"As well as it is, Jakub, thank the Lord," the ritual slaughterer answered. He often visited the grinder’s shop. His knives had to be sharp. Any visible nick on the edge, and the animals he killed were treyf. He had to slay at a single stroke, too. All in all, what he did was as merciful as killing could be, just as Torah and Talmud prescribed. He went on, "And you? And your wife?"
"Bertha’s fine. My ribs . . . could be better. They’ll get that way--eventually," Veit said. "Nu, what have you got for me today?"
Itzhik carried his short knife, the one he used for dispatching chickens and the occasional duck, wrapped in a cloth. "This needs to be perfect," he said. "Can’t have the ladies running to Reb Eliezer with their dead birds, complaining I didn’t kill them properly."
"That wouldn’t be good," Veit agreed. He inspected the blade. The edge seemed fine to him. He said so.
"Well, sharpen it some more anyway," Itzhik answered.
Veit might have known he would say that. Veit, in fact, had known Itzhik would say that; he would have bet money on it. "You’re a scrupulous man," he remarked as he set to work.
The shokhet shrugged. "If, eppes, you aren’t scrupulous doing what I do, better you should do something else."
Which was also true of a lot of other things. After watching sparks fly from the steel blade, Veit carefully inspected the edge. The last thing he wanted was to put in a tiny nick that hadn’t been there before. At length, he handed back the slaughtering knife. But, as he did, he said, "You’ll want to check it for yourself."
"Oh, sure." Itzhik carried it over to the window--the window that might have stood there forgotten since the beginning of time but was in fact brand new. He held the knife in the best light he could find and bent close to examine the edge. He took longer looking it over than Veit had. When the verdict came, it was a reluctant nod, but a nod it was. "You haven’t got a shayla on your puppik, anyway," he admitted.
"Thank you so much," Veit said with a snort. A shayla was a mark of disease that left meat unfit for consumption by Jews. His puppik--his gizzard--probably had a bruise on it right this minute, but no shaylas.
"So what do I owe you?" Itzhik asked.
"A zloty will do," Veit said. The shokhet set the coin on the counter. After one more nod, he walked out into the street.
Those chickens will never know what hit them, Veit thought, not without pride. The knife had been sharp when Itzhik handed it to him, and sharper after he got through with it. No one would be able to say its work went against Jewish rules for slaughtering.
Jewish rules held sway here, in Wawolnice’s Jewish quarter. Out in the wider world, things were different. The Reich let the performers playing Poles here execute--no, encouraged them to execute--those convicts dressed as shtetl Jews by stoning them and beating them to death. Assume the convicts (or some of them, anyhow) deserved to die for their crimes. Did they deserve to die like that?
As Veit’s recent argument with Reb Eliezer here in the shop showed, Jewish practice leaned over backwards to keep from putting people to death, even when the letter of the law said they had it coming. He’d learned in his own Talmudic studies that an ancient Sanhedrin that executed even one man in seventy years went down in history as a bloody Sanhedrin.
Again, the modern world was a little different. Yes, just a little. The Reich believed in Schrechlichkeit--frightfulness--as a legal principle. If you scared the living shit out of somebody, maybe he wouldn’t do what he would have done otherwise. And so the Reich didn’t just do frightful things to people it caught and condemned. It bragged that it did such things to them.
Along with the quiz shows and football matches and historical melodramas and shows full of singers and dancers that littered the TV landscape, there were always televised hangings of partisans from Siberia or Canada or Peru. Sometimes, for variety’s sake, the TV would show a Slav who’d presumed to sleep with his German mistress getting his head chopped off. Sometimes she would go to the block right after him, or even at his side.
All those executions, all those contorted faces and twisting bodies, all those fountains of blood, had been a normal part of the TV landscape for longer than Veit had been alive. He’d watched a few. Hell, everybody’d watched a few. He didn’t turn them on because they turned him on, the way some people did. He’d always figured that put him on the right side of the fence.
Maybe it did--no, of course it did--when you looked at things from the Reich’s perspective. Which he did, and which everyone did, because, in the world as it was, what other perspective could there be? None, none whatsoever, not in the world as it was.
But Wawolnice wasn’t part of the world as it was. Wawolnice was an artificial piece of the world as it had been before National Socialist Germany went and set it to rights. Performing here as a Jew, living here as a Jew, gave Veit an angle from which to view the wider world he could have got nowhere else.
And if the wider world turned out to be an uglier place than he’d imagined, than he could have imagined, before he came to Wawolnice, what did that say?
He’d been wrestling with the question ever since it first occurred to him. He was ashamed to remember how long that had taken. He wasn’t the only one, either. To some of the reenactors who portrayed Jews, it was just another gig. They’d put it on their résum é s and then go off and do something else, maybe on the legitimate stage, maybe not. Down in Romania, there was a Gypsy encampment that reproduced another way of life the National Socialist victory had eliminated.
For others here, things were different. You had to be careful what you said and where you said it, but that was true all over the Reich, which amounted to all over the world. Adding another layer of caution to the everyday one you grew up with probably--no, certainly--wouldn’t hurt.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the shop door swung open. In strode . . . not another village Jew, not a village Pole with something to fix that he trusted to Jakub’s clever hands rather than to one of his countrymen, not even a tourist curious about what the inside of one of these hole-in-the-wall shops looked like. No. In came a man wearing the uniform of an SS Hauptsturmf ü hrer: the equivalent of a Wehrmacht captain.
Veit blinked, not sure what he was supposed to do. The Wawolnice in which he lived and worked--in which he performed--lay buried in a past before the War of Retribution. A Wawolnice Jew seeing an SS Hauptsturmf ü hrer would not automatically be reduced to the blind panic that uniform induced in Jews during the war and for as long afterward as there were still Jews. A modern Aryan still might be reduced to that kind of panic, though, or to something not far from it.
If a modern Aryan was reduced to that kind of panic, he would be smart to try not to show it. Veit let the Hauptsturmf ü hrer take the lead. The officer wasted no time doing so, barking, "You are the performer Veit Harlan, otherwise called Jakub Shlayfer the Jew?"
"That’s right. What’s this all about?" Veit answered in Yiddish.
The SS man’s mouth twisted, as if at a bad smell. "Speak proper German, not this barbarous, disgusting dialect."
"Please excuse me, sir, but our instructions are to stay in character at all times when in public in the village," Veit said meekly, but still in the mamaloshen. He’d thought Yiddish was a barbarous dialect when he started learning it, too. The more natural it became, the less sure of that he got. You could say things in German you couldn’t begin to in Yiddish. But the reverse, he’d been surprised to discover, also held true. Yiddish might be a jaunty beggar of a language, but a language it was.