Short Stories (14 page)

He had to wait his turn, though. By the time he got over to her, a line had already formed. She beamed with pride as she carved and served. Only somebody else’s roast grouse gave her any competition for pride of place. Veit managed to snag a drumstick from one of the birds, too. He sat down on the grass and started filling his face . . . after the appropriate blessings, of course.

After a while, Reb Eliezer came over and squatted beside him. Eliezer seemed a man in perpetual motion. He’d already talked with half the people at the picnic, and he’d get to the rest before it finished. "Having a good time?" he asked.

Veit grinned and waved at his plate. "I’d have to be dead not to. I don’t know how I’m going to fit into my clothes."

"That’s a good time," Eliezer said, nodding. "I wonder what the Poles are doing with their holiday."

He meant the Aryans playing Poles in Wawolnice, of course. The real Poles, those who were left alive, worked in mines and on farms and in brothels and other places where bodies mattered more than brains. Veit stayed in character to answer, "They should grow like onions: with their heads in the ground."

Eliezer smiled that sad smile of his. "And they call us filthy kikes and Christ-killers and have extra fun when there’s a pogrom on the schedule." Veit rubbed his rib cage. Eliezer nodded again. "Yes, like that."

"Still twinges once in a while," Veit said.

"Hating Jews is easy," Eliezer said, and it was Veit’s turn to nod. The other man went on, "Hating anybody who isn’t just like you is easy. Look how you sounded about them. Look how the Propaganda Ministry sounds all the time."

"Hey!" Veit said. "That’s not fair."

"Well, maybe yes, maybe no," Reb Eliezer allowed. "But the way it looks to me is, if we’re going to live like
Yehudim
, like the
Yehudim
that used to be, like proper
Yehudim
, sooner or later we’ll have to do it all the time."

"What?" Now Veit was genuinely alarmed. "We won’t last twenty minutes if we do, and you know it."

"I didn’t meant that. Using
tefillin
? Putting on the
tallis
? No, it wouldn’t work." Eliezer smiled once more, but then quickly sobered. "I meant that we need to live, to think, to feel the way we do while we’re in Wawolnice when we’re out in the big world, too. We need to be witnesses to what the
Reich
is doing. Somebody has to, and who better than us?" That smile flashed across his face again, if only for a moment. "Do you know what
martyr
means in ancient Greek? It means
witness
, that’s what."

Veit had sometimes wondered if the rabbi was the SS plant in the village. He’d decided it didn’t matter. If Eliezer was, he could destroy them all any time he chose. But now Veit found himself able to ask a question that would have been bad manners inside Wawolnice: "What did you do before you came to the village that taught you ancient Greek?" As far as he knew, Eliezer--Ferdinand Marian--hadn’t been an actor. Veit had never seen him on stage or in a TV show or film.

"Me?" The older man quirked an eyebrow. "I thought everyone had heard about me. No? . . . I guess not. I was a German Christian minister."

"Oh," Veit said. It didn’t quite come out
Oy!
, but it might as well have. He managed something a little better on his next try: "Well, no wonder you learned Greek, then."

"No wonder at all. And Hebrew, and Aramaic. I was well trained for the part, all right. I just didn’t know ahead of time that I would like it better than what had been my real life."

"I don’t think any of us figured on that," Veit said slowly.

"I don’t, either," Reb Eliezer replied. "But if that doesn’t tell you things aren’t the way they ought to be out here, what would?" His two-armed wave encompassed
out here
: the world beyond Wawolnice, the world-bestriding
Reich
.

"What do we do?" Veit shook his head; that was the wrong question. Again, another try: "What
can
we do?"

Eliezer set a hand on his shoulder. "The best we can, Jakub. Always, the best we can." He ambled off to talk to somebody else.

Someone had brought along a soccer ball. In spite of full bellies, a pickup game started. It would have caused heart failure in World Cup circles. The pitch was bumpy and unmown. Only sweaters thrown down on the ground marked the corners and the goal mouths. Touchlines and bylines were as much a matter of argument as anything in the Talmud.

Nobody cared. People ran and yelled and knocked one another ass over teakettle. Some of the fouls would have got professionals sent off. The players just laughed about them. Plenty of liquid restoratives were at hand by the edge of the pitch. When the match ended, both sides loudly proclaimed victory.

By then, the sun was sliding down the sky toward the horizon. Clouds had started building up. With regret, everyone decided it was time to go home. Leftovers and dirty china and silverware went into ice chests and baskets. Nobody seemed to worry about supper at all.

Veit caught up with Reb Eliezer. "Thanks for not calling Kristina’s venison
treyf
," he said quietly.

Eliezer spread his hands. "It wasn’t that kind of gathering, or I didn’t think it was. I didn’t say anything about the grouse, either. Like I told you before, you do what you can do. Anyone who felt differently didn’t have to eat it. No finger-pointing. No fits. Just--no game."

"Makes sense." Veit hesitated, then blurted the question that had been on his mind most of the day: "What do you suppose the old-time Jews, the real Jews, would have made of us?"

"I often wonder about that," Eliezer said, which surprised Veit not at all. The older man went on, "You remember what Rabbi Hillel told the
goy
who stood on one foot and asked him to define Jewish doctrine before the other foot came down?"

"Oh, sure," Veit answered; that was a bit of Talmudic
pilpul
everybody--well, everybody in Wawolnice who cared about the Talmud--knew. "He said that you shouldn’t do to other people whatever was offensive to you. As far as he was concerned, the rest was just commentary."

"The Talmud says that
goy
ended up converting, too," Eliezer added. Veit nodded; he also remembered that. Eliezer said, "Well, if the
Reich
had followed Hillel’s teaching, there would still be real Jews, and they wouldn’t have needed to invent us. Since they did . . . We’re doing as well as we can on the main thing--we’re human beings, after all--and maybe not too bad on the commentary. Or do you think I’m wrong?"

"No. That’s about how I had it pegged, too." Veit turned away, then stopped short. "I’ll see you tomorrow in Wawolnice."

"Tomorrow in Wawolnice," Eliezer said. "Next year in Jerusalem."

"
Alevai omayn
," Veit answered, and was astonished by how much he meant it.

#

They wouldn’t have needed to invent us.
For some reason, that fragment of a sentence stuck in Veit’s mind. He knew Voltaire’s
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him
. Before coming to Wawolnice, he’d been in a couple of plays involving the Frenchman. Frederick the Great had been one of Hitler’s heroes, which had made the Prussian king’s friends and associates glow by reflected light in the eyes of German dramatists ever since.

If a whole
Volk
had nobody who could look at them from the outside, would they have to find--or make--someone? There, Veit wasn’t so sure. Like any actor’s, his mind was a jackdaw’s nest of other men’s words. He knew the story about the dying bandit chief and the priest who urged him to forgive his enemies.
Father, I have none,
the old ruffian wheezed.
I’ ve killed them all.

Here stood the
Reich
, triumphant. Its retribution had spread across the globe. It hadn’t quite killed all its enemies. No: it had enslaved some of them instead. But no one cared what a slave thought. No one even cared if a slave thought, so long as he didn’t think of trouble.

Here stood Wawolnice. It had come into being as a monument to the
Reich
’s pride.
Look at what we did. Look at what we had to get rid of,
it had declared, reproducing with typical, fanatical attention to detail what once had been. And such attention to detail had, all unintended, more or less brought back into being what had been destroyed. It was almost Hegelian.

After talking with Kristina, Veit decided to have the little operation that would mark him as one of the men who truly belonged in Wawolnice. He got it done the evening before the village shut down for another maintenance day. "You should be able to go back to work day after tomorrow," the doctor told him. "You’ll be sore, but it won’t be anything the pills can’t handle."

"Yes, I know about those." Of itself, Veit’s hand made that rib-feeling gesture.

"All right, then." The other man uncapped a syringe. "This is the local anesthetic. You may not want to watch while I give it to you."

"You bet I don’t." Veit looked up at the acoustic tiles on the treatment room’s ceiling. The shot didn’t hurt much--less than he’d expected. Still, it wasn’t something you wanted to think about; no, indeed.

Chuckling, the doctor said, "Since you’re playing one of those miserable, money-grubbing kikes, of course you’ll be happy about the raise you’re getting for going all out."

"As long as my eel still goes up after this, that’s the only raise I care about right now," Veit answered. The doctor laughed again and went to work.

Bandaging up afterward took longer than the actual procedure. As Veit was carefully pulling up his pants, the doctor said, "Take your first pill in about an hour. That way, it’ll be working when the local wears off."

"That would be good," Veit agreed. He got one more laugh from the man in the white coat. No doubt everything seemed funnier when you were on the other end of the scalpel.

He didn’t have Kristi drive home; he did it himself, with his legs splayed wide. He couldn’t feel anything--the anesthetic was still going strong--but he did even so. He dutifully swallowed the pill at the appointed time. Things started hurting anyway: hurting like hell, not to put too fine a point on it. Veit gulped another pill. It was too soon after the first, but he did it all the same.

Two pain pills were better than one, but not enough. He still hurt. The pills did make his head feel like a balloon attached to his body on a long string. What happened from his neck down was still there, but only distantly connected to the part of him that noticed.

He ate whatever Kristi put on the table. Afterward, he remembered eating, but not what he’d eaten.

He wandered out into the front room and sat down in front of the TV. He might do that any evening to unwind from a long day of being a Jew, but this felt different. The screen in front of him swallowed all of his consciousness that didn’t sting.

Which was odd, because the channel he’d chosen more or less at random was showing a string of ancient movies: movies from before the War of Retribution, movies in black and white. Normally, Veit had no patience for that. He lived in a black-and-white world in Wawolnice. When he watched the television, he wanted something brighter, something more interesting.

Tonight, though, with the two pain pills pumping through him, he just didn’t care. The TV was on. He’d watch it. He didn’t have to think while he stared at the pictures. Something called
Bringing Up Baby
was running. It was funny even though it was dubbed. It was funny even though he was drugged.

When it ended and commercials came on, they seemed jarringly out of place. They were gaudy. They were noisy. Veit couldn’t wait for them to end and the next old film to start.

It finally did.
Frankenstein
was about as far from
Bringing Up Baby
as you could get and still be called a movie. Some of the antique special effects seemed unintentionally comic to a modern man, even if the modern man was doped to the eyebrows. But Veit ended up impressed in spite of himself. As with the comedy, no wonder people still showed this one more than a hundred years after it was made.

He took one more green pill after the movie and staggered off to bed. He slept like a log, assuming logs take care to sleep on their backs.

When he woke up the next morning, he wasn’t as sore as he’d thought he would be. And he’d rolled over onto his side during the night and hadn’t perished, or even screamed. He did take another pill, but he didn’t break any Olympic sprint records running to the kitchen to get it.

"You poor thing," Kristi said. "Your poor thing."

"I’ll live." Veit decided he might even mean it. Once he soaked up some coffee and then some breakfast--and once that pill kicked in--he might even want to mean it.

Caffeine, food, and opiate did indeed work wonders. His wife nodded approvingly. "You don’t have that glazed look you did last night."

"Who, me?" Veit hadn’t been sure he could manage indignation, but he did.

Not that it helped. "Yes, you," Kristi retorted. "You don’t sit there gaping at the TV for three hours straight with drool running down your chin when you’re in your right mind."

"But it was good." No sooner had Veit said it than he wondered whether he would have thought so if he hadn’t been zonked. Kristina’s raised eyebrow announced louder than words that she wondered exactly the same thing.

Maybe he wouldn’t have enjoyed the silliness in
Bringing Up Baby
so much if he’d been fully in the boring old Aristotelian world. But
Frankenstein
wasn’t silly--not even slightly. Taking pieces from the dead, putting them together, and reanimating them . . . No, nothing even the least bit silly about that.

As a matter of fact . . . His jaw dropped. "
Der Herr Gott im Himmel
," he whispered, and then, "
Vey iz mir!
"

"What is it?"Kristi asked.

"Wawolnice," Veit said.

"Well, what about it?" his wife said.

But he shook his head. "You weren’t watching the movie last night." He didn’t know what she had been doing. Anything that hadn’t been right in front of him or right next to him simply wasn’t there. She’d stuck her head into the front room once or twice--probably to make sure he could sit up straight--but she hadn’t watched.