Short Stories Read online

  "Oh, not a hundred reasons. Maybe a dozen." Jakub was a precise man, as befitted a trade where a slip could cost a finger. But he also had his own kind of pride: "Give me enough time, and I suppose I could come up with a hundred."

  A sort of a smile lifted one corner of Reb Eliezer’s mouth. "Then perhaps now you begin to see why Rabbi Jokhanan of Palestine, of blessed memory, said hundreds of years ago that no man who could not do what you are doing had the skill he needed to open a capital case."

  As it so often did, seemingly preposterous Talmudic pilpul came back to the way Jews were supposed to live their lives. "I should hope so," Jakub answered. "You have to begin a capital case with the reasons for acquitting whoever is on trial. If you can’t find those reasons, someone else had better handle the case."

  "I agree with you." The rabbi wagged his forefinger at Jakub once more. "You won’t hear me tell you that very often."

  "Gevalt! I should hope not!" Jakub said in mock horror.

  Reb Eliezer’s eyes twinkled. "And so I had better go," he continued, as if the grinder hadn’t spoken. "The Lord bless you and keep you."

  "And you, Reb," Jakub replied. Eliezer dipped his head. He walked out of the shop and down the street. A man came in wanting liniment for a horse. Jakub compounded some. It made his business smell of camphor and turpentine the rest of the day. It also put a couple of more zlotych in his pocket. Bertha would be . . . less displeased.

  Shadows stretched across Wawolnice. Light began leaking out of the sky. The rain had held off, anyhow. People headed home from their work. Jakub was rarely one of the first to call it a day. Before long, though, the light coming in through the dusty front windows got too dim to use. Time to quit, all right.

  He closed up and locked the door. He’d done some tinkering with the lock. He didn’t think anybody not a locksmith could quietly pick it. Enough brute force, on the other hand . . . Jews in Poland understood all they needed to about brute force, and about who had enough of it. Jakub Shlayfer’s mobile mouth twisted. Polish Jews didn’t, never had, and never would.

  He walked home through the gathering gloom. "Stinking Yid!" The shrei in Polish pursued him. His shoulders wanted to sag under its weight, and the weight of a million more like it. He didn’t, he wouldn’t, let them. If the mamzrim saw they’d hurt you, they won. As long as a rock didn’t follow, he was all right. And if one did, he could duck or dodge. He hoped.

  No rocks tonight. Candles and kerosene lamps sent dim but warm glows out into the darkness. If you looked at the papers, electricity would come to the village soon. Then again, if you looked at the papers and believed everything you read in them, you were too dumb to live.

  Bertha met him at the door. Sheitel, head scarf over it, long black dress . . . She still looked good to him. She greeted him with, "So what were you and Reb Eliezer going on about today?"

  "Serpents," Jakub answered.

  "Pilpul." His wife’s sigh said she’d hoped for better, even if she hadn’t expected it. "I don’t suppose he had any paying business."

  "He didn’t, no," the grinder admitted. "But Barlicki’s wife came in for her clock. I had to swap out a gear, so I charged her more. I told her before that I would, but she still didn’t like it."

  "And God forbid you should make Barlicki’s wife unhappy." Bertha knew he thought the Polish woman was pretty, then. How long would she go on giving him a hard time about that? The next couple of days ought to be interesting. Not necessarily enjoyable, but interesting.

  He did what he could to show Bertha he appreciated her. Nostrils twitching, he said, "What smells so good?"

  "Soup with chicken feet," she replied, sounding slightly softened. "Cabbage, carrots, onions, mangel-wurzel . . ."

  Mangel-wurzel was what you used when you couldn’t afford turnips. Chicken feet were what you put in soup when you wanted it to taste like meat but you couldn’t afford much of the genuine article. You could gnaw on them, worrying off a little skin or some of the tendons that would have led to the drumsticks. You wouldn’t rise up from the table happy, but you might rise up happier.

  He stepped past her and into the small, crowded front room, with its rammed-earth floor and battered, shabby furniture. The little brass mezuzah still hung on the doorframe outside. He rarely gave it a conscious thought. Most of the time he only noticed it when it wasn’t there, so to speak. Stealing mezuzahs was one way Polish kids found to aggravate their Jewish neighbors. Not only that, but they might get a couple of groszy for the brass.

  Bertha closed the front door behind him and let the bar fall into its bracket. The sound of the stout plank thudding into place seemed very final, as if it put a full stop to the day. And so--again, in a manner of speaking--it did.

  Jakub walked over to the closet door. That the cramped space had room for a closet seemed something not far from miraculous. He wasn’t inclined to complain, though. Oh, no--on the contrary. Neither was Bertha, who came up smiling to stand beside him as he opened the door.

  Then they walked into the closet. They could do that now. The day was over. Jakub shoved coats and dresses out of the way. They smelled of wool and old sweat. Bertha flicked a switch as she closed the closet door. A ceiling light came on.

  "Thanks, sweetie," Jakub said. "That helps."

  In back of the clothes stood another door, this one painted battleship gray. In German, large, neatly stenciled black letters on the hidden doorway warned AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Being an authorized person, Jakub hit the numbers that opened that door. It showed a concrete stairway leading down. The walls to the descending corridor were also pale gray. Blue-tinged light from fluorescent tubes in ceiling fixtures streamed into the closet.

  Jakub started down the stairs. Bertha was an authorized person, too. She followed him, pausing only to close the hidden door behind them. A click announced it had locked automatically, as it was designed to do. The grinder and his wife left Wawolnice behind.

  Men and women in grimy Jewish costumes and about an equal number dressed as Poles from the time between the War of Humiliation and the triumphant War of Retribution ambled along an underground hallway. They chatted and chattered and laughed, as people who’ve worked together for a long time will at the end of a day.

  Arrows on the walls guided them toward their next destination. Explaining the arrows were large words beside them: TO THE SHOWERS. The explanation was about as necessary as a second head, but Germans had a habit of overdesigning things.

  Veit Harlan shook himself like a dog that had just scrambled out of a muddy creek. That was how he felt, too. Like any actor worth his salt, he immersed himself in the roles he played. When the curtain came down on another day, he always needed a little while to remember he wasn’t Jakub Shlayfer, a hungry Jew in a Polish village that had vanished from the map more than a hundred years ago.

  He wasn’t the only one, either. He would have been amazed if he had been. People heading for the showers to clean up after their latest shift in Wawolnice went right on throwing around the front vowels and extra-harsh gutturals of Yiddish. Only little by little did they start using honest German again.

  When they did, the fellow who played Reb Eliezer--his real name was Ferdinand Marian--and a pimply yeshiva-bukher (well, the pimply performer impersonating a young yeshiva-bukher) went right on with whatever disputation Eliezer had found after leaving Jakub’s shop. They went right on throwing Hebrew and Aramaic around, too. And the reb and the kid with zits both kept up a virtuoso display of finger-wagging.

  "They’d better watch that," Veit murmured to the woman who had been Bertha a moment before.

  "I know." She nodded. She was really Kristina Söderbaum. They were married to each other out in the Reich as well as in the village. The people who ran Wawolnice used real couples whenever they could. They claimed it made the performances more convincing. If that meant Veit got to work alongside his wife, he wouldn’t complain.

  The guy who played Alter the melamed caught up to Veit and Kristi from be
hind. In the wider world, he was Wolf Albach-Retty. "Hey, Veit. Did you see the gal who flashed her tits at me this morning?" he exclaimed.

  "No! I wish I would have," Harlan answered. His wife planted an elbow in his ribs. Ignoring her, he went on, "When did that happen?"

  "It was early--not long after the village opened up," Wolf said.

  "Too bad. I was working on that clock for a lot of the morning. I guess I didn’t pick the right time to look up."

  "A bunch of the kids did. Boy, they paid even less attention to me than usual after that," Albach-Retty said. Veit laughed. The melamed rolled his eyes. "It’s funny for you. It’s funny for the damn broad, too. But I’m the guy who had to deal with it. When I was potching the little bastards, I was potching ’em good." He mimed swatting a backside.

  "Nothing they haven’t got from you before," Veit said, which was also true. Everything the villagers did in Wawolnice was real. They pretended the curious people who came to gawk at them weren’t there. But how were you supposed to pretend a nice set of tits wasn’t there (and Veit would have bet it was a nice set--otherwise the woman wouldn’t have shown them off)?

  "Worse than usual, I tell you." Wolf leaned toward self-pity.

  "You’ll live. So will they," Veit said. "If they don’t like it, let ’em file a complaint with the SPCA." Kristi giggled, which was what he’d hoped for. After a moment, Wolf Albach-Retty laughed, too. That was a bonus.

  The corridor to the showers split, one arrow marked MEN, the other WOMEN. Veit stripped off the heavy, baggy, dark, sweaty outfit of a Wawolnice Jew with a sigh of relief. He chucked it into a cubbyhole and scratched. The village wasn’t a hundred percent realistic. They did spray it to keep down the bugs. You weren’t supposed to pick up fleas or lice or bedbugs, even if you were portraying a lousy, flea-bitten kike.

  Theory was wonderful. Veit had found himself buggy as new software more than once coming off a shift. So had Kristi. So had just about all the other performers. It was a hazard of the trade, like a director who happened to be an oaf.

  He didn’t discover any uninvited guests tonight. Hot water and strong soap wiped away the stinks from Wawolnice. He took showering with a bunch of other men completely for granted. He’d started as a Pimpf in the Hitler Jugend, he’d kept it up through the Labor Service and his two-year hitch in the Wehrmacht, and now he was doing it some more. So what? Skin was skin, and he didn’t get a charge out of guys.

  Reb Eliezer and the yeshiva-bukher were still arguing about the Talmud in the shower. They were both circumcised. Quite a few of the men playing Jews were. Prizing realism as it did, the Reenactors’Guild gave you a raise if you were willing to have the operation. Veit kept all his original equipment. He didn’t need the cash that badly, and Kristina liked him fine the way he was.

  He grabbed a cotton towel, dried himself off, and tossed the towel into a very full bin. A bath attendant in coveralls--a scared, scrawny Slavic Untermensch from beyond the Urals--wheeled the bin away and brought out an empty one. Veit noticed him hardly more than he did the tourists who came to stare at Wawolnice and see what Eastern Europe had been like before the Grossdeutsches Reich cleaned things up.

  You were trained not to notice tourists. You were trained to pretend they weren’t there, and not to react when they did stuff (though Veit had never had anybody flash tits at him). It was different with the bath attendant. Did you notice a stool if you didn’t intend to sit down on it? More like that.

  Veit spun the combination dial on his locker. He put on his own clothes: khaki cotton slacks, a pale green polo shirt, and a darker green cardigan sweater. Synthetic socks and track shoes finished the outfit. It was much lighter, much softer, and much more comfortable than his performing costume.

  He had to twiddle his thumbs for a couple of minutes before Kristi came down the corridor from her side of the changing area. Women always took longer getting ready. Being only a man, he had no idea why. But he would have bet the ancient Greeks told the same jokes about it as modern Aryans did.

  She was worth the wait. Her knee-length light blue skirt showed off her legs. Veit wasn’t the least bit sorry the Reich still frowned on pants for women. Her top clung to her in a way that would have made the real Jews on whom those of Wawolnice were based plotz. And the sheitel she had on now was attractively styled and an almost perfect match for the mane of wavy, honey-blond hair she’d sacrificed to take the role of Bertha Shlayfer.

  "Let’s go home," she said, and yawned. She shook her head. "Sorry. It’s been a long day."

  "For me, too," Veit agreed. "And it doesn’t get any easier."

  "It never gets any easier," Kristi said.

  "I know, but that isn’t what I meant. Didn’t you see the schedule? They’ve got a pogrom listed for week after next."

  "Oy!" Kristi burst out. Once you got used to Yiddish, plain German could seem flavorless beside it. And Veit felt like going Oy! himself. Pogroms were a pain, even if the tourists got off on them. Sure, the powers that be brought in drugged convicts for the people playing Poles to stomp and burn, but reenactors playing Jews always ended up getting hurt, too. Accidents happened. And, when you were living your role, sometimes you just got carried away and didn’t care who stood in front of you when you threw a rock or swung a club.

  "Nothing we can do about it but put on a good show." He pointed down the corridor toward the employee parking lot. "Come on. Like you said, let’s go home."

  The corridor spat performers out right next to the gift shop. Another sign reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and a prominently displayed surveillance camera discouraged anyone else from moving against the stream. A ragged apple orchard screened the gift shop and the parking lot off from Wawolnice proper. That was good, as far as Veit was concerned. The gift shop was about paperbacks of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and plastic Jew noses and rubber Jew lips. Once upon a time, no doubt, the village had been about the same kinds of things. It wasn’t anymore, or it wasn’t exactly and wasn’t all the time. As things have a way of doing, Wawolnice had taken on a life of its own.

  Veit opened the passenger-side door for his wife. Kristi murmured a word of thanks as she slid into the Audi. He went around and got in himself. The electric engine silently came to life. The car didn’t have the range of a gas auto, but more charging stations went up every day. Though petroleum might be running low, plenty of nuclear power plants off in the East made sure the Reich had plenty of electricity. If they belched radioactive waste into the environment every once in a while, well, that was the local Ivans’worry.

  He drove out of the lot, up the ramp, and onto the Autobahn, heading east toward their flat in Lublin. A garish, brilliantly lit billboard appeared in his rearview mirror. The big letters were backwards, but he knew what they said: COME SEE THE JEW VILLAGE! ADMISSION ONLY 15 REICHSMARKS! The sinister, hook-nosed figure in black on the billboard was straight out of a cartoon. It only faintly resembled the hardworking reenactors who populated Wawolnice.

  "I hate that stupid sign," Veit said, as he did at least twice a week. "Makes us look like a bunch of jerks."

  "It’s like a book cover," Kristina answered, as she did whenever he pissed and moaned about the billboard. "It draws people in. Then they can see what we’re really about."

  "It draws assholes in," Veit said morosely. "They hold their noses at the smells and they laugh at our clothes and they show off their titties and think it’s funny."

  "You weren’t complaining when Wolf told you about that," his wife pointed out. "Except that you didn’t see it, I mean."

  "Yeah, well . . ." He took one hand off the wheel for a moment to make a vague gesture of appeasement.

  Lublin was about half an hour away at the Autobahn’s Mach schnell! speeds. It was clean and bright and orderly, like any town in the Grossdeutsches Reich these days. It had belonged to Poland, of course, before the War of Retribution. It had been a provincial capital, in fact. But that was a long time ago now. These days, Poles were almost as
much an anachronism as Jews. The Germans had reshaped Lublin in their own image. They looked around and saw that it was good.

  "Want to stop somewhere for dinner?" Veit asked as he pulled off the highway and drove into the city.

  "Not really. I am tired," Kristi said. "We’ve got leftovers back at the flat. If that’s all right with you."

  "Whatever you want," he said.

  They could have afforded a bigger apartment, but what would the point have been? They poured most of their time and most of their energy into the village. If you weren’t going to do that, you didn’t belong at Wawolnice. They used the flat as a place to relax and to sleep. How fancy did you need to be for that?

  Kristina warmed up some rolls in the oven. A few minutes later, she put sweet-and-sour cabbage stuffed with veal sausage and rice into the microwave. Veit’s contribution to supper was pouring out two tumblers of Greek white wine. "Oh, thank you," his wife said. "I could use one tonight."

  "Me, too." Veit went on in Hebrew: "Barukh atah Adonai, elohaynu melekh ha-olam, bo’ re p’ ri ha-gafen." Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who bringest forth the fruit of the vine.

  "Practice," Kristi said as they clinked the big, heavy glasses.

  "Aber natürlich," Veit agreed. "If you don’t use a language, you’ll lose it." He assumed the flat had microphones. He’d never heard of one that didn’t. How much attention the Sicherheitsdienst paid . . . well, who could guess? Then again, who wanted to find out the hard way? If you started praying in the dead language of a proscribed Volk, better to let any possible SD ear know you had a reason.

  The microwave buzzed. Kristina took out the glass tray, then retrieved the rolls. Veit poured more wine. His wife put food on the table. He blessed the bread and the main course, as he had the wine. They ate. He made his portion disappear amazingly fast.

  "Do you want more?" Kristi asked. "There is some."