XII
Sometimes, in the Warsaw ghetto, Moishe Russie had developed a feeling that something was wrong, that trouble (worse trouble, he amended to himself: just being in the ghetto was tsuris aplenty) would land on him if he didn’t do something right away. He’d learned to act on that feeling. He was still alive, so he supposed following it had done him some good. Now, here in Lodz, he had it again.
It wasn’t the usual fears he’d known, not the heart-clutching spasm of alarm he’d had, for instance, when he’d seen his face on the wall in the Balut Market square with warnings that he raped and murdered little girls. You’d have to be meshuggeh, he thought, not to be frightened over something like that.
But what he felt now was different, smaller-just a tickling at the back of his neck and the skin over his spine that something wasn’t quite right somewhere. The first day it was there, he tried to make believe he didn’t notice it. The second day, he knew it was there, but he didn’t tell Rivka. I could be wrong, he thought.
The third day-or rather the evening, after Reuven had gone to bed-he said out of the blue, “I think we should move someplace else.”
Rivka looked up from the sock she was darning. “Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong here?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe nothing. But maybe something, too.”
“If you were a woman, they’d call that the vapors,” Rivka said. But instead of laughing at him as she had every right to do, she grew serious. “Someplace else where? A different flat in Lodz? A different town? A different country?”
“I’d say a different planet, but the Lizards seem to be using the others, too.” Now he laughed, but it wasn’t funny.
“Nu, if you think we should go, we’ll go,” Rivka said. “Better we should move and not need to than need to and not move. Why don’t you start looking for a new flat tomorrow, if you think that will be good enough.”
“I just don’t know,” he said. “I wish I could tune the feeling like a wireless set, but it doesn’t work that way.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed gravely. “What do you want to do? Do you want to go to Zgierz, for instance? That’s not far, but it would probably mean leaving things behind. Still, we’ve left enough things behind by now that a few more won’t matter. So long as the three of us are together, nothing else counts. If the war has taught us anything, that’s it.”
“You’re right.” Russie got up from his battered chair, walked over to the bare light bulb by which Rivka sat. He let his hand rest on her shoulder. “But we shouldn’t need a war to remind us of that.”
She set down the sock and put her hand on top of his. “We don’t, not really. But it has shown us we don’t need things to get by in the world, just people we love.”
“A good thing, too, because we don’t have many things.” Moishe stopped, afraid his attempt at a joke had wounded his wife. Not only had they left things behind, they’d left people as well a little daughter, other loved ones dead in the ghetto. And unlike things, you could not get a new set of people.
If she noticed the catch in Moishe s voice, Rivka gave no sign. She stayed resolutely practical, saying, “You never did answer me. Do you want to get out of Lodz, or shall we stay here?”
“The towns around here, most of them are Judenfrei,” he said. “We’d stick out. We don’tlook Polish. We can t look Polish, I don’tthink.” He sighed. “Litzmannstadt”-the name the Germans gave Lodz-“would have been Judenfrei, too, If the Lizard hadn’t come.”
“All right, we’ll stay here, then,” Rivka said, accepting his oblique answer.
He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. Maybe they would be wiser to flee far from Lodz, even if that meant taking to the road to go to the eastern parts of Lizard-held Poland where the Nazis had not had time to root out all the Jews. But he couldn’t make himself flee like that for what might have been, as Rivka said, a case of the vapors.
To make himself feel he was doing something, he said, “I’ll start looking for a new flat tomorrow over by Mostowski Street.” That was about as far from where they were as one could go and remain in the Lodz ghetto.
“All right,” Rivka said again. She picked up the sock and put another few stitches in it. After a moment, though, she added meditatively, “We’ll have to keep on shopping in the Balut Market square, though.”
“That’s true:” Moishe started to pace back and forth. To go? To stay? He still couldn’t make up his mind.
“It will be all right,” Rivka said. “God has protected us for this long; would He abandon us now?”
That argument would have been more persuasive, Moishe thought, before 1939. Since then, how many of His people had God allowed to die? Moishe didn’t say that to his wife; he didn’t even care to think it himself. His own faith was shakier these days than he wished it were, and he didn’t want to be guilty of troubling hers.
Instead, he yawned and said, “Let’s go to bed.”
Rivka put down the sock again. She hesitated, then said, “Do you want me to look for the flat? The fewer people who see you, the smaller the risk we run.”
Moishe knew that was true. Nonetheless, his pride revolted at hiding behind Rivka every day-and he had no evidence whatever to back up his hunch. So he said, “It shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll be only a moment crossing the Balut, and I don’t look like my poster picture anyhow, not clean-shaven.”
Rivka gave him her best dubious look, but didn’t say anything. He reckoned that a victory.
And, indeed, no one paid him any mind as he crossed the market square and turned east into the heart of the ghetto. The shabby brick buildings cast the narrow streets into shadow. Though the Lizards had driven the Germans out of Lodz nearly a year before, the atmosphere of the hellishly crowded ghetto still clung to the place, maybe more strongly than in Warsaw.
Maybe it’s the smell, Russie thought. It was a smell of despair and stale cabbage and unwashed bodies and more garbage and sewage than the trash collectors and sewers could handle. Not all the people the Nazis had crammed into Lodz had been able to go home. Some had no homes, not after the Germans had fought Poles and Russians, and the Lizards fought the Germans. Some, carried into the ghetto in cattle cars from Germany and Austria, had homes outside Lizard-held territory. Even now, the ghetto was a desperately crowded place.
Posters of Chaim Rumkowski shouted at people from every blank wall surface. As far as Moishe could tell, people weren’t doing much in the way of listening. In all those teeming streets, he saw only a couple of persons glance up at the posters, and one of those, an old woman, shook her head and laughed after she did. Somehow that made Russie feel a little better about mankind.
His own poster still appeared here and there, too, now beginning to fray and tatter a bit. No one looked up at that any more, either, to his relief.
When he got to Mostowski Street, he started poking his nose into blocks of flats and asking if they had any rooms to let. At first he thought he would have no choice but to stay where he was or else leave town. But at the fourth building he visited, the fellow who ran the place said, “You are a lucky man, my friend, do you know that? I just had a family move out not an hour ago.”
“Why?” Moishe asked in a challenging voice. “Were you charging them a thousand zlotys a day, or did the cockroaches and rats make alliance and drive them out? It’s probably a pigsty you’re going to show me.”
From one Jew to another, that hit hard a couple of ways. The landlord, or manager, or whatever he was, clapped a hand to his forehead in a theatrical, display of injured innocence. “A pigsty? I should kick you out of here on your tokhus to talk like that. One look at this flat and you’ll be down on your knee begging to rent.”