A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  “I’ll drop you at your place first,” Misha said. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen how you princes live.”

  In the two years he’d lived on the Lower East Side, Misha had come to his place only a handful of times. Landing this fifth-floor walkup on Orchard and Broome—a swamp in the summer and a drafty cell in the winter—had helped him feel like he’d finally become an adult. Before, he and Misha had always lived together: in Poland, when they were wards of Pan Doktor’s orphanage, and then in New York, in a series of crammed buildings in Brighton Beach, where English was hardly ever spoken. He didn’t miss it. All those friends of Misha’s who’d crash into their apartment at all hours, stink up the place with cheap booze and stories from the old country.

  Now, Misha inspected Jaryk’s apartment, the room that was living room plus kitchen, and pronounced, “Something changed.” It wasn’t obvious—Lucy hadn’t started to leave her things—but he supposed there was a neatness to the place: back issues of Life piled, not strewn; the kitchenette table sanded and polished; the torn bedspread replaced with a new one that was just as plain blue. That he had not objected to the rearrangements was more a testament to Lucy’s care than to his flexibility. What Lucy had altered, she’d done in fine stages and in partnership; for Jaryk, who did not enjoy domestic turbulence, even the loss of an old bedsheet had felt at first like bereavement but then, ultimately, in ways he did not yet understand, like an immense liberation.

  Lucy was out with her coworkers; she’d said she was a fifty-fifty for coming over if it didn’t get too late. But he didn’t mind if it did get late. Chopin was playing on WQXR. The station’s programing would go until midnight (finishing with Mozart and A Little Night Music), at which time he’d turn the dial to static, read a few of his prized Tagore poems, and then fall asleep to the sound of the almost-ocean. To catch the station properly and listen to any of his favorite Romantic composers, he had to place the radio near the doorway, which meant he had to bring his chair into the hall; he’d grown accustomed to sitting in that sloping, narrow hallway, listening to sonatas, though when Lucy came, it interrupted the evening schedule—pleasantly. When he opened his fridge, he found evidence that his bachelorhood was diminishing: a head of lettuce, carrots Lucy had peeled and sliced, a few boiled eggs for the week, and what was left of the turkey they’d roasted the night before. Before Lucy, the fridge sat mostly unused; he would eat at Misha’s or stop at a deli on the way home.

  “It is she, isn’t it?”

  Jaryk nodded. They pushed the bed aside and climbed onto the fire escape through the window. Jaryk’s Ukrainian landlord was smoking on the balcony, her sizable girth pinioned between the grilles of the railing. She met Misha’s grin with a disapproving glare and retreated inside. From the fifth floor, the city below felt emptied of its worries; a kind of translucence had come over the night.

  “I need to tell you about our plans,” Misha said.

  “Our plans?”

  “Yes, but first I want you to meet this professor. I’m bringing him out to the bar tomorrow. Be there,” Misha said.

  Jaryk didn’t think much about the conversation, but the next day, as he entered Seven and a Half Dimes, he found Misha seated in their regular corner with someone he didn’t recognize.

  “Meet my friend from India,” Misha said in English, as he pushed a pint of beer Jaryk’s way.

  Misha’s new friend wasn’t a regular at the bar. He was entirely too well dressed, in a sharp red blazer. Plus, he was an Indian man in a pub where everyone came from the same few parts of the world, and he was smiling in a way that said he didn’t belong. Here patrons smiled only when they were buzzed and laughed only when they were drunk. There were exceptions to this rule, of course. You could laugh for a particularly good story. You could smile with teeth to greet an old friend. But it was too early to be drunk, and no one was shouting a good story.

  Misha’s new friend continued to beam at Jaryk. “I’m Professor Rudra Bose,” he said. “I came to know Misha through the JCC lectures. I’m spending the semester at Columbia.”

  “So, I was at the lecture,” Misha said. “ ‘Art in the Ghettos, 1940–1942: Szpilman, Szlengel, Sutzkever.’ ”

  Whenever Misha talked about that time in their lives, Jaryk could feel his pulse quicken. Sometimes, a low-grade nausea would come and stay for hours after. His body remembered even when he wished to forget, and this was a terrible fact—how memory had mapped itself onto his bones. When they’d first lived together in Brooklyn, Jaryk tried to convince Misha never to talk about their time in the orphanage, but Misha wasn’t deterred. Jaryk’s best recourse had been silence. Eventually, Misha would move on—he always had.

  “Afterwards, this skinny Indian guy proposes to me.”

  The way Misha spoke reminded him of the difference in their ages. Just ten years apart, but it had meant that when they arrived in New York together, Jaryk would learn English well enough to carry just a hint of a faraway accent, whereas Misha would struggle to master the spoken language, his phrases sounding stilted more often than not. The oddness of the way Misha had spoken—the idea of one man proposing to another—had distracted Jaryk, but the professor didn’t seem to notice.

  “When I learned that Misha and you had been in the play that I’m producing, I had the revelation of my life.”

  Misha held up a flyer that said: “Commemoration of the Staging of Tagore’s The Post Office in Warsaw Ghetto, Thirty Years On. Presented by Visva-Bharati University, Shantiniketan.” “And he wants us to come. You and me in India.”

  “I’ll have another,” Jaryk called to Rebecca.

  “Don’t order me around,” she said, taking her time to refill his glass.

  He wasn’t looking at her, though. He was studying the professor, whose left eye was twitching as if there were a speck of dust in it.

  “So, what do you think?” Misha asked. “You and me and the play in India?”

  Performing The Post Office in Warsaw had been a pivotal moment of his childhood. Trying to remember the performance now, he felt weightless, as if the bar that contained them was ready to crumble from all the years of wear and snow, all the bodies it had soothed with drink, though when he looked at Misha, his large, nocturnal eyes blinking with the fullness of his curiosity, he felt again the wood of his seat hard under him and saw still-newly-married Earl Minton flirt with a girl out of his league.

  “Did you ever wonder why Pan Doktor had us perform that play, Jaryk?”

  He wished Misha would stop talking about the play. His hands were getting cold, though enough customers had crowded into the bar to make it feel like there was a second furnace.

  “Come on,” Misha pressed. “If we didn’t have the play to pass time, what do you think we would have done besides complain about how hungry we were? Anyway, it was the only way Pan Doktor knew to teach us about how a person should die, how dying could be something we didn’t have to fear. We were going to the land of the King, he said. We could stay who we were until the end and even after that, we could still be boys and girls. Not Jews, not poor people, not hungry people, just people.”

  The land of the King. He still remembered how Pan Doktor would talk about the afterlife like it was a paradise of culinary delights. Cream cakes, toffees, mandarins dipped in honey. Not even a line for bread.

  He licked the inside of his beer glass, an old habit, and looked around for Rebecca. She wasn’t anywhere to be found, but the professor was still there, watching them as if they were specimens in his lab. At least his eye had stopped twitching.

  “Why go to all the trouble, Professor? I bet there are people who know the play inside out where you come from.”

  “Oh, there are plenty of Tagore scholars,” the professor said. “In fact, I’m one of them. That’s not what I’m lacking. What I need are men who lived through the disease we’re living now.”

&nbs
p; “C’mon, brother, I know you read the papers,” Misha said.

  He tried to jog his memory. Not so long ago he’d read something about Communists trying to stage a revolution in a village in India. Was that right? He remembered reading about how the villagers carried bows and arrows to meet police armed with rifles and grenades. “Are you a Communist?” he asked the professor. In truth, he’d no issue with the philosophy.

  “I used to run laps with Mao in my pocket,” the professor said. “Not anymore, though. I don’t care for all that austerity, all that railing against the finer things in life. I like my down pillows and my old, beautiful records. That’s not the problem. The problem is that in my home state young men are disappearing. The problem is that police are shooting protestors at public rallies. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve taught who’ve ended up in jail, or worse. And there is this little village I’ve come to love. It’s rather idyllic, except for the fact that mercenaries are trying to take it away from the poor peoples who crossed over the border, searching for a new place to live.”

  “We can help,” Misha said. “The play meant so much to us. Finally, we can pass that on.”

  What did Jaryk know of persecuted youth in India or villagers evicted from their land? Once, in the Polish countryside, he’d walked across a field to scrounge for roots, only to discover that he was crossing over a large, unmarked grave, that all around him were belongings men, women, and children had left before they’d been shoveled into the earth. A doll the size of his hand, a man’s pocket brush, a lady’s leather boots. He’d been alone then. There’d been no Misha to tell him which way to run.

  This time, Rebecca filled his glass without his asking. Maybe she could see he’d fallen into a bind.

  “Well, what do you think?” the professor asked.

  “I think India is the other side of the world,” he said after a pause.

  “And they sleep on snakes,” Misha said, and laughed. His full-bodied laugh made their table shake.

  The professor joined in. “I’ll bring you pictures of our village. There are deer, but very few snakes. Of that, I promise.”

  * * *

  ………………

  Misha had nurtured the dream of India as he had tenured the vision of their lives in New York. Even as Jaryk resisted the professor’s invitation, Misha had cultivated the project, making visa and passport appointments, writing letters, and arranging their itineraries. But these last few months, Jaryk had seen less of Misha than he’d ever had. He’d been with Lucy—that had been where his time had gone.

  Now Jaryk was in India, stuck in a cell with a bandage on his forehead and without a plan. An attendant knocked on his door to deliver a plate of food, and he realized it was already evening, but he wasn’t hungry. Maybe he was ignoring something. Perhaps the effort of keeping both Misha and Lucy away from his thoughts had subsumed his simple wants: a meal at mealtime, or a proper bed. He allowed himself to return to one moment with Lucy, so small he doubted if she still remembered it. It’d happened in the modest glory of an autumn day, half of the leaves spent, the other half abiding still in the wind, the time in their relationship when he hadn’t yet exhausted his best clothes, outfits he’d purchased at a yearly pace, only to let them sit in sleeves of plastic for lack of having any occasion to wear them. They were walking downtown along Broadway just before sunset when Lucy stopped in front of the garden at Trinity Church, where a slanting pine sheltered rosebushes and honeysuckle was the only weed. A fence the height of Jaryk’s chest protected the garden. “Lift me up,” she said.

  Before he could refuse her, Lucy had climbed the fence herself, navigating with ease the problem of her skirt and the sharp ends of the gate. They sat on a bench past dark, his head resting on hers, consuming her smell. Her mint-sweet breath, which even then he had understood was her way of covering a vestigial habit. He had just asked her to do a difficult thing. “Quit smoking,” he’d said, and would have added, “for me,” if he’d had the gall, and she almost had. It felt grand: the fear that came with love, the immense sway it provided over another human being.

  He missed her, yet he didn’t allow himself to miss her. His first duty, he’d told himself, was to Misha. Sometimes she would come to him like a sharp pain, a hook in the eye. But now he’d failed Misha, abandoned him to his end. How could he not return to find his friend’s ashes, the last of his things?

  Jaryk wondered what Lucy was doing without him. It had been a gamble leaving her. Were they even a couple anymore? He couldn’t be sure. Every day they’d been together, for a year, it felt like she chose him anew. What they’d built was strong; but with a woman who made a daily choice, who could be sure? How many times had he thought of her? How many had she thought of him?

  When the attendant came to take his dinner away, Jaryk told him, “I’d like to make a phone call, please.” The attendant looked at him blankly, before running out of the room and returning with a quadrangle of eager policemen.

  He repeated his request. “A phone call. International.”

  The youngest of the policemen translated for the others, then rephrased his request. “You are requiring the use of the phone. This is permitted.”

  It was with a phone call that he’d learned of Misha’s death:

  “So sorry…Massive heart attack this morning…You must come straightaway.”

  He’d heard it all mutely and finally said, “Hold on, I’m coming for his remains.”

  Now the policemen led him to the hospital’s main switchboard, where the formal dispositions of the British were preserved, with orderly rows of middle-aged women punching codes into a machine that blinked and dialed, with the supervising men in the corner drinking tea from gently stained porcelain cups. After a few rounds of translation, he was given a line to America.

  It would be early morning in New York. He imagined her in her bed, for once letting the noise of the city keep her up; she would be wearing her faded blue pajamas and one of his flannel shirts. He regretted what he had done, first having let Misha go to India alone; now, with Lucy, he’d left her without a goodbye.

  “Hi, you’ve reached the Gardner residence. Please leave a message.”

  Her answering machine with his voice greeted him. It was her idea. She’d wanted his voice, at the lowest octave, to repel the city’s freaks. He found himself jarred by his echo, the seriousness of his own voice. What could he say?

  I want you to come…I want you to come be with me…be with me, here

  But he could not bring himself to say any of these words, to ask her to interrupt her life for him. He held the receiver until a policeman told him that the line had gone dead.

  “Fine,” he said, allowing himself to be led back to his room. It wouldn’t strike him till later that maybe this had been his last chance.

  Pan Doktor’s March

  warsaw—august 1942

  Sometimes Pan Doktor believed it was better to pretend it was all a story, that what happened to them—what was happening, each day—was better suited to the plot of a play that given enough time would turn toward redemption. In the latter acts the stale bread would turn into freshly baked cake, the black boots of the Germans would become roller skates, and all the walls that had been built would fall as quickly as a curtain falls after the final bow. Then he would cry unabashedly, dirtying his glasses with tears.

  There’s a part of him that still refuses to believe that this day begins the last chapter for all who’ve emerged from the orphanage into the August light, which slopes over the roof of their house, shines on the soot that silts the path, falls into the eyes of the little boy who holds his arm and squints at the onlookers. Everyone who’s left of the neighborhood is out to witness their march. He passes the flag of King Matt the First, Pan Doktor’s patron saint of children, up to the front of his procession, and together they all walk. Someone starts a song.
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br />   Only a few months before, he was meeting friends at a secret university. There’s a philosopher in their midst who’s convinced him of the way the world works. Everything you do in life is a kind of moral choice, says the philosopher. Waking up in the morning, deciding whether or not to brush your teeth, how many sips of vodka you have at night. How they walk to the cattle cars is also a choice, he decides. They’ve trained for this as they’ve rehearsed the lines of their theater. He had thought that his fame earned from his old radio show and the books he’d written would give them cover. He had believed the Germans would not come for a house of children, would take everyone but them. The problem with a moral choice is that it is never in isolation, always made surrounded by multitudes, he’s told the philosopher, and what if the multitudes win—what choice then remains?

  He leads two hundred children the morning of August 6th, 1942. They sing a song, but he focuses on walking without a limp, his bum knee struggling against him with each step, and nods at the Jewish policeman who nods back at him, stone-faced. One little boy holds his hand, and that is enough. To live with any sense of fullness you must be willing to bewilder yourself, embrace the confusion of a world that is always falling away from you, a little at a time. That, finally, is his contribution to the secret university: a little bewilderment can go a long way.

  (Sometimes when he looked into the mirror he saw the great fire, other times just a little smoke. Sometimes when he tried to make peace with his heart he’d cry uncle—was there something else he could’ve said or done, some pleading by which they could’ve all been saved?

  No, it was best to think of everything that happened to them as part of someone else’s theater, even that play they built together—a play within a play. These were the games to cheat the Germans. You just had to convince the old Samaritans, like Igor, that this was how the world worked. Just a few weeks before when Igor had been trying to persuade him to flee—)