Turtledove, Harry - World War 02 - Tilting the Balance by Turtledove Harry

Author:Turtledove, Harry [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345453624
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1994-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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