Shtetl Days Read online

  “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 shaylas.

  “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 résumés 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 Hauptsturmführer: 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 Hauptsturmführer 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 Hauptsturmführer 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 Hauptsturmführer. 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 Hauptsturmführer!” 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 Hauptsturmführer’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 Hauptsturmführer 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 Hauptsturmführer 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 Hauptsturmführer 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 Hauptsturmführer 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.

  When they walked into the Boar’s Head, the maître d’ blinked at Veit’s flowing beard. They weren’t the style in the real world. But Veit talked like a rational fellow, and slipped him ten Reichsmarks besides. No zlotych here. They were village play money. Poland’s currency was as dead as the country. The Reichsmark ruled the world no less than the Reich did. And ten of them were plenty to secure a good table.

  Veit and Kristi ordered beer. The place was lively and noisy. People chattered. A band oompahed in the background. It was still early, but couples already spun on the dance floor. After the seidels came, Veit talked about the Hauptsturmführer’s visit in a low voice.

  Her eyes widened in sympathy—and in alarm. “But that’s so stupid!” she burst out.

  “Tell me about it,” Veit said. “I think I finally got through to him that it was all part of a day’s work. I sure hope I did.”

  “Alevai omayn!” Kristi said. That was a slip of sorts, because it wasn’t German, but you had to believe you could get away with a couple of words every now and then if you were in a safe place or a public place: often one and the same. And the Yiddish phrase meant exactly what Veit was thinking.

  “Are you ready to order yet?” The waitress was young and cute and perky. And she was well trained. Veit’s whiskers didn’t faze her one bit.

  “I sure am.” He pointed to the menu. “I want the ham steak, with the red-cabbage sauerkraut and the creamed potatoes.”

  “Yes, sir.” She wrote it down. “And you, ma’am?”

  “How is the clam-and-crayfish stew?” Kristi asked.

  “Oh, it’s very good!” The waitress beamed. “Everybody likes it. Last week, someone who used to live in Lublin drove down from Warsaw just to have some.”

  “Well, I’ll try it, then.”

  When the food came, they stopped talking and attended to it. Once his plate was bare—which didn’t take long—Veit blotted his lips on his napkin and said, “I haven’t had ham that good in quite a while.” He hadn’t eaten any ham in quite a while, but he didn’t mention that.

  “The girl was right about the stew, too,” his wife said. “I don’t know that I’d come all the way from Warsaw to order it, but it’s delicious.”

  Busboys whisked away the dirty dishes. The waitress brought the check. Veit gave her his charge card. She took it away to print out the bill. He scrawled his signature on the restaurant copy and put the customer copy and the card back in his wallet.

  He and Kristi walked out to the car. On the way, she remarked, “Protective coloration.” Probably no microphones out here—and if there were, a phrase like that could mean almost anything.


  “Jawohl,” Veit agreed in no-doubt-about-it German. Now they’d put a couple of aggressively treyf meals in the computerized data system. Let some SS data analyst poring over their records go and call them Jews—or even think of them as Jews—after that!

  Again, Veit got in on the passenger side. “You just want me to keep chauffeuring you around,” Kristi teased.

  “I want my ribs to shut up and leave me alone,” Veit answered. “And if you do the same, I won’t complain about that, either.” She stuck out her tongue at him while she started the Audi. They were both laughing as she pulled out into traffic and headed home.

  As the medical technician had warned, getting over a broken rib took about six weeks. The tech hadn’t warned it would seem like forever. He also hadn’t warned what would happen if you caught a cold before the rib finished knitting. Veit did. It was easy to do in a place like Wawolnice, where a stream of strangers brought their germs with them. Sure as hell, he thought he was ripping himself to pieces every time he sneezed.

  But that too passed. At the time, Veit thought it passed like a kidney stone, but even Kristina was tired of his kvetching by then, so he did his best to keep his big mouth shut. It wasn’t as if he had nothing to be happy about. The SS didn’t call on him anymore, for instance. He and his wife went back to the Boar’s Head again. One treyf dinner after an interrogation might let analysts draw conclusions they wouldn’t draw from more than one. And the food there was good.

  He was pretty much his old self again by the time summer passed into fall and the High Holy Days—forgotten by everyone in the world save a few dedicated scholars…and the villagers and tourists at Wawolnice—came round again. He prayed in the shul on Rosh Hashanah, wishing everyone L’shanah tovah—a Happy New Year. That that New Year’s Day was celebrated only in the village didn’t bother him or any of the other performers playing Jews. It was the New Year for them, and they made the most of it with honey cakes and raisins and sweet kugels and other such poor people’s treats.