Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

At last Barbara broke free of the other man, but her hand lingered affectionately at his waist for an extra few seconds. Jens made himself turn away from the window and look at his desk. No matter what happens to the rest of my life, there’s still a war on and I have a ton of work to do, he told himself.

He could make himself lean forward in the chair. He could make himself pull a report from the varnished pine IN basket and set it on the blotter in front of him. But, try as he would, he couldn’t make the words mean anything. Misery and rage strangled his brains.

If that was bad, pedaling back to the BOQ with a silent Oscar right behind him felt ten times worse. “I won’t take it,” he whispered again and again, not wanting the guard to hear. “I won’t.”

Normal life. Moishe Russie had almost forgotten such a thing could exist. Certainly he’d known nothing of the sort for the past three and a half years, since the Stukas and broad-winged Heinkel 111s and other planes of the Nazi war machine began dropping death on Warsaw.

First the bombardment. Then the ghetto: insane crowding, disease, starvation, overwork-death for tens of thousands, served up a centimeter at a time. Then another spasm of war as the Lizards drove the Germans from Warsaw. And then that strange time as the Lizards’ mouthpiece. He’d thought that was close to normal; at least he and his family had had food on the table.

But the Lizards were as eager to put shackles on his spirit as the Nazis had been to squeeze work out of his body and then let it die… or to ship him away and just kill him, regardless of how much work was left in him.

Then God only knew how long underground in a dark sardine tin, and then the flight to Lodz. None of that had been even remotely normal. But now here he was, with Rivka and Reuven, in a flat with water and electricity (most of the time, at least), and with no sign the Lizards knew where he’d gone.

It wasn’t paradise-but what was? It was a chance to live like a human being instead of a starving draft horse or a hunted rabbit. This, by now, is my definition of normal? Russie asked himself as he strode down Zgierska Street to see what the market had to offer.

He shook his head. “Not normal,” he insisted aloud, as if someone had disagreed with him. Normal would have meant going back to medical school, where the worst he would hate had to endure was hostility from the Polish students. He itched to be able to start learning again, and to start practicing what he’d learned.

Instead, here he came, ambling along down a street in a town not his own, clean-shaven, doing his best to act like a man who’d never had a thought in his life. This was safer than the way he’d been living, but… normal? No.

As usual, the Balut Market square was packed. Some new posters had gone up on the dirty brick walls of the buildings surrounding the square. Bigger than life, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski looked down on the ragged men and women gathered there, his arms and hands outstretched in exhortation. WORK MEANS FREEDOM! the poster cried in Yiddish, Polish, and German.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI. A shiver ran down Russie’s back when he saw that in German. The Nazis had put the same legend above the gates of their extermination camp at Auschwitz. He wondered if Rumkowski knew.

He got in line to buy cabbage. More of Rumkowski’s posters stood behind the peddler’s cart. So did other, smaller ones with big red letters that announced WANTED FOR THE RAPE AND MURDER OF A LITTLE GIRL in the three most widely spoken languages of Lizard-held Poland.

Who could be such a monster? Russie thought. His eyes, drawn by those screaming red letters, looked to the picture on the poster. It was one of the fancy photographs the Lizards took, in full color and giving the effect of three dimensions. Moishe noticed that before he realized with horror that he recognized the face on the poster. It was his own.

The poster didn’t call him by his proper name-that would, have given the game away. Instead, it styled him Israel Gottlieb. It said he’d committed his ghastly crimes in Warsaw and was being sought all over Poland, and it offered a large reward for his capture.

His head whipped wildly back and forth. Were people staring at him, at the poster, getting ready to shout at him or grab him and drag him to the cobblestones? He’d never imagined the Lizards would come up with such a devilish way of trying to bring him back into their hands. He felt as if they’d set the mark of Cain on his forehead.

But none of the men in hats or caps, none of the women in head scarves, acted as if the mark were visible. Few even glanced at the poster, of those who did, none looked from it to Russie.

His eyes went to it once more. On that second examination he began to understand. The Lizards’ photo showed him as he had been when he was speaking on the radio for Zolraag: in other words, bearded and in a dark homburg rather than clean-shaven and with a flat gray cloth cap of the sort he wore these days. To him, the difference seemed minuscule: it was, after all, his own face. But nobody else seemed to have the faintest suspicion he was the alleged monster whose visage would undoubtedly be used to frighten children.

Bristles rasped under his fingers as he rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. From here on out, he’d shave every day, no matter what: putting it off till tomorrow was liable to make him resemble himself too much.

He finally reached the head of the line, bought a couple of cabbages, and asked the price of some green onions the peddler had in a little wicker basket on his cart. When the fellow told him, he clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “ Ganef! You should grow like an onion-with your head in the ground.”

“An onion should grow from your pippuk ,” the vegetable seller retorted, answering one Yiddish execration with another. “Then it would be cheaper.”

They haggled for a while, but Russie couldn’t beat the man down to a price that wouldn’t leave Rivka furious at him, so he gave up and left, carrying his cabbages in a canvas bag. He thought about stopping to buy a cup of tea from a fellow with a battered tin samovar, but decided that would be tempting fate. The sooner he got out of the square, the fewer eyes would have a chance to light on him.

Going out, though, was swimming against the tide. The Balut Market square had filled even fuller when he stood in line. Then, abruptly, the swarm of people coming in slowed. Russie looked up just in time to keep from being run over by Chaim Rumkowski’s coach.

The horse that drew the four-wheeled carriage snorted in annoyance as the driver, a hard-faced man in a gray greatcoat and quasimilitary cap, hauled back on the reins to stop it. The driver looked annoyed, too. Russie touched the brim of his own cap and mumbled, “Sorry, sir.” He’d had plenty of practice fawning on the Germans, but doing it for one of his own people grated even harder on him.

Mollified, the driver dipped his head, but from behind him came the querulous voice of an elderly man:

“You up there-come here.” Heart sinking, Russie obeyed. As he walked back toward Rumkowski, he saw that the driver’s bench still sported a neat sign left over from the days of German domination: WAGEN DES AELTESTEN DER JUDEN (coach of the Eldest of the Jews), with the same in smaller letters in Yiddish below.

He wondered if the Eldest still wore a yellow Star of David on his right breast, as the Nazis had required the ghetto Jews to do. No, he found to his relief, although he could still see where the star had been sewn onto Rumkowski’s herringbone tweed overcoat.

Then Moishe stopped worrying about small things, for sitting beside Rumkowski, almost hidden by his bulk, was a Lizard. Russie didn’t think he had ever seen this particular alien, but he couldn’t be sure. He felt as if all the posters with his picture on them were growing hands and pointing straight at him.