Striking the Balance

Ludmila caught Avram glancing over at Wladeslaw to see if he would say anything about that. He didn’t. Ludmila couldn’t tell whether that pleased the Jewish partisan or irked him. What passed for Polish politics was too complex for her to follow easily.

A ferryboat sent up a great cloud of soft-coal fumes as it carried the wagon across the Vistula. The country was so flat, it reminded Ludmila of the endless plain surrounding Kiev. Cottages with thatched roofs and with sunflowers and hollyhocks growing around them could have belonged to her homeland, too.

That evening, they stopped at a farmhouse by a pond. Ludmila didn’t wonder how they’d found that particular house. Not only was it on the water, the Germans must have used it for target practice, for it was ringed by old, overgrown bomb craters, some of them, the deeper ones, on the way to becoming ponds themselves as groundwater seeped up into them.

No one asked or gave names there. Ludmila understood that; what you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell. The middle-aged couple who worked the farm with their swarm of children put her in mind ofkulaks, the prosperous peasants who in the Soviet Union had resisted giving up their property to join the glorious egalitarian collective farm movement, and so had disappeared off the face of the earth when she was still a girl. Poland had not seen the same leveling.

The wife of the couple, a plump, pleasant woman who wore on her head a bright kerchief like a Russianbabushka, cooked up a great pot of what she calledbarszcz: beet soup with sour cream, which, except for the caraway seeds stirred into it for flavor, might have come from a Russian kitchen. Along with it she served boiled cabbage, potatoes, and a spicy homemade sausage Ludmila found delicious but Avram wouldn’t touch. “Jew,” the woman muttered to her husband when Avram was out of earshot. They helped the partisans; that didn’t mean they loved all of them.

After supper, Avram and Wladeslaw went out to sleep in the barn. Ludmila got the sofa in the parlor, an honor she wouldn’t have been sorry to decline, as it was short and narrow and lumpy. She tossed and turned and almost fell off a couple of times in the course of an uncomfortable evening.

Toward sunset the next day, they crossed the Pilica River, a tributary of the Vistula, over a rebuilt wooden bridge and came into Warka. Wladeslaw waxed enthusiastic: “They make the best beer in Poland here.” Sure enough, the air held the nutty tang of malt and hops. The Pole added, “Pulaski was born in Warka.”

“And who is Pulaski?” Ludmila asked.

Wladeslaw let out a long, resigned sigh. “They don’t teach you much in those Bolshevik schools, do they?” As she bristled, he went on, “He was a Polish nobleman who tried to keep the Prussians and the Austrians and you Russians from carving up our country. He failed.” He sighed again. “We have a way of failing at such things. Then he went to America and helped the United States fight England. He got killed there, poor fellow. He was still a young man.”

Ludmila had been on the point of calling-or at least thinking of-Pulaski as a reactionary holdover of the corrupt Polish feudal regime. But helping the revolutionary movement in the United States had surely been a progressive act. The curious combination left her without an intellectual slot in which to pigeonhole Pulaski, an unsettling feeling. This was the second time she’d left the confines of the USSR. On each trip, her view of the world had shown itself to be imperfectly adequate.

No doubt a Talmudic perspective would be even worse,she thought.

She consciously noticed what she’d been hearing for a while: a low, distant rumble off to the north and west. “That can’t be thunder!” she exclaimed. The day was fine and bright and sunny, with only a few puffy white clouds drifting slowly across the sky from west to east.

“Thunder of a sort,” Avram answered, “but only of a sort. That’s Lizard artillery going after the Nazis, or maybe German artillery going after the Lizards. It’s not going to be easy any more, getting where we’re going.”

“One thing I’ve learned,” Ludmila said, “is that it’s never easy, getting where you’re going.”

Avram plucked at his beard. “If you know that much, maybe those Bolshevik schools aren’t so bad after all.”

“Okay, listen up, people, because this is what we’re going to do,” Rance Auerbach said in the cool darkness of Colorado night “Right now we’re somewhere between Karval and Punkin Center.” A couple of the cavalry troopers gathered round him chuckled softly. He did, too. “Yeah, they’ve got some great names for places ’round these parts. Before the sunset, scouts spotted Lizard outposts north and west of Karval. What we want to do is make ’em think there’s a whole hell of a lot more than us between them and Punkin Center. We do that, we slow down this part of their drive on Denver, and that’s the idea.”