Departures (35 page)

“Good.”

The Stutzmans and Susanna walked off toward the bus stop. The Gimpels went back inside. Lise went with Alicia to get her ready for bed. Heinrich rinsed off the dishes and started loading them into the washer. He was still busy when Alicia came out for a good night kiss. Usually that was just part of the nighttime routine; tonight it felt special.

He said, “You don’t have to be frightened every second, darling. If you show you’re afraid, people will start to wonder what you have to be afraid of. Keep on being your own sweet self and no one will ever suspect a thing.”

“I’ll try, Papa.” When she hugged him, she clung for a few extra seconds. He squeezed her, then ran his hand through her hair. “Good night,” she said, and hurried away.

Lise walked into the kitchen a couple of minutes later. She dragged in a chair from the dining room, sat down, and waited till the sink was empty and the washer full. Then, as the machine started to churn, she got up and gave him a long, slow hug. “And so the tale gets told once more,” she said.

As he had with his daughter, Heinrich held on to his wife. “And so we try to go on for another generation,” he said. “We’ve outlasted so much. God willing, we’ll outlast the Nazis, too.”

“And of course, now that the tale is told, the risk we’ll get caught also goes up,” Lise said. “You did well there, keeping her from running from the police van.”

“Couldn’t have that,” Gimpel agreed. “But she’ll be nervous for a while now, and she’s so young.” He shook his head. “Strange how our greatest danger lies in making sure our kind goes on. No one would ever suspect you or me.”

“Why else buy pork?”

“I know.” Gimpel took off his glasses, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, set the spectacles back on his nose. “Why else do all the other things we do to seem like perfect Germans? I can quote
Mein Kampf
more easily than Scripture. But it’s not so easy for a child. And we have two more yet to go.” He let out a long, worn sigh, hugged Lise again. “I’m so tired.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s easier for me, staying home with the
Kinder
like a proper
Hausfrau
. But you have to wear the mask every day at your office.”

“It’s either pretend to others I’m not a Jew or pack it in and pretend the same thing to myself. I’m not ready for that. I remember too well.” He thought again of the hidden yellowing photographs from the east. “We
will
go on, in spite of everything.”

Lise yawned. “Right now, I think I’m going on to bed.”

“I’m right behind you. Oh—speaking of the office, on the way home today Willi said he admired how content I was here and now.”

“Good,” Lise said at once. “If you must wear the mask, wear it well.”

“I suppose so. He also asked if we were busy tonight. I told him yes, since we were, but we’ll be going over there one evening soon.”

“I’ll arrange for my sister to stay with the girls,” Lise said. “Let’s give Alicia a little more time to get used to things before we take her out.”

“Sensible. You generally are, though.”

“Ha!” Lise said darkly. “I’d better be. So had you.”

“I know.” He chuckled. “Besides, with the girls at home we’ll be able to play more bridge.”

“That’s true.” Lise also laughed. Both of them, by now, were long used to the strangeness of having good friends who, if they knew the truth, might well want to send them to an extermination camp. Heinrich
was
looking forward to getting together with Willi and Erika Dorsch for an evening of talk and bridge. Within the limits of his upbringing, Willi was a good fellow.

Gimpel pondered the limits of his own upbringing, which were a good deal narrower than Willi Dorsch’s. In one way, telling Alicia of her heritage was transcending those limits. In another, it was forcing them on her as well. In still another—He gave up the regress before he got lost in it. “Didn’t you say something about bed?”

“You’re the one who’s been standing here talking,” Lise said.

“Let’s go.”

Although I’m Jewish, I’m not particularly observant: I eat pork, for instance. One morning, after a breakfast of bacon and eggs, I thought, That’s so good, I wish it were kosher. “The R Strain” followed shortly thereafter. Curiously, after Stan Schmidt bought it but before it saw print, there was a story in
Science News
about the babirusa, a Southeast Asian pig that actually does more or less chew its cud. One of the scientists who was working on the babirusa saw the story in
Analog
and thought her work had given me the idea. It didn’t, but who knows? It might have.

EVEN IN LOS ANGELES, IT IS OUT OF THE
ordinary for the star of a press conference to be a small pink pig. Peter Delahanty had been anxious about how Lionel would react to the SV lights, but the shoat was doing just what he’d hoped: ignoring them. He was happily feeding his face from a plastic washtub full of potatoes and carrots. Delahanty beamed at him like a proud father, which, as he headed Genetic Enterprises, in a way he was.

Still cameras flashed and stereovision cameras whirred, but there were, after all, only so many pictures to be taken of a pig. After a while, Delahanty took the tub away from Lionel and put it on a table by the lectern.

Following it with his eyes, Lionel let out a grunt of piggy indignation. “Sorry, pal,” Delahanty told him. “Maybe later.” As if he understood, Lionel settled back—he really was a good-natured beast. His throat and jaws began to work.

More flashes went off. “That’s what you came to see, ladies and gentlemen,” Delahanty said. “Lionel’s one of Genetic Enterprises’ new R strain of pigs—R for ruminant, of course. In other words, unlike ordinary, unimproved swine, he chews his cud.”

“Just why is that an improvement?” asked a lady reporter in the second row.

“It makes him and his brothers and sisters more efficient food processors. Ruminant animals—cattle, sheep, goats, deer, antelope
are some of the ones occurring in nature—partially digest food, then store and and regurgitate it for rechewing and more complete digestion. They get more out of a given amount of food than nonruminants. Lionel will gain weight on less feed or lower-quality feed than an unimproved pig.”

“Which means lower cost to the farmer?” someone asked.

“Exactly.”

“But of course buying your R strain is going to be more expensive for the farmer. What’s the net savings?”

Delahanty turned to a chart behind him. “Here you have costs for the R strain compared to those for ordinary swine. As you can see, the break-even point is at three and a half months if the farmer buys piglets; it’s even sooner if he chooses to have fertilized ova implanted in his own sows. And the extra expense is all in the first generation; the R strain breeds true.”

“Will they interbreed with unmodified pigs?” a man with a gray mustache wondered.

“No,” Delahanty said. “There may be matings, but no offspring from them. The genetic changes are too great for inter-fertility.”

Another woman had a question: “How hardy are your new pigs? Can they survive the poor treatment they may get, say, in a Third World country?”

“At least as well as any other pigs,” Delahanty said firmly. “Probably better, since they’ll thrive on less food. One of the reasons Genetic Enterprises developed the R strain was to provide more protein for overpopulated developing nations.”

He fielded more queries about costs, and several on the genetic engineering techniques that had gone into Lionel and his ilk. After half an hour or so, the reporters’ ingenuity flagged. Finally, though, someone asked the question Delahanty had been hoping for: “What do these beasts of yours taste like?”

He smiled. “I’ll let you all be the judges of that. The chops and hams on the buffet to my left here come from the R strain. If there aren’t any more questions—”

The surge forward was so sudden and urgent that Lionel snorted in alarm. But somebody was still waving a hand—not a reporter but a cameraman, a fellow with curly brown hair and a big nose. “Yes? You want to ask me something?” Delahanty called.

“Yeah, if I could,” the man said. “My name’s Stan Jacoby. Here’s what I want to know …”

Delahanty had been ready for every question the reporters
had thrown at him, and a good many they hadn’t. Now, though, he felt his jaw drop. “Mr. Jacoby,” he said in the most spontaneous answer of the press conference, “I’ll be goddamned if I know.”

The phone rang three times before Ruth picked it up. “It’s for you, dear,” she shouted.

Rabbi Aaron Kaplan muttered something unrabbinic that his wet beard mercifully swallowed. “Unless it’s an emergency, get a number and say I’ll call back,” he called over the hiss of the shower. He expected to be dragged out dripping—when did anyone calling a rabbi
not
think it was an emergency?—but he got to finish bathing in peace.

Somewhat mollified, he surveyed himself in the steamy bathroom mirror as he dried off. There were gray threads in the beard and a bald spot at his crown, but his stocky frame had not changed too badly since his days as a high school linebacker twenty-five years before.

Ruth came in with a scrap of paper. He smiled at her, thinking how lucky he was; if she had not been a rabbi’s daughter, she would have been a
rebbitzin
decorative enough to make half his congregation nervous.

At the moment, she was giggling. “What’s so funny?” he asked. She gave him the paper. He recognized Peter Delahanty’s name; they had worked together on a couple of fund-raising committees. Underneath were a phone number and a one-sentence message: “Wants to know if pigs can be kosher.”

He laughed. “A practical joke?”

“I don’t think so. He seemed very sincere.”

“Well, all right, I’ll call him. He’s got
chutzpah
, if nothing else.” Kaplan went into the bedroom, put on a T-shirt and pair of shorts. Not for the first time, he was glad he hadn’t added video to his phone system.

He punched the number. “Genetic Enterprises, Dr. Delahanty’s office,” a woman said. He asked to speak to Dr. Delahanty. “May I ask who’s calling?” the secretary said. When he gave his name, she answered, “One moment. I’ll connect you.”

“Oh, Rabbi Kaplan. Thanks for returning my call.” Delahanty sounded young and earnest. If he was a practical joker, he was first-rate.

Kaplan said, “My wife tells me you were inquiring about the
possibility of, uh, pork being acceptable under Jewish dietary law.”

“Yes, that’s right. You see—”

Kaplan cut him off. “I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Leviticus 11:3 and 11:7 are the relevant passages. Here, let me give you the exact wording.” He reached for the Bible on the night-stand. “ ‘Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.’ And again, ‘And the swine, because he parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, but cheweth not the cud, he is unclean to you.’ The fourteenth chapter of Deuteronomy repeats the same prohibitions. So I really don’t see how—”

It was Delahanty’s turn to interrupt. “Forgive me, Rabbi Kaplan, but I do know that under normal circumstances Jews are not supposed to eat pork. Let me tell you about Lionel, though.”

“Lionel?” Kaplan echoed, confused.

“Yes. This would have been easier if you’d caught the news last night. Lionel is a pig who chews his cud … Are you there, Rabbi Kaplan?”

“I’m here,” Kaplan said after a long pause. “I think you’d better tell me more.” He felt a headache coming on.

“The easiest thing to do would have been to say that pigs is pigs, whether they chew their cuds or not. That would have been that,” Ruth said when he finally got off the phone with Delahanty and, still wearing a bemused look, explained the dilemma to her.

“Simplest, yes, but would it have been right?” Kaplan said, shaking his head. “It goes against everything I’ve been brought up with to say ‘kosher’ and ‘pig’ in the same sentence. But if a pig has a cloven hoof and chews its cud, doesn’t it meet the criteria the Bible sets for permitted beasts?”

“It meets the criteria for trouble,” his wife said practically. “If you start saying pork is kosher, you’d best thank God there’s no Jewish Inquisition, because if there were, it would burn you at the stake.”

“At the chop, actually,” said Kaplan, who had a weakness for bad puns.

Ruth did not groan, as he had hoped she would. She set her hands on her hips, saying, “I’m serious, Aaron. Do you want to make yourself a laughingstock for the congregation, to say nothing of other rabbis?”

“Of course not.” Just the same, he winced as he imagined the headlines: “Only in Los Angeles.” “Rabbi Kaplan’s Favorite Ham Recipes.” A caption under a picture of a pig: “Funny, he doesn’t
look
Jewish.” Oh, he was opening a can of worms, and no mistake.

But it was such a
pretty
problem. Kaplan had been a rabbi going on twenty years now: a teacher, a counselor, a preacher, a social worker, sometimes even a scholar. Not since his student days, though, had he had a chance to be a theologian.

His wife recognized his faraway stare, and it alarmed her. She chose a question close to the issue at hand: “Aaron, have you ever tasted pork?”

As she had intended, that snapped him out of his reverie. He looked at her in surprise. He was Conservative, not Orthodox; he did not pretend to observe all the minutiae of dietary law. Pork, however, was something else. It was like asking if he had ever been unfaithful—exactly like that, he thought uncomfortably.

“Once,” he admitted. “I was eighteen, in my senior year in high school, and out to do anything my father didn’t want me to do. And so, one morning I stopped for breakfast with some friends, and I ordered bacon and eggs.”

“Was it good?”

“You know, I really don’t remember.” He supposed that was like a lot of infidelity, too—he had been too nervous to enjoy it. “What’s all this about?”

“If you decide this meat could somehow be kosher, I was just wondering how you were going to react when people said you did it because you liked pork yourself and wanted an excuse to eat it.”

“That’s ridi—” he began, and then stopped. It was not ridiculous, even in the twenty-first century. It might very well be one of the kinder things Orthodox rabbis would say. They would, he thought with a curiously mixed metaphor, crucify him if he had anything at all good to say about pigs. The only thing they could not do was excommunicate him; Judaism didn’t work that way. It was something of a relief, but not much.