Then Menachem Begin laughed, too, and then Stern, and then all the underground leaders. Even the guard with the Sten gun, at first glance as humorless amamzer as was ever spawned, chuckled under his breath. The idea of Jews choosing rationality over martyrdom was too deliciously absurd to resist.
Now the underground leaders glanced at one another. How could you explain Zolraag’s unintentional irony? Nobody tried. Maybe you couldn’t explain it, not so it made sense to him. Didn’t that show the essential difference between Lizards and human beings? Moishe thought so.
Before he could drive the point home, Stern said, “We will not turn Russie over to you, Zolraag. Get used to that idea. We take care of our own.”
“Very well,” the Lizard answered. “We also do this. Here I think your behavior may be more stubborn than necessary, but I comprehend it. Your mirth, however, I find beyond understanding.”
“You would have to know more of our history for it to make sense to you,” Moishe told him.
That set Zolraag to making unhappy-teakettle noises again. Russie hid a grin. He’d said that with malice aforethought The Lizards had a history that reached far back into the depths of time, to the days when men still lived in caves and fire was the great new invention of the age. As far as they were concerned, mankind had no history to speak of. The idea that they should concern themselves with human ephemera hit a nerve.
Menachem Begin spoke to Zolraag: “Suppose we do rise against the British. Suppose you help us in the fight. Suppose that helps you come into Palestine afterwards. What do we get from it besides a new master to lord it over us in place of the master we have now?”
“Are you now as free as any Tosevites on this planet?” Zolraag asked, adding an interrogative cough to the end of the sentence.
“If we were, the British wouldn’t be our masters,” Stern answered.
“Just so,” the Lizard said. “After the conquest of Tosev 3 is over, though, you will be raised to the same status as any other nation under us. You will have the highest degree of-what is the word? — autonomy, yes.”
“Which is not much,” Moishe put in.
“You be silent!” Zolraag said with an emphatic cough.
“Why?” Russie jeered when none of the Jewish underground leaders chose to back the Lizard. “I’m just being truthful, which is sensible and rational, isn’t it? Besides, who knows if the conquest of Tosev 3 will ever be over? You haven’t beaten us yet, and we’ve hurt you badly.”
“Truth,” Zolraag admitted, which disconcerted Moishe for a moment. The Lizard went on, “And among the Tosevite not-empires that has hurt us worst is Deutschland, which also hurt you Jews worst. Do you cheer on the Deutsche now where you fought them before?”
Russie tried not to show his wince. Zolraag might have had no notion of what the history of the Jews was like, but he knew mentioning the Nazis to Jews was like waving a red flag before a bulclass="underline" he did it to take away their power of rational thought. Reckoning him a fool did not do.
“We are not talking about the Germans now,” Moishe said. “We’re talking about the British, who have treated Jews well on the whole, on the one hand, and your chances for conquering the world, which do not look as good as they might, on the other.”
“Of course we shall conquer Tosev 3,” Zolraag said. “The Emperor has ordered it”-he looked down at the floor for a moment-“and it shall be done.”
He didn’t sound particularly sensible or rational himself there. What he sounded like was an ultrapious Jew who got everything he knew from the Torah and the Talmud and rejected all secular learning: his faith sustained him in the face of all obstacles. Sometimes that kept you going through bad times. Sometimes it blinded you to things you should see.
Moishe studied his captors. Would they see Zolraag’s blind spot, or would their own blind them to it? He picked a different argument: “If you choose to deal with the Lizards, you’ll always be a little fish next to them. They may think you’re useful now, but what happens after they have Palestine and they don’t need you any more?”
Menachem Begin showed his teeth in what was not a grin of amusement. “Then we start giving them a hard time, the same as we do the British now.”
“This I believe,” Zolraag said. “It would certainly follow the Polish pattern.” Did he sound bitter? Hard to tell with a Lizard, but that would have been Moishe’s guess.
“If the Race conquers the whole world, though, who will back you against us?” he asked Begin. “What can you hope to gain?”
Now Begin started to laugh. “We are Jews. No one will back us. We will gain nothing. And we will fight anyway. Do you doubt it?”
“Not even slightly,” Moishe said. For a moment, captive and captor understood each other perfectly. Moishe had been Zolraag’s captive, too. They had stared at each other across a gap of incomprehension wide as the black gulf of space that separated the Lizards’ world from Earth.
Zolraag did not fully follow what was going on now, either. He said, “What is your answer, Tosevites? If you must. If there is fire for him in your innards because he is of your clutch of eggs, keep this Russie. But what do you say about the bigger question? Will you fight alongside us when we move forward here and punish the British?”
“Do you Lizards decide things on the spur of the moment?” Stern demanded.
“No, but we are not Tosevites, either,” Zolraag answered with evident relish. “You do everything quickly, do you not?”
“Not everything,” Stern said, chuckling a little. “This we have to talk about. We’ll send you back safe-”
“I was hoping to bring an answer with me,” Zolraag said. “This would not only help the Race but improve my own status.”
“But we don’t care about either of those, except insofar as they help us,” Stern said. He nodded to Russie’s guard. “Take him back to his room.” He didn’t call it a cell; even Jews used euphemisms to sugar-coat the things they did. Stern went on, “You can let his wife and son visit, or just his wife. If he’d rather. They aren’t going anywhere.”
“Right. Come on, you,” the guard said to Moishe, as usual punctuating his orders with a jerk of the Sten gun’s barrel. As they walked down the corridor toward the chamber-however you wanted to describe it-in which Russie was confined, the fellow added, “No, you aren’t going anywhere-not alive, you’re not.”
“Thank you so much. You do reassure my mind,” Moishe replied. For one of the rare times since the Jewish underground had stolen him from the British, he heard that hard-nosed guard laugh out loud.
Ice was still floating in the Moscow River. A big chunk banged into the bow of the rowboat in which Vyacheslav Molotov sat, knocking the boat sideways. “Sorry, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the fellow at the oars said, and put the rowboat back on its proper course upstream.
“It’s all right,” Molotov answered absently. Of course, the oarsman belonged to the NKVD. But he had such a heavy, bovineokane- a Gorky accent that turned a’s into o’s until he sounded as if he himself had been turned out to pasture-that no one, hearing him for the first time, could possibly take him seriously. A nice bit ofmaskirovka, that’s what it was.
A couple of minutes later, another piece of ice ran into the boat. The NKVD man chuckled. “Bet you wish you’d taken apanje wagon to thekolkhoz now, eh, Comrade?”
“No,” Molotov answered coldly. He waved a gloved hand over to the riverbank to illustrate why he said what he said. Apanje wagon pulled by atroika of horses slowly struggled along. Even the Russian wagons, with their tall wheels and boatlike bottoms, had a tough time getting through the mud of the springrasputitsa. The muddy season would vary in the fall, depending on how heavy the rains were. In spring, when a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted, the mud was always thick enough to seem bottomless.