Short Stories (11 page)

"Huh?" He looked down at the forms and saw he’d been scribbling
Jakub Shlayfer
in backwards-running Yiddish script on each signature line. He couldn’t even blame the dope; it hadn’t kicked in yet. Maybe pain would do for an excuse. Or maybe least said, soonest mended. He muttered "Sorry" and started substituting the name he’d been born with.

"That’s more like it." The woman sniffed loudly. "Some of you people don’t know the difference between who you are and who you play anymore."

"You’ve got to be kidding." Veit wrote his own name once again. "Nobody wants to break
my
ribs on account of who I am. That only happens when I put on this stuff." His wave encompassed his
shtetl
finery.

"Remember that, then. Better to be Aryan. Easier, too."

Veit didn’t feel like arguing. He did feel woozy--the pain pill started hitting hard and fast. "Easier is right," he said, and turned to leave the infirmary. The broken rib stabbed him again. He let out a hiss any snake,
treyf
or kosher, would have been proud of. The medical tech had been right, dammit. Even with a pill, he was sore as hell.

#

"We have to be
meshuggeh
to keep doing this," Kristina said as she piloted their car back toward Lublin at the end of the day.

"Right now, I won’t argue with you." Veit wasn’t inclined to argue about anything, not right now. Changing into ordinary German clothes had hurt more than he’d believed anything could. The prescription said
Take one tablet at a time every four to six hours, as needed for pain
. One tablet was sending a boy to do a man’s job, and a half-witted boy at that. He’d taken two. He still hurt--and now he had the brains of a half-witted boy himself. No wonder his wife sat behind the Audi’s wheel.

She flashed her lights at some
Dummkopf
puttering along on the
Autobahn
at eighty kilometers an hour. The jerk did eventually move over and let her by. Veit was too stoned for even that to annoy him, which meant he was very stoned indeed.

Kristi sighed as she zoomed past the old, flatulent VW. "But we’ll be back at the same old stand tomorrow," she said, daring him to deny it.

"What would you rather do instead?" he asked. She sent him a reproachful side glance instead of an answer. Wawolnice offered more chances for honest performing than almost anywhere else in the
Reich
. Television was pap. The movies, too. The stage was mostly pap: pap and revivals.

Besides, they’d been at the village for so long now, most of the people they’d worked with anywhere else had forgotten they existed. Wawolnice was a world unto itself. Most of the kids in the
kheder
really were the children of performers who played Jews in the village. Were they getting in on the ground floor, or were they trapped? How much of a difference was there?

Veit didn’t feel too bad as long as he held still. With the pills in him, he felt pretty damn good, as a matter of fact. Whenever he moved or coughed, though, all the pain pills in the world couldn’t hope to block the message his ribs sent. He dreaded sneezing. That would probably feel as if he were being torn in two--which might not be so far wrong.

Moving slowly and carefully, he made it up to the apartment with his wife. He started to flop down onto the sofa in front of the TV, but thought better of it in the nick of time. Lowering himself slowly and gently was a much better plan. Then he found a football match. Watching other people run and jump and kick seemed smarter than trying to do any of that himself.

"Want a drink?" Kristi asked.

One of the warning labels on the pill bottle cautioned against driving or running machinery while taking the drugs, and advised that alcohol could make things worse. "Oh, Lord, yes!" Veit exclaimed.

She brought him a glass of slivovitz. She had one for herself, too. He recited the blessing over fruit. He wasn’t too drug-addled to remember it. The plum brandy went down in a stream of sweet fire. "Anesthetic," Kristi said.

"Well, sure," Veit agreed. He made a point of getting good and anesthetized, too.

No matter how anesthetized he was, though, he couldn’t lie on his stomach. It hurt too much. He didn’t like going to bed on his back, but he didn’t have much choice. Kristi turned out the light, then cautiously straddled him. Thanks to the stupid pain pills, that was no damn good, either. No matter how dopey he was, he took a long, long time to fall asleep.

They went back to Wawolnice the next morning. Cleanup crews had labored through the night. If you didn’t live there, you wouldn’t have known a pogrom had raged the day before. Just as well, too, because no pogrom was laid on for today. You couldn’t run them too often. No matter how exciting they were, they were too wearing on everybody--although the Ministry of Justice never ran short on prisoners to be disposed of in interesting ways.

Putting on his ordinary clothes at the apartment had made Veit flinch. He’d swallowed a pain pill beforehand, but just the same . . . And changing into his Jew’s outfit under Wawolnice hurt even more. No wonder: the left side of his rib cage was all over black-and-blue.

"That looks nasty," Reb Eliezer said sympathetically, pointing. "Are you coming to
shul
this morning?"

"
Fraygst nokh?
" Veit replied in Jakub’s Yiddish.
Do you need to ask?
"Today I would even if it weren’t my turn to help make the
minyan
."

A couple of
yeshiva-bykher
were already poring over the Talmud when he got to the cramped little synagogue. The real books were back in place, then. The men who made up the ten required for services ranged in age from a couple just past their
bar-mitzvah
s to the
melamed
’s thin, white-bearded father. If the old man’s cough was only a performer’s art, he deserved an award for it.

They all put on their
tefillin
, wrapping the straps of one on their left arms and wearing the other so the enclosed text from the Torah was between their eyes. "Phylacteries" was the secular name for
tefillin
. It had to do with the idea of guarding. Veit’s aching ribs said he hadn’t been guarded any too well the day before. Wrapped in his
tallis
, he stood there and went through the morning service’s prayers with the rest of the men.

And he had a prayer of his own to add: the
Birkhas ha-gomel
, said after surviving danger. "
Barukh atah Adonai, eloheinu melekh ha-olam, ha-gomel lahavayim tovos sheg’ malani kol tov.
"
Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who bestowest good things on the unworthy, and hast bestowed upon me every goodness.

"
Omayn
," the rest of the
minyan
chorused. Their following response meant
May He Who has bestowed upon you every goodness continue to bestow every goodness upon you. Selah.

At the end of the services, the
melamed
’s father poured out little shots of
shnaps
for everybody. He smacked his lips as he downed his. So did Veit. The two kids choked and coughed getting their shots down. Their elders smiled tolerantly. It wouldn’t be long before the youngsters knocked back whiskey as easily and with as much enjoyment as everyone else.

One by one, the men went off to their work on the village. Reb Eliezer set a hand on Veit’s arm as he was about to leave the
shul
. "I’m glad you remembered the
Birkhas ha-gomel
," the rabbi said quietly.

Veit raised an eyebrow. "What’s not to remember? Only someone who isn’t
frum
would forget such a thing. And, thank God, all the Jews in Wawolnice
are
pious." He stayed in character no matter how much it hurt. Right this minute, thanks to his ribs, it hurt quite a bit.

Eliezer’s cat-green stare bored into him. To whom did the rabbi report? What did he say when he did? A Jew in a Polish village wouldn’t have needed to worry about such things. A performer who was a Jew in a Polish village during working hours? You never could tell what somebody like that needed to worry about.

"Thank God," Reb Eliezer said now. He patted Veit on the back: gently, so as not to afflict him with any new pain. Then he walked over to the two men studying the Talmud and sat down next to one of them.

Part of Veit wanted to join the disputation, too. But the services were over. He had work waiting at the shop: not so much work as his wife would have liked, but work nonetheless. Eliezer did look up and nod to him as he slipped out of the
shul
. Then the rabbi went back to the other world, the higher world, of the Law and the two millennia of commentary on it and argument about it.

The day was dark, cloudy, gloomy. A horse-drawn wagon brought barrels of beer to the tavern. A skinny dog gnawed at something in the gutter. A Jewish woman in
sheitel
and head scarf nodded to Veit. He nodded back and slowly walked to his shop. He couldn’t walk any other way, not today and not for a while.

A tall, plump, ruddy man in
Lederhosen
snapped his picture. As usual, Veit pretended the tourist didn’t exist. When you thought about it, this was a strange business. Because it was, Veit did his best
not
to think about it most of the time.

Every now and then, though, you couldn’t help wondering. During and after its victories in the War of Retribution, the
Reich
did just what the first
Führer
promised he would do: it wiped Jewry off the face of the earth. And, ever since destroying Jewry (no, even while getting on with the job), the Aryan victors studied and examined their victims in as much detail as the dead Jews had studied and examined Torah and Talmud. The Germans hadn’t had two thousand years to split hairs about their researches, but they’d had more than a hundred now. Plenty of time for a whole bunch of
pilpul
to build up. And it had. It had.

Without that concentrated, minute study, a place like Wawolnice wouldn’t just have been impossible. It would have been unimaginable. But the authorities wanted the world to see what a horrible thing it was that they’d disposed of. And so twenty-first-century Aryans lived the life of early-twentieth-century Jews and Poles for the edification of . . . fat tourists in
Lederhosen
.

Repairmen had installed a new front window at the shop. Remarkably, they’d also sprayed it, or painted it, or whatever the hell they’d done, with enough dust and grime and general
shmutz
to make it look as if it had been there the past twenty years, and gone unwashed in all that time. Wawolnice was tended with, well, Germanic thoroughness. A clean window would have looked out of place, and so in went a dirty one.

As Veit opened up, the voices of the children chanting their lessons floated through the morning air. He’d been an adult when he came to the village. Would the boys grow up to become the next generation’s tavern-keeper and rabbi and ragpicker . . . and maybe grinder and jack-of-all-trades? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. The
Reich
built things to last. Chances were Wawolnice would still be here to instruct the curious about downfallen Judaism a generation from now, a century from now, five hundred years from now. . . .

You learned in school that Hitler had said he intended his
Reich
to last for a thousand years. You also learned that the first
Führer
commonly meant what he said. But then, you had to be pretty stupid to need to learn that in school. Hitler’s works were still all around, just as Augustus Caesar’s must have been throughout the Roman Empire in the second century A.D.

Something on the floor sparkled. Veit bent and picked up a tiny shard of glass the cleaners had missed. He was almost relieved to chuck it into his battered tin wastebasket. Except for the lancinating pain in his side, it was almost the only physical sign he could find that the pogrom really had happened.

He settled onto his stool, shifting once or twice to find the position where his ribs hurt least. The chanted lessons came through the closed door, but only faintly. The kid who went around with the basket of bagels--no
kheder
for him, even though it was cheap--came by. Veit bought one. The kid scurried away. Veit smiled as he bit into the chewy roll. Damned if he didn’t feel more at home in Yiddish than in ordinary German these days.

In came Itzhik the
shokhet
. "How’s the world treating you these days?" Veit asked. Yes, this rasping, guttural jargon seemed natural in his mouth. And why not--
fur vos nit?
--when he used it so much?

"As well as it is, Jakub, thank the Lord," the ritual slaughterer answered. He often visited the grinder’s shop. His knives had to be sharp. Any visible nick on the edge, and the animals he killed were
treyf
. He had to slay at a single stroke, too. All in all, what he did was as merciful as killing could be, just as Torah and Talmud prescribed. He went on, "And you? And your wife?"

"Bertha’s fine. My ribs . . . could be better. They’ll get that way--eventually," Veit said. "
Nu
, what have you got for me today?"

Itzhik carried his short knife, the one he used for dispatching chickens and the occasional duck, wrapped in a cloth. "This needs to be perfect," he said. "Can’t have the ladies running to Reb Eliezer with their dead birds, complaining I didn’t kill them properly."

"That wouldn’t be good," Veit agreed. He inspected the blade. The edge seemed fine to him. He said so.

"Well, sharpen it some more anyway," Itzhik answered.

Veit might have known he would say that. Veit, in fact, had known Itzhik would say that; he would have bet money on it. "You’re a scrupulous man," he remarked as he set to work.

The
shokhet
shrugged. "If,
eppes
, you aren’t scrupulous doing what I do, better you should do something else."

Which was also true of a lot of other things. After watching sparks fly from the steel blade, Veit carefully inspected the edge. The last thing he wanted was to put in a tiny nick that hadn’t been there before. At length, he handed back the slaughtering knife. But, as he did, he said, "You’ll want to check it for yourself."