In the Balance (6 page)

“What else could they be?” Jones still belonged to the circuitry-problem school. He fired off the big guns of its argument: “They aren’t ours. They don’t belong to the Yanks. And if they were Jerry’s they’d be dropping things on our heads. What does that leave? Men from Mars?

“Laugh all you like,” Goldfarb said stubbornly. “If there’s something wrong in the machinery’s guts, why can’t the boffins find it and fix it?”

“Crikey, I don’t think even the blokes who invented this beast know what all it can and can’t do,” Jones retorted.

Since that was unquestionably true Goldfarb didn’t respond to it directly. Instead, he said, “So why has the machinery only started finding pixies now? Why didn’t they show up on the screens from the first day?”

“If the boffins can’t figure it out, how do you expect me to know?” Jones said. “Pull out a bloody pixie report form, will you? With luck, we can get it done before we spot the bombers. Then we won’t have to worry about it tomorrow.”

“Right.” Goldfarb sometimes thought that if the Germans had managed to cross the Channel and invade England, the British could have penned them behind walls of paper and then buried them in more. The pigeonholes under the console at which he sat held enough requisitions, directives, and reports to baffle the most subtle bureaucrat for years.

Nor was the pixie report, blurrily printed on coarse, shoddy paper, properly called by a name anywhere near so simple. The RAF had instead produced.a document titled
INCIDENT OF APPARENT ANOMALOUS DETECTION OF HIGH-SPEED, HIGH-ALTITUDE TARGET
. Lest the form fall into German hands, it nowhere mentioned that the anomalous detections
(apparent detections
, Goldfarb corrected himself) took place by means of radar. As if Jerry doesn’t know we’ve got it, he thought.

He found a stub of pencil, filled in the name of the station, the date, time, and bearing and perceived velocity of the contact, then stuck the form in a manila folder taped to the side of the radar screen. The folder, stuck there by the base CO, was labeled
PIXIE REPORTS
. With an attitude like that, the CO would never see promotion again.

Jones grunted in satisfaction, as if he’d filled out the form himself. He said, “Off it goes to London tomorrow.”

“Yes, so they can compare it to others they’ve got and work out altitude and such from the figures,” Goldfarb said. “They wouldn’t bother with that if it were just in the circuits, now, would they?”

“Don’t ask me what they’ll do in London,” Jones said, an attitude Goldfarb also found sensible. Jones went on, “I’d be happier believing the pixies were real if anyone ever saw one anywhere but there.” He pointed at the radar screen.

“So would I,” Goldfarb admitted, “but look at the trouble we’ve had even with the Ju-86.” The wide-span reconnaissance bombers had been flying over southern England for months, usually above 40,000 feet—so high that Spitfires had enormous trouble climbing up to intercept them.

Jerome Jones remained unconvinced. “The Junkers 86 is just a Jerry crate. It’s got a good ceiling, yes, but it’s slow and easy to shoot down once we get to it. It’s not like that Superman bloke in the Yank funny books, faster than a speeding bullet.”

“I know. I’m just saying we can’t see a plane that high up even if it’s there—and if it’s going that fast, even a spotter with binoculars doesn’t have long to search before it’s gone. What we need are binoculars slaved to the radar, so one could know precisely where to look.” As he spoke, Goldfarb wondered if that was practical, and how to go about setting it up if it was.

He got so lost in his own scheme that he didn’t really notice the blip on the radar screen for a moment. Then Jones said, “Pixies again.” Sure enough, the radar was reporting more of the mysterious targets. Jones’s voice changed. “They’re acting peculiar.”

“Too right they are.” Goldfarb stared at the screen, mentally translating its picture into aircraft (he wondered if Jones, who thought of pixies as something peculiar going on inside the radar set, did the same). “They’re showing up as slower than they ever did before.”

“And there are more of them,” Jones said. “Lots more.” He turned to Goldfarb. No one looked healthy by the green glow of the cathode-ray tube, but now he seemed especially pale; the line of his David Niven mustache was the sole color in his thin, sharp-featured face. “David, I think—they must be real.” Goldfarb recognized what was in his voice. It was fear.

2

Hunger crackled like fire in Moishe Russie’s belly. He’d thought lean times and High Holy Days fasts had taught him what hunger meant, but they’d no more prepared him for the Warsaw ghetto than a picture of a lake taught a man to swim.

Long black coat flapping about him like a moving piece of the night, he scurried from one patch of deep shadow to the next. It was long past curfew, which had begun at nine. If a German saw him, he would live only so long as he still amused his tormentor. Fear dilated his nostrils at every breath, made him suck in great draughts of the fetid ghetto air.

But hunger drove harder than fear—and after all, he could become the object of a German’s sport at any hour of the day or night, for any reason or none. Only four days before, the Nazis had fallen on the Jews who came to the Leszno Street courthouse to pay their taxes—taxes the Nazis themselves imposed. They robbed the Jews not only of what they claimed was owed, but also of anything else they happened to have on their persons. With the robbery came blows and kicks, as if to remind the Jews in whose clawed grip they lay.

“Not that I needed reminding,” Russie whispered aloud. He was a native of Wolynska Street, and had been in the ghetto since Warsaw surrendered to the Germans. Not many had lasted through two and a half years of hell

He wondered how much longer he would last. He’d been a medical student before September 1939; he could diagnose his own symptoms easily enough. Loose teeth and tender gums warned of the onset of scurvy; poor night vision meant vitamin A deficiency. The diarrhea could have had a dozen fathers. And starvation needed no doctor to give it a name. The hundreds of thousands of Jews packed into four square kilometers had all too intimate an acquaintance with it.

The one advantage of being so thin was that his coat went round him nearly twice. He’d liked it better when it was a proper fit.

His furtive movements became, even more cautious as he, drew near the wall. The red bricks went up twice as high as a man, with barbed wire strung above them to keep the boldest adventurer from climbing over. However much he wanted to, Russie did not aim to try that. Instead, he whirled the sack he carried around and. around like an Olympic hammerthrower, then flung it toward the Polish side of the wall.

The sack flew up and over. Heart pounding, Russie listened to it land. He had padded the silver candlestick with rags, so it bit with a soft, dull thump instead of a clatter. He strained to catch the sound of footfalls on the other side. He was at the Pole’s mercy now. If the fellow simply wanted to steal the candlestick, he could. If he had hope of more, he’d keep the bargain they’d made in Leszno Street.

Waiting stretched like the lengths of wire on the wall and had as many spikes. Try as he would, Russie could hear nothing from the other side. Maybe the Germans had arrested the Pole. Then the precious candlestick would lie abandoned till some passerby came upon it … and Russie would have squandered one of his last remaining resources for nothing.

A soft
plop
on the cobblestones not far away. Russie sprinted over. The rags that bound up the tattered remnants of his shoes made hardly a sound. He held his hat on with one hand; as he grew thinner, even his head seemed to have shrunk.

He snatched up the bag, dashed back toward darkness. Even as he ran, the rich, intoxicating odor of meat flooded his senses, made his mouth gush with saliva. He fumbled at the drawstring, reached inside. His spidery fingers closed round the chunk, gauged its size and weight. Not the half a kilo he’d been promised, but not far from it. He’d expected the Pole to cheat worse: what recourse did a Jew have? Perhaps he could complain to the SS. Sick and starving though he was, the thought raised black laughter in him.

He drew out his hand, licked the salt and fat that clung to it. Water filled his eyes as well as his mouth. His wife, Rivka, and their son, Reuven (and, incidentally, himself), might live a little longer. Too late for their little Sarah, too late for his wife’s parents and his own father. But the three of them might go on.

He smacked his lips. Part of the sweetness on his tongue came from the meat’s being spoiled (but only slightly; he’d eaten far worse), the rest because it was pork. The rabbis in the ghetto had long since relaxed the prohibitions against forbidden food, but Russie still felt guilty every time it passed his lips. Some Jews chose to starve sooner than break the Law. Had he been alone in the ghetto, Russie might have followed that way. But while he had others to care for, he would live if he could. He’d talk it over with God when he got the chance.

How best to use the meat?
he wondered. Soup was the only answer: it
would last for several days, that way, and make rotten potatoes and moldy cabbage tolerable (only a tiny part of him remembered the dim dead days before the war, when he would have turned aside in scorn from rotten potatoes and moldy cabbage instead of wolfing them down and wishing for more).

He reached into a coat pocket. Now his spit-wet fist closed on a wad of zlotys, enough to bribe a Jewish policeman if he had to. The banknotes were good for little else; mere money was rarely enough to buy food, not in the ghetto.

“I have to get back,” he reminded himself under his breath. If he was not at his sewing machine in the factory fifteen minutes after curfew lifted, some other scrawny Jew would praise God for having the chance to take his place. And if he was there but too worn to meet his quota of German uniform trousers, he would not keep his sewing machine long. His narrow, clever hands were made for taking a pulse or removing an appendix, but their agility with bobbin and cloth was what kept him and part of his family alive.

He wondered how long he would be allowed to maintain even the hellish life he led. He did not so much fear the random murder that stalked the ghetto on German jackboots. But just that day, whispers had slithered from bench to bench at the factory. The Lublin ghetto, they said, had ceased to be: thousands of Jews taken away and—Everyone filled in his own
and
, according to his nightmares.

Russie’s
and
was something like a meat-packing plant, with people going through instead of cattle. He prayed that he was wrong, that God would never allow such an abomination. But too many prayers had fallen on deaf ears, too many Jews lay dead on sidewalks until at last, like cordwood, they were piled up and hauled away.

“Lord of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” he murmured softly, “I beg You, give, me a sign that You have not forsaken Your chosen people.”

Like tens of thousands of his fellow sufferers, he sent up that prayer at all hours of the day and night, sent it up because it was the only thing he could do to affect his horrid fate.

“I beg You, Lord,” he murmured again, “give me a sign.”

All at once, noon came to the Warsaw ghetto in the middle of the night. Moishe Russie stared in disbelieving wonder, at the sun-hot point of light blazing in the still-black sky.
Parachute flare
, he thought, remembering the German bombardment of his city.

But it was no flare. Whatever it was, it was bigger and brighter than any flare, by itself lighting the whole of the ghetto—maybe the whole of Warsaw, or the whole of Poland—bright as day. It hung unmoving in the sky, as no flare could. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the point of light became a
smudge, began to fade from eye-searing, actinic violet to white and yellow and orange. The brilliance of noon gave way little by little to sunset and then to twilight. The two or three startled birds that burst into song fell silent again, as if embarrassed at being fooled.”

Their sweet notes were in any case all but drowned by the cries from the ghetto and beyond, cries of wonder and fear. Russie heard German voices with fear in them. He had not heard German voices with fear in them since the Nazis forced the Jews into the ghetto. He had not imagined he could hear such voices. Somehow that made them all the sweeter.