Short Stories (10 page)

Veit opened the passenger-side door for his wife. Kristi murmured a word of thanks as she slid into the Audi. He went around and got in himself. The electric engine silently came to life. The car didn’t have the range of a gas auto, but more charging stations went up every day. Though petroleum might be running low, plenty of nuclear power plants off in the East made sure the
Reich
had plenty of electricity. If they belched radioactive waste into the environment every once in a while, well, that was the local Ivans’worry.

He drove out of the lot, up the ramp, and onto the
Autobahn
, heading east toward their flat in Lublin. A garish, brilliantly lit billboard appeared in his rearview mirror. The big letters were backwards, but he knew what they said: COME SEE THE JEW VILLAGE! ADMISSION ONLY 15 REICHSMARKS! The sinister, hook-nosed figure in black on the billboard was straight out of a cartoon. It only faintly resembled the hardworking reenactors who populated Wawolnice.

"I hate that stupid sign," Veit said, as he did at least twice a week. "Makes us look like a bunch of jerks."

"It’s like a book cover," Kristina answered, as she did whenever he pissed and moaned about the billboard. "It draws people in. Then they can see what we’re really about."

"It draws assholes in," Veit said morosely. "They hold their noses at the smells and they laugh at our clothes and they show off their titties and think it’s funny."

"You weren’t complaining when Wolf told you about that," his wife pointed out. "Except that you didn’t see it, I mean."

"Yeah, well . . ." He took one hand off the wheel for a moment to make a vague gesture of appeasement.

Lublin was about half an hour away at the Autobahn’s
Mach schnell!
speeds. It was clean and bright and orderly, like any town in the
Grossdeutsches Reich
these days. It had belonged to Poland, of course, before the War of Retribution. It had been a provincial capital, in fact. But that was a long time ago now. These days, Poles were almost as much an anachronism as Jews. The Germans had reshaped Lublin in their own image. They looked around and saw that it was good.

"Want to stop somewhere for dinner?" Veit asked as he pulled off the highway and drove into the city.

"Not really. I am tired," Kristi said. "We’ve got leftovers back at the flat. If that’s all right with you."

"Whatever you want," he said.

They could have afforded a bigger apartment, but what would the point have been? They poured most of their time and most of their energy into the village. If you weren’t going to do that, you didn’t belong at Wawolnice. They used the flat as a place to relax and to sleep. How fancy did you need to be for that?

Kristina warmed up some rolls in the oven. A few minutes later, she put sweet-and-sour cabbage stuffed with veal sausage and rice into the microwave. Veit’s contribution to supper was pouring out two tumblers of Greek white wine. "Oh, thank you," his wife said. "I could use one tonight."

"Me, too." Veit went on in Hebrew: "
Barukh atah Adonai, elohaynu melekh ha-olam, bo’ re p’ ri ha-gafen.
"
Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who bringest forth the fruit of the vine.

"Practice," Kristi said as they clinked the big, heavy glasses.

"
Aber natürlich
," Veit agreed. "If you don’t use a language, you’ll lose it." He assumed the flat had microphones. He’d never heard of one that didn’t. How much attention the
Sicherheitsdienst
paid . . . well, who could guess? Then again, who wanted to find out the hard way? If you started praying in the dead language of a proscribed
Volk
, better to let any possible SD ear know you had a reason.

The microwave buzzed. Kristina took out the glass tray, then retrieved the rolls. Veit poured more wine. His wife put food on the table. He blessed the bread and the main course, as he had the wine. They ate. He made his portion disappear amazingly fast.

"Do you want more?" Kristi asked. "There is some."

He thought about it, then shook his head. "No, that’s all right. But I was hungry."

She was doing the dishes when the phone rang. Veit picked it up. "
Bitte?
" He listened for a little while, then said, "Hang on a second." Putting his palm on the mouthpiece, he spoke over the rush of water in the sink: "It’s your kid sister. She wants to know if we feel like going out and having a few drinks."

She raised an eyebrow as she turned off the faucet. He shrugged back. She reached for the phone. He handed it to her. "Ilse?" she said. "Listen, thanks for asking, but I think we’ll pass. . . . Yes, I know we said that the last time, too, but we’re really beat tonight. And there’s a pogrom coming up soon, and we’ll have to get ready for that. They’re always
meshuggeh
. . . . It means crazy, is what it means, and they are. . . . Yes, next time for sure. So long." She hung up.

"So what will we do?" Veit asked.

"I’m going to finish the dishes," his wife said virtuously. "Then? I don’t know. TV, maybe. And some more wine."

"Sounds exciting." Veit picked up the corkscrew. They’d just about killed this bottle. He’d have to summon reinforcements.

They plopped down on the sofa. TV was TV, which is to say, dull. The comedies were stupid. When a story about a cat up a tree led the news, you knew there was no news. The local footballers were down 3-1 with twenty minutes to play.

And so it wasn’t at all by accident that Veit’s hand happened to fall on Kristina’s knee. She made as if to swat him, but her eyes sparkled. Instead of pulling away, he slid the hand up under her skirt. She swung toward him. "Who says it won’t be exciting tonight?"she asked.

#

Getting ready for the pogrom kept everyone hopping. The reenactors who played Wawolnice’s Jews and Poles had to go on doing everything they normally did. You couldn’t disappoint the paying customers, and the routine of village life had an attraction of its own once you got used to it. And they had to ready the place so it would go through chaos and come out the other side with as little damage as possible.

A couple of buildings would burn down. They’d get rebuilt later, during nights. Along with everyone else, Veit and Kristi made sure the hidden sprinkler systems in the houses and shops nearby were in good working order, and that anything sprinklers might damage was replaced by a waterproof substitute.

Veit also moved the Torah from the Ark in the
shul
. A blank substitute scroll would burn, along with a couple of drugged and conditioned convicts who would try to rescue it. The Poles would make a bonfire of the books in the
bet ha-midrash
--but not out of the real books, only of convincing fakes.

People slept in their village living quarters, or on cots in the underground changing areas. Hardly anyone had time to go home. They wore their costumes all the time, even though the laundry did tend to them more often than would have been strictly authentic.

Eyeing a bandage on his finger--a knife he was sharpening had got him, a hazard of his village trade--Veit Harlan grumbled, "I’m Jakub a lot more than I’m me these days."

"You aren’t the only one," Kristina said. His wife was also eligible for a wound badge. She’d grated her knuckle along with some potatoes that went into a
kugel
.

"We’ll get to relax a little after the pogrom," Veit said. "And it’ll bring in the crowds. Somebody told me he heard a tourist say they were advertising it on the radio."

"‘ Come see the Jews get what’s coming to them--again!’" Kristi did a fine impersonation of an excitable radio announcer. It would have been a fine impersonation, anyhow, if not for the irony that dripped from her voice.

"Hey," Veit said--half sympathy, half warning.

"I know," she answered. Her tone
had
been too raw. "I’m just tired."

"Oh, sure. Me, too. Everybody is," Veit said. "Well, day after tomorrow and then it’s over--till the next time."

"Till the next time," Kristi said.

"Yeah. Till then," Veit echoed. That wasn’t exactly agreement. Then again, it wasn’t exactly disagreement. Wawolnice moved in strange and mysterious ways. The
Reich
’s Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German Populace knew in broad outline what it wanted to have happen in the village. After all, National Socialism had been closely studying the Jewish enemy since long before the War of Retribution. Without such study, the Commissariat would never have been able to re-create such a precise copy of a
shtetl
. Details were up to the reenactors, though. They didn’t have scripts. They improvised every day.

The pogrom broke out in the market square. That made sense. A Polish woman screeched that a Jew selling old clothes--old clothes specially manufactured for the village and lovingly aged--was cheating her. Rocks started flying. Jews started running. Whooping, drunken Poles overturned carts, spilling clothes and vegetables and rags and leather goods and what-have-you on the muddy ground. Others swooped down to steal what they could.

When the
melamed
and the boys from the
kheder
fled, Veit figured Jakub had better get out, too. A rock crashing through his shop’s front window reinforced the message. This part of Wawolnice wasn’t supposed to burn. All those elaborate fire-squelching systems should make sure of that. But anything you could make, you could also screw up. And so he scuttled out the front door, one hand clapped to his black hat so he shouldn’t, God forbid, go bareheaded even for an instant.

Schoolchildren, plump burghers on holiday, and tourists from places like Japan and Brazil photographed the insanity. You had to go on pretending they weren’t there. A pack of Poles were stomping a man in Jewish costume to death. One of the convict’s hands opened and closed convulsively as they did him in. He bleated out the last words that had been imposed on him: "
Sh’ ma, Yisroayl, Adonai elohaynu, Adonai ekhod!
"
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!

Another performer playing a Pole swung a plank at Veit. Had that connected, he never would have had a chance to gabble out his last prayer. But the reenactor missed--on purpose, Veit devoutly hoped. Still holding on to his hat, he ran down the street.

"Stinking Yid!" the performer roared in Polish. Veit just ran faster. Jews didn’t fight back, after all. Then he ran into bad luck--or rather, it ran into him. A flying rock caught him in the ribs.

"Oof!" he said, and then, "
Vey iz mir!
" When he breathed, he breathed knives. Something in there was broken. He had to keep running. If the Poles caught him, they wouldn’t beat him to death, but they’d beat him up. They couldn’t do anything else--realism came first. Oh, they might pull punches and go easy on kicks where they could, but they’d still hurt him. Hell, they’d already hurt him, even without meaning to.

Or they might not pull anything. Just as the reenactors in Jewish roles took pride in playing them to the hilt, so did the people playing Poles. If they were supposed to thump on Jews, they might go ahead and thump on any old Jew they could grab, and then have a drink or three to celebrate afterward.

A woman screamed. The shriek sounded alarmingly sincere, even by Wawolnice standards. Veit hoped things weren’t getting out of hand there. The less the senior inspectors from Lublin or even Berlin interfered with the way the village ran, the better for everybody here. "Jews" and "Poles" both took that as an article of faith.

Veit ducked into one of the buildings where Jews lived in one another’s laps. As long as nobody could see him from outside . . . A woman in there gaped at him. "What are you doing here?" she asked--still in Yiddish, still in character.

"I got hurt. They banged on my teakettle once too often," he answered, also sticking to his role. He grabbed at his side. Would he have to start coughing up blood to convince people? He was afraid he might be able to do it.

What kind of horrible grimace stretched across his face? Or had he gone as pale as that village miracle, a clean shirt? The woman didn’t argue with him any more (for a Wawolnice Jew, that came perilously close to falling out of one’s part). She threw open her closet door. "Go on. Disappear, already."

"God bless you and keep you. I wish my ribs would disappear." He ducked inside. She closed the outer door after him. He fumbled till he found the light switch. Then he went to the inner door, identical to the one in his own crowded home. He was an authorized person, all right. On the far side of that door lay the modern underpinnings to the early-twentieth-century Polish village.

Now he didn’t have to run for his life. Slowly and painfully, he walked down the concrete stairs and along a passageway to the first-aid center. He had to wait to be seen. He wasn’t the only villager who’d got hurt. Sure as hell, pogroms were always a mess.

A medical tech prodded his rib cage. "
Gevalt!
" Veit exclaimed.

"You don’t have to go on making like a Jew down here," the tech said condescendingly. Veit hurt too much to argue with him. The neatly uniformed Aryan felt him some more and listened to his chest with a stethoscope, then delivered his verdict: "You’ve got a busted slat or two, all right. Doesn’t seem to be any lung damage, though. I’ll give you some pain pills. Even with ’em, you’ll be sore as hell on and off the next six weeks."

"Aren’t you even going to bandage me up?" Veit asked.

"Nope. We don’t do that anymore, not in ordinary cases. The lung heals better unconstricted. Step off to one side now for your pills and your paperwork."

"Right," Veit said tightly. The tech might as well have been an auto mechanic. Now that he’d checked Veit’s struts and figured out what his trouble was, he moved on to the next dented chassis. And Veit moved on to pharmacy and bureaucracy.

A woman who would have been attractive if she hadn’t seemed so bored handed him a plastic vial full of fat green pills. He gulped one down, dry, then started signing the papers she shoved at him. That got a rise out of her: she went from bored to irked in one fell swoop. "What are those chicken scratches?" she demanded.