Striking the Balance

Maybe having a pistol pointed at his face convinced Casimir that he really did want to be rid of Ludmila. Two days later, she and a pair of guides-a Jew named Avram and a Pole called Wladeslaw-headed north and west in a beat-up wagon pulled by a beat-up donkey. Ludmila had wondered if she ought to get rid of her Red Air Force gear, but seeing what the Pole and the Jew wore put an end to that notion. Wladeslaw might have been a Red Army man himself, though he carried a GermanGewehr 98 on his back. And Avram’s hooked nose and stringy, graying beard looked particularly out of place under the brim of a coal-scuttle helmet someWehrmacht man would never need again.

As the wagon rattled on through the modest highlands south of Lublin, she saw how common such mixtures of clothing were, not just among partisans but for ordinary citizens-assuming any such still existed in Poland. And every other man and about every third woman carried a rifle or submachine gun. With only the Tokarev on her hip, Ludmila began to feel underdressed.

She also got a closer look at the Lizards than she’d ever had before: now a convoy of lorries rolling past and kicking up clouds of dust, now tanks tearing up the roads even worse. Had those tanks been in the Soviet Union, their machine guns would have made short work of a wagon and three armed people in it, but they rumbled by, eerily quiet, without even pausing.

In pretty good Russian-he and Wladeslaw both spoke the language-Avram said, “They don’t know whether we’re with them or against them. They’ve learned not to take chances finding out, too. Every time they make a mistake and shoot up people who had been their friends, they turn a lot of people who were for them against them.”

“Why are there so many willing traitors to mankind in Poland?” Ludmila asked. The phrase from Radio Moscow sprang automatically to her lips; only after she’d said it did she wish she’d been more tactful.

Fortunately, it didn’t irk either Wladeslaw or Avram. In fact, they both started to laugh. They both started to answer at the same time, too. With a flowery wave, Avram motioned for Wladeslaw to go on. The Pole said, “After you’ve lived under the Nazis for a while and under the Reds for a while, anything that isn’t the Nazis or the Reds looks good to a lot of folks.”

Now they’d gone and insulted her, or at least her government. She said, “But I remember Comrade Stalin’s statement on the wireless. The only reason the Soviet Union occupied the eastern half of Poland was that the Polish state was internally bankrupt, the government had disintegrated, and the Ukrainians and Belorussians in Poland, cousins to their Soviet kindred, were left to the mercy of fate. The Soviet Union extricated the Polish people from war and enabled them to lead a peaceful life until fascist aggression took its toll on us all.”

“That’s what the wireless said, is it?” Avram said. Ludmila stuck out her chin and nodded stubbornly. She was primed and ready for a fine, bruising ideological debate, but Avram and Wladeslaw didn’t feel like arguing. Instead, they howled laughter like a couple of wit-struck wolves baying at the moon. They pounded their fists down on their thighs and finally ended up embracing each other. The donkey flicked its ears in annoyance at their untoward carrying-on.

“What have I said that was so funny?” Ludmila inquired in tones of ice.

Avram didn’t answer directly. Instead, he returned a question of his own: “Could I teach you Talmud in a few minutes?” She didn’t know what Talmud was, but shook her head. He said, “That’s right. To learn Talmud, you’d have to learn a whole new way of looking at the world and think only in that way-a new ideology. If you want to put it that way.” He paused again. This time she nodded. He went on, “You already have an ideology, but you’re so used to it, you don’t even notice it’s there. That’s what’s funny.”

“But my ideology is scientflic and correct,” Ludmila said. For some reason, that started the Jew and the Pole on another spasm of laughter. Ludmila gave up. With some people, you simply could not have an intelligent discussion.

The land dropped down toward the valley of the Vistula. Kaziemierz Doly looked down on the river from high, sandy banks overgrown with willows whose branches trailed in the water and cut by a good many ravines. “Lovers come here in the springtime,” Wladeslaw remarked. Ludmila sent him a suspicious look, but he let it go at that, so it probably hadn’t been a suggestion.

Some of the buildings around the marketplace were large and had probably been impressive when they were whole, but several rounds of fighting had left most of them charred ruins. A synagogue didn’t look much better than any of the other wreckage, but Jews were going in and out. Other Jews-armed guards-stood watch outside.