And this misery, he realized, remained after the Nazis were the better part of a year out of Lodz. The Jews now were fed better and treated like human beings. What the ghetto had been like under German rule was-not unimaginable, for he imagined it all too vividly, but horrifying in a way he’d never imagined till now.
“Thank you, Father, for getting out when you did,” he said. For a couple of blocks he simply let himself be washed along like a fish in a swift-flowing stream. Then he began moving against the current in a direction of his own choosing.
Posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski seemed to follow him wherever he went. Some were tattered and faded, some as new and bright as if they’d been put up yesterday, which they probably had. Rumkowski stared down at Goldfarb from a variety of poses, but always looked stern and commanding.
Goldfarb shook his head; the briefing papers had had considerable to say about Rumkowski and his regime in Lodz, but not much of that was good. In sum, he amounted to a pocket Jewish Hitler. Just what we need, Goldfarb thought.
A couple of times, he passed Order Service men with their armbands and truncheons. He noticed them not only for those, but also because they looked uncommonly well-fed. A pocket Jewish SS, too. Wonderful. Goldfarb kept his head down and did his best to pretend he was invisible.
But he had to look up from time to time to tell where he was going; studying a street map of Lodz didn’t do enough to let him make his way through the town itself. Luckily, being one mote in a swirling crowd kept him from drawing special notice. After three wrong turns-about half as many as he’d expected-he walked into a block of flats on Mostowski Street and started climbing stairs.
He knocked on what he hoped was the right door. A woman a couple of years older than he was-she would have been pretty If she hadn’t been so thin-opened it and stared at his unfamiliar face with fear-widened eyes. “Who are you?” she demanded.
Goldfarb got the idea something unpleasant would happen to him if he gave the wrong answer. He said, “I’m supposed to tell you even Job didn’t suffer forever.”
“And I’m supposed to tell you it must have seemed that way to him.” The woman’s whole body relaxed. “Come in. You must be Moishe’s cousin from England.”
“That’s right,” he said. She closed the door behind him. He went on, “And you’re Rivka? Where’s your son?”
“He’s out playing. In the crowds on the street, the risk is small, and besides, someone has an eye on him.”
“Good.” Goldfarb looked around. The flat was tiny, but so bare that it seemed larger. He shook his head in sympathy.
“You must be sick to death of moving.”
Rivka Russie smiled for the first time, tiredly. “You have no idea. Reuven and I have moved three times since Moishe didn’t come back to the flat we’d just taken.” She shook her head. “He thought someone had known who he was. We must have been just too late getting out of the other place. If it hadn’t been for the underground, I don’t know what we would have done. Got caught, I suppose.”
“They got word to England, too,” Goldfarb said, “and orders eventually got to me.” He wondered if they would have, had Churchill not spent a while talking with him at Bruntingthorpe. “I’m supposed to help get Moishe out of here and take him-and you and the boy back to England with me. If I can.”
“Can you do that?” Rivka asked eagerly.
“Gott vayss-God knows,” he said. That won a startled laugh from her. He went on, “I’m no commando or hero or anything like that. I’ll work with your people and I’ll do the best I can, that’s all.”
“A better answer than I expected.” Her voice was judicious.
“Is he still in Lodz?” Goldfarb asked. “That’s the last information I had, but it’s not necessarily good any more.”
“As far as we know, yes. The Lizards aren’t in a lot of hurry about dealing with him. That doesn’t make sense to me, when he did such a good job of embarrassing them.”
“They’re more sure than quick,” Goldfarb said, remembering pages from the briefing book. “Very methodical, but not swift. What sort of charge do they have him up on?”
“Disobedience,” Rivka said. “From everything he ever said while he was on better terms with them, they couldn’t accuse him of anything much worse.”
That fit in with what Goldfarb had read, too. The Lizards seemed rank-, class-, and duty-conscious to a degree that made the English and even the Japanese look like wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchists. In that kind of society, disobedience had to be as heinous a sin as blasphemy in the Middle Ages.
“Still here in Lodz,” Goldfarb mused. “That’s good, I suppose. The Lizards’ main Polish headquarters is in Warsaw. Getting him out of there would be a lot tougher.” He grinned wryly. “Besides, I don’t fancy walking all that way east, not when I’ve just come here from the coast the same way.”
“Would you like some tea?” Rivka asked. A moment later, she added another, more indignant question: “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, really,” Goldfarb said, though he was still chuckling. “It’s only that any woman in my family would have asked exactly the same question.”
“I am a woman in your family,” Rivka said quietly.
“That’s true. You are.” They eyed each other across the gulf of lifetimes spent in very different lands. Goldfarb’s parents had escaped the ghetto; to him, this place was something medieval returned to malignant life, and Rivka in her long black dress almost as much a part of the past come again. He wondered how he seemed to her: exotic stranger from a land rich and peaceful compared to Poland, in spite of everything Hitler and the Lizards had done to England, or just an apikoros, someone who’d abandoned most of his Judaism to get along in the wider world? He didn’t know how to ask, or even if it was his business.
“Do you want that cup of tea?” Rivka asked again. “It’s not real tea, I’m afraid, only chopped-up herbs and leaves.”
“Same sort of muck we’ve been drinking at home,” Goldfarb said. “Yes, I’d like some, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Rivka Russie made the “tea” on an electric hot plate. She served it to him in a glass with sugar but no milk. That was how his parents drank it, but he’d come to prefer the way most Englishmen took theirs. Asking for milk here, though, didn’t seem likely to produce anything but embarrassment. Cautiously, he sipped.
He raised an eyebrow. “Not bad at all. Better than most of what I’ve had lately, as a matter of fact.” To prove he meant it, he quickly drained the glass. Then he said, “So you’re still in touch with the underground?”
“Yes,” Rivka answered. “If it weren’t for them, the Order Service men would have taken Reuven and me along with Moishe by now.”
“Can you let me know how to get hold of them? If nothing else, I’ll need somewhere to sleep while I’m looking things over.” Can’t very well stay in a flat with my cousin’s wife, not when he’s in gaol.
“It’s not as hard as you might think.” Amusement shone in Rivka’s eyes. “Go across the hall to flat number twenty-four. Knock on the door-twice, then once.”
He’d used a password to identify himself to her. Now he had to trot out a secret knock? He’d always thought that sort of thing more the province of sensational novels than sober fact, but he was learning better in a hurry. If you wanted to keep going when every man’s hand was raised against you, you had to figure out ways to keep from being noticed.
He went across the hall, found the battered door with a tarnished brass 24 on it. Knock, knock… knock. He waited. The door opened. The big man standing in it said, “Nu?”
“Nu, the lady across the way sent me here,” Goldfarb replied. With his shaggy beard and soldier’s cap over civilian clothes, the big man looked like a bandit chief. He also looked like someone it would be wiser not to annoy. Goldfarb was glad he’d had the right code to introduce himself to Rivka Russie; without it, this fellow likely would have descended on him like a falling building. He’d been right to have his wind up.