Hidden away somewhere not too far from Lodz, the Jews had the ultimate equalizer: an explosive-metal bomb, captured from the Nazis who’d intended to turn the city and its large ghetto into a mushroom cloud. Anielewicz didn’t know whether the bomb would still work after all these years. His technicians had done their best to maintain it, but how good was that? The Poles couldn’t be sure. Neither could the Lizards. And neither could the Germans or the Russians.
He started whistling again, a loud, cheery tune. “Not being too certain is good for people,” he said to no one in particular. “It keeps them from going ahead and doing things they’re sorry for later.”
As he got closer to Lodz, his legs started aching. He was up into his forties now, not a young man as he had been during the war. He’d been riding a good long way, too, up from Belchatow. But whenever he got aches and pains he didn’t think he ought to have, he wondered if the nerve gas he’d breathed while keeping the Germans from blowing up Lodz was still having its way with him. He’d had the antidote; without it, he would have just quietly stopped breathing and died. Even so, his health had never been the same since.
That sort of doubt made him pedal harder than ever, to prove to himself that he did have something left. Sweat streamed down his face. The modern suburbs around Lodz whizzed past in a blur. So did a Lizard radar station, one dish scanning toward the west, toward Germany, the other toward the south, in the direction of German-dominated Hungary. If trouble came this way, it could get here in a hurry.
If trouble came this way and didn’t get knocked down, he would probably die before he knew it arrived. That was a consolation of sorts, but he declined to be consoled. Most of the people in the neighborhood around the radar station were Jews. They waved to Mordechai as he rode past. He waved back, and called out the same sort of insults he’d traded with Boleslaw the Pole. Along with most of the Jews in Poland, he switched back and forth between Yiddish and Polish, sometimes hardly noticing he was doing it.
Traffic got heavier as he rode up Franciszkanska Street into the city: horse-drawn wagons, lorries, motorcars-some old gasoline-burners, others hydrogen-powered-and swarms of bicycles. Anielewicz was glad to have an excuse to slow down.
New and old commingled inside Lodz. It had suffered in the German invasion, and again in the Lizards’ conquest of the area, and yet again when the Nazis started lobbing rockets at it. In the intervening years, fresh construction had replaced most of the buildings wrecked in one round or another of fighting. Some new structures were of brick or pale tan sandstone that harmonized with their older neighbors. Others, especially those the Lizards had run up for themselves, were so boxy and utilitarian, they might as well have been alien invaders-and so, in fact, they were.
Anielewicz still lived in what had been the Lodz ghetto, not far from the fire station that had housed the ghetto’s only motorized vehicle, a fire engine. He could have lived anywhere in the city- indeed, anywhere in Poland-he chose. His flat suited him well enough, and his wife, Bertha, had lived her whole life in Lodz. He sometimes thought about moving, but without great urgency.
An old friend waved as he rolled to a stop in front of the block of flats and put his feet down on the ground. Mordechai waved back. “How are you today, Ludmila?” he asked with real concern.
Ludmila Jager slowly walked up to him. “I am… not so bad,” she replied in Russian-accented Polish. “How are you?”
“I’m pretty well,” Anielewicz answered in Yiddish. Ludmila nodded; she spoke German, and could follow the Jews’ variation on it. He went on, “How are your legs? How are your arms?”
She shrugged. The motion made pain flow across her round, ruddy face. With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, she wiped it away. “I will never move fast again,” she said. “Nichevo.” That was a Russian word, and a useful one: it meant something like, It can’t be helped. Ludmila went on, “It could have been worse.” Pain filled her face again. This time, she let it stay. “For Heinrich, it was worse.”
“I know,” Anielewicz said quietly, and kicked at the cobblestones. A Jewish partisan leader, a German panzer officer who couldn’t stomach the incineration of Lodz, and a Red Air Force pilot, as Ludmila had been then-a strange trio to thwart the Reich after the atomic bomb got smuggled into the city. They’d done it, but they’d paid the price.
Mordechai Anielewicz knew how lucky he’d been. All he had to show for his brush with Otto Skorzeny’s nerve gas were pains if he exercised too hard for too long. Ludmila, though, was nearly a cripple. And Heinrich Jager… Mordechai shook his head. Jager, a German who proved his kind could be decent, had died young, and with few healthy days before he did.
After all these years, Anielewicz still wondered why. Was it because Jager had been twenty years older than his two comrades? Or had he breathed in more of the gas? Or had the antidote not been so effective on him? No way to tell, no way at all. Whatever the reason, it was too damn bad.
Ludmila might have been reading his thoughts. She said, “He did what he thought was right. If he hadn’t done it, the fascist jackals might have caused the destruction of the entire world. We had a cease-fire with the Lizards. If it had come apart then… Heinrich said to the end of his days that keeping that from happening was the best thing he ever did.”
“I wish he were still here to say it, your fascist jackal,” Anielewicz replied.
Ludmila smiled; she still sometimes used Communist jargon without even noticing she’d done it. She said, “So do I, but… nichevo.” Yes, that was a very useful word indeed. With another nod, she made her slow, painful way down the street, never once complaining.
Anielewicz carried the bicycle upstairs to his flat. Had he been so rash as to leave it on the sidewalk, even with a stout chain, it would have walked with Jesus. Even Jews used that saying about mysterious disappearances these days.
When he opened the door, familiar chaos surrounded him. His wife, Bertha, wearing a dress that would have been stylish in London a couple of years before and was still the height of fashion in Lodz, came up to give him a kiss. As always, a smile brought beauty to her plain face without the intermediate step of prettiness.
She said something. It was probably “How are you?” or “How are things?” but Anielewicz had trouble being sure. His daughter, Miriam, was practicing the violin. His son David, a couple of years younger, was practicing Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, which was only a little more than a month away. And his other son, Heinrich, who was eight, was working his way through a school lesson in the Lizards’ language. These days, Anielewicz hardly noticed the contrast between Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe and It shall be done, superior sir. He did notice the racket. He would have had to be deaf, or more likely dead, not to notice.
The racket changed only languages when his children spotted him. They all tried to tell him everything about their days at the same time. What he heard were bits and pieces that surely didn’t-couldn’t-have gone together. If a boy had in fact invited Miriam to go to a film about Lizard irregular verbs, the world was even stranger than Anielewicz suspected.
When his wife could get a word in edgewise, she said, “Bunim telephoned a couple of hours ago.”
“Did he?” That brought Mordechai to full alertness; Bunim was the most powerful Lizard stationed in Lodz. “What did he want?”
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Bertha answered. “He said leaving a message would not be proper protocol.”
“Sounds like a Lizard,” Anielewicz said, and Bertha nodded. He went on, “I’d better ring him up. Can you keep the menagerie down to low roars while I’m on the telephone?”