They’d apologized for the modest Soho flat in which they’d set up his family, but it would have made three of the ones he’d had in Lodz He hadn’t seen so much furniture in years: they weren’t burning it for fuel here. He even had hot water from a tap whenever he wanted it.
A guard in a tin hat in front of the BBC Overseas Services building nodded as he showed his pass and went in. Waiting inside, sipping a cup of ersatz tea quite as dreadful as anything available in Poland stood Nathan Jacobi. “Good to see you, Mr. Russie,” he said in English, and then fell back into Yiddish: “And now, shall we go and give the Lizards’ little stumpy tails a good yank?”
“That would be a pleasure,” Moishe said sincerely. He pulled his script from a coat pocket. “This is the latest draft, with all the censors’ notes included. I’m ready to record it for broadcast.”
“Jolly good,” Jacobi said, again in English. Like David Goldfarb, he flipped back and forth between languages at will, sometimes hardly seeming to realize he was doing so. Unlike Goldfarb’s, his Yiddish was not only fluent but elegant and unaccented; he spoke like an educated Warsaw Jew. Russie wondered if his English was as polished.
Jacobi led the way to a recording studio. But for a couple of glass squares so the engineers could watch the proceedings, the walls were covered with sound-deadening tiles, each punched with its own square grid of holes. On the table sat a microphone with a BBC plaque screwed onto its side. A bare electric bulb threw harsh light down onto the table and the chairs in front of it.
The arrangements were as up-to-date as human technology could produce. Moishe wished they impressed him more than they did. They were certainly finer than anything the Polish wireless services had had in 1939. But that was not the standard by which Russie judged them. In the first months after the Lizards took Warsaw, he’d broadcast anti-Nazi statements for them. Compared to their equipment, the BBC gear looked angular, bulky, and not very efficient, rather like an early wind-up gramophone with trumpet speaker set alongside a modem phonograph.
He sighed as he sat down on one of the hard-backed wooden chairs and set his script in front of him. The censors’ stamps-a triangular one that said PASSED FOR SECURITY and a rectangle that read PASSED FOR CONTENT-obscured a couple of words. He bent down to peer at them and make sure he could read them without hesitation; even though the talk was being recorded for later broadcast, he wanted to be as smooth as he could.
He glanced over to the engineer in the next room. When the man suddenly shot out a finger toward him, he began to talk: “Good day, people of Earth. This is Moishe Russie speaking to you from London in free England. That I am here shows the Lizards lie when they say they are invincible and their victory inevitable. They are very strong; no one could deny that. But they are not supermen”-he’d had to borrow Ubermenschen from the German to put that across-“and they can be beaten.
“I do not intend to say anything about how I came from Poland to London, for fear of closing that way for others who may come after me. But I will say that I was rescued from a Lizard prison in Lodz, that Englishmen and local Jews took part in the rescue, and they defeated both the Lizards and their human henchmen.
“Too many men, women, and children live in parts of the world under Lizard occupation. I understand that, if you are to survive, you must to some degree go on about your daily work. But I urge you from the bottom of my heart to cooperate with the enemy as little as you can and to sabotage his efforts wherever you can. Those who serve as their prison guards and police, those who seek work in their factories to make munitions that will be used against their fellow human beings-they are traitors to mankind. When victory comes, collaborators will be remembered… and punished. If you see the chance, move against them now.”
He had his talk nicely timed-he’d practiced it with Rivka back in the flat. He was just reaching his summing-up when the engineer held, up one finger to show he had a minute left, and came to the end as the fellow drew his index finger across his throat. The engineer grinned and gave him a two-finger V for victory.
Then it was Nathan Jacobi’s turn. He read an English translation (similarly stamped with censors’ marks) of what Russie had just said in Yiddish, the better to reach as large an audience as possible. His timing was as impeccable as Moishe’s had been. This time the engineer signaled his approval with an upraised thumb.
“I think that went very well,” Jacobi said. “With any luck at all, it should leave the Lizards quite nicely browned off.”
“I hope so,” Moishe said. He got up and stretched. Wireless broadcasting was not physically demanding, but it left him worn all the same. Getting out of the studio always came as a relief.
Jacobi held the door open for him. They went out together. Waiting in the hallway stood a tall, thin, tweedy Englishman with a long, craggy face and dark hair combed high in a pompadour. He nodded to Jacobi. They spoke together in English. Jacobi turned to Moishe and switched to Yiddish: “I’d like to introduce you to Eric Blair. He’s talks producer of the Indian Section, and he goes in after us.”
Russie stuck out his hand and said, “Tell him I’m pleased to meet him.”
Blair shook hands with him, then spoke in English again. Jacobi translated: “He says he’s even more pleased to meet you: you’ve escaped from two different sets of tyrants, and honestly described the evils of both.” He added, “Blair is a very fine fellow, hates tyrants of all stripes. He fought against the fascists in Spain-almost got killed there-but he couldn’t stomach what the Communists were doing on the Republican side. An honest man.”
“We need more honest men,” Moishe said.
Jacobi translated that for Blair. The Englishman smiled, but suffered a coughing fit before he could answer. Moishe had heard those wet coughs in Warsaw more times than he cared to remember. Tuberculosis, the medical student in him said. Blair mastered the coughs, then spoke apologetically to Jacobi.
“He says he’s glad he did that out here rather than in the studio while he was recording,” Jacobi said. Moishe nodded; he understood and admired the workmanlike, professional attitude. You worked as hard as you could for as long as you could, and if, you fell in the traces you had to hope someone else would carry on.
Blair pulled his script from a waistcoat pocket and went into the studio. Jacobi said, “I’ll see you later, Moishe. I’m afraid I have a mountain of forms to fill out. Perhaps we should put up stacks of paper in place of barrage balloons. They’d be rather better at keeping the Lizards away, I think.”
He headed away to his upstairs office. Moishe went outside. He decided not to head back to his flat right away, but walked west down Oxford Street toward Hyde Park. People mostly women, often with small children in tow-bustled in and out of Selfridge’s. He’d been in the great department store once or twice himself. Even with wartime shortages, it held more goods and more different kinds of goods than were likely to be left in all of Poland. He wondered if the British knew how lucky they were.
The great marble arch where Oxford Street, Park Lane, and Bayswater Road came together marked the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Across Park Lane from the arch was the Speakers’ Corner where men and women climbed up on crates or chairs or whatever they had handy and harangued whoever would hear. He tried to imagine such a thing in Warsaw, whether under Poles, Nazis, or Lizards. The only thing he could picture was the public executions that would follow unbridled public speech. Maybe. England had earned its luck after all.
Only a handful of people listened to-or heckled-the speakers. The rest of the park was almost as crowded with people tending their gardens. Every bit of open space in London grew potatoes, wheat, maize, beets, beans, peas, cabbages. German submarines had put Britain under siege; the coming of the Lizards brought little relief. They weren’t as hard on shipping, but America and the rest of the world, had less to send these days.