Striking the Balance

The Russies walked a couple of blocks. Then someone shouted at them: “Get off the street, you fools!” Not until he was running for a doorway did Moishe realize the yell had been in English, not Yiddish or Hebrew. A khaki-clad soldier, ignoring his own advice, fired at the Lizard planes overhead.

“He can’t knock them down, Papa,” Reuven said seriously; his brief life had made him an expert on air raids. “Doesn’t he know that?”

“He knows it,” Moishe answered. “He’s trying anyhow, because he is brave.”

Bombs crashed down, not too close: the war had honed Moishe’s ears, too. He heard sharp whistling in the sky, then more explosions. The wall against which he was leaning shook. “Those aren’t bombs, Papa,” Reuven exclaimed-yes, he was a connoisseur of such things. “That’s artillery.”

“You’re right again,” Moishe said. If the Lizards were landing artillery in Jerusalem, they couldn’t be far away. He wanted to flee the city, but how? And where would he go?

A new set of shells landed, these nearer to him. Fragments hissed through the air. What had been a house was suddenly transformed into a pile of rubble. An Arab woman with veil and head-cloth and robes covering her down to her toes emerged from the building next door to it, running for new shelter like a beetle when the stone under which it huddles is disturbed. A shell landed in the street, only a few meters from her. After that, she didn’t run. She lay and writhed and screamed.

“She’s hurt bad,” Reuven said in that alarmingly knowing way of his.

Moishe ran out to do what he could for her. Without medicines, without instruments, he knew how little that would be. “Be careful!” Rivka called after him. He nodded, but laughed a little under his breath, As if he could be careful now! That was up to the shells, not to him.

Blood pooled under the woman. She wailed in Arabic, which Moishe didn’t understand. He told her he was a doctor-“medical student” didn’t pack enough punch-using German, Yiddish, Polish, and English. She didn’t follow any of them. When he tried to tear her robe to bandage a wound high up in her leg, she fought him as if she thought he was going to rape her right there. Maybe she did think that.

An Arab man came up. “What you do, Jew?” he asked in bad Hebrew, then in worse English.

“I’m a doctor. I try to help her.” Moishe also spoke in both languages.

The man turned his words into rapid-fire Arabic. Halfway through, the woman stopped struggling. It wasn’t because she acquiesced. Moishe grabbed for her wrist. He found no pulse. When he let her arm drop, the Arab man knew what that meant.“lnshallah,”

he said, and then, in English, “The will of God. Good you try to help, Jew doctor.” With a nod, he walked away.

Shaking his head, Russie went back to his family. Now, too late for the poor woman, the Lizard bombardment was easing. Staying close to the sides of buildings in case it picked up again, Moishe led his wife and son through the streets of Jerusalem. He didn’t know just what he was looking for. He would have taken a way out of the city, a good shelter, or a glimpse of the Wailing Wall.

Before he got any of those, a spatter of small-arms fire broke out, no more than a few hundred meters away. “Are the Lizards here?” Rivka exclaimed.

“I don’t think so,” Moishe answered. “I think it’s the Jewish underground rising against the British.”

“Oy!”

Rivka and Reuven said it together. Moishe nodded mournfully. The shooting-rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, the occasionalpop! of a mortar-spread like wildfire, fanning out in every direction. Inside a couple of minutes, the Russies were flat on their bellies in another doorway as bullets pinged and ricocheted all around.

Several British soldiers in tin hats and khaki tunics and shorts dashed up the street. One of them spotted Moishe and his family. He pointed his rifle at them and screamed, “Don’t move or you’re dead, you Jew bastards!”

That was when Moishe remembered the submachine gun that lay on the ground beside him.So much for taking up arms, he thought. “Take the gun,” he told the Englishman. “You have us.”

The soldier called, “Permission to take prisoners, sir?” That didn’t mean anything to Russie for a moment. Then it sank in: if the man didn’t get that permission, he was going to shoot them and go on about his business. Moishe got ready to reach for the Sten gun. If he was going to go down, he’d go down fighting.

But a fellow with a second lieutenant’s single pips on his shoulder boards said, “Yes, take them back to the detention center. If we start murdering theirs, they’ll slaughter ours, the buggers.” He sounded weary and bitter beyond measure. Moishe hoped Rivka hadn’t followed what he said.