Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

He’d told himself that a great many times. He still had trouble believing it. After almost five years of war, first against the Germans and then sometimes against the Germans and Lizards both, he had trouble believing any counsel of safety.

As he emerged onto the street, he fumbled at his trousers to show why he had gone back behind the wall, then looked up and down to see if anyone was taking any special notice either of him or of the wrecked factory building. He didn’t spot anyone like that, so he started up the street.

There maybe fifteen meters ahead of him, striding along briskly, was a tall, broad-shouldered man with light brown hair. The fellow turned a corner. Anielewicz followed, not thinking much of him except that his black coat was too short: it flapped halfway down his calves instead of at his ankles as it should have. Not many men in Lodz were so big, which no doubt explained why the fellow couldn’t find a coat to fit him. He lacked only six or eight centimeters of two meters’ height.

No, Anielewicz hadn’t seen many men that size in the ghetto. Big, beefy men, because they needed more food, had a way of dying faster on bad rations than small men did. But Anielewicz had seen a man about that tall some time in the not too distant past. He frowned, trying to remember when and where. One of the Polish farmers who sometimes passed information on to the Jews? It had been outside of Lodz: he was fairly sure of that.

All at once, he started to run. When he got to the corner at which the tall man had turned, he paused, his head swiveling this way and that. He didn’t see the fellow. He walked over to the next corner, where he peered both ways again. Still no sign of the man. He kicked at a paving stone in frustration.

Could that have been Otto Skorzeny on the streets of the Lodz ghetto, or was he starting at shadows? The SS man had no rational reason to be here; so Anielewicz tried to convince himself he’d spied someone else of about the same size and build.

“It’s impossible,” he muttered under his breath. “If the Nazis blow up Lodz in the middle of peace talks, God only knows what the Lizards will drop on their heads: reap the wind, sow the whirlwind. Not even Hitler’s that meshuggeh.”

As with his earlier, more general fears, he had trouble dismissing this one. When you got right down to it, who could say just how meshuggeh Hitler was?

David Goldfarb and Basil Roundbush climbed off their bicycles and made their eager way toward the White Horse Inn like castaways struggling up to the edge of a desert oasis. “Pity we can’t bring Mzepps with us,” Roundbush remarked. “Do the poor blighter good to have a night out, don’t you think?”

“Me?” Goldfarb said. “I’ve given up thinking for the duration.”

“Commendable attitude,” Roundbush said with a nod. “Keep that firmly in mind, lad, and you’ll go far-though thinking about not thinking does rather spoil the exercise, eh?”

Goldfarb had the sense not to get stuck in that infinite regress. He opened the door to the White Horse Inn and was greeted by a cloud of smoke and a roar of noise. Basil Roundbush shut the door after them. As soon as he’d done so, Goldfarb pushed aside the black cloth curtains that screened off the short entryway and went inside.

He blinked at the bright electric lamps. “I liked the place better when it was all torchlight and hearthfire,” he said. “Gave it more atmosphere: you felt Shakespeare or Johnson might drop in for a pint with you.”

“If Johnson dropped in, it would be for more than one, and that’s a fact,” Roundbush said. “All the fires did take one back to the eighteenth century, I must say. But remember, old boy, the eighteenth century was a filthy, nasty place. Give me electricity every day.”

“They seem to be doing just that,” Goldfarb said, making his way toward the bar. “Amazing how quickly you can get a system of electricity up and running again when you’re not being bombed round the clock.”

“Makes a bit of a difference,” Roundbush agreed. “I hear the blackout regulations will be going soon, if this truce holds up.” He waved to Naomi Kaplan, who stood behind the bar. She smiled and waved back, then turned up the wattage of that smile when she spotted the shorter Goldfarb behind him. Roundbush chuckled. “You are a lucky fellow. I hope you know it.”

“You’d best believe I do,” Goldfarb said, so enthusiastically that Roundbush laughed again. “And if I didn’t, my family would tell me too often to let me forget.” His parents and siblings approved of Naomi. He’d been certain they would. To his great relief, she approved of them, too, though their crowded East End flat was far from the upper-middle-class comforts she’d known growing up in Germany before Hitler made life there impossible.

They found a narrow opening at the bar and squeezed in to widen it. Roundbush slapped silver on the damp, polished wood. “Two pints of best bitter,” he said to Naomi, and then set out more coins: “And one for yourself, if you’ve a mind to.”

“Thank you, no,” she said, and pushed those back at the RAF officer. The others she scooped into the cash box under the bar. Goldfarb wished she didn’t have to work here, but she was making much better money than he was. The landlord of the White Horse Inn could raise prices to keep up with the inflation galloping through the British economy, and raise wages almost as much. Goldfarb’s meager RAF salary ran several bureaucratic lurches behind. He would have thought it a princely sum when he enlisted in 1939; what had been princely now left him a pauper.

He gulped down his pint and bought a round in return. Naomi let him get her a pint, too, which set Basil Roundbush to making indignant noises through his mustache.

They were just lifting the pint pots when someone behind Goldfarb said, “Who’s your new chum, old man?”

Goldfarb hadn’t heard those Cantabrian tones in a long time. “Jones!” he said. “I haven’t seen you in so long, I’d long since figured you’d bought your plot.” Then he got a good look at Jerome Jones’ companions, and his eyes went even wider. “Mr. Embry! Mr. Bagnall! I didn’t know they’d declared this old home week.”

Introductions followed. Jerome Jones blinked with surprise when Goldfarb presented Naomi Kaplan as his fiancee. “You lucky dog!” he exclaimed. “You found yourself a beautiful girl, and I’d lay two to one she’s neither a sniper nor a Communist”

“Er-no,” David said. He coughed. “Would I be wrong in guessing you’ve not had a dull time of it this past little while?”

“Not half dull,” the other radarman said with unwonted sincerity. He shivered. “Not half.” Goldfarb recognized that tone of voice: someone trying hard not to think about places he’d been and things he’d done. The more he looked at it, giving up thought for the duration seemed a good scheme.

Sylvia came back to the bar carrying a tray crowded with empty pint pots. “Good Lord,” she said, staring at the new arrivals. “Look what the breeze blew in.” Of itself, her hand went up to smooth her hair. “Where the devil have you lads been? I thought-” She’d thought the same thing Goldfarb had, but didn’t want to say it out loud.

“Beautiful, romantic Pskov.” George Bagnall rolled his eyes to show how seriously the adjectives were meant to be taken.

“Where’s whatever-you-call-it?” Sylvia asked, beating everyone else to the punch.

“If you draw a line from Leningrad to Warsaw, you won’t be far off,” Bagnall answered. That let Goldfarb put it on his mental map.

Jerome Jones added, “And all the time we were there, the only thing sustaining us was the thought of the White Horse Inn and the sweet, gentle, lovely lasses working here.”