Tilting the Balance

“Not a bit. Come in, wash up, sit and rest your feet. ”

The farmhouse stood between two thatch-roofed outbuildings. The farmer shooed some chickens away from the woodpile and into a henhouse in one of those outbuildings, then slammed the door on them. At the fellow’s urging, Anielewicz clumped up the wooden stairs and into the foyer.

A big brass basin there served for a sink. He washed his hands and face, dried them on a linen towel hung on a nail above the basin. The farmer courteously waited for him to use the water first, then cleaned himself off. After that, introductions were in order: the farmer gave his own name as Wladyslaw Sawatski; his wife was Emilia (a pleasant-looking woman who wore a kerchief over her hair), his teenage son Jozef, and his daughters Maria and Ewa (one older than Jozef, one younger).

Anielewicz said he was Janusz Borwicz, giving himself a good Polish name to go with his Polish looks. Everyone made much of him. He got the seat at the head of the table in the parlor, he got a mug of apple brandy big enough to make three people shikker, and he got the family’s undivided attention. He gave them all the Warsaw gossip he had, especially the part pertaining to the Polish majority.

“Did you fight the Germans when the Lizards came? ” Jozef Sawatski asked. He and his father-and both his sisters, too-leaned forward at that.

They wanted war stories, Mordechai realized. Well, he could give them some. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did, ” he said truthfully. Again, he edited the tales to disguise his Jewishness.

Wladyslaw Sawatski, who had a brandy mug the size of Anielewicz’s, slammed it down on the table with a roar of approval. “Well done, by God! ” he exclaimed. “If we’d fought like that in ‘39, we wouldn’t have needed these-creatures-to get the Nazis off our backs. ”

Anielewicz doubted that. Sandwiched between Germany and Russia, Poland was going to get walloped every so often. Before he could come up with a polite way to disagree with his host, Emilia Sawatski turned to her daughters and said, “Why don’t you go and bring in the food now? ” Alone in the family, she hadn’t cared about tales of conflict.

In came supper, mountains of it: boiled potatoes, boiled kielbasa sausage, big pork steaks, headcheese, fresh-baked bread. Warsaw might be hungry, but the countryside seemed to be doing pretty well for itself.

As Maria, the older girl, plopped a length of sausage onto Anielewicz’s plate, she gave him a sidelong glance, then spoke in silky tones to her father. “You’re not going to send a hero like Janusz out onto the road after supper, are you, Papa? He’ll sleep here tonight, won’t he? ”

She wants to go to bed with me, Anielewicz realized with some alarm. That alarm had nothing to do with Maria’s person: she was eighteen or nineteen, and quite pretty in a wide-faced, blue-eyed way. Anielewicz didn’t particularly worry about angering her father either. But if he took off his trousers for her, he wouldn’t be able to hide being a Jew.

Wladyslaw Sawatski looked from Maria to Mordechai and back again. The glance was full of understanding: whatever else he might be, Sawatski was no fool. He said, “I was going to let him rest in the barn, Maria, but as you say, he is a hero, and too good for straw. He can sleep on the sofa in the front room there. ”

He pointed to show Anielewicz where that was. Mordechai was not surprised to discover it lay right outside the doorway to a bedroom that would su