Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

Sholom watched her, his dark, deep-set eyes full of irony. At last, feeling she had to say something, she answered, “I am a senior lieutenant in the Red Air Force. Do you like hearing your government insulted?”

“My government?” Sholom spat on the ground. “I am Jew. You think the Polish government is mine?” He laughed again; this time, the sound carried the weight of centuries of oppression. “And then the Nazis come, and make Poles look like nice and kindly people. Who thinks anyone can do that?”

“So why are you here and not with the Lizards inside Hrubieszow?” Ludmila asked. A moment later, she realized the question was imperfectly tactful, but she’d already let it out.

“Some things are bad, some things are worse, some things are worst of all,” Sholom answered. He waited to see if Ludmila followed the Polish comparative and superlative. When he decided she did, he added, “For Jews, the Nazis are worst of all. For people, the Lizards are worst of all. Am I a person first, or am I a Jew first?”

“You are a person first,” Ludmila answered at once.

“From you, it sounds so easy,” Sholom said with a sigh. “My brother Mendel, he is in Hrubieszow.” The Jew shrugged yet again. “These things happen.”

Not knowing what to say, Ludmila kept quiet. She gave her U-2 one more anxious glance. It was covered up so it would be hard to spot from the air, but it wasn’t concealed the way a Red Air Force crew would have done the job. She did her best not to worry about it. The guerrillas remained operational, so their camouflage precautions were adequate.

In some way, their maskirovka was downright inspired, with tricks like those she’d seen from her own experience. A couple of kilometers away from their encampment, large fires burned and cloth tents simulated the presence of a good-sized force. The Lizards had shelled that area a couple of times, while leaving the real site alone.

Fires here were smaller, all of them either inside tents or else hidden under canvas sheets held up on stakes. Men went back and forth or sat around the fires, some cleaning their weapons, others gossiping, still others playing with packs of dog-eared cards.

With the men were a fair number of women, perhaps one in six of the partisans. Some, it seemed, were there for little more than to cook for the men and to sleep with them, but some were real soldiers. The men treated the women who fought like any other fighters, but towards the others they were as coarse and scornful as peasants were to their wives.

A fellow who wore a German greatcoat but who had to be a Jew got up from his card games to throw some powdered herbs into a pot and stir it with a wooden-handled iron spoon. Catching Ludmila’s eye on him, he laughed self-consciously and said something in Yiddish. She got the gist of it: he’d been a cook in Hrubieszow, and now he was reduced to this.

“Better a real cook should cook than someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she answered in German, and set a hand on her stomach to emphasize what she meant.

“This, yes,” the Jew answered. He stirred the pot again. “But that’s salt pork in there. It’s the only meat we could get. So now we eat it, and I have to make it tasty, too?” He rolled his eyes up to heaven, as if to say a reasonable God would never have made him put up with such humiliation.

As far as Ludmila was concerned, the dietary regulations he agonized over transgressing were primitive superstitions to be ignored by modern, progressive individuals. She kept that to herself, though. Even the Great Stalin had made his peace with the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow and enlisted God on the side of the Red Army. If superstition would serve the cause, then what point to castigating it?

She was young enough that such compromises with medievalism still struck her as betrayals, in spite of the indoctrination she’d received on the subject. Then she realized the Jew undoubtedly thought cooking salt pork and, worse yet, eating it, was a hideous compromise with godlessness. He was wrong, of course, but that did not make him insincere.

When she got a bowl of the pork stew, she blinked in amazement at the flavor. He might have thought it an abomination, but he’d given it his best.

She was scrubbing out her bowl with snow when one of the camp women-not one of the ones who carried a rifle-came up to her. Hesitantly, in slow Russian, the woman (girl, really; she couldn’t have been more than seventeen) asked, “You really flew that airplane against the Lizards?”

“Yes, and against the Nazis before them,” Ludmila answered.

The girl’s eyes-very big, very blue-went wide. She was slim and pretty, and would have been prettier if her face hadn’t had a vacant, cowlike expression. “Heavens,” she breathed. “How many men did you have to screw to get them to let you do that?”

The question was innocent, candid. Somehow, that made it worse. Ludmila wanted to shake her. “I didn’t screw anybody,” she said indignantly. “I-”

“It’s all right,” the girl-Stefania, that’s what her name was-interrupted. “You can tell me. It’s not like it’s something important. If you’re a woman, you have to do such things now and again. Everybody knows it.”

“I-didn’t-screw-anybody,” Ludmila repeated, spacing out the words as if she were talking to a half-wit. “Plenty of men have tried to screw me. I got to be a Red Air Force pilot because I’d been in the Osoaviakhim- the state pilot training program-before the war. I’m good at what I do. If I weren’t, I’d have got killed twenty times by now.”

Stefania studied her. The intent look on the Polish girl’s face made Ludmila think she’d made an impression on her. Then Stefania shook her head; her blond braids flipped back and forth. “We know what we get from Russians-nothing but lies.” As Witold had, she walked away.

Ludmila wished she were pointing a pistol at the stupid little bitch. She finished cleaning her bowl. This was her second trip outside the Soviet Union. Both times, she’d seen how little use foreigners had for her country. Her immediate reaction to that was disdain. Foreigners had to be ignorant reactionaries if they couldn’t appreciate the glorious achievements of the Soviet state and its promise to bring the benefits of scientflic socialism to all mankind.

Then she remembered the purges. Had her cousin, her geometry teacher, and the man who ran the tobacconist’s shop across from her block of flats truly been counterrevolutionaries, wreckers, spies for the Trotskyites or the decadent imperialists? She’d wondered at the time, but hadn’t let herself think about it since. Such thoughts held danger, she knew instinctively.

How glorious were the achievements of the Soviet state if you didn’t dare think about them? Frowning, she piled her bowl with all the rest.

Ussmak didn’t think he’d ever seen such a sorry-looking male in all his days since hatchlinghood. It wasn’t just that the poor fellow wore no body paint, although being bare of it contributed to his general air of misery. Worse was the way his eye turrets kept swiveling back toward the Big Ugly for whom he was interpreting, as if that Tosevite were the sun and he himself only a very minor planet.

“This is Colonel Boris Lidov,” the male said in the language of the Race, although the title was in the Russki tongue. “He is of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior-the NKVD-and is to be your interrogator.”

Ussmak glanced over at the Tosevite male for a moment. He looked like a Big Ugly, and not a particularly impressive one: skinny, with a narrow, wrinkled face, not much fur on the top of his head, and a small mouth drawn up even tighter than was the Tosevite norm. “That’s nice,” Ussmak said; he’d figured the Big Uglies would have questions for him. “Who are you, though, friend? How did you get stuck with this duty?”