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“But it would hurt afterwards. You said so.” Mrs. Zylbring made a sour face. “And it would be expensive, too.”
Reuven nodded politely. The training he’d had at the Lizards’ medical college hadn’t prepared him for dealing with dilemmas like this. He suspected he was a good deal more highly trained than he needed to be to join his father’s practice. No, he didn’t suspect it: he knew it. But he was also trained in some of the wrong things.
The old lady waggled a finger at him. “If it were your leg, Doctor, what would you do?”
He almost burst out laughing. The Lizards had never asked him a question like that. But it wasn’t a bad question, not really. Mrs. Zylbring assumed he had all the answers. That was what a doctor was for, wasn’t it-having answers? Answering what kind of condition she had was easy. Knowing what to do about it was a different question, a different kind of question, one Shpaaka and the other physicians from the Race hadn’t got him ready to handle.
He temporized: “If the fact that it doesn’t disturb function satisfies you, leave it alone. If the way it looks bothers you, I can get rid of it inside half an hour.”
“Of course the way it looks bothers me,” she said. “If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have come here. But I don’t like the idea of you cutting on me, and I don’t have a whole lot of money, either. I don’t know what to do.”
In the hope Yetta would have a good idea, Reuven glanced over to her. She rolled her eyes in a way suggesting she’d seen patients like Mrs. Zylbring a million times before but didn’t know what to do about them, either. In the end, the old woman went home with her cyst. Reuven wished he’d tried harder to talk her into getting rid of it; his urge was always to do something, to intervene. If he hadn’t had that urge, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.
But when he said as much to his father, Moishe Russie shook his head. “If it’s not really hurting the woman, it doesn’t matter one way or another. She’d have been unhappy at the pain afterwards, too, mark my words. If she’d wanted you to do it, that would have been different.”
“The pain would be the same either way,” Reuven said.
“Yes-but at the same time no, too,” his father said. “The difference is, she’d have accepted it better if she’d been the one urging you to have the thing out. She wouldn’t blame you for it, if you know what I mean.”
“I suppose so,” Reuven said. “Things aren’t so cut-and-dried here as they were back in the medical college. You were always supposed to come up with the one right answer there, and you got into trouble if you didn’t.”
His father’s chuckle had a reminiscent feel to it. “Oh, yes. But the real world is more complicated than school, and you’d better believe it.” He got up from behind his desk, came around it, and clapped Reuven on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go home. You haven’t got homework any more, anyhow.”
“That’s true.” Reuven grinned. “I knew I must have had some good reason for getting out of there.”
Moishe Russie laughed, but soon sobered. “You did have a good reason, a very good one. And I’m proud of you.”
“Can’t you get the fleet lord to do anything about that?” Reuven asked as they left the office-Moishe Russie locked up behind them-and started for home.
Late-afternoon sunlight gleamed off Moishe Russie’s bald crown as he shook his head. “I’ve tried. He won’t listen. He wants everybody to reverence the spirits of Emperors past”-he said the phrase in the Lizards’ language-“so we’ll get used to bowing down to the Race.”
“He’d better not hold his breath, or he’ll be the bluest Lizard ever hatched,” Reuven said.
“I hope you’re right. With all my heart, I hope you’re right,” his father said. “But the Race is stubborn, and the Race is very patient, too. That worries me.”
“How much is patience worth if we all blow up tomorrow?” Reuven asked. “That’s what worries me.”
Moishe Russie started to step off the curb, then jumped back in a hurry to avoid an Arab hurtling past on a bicycle. “It worries me, too,” he said quietly, and then switched to Yiddish to add, “God damn the stupid Nazis.”
“Everyone’s been saying that for the past thirty years,” Reuven said. “If He’s going to do it, He’s taking His own sweet time about it.”
“He works at His speed, not ours,” Moishe Russie answered.
“If He’s there at all,” Reuven said. There were days-commonly days when people were more stupid or vicious than usual-when belief came hard.
His father sighed. “The night the Lizards came to Earth, I was-we all were-starving to death in the Warsaw ghetto. Your sister Sarah already had. I’d gone out to trade some of the family silver for a pork bone. I threw a candlestick over the wall around the ghetto, and the Pole threw me the bone. He could have just cheated me, but he didn’t. As I was walking back to our flat, I prayed to God for a sign, and an explosive-metal bomb went off high in the sky. I thought I was a prophet, and other people did, too, for a while.”
“Sarah…” Reuven felt a sudden rush of shame. He hadn’t thought about his dead sister in years. “I hardly remember her.” He couldn’t have been more than three when she died. All he really had was a confused recollection of not being the only child in the family. Unlike his parents, he brought little in the way of memories with him from Poland.
“She was very sweet and very mischievous, and I think she would have been beautiful,” Moishe Russie said, which was about as much as he’d ever talked about the girl who’d died before the Lizards came.
“She sounds like the twins,” Reuven said. He walked on again.
“Nu? Why not?” his father said. “There’s something to this genetics business, you know. But maybe God really was giving me a sign, there in Warsaw that night. If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d surely be dead now. So would all the Jews in Poland-all the Jews in
Europe, come to that.”
“Instead, it’s only a big chunk that are, and the rest who are liable to be,” Reuven said. “Maybe that’s better, but it’s a long way from good.”
Moishe Russie raised an eyebrow. “So what you’re accusing God of, then, is sloppy workmanship?”
Reuven thought about it. “Well, when you get right down to it, yes. If I do a sloppy job of something, I’m only human. I make mistakes. I know I’ll make mistakes. But I expect better from God, somehow.”
“Maybe He expects better from you, too.” His father didn’t sound reproachful. He just sounded thoughtful, thoughtful and a little sad.
“I don’t like riddles.” Reuven, now, Reuven sounded reproachful.
“No?” Moishe Russie’s laugh came out sad, too. “What is life, then? You won’t find the answer to that one till you can’t tell anybody.” He quoted from the Psalms: “ ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?’ God has riddles, too.”
“Words,” Reuven fleered, sounding even more secular than he felt. “Nothing but words. Where’s the reality behind them? When I work with patients, I know what is and what isn’t.” He scowled, remembering Mrs. Zylbring. Things weren’t always simple with patients, either.
From the Bible, his father swung to Kipling, whom he quoted in Yiddish translation: “ ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’ ” He laughed again. “Or more likely you’re just a younger man. We’re almost home. I wonder what your mother’s making for supper.” He set a hand on Reuven’s shoulder, hurrying him along as if he were a little boy. Reuven started to shrug it off, but in the end let it stay.
When they got home, the odor of roasting lamb filled their nostrils. So did the excitement of the twins, who, like Jacob with the angel of the Lord, were wrestling with algebra. “It’s fun,” Judith said.
“It’s fun after you figure out what’s going on, anyhow,” Esther amended.
“Till then, your head wants to fall off,” Judith agreed. “But we’ve got it now.”
