Striking the Balance

The guard exhaled in exasperation. “Don’t be stupid, Russie. The Lizards invaded Palestine without cutting any deals with us. Looks like they’re going to win here, too, so we’re making sure they see we’re on the right side-we’re giving the British all the trouble they want, all the trouble we can. But we don’t have a deal over you with the Lizards, either. If they ask for you when the fighting’s done, we don’t want to be in a place where we have to say yes or no. You aren’t ours, we don’t have to. You get it now?”

In a crazy sort of way, Moishe did get it. The Jewish underground could have kept him while denying to the Lizards they were doing so, but that exposed them to the risk of being found out. “My family?” he asked.

“I’d have taken you to them by now. If you hadn’t started banging your gums,” the guard told him. He squawked indignant protest, which the other Jew ignored, turning his back and giving Moishe the choice of following or staying where he was. He followed.

He went down hallways he’d never seen before. Up till now, they’d always brought Rivka or Reuven to him, not the other way around. Turning a corner, he almost ran into Menachem Begin. The underground leader said,“Nu,

you were right, Russie. The Lizards aren’t to be trusted. We’ll deal with them as best we can, and then we’ll make their lives miserable. How does that sound?”

“I’ve heard worse,” Moishe said, “but I’ve also heard better. You should have stood with the British against the Lizards from the beginning.”

“And gone down with them? For they will go down. No, thank you.”

Begin started to head down the hall. “Wait,” Moishe called after him. “Before you turn me loose, at least tell me where I am.”

The underground leader and the tough-looking guard both started to laugh. “That’s right, you never did find out,” Menachem Begin said. “Now it doesn’t hurt us for you to know. You’re in Jerusalem, Russie, not far from the one wall of the Temple that’s still left standing.” After an awkward half wave, he hurried away on whatever his own mission was.

Jerusalem? Moishe stood staring for a moment. The guard vanished round a corner before he noticed his charge wasn’t coming after him. He stuck his head and upper body back into sight and waved impatiently. As if awakening from a dream, Moishe started moving again.

The guard took a key from his belt and used it to unlock a door like any other door. “What do you want?” Rivka exclaimed, her voice sharp with alarm. Then she saw Moishe behind the guard, who was both taller and broader than he. “What’s going on?” she asked in an entirely different tone of voice.

She got a condensed version of the story the guard had given Moishe. He didn’t know how much of it she believed. He didn’t know how much of it he believed himself, although the submachine gun he carried was a potent argument for there being some truth to it. “Come on,” the guard said. “You’re getting out of here right now.”

“Give us some money,” Rivka said. Moishe shook his head in chagrin. He hadn’t even thought of that. Evidently the guard had. He reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out a roll of bills that would have made a man rich before the war and now might keep him eating till he found work. Moishe handed the roll to Rivka. As the guard snorted, he bent to hug Reuven.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked his son.

“Palestine, of course,” Reuven answered scornfully, as if wondering what was wrong with him.

“Not just Palestine-Jerusalem,” Moishe said.

The guard snorted again, this time at Reuven’s wide-eyed wonder. He said, “Out you go now, the lot of you.” The strides with which he led them toward the street had made no concessions to the boy’s short legs. Moishe grabbed Reuven’s hand to help his son keep up.

How strange,he thought,to be holding Reuven with one hand and a Sten gun in the other. He’d wanted to fight the Lizards ever since they twisted his words in Poland. He had fought them, with medic’s kit and with wireless broadcasts. Now he had a gun. Mordechai Anielewicz had convinced him that was not his best weapon, but it was better than nothing.

“Here.” The guard slid back a bar from the front doors. The doors and the bar looked as if they could withstand anything short of a tank running into them. The guard grunted as he pushed the stout portals open wide enough for Moishe and his family to squeeze through. As soon as they were out on the street, he said, “Good luck,” and closed the doors behind them. The scrape of the bar sliding back into place behind them sounded very final.

Moishe looked around. To be in Jerusalem without looking around-that seemed a sin. What he saw was chaos. He’d seen that before, in Warsaw. London hadn’t shown him as much; the British had been under attack from the sky long before he got there, and had learned to cope as best they could… and, in any case, they were far more phlegmatic than Poles or Jews or Arabs.