Shtetl Days

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