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“What am I going to do?” she asked the metal walls. She got no more answer there than anywhere else.
I might have done better never to have met wild Big Uglies in the flesh at all, she thought. I certainly might have done better never to have started a sexual relationship with one of them. I could have gone on doing my best to emulate a female of the Race. I would not have known about some of the emotions accessible to Big Uglies, emotions for which the Race has no real equivalents. I had no real equivalents, only a dim awareness that I felt things Ttomalss did not. Now I understand much more, now these areas have opened up in my mind-and I cannot use them. Would it not have been better that they stayed closed?
She had no real answer for that. She could not go back into the eggshell that had held her before. But she could not use the new areas, enjoy the new areas, as long as she was alone. Even if a new Big Ugly male came up to the starship, even if he was everything Jonathan Yeager had been and more… sooner or later, he would go back down to Tosev 3, and she would be alone, cut off, once more.
“What am I going to do?” she repeated. Again, no answer.
“Congratulations,” Johannes Drucker told Mordechai Anielewicz. “Congratulations,” he repeated to Anielewicz’s family. A wife, two boys, a girl-achingly like his own family, though Anielewicz’s girl was the eldest, where his Claudia was sandwiched between Heinrich and Adolf.
They didn’t particularly look like Jews, or what he imagined Jews looking like. He suspected German propaganda of exaggerating noses and lips and chins. They just looked like… people. Bertha Anielewicz, Mordechai’s wife, was plain till she smiled. When she did, though, she turned very pretty. When she was younger, she’d probably been gorgeous when she smiled.
“I hope you find your wife and children, too,” she told him. She spoke Yiddish, not German. The gutturals were harsh and the vowel sounds strange, but he understood well enough.
“Thanks,” he said. Hearing Yiddish reminded him how strange it was to be standing outside a Red Cross shelter-another Red Cross shelter-near Greifswald talking with five Jews. Before this last war, it wouldn’t have been strange; it would have been impossible, unimaginable. A lot of things that would have been unimaginable a few months before now seemed commonplace. “What will you do?” he asked the Anielewiczes, trying his best not to be jealous of their good fortune. “Go home?”
Mordechai laughed. “Home? We haven’t got one, not with Lodz blown off the map. We’ll find something back in Poland, I expect. Right this minute, I have no idea what. Something.”
“I’m sure you will,” Drucker agreed. No, staying away from jealousy wasn’t easy. “You’ll help pick up the pieces back there. And I’ll help pick up the pieces here… one way or another.” He didn’t want to dwell on that. Holding on to hope came hard.
Anielewicz set a hand on his shoulder. Part of him wanted to shake it off, but he let it stay. The Jewish fighting leader said, “Don’t quit, that’s all. Never quit.”
He could afford to say that. He could quit now-he’d found his needle in a haystack. But he wasn’t wrong, either. If he hadn’t scoured this corner of Prussia, he never would have come up with his wife and sons and daughter. “I know,” Drucker said. “I’ll go on. I have to. What else can I do? Kill myself like the American president? Not likely.”
He tried to imagine Adolf Hitler killing himself if faced by some disaster. Not likely rang again in his mind. The first Fuhrer would surely have grabbed some soldier’s Mauser and kept firing at his foes till he finally fell. Suicide was the coward’s way out.
Heinrich Anielewicz-like Drucker’s own Heinrich, named for the Heinrich Jager they’d both admired-was holding his pet beffel. The little animal from Home swiveled one eye turret toward Drucker. It opened its mouth. “Beep!” Pancer said, almost as if it were a squeeze toy. The corners of Drucker’s mouth couldn’t help twitching up a few millimeters. That really was one of the most preposterously friendly sounds he’d ever heard.
Heinrich Anielewicz scratched the beffel between the eye turrets and under the chin. Pancer liked that, and said, “Beep!” again. The boy spoke to it in Polish. Drucker had no idea what he said; he’d never known more than a handful of words in the language, and he’d long since forgotten those. Then Heinrich Anielewicz switched to Yiddish and spoke to him: “If it hadn’t been for Pancer, you know, we might never have been found.”
“Yes, I do know that. I was with your father when he heard him,” Drucker answered. “I didn’t know what the noise was. But he did.”
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “It was luck, nothing else. But sometimes, when you haven’t got anything else, you’ll take luck.”
“You don’t just take it. If you get it, you grab it with both hands,” Drucker said, the soldier in him speaking. Had Bertha and Miriam Anielewicz not been there, he might have put it more earthily.
“Listen,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “I’ve talked to that male named Gorppet, the one who had Pancer. He knows I’m a Big Ugly”-he used the language of the Race to say that-“the Lizards want to keep happy. I’ve asked him to give you whatever help he can. He’s an intelligence officer, too, so whatever they hear, he can get his hands on it. I hope that does you some good.”
“Thanks.” Drucker nodded. “That’s-damned good of you, all things considered.”
“All things considered.” Anielewicz savored the phrase. “There’s a lot to consider, all right, Herr Oberst. There’s the Reich you fought for. But then there’s your wife and your children. And you got Jager loose from the SS, you tell me, and if you hadn’t done that, Lodz would have gone up in 1944 instead of this spring. Bertha and I would be dead, and the first round of fighting might have gone on and ended up wrecking the whole world. So I didn’t spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying about this one.”
“Thanks,” Drucker said again. That didn’t seem to be enough. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it. Bertha Anielewicz hugged him, which took him by surprise. No woman had done that since… since the last time he’d seen Kathe, before the fighting started up. Too long. God, too long. Roughly, he said, “I’m going into the camp now.”
“Good luck,” they chorused behind him.
He’d seen too many refugee camps by now for this one to hold any surprises. Tents. People in shabby clothes. More shabby clothes hanging out as laundry. The smell of latrines and unwashed bodies. The dull, apathetic look of men and women who didn’t think things would or could ever get better again.
In the middle of the camp, as in the middle of all these camps, stood a tent with a Red Cross flag flying above it. The men and women-they’d be mostly women-in it would be clean. They’d have clean clothes, fresh clothes, clothes they could change
. They’d mislike anyone entering their realm who didn’t give them their full due.
As he ducked through the tent flap, he heard rhythmic tapping. Someone in there had a typewriter. It wasn’t a computer, but it was still a sure-fire sign of superiority in the middle of a refugee camp. Several women-sure enough, all of them scrubbed till they gleamed-looked up from whatever important things they were doing to give him the once-over. By their expressions, he didn’t pass muster. They probably took him for one of the people they were there to help.
“Yes?” one of them said. “What is it?” By her tone, it couldn’t possibly have been as urgent as the forms she was filling out. Yes, she must have taken him for an inmate here.
“I am here to look for my family. My wife. My sons. My daughter. Drucker. Katherina-Kathe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia.” Drucker stayed polite and businesslike.
“Oh. One of those.” The woman nodded. Now she knew in which pigeonhole he belonged. She pulled out a form from a box on the table behind her and said, “Fill this out. Fill it out very carefully. We will search. If we find them in our records, you will be notified.”
“When will you search? When will I be notified?” Drucker asked. “Why don’t you search now? I’m here now.” By all the signs, she needed reminding of that.
A slow flush darkened her cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment; it was anger. “We have many important duties to perform here, sir,” she said in a voice like winter on the Russian front. “When we have the opportunity, we shall search the records for you.” That might be twenty years from now. It might, on the other hand, be never. “Please fill out the form.” The form was important. The family it represented? That might matter, but more likely it wouldn’t.
Drucker had seen that attitude before. He had a weapon to combat it. He took from his wallet a telegram and passed the woman the yellow sheet. “Here. I suggest you read this.”
For a moment, he thought she’d try to crumple it instead. He would have prevented that-by force, if necessary. But she did read. And her eyes, the dull blue and white of cheap china, grew bigger and bigger as she read.
