Page 82 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

“What do you have in mind?” Moishe said. “You still haven’t answered what I asked you.”

“I was coming round to it, sir; by easy stages,” Donald Mather said. “One thing you learned in Poland was that cooperating with the Lizards isn’t always the best of notions, if you’ll forgive your understatement.”

“No, not always, but if I hadn’t cooperated with them at first, I wouldn’t be here arguing with you now,” Moishe said.

“Saving yourself and your family-” Mather began.

“-And my people,” Russie put in “Without the Lizards, the Nazis would have slaughtered us all.”

“And your people,” Captain Mather conceded. “No one will say you didn’t do what you had to do when you joined the Lizards against the Nazis. But afterwards, you saw that mankind as a whole was your people, too, and you turned against the Lizards.”

“Yes to all of this,” Moishe said, beginning to grow impatient. “But what does it have to do with whatever you want from me?”

“I am coming to that,” Mather answered calmly. No matter how well he spoke, that external calm would have marked him as an Englishman; in his place, a Jew or a Pole would have been shouting and gesticulating. He went on, “Would you agree that in His Majesty’s mandate of Palestine, no effort to exterminate the Jews is now under way, but rather the reverse?”

“In Palestine?” Moishe echoed. The mention of the name was enough to make Rivka sharply catch her breath. Moishe shook his head. “No, you aren’t doing anything like that.Nu?” Here, the multifarious Yiddish word meantcome to the point.

He would have explained that to Mather, but the captain understood it on his own. Mather said, “The nub of it is, Mr. Russie, that there are Jews in Palestine who are not content with British administration there and have been intriguing with the Lizards in Egypt to aid any advance they might make into the Holy Land. His Majesty’s government would like to send you to Palestine to talk to the Jewish fighting leaders and convince them to stay loyal to the crown, to show them that, unlike yours, their situation is not so bad as to require intervention by the aliens to liberate them from it.”

“You want to send me to Palestine?” Moishe asked. He knew he sounded incredulous, but couldn’t help it. Beside him, Rivka made an indignant noise. He corrected himself at once: “You want to send us-me and my family-to Palestine?” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. Occasionally, in Poland, he’d thought of emigrating, of makingaliyah, to the Holy Land. But he’d never taken the notion seriously, no matter how hard the Poles made life for a Jew. And, once the Nazis came, it was too late.

Now this Englishman he’d known for five minutes was nodding, telling him the long-hopeless dream of his exiled people could come true for him. “That’s just what we want to do. We can’t think of a righter man for the job.”

With a woman’s practicality, Rivka asked the next question: “How do we get there?”

“By ship,” Donald Mather answered. “We can get you down to Lisbon without any trouble. Outbound from Lisbon, your freighter will meet a submarine to take you through the Straits of Gibraltar. From the submarine, you’ll board another freighter for the journey to Haifa. How soon can you be ready to leave?”

“It wouldn’t be long,” Moishe said. “It’s not as if we have a lot to pack.” That was, if anything, an understatement. They’d come to England with only the clothes on their backs. They had more than that now, thanks to the kindness of the British and of their relatives here. But a lot of what they had wouldn’t come with them-why bring pots and pans to the Holy Land?

“If I came for you day after tomorrow this same time, you’d be ready, then?” Captain Mather asked.

Moishe almost laughed at him. If they had to leave, he and Rivka could have been ready in half an hour-assuming they found Reuven and dragged him away from whatever game he was playing or watching. A couple of days’ notice struck him as riches like those the Rothschilds were said to enjoy. “We’ll be ready,” he said firmly.

“Good. Until then-” Mather turned to go.

“Wait,” Rivka said, and the Englishman stopped. She went on, “For how long would we be going to-to Palestine?” She had to fight to say the incredible word. “How would you bring us back, and when?”

“As for how long you’d stay,Frau Russie, it would be at least until your husband completed his mission, however long that might take,” Mather answered. “Once that’s done, if you want to return to England, we’ll arrange that, and if you want to stay in Palestine, we can arrange that, too. We do remember those who help us, I promise you that. Have you any other questions? No?” He saluted, did a smart about-turn, and headed for the stairwell.

Moishe and Rivka stared at each other. “Next year in Jerusalem,” Moishe whispered. Jews had been making that prayer since the Romans sacked the Second Temple almost nineteen hundred years before. For almost all of them, it expressed nothing more than a wish that would never be fulfilled. Now-

Now Moishe seized Rivka. Together, they danced around the inside of the flat. It was more than exuberance; he felt as if he could dance on the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. Rivka slowed sooner than he did. She kept a firm grasp on the essentials of the situation, saying, “They are not doing this for you, Moishe-they’re doing it for themselves. Who are these Jews conniving with the Lizards, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” Moishe admitted. “What could I know of what goes on in Palestine? But I know this much: if they want to play games with the Lizards, they’re making a mistake. The British aren’t starving them and killing them for sport, and that would be the only possible excuse for choosing the Lizards.”

“You’ve seen that for yourself,” Rivka agreed, and then turned practical once more: “We’ll have to leave a lot of these clothes behind. The Holy Land is a warmer country than England.”

“So it is.” Moishe hadn’t been thinking about such mundane things. “To pray at the Wailing Wall-” He shook his head in wonder. The idea was just starting to sink down from the front of his mind to the place where his feelings lived: he’d gone from stunned to joyful, and the joy kept growing. It was the first thing he’d ever imagined that might improve on being in love.

It had seized Rivka, too. “To live the rest of our lives in Palestine,” she murmured. “England here, this is not bad-next to Poland even before the Nazis came, it’s a paradise. But to live in a land with plenty of Jews and no one to hate us-that would really be paradise.”

“Who else lives in Palestine?” Moishe said, once again realizing his ignorance of the wider world was both broad and deep. “Arabs, I suppose. After Poles and Germans, they can’t be anything but good neighbors. If Reuven grows up in a country where no one hates him-” He paused. To a Polish Jew, that was like wishing for the moon. But here, even though he hadn’t wished for the moon, Captain Mather had just handed it to him.

“They speak Hebrew in Palestine along with Yiddish, do

n’t they?” Rivka said. “I’ll have to learn.”

“I’ll have a lot of learning to do myself,” Moishe said. Men read the Torah and the Talmud, so he’d learned Hebrew while Rivka hadn’t. But there was a difference between using a language to talk to God and using it to talk with your fellow men.When I get to Jerusalem, I’ll find out what the difference is, he thought, and shivered with excitement.

It occurred to him then that he owed his chance of going to the Holy Land to the Lizards. Before they came, he’d been one more Jew among tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of others starving in the Warsaw ghetto. He’d been out on the streets in dead of night, trying to cadge some food to stay alive and praying to God to grant him a sign that He had not forsaken His people. He’d taken the sun-like glow of the explosive-metal bomb the Lizards had set off high above the city as an answer to that prayer.

A lot of other people had taken it the same way. Almost willy-nilly, they’d made him into their leader, though becoming one had been the last thing in his mind. Because he’d looked like a leader to his people, he’d looked like one to the Lizards, too, when they drove Hitler’s thugs out of Warsaw. Had it not been for them, he would have stayed ordinary till the day he died-and he’d probably be dead by now.

Haltingly, he spoke that thought aloud. Rivka heard him out, then shook her head. “Whatever you think you owe them, you paid it off long ago,” she said. “Yes, they saved us from the Nazis, but they did it for themselves, not for us. They just used us for their own purposes-and if it suits them to start killing us the way the Nazis did, they will.”

“You’re right, I think,” Moishe said.

“Of course I am,” she answered.

He smiled, but soon sobered. Rivka had repeatedly shown she was better at dealing with the real world than he was. If she made a pronouncement like that, he would be wise to take it seriously. Then, all at once, he started to laugh: who would have thought that going to the Holy Land was part of the real world?

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