Striking the Balance

Ludmila studied the smith through slitted eyes. She thought he’d said more than that; some of his Polish had sounded close to what would have been a lewd suggestion in Russian. Well. If she didn’t understand it, she didn’t have to react to it. She decided that would be the wisest course for the time being.

To Sholom, she said, “Tell him to come look at the damage, then, and see what he can do.”

Witold strutted along beside her, chest out, back straight, chin up. Ludmila was not a tall woman, and felt even smaller beside him. Whatever he might have hoped, that did not endear him to her.

He studied the biplane for a couple of minutes, then asked, “What is broken that takes a smith to fix?”

“The crankshaft,” Ludmila answered. Witold’s handsome face remained blank, even after Sholom translated that into Polish. Ludmila craned her neck to glare up at him. With poisonous sweetness, she asked, “You do know what a crankshaft is, don’t you? If you’ve worked on motorcars, you’d better.”

More translation from Sholom, another spate of fast Polish from Witold. Ludmila caught pieces of it, and didn’t like what she heard. Sholom’s rendition did nothing to improve her spirits: “He say he work on car springs, on fixing dent in-how you say this? — in mudguards, you understand? He not work on motor of motorcar.”

“Bozhemoi,”Ludmila muttered. Atheist she might be, but swearing needed flavor to release tension, and so she called on God. There stood Witold, strong as a bull, and, for all the use he was to her, he might as well have had a bull’s ring in his nose. She rounded on Sholom, who cringed. “Why didn’t you find me a real mechanic, then, not this blundering idiot?”

Witold got enough of that to let out a very bull-like bellow of rage. Sholom shrugged helplessly. “Before war, only two motor mechanics in Hrubieszow, lady pilot. One of them, he dead now-forget whether Nazis or Russians kill him. The other one, he licks the Lizards’ backsides. We bring him here, he tell Lizards everything. Witold, he may not do much, but he loyal.”

Witold followed that, too. He shouted something incendiary and drew back a massive fist to knock Sholom into the middle of next week.

The Jewish partisan had not looked to be armed. Now, with the air of a man performing a conjurer’s trick, he produced a Luger apparently from thin air and pointed it at Witold’s middle. “Jews have guns now, Witold. You’d better remember it. Talk about my mother and I’ll blow your balls off. We don’t need to takegowno from you Poles any more.” In Polish or in Russian, shit was shit.

Witold’s pale blue eyes were wide and staring. His mouth was wide, too. It opened and closed a couple of times, but no words emerged. Still wordlessly, he turned on his heel and walked away. All the swagger had leaked out of him, like the air from a punctured bicycle tire.

Quietly, Ludmila told Sholom, “You’ve just given him reason to sell us out to the Lizards.”

Sholom shrugged. The Luger disappeared. “He has reason to want to breathe more, too. He keep quiet or he is dead. He knows.”

“There is that,” Ludmila admitted.

Sholom laughed. “Yes, there is that. All Russia is that, yes?”

Ludmila started to make an angry retort, but stopped before the words passed her lips. She remembered neighbors, teachers, and a couple of cousins disappearing in 1937 and 1938. One day they were there, the next gone. You didn’t ask questions about it, you didn’t talk about it. If you did, you would disappear next. That had happened, too. You kept your head down, pretended nothing was going on, and hoped the terror would pass you by.

Sholom watched her, his dark, deep-set eyes full of irony. At last, feeling she had to say something, she answered, “I am a senior lieutenant in the Red Air Force. Do you like hearing your government insulted?”

“My

government?” Sholom spat on the ground. “I am Jew. You think the Polish government is mine?” He laughed again; this time, the sound carried the weight of centuries of oppression. “And then the Nazis come, and make Poles look like nice and kindly people. Who thinks anyone can do that?”

“So why are you here and not with the Lizards inside Hrubieszow?” Ludmila asked. A moment later, she realized the question was imperfectly tactful, but she’d already let it out.

“Some things are bad, some things are worse, some things are worst of all,” Sholom answered. He waited to see if Ludmila followed the Polish comparative and superlative. When he decided she did, he added, “For Jews, the Nazis are worst of all. For people, the Lizards are worst of all. Am I a person first, or am I a Jew first?”

“You are a person first,” Ludmila answered at once.

“From you, it sounds so easy,” Sholom said with a sigh. “My brother Mendel, he is in Hrubieszow.” The Jew shrugged yet again. “These things happen.”