29f9581009b0b0d35f13d7c8394053d6 by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zinepal

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.

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