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“Send a Jew to the Greater German Reich?” Reuven exclaimed. “If those are Cousin David’s friends, God forbid he should ever get enemies.”
“Omayn,” his father said. “But when all the other choices are worse…” Moishe Russie shook his head. “I know. It hardly seems possible. But he wants me to find out what I can from the Lizards about ginger-smuggling through Marseille, so he doesn’t go in completely blind.”
“How much of that can you do?” Reuven asked.
“There are males who will tell me some,” his father said. “I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know them. For something like that, they will give me answers, I think. And what I cannot learn from them, I may be able to find out from the Lizards’ computers.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Reuven agreed. “You can find out almost anything from them if you know where to look and which questions to ask.”
His father laughed, which irked him till Moishe remarked, “If you know where to look and which questions to ask, you can find out almost anything almost anywhere-you don’t need computers to do it.”
Reuven’s twin sisters came out of the kitchen to announce supper would be ready in a few minutes. Fixing Judith and Esther with a mild and speculative eye, he remarked, “You’re right, Father. They already know everything already.”
“What is he talking about now?” Esther asked, at the same time as Judith was saying, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“If you’d listened carefully, he was paying you a compliment,” their father said.
They both sniffed. One of them said, “I’d sooner get a compliment where I don’t have to listen carefully.”
“I’ll give you one,” Reuven said. “You’re the most-” His father coughed before he could say anything more. That probably kept him out of trouble. Even so, he didn’t appreciate it. His sisters rarely gave him such a golden opportunity, and here he couldn’t even take advantage of it.
A moment later, his mother quelled the budding argument for the time being, calling, “Supper!” The ploy might not have been so subtle as Solomon’s, but it did the job. Next to boiled-beef-and-barley soup with carrots and onions and celery, squabbling with his sisters suddenly seemed less important.
His father approved, too, saying, “This is fine, Rivka. It takes me back to the days before the fighting all started, when we were living in Warsaw and things… weren’t so bad.”
“Why would you want to remember Warsaw?” Reuven asked with a shudder. His own memories of the place, such as they were, began only after the Nazis had taken it. They were filled with cold and fear and hunger, endless gnawing hunger. He couldn’t imagine how a pleasant bowl of soup took anyone back there in memory.
But his mother’s smile also looked into the past. She said, “Don’t forget, your father and I fell in love in Warsaw.”
“And if we hadn’t,” Moishe Russie added, “you wouldn’t be here now.” He glanced over to the twins. “And neither would you.”
“Oh, yes, we would,” Esther said. Judith added, “Somehow or other, we would have found a way.” Reuven was about to blast the twins for logical inconsistency when he saw they were both holding in giggles. He went back to his soup, which evidently disappointed them.
“What did Cousin David say?” Rivka Russie asked. “I heard you talking about his letter out in the front room, but I couldn’t make out everything you were saying.” Moishe explained. Rivka frowned. “That’s very bad,” she said, shaking her head. “That such trouble should happen in England… Who would have dreamt such trouble could happen in England?”
Moishe Russie sighed. “When you and I were small, dear, who would have dreamt such trouble could happen in Germany? In Poland, yes. We always knew that. In Russia, yes. We always knew that, too. But Germany? David’s wife is from Germany. She and her family were lucky-they got out in time. But when she was small, Germany was a good place to be a Jew.”
“America, now,” Reuven said. “America, and here, and maybe South Africa and Argentina. But if you want to live under human beings and not the Race, America is about the only place left where you can breathe free.”
“Mosley’s bill failed, thank heaven,” his father said. “It’s not against the law to be a Jew in England, the way it is in the Reich. It’s only that you’d better not, or people will make you wish you weren’t.”
“Poland was like that,” Reuven’s mother said. “I don’t think England is as bad as Poland was, but it could be one of these days.”
Reuven watched his sisters stir. He waited for one of them to ask why gentiles persecuted Jews. He’d asked that himself, till finally deciding it wasn’t worth asking. That it was so mattered. Why it was so… Ask a thousand different anti-Semites and you’d get a thousand different answers. Which of them was true? Were any of them true? Why questions too often lost you in a maze of mirrors, each reflecting back on another till you weren’t sure where you stood, or if you stood anywhere.
And, sure enough, one of the twins did ask a why question, though not the one Reuven expected: “Why does it matter if anyone-especially anyone Jewish-lives under people or under the Race? It doesn’t look like Jews will ever live under other Jews, and the Lizards do a better job of keeping people from bothering us than just about any human beings do-you said so yourself.”
“That is an important question,” Moishe Russie said gravely. Reuven found himself nodding. It was a more important question than he’d thought his sisters had in them. His father went on, “Who the rulers are matters because they set the tone for the people who live under them. The Nazis didn’t make the Germans anti-Semites, but they let them be anti-Semites and helped them be anti-Semites. Do you see what I mean?”
Both twins nodded. Judith, who hadn’t asked the question, said, “The Lizards would never do anything like that.”
“Never is a long time,” Reuven said before his father could speak. “Jews are useful to them right now. One of the reasons we’re useful to them is that so many people treat us so badly-we haven’t got many other places to turn. But that could change, or the Lizards could decide they need to make the Arabs happy instead of us. If either one of those things happens, where are we? In trouble, that’s where.”
He waited for Esther and Judith to argue with him, not so much because of what he’d said as because he’d been the one who said it. But they both nodded solemnly. Either he’d made more sense than usual, or they were starting to grow up.
His father quoted the Psalm: “Put not your trust in princes.”
“Or even fleetlords,” Reuven added.
“If we don’t trust princes, if we don’t trust fleetlords, whom do we trust?” Esther asked.
“God,” Moishe Russie said. “That’s what the Psalm is talking about.”
“Nobody,” Reuven said. He’d been raised in the Holy Land, in the cradle of Judaism, but was far less observant than either of his parents. Maybe it was because he’d been persecuted less. Maybe it was because he had a better secular education, though his father had had a good one by the standards of his time. Maybe he just had a hard time believing in anything he couldn’t see.
“Reuven,” his mother said reprovingly.
And maybe he had reasons for doubt his parents hadn’t had when they were young. “What’s the use of believing in a God Who lets His chosen people go through what the Reich has put them through?”
“I’m sure men thought the same in the time of Philistines, and in the time of the Greeks, and in the time of the Romans, and in the Middle Ages, and in the time of the pogroms, too,” his father said. “Jews have gone on anyhow.”
“They didn’t have any other answers in the old days,” Reuven said defiantly. “We have science and technology now. God was a guess that did well enough when there wasn’t any competition. Today, there is.”
He waited for his parents to pitch a fit. His mother looked as if she were on the point of it. His father raised an eyebrow. “The Nazis have science and techno
logy, too,” Dr. Moishe Russie observed. “Science and technology tell them how to build the extermination camps they like so well. But what tells them they shouldn’t like those camps and shouldn’t want to build them?”
Reuven said, “Wait a minute. You’re confusing things.”
“Am I?” his father asked. “I don’t think so. Science and technology talk about what and how. We know more about what and how than they did in the days of the Bible. I have to admit that-I could hardly deny it. But science and technology don’t say anything about why.”
“You can’t really answer questions about why,” Reuven protested: the same thought he’d had not long before. “There’s no evidence.”
