But Roundbush disappointed him by shaking his head. “Haven’t the foggiest idea, I’m afraid. Whoever did manage that one isn’t letting on. He’d be a fool to let on, but that hasn’t always stopped people in the past.”
“True enough,” David said. The trouble was, too much of what Roundbush said made too much sense to dismiss him out of hand as just a bloke who’d gone bad. From the standpoint of mankind at large-as opposed to the standpoint of one particular British Jew-he might not even have gone bad at all. Something else occurred to Goldfarb: “Did you have anything to do with the ginger bombs that went off over Australia and made the Lizards have an orgy?”
“I haven’t got the faintest notion of what you’re talking about, old man,” Roundbush said, and laid a finger by the side of his nose. That was a denial far less ringing than the one he’d used in connection with the colonization fleet. Goldfarb noticed as much, as he was no doubt intended to. With a chuckle, Roundbush went on, “Only goes to show there really may be such a thing as killing them with kindness.”
“Yes, sir.” The whiskey mounted to Goldfarb’s head, making him add, “That’s not how the Reich kills its Jews.”
“I fought the Reich,” Roundbush said. “I have no love for it now. But it’s there. I can’t very well pretend it’s not-and neither can you.”
“No, sir,” David Goldfarb agreed mournfully. “But Gottenyu, how I wish I could.”
“Another letter from your cousin in England?” Reuven Russie said to his father. “That’s more often than you usually hear from him.”
“He has more tsuris than usual, too,” Dr. Moishe Russie answered. “Some of his friends-this is what he calls them, anyhow-are going to send him to Marseille, to help them in their ginger-trafficking.”
“Send a Jew to the Greater German Reich?” Reuven exclaimed. “If those are Cousin David’s friends, God forbid he should ever get enemies.”
“Omayn,” his father said. “But when all the other choices are worse…” Moishe Russie shook his head. “I know. It hardly seems possible. But he wants me to find out what I can from the Lizards about ginger-smuggling through Marseille, so he doesn’t go in completely blind.”
“How much of that can you do?” Reuven asked.
“There are males who will tell me some,” his father said. “I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know them. For something like that, they will give me answers, I think. And what I cannot learn from them, I may be able to find out from the Lizards’ computers.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Reuven agreed. “You can find out almost anything from them if you know where to look and which questions to ask.”
His father laughed, which irked him till Moishe remarked, “If you know where to look and which questions to ask, you can find out almost anything almost anywhere-you don’t need computers to do it.”
Reuven’s twin sisters came out of the kitchen to announce supper would be ready in a few minutes. Fixing Judith and Esther with a mild and speculative eye, he remarked, “You’re right, Father. They already know everything already.”
“What is he talking about now?” Esther asked, at the same time as Judith was saying, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“If you’d listened carefully, he was paying you a compliment,” their father said.
They both sniffed. One of them said, “I’d sooner get a compliment where I don’t have to listen carefully.”
“I’ll give you one,” Reuven said. “You’re the most-” His father coughed before he could say anything more. That probably kept him out of trouble. Even so, he didn’t appreciate it. His sisters rarely gave him such a golden opportunity, and here he couldn’t even take advantage of it.
A moment later, his mother quelled the budding argument for the time being, calling, “Supper!” The ploy might not have been so subtle as Solomon’s, but it did the job. Next to boiled-beef-and-barley soup with carrots and onions and celery, squabbling with his sisters suddenly seemed less important.
His father approved, too, saying, “This is fine, Rivka. It takes me back to the days before the fighting all started, when we were living in Warsaw and things… weren’t so bad.”
“Why would you want to remember Warsaw?” Reuven asked with a shudder. His own memories of the place, such as they were, began only after the Nazis had taken it. They were filled with cold and fear and hunger, endless gnawing hunger. He couldn’t imagine how a pleasant bowl of soup took anyone back there in memory.
But his mother’s smile also looked into the past. She said, “Don’t forget, your father and I fell in love in Warsaw.”
“And if we hadn’t,” Moishe Russie added, “you wouldn’t be here now.” He glanced over to the twins. “And neither would you.”
“Oh, yes, we would,” Esther said. Judith added, “Somehow or other, we would have found a way.” Reuven was about to blast the twins for logical inconsistency when he saw they were both holding in giggles. He went back to his soup, which evidently disappointed them.
“What did Cousin David say?” Rivka Russie asked. “I heard you talking about his letter out in the front room, but I couldn’t make out everything you were saying.” Moishe explained. Rivka frowned. “That’s very bad,” she said, shaking her head. “That such trouble should happen in England… Who would have dreamt such trouble could happen in England?”
Moishe Russie sighed. “When you and I were small, dear, who would have dreamt such trouble could happen in Germany? In Poland, yes. We always knew that. In Russia, yes. We always knew that, too. But Germany? David’s wife is from Germany. She and her family were lucky-they got out in time. But when she was small, Germany was a good place to be a Jew.”
“America, now,” Reuven said. “America, and here, and maybe South Africa and Argentina. But if you want to live under human beings and not the Race, America is about the only place left where you can breathe free.”
“Mosley’s bill failed, thank heaven,” his father said. “It’s not against the law to be a Jew in England, the way it is in the Reich. It’s only that you’d better not, or people will make you wish you weren’t.”
“Poland was like that,” Reuven’s mother said. “I don’t think England is as bad as Poland was, but it could be one of these days.”
Reuven watched his sisters stir. He waited for one of them to ask why gentiles persecuted Jews. He’d asked that himself, till finally deciding it wasn’t worth asking. That it was so mattered. Why it was so… Ask a thousand different anti-Semites and you’d get a thousand different answers. Which of them was true? Were any of them true? Why questions too often lost you in a maze of mirrors, each reflecting back on another till you weren’t sure where you stood, or if you stood anywhere.
And, sure enough, one of the twins did ask a why question, though not the one Reuven expected: “Why does it matter if anyone-especially anyone Jewish-lives under people or under the Race? It doesn’t look like Jews will ever live under other Jews, and the Lizards do a better job of keeping people from bothering us than just about any human beings do-you said so yourself.”
“That is an important question,” Moishe Russie said gravely. Reuven found himself nodding. It was a more important question than he’d thought his sisters had in them. His father went on, “Who the rulers are matters because they set the tone for the people who live under them. The Nazis didn’t make the Germans anti-Semites, but they let them be anti-Semites and helped them be anti-Semites. Do you see what I mean?”
Both twins nodded. Judith, who hadn’t asked the question, said, “The Lizards would never do anything like that.”