Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

From the outside, the railroad car looked like one that hauled baggage. David Nussboym had seen that, before the bored-looking NKVD men, submachine guns in hand but plainly sure they wouldn’t have to use them, herded him and his companions in misfortune into it. Inside, it was divided into nine compartments, like any passenger car.

In an ordinary passenger car, though, four to a compartment was crowded. People looked resentfully at one another, as if it was the fault of the person on whom the irritated gaze fell that he took up so much space. In each of the five prisoner compartments on this car… Nussboym shook his head. He was a scrupulous man, a meticulous man. He didn’t know how many people each of the other compartments held. He knew there were twenty-five men in his.

He and three others had perches-not proper seats-upon the baggage racks by the ceiling. The strongest, toughest prisoners lay in relative comfort-and extremely relative it was, too-on the hard middle bunk. The rest sat jammed together on the lower bunk and on the floor, on top of their meager belongings.

Nussboym’s rackmate was a lanky fellow named Ivan Fyodorov. He understood some of Nussboym’s Polish and a bit of Yiddish when the Polish failed. Nussboym, in turn, could follow Russian after a fashion, and Fyodorov threw in a word of German every now and again.

He wasn’t a mental giant “Tell me again how you’re here, David Aronovich,” he said. “I’ve never heard a story like yours, not even once.”

Nussboym sighed. He’d told the story three times already in the two days-he thought it was two days-he’d been perched on the rack. “It’s like this, Ivan Vasilievich,” he said. “I was in Lodz, in Poland, in the part of Poland the Lizards held. My crime was hating the Germans worse than the Lizards.”

“Why did you do that?” Fyodorov asked. This was the fourth time he’d asked that question, too.

Up till now, Nussboym had evaded it: your average Russian was no more apt to love Jews than was your average Pole. “Can’t you figure it out for yourself?” he asked now. But, when Fyodorov’s brow furrowed and did not clear, he snapped, “Damn it, don’t you see I’m Jewish?”

“Oh, that. Yeah, sure, I knew that,” his fellow prisoner said, sunny still. “Ain’t no Russian with a nose that big, anyhow.” Nussboym brought a hand up to the offended member, but Ivan hadn’t seemed to mean anything by it past a simple statement of fact. He went on, “So you were in Lodz. How did you get here? That’s what I want to know.”

“My chums wanted to get rid of me,” Nussboym said bitterly. “They wouldn’t give me to the Nazis-even they aren’t that vile. But they couldn’t leave me in Poland, either, they knew I wouldn’t let them get away with collaborating. So they knocked me unconscious, took me across Lizard-held country till they came to land you Russians still controlled-and they gave me to your border patrols.”

Fyodorov might not have been a mental giant, but he was a Soviet citizen. He knew what had happened after that. Smiling, he said, “And the border patrol decided you had to be a criminal-and besides, you were a foreigner and a zhid to boot-and so they dropped you into the gulag. Now I get it.”

“I’m so glad for you,” Nussboym said sourly.

The window that looked out from the compartment to the hallway of the prison car had crosshatched bars over it. Nussboym watched a couple of NKVD men make their way toward the compartment entrance, which had no door, only a sliding grate of similar crosshatched bars. The compartment had no windows that opened on the outside world, just a couple of tiny barred blinds that might as well not have been there.

Nussboym didn’t care. He’d learned that when the NKVD men walked by with that slow deliberate stride, they had food with them. His stomach rumbled. Spit rushed into his mouth. He ate better in the prison car-a Stolypin car, the Russians universally called it-than he had in the Lodz ghetto before the Lizards came, but not much better.

One of the NKVD men opened the grate, then stood back, covering the prisoners with a submachine gun. The other one set down two buckets. “All right, you zeks !” he shouted. “Feeding time at the zoo!” He laughed loudly at his own wit, though he made the joke every time it was his turn to feed the prisoners.

They laughed too, loudly. If they didn’t laugh, nobody got anything to eat. They’d found that out very fast. A couple of beatings soon forced the recalcitrant ones into line.

Satisfied, the guard started passing out a chunk of coarse, black bread and half a salted herring apiece. They’d got sugar once, but the guards said they were out of that now. Nussboym didn’t know whether it was true, but did know he was in no position to find out.

The prisoners who reclined on the middle bunk got the biggest loaves and fishes. They’d enforced that rule with their fists, too. Nussboym’s hand went to the shiner below his left eye. He’d tried holding out on them, and paid the price.

He wolfed down the bread, but stuck his bony fragment of herring in a pocket. He’d learned to wait for water before he ate the fish. It was so salty, thirst would have driven him mad till he got something to drink. Sometimes the guards brought a bucket of water after they brought food. Sometimes they didn’t. Today they didn’t.

The train rumbled on. In summer, having two dozen men stuffed into a compartment intended for four would have been intolerable-not that that would have stopped the NKVD. In a Russian winter, animal warmth was not to be despised. In spite of being cold, Nussboym wasn’t freezing.

His stomach growled again. It didn’t care that he would suffer agonies of thirst if he ate his herring without water. All it knew was that it was still mostly empty, and that the fish would help fill it up.

With a squeal of brakes, the train pulled to a halt Nussboym almost slipped down onto men below. Ivan had done that once. They’d fallen on him like a pack of wolves, beating and kicking him till he was black and blue. After that, the fellows perched on the baggage racks had learned to hang on tight during stops.

“Where are we, do you think?” somebody down below asked.

“In hell,” somebody else answered, which produced laughs both more bitter and more sincere than the ones the guard had got for himself.

“This’ll be Pskov, I bet,” a zek in the middle bunk declared. “I hear tell we’ve cleared the Lizards away from the railroad line that leads there from the west. After that”-he stopped sounding so arrogant and sure of himself-“after that, it’s north and east, on to the White Sea, or maybe to the Siberian gulags .”

Nobody spoke for a couple of minutes after that. Winter labor up around Archangel or in Siberia was enough to daunt even the heartiest of spirits.

Small clangs and jerks showed that cars were either being added to the train or taken off it. One of the zeks sitting on the bottom bunks said, “Didn’t the Hitlerites take Pskov away from the rodina? Shit, they can’t do anything worse to us than our own people do.”

“Oh yes, they can,” Nussboym said, and told them about Treblinka.

“That’s Lizard propaganda, is what that is,” the big-mouthed zek in the middle bunk said.

“No,” Nussboym said. Even in the face of opposition from the powerful prisoner, about half the zeks in the car ended up believing him. He reckoned that a moral victory.

A guard came back with a bucket of water, a dipper, and a couple of mugs. He looked disgusted with fate, as if by letting the men drink he was granting them a privilege they didn’t deserve. “Come on, you slimy bastards,” he said. “Queue up-and make it snappy. I don’t have all day.”