Shtetl Days Read online

  “You bet I don’t.” Veit looked up at the acoustic tiles on the treatment room’s ceiling. The shot didn’t hurt much—less than he’d expected. Still, it wasn’t something you wanted to think about; no, indeed.

  Chuckling, the doctor said, “Since you’re playing one of those miserable, money-grubbing kikes, of course you’ll be happy about the raise you’re getting for going all out.”

  “As long as my eel still goes up after this, that’s the only raise I care about right now,” Veit answered. The doctor laughed again and went to work.

  Bandaging up afterward took longer than the actual procedure. As Veit was carefully pulling up his pants, the doctor said, “Take your first pill in about an hour. That way, it’ll be working when the local wears off.”

  “That would be good,” Veit agreed. He got one more laugh from the man in the white coat. No doubt everything seemed funnier when you were on the other end of the scalpel.

  He didn’t have Kristi drive home; he did it himself, with his legs splayed wide. He couldn’t feel anything—the anesthetic was still going strong—but he did even so. He dutifully swallowed the pill at the appointed time. Things started hurting anyway: hurting like hell, not to put too fine a point on it. Veit gulped another pill. It was too soon after the first, but he did it all the same.

  Two pain pills were better than one, but not enough. He still hurt. The pills did make his head feel like a balloon attached to his body on a long string. What happened from his neck down was still there, but only distantly connected to the part of him that noticed.

  He ate whatever Kristi put on the table. Afterward, he remembered eating, but not what he’d eaten.

  He wandered out into the front room and sat down in front of the TV. He might do that any evening to unwind from a long day of being a Jew, but this felt different. The screen in front of him swallowed all of his consciousness that didn’t sting.

  Which was odd, because the channel he’d chosen more or less at random was showing a string of ancient movies: movies from before the War of Retribution, movies in black and white. Normally, Veit had no patience for that. He lived in a black-and-white world in Wawolnice. When he watched the television, he wanted something brighter, something more interesting.

  Tonight, though, with the two pain pills pumping through him, he just didn’t care. The TV was on. He’d watch it. He didn’t have to think while he stared at the pictures. Something called Bringing Up Baby was running. It was funny even though it was dubbed. It was funny even though he was drugged.

  When it ended and commercials came on, they seemed jarringly out of place. They were gaudy. They were noisy. Veit couldn’t wait for them to end and the next old film to start.

  It finally did. Frankenstein was about as far from Bringing Up Baby as you could get and still be called a movie. Some of the antique special effects seemed unintentionally comic to a modern man, even if the modern man was doped to the eyebrows. But Veit ended up impressed in spite of himself. As with the comedy, no wonder people still showed this one more than a hundred years after it was made.

  He took one more green pill after the movie and staggered off to bed. He slept like a log, assuming logs take care to sleep on their backs.

  When he woke up the next morning, he wasn’t as sore as he’d thought he would be. And he’d rolled over onto his side during the night and hadn’t perished, or even screamed. He did take another pill, but he didn’t break any Olympic sprint records running to the kitchen to get it.

  “You poor thing,” Kristi said. “Your poor thing.”

  “I’ll live.” Veit decided he might even mean it. Once he soaked up some coffee and then some breakfast—and once that pill kicked in—he might even want to mean it.

  Caffeine, food, and opiate did indeed work wonders. His wife nodded approvingly. “You don’t have that glazed look you did last night.”

  “Who, me?” Veit hadn’t been sure he could manage indignation, but he did.

  Not that it helped. “Yes, you,” Kristi retorted. “You don’t sit there gaping at the TV for three hours straight with drool running down your chin when you’re in your right mind.”

  “But it was good.” No sooner had Veit said it than he wondered whether he would have thought so if he hadn’t been zonked. Kristina’s raised eyebrow announced louder than words that she wondered exactly the same thing.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have enjoyed the silliness in Bringing Up Baby so much if he’d been fully in the boring old Aristotelian world. But Frankenstein wasn’t silly—not even slightly. Taking pieces from the dead, putting them together, and reanimating them… No, nothing even the least bit silly about that.

  As a matter of fact… His jaw dropped. “Der Herr Gott im Himmel,” he whispered, and then, “Vey iz mir!”

  “What is it?” Kristi asked.

  “Wawolnice,” Veit said.

  “Well, what about it?” hi wife said.

  But he shook his head. “You weren’t watching the movie last night.” He didn’t know what she had been doing. Anything that hadn’t been right in front of him or right next to him simply wasn’t there. She’d stuck her head into the front room once or twice—probably to make sure he could sit up straight—but she hadn’t watched.

  And you needed to have. Because what was Wawolnice but a Frankenstein village of Jews? It wasn’t meant to have come to life on its own, but it had, it had. So far, the outsiders hadn’t noticed. No mob of peasants with torches and pitchforks had swarmed in to destroy it—only performers playing Poles, who were every bit as artificial.

  How long could they go on? Could they possibly spread? Reb Eliezer thought so. Veit wasn’t nearly as sure. But Eliezer might be right. He might. One more time, alevai omayn.

  END

  Copyright © 2011 by Harry Turtledove

  Art copyright © 2011 by Gary Kelley

  Books by Harry Turtledove

  GERIN THE FOX

  Were Blood

  Werenight

  Prince of the North

  King of the North

  Fox and Empire

  VIDESSOS

  The Misplaced Legion

  An Emperor for the Legion

  The Legion of Videssos

  Swords of the Legion

  Videssos Cycle (omnibus)

  Bridge of the Separator

  KRISPOS

  Krispos Rising

  Krispos of Videssos

  Krispos the Emperor

  WORLDWAR

  In the Balance

  Tilting the Balance

  Upsetting the Balance

  Striking the Balance

  TIME OF TROUBLES

  The Stolen Throne

  Hammer and Anvil

  The Thousand Cities

  Videssos Besieged

  GREAT WAR

  How Few Remain

  The American Front

  Walk in Hell

  Breakthroughs

  DARKNESS

  Into the Darkness

  Darkness Descending

  Through the Darkness

  Rulers of the Darkness

  Jaws of Darkness

  Out of the Darkness

  COLONISATION

  Second Contact

  Down to Earth

  Aftershocks

  WAR BETWEEN THE PROVINCES

  Sentry Peak

  Marching Through Peachtree

  Advance and Retreat

  AMERICAN EMPIRE

  Blood and Iron

  The Center Cannot Hold

  The Victorious Opposition

  CROSSTIME TRAFFIC

  Gunpowder Empire

  Curious Notions

  In High Places

  The Disunited States of America

  The Gladiator

  The Valley-Westside War

  SETTLING ACCOUNTS

  Return Engagement

  Drive to the East

  The Grapple

  In At the Death

  Pacific War

  Day
s of Infamy

  End of the Beginning

  Gap

  Beyond the Gap

  The Breath of God

  The Golden Shrine

  Atlantis

  Opening Atlantis

  The United States of Atlantis

  Liberating Atlantis

  War That Came Early

  Hitler's War

  West and East

  The Big Switch

  Novels

  Agent of Byzantium

  Noninterference

  A Different Flesh

  Kaleidoscope

  A World of Difference

  Earthgrip

  The Guns of the South

  The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

  The Two Georges: The Novel of an Alternate America (with Richard Dreyfuss)

  Thessalonica

  Between the Rivers

  Household Gods (with Judith Tarr)

  Wisdom of the Fox: The Man Who Wouldn't Be King (As If He Had a Choice)

  Tale of the Fox

  Ruled Britannia

  Conan of Venarium

  In the Presence of Mine Enemies

  Homeward Bound

  Every Inch a King

  Fort Pillow

  The Man with the Iron Heart

  After the Downfall

  Give Me Back My Legions!

  Collections

  Departures

  Down in the Bottomlands: And Other Places (with L Sprague de Camp)

  Counting Up, Counting Down

  Reincarnations

  Forty, Counting Down & Twenty-One, Counting Up

  Atlantis and Other Places