Tilting the Balance

Pale-Moishe looked down at his own hands. Beneath dirt, they were white and transparent as skimmed milk. His wife and son were just as pale. Everyone grew pallid through a Polish winter; but if he and his family lost any more color, they’d disappear.

“What’s the date? ” he asked, wondering how long he’d been cooped up in the bunker.

“Twenty-second of February, ” the Jew with the lantern answered. “A month till spring. ” He snorted. Spring seemed more likely a year away than mere weeks.

The first Lizard Moishe saw on the street made him want to run back to the bunker. The alien, though, paid him no special attention. Lizards had as much trouble telling humans apart as people did with Lizards. Moishe glanced over to Reuven and Rivka. The aliens’ difficulties in that regard had helped the Jews spirit the two of them away from right under their snouts.

“In here, ” the fighter with the pistol said. The Russies obediently went up a stairway and into another block of flats. The halls smelled of cabbage and unwashed bodies and urine. In an apartment at the back of the third floor, more of Anielewicz’s warriors waited. They whisked Moishe and his family inside.

One of them grabbed Moishe by the arm and hustled him over to a table set out with a bar of yellow-tan soap, an enameled basin, a pair of shears, and a straight razor. “The beard, Reb Moishe, has to come off, ” he said without preamble.

Moishe drew back in dismay. A protective hand rose to cover his chin. The SS had cut off the beards-and sometimes the ears and noses-of Jews in the ghetto for sport.

“I’m sorry, ” the fellow-bearded himself-said. “We’re going to move you, we’re going to hide you. Look at yourself now. ” He picked up a fragment of what might once have been a full-length mirror, thrust it in Moishe’s face.

Moishe perforce looked. He saw-himself, paler than usual, his beard longer and fuzzier than usual because he hadn’t bothered trimming it while in the bunker, but otherwise the same rather horse-faced, studious-looking Jew he’d always been.

The fighter said, “Now imagine yourself clean-shaven. Imagine a Lizard with a photograph of you as you are now looking at you-and walking on to look at someone else. ”

The closest Moishe could come to seeing himself beardless was remembering what he’d looked like before his whiskers sprouted. He had trouble bringing the youth across the years and putting that face on the man he’d become.

Then Rivka said, “They’re right, Moishe. It will make you different, and we need that. Please, go ahead and shave. ”

He sighed deeply, a token of surrender. Then he took the mirror from the fighter and leaned it on a shelf so he could see what he was doing. He picked up the shears and rapidly clipped as short as he could the beard he’d worn his whole adult life. What he knew about shaving was all theoretical. He splashed his face with water, then lathered the strong-smelling soap, and spread it over cheeks and chin and neck.

Reuven snickered. “You look funny, Father! ”

“I feel funny. ” He picked up the razor. The bone grip molded itself to his hand, like the handle of a scalpel. The comparison seemed even more apt a few minutes later. He thought he’d seen less blood flow at an appendectomy. He nicked his ear, the hollow under his cheekbone, his chin, his larynx, and he made a good game try at slicing off his upper lip. When he rinsed himself, the water in the basin turned pink.

“You look funny, Father, ” Reuven said again.

Moishe peered into the scrap of mirror. A stranger stared back at him. He looked younger than he had with the beard, but not really like his earlier self. His features were sharper-edged, bonier, more defined. He looked tougher than he’d expected. The dried blood here and there on his face might have had something to do with that; it gave him the air of a boxer who’d just lost a tough match.

The fellow who’d handed him the mirror patted him on the back and said, “Don’t worry, Reb Moishe. They say it gets easier with practice. ” He wasn’t speaking from experience; his own gray-brown beard reached halfway down his shirtfront.

Russie started to nod, then stopped and stared. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d have to do this more than once. But of course the fighter was right-if he wanted to keep up his disguise, he’d have to go on shaving. It struck him as a great waste of time. Even so, after he rinsed and dried the razor, he stuck it into a pocket of his long, dark coat.

The man with the pistol who’d plucked him from the bunker said, “All right, I think we can get you out of here now without too many people recognizing you. ”

His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him… but she was dead, like his daughter, of intestinal disease aggravated by starvation. He said, “If I stay in Warsaw, sooner or later I’ll be spotted. ”

“Of course, ” the fighter said. “So you won’t stay in Warsaw. ”

It made sense. It was like a kick in the belly just the same. He’d spent his whole life here. Till the Lizards came, he’d been sure he would die here, too. “Where will I-where will we-go? ” he asked quietly.

“Lodz, ” the fellow answered.

The word tolled through the room like the deep chime of a funeral bell at a Catholic church. The Germans had done their worst to the Lodz ghetto, second largest in Poland after Warsaw’s, just before the Lizards came. Many of the quarter million Jews who had lived there were shipped to Chelmno and Treblinka, never to come out again.

Russie’s newly bared face must have shown his thoughts all too clearly. The Jewish fighter said, “I understand how you feel, Reb Moishe, but it’s the best place. No one, not even, God willing, a Lizard, would think to look for you there, and if you’re needed, we can bring you back in a hurry. ”