Short Stories Read online

  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 clo
sed 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.

  "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-mitzvahs 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 goodne
ss.

  "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.