Tilting the Balance

“I don’t know, ” he answered, which was honest enough to make her nod soberly. He went on, “In the end, it’s more or less up to you, isn’t it? ”

“Not altogether. ” Her left hand spread over her belly; he wondered if she knew it had moved. “For instance, do you want me back-under the circumstances? ”

Since he’d been asking himself the same thing, he couldn’t exclaim Yes! the way he probably should have. When a couple of seconds passed without his saying anything, Barbara looked away. That frightened him. He didn’t want to throw her out, either. He said, “I’m sorry, dear. Too much landing on me all at once. ”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth? ” She shook her head wearily, then got to her feet. “I’d better get downstairs and help with the work, Jens. I’ve sort of turned into assistant Lizard liaison person. ”

“Wait. ” He had work, too, a load that was going to quadruple now that the Met Lab was finally here. But that didn’t have to start at this precise instant. He got up, too, hurried around the desk and took her in his arms. She held him tight; her body molded itself to his. It felt so familiar, so right. He wished he’d had the sense to lock his office door: he might have tried to drag her down to the floor then and there. It had been so long… He remembered the last time they’d made love on the floor, with Lizard bombs falling all over Chicago.

She tilted her face up, kissed him with more warmth than she’d shown down on East Evans. But before he could try dragging her down to the floor even with the door unlocked, she pulled away and said, “I really should go. ”

“Where will you stay tonight? ” he asked. There. That brought it out in the open. If she said she’d stay with him, he didn’t know what he’d do-not go back to the BOQ, that was for sure.

But she just shook her head and answered, “Don’t ask me that yet, please. Right now I don’t even know which end is up. ”

“All right, ” he said reluctantly; he’d been up when they held each other.

Barbara walked out of the office. He listened to her footsteps receding down the hallway and then in the stairwell. He went back to his desk, looked out the window behind it. There she came, out, of Science Hall.

And there she went, over to Sam Yeager. No doubt who he was, even from three floors up: plenty of men in Army uniforms standing around, but only one of them stayed by the two Lizard prisoners. Jens felt like a Peeping Tom as he watched his wife hug and kiss the tall soldier, but he couldn’t make himself tear his eyes away. When he compared the way she held Yeager to how she’d embraced him, a cold, inescapable conclusion formed in his mind: wherever she slept tonight, it wouldn’t be with him.

At last Barbara broke free of the other man, but her hand lingered affectionately at his waist for an extra few seconds. Jens made himself turn away from the window and look at his desk. No matter what happens to the rest of my life, there’s still a war on and I have a ton of work to do, he told himself.

He could make himself lean forward in the chair. He could make himself pull a report from the varnished pine IN basket and set it on the blotter in front of him. But, try as he would, he couldn’t make the words mean anything. Misery and rage strangled his brains.

If that was bad, pedaling back to the BOQ with a silent Oscar right behind him felt ten times worse. “I won’t take it, ” he whispered again and again, not wanting the guard to hear. “I won’t. ”

Normal life. Moishe Russie had almost forgotten such a thing could exist. Certainly he’d known nothing of the sort for the past three and a half years, since the Stukas and broad-winged Heinkel 111s and other planes of the Nazi war machine began dropping death on Warsaw.

First the bombardment. Then the ghetto: insane crowding, disease, starvation, overwork-death for tens of thousands, served up a centimeter at a time. Then another spasm of war as the Lizards drove the Germans from Warsaw. And then that strange time as the Lizards’ mouthpiece. He’d thought that was close to normal; at least he and his family had had food on the table.

But the Lizards were as eager to put shackles on his spirit as the Nazis had been to squeeze work out of his body and then let it die… or to ship him away and just kill him, regardless of how much work was left in him.

Then God only knew how long underground in a dark sardine tin, and then the flight to Lodz. None of that had been even remotely normal. But now here he was, with Rivka and Reuven, in a flat with water and electricity (most of the time, at least), and with no sign the Lizards knew where he’d gone.

It wasn’t paradise-but what was? It was a chance to live like a human being instead of a starving draft horse or a hunted rabbit. This, by now, is my definition of normal? Russie asked himself as he strode down Zgierska Street to see what the market had to offer.

He shook his head. “Not normal, ” he insisted aloud, as if someone had disagreed with him. Normal would have meant going back to medical school, where the worst he would hate had to endure was hostility from the Polish students. He itched to be able to start learning again, and to start practicing what he’d learned.

Instead, here he came, ambling along down a street in a town not his own, clean-shaven, doing his best to act like a man who’d never had a thought in his life. This was safer than the way he’d been living, but… normal? No.

As usual, the Balut Market square was packed. Some new posters had gone up on the dirty brick walls of the buildings surrounding the square. Bigger than life, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski looked down on the ragged men and women gathered there, his arms and hands outstretched in exhortation. WORK MEANS FREEDOM! the poster cried in Yiddish, Polish, and German.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI. A shiver ran down Russie’s back when he saw that in German. The Nazis had put the same legend above the gates of their extermination camp at Auschwitz. He wondered if Rumkowski knew.

He got in line to buy cabbage. More of Rumkowski’s posters stood behind the peddler’s cart. So did other, smaller ones with big red letters that announced WANTED FOR THE RAPE AND MURDER OF A LITTLE GIRL in the three most widely spoken languages of Lizard-held Poland.