Eliezer set a hand on his shoulder. "The best we can, Jakub. Always, the best we can." He ambled off to talk to somebody else.
Someone had brought along a soccer ball. In spite of full bellies, a pickup game started. It would have caused heart failure in World Cup circles. The pitch was bumpy and unmown. Only sweaters thrown down on the ground marked the corners and the goal mouths. Touchlines and bylines were as much a matter of argument as anything in the Talmud.
Nobody cared. People ran and yelled and knocked one another ass over teakettle. Some of the fouls would have got professionals sent off. The players just laughed about them. Plenty of liquid restoratives were at hand by the edge of the pitch. When the match ended, both sides loudly proclaimed victory.
By then, the sun was sliding down the sky toward the horizon. Clouds had started building up. With regret, everyone decided it was time to go home. Leftovers and dirty china and silverware went into ice chests and baskets. Nobody seemed to worry about supper at all.
Veit caught up with Reb Eliezer. "Thanks for not calling Kristina’s venison treyf," he said quietly.
Eliezer spread his hands. "It wasn’t that kind of gathering, or I didn’t think it was. I didn’t say anything about the grouse, either. Like I told you before, you do what you can do. Anyone who felt differently didn’t have to eat it. No finger-pointing. No fits. Just--no game."
"Makes sense." Veit hesitated, then blurted the question that had been on his mind most of the day: "What do you suppose the old-time Jews, the real Jews, would have made of us?"
"I often wonder about that," Eliezer said, which surprised Veit not at all. The older man went on, "You remember what Rabbi Hillel told the goy who stood on one foot and asked him to define Jewish doctrine before the other foot came down?"
"Oh, sure," Veit answered; that was a bit of Talmudic pilpul everybody--well, everybody in Wawolnice who cared about the Talmud--knew. "He said that you shouldn’t do to other people whatever was offensive to you. As far as he was concerned, the rest was just commentary."
"The Talmud says that goy ended up converting, too," Eliezer added. Veit nodded; he also remembered that. Eliezer said, "Well, if the Reich had followed Hillel’s teaching, there would still be real Jews, and they wouldn’t have needed to invent us. Since they did . . . We’re doing as well as we can on the main thing--we’re human beings, after all--and maybe not too bad on the commentary. Or do you think I’m wrong?"
"No. That’s about how I had it pegged, too." Veit turned away, then stopped short. "I’ll see you tomorrow in Wawolnice."
"Tomorrow in Wawolnice," Eliezer said. "Next year in Jerusalem."
"Alevai omayn," Veit answered, and was astonished by how much he meant it.
#
They wouldn’t have needed to invent us. For some reason, that fragment of a sentence stuck in Veit’s mind. He knew Voltaire’s If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Before coming to Wawolnice, he’d been in a couple of plays involving the Frenchman. Frederick the Great had been one of Hitler’s heroes, which had made the Prussian king’s friends and associates glow by reflected light in the eyes of German dramatists ever since.
If a whole Volk had nobody who could look at them from the outside, would they have to find--or make--someone? There, Veit wasn’t so sure. Like any actor’s, his mind was a jackdaw’s nest of other men’s words. He knew the story about the dying bandit chief and the priest who urged him to forgive his enemies. Father, I have none, the old ruffian wheezed. I’ ve killed them all.
Here stood the Reich, triumphant. Its retribution had spread across the globe. It hadn’t quite killed all its enemies. No: it had enslaved some of them instead. But no one cared what a slave thought. No one even cared if a slave thought, so long as he didn’t think of trouble.
Here stood Wawolnice. It had come into being as a monument to the Reich’s pride. Look at what we did. Look at what we had to get rid of, it had declared, reproducing with typical, fanatical attention to detail what once had been. And such attention to detail had, all unintended, more or less brought back into being what had been destroyed. It was almost Hegelian.
After talking with Kristina, Veit decided to have the little operation that would mark him as one of the men who truly belonged in Wawolnice. He got it done the evening before the village shut down for another maintenance day. "You should be able to go back to work day after tomorrow," the doctor told him. "You’ll be sore, but it won’t be anything the pills can’t handle."
"Yes, I know about those." Of itself, Veit’s hand made that rib-feeling gesture.
"All right, then." The other man uncapped a syringe. "This is the local anesthetic. You may not want to watch while I give it to you."
"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?" his 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.
"Shtetl Days" copyright © 2011 Harry Turtledove
The House That George Built
Harry Turtledove
illustration by James Bennett
Puffing slightly, Henry Louis Mencken paused outside of George’s Restaurant. He’d walked a little more than a mile from the red-brick house on Hollins Street to the corner of Eutaw and Lombard. Along with masonry, walking was the only kind of exercise he cared for. Tennis and golf and other so-called diversions were to him nothing but a waste of time. He wished his wind were better, but he’d turned sixty the summer before. He carried more weight than he had as a younger man. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. At his age, who could hope for better than that?
He chuckled as his gloved hand fell toward the latch. Every tavern in Baltimore seemed to style itself a restaurant. Maybe that was the Germanic influence. A proud German himself, Mencken wouldn’t have been surprised.
His breath smoked. It was cold out here this February afternoon. The chuckle cut off abruptly. Because he was a proud German, he’d severed his ties with the Sunpapers a couple of weeks before, just as he had back in 1915. Like Wilson a generation before him, Roosevelt II was bound and determined to bring the United States into a stupid war on England’s side. Mencken had spent his working life taking swipes at idiots in America. Somehow, they always ended up running the country just when you most wished they wouldn’t.
The odors of beer and hot meat and tobacco smoke greeted him when he stepped inside. Mencken nodded happily as he pulled a cigar from an inside pocket of his overcoat and got it going. You could walk into a tavern in Berlin or Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco and it would smell the same way. Some things didn’t, and shouldn’t, change.
“Hey, buddy! How ya doin’?” called the big man behind the bar. He had to go six-two, maybe six-three, and at least two hundred fifty pounds. He had a moon face, a wide mouth, a broad, flat nose, and a thick shock of dark brown hair just starting to go gray: he was about fifteen years younger than the journalist. He never remembered Mencken’s name, though Mencken was a regular. But, as far as Mencken could see, the big man never remembered anybody’s name.
“I’m fine, George. How are you?” Mencken answered, settling himself on a stool. He took off the gloves, stuck them in his pocket, and then shed the overcoat.
“Who, me? I’m okay. What’ll it be today?” George said.
“Let me have a glass of Blatz, why don’t you?”
“Comin’ up.” George worked the tap left-handed. He was a southpaw in most things, though Mencken had noticed that he wrote with his right hand. He slid the glass across the bar. “Here y’go.”
Mencken gave him a quarter. “Much obliged, publican.”
“Publican?” George shook his head. “You got me wrong, pal. I voted for FDR all three times.”
Mencken had voted for Roosevelt II once, and regretted it ever after. But if arguing politics with a bartender wasn’t a waste of time, he didn’t know what would be. He sipped the beer, sucking foam from his upper lip as he set the glass down.
Halfway along the bar, two cops were working on beers of their own and demolishing big plates of braised short ribs. One of them was saying, “So the dumb S.O.B tried to run away from me, y’know? I got him in the back of the head with my espantoon”--he patted the billy club on his belt--”and after that he didn’t feel like runnin’ no more.”
“That’s how you do it,” the other policeman agreed. “You gotta fill out all kindsa papers if you shoot somebody, but not if you give him the old espantoon. It’s just part of a day’s work, like.”
Hearing the familiar Baltimore word made Mencken smile. He took a longer pull from his glass, then raised his eyes to the big plaque on the wall behind the bar. Mounted on it were a baseball, a bat, and a small, old-fashioned glove. He caught the bartender’s eye and pointed to the bat. “There’s your espantoon, eh, George?”
“Damn straight,” George said proudly. Then he raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Never heard before you was a baseball fan.”
He might not remember Mencken’s name, but he knew who he was. “I used to be, back in the Nineties,” Mencken answered. “I could give you chapter and verse--hell’s bells, I could give you word and syllable--about the old Orioles. Do you know, the very first thing I ever had in print was a poem about how ratty and faded the 1894 pennant looked by 1896. The very first thing, in the Baltimore American.”
“Them was the National League Orioles,” George said. “Not the International League Orioles, like I played for.”
“Yes, I know.” Mencken didn’t tell the bartender that for the past thirty years and more he’d found baseball a dismal game. He did add, “Everybody in Baltimore knows for whom George Ruth played.” As any native would have, he pronounced the city’s name Baltm’r.
And he told the truth. People in Baltimore did recall their hometown hero. No doubt baseball aficionados in places like Syracuse and Jersey City and even Kansas City remembered his name, too. He’d played in the high minors for many years, mostly for the Orioles, and done splendidly both as a pitcher and as a part-time outfielder and first baseman.
Did they remember him in Philadelphia? In Boston? In New York, where you needed to go if you wanted to get remembered in a big way? No and no and no, and he’d played, briefly and not too well, in both Philly and Boston. Did they remember him in Mobile and in Madison, in Colorado Springs and in Wichita, in Yakima and in Fresno, in all the two-bit towns where being remembered constituted fame? They did not. And it wasn’t as if they’d forgotten him, either. They’d simply
never heard of him. That was what stopping one rung shy of the top of the ladder did for you--and to you.
But this was Baltimore. Here, George Ruth was a hometown hero in his hometown. A superannuated hometown hero, but nevertheless . . . Mencken pointed to the bat on the plaque again. “Is that the one you used to hit the I Told You So Homer?” he asked.
He hadn’t been a baseball fan these past two-thirds of his life. But he was a Baltimorean. He knew the story, or enough of it. In the 1922 Little World Series--or was it 1921? or 1923?--the Kansas City pitcher facing Ruth knocked him down with a fastball. Ruth got up, dusted himself off, and announced to all and sundry that he’d hit the next one out of the park. He didn’t. The Blues’ hurler knocked him down again, almost performing a craniotomy on him in the process.
He got to his feet once more . . . and blasted the next pitch not only out of Oriole Park but through a plate glass window in a building across the street on the fly. As he toured the bases, he loudly and profanely embellished on the theme of I told you so.
A famous home run--in Baltimore. One the older fans in Kansas City shuddered to remember. A homer nobody anywhere else cared about.
Ruth turned to eye the shillelagh. He was an ugly bruiser, though you’d have to own a death wish to tell him so. Now he morosely shook his head. “Nah. That winter, some guy said he’d give me forty bucks for it, so I sold the son of a gun. You’d best believe I did. I needed the jack.”
“I know the feeling,” Mencken said. “Most of us do at one time or another--at one time and another, more likely.”
“Boy, you got that right.” George Ruth assumed the expression of an overweight Mask of Tragedy. Then he said, “How’s about you buy me a drink?”
“How’s about I do?” Mencken said agreeably. He fished another quarter from his trouser pocket and set it in on the bar. Ruth dropped it into the cash box. The silver clinked sweetly.
Short Stories Page 13
