Shtetl Days

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.