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“I thank you. I would like that.” Mordechai meant it. Regardless of what they thought of the weather, lots of Lizards were colonizing Poland. He was very curious about how they lived.
But, as Nesseref went about her business, Anielewicz realized he had to go about his. Bertha would indeed be unhappy if he came home without the things she’d sent him to buy. Cabbage was easy. Several vendors were selling it; he had only to choose the one with the best price. Potatoes didn’t prove any great problem, either. And he got a deal on onions that would make his wife smile.
Eggs, now… He’d expected eggs to be the hard part of the shopping, and they were. You could always count on plenty of people having vegetables for sale. Ever since the Nazis had been driven out of Poland, there had been enough vegetables to go around. And vegetables, or a lot of them, stayed good for weeks or months at a time.
None of that held true for eggs. You never could tell how many would be on sale when you went to the market square, or what sort of prices the vendors would demand. Today, only a couple of peasant grandmothers, scarves around their heads against the winter cold, displayed baskets of eggs.
Radiating charm, Anielewicz went up to one of them. “Hello, there,” he said cheerfully. He spoke Polish as readily as Yiddish, as did most Jews hereabouts. Unlike a lot of them, he also looked more Polish than Jewish, having a broad face, fair skin, and light brown, almost blond, hair. Sometimes his looks helped him when he was dealing with Poles.
Not today. The old lady with the eggs looked him up and down as if he’d just crawled out of the gutter. “Hello, Jew,” she said flatly.
Well, few goyim came to buy at the Bialut Market Square. During the Nazi occupation, it had been the chief market of the Lodz ghetto. The ghetto was gone, but this remained the Jewish part of town. Mordechai gathered himself. If she was going to play tough, he could do the same. Pointing to the eggs, he said, “How much for half a dozen of those sad little things?”
“Two zlotys apiece,” the Polish woman said, sounding as calm and self-assured as if that weren’t highway robbery.
“What?” Anielewicz yelped. “That’s not selling. That’s stealing, is what it is.”
“You don’t want them, you don’t have to pay,” the woman answered. “Ewa over there, she’s charging two and a half, but she says hers are bigger eggs. You go on over and see if you can find any difference.”
“It’s still stealing,” Mordechai said, and it was-even two zlotys was close to twice the going rate.
“Feed’s gone up,” the Polish woman said with a shrug. “If you think I’m going to sell at a loss, you’re meshuggeh.” Where he stuck to Polish, she threw in a Yiddish word with malice aforethought. A moment later, she slyly added, “And I know you Jews aren’t crazy that way.”
“What are you feeding your miserable chickens, anyhow? Caviar and champagne?” Anielewicz shot back. “Bread’s up a couple of groschen, but not that much. I think you’re out for some quick profit.”
Her eyes might have been cut from gray ice. “I think if you don’t want my eggs, you can go away and let someone who does want them have a look.”
Dammit, he did want the eggs. He just didn’t want to pay so much for them. Bertha would pitch a fit; then she’d make disparaging noises about the uselessness of sending a mere man to the market square. Mordechai was, or thought he was, a competent shopper in his own right. “I’ll give you nine zlotys for half a dozen,” he said.
For a bad moment, he thought the egg seller wouldn’t even deign to haggle with him. But she did. He ended up buying the eggs for ten zlotys forty groschen, and won the privilege of picking them himself. It wasn’t a victory-he couldn’t pretend it was, no matter how hard he tried-but it was something less than a crushing defeat.
Weighed down by groceries, he started south on Zgierska Street, then turned right onto Lutomierska; his flat wasn’t far from the fire station on that street. The backs of his legs pained him as he walked. His arms felt as if he were carrying sacks of lead, not vegetables and eggs.
Scowling, he kept on. He’d never been quite right after inhaling German nerve gas half a lifetime before. At that, he’d got off lucky. Ludmila Jager-Ludmila Gorbunova, she’d been then-was far more crippled than he, while the gas had helped bring Heinrich Jager to an early grave. Anielewicz found that dreadfully unfair; were it not for the German panzer colonel, an explosive-metal bomb would have blown Lodz off the face of the earth, and probably would have blown up the then-fragile truce between humans and Lizards.
Anielewicz’s younger son was named Heinrich. There was a stretch of several years when he would either have laughed or reached for a rifle had anyone suggested he might name a child after a Wehrmacht officer.
Panting, he fought his way up the stairs to his flat. He paused in the hail to catch his breath, gathering himself so Bertha wouldn’t worry, before he went inside. He also paused to examine the new door, after the would-be assassin put a submachine-gun magazine through the old one, it had become too thoroughly ventilated to be worth much. The flat also had new windows.
When he did go inside, the look on his wife’s face said he hadn’t paused long enough. “It must be bothering you today,” Bertha Anielewicz said.
“Not too bad,” Mordechai insisted. If she believed it, maybe he would, too. “And I did pretty well at the market.” That won a smile from his wife. She wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense of the word, but she turned beautiful when a smile lit up her face. Then, of course, she wanted details.
When he gave them to her, the smile disappeared. He’d known it would. “That’s robbery!” she exclaimed.
“I know,” he said. “It would have been worse robbery if I hadn’t haggled hard. We did need the eggs.”
“We needed the money, too,” Bertha said mournfully. Then she shrugged. “Well, it’s done, and the eggs do look good.” Her smile returned. He smiled back, knowing full well she was letting him down easy.
Vyacheslav Molotov was not happy with the budget projections for the upcoming Five Year Plan. Unfortunately, the parts about which he was least happy had to do with the money allocated for the Red Army.
Since Marshal Zhukov had rescued him fro
m NKVD headquarters after Lavrenti Beria’s coup failed, he couldn’t wield a red pencil so vigorously as he would have liked. He couldn’t wield one at all, in fact. If he made Zhukov unhappy with him, a Red Army-led coup would surely succeed.
Behind the expressionless mask of his face, he was scowling. After Zhukov got all the funds he wanted, the Red Army would in essence be running the Soviet State with or without a coup. Were Zhukov a little less deferential to Party authority, that would be obvious already.
The intercom buzzed. Molotov answered it with a sense of relief, though he showed no more of that than of his inner scowl. “Yes?” he asked.
“Comrade General Secretary, David Nussboym is here for his appointment,” his secretary answered.
Molotov glanced at the clock on the wall of his Kremlin office. It was precisely ten o’clock. Few Russians would have been so punctual, but the NKVD man had been born and raised in Poland. “Send him in, Pyotr Maksimovich,” Molotov said. Dealing with Nussboym would mean he didn’t have to deal with-or not deal with-the budget for a while. Putting things off didn’t make them better. Molotov knew that. But nothing he dared do to the Five Year Plan budget would make it better, either.
In came David Nussboym: a skinny, nondescript, middle-aged Jew. “Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” he said in Polish-flavored Russian, every word accented on the next-to-last syllable whether the stress belonged there or not.
“Good day, David Aronovich,” Molotov answered. “Take a seat; help yourself to tea from the samovar if you care to.”
“No, thank you.” Along with Western punctuality, Nussboym had a good deal of Western briskness. “I regret to report, Comrade General Secretary, that our attempt against Mordechai Anielewicz did not succeed.”
“Your attempt, you mean,” Molotov said. David Nussboym had got him out of his cell in the NKVD prison. Otherwise, Beria’s henchmen might have shot him before Marshal Zhukov’s troops overpowered them. Molotov recognized the debt, and had acquiesced in Nussboym’s pursuit of revenge against the Polish Jews who’d sent him to the USSR. But there were limits. Molotov made them plain: “You were warned not to place the Soviet government in an embarrassing position, even if you are permitted to use its resources.”
