand me out your filthy clothes, clean yourself off, and put on something fresh. You’ll be better for it.”
“All right,” he said meekly. Shedding the soiled garments was nothing but relief. He discovered he’d managed to get vomit on the brim of his hat. In a horrid sort of way, that was an accomplishment. The rag and bucket seemed hardly enough for the job for which they were intended; he wondered if the Vistula would have been enough. Thoughts of the Augean stables ran through his mind as he scrubbed filth from himself. He hadn’t discovered Greek mythology until his university days. Sometimes the images it evoked were as telling as any in the Bible.
In clean clothes he felt a new, if hollow, man. He didn’t want to touch what he had been wearing, but finally bundled the befouled outfit so the filthiest parts were toward the middle. He brought everything out to Rivka.
She nodded. “I’ll take care of them soon.” Living in the ghetto had made stenches just part of life, not something that had to be swept away on the instant. At the moment, questions were more urgent: “What will you do if the Lizards insist that you speak for them after you’re better?”
“I’ll get sick again,” be answered, though his guts twisted at the prospect. “With luck, though, I won’t have to.” He told her what Anielewicz had planned for the transmitter.
“Even if that works, it only puts off the evil day,” Rivka said. “Sooner or later, Moishe, either you will have to do what the Lizards want or else you will have to tell them no.”
“I know.” Moishe grimaced. “Maybe we never should have thrown our lot in with them in the first place. Maybe even the Nazis were a better bargain than this.”
Rivka vigorously shook her head. “You know better. When you are dead, you can’t bargain. And even if we have to disobey the Lizards, I think they will kill only the ones who disobey, and only because they disobey, rather than making a sport of it or killing us simply because we are Jews.”
“I think you are right.” The admission failed to reassure Russie. He, after all, would be one of those who disobeyed, and he wanted to live. But to praise the Lizards for using one of their great bombs on Washington… better to die with self-respect intact.
“Let me make you some soup.” Rivka eyed him as if gauging his strength. “Will you be able to hold it down?”
“I think so,” he said after making his own internal assessments. He let out a dry chuckle. “I ought to try, anyhow, so I have something in my stomach in case I, ah, have to start throwing up again. What I just went through was bad enough, but the dry heaves are worse.”
The soup was thick with cabbage and potatoes, not the watery stuff of the days when the Germans starved the ghetto Jews and every morsel had to be stretched to the utmost. Though no one who had not known those dreadful days would have thought much of it, its warmth helped ease the knots in Russie’s midsection.
He had just finished the last spoonful when somebody came pounding down the hall at a dead run. A fist slammed against his front door. The somebody shouted, “Reb Moishe, Reb Moishe, come quick, Reb Moishe!”
Russie started to get up. His wife took him by the shoulders and forced him back into his chair. “You’re sick, remember?” she hissed. She went to the door herself, opened it. “What’s wrong? My husband is ill. He cannot go anywhere.”
“But he has to!” the man in the hallway exclaimed, as if he were a two-year-old convinced his word was law.
“He cannot,” Rivka repeated. She stepped aside to let the fellow get a look at Moishe, adding, “See for yourself if you don’t believe me,” which told Russie he had to look as bad as he felt.
“I’m sorry, Reb Moishe,” the man said, “but we really do need you. Some of our fighters are facing off with some Armja Krajowa louts up on Mickiewicza Street, and it’s getting ugly. They’re liable to start shooting at each other any minute now.”
Russie groaned. Of all the times for hotheaded Jews and prejudiced Poles to start butting heads, this was the worst Rivka was too far away to make him keep sitting down. He rose, ignoring her look of consternation. But before he could do anything more, the man in the hallway said, “The Lizards are already bringing heavy equipment up there. They’ll slaughter everyone if a fight breaks out.”
With another groan, Russie clutched his belly and sank back down. Rivka’s alarmed expression turned to real concern. But she rallied quickly. “Please go now,” she told the man. “My husband would come if he possibly could; you know that. But he really is ill.”
“Yes, I see he is. I’m sorry. God grant you health soon, Reb Moishe.” The fellow departed at the same breakneck pace at which he’d arrived.
Rivka shut the door, then turned on Russie. “Are you all right?” she demanded, hands on hips. “You w
ere going out there, I know you were. Then all, of a sudden-”
He knew a moment’s pride that his acting had been good enough to give her doubts. He said, “If the Lizards are already there, I can’t let them see me, or they’ll know I’m not as sick as I let on.”
Her eyes widened. “Yes, that makes sense. You-”
“I’m not done,” he interrupted. “The other thing is, I don’t think our men are tangling with the Armja Krajowa Poles by accident. Think where the quarrel is-at the opposite end of Warsaw from the Lizard headquarters. I think they’re trying to draw troops-and maybe Zolraag’s attention, too-away from the studio and the transmitter. Mordechai said tomorrow night, but he works fast. Unless I miss my guess, this is a put-up fight.”
