Shtetl Days Read online

  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.

  “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 anesthe
tized, 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 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.”

  “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.