Aftershocks (24 page)

A crowd had gathered, drawn by the commotion. Several women laughed and jeered to see Hsia Shou-Tao bleeding and filthy on the ground. If that didn’t mean Liu Mei was far from the only one he’d tried to molest, Liu Han would have been astonished.

But Nieh still held up a hand, ordering Liu Mei to stop. “You have punished him as he deserves,” the People’s Liberation Army general said. “He is a good officer. He is a bold officer. He is fierce against the little scaly devils.”

Liu Mei did stop, but she didn’t put away the knife. “He is a man. You are a man,” she said. “He is an officer. You are an officer. He is your friend. He has been your aide. No wonder you take his side.”

The women, most of them peasants but some lesser Party functionaries, yelled raucous agreement. One of them threw a stone at Hsia. It thudded into his ribs. He writhed and grunted; he still wasn’t more than half conscious.

“No!” Now Nieh spoke sharply, and set a hand on the pistol in his belt. “I say enough. Hsia may be subject to self-criticism and revolutionary justice, but he will not be mobbed. The revolutionary struggle needs him.”

His words probably wouldn’t have stopped the angry women. The pistol did. Liu Han wondered if the struggle between men and women would end before the struggle against the little scaly devils. She doubted it; she wasn’t sure even the coming of perfect Communism would make men and women get along.

“Mother!” Rage still filled Liu Mei’s voice. “Will you let this, this
man
protect his friend so?”

No, the struggle between the sexes surely had a long way to go. With great reluctance, Liu Han nodded. “I will. I do not like it, but I will. Let revolutionary justice see to him from here on out. We will remember him smeared with blood and night soil. We will all remember him like that. He won’t trouble you again—I’m sure of it.”

“No, but he will touch someone else,” Liu Mei said grimly. “I didn’t knock out enough of his brains to keep him from doing that.”

She was bound to be right. Liu Han wouldn’t have minded seeing Hsia dead, not personally, not even a little bit. But Nieh said, “He will also trouble the scaly devils again, and that is more important.”

“Not to me,” Liu Mei said. “He didn’t put his filthy hands inside your trousers.” She didn’t advance on Hsia any more, though, and she did put the knife away. A couple of people drifted back toward their huts. The worst was over. Hsia Shou-Tao wouldn’t get all of what was coming to him, but Liu Mei had already given him a good piece of it.

Hsia groaned again. This time, he managed to sit up. Something like reason was in his eyes. His hand went to the back of his head. When he found it was wet, he jerked it away. When he found what the moisture was, he frantically rubbed his hand in the dirt beside him.

“I should have cut it off you when I had the chance,” Liu Han told him. “If I had, this wouldn’t have happened to you.”

“I’m sorry,” Hsia said vaguely, as if he couldn’t quite recall why he should be apologizing.

“Sorry you got hurt. Sorry you got caught,” Liu Han said. “Sorry for what you did? Don’t make me laugh. Don’t make us all laugh. We know better.” The women who were still watching Hsia wallow in filth and blood clapped their hands and cried agreement. Liu Han found a smile stretching wide across her face. Russian arms for the People’s Liberation Army, Hsia Shou-Tao humiliated—it was a very good day indeed.

Reuven Russie walked slowly and glumly to the office he shared with his father. The sun shone hot and warm in Jerusalem even in early autumn, making the yellow limestone from which so much of the city was built gleam and sparkle like gold. The beauty was wasted on him. So was the sunshine.

His father had to keep slowing down so as not to get ahead. About halfway there, Moishe Russie remarked, “You could have gone to Canada.”

“No, I couldn’t, not really.” Reuven had already wrestled with himself a great many times. “Emigrating would have been too easy. And if I had, my children probably would have ended up not being Jewish. I didn’t want that, not after we’ve been through so much to hold on to what we are.”

His father walked on a few paces before reaching out to set a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “That’s a fine thing to say, a fine thing to do,” he observed, “especially when you think about the woman you were giving up.”

Don’t remind me,
was the first thing that went through Reuven’s mind. He’d miss Jane’s lush warmth for . . . he didn’t know how long, but it would be a while. After a few silent steps of his own, he said, “I’m going to be thirty before too long. If I’d had to decide the same thing six or eight years ago, who knows how I would have chosen?”

“Maybe that has something to do with it,” Moishe Russie admitted. “On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t, too. Plenty of men your age, plenty of men my age
—gevalt,
plenty of men my father’s age, if he were still alive—would think with their crotch first and worry about everything else later.”

That was probably true. That was, in fact, undoubtedly true. And, as far as Reuven was concerned, anyone who didn’t think with his crotch around Jane Archibald had something wrong with him. After a bit, he said, “Too easy,” again.

His father understood him, as his father generally did. “Being a Jew in Canada, you mean?” he said. “Well, maybe. But, once more, maybe not. It
is
possible to be a Jew in a country where they don’t persecute you for it. Up until just a little while ago, remember, the Race didn’t charge us anything for the privilege of worshiping in our own synagogues.”

Reuven nodded. “I know. But people take it more seriously now, don’t they? Because they see it’s endangered.”

“Some do,” his father said. “Maybe even most do. But some don’t take anything seriously—for a while, when you were a little younger, I was afraid you might be one of those, but I think every young man makes his father worry about that.” He let out a wry chuckle, then sighed. “And some—a few—go to this temple the Lizards put up and give reverence to the spirits of Emperors past.”

“Jane went,” Reuven said. “She had to, if she wanted to stay in the medical college. She always said it wasn’t anything bad—said the atmosphere put her in mind of a church, as a matter of fact.”

“I never said it was bad—for the Race,” Moishe Russie replied. “Or even for people, necessarily. But it’s not a place for Jews. A church isn’t bad. A mosque isn’t bad. But they’re not
ours
.” He paused. “You know the word
apikoros
?”

“I’ve heard it,” Reuven answered. “It’s as much Yiddish as Hebrew, isn’t it? Means somebody who doesn’t believe or doesn’t practice, doesn’t it?”

His father nodded. “Usually a particular kind of person who doesn’t believe or practice: the kind who thinks it’s unscientific to believe in God, if you know what I mean. Comes from the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Now, I happen to think Epicurus was a good man, not a bad one, though I know plenty of rabbis who’d have a stroke if they heard me say that. But he wasn’t
ours,
either. Back in the days of the Maccabees, ideas like his led too many people away from being Jews. These shrines to the spirits of Emperors past are another verse of the same song.”

“I suppose so,” Reuven said after some thought. “A good education will make you an
apikoros
sometimes, too, won’t it?”

“It can,” Moishe Russie agreed. “It doesn’t have to. If it did, you’d be in . . . where in Canada did Jane end up?”

“Somewhere called Edmonton,” Reuven answered. She’d sent a couple of enthusiastic letters. He’d written back, but she’d been a while replying now. As she’d said she would, she was busy making a new life for herself in a land where the Lizards didn’t rule.

“Canada,” his father said in musing tones. “I wonder how she’ll like the winters there. They aren’t like the ones in Jerusalem, or like the ones in Australia, either, I don’t think. More like Warsaw, unless I miss my guess.” He shuddered. “The weather is one more thing I don’t miss about Poland.”

Almost all of Reuven’s childhood memories of the land where he’d been born were of hunger and fear and cold. He asked, “Is there anything you
do
miss about Poland?”

His father started to shake his head, but checked himself. Quietly, he answered, “All the people the Nazi
mamzrim
murdered.”

Reuven didn’t know what to say to that. In the end, he didn’t say anything directly, but asked, “Has Anielewicz had any luck finding his family?”

“Not the last I heard,” his father answered. “And that doesn’t look good, either. The fighting’s been over for a while. Of course”—he did his best to sound optimistic—“a country’s a big place, and I doubt even the
verkakte
Germans could keep proper records while the Lizards were pounding them to pieces.”

“Alevai
you’re right, and
alevai
they’ll turn up.” Reuven walked around the last corner before their office. “And now we’ve turned up, too.”

After the grim talk, Moishe Russie put on a smile. “Bad pennies have a way of doing that. I wonder what we have waiting for us today.”

“Something interesting, maybe?” Reuven suggested, holding the door open for his father. “When I started practice, I didn’t think so much of it would be just . . . routine.”

“That’s not always bad,” his father said. “The interesting cases are usually the hard ones, too, the ones that don’t always turn out so well.”

“Did you become a doctor so you could sew up cut legs and give babies shots and tell people with strep throats to take penicillin?” Reuven asked. “Or did you want to see things you’d never seen before, maybe things nobody else had seen, either?”

“I became a doctor for two reasons: to make sick people better, and to make a living,” Moishe Russie answered. “If I see a patient who’s got something I’ve never seen before, I always worry, because that means I haven’t got any knowledge to fall back on. I have to start guessing, and it’s easier to guess wrong than it is to guess right.”

“You’d better be careful, Father,” Reuven said. “You sound like you’re in danger of turning into a conservative.”

“Some ways maybe,” Moishe Russie said. “That’s what general practice does—it makes you glad for routine. Consider yourself warned. If you wanted to stay radical your whole life long, you should have gone in for surgery. Surgeons always think they can do anything. That’s because they get to play God in the operating room, and they have trouble remembering the difference between the One Who made bodies and the ones who try to repair them.”

They went into the office. “Good morning, Dr. Russie,” Yetta the receptionist said, and then, “Good morning, Dr. Russie.” She smiled and laughed at her own wit. Reuven smiled, too, but it wasn’t easy. He’d heard the same joke every third morning since starting in practice with his father, and he was bloody sick of it.

His father managed a smile that looked something like sincere. “Good morning,” he said, a good deal more heartily than Reuven could have done. “What appointments have we got today?”

Yetta ran down the list: a woman with a skin fungus they’d been fighting for weeks, another woman bringing in her baby for a booster shot, a man with a cough, another man—a diabetic—with an abscess on his leg, a woman with belly pain, a man with belly pain . . . “Maybe we can do both of those at once,” Reuven suggested. “Two for the price of one.” His father snorted. Yetta looked disapproving. She liked her own jokes fine, no matter how often she repeated them. A doctor making jokes about medicine was almost as bad as a rabbi making jokes about religion.

“All right, we’ll have enough to do today, even without the people who just drop in,” his father said. “We’ll have some of those, too, I expect; we always do.” Some people, of course, got sick unexpectedly. Others didn’t believe in appointments, any more than Reuven believed in Muhammad as a prophet.

He got to see the woman with the stubborn skin fungus, a Mrs. Kratz. Yetta stayed in the room to make sure nothing improper occurred, as she did with all female patients. Custom aside, she could have stayed out. Reuven had no lecherous interest in Mrs. Kratz, and would have had none even without the fungus on her leg. She was plump and gray and older than his father.

“Here,” he said, and handed her a little plastic tube. “This is a new cream. It’s a sample, about four days’ worth. Use it twice a day, then call and let us know how it’s doing. If it helps, I’ll write you a prescription for more.”

“All right, Doctor.” She sighed. “I hope one of these creams works one of these days.”

“This one is supposed to be very strong,” Reuven said solemnly. The active ingredient, one new to human medicine, was closely related to the chemical the Lizards used to fight what they called the purple itch. He didn’t tell that to Mrs. Kratz. He judged her more likely to take offense than to be delighted.

After she left, the man with a cough came in. Reuven’s nose wrinkled. “How much do you smoke, Mr. Sadorowicz?” he asked; the aroma that clung to the fellow’s clothes gave him a head start on etiology here.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Sadorowicz answered, coughing. “Whenever I feel like it. What’s that got to do with anything?”

Reuven delivered his standard lecture on the evils of tobacco. Mr. Sadorowicz plainly didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t want to get an X-ray when Reuven recommended one, either. He didn’t want to do anything Reuven suggested. Reuven wondered why the devil he’d bothered coming in. Mr. Sadorowicz departed, still coughing.

Yetta came in again. “Here’s Mrs. Radofsky and her daughter, Miriam. She’s here for Miriam’s tetanus booster.”

“All right,” Reuven answered. Then he brightened: Mrs. Radofsky was a nice-looking brunette not far from his own age, while Miriam, who was about two, gave him a high-wattage little-girl smile. “Hello,” Reuven said to her mother. “I’m afraid I’m going to make her unhappy for a little while. Her arm may swell up and be tender for a couple of days, and she may run a bit of a fever. If it’s anything more than that, bring her back and we’ll see what we can do.” It wouldn’t be much, but he didn’t say that.

He rubbed Miriam’s arm with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab. She giggled at the sensation of cold, then shrieked when he injected her. He sighed. He’d known she would. He taped a square of gauze over the injection site.