“I don’t suppose you’re going to ask the fleetlord about the details now,” Reuven said.
His mother laughed. “See what your fancy education does for you?”
“Mother!” he said indignantly. His father made cracks like that all the time. His sisters made them whenever they thought they could get away with them. For Rivka Russie to make one, too, felt like a betrayal.
“But the point,” his father said, “the point is that he’s left the United States and come to Cairo-I think he’s in Cairo. He had to know something important, or else he’d be imprisoned somewhere, and he’s not.”
“And it’s probably something that has to do with the United States, since he lived there so long,” Reuven said.
“Very good, Sherlock.” That was Esther, who’d been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle in Hebrew translation. “Now all you have to do is figure out what he knows.”
Reuven looked at his father. Moishe Russie shrugged and said, “I already told you, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all find out one day before too long. I’m hoping we never find out, because that will mean the trouble’s gone away.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Reuven took another bite of beefsteak. He raised his wineglass. “Here’s to ignorance!”
Everyone drank the toast. Amid laughter, Reuven’s father said, “That’s probably the first time anyone has ever made that toast inside a Jewish house. Alevai, it’ll be the last time, too.” His face clouded. “Alevai, we won’t need to make that kind of toast again.”
“Omayn.” Reuven and his mother spoke together.
After supper, Reuven asked his father, “If the United States and the Lizards go to war, what do we do?”
“We here in Palestine, you mean?” Moishe Russie asked, and Reuven nodded. His father sighed. “About the same thing we did when the Race fought the Germans: sit tight and hope the Americans don’t manage to land a missile on Jerusalem. I think that would be less likely in this fight than in the war with the Nazis. The Americans don’t particularly hate Jews, so they don’t have any big reason for aiming a missile here-and most of their missiles are farther away than the ones the Germans fired at us.”
“How do you know that?” Reuven asked. “They may have three submarines sitting right off the coast. How would we know?”
“We wouldn’t, not until something either happened or didn’t,” his father said. “I told you what I thought was likely. If you don’t like that, come up with your own answers.”
“I like it fine. I hope you’re right,” Reuven said. “Actually, I hope we’re all worrying over nothing, and that there won’t be a war.”
This time, his father said, “Omayn!”
When they walked to work the next morning, someone had painted new black swastikas on several walls, and the phrase Allahu akbar! by them. Reuven laughed to keep from cursing. “Haven’t the Arabs noticed that that firm’s gone out of business?”
“Who can say?” Moishe Russie answered. “Maybe they wish it were still operating. Or maybe it is still operating, but being quiet about it. That wouldn’t surprise me. Once some things get loose, they’re hard to kill.”
“I thought Dornberger was supposed to be a relatively civilized man,” Reuven said.
“Compared to Hitler, compared to Himmler, compared to Kaltenbrunner-how much praise is that?” his father asked. “He’s still a German. He’s still a Nazi. If he can find some way to make the Lizards unhappy, don’t you think he’ll use it? Getting the Arabs to erupt is one easy way to do it.”
“And if he incites them against us, too, all the better,” Reuven said. His father didn’t contradict him. He wished Moishe Russie had.
Once they got to the office, Yetta showed them their appointments. Reuven sighed. When he’d been studying at the Moishe Russie Medical College, human physiology and biochemistry had looked like important subjects. And they’d looked like fascinating subjects. Seeing them exemplified in the persons of his patients was much less exciting. A lot of the answers he got were ambiguous. Sometimes he couldn’t find any answers at all. And even a lot of the ones that were perfectly clear weren’t very interesting. Yes, sir, that boil will respond to antibiotics. Yes, ma’am, that toe is broken. No, it doesn’t matter if we put a cast on it or not. It’ll do the same either way, and yes, it will hurt for a few weeks.
He gave a tetanus shot. He removed a splinter of metal that had got lodged in a construction worker’s leg. He took the cast off a broken wrist his father had set a few weeks before. He swabbed a four-year-old’s throat to see if the girl was coming down with a streptococcus infection. He injected local anesthetic and stitched up a cut arm. Every bit of that needed doing. He did it well. But it wasn’t what he’d imagined a physician’s career was like.
He was putting a clean dressing on the cut arm when Yetta stuck her head into the room and said, “Mrs. Radofsky just telephoned. Her daughter is screaming her head off-she thinks it’s an earache. Can you fit her in?”
A screaming toddler-just what I need, Reuven thought. But he nodded. “One way or another, I’ll manage.”
“That’s good,” the receptionist said. “I asked your father, but he said he was too busy and told me to go to you instead.” Yetta was plain to the point of frumpishness, but at the moment she looked almost comically amused. “I’ll tell her she can bring Miriam in to you in an hour, if that’s all right.”
“Fine,” Reuven said. He almost asked her what was so funny, but held off at the last minute because he saw a possible answer. She thinks my father is trying to fix me up with a pretty widow, he realized. That almost started him laughing. Then he wondered what was so laughable about it. With Jane gone to Canada, he wouldn’t have minded getting fixed up with anybody.
As if Mrs. Radofsky cares about you for anything but whether you can make her little girl feel better, he thought. That didn’t bother him. That was the way things were supposed to be.
Even back in his examination room, he could tell when the widow Radofsky brought her daughter into the office. The racket Miriam was making left no possible doubt. Reuven was looking at another widow, a little old lady named Goldblatt whose varicose veins were troubling her. “Gevalt!” she said. “That one’s not very happy.”
“No, she’s not,” Reuven agreed. “I’m going to recommend an elastic bandage on that leg to help keep those veins under control for you. I don’t think they’re bad enough to need surgery now. If they bother you more, though, come back in and we’ll have another look at them.”
“All right, Doctor, thank you,” Mrs. Goldblatt said. Reuven hid his smile. I’m learning, he thought. If he’d told her straight out that she was fussing over very little, she’d have left in a huff. As things were, she seemed well enough pleased, even though all he’d done was sugarcoat essentially the same message.
“Can you see Mrs. Radofsky and Miriam now?” Yetta asked.
“Why not?” Reuven raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been hearing them-or Miriam, anyhow-for a while now.” The receptionist sniffed. No, she didn’t care for anyone’s jokes but her own.
A moment later, the young widow carried her daughter into the examination room. Miriam was still howling at the top of her lungs, and was tugging at the lobe of her left ear and trying to stick her finger into it. That would have been diagnostic all by itself. Mrs. Radofsky gave Reuven a wan smile and tried to talk through the din: “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. She woke up like this at four in the morning.” No wonder her smile was wan.
Reuven grabbed his otoscope. “We’ll see what we can do.”
Miriam didn’t want to let him examine her, not for beans she didn’t. She screeched, “No!”-a two-year-old’s favorite word anyway, as Reuven remembered from his sisters-and tried to grab the otoscope and keep it away from her ear.
“Can you hold her, please?” Reuven asked her mother.
“All right,” the widow Radofsky said. Even in his brief time in practice, Reuven had discovered that almost no mother would hold her precious darling tight enough to do a doctor one damn bit of good. He’d thought about investing in pediatric straitjackets, or even manufacturing them and making his fortune from grateful physicians the world around. He expected to do half the holding himself this time, too.
But he got a surprise. Mrs. Radofsky battled Miriam to a standstill. Reuven got a good look inside a red, swollen ear canal. “She’s got it, sure enough,” he said. “I’m going to give her a shot of penicillin, and I’m going to prescribe a liquid for her. You have an icebox to keep it cold?” Most people did, but not everybody.
To his relief, Miriam’s mother nodded. She rolled her daughter onto her stomach on the examining table so Reuven could give her the shot in the right cheek. That produced a new set of screams, almost supersonically shrill. When they subsided, the widow Radofsky said, “Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome.” Reuven felt like sticking a finger in his ear, too. “She should start getting relief in twenty-four hours. If she doesn’t, bring her back. Make sure she takes all the liquid. It’s nasty, but she needs it.”
“I understand.” Mrs. Radofsky didn’t have to shout, for Miriam, finally exhausted, hiccuped a couple of times and fell asleep. Her mother sighed and said, “Life is never as simple as we wish it would be, is it?” She brushed back a lock of dark hair that had come loose.