Shtetl Days

by Harry Turtledove

  A week and a half later came Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar. By that extinct usage, the daylong fast began the night before at sundown. Veit and his wife were driving home from Wawolnice when the sun went down behind them. He sat behind the wheel; he’d been doing most of the driving again for some time.

  When they got to their flat, Kristi turned on the oven. She left it on for forty-five minutes. Then she turned it off again. She and Veit sat at the table and talked as they would have over supper, but there was no food on the plates. After a while, Kristi washed them anyhow. Neither a mike nor utility data would show anything out of the ordinary.

  How close to the ancient laws did you have to stick? In this day and age, how close to the ancient laws could you possibly stick? How careful did you have to be to make sure the authorities didn’t notice you were sticking to those laws? Veit and Kristi had played games with the oven and the dishwashing water before. In light of the call the SS Hauptsturmführer had paid on Veit earlier in the year (last year now, by Jewish reckoning), you couldn’t be too careful—and you couldn’t stick too close to the old laws.

  So you did what you could, and you didn’t worry about what you couldn’t help. That seemed to fit in with the way things in Wawolnice generally worked.

  At shul the next morning, Kristi sat with the women while Veit took his place among the men. How many of the assembled reenactors were fasting except when public performance of these rituals required it? Veit didn’t know; it wasn’t a safe question, and wouldn’t have been good manners even if it were. But he was as sure as made no difference that Kristi and he weren’t the only ones.

  After the service ended, he asked his village friends and neighbors to forgive him for whatever he’d done to offend them over the past year. You had to apologize sincerely, not just go through the motions. And you were supposed to accept such apologies with equal sincerity. His fellow villagers were saying they were sorry to him and to one another, too.

  Such self-abasement was altogether alien to the spirit of the Reich. Good National Socialists never dreamt they could do anything regrettable. Übermenschen, after all, didn’t look back—or need to.

  And yet, the heartfelt apologies of an earlier Yom Kippur were some of the first things that had made Veit wonder whether what people here in Wawolnice had wasn’t a better way to live than much of what went on in the wider world. He’d come here glad to have steady work. He hadn’t bargained for anything more. He hadn’t bargained for it, but he’d found it.

  You needed to ignore the funny clothes. You needed to forget about the dirt and the crowding and the poverty. Those were all incidentals. When it came to living with other people, when it came to finding an anchor for your own life… He nodded once, to himself. This was better. Even if you couldn’t talk about it much, maybe especially because you couldn’t, this was better. It had taken a while for Veit to realize it, but he liked the way he lived in the village when he was Jakub Shlayfer better than he liked how he lived away from it when he was only himself.

  People who worked together naturally got together when they weren’t working, too. Not even the ever-wary SS could make too much of that. There was always the risk that some of the people you hung with reported to the blackshirts, but everyone in the Reich ran that risk. You took the precautions you thought you needed and you got on with your life.

  One weekend not long after the High Holy Days, Wawolnice closed down for maintenance more thorough than repair crews could manage overnight or behind the scenes. Autumn was on the way. By the calendar, autumn had arrived. But it wasn’t pouring or freezing or otherwise nasty, though no doubt it would be before long. A bunch of the reenactors who played Jews seized the moment for a Sunday picnic outside of Lublin.

  The grass on the meadow was still green: proof it hadn’t started freezing yet. Women packed baskets groaning with food. Men tended to other essentials: beer, slivovitz, shnaps, and the like.

  One of Kristi’s cousins was just back from a hunting trip to the Carpathians. Her contribution to the spread was a saddle of venison. Her cousin was no shokhet, of course, but some things were too good to pass up. So she reasoned, anyhow, and Veit didn’t try to argue with her.

  “Let’s see anybody match this,” she declared.

  “Not likely.” Veit had splurged on a couple of liters of fancy vodka, stuff so smooth you’d hardly notice you weren’t drinking water…till you fell over.

  He waited for clouds to roll in and rain to spoil things, but it didn’t happen. A little dawn mist had cleared out by midmorning, when the performers started gathering. It wasn’t a hot day, but it wasn’t bad. If shadows stretched farther across the grass than they would have during high summer, well, it wasn’t high summer anymore.

  Kids scampered here, there, and everywhere, squealing in German and Yiddish. Not all of them really noticed any difference between the two languages except in the way they were written. Lots of reenactors exclaimed over the venison. Kristi beamed with pride as Reb Eliezer said “I didn’t expect that” and patted his belly in anticipation. If he wasn’t going to get fussy about dietary rules today…

  They might have been any picnicking group, but for one detail. A car going down the narrow road stopped. The driver rolled down his window and called, “Hey, what’s with all the face fuzz?” He rubbed his own smooth chin and laughed.

  “We’re the Great Lublin Beard-Growers’ Fraternity,” Eliezer answered with a perfectly straight face.

  All of a sudden, the Aryan in the VW wasn’t laughing anymore. The official-sounding title impressed him; official-sounding titles had a way of doing that in the Reich. “Ach, so. The Beard-Growers’ Fraternity,” he echoed. “That’s splendid!” He put the car in gear and drove away, satisfied.

  “Things would be easier if we were the Greater Lublin Beard-Growers’ Fraternity,” Veit remarked.

  “Some ways,” Reb Eliezer said with a sweet, sad smile. “Not others, perhaps.”

  Alter the melamed—otherwise Wolf Albach-Retty—said, “There really are clubs for men who grow fancy whiskers. They have contests. Sometimes the winners get their pictures in the papers.”

  “Our whiskers are just incidental.” Veit stroked his beard. “We raise tsuris instead.”

  Wolf hoisted an eyebrow. Yes, he made a good melamed. Yes, he was as much a believer as anyone here except Reb Eliezer. (Like Paul on the road to Damascus—well, maybe not just like that—some years before Eliezer had been the first to see how a role could take on an inner reality the Nazi functionaries who’d brought Wawolnice into being had never imagined.) All that said, everyone here except Wolf himself knew he was a ham.

  If the SS swooped down on this gathering, what would they find? A bunch of men with beards, along with wives, girlfriends, children, and a few dogs running around barking and generally making idiots of themselves. A hell of a lot of food. No ham, no pig’s trotters, no pickled eels, no crayfish or mussels. No meat cooked in cream sauce or anything like that. Even more dishes than you’d normally need for all the chow.

  Plenty to hang everybody here, in other words, or to earn people a bullet in the back of the neck. Suspicious security personnel could make all the case they needed from what was and what wasn’t at the picnic. And if they weren’t suspicious, why would they raid?

  Someone here might also be wearing a microphone or carrying a concealed video camera. Being a Jew hadn’t stopped Judas from betraying Jesus. Even the so-called German Christians, whose worship rendered more unto the Reich than unto God, learned about Judas.

  But what could you do? You had to take some chances or you couldn’t live. Well, you could, but you’d have to stay by yourself in your flat and never come out. Some days, that looked pretty good to Veit. Some days, but not today.

  Reb Eliezer did what he could to cover himself. He waved his hands in the air to draw people’s notice. Then he said, “It’s good we could all get together today.” He was speaking Yiddish; he sa
id haynt for today, not the German heute. He went on, “We need to stay in our roles as much as we can. We live them as much as we can. So if we do some things our friends and neighbors outside Wawolnice might find odd, it’s only so we keep them in mind even when we aren’t up in front of strangers.”

  Several men and women nodded. Kids and dogs, predictably, paid no attention. What Eliezer said might save the reenactors’ bacon (Not that we’ve got any bacon here, either, Veit thought) if the SS was keeping an eye on things without worrying too much. If the blackshirts were looking for sedition, they’d know bullshit when they heard it.

  “All right, then.” Eliezer went on to pronounce a brokhe, a blessing, that no one—not even the most vicious SS officer, a Rottweiler in human shape—could have found fault with: “Let’s eat!”

  Women with meat dishes had gathered here, those with dairy dishes over there, and those with parve food—vegetable dishes that could be eaten with either—at a spot in between them. Veit took some sour tomatoes and some cold noodles and some green beans in a sauce made with olive oil and garlic (not exactly a specialty of Polish Jews in the old days, but tasty even so), and then headed over to get some of the venison on which his wife had worked so hard. Kristi would let him hear about it if he didn’t take a slice.

  He had to wait his turn, though. By the time he got over to her, a line had already formed. She beamed with pride as she carved and served. Only somebody else’s roast grouse gave her any competition for pride of place. Veit managed to snag a drumstick from one of the birds, too. He sat down on the grass and started filling his face…after the appropriate blessings, of course.

  After a while, Reb Eliezer came over and squatted beside him. Eliezer seemed a man in perpetual motion. He’d already talked with half the people at the picnic, and he’d get to the rest before it finished. “Having a good time?” he asked.

  Veit grinned and waved at his plate. “I’d have to be dead not to. I don’t know how I’m going to fit into my clothes.”

  “That’s a good time,” Eliezer said, nodding. “I wonder what the Poles are doing with their holiday.”

  He meant the Aryans playing Poles in Wawolnice, of course. The real Poles, those who were left alive, worked in mines and on farms and in brothels and other places where bodies mattered more than brains. Veit stayed in character to answer, “They should grow like onions: with their heads in the ground.”

  Eliezer smiled that sad smile of his. “And they call us filthy kikes and Christ-killers and have extra fun when there’s a pogrom on the schedule.” Veit rubbed his rib cage. Eliezer nodded again. “Yes, like that.”

  “Still twinges once in a while,” Veit said.

  “Hating Jews is easy,” Eliezer said, and it was Veit’s turn to nod. The other man went on,

  “Hating anybody who isn’t just like you is easy. Look how you sounded about them. Look how the Propaganda Ministry sounds all the time.”

  “Hey!” Veit said. “That’s not fair.”

  “Well, maybe yes, maybe no,” Reb Eliezer allowed. “But the way it looks to me is, if we’re going to live like Yehudim, like the Yehudim that used to be, like proper Yehudim, sooner or later we’ll have to do it all the time.”

  “What?” Now Veit was genuinely alarmed. “We won’t last twenty minutes if we do, and you know it.”

  “I didn’t meant that. Using tefillin? Putting on the tallis? No, it wouldn’t work.” Eliezer smiled once more, but then quickly sobered. “I meant that we need to live, to think, to feel the way we do while we’re in Wawolnice when we’re out in the big world, too. We need to be witnesses to what the Reich is doing. Somebody has to, and who better than us?” That smile flashed across his face again, if only for a moment. “Do you know what martyr means in ancient Greek? It means witness, that’s what.”

  Veit had sometimes wondered if the rabbi was the SS plant in the village. He’d decided it didn’t matter. If Eliezer was, he could destroy them all any time he chose. But now Veit found himself able to ask a question that would have been bad manners inside Wawolnice: “What did you do before you came to the village that taught you ancient Greek?” As far as he knew, Eliezer—Ferdinand Marian—hadn’t been an actor. Veit had never seen him on stage or in a TV show or film.

  “Me?” The older man quirked an eyebrow. “I thought everyone had heard about me. No? …I guess not. I was a German Christian minister.”

  “Oh,” Veit said. It didn’t quite come out Oy!, but it might as well have. He managed something a little better on his next try: “Well, no wonder you learned Greek, then.”

  “No wonder at all. And Hebrew, and Aramaic. I was well trained for the part, all right. I just didn’t know ahead of time that I would like it better than what had been my real life.”

  “I don’t think any of us figured on that,” Veit said slowly.

  “I don’t, either,” Reb Eliezer replied. “But if that doesn’t tell you things aren’t the way they ought to be out here, what would?” His two-armed wave encompassed out here: the world beyond Wawolnice, the world-bestriding Reich.

  “What do we do?” Veit shook his head; that was the wrong question. Again, another try: “What can we do?”

  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.”