Page 26 of Aftershocks (Colonization 3)

What hadn’t occurred to him was how few German functionaries were left to overawe. The Lizards had done a truly astonishing job of pounding flat the part of Germany just west of Poland. He’d known that in the abstract. The Wehrmacht’s assault on Poland had petered out not least because the Germans couldn’t keep their invading army supplied. As he entered Germany, he saw exactly what that pounding had done.

Kreuz, where Mordechai entered the Reich, had taken an explosive-metal bomb. The center of the city had simply ceased to be, except for one church spire and most of a factory chimney, which still reached toward the heavens like the skeletal fingers of a dead man. Fused, shiny glass gradually gave way to rubble outside the center of town.

This is what the Nazis did to Lodz, Anielewicz thought. This is what they did to Warsaw, and to as many other cities as they could hit. But they’d taken worse than they’d given: that was dreadfully clear. He asked a Lizard officer, “How many Deutsch cities did the Race bomb with explosive-metal weapons?”

“I do not know, not precisely,” the male answered. “Many tens of them, without a doubt. Hundreds, very possibly. The Deutsche were stubborn. They should have yielded long before they did. They had no hope of defeating us, and merely inflicted more suffering on their own population by refusing to give up the futile fight.”

Many tens. Hundreds, very possibly. The answer was horrifying enough to Mordechai when he first heard it. It became far more so when he got to the makeshift hospital on the far side of what had been Kreuz. Tents and shacks housed people maimed or blinded or horribly burned by the explosive-metal bomb. The handful of doctors and nurses and civilian volunteers were desperately overworked and had next to nothing with which to treat their patients.

Mordechai multiplied that improvised hospital by tens, hundreds very possibly. He shivered, though the day was fine, even warm. What sort of miracle was it that any Germans survived at all?

A bespectacled doctor in a long, none too clean white coat came up to him. “You are a person of some influence with the Lizards,” he stated, his voice brooking no argument. “You must be, to be clean and well fed and traveling so.”

“What if I am?” Mordechai asked.

“You will try to obtain for us more medical supplies,” the doctor said, again as if stating a law of nature. “You see what we lack.”

Humility, Anielewicz thought. Aloud, he said, “You’d ask this of me even though I’m a Jew?” He let the German he had used slide into Yiddish. If the doctor-the Nazi doctor, he thought-couldn’t follow, too bad.

But the man only shrugged. “I would ask it if you were Satan himself,” he answered. “I need these things. My patients need these things.”

“You aren’t the only ones who do,” Anielewicz observed.

“That does not make my need any less urgent,” the doctor said.

From his point of view, he might even have been right. Germans in torment suffered no less than Jews in torment. Anielewicz wished he could deny that. If he did, though, what would he be but the mirror image of a Nazi? Roughly, he said, “I’ll do what I can.”

By the way the doctor looked at him, the man thought he was lying. But he spoke of the matter with the first Lizard officer he encountered, a couple of kilometers farther outside of Kreuz. The male responded, “I understand the physician’s difficulties, but the number of injured Deutsche far outstrips our ability to provide all physicians with all required medicaments. We shall do what we can. It may not be much and it may not be timely, but we shall make the effort.”

“I thank you,” Mordechai answered. There, he told his conscience. Relax. I’ve made the effort, too.

Every time he went into a village, he asked about soldiers bringing Jews back into Germany from Poland. Most of the time, he got only blank stares by way of reply. A few people glared at him. Nazi teachings had sunk deep. Those Germans eyed a Jew-maybe the first they’d ever seen in the flesh, surely the first they’d seen for years-as if he were Satan incarnate.

More Germans, though, groveled before him. He needed a little while to realize that was a residue of Nazi teachings, too. He had authority: therefore, he was to be obeyed. If he weren’t obeyed, something dreadful would befall the villagers. They seemed convinced of it. At times, he wished it were true.

None of the Germans he questioned knew anything about his wife and sons and daughter. None of them had seen a beffel. He made a point of asking about Pancer; the alien pet might have stuck in people’s minds where a few Jews wouldn’t have registered. The logic was good, but he had no luck with it.

He pedaled into a little town called Arnswalde as the sun was setting for the brief summer night of northern Germany. With the beating the Reichsmark had taken since the Nazis surrendered, the Polish zlotys in his wallet seemed good as gold-better. He got himself an excellent roast duck, an enormous mound of red cabbage, and all the fine lager he could drink for the price of a couple of apples back in Poland.

The fellow who served him the feast was one of those who fawned on the occupiers. “Take the leftovers with you, sir,” he said. “They’ll make you a fine breakfast, see if they don’t.”

“All right, I will. Thanks,” Mordechai said. “Do you have enough for yourself here, though?”

“Ach, ja,” the German answered with a chuckle that might have been jolly or might have been nervous. “When did you ever hear of a tavern keeper who starved to death?”

He didn’t look as if he were in any imminent danger of starving (he looked plump, as a matter of fact), so Anielewicz took the duck and some cabbage without a qualm. He even let the tavern keeper give him an old, beat-up pot in which to carry them. Either the man was generous by nature or he was a fool or the zloty was worth even more than Mordechai had thought.

Twilight lay over Arnswalde when he came out of the tavern. He’d just climbed onto his bicycle when a young blond woman walked up to him. Pointing to the pot, she came straight to the point: “You have food in there?”

“Yes,” he said, eyeing her. Not too long before, she’d probably been very pretty-a perfect Aryan princess, he thought. Now her hair was tangled and matted, her face and legs-she was wearing a short skirt, so he could see quite a lot of them-scrawny rather than pleasantly rounded. His nose wrinkled. She hadn’t bathed in a long time.

Again, she didn’t beat around the bush, saying, “Feed me and you can have me.”

“Here.” He gave her the pot. “Take it. I don’t want you, not for that. I’m looking for my wife and children.”

She snatched the pot out of his hands as if afraid he would change his mind. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re one of the decent ones. There are a few, but only a few, believe me.” She turned her head in the direction of the tavern and spat. “Not him-he takes it all out in trade, believe me.”

Mordechai sighed. Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. The German girl, after all, had no zlotys to pay for roast duck.

She said, “Who are your people? Maybe I know them.”

“I doubt it.” His voice was dry. “They’re Jews. The Wehrmacht would have brought them back from Widawa, in Poland. A woman my age, a girl, two boys-and a beffel, if you know what a beffel is. One of the Lizards’ pets.”

She shook her head. “Jews,” she said in tones of wonder. “I thought there weren’t any Jews any more. I thought they were-what’s the word I want? — extinct, that’s it.”

In Germany, in all the Greater German Reich, Jews were extinct, or close enough. “You’re talking to one,” Mordechai said, not without a certain sour pride.

“How funny.” The German girl’s laugh was hard. “If you had screwed me, then I’d’ve got in trouble for sleeping with a Jew.”

“Maybe,” Anielewicz said. “Maybe not, too. The rules are liable to change now, you know.” He wondered if they would, if the Lizards would try to enforce tolerance on the Reich. He wondered if it mattered, one way or the other. The people-the peoples-the Germans would have had to learn to tolerate were dead

now… extinct, as the girl had said.

“Who would have thought a Jew could be decent?” she murmured, more than half to herself. She’d learned what her teachers taught, all right.

“What would you say if I said, ‘Who would have thought a German could be decent?’ ” Mordechai didn’t know why he bothered. Maybe because he thought she might be reached. Maybe just because, despite dirt and hunger-induced leanness, she was a pretty girl, and part of him, the eternally optimistic male part, wouldn’t have minded sleeping with her at all.

She frowned. She knew he was trying to tell her something important, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what. “But Germans, Germans are decent,” she said, as if stating a law of nature.

All at once, Anielewicz wanted to snatch back the pot full of duck and cabbage. The only reason he didn’t was that it would have confirmed her in all the worst things she thought about Jews. Germans could always see when they were being maligned, but rarely noticed when they were maligning anyone else.

The girl could have no idea what was going through his mind. She said, “If you’re looking for people, the army kept falling back to the northwest during the fighting. If they had people along with them, that’s where those people would have gone.”

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