Shtetl Days

"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 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.