“Johnny Rainbow! Isn’t it fantastic! How did you come up with that? Your mother name you that? Give that woman a medal!”
Denise said, “Give that woman a medal for having a child, period.”
And Yvette leaned over my seat to my head and whispered into my ear, “I love Denise to death, but she doesn’t have any kids!”
“You don’t have to tell them my whole life story, Yvette!” Denise shouted. “Why don’t you tell them that Dennis got snipped while you’re at it?”
I looked into my lap. Even my lap was embarrassed.
“How long have you been in Warsaw?” Yvette yelled to us. She was sitting behind Hannah and me, and kept leaning over into every millimeter of my personal space. She was leaning over into personal spaces that even my girlfriend had not visited. The woman was right up my ass, and shouting into it. “We’ve been here a week already, waiting for Johnny! He’s the best, so we didn’t want to have a death tour until he came, we’re so happy it worked out, I wish you could’ve come with us yesterday, yesterday was amazing, wasn’t it, Brett, tell them, wasn’t it?”
You might think that they would marry their opposites, the way people sometimes do if they want to stay married. But no. Brett also leaned over into Hannah’s crevices and began shouting.
“It was incredible! Johnny said you were going to join us, but you missed your train? Those trains are a bitch, aren’t they? We didn’t want to travel the Baltic states for that reason! Too much hassle, and we don’t want any hassle, we hate hassle!”
Across the aisle Denise leaned over to Chloe. “Darlin’, did Johnny tell you his chaos theory? He explained it yesterday on the way to Lublin when he told us all about you. We had time. It was like a three-hour tour!”
Dennis broke into an out-of-tune theme song for Gilligan’s Island.
The widower from the last seat in the back, slightly quieter than the rest, bless him, said, “Johnny’s chaos theory is why we felt so bad about keeping you waiting this morning. Totally our fault. I hope it doesn’t ruin our day.”
“I really hope your theory is wrong, Johnny,” said the widower. “Otherwise we’re screwed—pardon my French.” He took off his hat and fanned himself.
“Why are you fanning yourself?” Emil suddenly bristled, glancing through the rearview mirror. “There’s air-conditioning on my bus. It’s running on max.” The poor overheated man apologized and stopped fanning himself!
“I hope I’m wrong, too, Artie,” Johnny said. Artie! That was his name. Please remember it, Blake. You’re a writer now. “Chaos theory states that one small change out of the ordinary order of initial things multiplies by geometric expansion all the subsequent things until unpredictability follows. That’s why they say that a tennis ball lobbed in error can lead to the collapse of the universe.”
“Isn’t that the butterfly effect?” Brett said.
Johnny nodded. “It’s the double pendulum theory. Minute changes in initial motion result in drastically different patterns of consequences.” His gaze kept circling back around to Chloe.
“Wait, what’s your name again?” Denise said to Chloe. “Chloe what?”
“Chloe Divine.”
“Oh Yvette, isn’t that just divine! Aren’t they darling, all four of them, simply divine, aren’t they? Do they remind you of anyone, Yvette? They’re just like we used to be. Aren’t they precious?”
“What about me, Denise?” Johnny smiled, but after catching my humorless face looked away, toward Chloe, of course.
“You are the divinest of them all, darling boy!”
“How do you know anything about double pendulums?” Hannah asked Johnny. I wanted to know this myself, but I wouldn’t abase myself to ask. That might mean I was interested in his answer.
“I told you, my grandmother is a mathematician.”
“Lucky you,” Yvette exclaimed. “Your grandma is still alive?”
“Yes,” Johnny said. “Grandma taught me more than I ever wanted to know about the laws of mathematics.” For some reason he then glanced at Hannah! What a freak.
“Lucky, lucky! And your grandpa?”
Johnny grinned. “He taught me how to fight. Just kidding. How to fish, I mean.” But his eyes were all twinkly.
I nearly groaned. He fished, too? I know Hannah wouldn’t be that impressed, but Chloe loved fishing. Sure enough, when I glanced to my right, there was Chloe, blinking, all soft in the eye, probably thinking, oh, you fish too …
Bastard.
Trouble was, when I looked over at my brother, to see if he was as disgusted as I was, Mason was gazing at Johnny with Chloe’s expression, all doe-eyed and smiley. Oh, you fish too …
I give up. I. Give. Up.
Yvette and Brett, Dennis and Denise, and Artie told us that they’d been traveling together since the last of Yvette and Brett’s and Artie’s kids left for college. Before they regaled us with stories about which countries they had been to, they regaled us with stories about their children, grown, successful, two of them married, one of them popping with twins, one engaged, one almost engaged but pregnant, so Artie was going to be a grandpa again, and “Oh, how Arlene would have loved to have a little girl after having all them boys!”
Hannah turned to the back of the bus, to face Artie. “Do they plan to get married?”
“They don’t know. They gonna have the baby first, then see how they feel.”
“What do you think about that?”
“Good, fine. If they’re happy, I’m happy. They’re my kids, I just want them happy.”
Hannah nodded but uncertainly, as if she didn’t quite understand or believe it. Johnny stared at Hannah with a mixture of pity and regret, and I wanted to ask him what the hell he was staring at, but Denise, happy not to be talking about the kids she never wanted to have, tapped insistently on my shoulder and resumed telling us about the places the six of them had traveled to over the years, but when Arlene “passed away” (in a whisper) last year, they pledged they were not going to stop just because they lost one of their ranks. “Arlene wouldn’t want that, would she, Artie?”
Artie agreed that his deceased wife wouldn’t want that.
“So we realized,” Denise continued, “that though we’d been to Greece and Spain and Italy, and all round the Mediterranean islands, though we’d spent a month in France and a month in England, we’ve never been to the Baltic states. We decided there was no later. And being that Arlene was Jewish, we thought we’d honor her memory by going to see the camps in Poland. Artie approved, didn’t you, Artie?”
From the back, Artie grunted his approval.
“Though we’ll tell you frankly, we don’t like the travel here. It’s a slog, and the distances are too far. We much prefer the Alps, or Marseilles. We’re actually thinking of cutting the trip short and flying to Cote d’Azur for a few days, just to wash the grime off our bodies, relax a little bit by the sea, aren’t we, Yvette?”
“I don’t know if we’ll have time, Denise,” said Yvette. “There’s a lot to see.”
“Yesterday Johnny was so efficient with time,” Yvette said. “We can do it if he’s with us. He was swinging that pendulum all day, weren’t you, dear boy? He swung it back and forth between Sobibor and Majdanek.”
“Sobibor was the worst,” Brett said.
“Johnny didn’t think so!” Yvette said. “He was most affected by Majdanek, weren’t you, Johnny?”
“I don’t get why,” Brett said. “It wasn’t nearly as impressive as Sobibor. It was so small. A few barracks, one little gas chamber, all overgrown with grass.”
“A lot of destruction for a small place,” Johnny said.
“I agree with Yvette,” Denise said. “Majdanek wasn’t that impressive.”
“It looked different from the way my grandfather had described it,” Johnny said.
“Different? How? How would your grandfather know? Did he come here?”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “He came here.”
“Well, accordi
ng to the guidebook, the camp’s been like this for years. He must’ve come a long time ago. How was it different?”
“He said there were shoes in the barracks and giant cabbages growing in the ashes,” said Johnny.
An odd hush fell over the bus.
“What ashes?” Denise said.
“There were no cabbages,” Yvette said.
“Or shoes in the barracks.”
“Maybe we didn’t see everything,” Denise said. “Dennis, did you see shoes?”
“I did not see shoes,” said Dennis.
“How long ago was your grandfather there?”
“I don’t know,” Johnny said. “Sixty years.”
There was an exhale of relieved air among our seasoned travelers.
“Oh!” Yvette said, “so a really long time ago! Well, no wonder!”
And then from the back came Artie’s voice. “Sixty years, Johnny?” he said. “Wouldn’t that be 1944?”
“I guess it would,” said Johnny. “Give or take.”
“Give or take what?”
“A few days.”
“What was he doing here?” asked Denise. “No wonder he saw cabbages. Probably on the farms all around Lublin. They were destroyed during the war. Are you sure he was in Majdanek?”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Johnny said. “Emil, stop the bus.”
Emil slowed down and pulled into a dusty half-road by the edge of the forest.
“Why are we stopping?” Yvette said. “Are we taking a bathroom break?”
“Oh, good,” said Hannah. “I could use one.”
“We’re stopping,” Johnny said, “because we are here.”
“Here where?”
“Treblinka.”
Chloe
The two of them walked to get the flowers, half a block away in the Palace Square. A lady on a sunlit corner sold roses under her umbrella. They had been picked fresh that morning. Johnny paid for the two dozen red roses with baby’s breath in pink cellophane and then handed them to Chloe as if he were giving them to her. She took them, without lifting her eyes, and said thank you, and he said look at me.
I can’t, she whispered back.
Please, Chloe. Look at me.
I can’t, Johnny. They’re watching us. I can’t.
Just raise your eyes to me.
What could she do? Not look at him was one thing she could do. That’s not what she did. She lifted her gaze. His blinkless tar eyes stared back at her dumb with love.
Not nearly enough roses for you, he said, his voice catching on all kinds of things.
Johnny, please, she breathed out, like begging.
I want to kiss you right now. He bent his head toward her. I’m going to kiss you right now.
Johnny, please!
She staggered away. He stood motionless. I can’t take this, he said.
Me neither.
Khloya Deveeny, what are we going to do?
Nothing. You are going to spend the day telling us about the camps.
I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to show you. I don’t mean that. I mean after.
After what?
He didn’t say after what. But she knew. After today when he would go to Tarcento and she to Barcelona, and he to Afghanistan and she to San Diego, he to somewhere in his vagrant life, and she most certainly to some place else. She couldn’t look at him anymore. Her mouth twisted sharply in an effort to keep her eyes from welling up. We better go back, she whispered.
They were a few buildings away, in full view of the others, who loitered on the street past the horses, waiting for Johnny’s tourists. Everybody’s eyes were on them. They walked as slowly as they could.
“Was it okay when Blake came back instead of me in the middle of the night?”
“No.”
“Were you surprised?”
“I wasn’t not surprised.”
“He insisted he go.”
“That sounds like Blake.”
“I wanted to come back, Chloe. But he insisted.”
“I understand.”
“Was he angry?”
“Yes, but …” Chloe didn’t know why they were talking about Blake.
I don’t know what I want to say, he said. I guess I’m not saying it very well.
No, Johnny, she said. You’re saying it perfectly.
You’re tearing me from limb to limb.
And you me.
They took the last steps of their glacial amble, closing in on the others. She clutched the flowers to her chest, as if she and Johnny were walking down the aisle of a long church. By the time she realized this, it was too late. But she didn’t know how else to carry flowers! Or how to walk next to a tall beautiful boy if not in a ONE-two-and-three waltz, trying not to weep, to look less alive, to want less, to hurt less with bliss and sorrow. One two and three. One two and three. All things are numbers.
26
Dread
JOHNNY SAID THEY WOULD WALK FOUR KILOMETERS INTO THE woods. They would follow the old spur of the railroad, the spur that had been built by imprisoned Jews to reroute the trains from the main track in Treblinka village to a field in the remote forests. The sign was still there by the side of the desolate road in the gray flatlands. Treblinka, the sign proclaimed, announced, shouted, whispered.
They climbed out of the van at the crumbling, run-down train station. Yvette asked if it was still operational.
“Would you hop aboard a train at a station called Treblinka?” Johnny asked. Yvette wasn’t sure how to answer that.
Artie helped her. “The answer is no, Yvette. Say no.”
“No.”
“Thatagirl.”
Mason said that maybe the station had been left shuttered, yet standing on purpose and Chloe agreed. Acidly, Blake said, “You think?” Chloe and Mason glared at Blake.
“Anyway, as Johnny told us,” Mason went on, “they couldn’t continue to use it after the war, could they?”
“Why not?” Denise said. “Tell us, Johnny, you’re the tour guide.” Johnny, bless him, had to repeat everything he had told Chloe and Mason on the bus. He did it without rancor, but Mason was peeved for him, Chloe could see that. She gripped her roses with one hand, and Mason’s hand with the other. Aberrantly, she liked that Mason liked Johnny.
“The sign is a replica,” Blake said. “The original hangs in Yad Vashem.”
“Where?”
“Jerusalem.”
Johnny stared at Blake, amused. “That is correct, and it’s fascinating,” he said, “that you would know that.”
“I know a lot of crap,” Blake said with a cold shrug and an even colder stare.
Johnny advised everyone to leave their heavy things behind. “Bring your cameras if you want, but I’d counsel against even that. It’s eight kilometers there and back. You don’t want to be loaded down.” He showed everyone his little Olympus point and shoot. “This is the size of camera you want on long hikes.” Chloe glanced over at Blake and saw that he wanted to pitch his own silver Olympus into the trash. Imagine those two having the exact same camera.
“Can’t Emil drive us?” Hannah asked. Chloe poked her to keep quiet. “What?” she said. “I’m just wondering.”
“No, Emil can’t drive into the forest,” Johnny said. “Is everyone ready?”
Hannah stared at the path disappearing into the woods. “Why not?” she whispered to Chloe. “Why can’t he drive us?”
Chloe hurried ahead to stay closer to Johnny, while doing some math in her head. Eight kilometers was five miles. Two and a half miles each way. Piece of cake. They walked more than that when they went mushroom picking around their lake after a rain. Chloe wanted to whisper that to Hannah, but her friend was in no mood to be chided, no matter how lightly.
They left their belongings in the van, which Emil promptly locked up. He wasn’t joining them. He wasn’t interested in that stuff, he said, swirling his hand in the direction of the forest. He was going to find some food and have a nap.
“How long, Johnny?” he asked in his regal English.
“About three hours,” Johnny replied. They fist bumped.
“Three hours?” Hannah mouthed in horror.
The group set off.
“What if we have to go to the bathroom?” she asked, loudly, and then to Chloe: “I sort of have to go now.”
Yvette laughed. “The forest is your ladies’ room, darling,” she said.
Hannah hemmed and hawed. “Wouldn’t that be disrespectful?”
Johnny nodded. “Yes, probably best to go now rather than later.”
Hannah shook her head. “Is he kidding me?” she whispered, hanging on to Chloe’s arm.
It was just past noon. There was no one else on the needly path through the woods. “Well, why should there be?” Dennis said. “There’s hardly anything here.”
“There are some things here,” said Johnny.
“Does anyone know about this place?” Denise asked.
“Yes. Poland and the Jewish Holocaust Committee are thinking of building a permanent museum here.”
“There’s not even a museum?” Dennis exclaimed.
“There’s not even a museum,” said Johnny.
“So what’s here?”
“Well, there’s these four kilometers of the railroad spur. As they rode it in the cattle cars, we’re walking it now.” He smirked. “Though I’m sure Hannah would prefer it the other way around, no?”
Hannah colored a little. “I’m fine now,” she said, taking Blake’s hand. “Carry on. You were saying there was a museum?”
“Actually, just the opposite.”
“So what’s there?” Brett persisted. “A watchtower? A barbed-wire fence? Remnants of the sleeping barracks?”
“Even Majdanek had more,” Denise said. “And it hardly had anything.”
“Yes, Treblinka has less. You’ll see.”
“So what are we walking to?” Hannah said. “We’re just going to walk down this road, and then walk back?”
“We’re walking to what used to be a farm,” Johnny said. “Or what is now a cemetery, if you prefer.”
They moved in single file along the narrow path, except for Hannah and Blake, who brought up the rear side by side. Hannah, despite her bravado, walked like the injured. Johnny strode in front, black guitar case on his back, followed by Chloe, Mason, and then the Arizona tourists. Johnny was the only one with a small backpack. His had maps in it, a compass.
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