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"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 ma î tre 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 Hauptsturmf ü hrer’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 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.

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.