Down to Earth by Harry Turtledove

were selling it; he had only to choose the one with the best price. Potatoes didn’t prove any great problem, either. And he got a deal on onions that would make his wife smile.
    Eggs, now . . . He’d expected eggs to be the hard part of the shopping, and they were. You could always count on plenty of people having vegetables for sale. Ever since the Nazis had been driven out of Poland, there had been enough vegetables to go around. And vegetables, or a lot of them, stayed good for weeks or months at a time.
    None of that held true for eggs. You never could tell how many would be on sale when you went to the market square, or what sort of prices the vendors would demand. Today, only a couple of peasant grandmothers, scarves around their heads against the winter cold, displayed baskets of eggs.
    Radiating charm, Anielewicz went up to one of them. “Hello, there,” he said cheerfully. He spoke Polish as readily as Yiddish, as did most Jews hereabouts. Unlike a lot of them, he also looked more Polish than Jewish, having a broad face, fair skin, and light brown, almost blond, hair. Sometimes his looks helped him when he was dealing with Poles.
    Not today. The old lady with the eggs looked him up and down as if he’d just crawled out of the gutter. “Hello, Jew,” she said flatly.
    Well, few
goyim
came to buy at the Bialut Market Square. During the Nazi occupation, it had been the chief market of the Lodz ghetto. The ghetto was gone, but this remained the Jewish part of town. Mordechai gathered himself. If she was going to play tough, he could do the same. Pointing to the eggs, he said, “How much for half a dozen of those sad little things?”
    “Two zlotys apiece,” the Polish woman said, sounding as calm and self-assured as if that weren’t highway robbery.
    “What?” Anielewicz yelped. “That’s not selling. That’s stealing, is what it is.”
    “You don’t want them, you don’t have to pay,” the woman answered. “Ewa over there, she’s charging two and a half, but she says hers are bigger eggs. You go on over and see if you can find any difference.”
    “It’s still stealing,” Mordechai said, and it was—even two zlotys was close to twice the going rate.
    “Feed’s gone up,” the Polish woman said with a shrug. “If you think I’m going to sell at a loss, you’re
meshuggeh.”
Where he stuck to Polish, she threw in a Yiddish word with malice aforethought. A moment later, she slyly added, “And I know you Jews aren’t crazy that way.”
    “What are you feeding your miserable chickens, anyhow? Caviar and champagne?” Anielewicz shot back. “Bread’s up a couple of groschen, but not that much.
I
think you’re out for some quick profit.”
    Her eyes might have been cut from gray ice. “I think if you don’t want my eggs, you can go away and let someone who does want them have a look.”
    Dammit, he did want the eggs. He just didn’t want to pay so much for them. Bertha would pitch a fit; then she’d make disparaging noises about the uselessness of sending a mere man to the market square. Mordechai was, or thought he was, a competent shopper in his own right. “I’ll give you nine zlotys for half a dozen,” he said.
    For a bad moment, he thought the egg seller wouldn’t even deign to haggle with him. But she did. He ended up buying the eggs for ten zlotys forty groschen, and won the privilege of picking them himself. It wasn’t a victory—he couldn’t pretend it was, no matter how hard he tried—but it was something less than a crushing defeat.
    Weighed down by groceries, he started south on Zgierska Street, then turned right onto Lutomierska; his flat wasn’t far from the fire station on that street. The backs of his legs pained him as he walked. His arms felt as if he were carrying sacks of lead, not vegetables and eggs.
    Scowling, he kept on. He’d never been quite right after inhaling German nerve gas half a lifetime before. At that, he’d got off lucky. Ludmila