Another Green World Read Free Page B

numbers, drafted by an expert in Slavic languages not eager to share his trade secrets. A map of the Carpathian Mountains, Count Dracula's old stomping grounds. A crumpled photo spread from an Australian Socialist weekly,
The Anvil
, cheaply printed, brittle to the touch. Last, deceptively slight, a square of brown paper just larger than needed to roll a cigarette. Ingo accepted the pile incuriously.
    “What you're looking at”— she fingered the topmost sheet—” is our best recent tally of resistance organizations in Central Europe. First column name, second column numerical strength—that's a guess, of course—and third operational status. ‘A’ means fully active, ‘I’ is for intelligence services only, ‘S’ for groups devoted primarily to sabotage—you get the idea. ‘NI’ means no information available.”
    “A lot of NIs, aren't there.”
    “Small wonder. You'll notice they tend to coincide with the groups whose strength is given at less than twenty. What happens usually is, these smaller outfits get rounded up and shot. Or they may simply be out of contact. Our information isn't perfect. A lot of it comes via the British, who may or may not be sharing everything they know.”
    “I thought we were on the same side.”
    Martina flashed him the look one reserves for the hopelessly naïve. “You'll notice toward the end, something called the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ZOB. That's the Jewish Fighting Organization.”
    Ingo glanced down. “Another NI.”
    She resisted the urge, which his air of kingly indifference provoked in her, to throw the handbag at him. “The ZOB was formed in the ghettos during the early stages of occupation. There were plenty of people around to fight in those days, but mostly they took a wait-and-see attitude: you know, maybe we can get through this, there've been pogroms before, we always manage to survive.” She shrugged,
what can you do
, recognizing in the gesture her grandmother again. “Now the wait-and-see is over, only there's nobody left to do the fighting.”
    She paused long enough for Ingo to ask a question, the simplest one: Why? But he didn't—people never did. It was odd, but she knew the pattern by now. Like a blind spot, into which, at one blink, a whole race had vanished. Ingo continued to stare at the page on which the ZOB still enjoyed a hypothetic existence.
    “So the next thing there, the map, shows roughly the distribution of resistance forces, principal areas of German anti-partisan operations,Underground safe zones. The Xs mark recent major engagements. Of course the situation is highly fluid. And I should add, our intelligence, such as it is, is always out of date. What you've got there reflects our best guess at how things stood about six weeks ago. Since then, Tito has swallowed a bigger chunk of Yugoslavia. German strength in Slovakia is building up as the line shifts west. And as of last month, the Red Army has liberated a whole sweep of Poland.”
    Ingo tightened his lips. “Wouldn't the appropriate term be reconquered?”
    “Sure, I get it. They're Communists, so everything they do is evil. Even if it contributes to an Allied victory.” She regretted saying this immediately. Escaping into the briar patch of squabbling would suit Ingo fine. By way of atonement she surrendered the armchair and joined Ingo on the love seat, squeezing in all chummy-like.
    “There in red,” she went on more calmly, pointing at a squiggle that snaked like a garden hose through the mountains on the Czech-Polish frontier, “you can see where the ZOB
might
be operating, assuming it still exists. The main concentration, near Warsaw, was wiped out last autumn. Survivors trickled east into the Pripet Marshes and merged with the Ukrainian Jewish Brigade, under the direct control of Moscow. But a local band or two might be left down here.”
    She gave him a moment to absorb this. The wicked Reds are over
there;
don't worry about them, they're not even