The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “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.

  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 whe
n 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 said 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.”