Naomi’s thoughts, on the other hand, seemed focused on politics and war, not love. “But you are in the RAF,” she said indignantly. “How could you not know whether we have got a cease-fire with the Lizards or have not got any such thing?”
He laughed. “How could I not know? Nothing simpler: they don’t tell rue. I don’t need to know to do my job, which is a good enough reason for not telling. All I know is what I want to know: I’ve not heard any Lizard aircraft-nor heardof any Lizard aircraft-over England since the cease-fire with the Yanks, the Russians, and the Nazis.”
“Then it is a cease-fire,” Naomi insisted. “It must be a cease-fire.”
Goldfarb shrugged. “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not. I admit, I don’t know of any of our planes heading off to bomb the Continent, either, but we’ve not done much of that lately anyhow; the loss rate got too beastly high to bear. Maybe it’s one of those informal arrangements: you don’t hurt me and I shan’t hurt you, but we’ll not put anything in writing for fear of admitting we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing-or not doing.”
Naomi frowned. “This is not right This is not proper. This is not orderly.” At that moment, she sounded very German. Goldfarb would sooner have bitten through his tongue than said so out loud. She went on, “The Lizards’ agreements with the other nations are formal and binding. Why not with us?”
“I told you I don’t know anything for certain,” Goldfarb said. “Will you listen to my guess?” When she nodded, he went on, “The Americans, the Russians, and the Nazis have all used super-bombs of the same type the Lizards have. We’ve not done that. In their eyes, maybe we don’t deserve a truce because we’ve not done it. But when they tried invading us, they found we weren’t a walkover. And so they leave us alone without saying they’re doing it.”
“This is possible, I suppose,” Naomi admitted after some serious thought. “But it is still not orderly.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “No matter what it is, though, I’m glad not to hear the air-raid sirens go off every day, or twice a day, or every hour on the hour.”
He waited to see if Naomi would say such an irregular schedule of raids was disorderly, too. Instead, she pointed to the bright red breast of a robin streaking through the air after a dragonfly.
“That’s the only kind of aircraft I want to see in the sky.”
“Hmm,” Goldfarb said. “I am partial to a nice flight of Meteors, but I’d be stretching things if I didn’t say you had a point.”
They walked on for a while, not talking, glad of each other’s company. It was very quiet. A bee buzzed from flower to flower in a field by the side of the road. Goldfarb noticed both the sound and the field without any vegetables growing in it: it had to be one of the few such so close to Dover.
Apparently apropos of nothing in particular, Naomi remarked, “My father and mother like you, David.”
“I’m glad,” he answered, which was true enough. Had Isaac and Leah Kaplan not liked him, he wouldn’t be out walking with their daughter now. “I like them, too.” That was also true to a large degree: he liked them about as well as a young man could like the parents of the girl he was courting.
“They think you have a serious mind,” Naomi went on.
“Do they?” Goldfarb said, a little more cautiously now. If by serious-minded they meant he wouldn’t try to seduce their daughter, they didn’t know him as well as they thought they did. He’d already tried that. Maybe they knew Naomi, though, because it hadn’t worked. And yet he hadn’t gone off in a huff because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Did that make him serious-minded? Maybe it did. He realized he had to say something more. “I think it’s good they don’t worry about where I’m from-or where my mother and father are from, I should say.”
“They think of you as an English Jew,” Naomi answered. “So do I, as a matter of fact.”
“I suppose so. I was born here,” Goldfarb said. He didn’t think of himself as an English Jew, though, not when his parents had fled here from Warsaw on account of pogroms before the First World War. German Jews had a way of looking down their noses at their Eastern European cousins. If Naomi met his parents, it would be quite plain they weren’t what she thought of as English Jews. If-Thoughtfully, he went on, “My father and mother would like you, too. If I get leave and you can get a day off from the pub, would you like to go up to London and meet them?”
“I would like that very much,” she replied. Then she cocked her head to one side and looked over at him. “How would you introduce me?”
“How would you like me to introduce you?” he asked. But Naomi shook her head; that one wasn’t for her to answer.Fair enough, he thought. He went on for another couple of paces before trying a slightly different question: “How would you like me to introduce you as my fiancee?”
Naomi stopped in her tracks. Her eyes went very wide. “You mean this?” she asked slowly. Goldfarb nodded, though his stomach felt as it sometimes had up in a Lancaster taking violent evasive action. Naomi said, “I would like this very much,” and stepped into his arms.
The kiss she gave him nailed his stomach firmly back in place, though it made his head spin. When one hand of his closed softly on her breast, she didn’t pull away. Instead, she sighed and held him tighter. Emboldened, he slid his other down from the small of her back to her right buttock-and, with a twirl as neat as a jitterbug dancer’s, she twisted away from him.
“Soon,” she said. “Not yet. Soon. We tell my parents. I meet your mother and father-and my mother and father will want to do the same. We find a rabbi to marry us. Then.” Her eyes glittered. “And I tell you this-you will not be the only one who is impatient.”
“All right,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go tell your father and mother now.” He turned and started toward Dover. The faster he cleared obstacles out of the way, the sooner she wouldn’t use that little twirl His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground all the way back to the city.
Mordechai Anielewicz’s voice came out flat as the Polish plain, hard as stone: “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
“Fine. Whatever you say.” The Polish farmer had been milking a cow when Anielewicz found him. He turned away from the Jewish fighting leader and back to the business at hand.Siss! Siss! Siss! Jets of milk landed in the dented tin pail. The cow tried to walk off. “Stay here, you stupid bitch,” the Pole growled.
“But see here, Mieczyslaw,” Mordechai protested. “It’s impossible, I tell you. How could the Nazis have smuggled an explosive-metal bomb into Lodz without us or the Lizards or the Polish Home Army knowing about it?”
“I don’t know anything about how,” Mieczyslaw answered. “I hear tell they’ve done it. I’m supposed to tell you somebody stayed at Lejb’s house in Hrubieszow. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” Anielewicz said with as much equanimity as he could muster. He didn’t want the Pole to know how shaken he was. Heinrich Jager had stayed with a Jew named Lejb, all right, back when he was carrying explosive metal from the Soviet Union to Germany. The message had to be authentic, then; who else would know about that? It wasn’t even the sort of thing he’d have been likely to mention in a report. Cautiously, Mordechai asked, “What else have you heard?”
“It’s somewhere in the ghetto,” Mieczyslaw told him. “Don’t have any idea where, so don’t waste time asking. Hadn’t been for the cease-fire, all you kikes’d probably be toasting your toes in hell by now.”
“I love you, too, Mieczyslaw,” Anielewicz said. The Pole chuckled, not in the least put out. Mordechai kicked at the dirt.“Gottenyu! That man has balls the size of an elephant. Thechutzpah it takes to try something like that-and the luck you need to get away with it… ”