Striking the Balance

Maybe Liu Mei was getting used to proper sorts of food after all. Maybe she was just so hungry that anything even vaguely edible tasted good to her right now. Liu Han understood how that might be from her own desperate times aboard the airplane that never came down. She’d eaten grayish-green tinned peas that reminded her of nothing so much as boiled dust. Perhaps in the same spirit of resignation, Liu Mei now took several blobs ofkao kan mien-erh from Liu Han’s finger and didn’t fuss once.

“Isn’t that good?” Liu Han crooned. She thought the dry cake powder had very little flavor of any sort, but babies didn’t like strongly flavored food. So grandmothers said, anyhow, and if they didn’t know, who did?

Liu Mei looked up at Liu Han and let out an emphatic cough. Liu Han stared at her daughter. Was she really saying she liked the dry cake powder today? Liu Han couldn’t think of anything else that cough might mean. Although her daughter had still expressed herself in the fashion of a little scaly devil, she’d done it to approve of something not only earthly but Chinese.

“Mama,” Liu Mei said, and then used another emphatic cough. Liu Han thought she would melt into a little puddle of dry-cake-flour mush, right there on the floor of her room. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been right: little by little, she was winning her daughter back from the scaly devils.

Mordechai Anielewicz looked at his companions in the room above the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “Well, now we have it,” he said. “What do we do with it?”

“We ought to give it back to the Nazis,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “They tried to kill us with it; only fair we should return the favor.”

“David Nussboym would have said we should give it to the Lizards,” Bertha Fleishman said, “and not the way Solomon meant, but as a true gift.”

“Yes, and because he kept saying things like that, we said goodbye to him,” Gruver answered. “We don’t need any more of such foolishness.”

“Just a miracle we managed to get that hideous stuff out of the casing and into our own sealed bottles without killing anybody doing it,” Anielewicz said: “a miracle, and a couple of those antidote kits theWehrmacht men sold us, for when their own people started feeling the gas in spite of the masks and the protective clothes they were wearing.” He shook his head. “The Nazis are much too good at making things like that.”

“They’re much too good at giving them to us, too,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Before, their rockets would send over a few kilos of nerve gas at a time, with a big bursting charge to spread it around. But this… we salvaged more than a tonne from that bomb. And they were going to have us place it so it hurt us worst. The rockets could come down almost anywhere.”

Solomon Gruver’s laugh was anything but pleasant. “I bet that Skorzeny pitched a fit when he found out he couldn’t play us for suckers the way he thought he could.”

“He probably did,” Mordechai agreed. “But don’t think he’s done for good because we fooled him once. I never thought themamzer would live up to the nonsense Gobbels puts out on the wireless, but he does. That is a man to be taken seriously no matter what. If we don’t keep an eye on him all the time, he’ll do something dreadful to us. Even if we do, he may yet.”

“Thank God for your friend, the other German,” Bertha said.

Now Anielewicz laughed-uncomfortably. “I don’t think he’s my friend, exactly. I don’t think I’m his friend, either. But I let him live and I let him carry that explosive metal back to Germany, and so… I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just a stiff-necked sense of honor, and he’s paying back a debt.”

“There can be decent Germans,” Solomon Gruver said reluctantly. That almost set Mordechai laughing again. If he had started, the laugh would have carried an edge of hysteria. He could imagine some plump, monocled Nazi functionary using that precise tone of voice to admit,There can be decent Jews.

“I still wonder if I should have killed him,” Mordechai said. “The Nazis would have had a much harder time building their bombs without that metal, and God knows the world would be a better place without them. But the world wouldn’t be a better place with the Lizards overrunning it.”

“And here we are, still stuck in the middle between them,” Bertha Fleishman said. “If the Lizards win, everyone loses. If the Nazis win, we lose.”

“We’ll hurt them before we go,” Anielewicz said. “They’ve helped us do it, too. If they should come back, we won’t let them treat us the way they did before. Not now. Never again. What was the last desire of my life before the Lizards came has been fulfilled. Jewish self-defense is a fact.”

How tenuous a fact it was came to be shown a moment later, when a Jewish fighter named Leon Zelkowitz walked into the room where they were talking and said, “There’s an Order Service district leader down at the entrance who wants to talk with you, Mordechai.”