A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  The motorcycle behind Jaryk revved up and struck his rear wheel. He fell to the ground, a few feet short of an oncoming rickshaw. Misha’s suitcase came loose along with Mrs. Pal’s lunch—rice and lentils strewn across the concrete. It took him a moment to stand, and by then the motorcycle driver had fled the scene. Above the honking, people began to yell. He couldn’t understand the words, but he thought it was about his predicament. When he touched his throbbing forehead, he came away with blood on his hand.

  The policeman in the center of the intersection ran to him, waving his baton majestically, the whistle in his mouth producing unexpected volume. “Halt!” he was saying in English. “All halt!”

  * * *

  ………………

  He was taken to the Calcutta Police Hospital. The cut above his eye was bandaged by four medical staff (one to hold the gauze, another to apply pressure to the wound, a third to place the bandage, and the last to supervise the whole endeavor). In a dark room that smelled of mold, the deputy chief of police offered him a cup of tea.

  “So sorry,” said the officer. “The traffic is poor because of the protests. The last of the Naxals, you know. There are still a few bad apples out on the streets.”

  Misha had spoken about these Naxals, named after the little village where all the trouble started. They were mostly boys in Calcutta and the surrounding villages who’d been rounded up in prisons. The root of the problem, Misha had said, was land and who had the right to own it. So far it’d been a shadow war fought by peasants with bows and arrows against SWAT teams with automatic weapons. A few bad apples. No government tolerated a brewing revolution for long.

  Jaryk consented to sign a series of forms, after which he was rushed into what was called a “visitor’s room.” The room was equipped with only a latrine and a cot.

  When he told the deputy that he was heading to Shantiniketan, the deputy had responded, “But a foreigner on a bicycle, in such a climate of government activity, could not possibly be heading in that direction. We simply have too many disturbing peoples out there. When you’re well again and have secured proper transportation, we shall bid you goodbye.”

  He was left alone in the cell, where he now lay, feeling the effects of sleeplessness claw into his body, feeling the ache in his temples where he’d hit the concrete. A band of ants crawled toward a sugary piece of something in the near corner. There were no windows in the room, only a single fluorescent light that seemingly blinked at will. How had he ended up here—a prison in the heart of Calcutta—with nothing but an ugly green suitcase to keep him company?

  He knocked on his door until an attendant came for him. “Could I speak to the deputy?” Jaryk asked. “I’m feeling fine. I’m ready to leave.”

  “Sorry, sir, but that is not permitted. The deputy, sir, has gone home for the day, but he has left instructions to keep you secure.”

  “Just let me know when the deputy is back,” he said. “I’d like to be on my way soon.”

  The attendant left with a bow. Alone, Jaryk skimmed through a handful of pages in Misha’s guidebook. Strange that the idea of India—all of Misha’s planning, his joyous scribbling on pamphlets from the embassy and his one proper guidebook—had come upon them the same season as Lucy, her brilliant grip. It had felt then like a convergence of good things.

  * * *

  ………………

  Over half a year ago Jaryk had first seen Misha’s guidebook, but they hadn’t spoken much about it then, because there was something else on his mind. For that something else, one early evening in November, he arranged to meet Misha after work. At Fulton Market, the last of the fish had been sold or sent to the freezer, and groups of men were plunging their thick boots into the water to release the day’s smell. He followed Misha’s lead and, shoeless, toed the East River; it was cold, and he had to take his feet out after a moment, though Misha kept his in. He winked at Jaryk and asked in Polish, “Should we go swimming?”

  They shared the sandwich Misha had saved from his lunch and allowed the sun to wane. When the lights on the Empire State Building came on, they dried their feet on burlap bags that served as breakers and made their way to a nearby bar, Seven and a Half Dimes, where a beer cost seventy-five cents and men of every rank gathered to drink for cheap. Junior hands scooted out of the way when Misha walked to his spot near the woodstove; a fire was quickly kindled.

  Jaryk knew the faces of many of the men Misha worked with. When Jaryk was nineteen, Misha had found him his first job at the market, running the slop buckets, collecting the entrails from filleted fish and dumping them into a giant container, whose purpose was a mystery no one discussed. Afterwards, at the bar, they would drink one or two beers, and Misha would speak about the biggest fish they’d carted in that day—once, a marlin that weighed over two hundred pounds, and another time a tuna so plump it sold for a limb and a half. When it was just the two of them, they could speak Polish, but tonight Jaryk kept quiet.

  Rebecca, the owner’s daughter, collected their empty glasses. “You’ll have another, won’t you?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she left and returned with another round on the house. After handing Jaryk his beer, she pinched his cheek. He flushed at the touch, but when Rebecca winked at him, he didn’t take the bait. Another time, he might have left Misha for an hour. Walked down into the basement to engage in half an hour of fierce play with Rebecca, who, a decade older than him, was still equipped with a remarkable figure and an astonishing libido. Afterwards, he’d check the books. Rebecca feared her wealth would be lost suddenly, so she gave him the postcoital duty of making sure the ones and zeros were well aligned. Soon, he would have to tell Rebecca that the basement was forbidden for him—at least, for half of its pursuits.

  “You’ve had the look on you the last hour,” Misha said. “Something about the job? They not treating you right?” Misha flexed his hands in front of his face. He wasn’t even fifty years old but had already developed the first signs of arthritis in his fingers and wrists. In this country, he’d always worked the wharves, everything from cleaning the docks to helping hoist giant octopi onto weigh scales. Once, a fish hook had gotten lodged in the middle of his palm, and it had taken a doctor eighteen stitches to sew the wound, but he’d come back to work the next day, doing everything he needed to with one good hand.

  “Remember when you told me to get married,” Jaryk said. “We were sitting right here.” Months had passed since that conversation. He wasn’t sure how much Misha remembered of that night. It had been the week leading up to the Fourth of July, and the crowd at Seven and a Half Dimes was thin. Someone had put Celtic music on the jukebox, and several Irishmen step-danced around the tables. Earl Minton, who ran inspections at the fish market and who was to be married the next day, was hoisted up on a chair and carried around as if he were a bag of bait. At first Earl encouraged the attention by yelping in his highest register, but the jostling caught up to him, and thick into the night he looked seasick; when the men wouldn’t keep their hands off him, it was Misha who glowered over them until they sloughed away, Misha who found Earl’s coat and put it back over his shoulders. After that, though, Misha went from beer to whiskey to rum. Gifts mostly from the regulars who loved him, but still. Too often, Misha would mix his booze and leave himself slurring and dangerous. Jaryk had to take him home.

  At the doorstep, Misha had clubbed Jaryk lightly on the chin and said, “I want you to find a nice woman, and I want you to have a family. Two fat boys. Will you do that for me?” Jaryk rubbed his chin and helped Misha up the stairs, but he took Misha’s words seriously—he always had. The steadiest girl in Misha’s life had lasted only six months. Ann Lazar, who despite her genteel name, had enough steel in her to skin a chicken with her bare hands. She kept Misha right for months, but Misha’s head was never right for love. If either Jaryk or Misha were to start a family—and every day their chances were dimming�
��Jaryk would have to be the one to do it. There were stories Misha wanted to pass on. All that wisdom from Pan Doktor. That was what he was asking of Jaryk.

  Now at the bar, Misha pulled at his beard and gazed into the distance. Finally he turned to Jaryk and asked, “Let the cat out of the bag already. Is she a looker?”

  “It’s serious,” Jaryk said. “I want you to meet her.”

  Misha whistled under his breath. He made his eyes as large as the mouth of his beer glass, sticking his nose close to Jaryk’s face. “Well, it’s about time.”

  * * *

  ………………

  Jaryk worked at a synagogue on Seventy-Second Street and Amsterdam, keeping the books. Nearing his twenty-fifth birthday, having tired of work at the fish market, he’d answered an ad in the paper for a bookkeeper. Since he enjoyed doing sums, counting change, and weighing portions of fish, he felt qualified for the job.

  The rabbi had interviewed him by presenting three mathematical challenges. He still remembered the final question involved figuring the number of angels who could stand on top of a wedding cake that had a radius of two and a quarter feet. “How small are the angels?” Jaryk had asked, and then computed the measurements so that they could all fit snugly atop the icing.

  The morning after Jaryk told Misha about Lucy, he gave himself a task. The synagogue was over a hundred years old and had endured the tenures of two Kabbalistic rabbis who did not care about its upkeep. The current rabbi, Samuel, had said on the last Shabbat, “It can be dark in here,” and while he’d meant it in the context of religious light—the kind you had to persistently cultivate, as if faith were a difficult plant—Jaryk had understood it more plainly. The grand chandelier had burned its last bulb, and the congregation relied on a series of steel-toed lamps that had been placed between the rows like vigilant soldiers.

  Long ago, someone had climbed the twenty feet and replaced each old bulb with a new, but in the many years he’d worked here—fourteen, to be exact, the rhythm of time passing through a succession of holidays—he’d never wanted to make the effort to do it till now. He went down to the basement, where they kept odds and ends from over the years, and found a ladder and a box of replacement bulbs, which he tied to his belt. He put on his sunglasses to withstand the brightness. Slowly, he climbed all the way up, the bulbs tinkling like small jewels.

  When all the bulbs had been replaced, he returned to the pews with aching shoulders. In the strange brightness, he could see the dust his feet had released, but it seemed beautiful, the candor of that room, with the five books of Moses in every row; and the bimah, the fray of the wood where the rabbi rested his elbows and spoke of God—that, too, had its splendor.

  All their years in New York, Misha had never entered the synagogue. Were it not for the paying job, Jaryk, too, might have stayed away, but he felt in this chamber, now brightly lit, that he was grateful for his life. He prayed for the first time since he’d been a child, the words out of his mouth difficult yet familiar: for what was to come with Misha and with Lucy—that they would all know equal happiness, neither too much nor too little of life’s ordinary pleasures.

  * * *

  ………………

  A few days later, after he’d finished at the synagogue, Jaryk met Misha at Seven and a Half Dimes to play pool. Two of the pool table’s corners were creased enough to impose their own physics to the game. Newcomers at the bar were often confounded by the way balls spun near the pockets, but on this table Jaryk could make a shot from just about any angle, which meant that the few times he’d played pool on a proper setup, he’d mishit more often than not. It didn’t matter that Misha had played on this surface as much as he had—Misha treated the cue ball as if it needed a good, solid whacking, and it was not uncommon to see his shots engage a crease and volley onto the barroom floor, rolling between legs of tottering patrons and scores of abandoned peanut shells, leaving it to Jaryk to find and retrieve.

  But Misha was never a sore loser. He was always a few points behind Jaryk, but he didn’t mind. He’d once announced, “It’s okay to lose to your friends,” and Jaryk, guilty of being the one with the perennially better aim, had felt relieved of a burden.

  He’d been bringing up the matter of Lucy in small doses. Despite what Lucy believed, he’d been preparing Misha for months. At first, he just introduced the idea of her, a something serious. Then he talked about her place of employment. “So she listens to people complain all day?” Misha had said incredulously. Afterwards, he talked about her father, whom he had a fear of meeting, an army man from the South.

  “She told her father about you? A forty-year-old Jew?”

  He didn’t think she had. But then, he’d been telling Misha about Lucy regularly; maybe, she’d done the same with her father.

  Misha hit the cue ball into the eight ball and both nearly tumbled into the same pocket. Jaryk didn’t take the next shot, though he had a clear view of a strike that would likely end the game. “Will you meet Lucy for dinner?” he asked.

  “Will she like our food?” Misha asked, earnestly. “Can she hold her liquor?”

  * * *

  ………………

  They walked along the water, around which the financial district was tucked like an errant elbow. The cold had come early, and the East River was besieged by an early freeze, a thin skein of ice that wouldn’t hold the weight of a boot. But they had an affinity for the cold, walking in the early frost with a liminal sense of pride. The cold made them remember the cobbled and unhurried streets of their youth, where for much of the winter the stones were buried in snow.

  They headed to the Dockside Players Field, where men from the wharves played roundup baseball year-round at a park the city had left to wither. The bleachers they’d built by hand were covered by snow, but the men had shoveled the field clean, exposing much-maligned sections of summer-planted grass. The dozen or so players on the field now were operating with an efficiency brought on by the cold.

  There were rapid-fire volleys of chatter between catcher and pitcher, a musical banter Jaryk had long since learned to ignore. Where in professional leagues, the same conversation would have been had through a series of hand signals, on the Dockside Players Field it was paraded in the open. Ninety-five west, lone man deep, fire in the hole!—odd, made-up phrases that signified a constantly shifting vocabulary of pitches.

  Jaryk understood the game reasonably well, though he was sure both he and Misha missed some of the intricacies, but that didn’t matter—not now in the middle of an autumn that already felt like winter, watching his old coworkers run gregariously in thick jackets from one leather stump to another—nor had it mattered in the summers they’d shared here, when the grass had been tended green not by the city but by players who loved the sport too much to let their field wither. Jaryk imagined bringing Lucy. He could see her easily bored by the pace of the game. He could see her wandering from the bleachers to the hut that served as a concession stand to coax stories from the old bruisers who tended bar. In minutes she’d likely charm one of Misha’s old friends to tell her his whole life’s story. He’d seen that before, how she’d get people talking about their oldest wounds.

  “You in, old man?” one of the men called out to Misha. A terrible batsman, Misha was more beloved for his sense of humor on the field (and his propensity for half-Polish, half-English curses) than for his athletic prowess.

  “I’ve got a lecture to go to,” Misha said.

  “Fancy, you. Well, what about the Flash?” the same man asked.

  Jaryk’s nickname on the field had been earned after he proved how fast he could run the bases. It was a skill he’d cultivated many years ago, when the whole orphanage had gone to a summer camp on the outskirts of Warsaw and Misha had taken him under his wing, had trained him to outsprint the other boys.

  Jaryk said he’d be game another time, and they walked toward West
Street. Across the water, smoke rose from the mouths of shoe factories. A tabby cat stopped to smell Jaryk’s boot, then darted away. They squatted at the edge of an abandoned pier and listened. Fish were preparing for the winter. A trident of seagulls skimmed low just above the water, then flew away. Behind them they heard, then saw, a drunk zigzag his way down toward the pier, and they gave him space. More and more in the city you had to look out for danger. Everyone knew someone who’d gotten mugged or worse. It hadn’t happened to them, and sometimes Jaryk thought it was because the lowlifes could smell all the rot he and Misha had lived through.

  “I know you won’t come to the lecture, but aren’t you at least curious what it’s about?” Misha asked.

  “I’m dying to know,” Jaryk said with a grim smile.

  “It’s called ‘Art in the Ghettos.’ All the ways our people made poems or songs. Who knows, maybe they’ll even talk about our play.”

  Misha saw the ghetto as history they should never forget and the art they’d made there as something that mattered. He liked to talk about Avrom Sutzkever of the Vilna Ghetto, who’d once composed a poem hiding in a coffin—that somehow poetry helped him survive. Misha was always looking for meaning, and he’d developed an appetite for history. In the sallow light of Seven and a Half Dimes, Misha would recount what he’d learned about the migration of the Sephardic peoples, about Sandy Koufax’s roots, about the Gershwins, and Jaryk would listen, thinking it was not art that had saved Sutzkever but endurance and luck.