Short Stories (12 page)

"Oh, sure." Itzhik carried it over to the window--the window that might have stood there forgotten since the beginning of time but was in fact brand new. He held the knife in the best light he could find and bent close to examine the edge. He took longer looking it over than Veit had. When the verdict came, it was a reluctant nod, but a nod it was. "You haven’t got a
shayla
on your
puppik
, anyway," he admitted.

"Thank you so much," Veit said with a snort. A
shayla
was a mark of disease that left meat unfit for consumption by Jews. His
puppik
--his gizzard--probably had a bruise on it right this minute, but no
shayla
s.

"So what do I owe you?" Itzhik asked.

"A zloty will do," Veit said. The
shokhet
set the coin on the counter. After one more nod, he walked out into the street.

Those chickens will never know what hit them,
Veit thought, not without pride. The knife had been sharp when Itzhik handed it to him, and sharper after he got through with it. No one would be able to say its work went against Jewish rules for slaughtering.

Jewish rules held sway here, in Wawolnice’s Jewish quarter. Out in the wider world, things were different. The
Reich
let the performers playing Poles here execute--no, encouraged them to execute--those convicts dressed as
shtetl
Jews by stoning them and beating them to death. Assume the convicts (or some of them, anyhow) deserved to die for their crimes. Did they deserve to die like that?

As Veit’s recent argument with Reb Eliezer here in the shop showed, Jewish practice leaned over backwards to keep from putting people to death, even when the letter of the law said they had it coming. He’d learned in his own Talmudic studies that an ancient Sanhedrin that executed even one man in seventy years went down in history as a bloody Sanhedrin.

Again, the modern world was a little different. Yes, just a little. The
Reich
believed in
Schrechlichkeit
--frightfulness--as a legal principle. If you scared the living shit out of somebody, maybe he wouldn’t do what he would have done otherwise. And so the
Reich
didn’t just do frightful things to people it caught and condemned. It bragged that it did such things to them.

Along with the quiz shows and football matches and historical melodramas and shows full of singers and dancers that littered the TV landscape, there were always televised hangings of partisans from Siberia or Canada or Peru. Sometimes, for variety’s sake, the TV would show a Slav who’d presumed to sleep with his German mistress getting his head chopped off. Sometimes she would go to the block right after him, or even at his side.

All those executions, all those contorted faces and twisting bodies, all those fountains of blood, had been a normal part of the TV landscape for longer than Veit had been alive. He’d watched a few. Hell, everybody’d watched a few. He didn’t turn them on because they turned him on, the way some people did. He’d always figured that put him on the right side of the fence.

Maybe it did--no, of course it did--when you looked at things from the
Reich
’s perspective. Which he did, and which everyone did, because, in the world as it was, what other perspective could there be? None, none whatsoever, not in the world as it was.

But Wawolnice wasn’t part of the world as it was. Wawolnice was an artificial piece of the world as it had been before National Socialist Germany went and set it to rights. Performing here as a Jew, living here as a Jew, gave Veit an angle from which to view the wider world he could have got nowhere else.

And if the wider world turned out to be an uglier place than he’d imagined, than he could have imagined, before he came to Wawolnice, what did that say?

He’d been wrestling with the question ever since it first occurred to him. He was ashamed to remember how long that had taken. He wasn’t the only one, either. To some of the reenactors who portrayed Jews, it was just another gig. They’d put it on their résum é s and then go off and do something else, maybe on the legitimate stage, maybe not. Down in Romania, there was a Gypsy encampment that reproduced another way of life the National Socialist victory had eliminated.

For others here, things were different. You had to be careful what you said and where you said it, but that was true all over the
Reich
, which amounted to all over the world. Adding another layer of caution to the everyday one you grew up with probably--no, certainly--wouldn’t hurt.

#

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the shop door swung open. In strode . . . not another village Jew, not a village Pole with something to fix that he trusted to Jakub’s clever hands rather than to one of his countrymen, not even a tourist curious about what the inside of one of these hole-in-the-wall shops looked like. No. In came a man wearing the uniform of an SS
Hauptsturmf ü hrer
: the equivalent of a
Wehrmacht
captain.

Veit blinked, not sure what he was supposed to do. The Wawolnice in which he lived and worked--in which he performed--lay buried in a past before the War of Retribution. A Wawolnice Jew seeing an SS
Hauptsturmf ü hrer
would not automatically be reduced to the blind panic that uniform induced in Jews during the war and for as long afterward as there were still Jews. A modern Aryan still might be reduced to that kind of panic, though, or to something not far from it.

If a modern Aryan was reduced to that kind of panic, he would be smart to try not to show it. Veit let the
Hauptsturmf ü hrer
take the lead. The officer wasted no time doing so, barking, "You are the performer Veit Harlan, otherwise called Jakub Shlayfer the Jew?"

"That’s right. What’s this all about?" Veit answered in Yiddish.

The SS man’s mouth twisted, as if at a bad smell. "Speak proper German, not this barbarous, disgusting dialect."

"Please excuse me, sir, but our instructions are to stay in character at all times when in public in the village," Veit said meekly, but still in the
mamaloshen
. He’d thought Yiddish was a barbarous dialect when he started learning it, too. The more natural it became, the less sure of that he got. You could say things in German you couldn’t begin to in Yiddish. But the reverse, he’d been surprised to discover, also held true. Yiddish might be a jaunty beggar of a language, but a language it was.

All of which cut no ice with the
Hauptsturmf ü hrer
. He laid a sheet of paper on the counter. "Here is a directive from your project leader, releasing you from those instructions so you may be properly questioned."

Veit picked up the paper and read it. It was what the SS man said it was. "
Zu befehl, Herr Hauptsturmfü hrer!
" he said, clicking his heels.

"That’s more like it," the SS officer said smugly. Veit counted himself lucky that the fellow didn’t notice obedience laid on with a trowel.

Making sure to treat his vowels the way an ordinary German would--in this shop, remembering wasn’t easy; Veit felt as if he were using a foreign language, not his own--the reenactor said, "Sir, you still haven’t told me what this is about."

"I would have, if you hadn’t wasted my time." Nothing was going to be--nothing could possibly be--the
Hauptsturmfü hrer
’s fault. He leaned toward Veit. No doubt he intended to intimidate, and he succeeded. "So tell me, Jew, what your rabbi meant by congratulating you on your prayer this morning."

He couldn’t have practiced that sneer on authentic Jews. Authentic Jews were gone: gone from Germany, gone from Eastern Europe, gone from France and England, gone from North America, gone from Argentina, gone from Palestine, gone from South Africa, gone even from Shanghai and Harbin. Gone.
Spurlos verschwunden
--vanished without a trace. Off the map, literally and metaphorically. But he must have seen a lot of movies and TV shows and plays (Jews made favorite enemies, of course), because he had it down pat.

First things first, then. Veit pulled his wallet from an inside pocket of his coat and took out his identity card. He thrust it at the SS man. "
Herr Hauptsturmführer
, I am not a Jew. This proves my Aryan blood. I am a performer, paid to portray a Jew."

Grudgingly, the officer inspected the card. Grudgingly, he handed it back. "All right. You are not a Jew," he said, more grudgingly yet. "Answer my questions anyhow."

"You would do better asking him." Veit pressed his tiny advantage.

"Don’t worry. Someone else is taking care of that." The officer stuck out his chin, which wasn’t so strong as he might have wished. "Meanwhile, I’m asking you."

"All right. You have to understand, I’m only guessing, though. I think he meant I played my role well. I got hurt when the village staged a pogrom yesterday--a broken rib."

"Yes, I’ve seen the medical report," the SS man said impatiently. "Go on."

"A real Jew, a pious Jew, would have given the prayer of thanksgiving for coming through danger at the next
minyan
he was part of. I play a pious Jew, so I did what a pious Jew would do. The actor who plays the rabbi"--Veit came down hard on that--"must have thought it was a nice touch, and he was kind enough to tell me so. Please excuse me, but you’re wasting your time trying to make anything more out of it."

"Time spent protecting the
Reich
’s security is never wasted." The
Hauptsturmfü hrer
might have been quoting the Torah. He certainly was quoting his own Holy Writ. He stabbed a forefinger at Veit. "Besides, look at the village. This is a new day. The pogrom never happened."

"
Herr Hauptsturmführer
, they’ve fixed up the village overnight. My ribs still hurt," Veit said reasonably. He reached into a coat pocket again. This time, he took out the plastic vial of pain pills. He displayed them in the palm of his hand.

The SS man snatched them away and examined the label. "Oh, yeah. This shit. They gave me some of this after they yanked my wisdom teeth. I was flying, man." As if embarrassed that the human being under the uniform had peeped out for a moment, he slammed the vial down on the counter.

Veit tucked the pills away. He tried to take advantage of the officer’s slip, if that was what it was: "So you see how it goes, sir. I was just playing my role, just doing my job. If I have to act like a dirty Jew, I should act like the best dirty Jew I can, shouldn’t I?"

"Dirty is right." The
Hauptsturmfü hrer
jerked a thumb at the window behind him. "When’s the last time somebody washed that?"

"I don’t know, sir," Veit answered, which might have been technically true. He wasn’t flying--his latest pill was wearing off--but he knew he might burst into hysterical laughter if he told the SS man that window had gone into place during the night to replace one smashed in the pogrom.

"Disgusting. And to think those pigdogs actually got off on living like this." The SS man shook his head in disbelief. "Fucking disgusting. So you remember you’re playing a fucking part, you hear?"

"I always remember," Veit said, and that was nothing but the truth.

"You’d better." The
Hauptsturmfü hrer
lumbered out of the shop. He slammed the door behind him. For a moment, Veit feared the glaziers would have another window to replace, but the pane held.

He wasn’t due for the next pill for another hour, but he took one anyhow, and washed it down with a slug of plum brandy from a small bottle he kept in a drawer on his side of the counter. The warnings on the vial might say you shouldn’t do that, but the warnings on the vial hadn’t been written with visits from SS men in mind.

He wondered how Reb Eliezer’s interrogation had gone. As they’d needed to, they’d picked a clever fellow to play the village rabbi. But the SS specialized in scaring you so much, you forgot you had any brains. And if they were questioning Eliezer, maybe he didn’t report to anybody after all. Maybe. All Eliezer had to do was stick to the truth here and everything would be fine . . . Veit hoped.

He also wondered if the rabbi would come over here to talk about what had happened. There, Veit hoped not. The
Hauptsturmf ü hrer
had proved that the
shul
was thoroughly bugged. No great surprise, that, but now it was confirmed. And if they’d just grilled one Jakub Shlayfer, grinder, the walls to his shop were bound to have ears, too. Would Reb Eliezer be clever enough to realize as much?

Eliezer must have been, because he didn’t show up. Before long, the potent pill and the slivovitz made Veit not care so much. He got less work done than he might have. On the other hand, they didn’t haul him off to a
Vernichtungslager
, either, so he couldn’t count the day a dead loss.

#

"I’m tired," Kristi said as they walked across the parking lot to their car.

"Me, too." Veit moved carefully, like an old man. The rib still bit him every few steps.

"Want me to drive again, then?" his wife asked. She’d thrown out a hint, but he’d tossed it right back.

"Please, if you don’t mind too much."

"It’s all right," she said.

Veit translated that as
I mind, but not too much
. He waited till they were pulling onto the
Autobahn
before saying, "Let’s stop somewhere in Lublin for supper."

"I’ve got those chicken legs defrosting at home," Kristi said doubtfully.

"Chuck ’em in the fridge when we get back," Veit said. "We’ll have ’em tomorrow."

"Suits me." She sounded happy. "I didn’t feel much like cooking tonight anyway."

"I could tell." That was one reason Veit had suggested eating out. It wasn’t the only one. He hadn’t told her anything about what had happened during the day. You had to assume the SS could hear anything that went on in Wawolnice. You also had to figure they could bug an Audi. But you had to hope they couldn’t keep tabs on everything that went on in every eatery in Lublin.

"That looks like a good place," he said, pointing, as they went through town.

"But--" she began. He held a vertical finger in front of his lips, as if to say,
Yes, something is up
. No dope, Kristi got it right away. "Well, we’ll give it a try, then," she said, and eased the car into a tight parking space at least as smoothly as Veit could have done it.