igor newerly: There’s no room for poetry when you’re marching for death. I told you to leave when you had the chance.
pan doktor: You do not leave a sick child in the night…
igor newerly: …and therefore you do not leave them now. It is by being together they can be less afraid. I know. I know all this. And yet, I was hoping for a better ending.
pan doktor: Who said this was an ending? Even the moon is falling out of our orbit, a little at a time. Even the moon is heading toward its own recompense. Now, see them salute us. See them all rise as the children walk down Grzybowski. Even the rain will stop for us now. No one can take away that we walked together, that we were family till the end.
igor newerly: You would’ve had oranges and pies with cherries and meat every night had you listened to my words. Now look at how the dust rises. Not even the rain will save your soul, and if anyone escapes this horrid day, they will be marked for all their lives.
Sixty Miles East
warsaw—august 1942
Sometimes Jaryk relived a day in his childhood he kept under lock and key. Umschlagplatz, which meant, as he’d been told, a collection point, the town square with thousands packed into too little space, awaiting the trains. For them it was to be a train with one hundred ninety-two children. The officers had counted, and so had Jaryk. In the three years he’d been at the orphanage, he’d learned not only how to count but also how to multiply and even divide larger and larger numbers. It was a good way to pass the time, to not think of the hunger, which would spread like a sneeze from child to child. Sometimes, everyone’s stomach grumbled at once, but today their stomachs were quiet.
It was not far. They had all heard the word. Chaim had etched it on the wood in the hall, and each of the boys had taken a turn to see: Treblinka. The day before, Madam Stefa had made sure they were each washed in the big cauldron—what if the tub smelled a little foul from all the children before, and there was no soap, no soap for months, so they were cleaned behind their ears with dishwater and lye?
The guards were giving out bread and jelly, and Jaryk reached with his fingers, his lips, his toes, but there were so many wanting, so many pushing, that his feet went ahead of themselves and he fell into the cattle car. In the shadows he thought he saw Old Dog, the mastiff, its large eyes sniffing the world.
One cattle car. So many bodies, worming. One murmured. “My hat,” the voice said. “I left it behind.”
The doors squeezed shut made the dark so tight not a sound was left unheard.
“What was it like, your hat?” Was it Mordechai speaking?
“Felt, soft, perfect shape of my head.”
Not a wheel moved. For a while not a wheel. Then when the train started they covered their ears, so shrill was the sound. He thought it was like an animal who’d awoken from the core of the earth.
With the third whistle, a guard opened the door a crack, pressed his body to the entrance. The light coming through left a shadow the shape of his leg. Still, it illumined. Jaryk swallowed.
Once the train started moving, Madam Stefa began to sew. Six gathered around to watch. He was there when Hanna said, “What is it?”
Madam Stefa turned her face up. This was the incredible thing: she winked. Where had he seen her wink like that? He couldn’t remember, but it had something to do with a mischief only the two of them knew about. Was it soup? Spilled soup, that was it.
Hanna tugged at Stefa’s dress. “Show me, please.”
There was nothing to show: she had raised her needle so many times, but there wasn’t a stitch on the white cloth. He stared as her wrist rose and fell again, but every time he thought she would leave a mark she would instead double back and undo the thread. It made him so happy, the blankness—he could see anything he wanted to in that cloth: his life before the orphans, Old Dog, the mastiff, stopping by a stream, with a squirrel kicking in his mouth.
“Children, gather around,” Pan Doktor said.
Where was there to move? Some nudged. He tried to square a look at Pan Doktor’s face, but the older boys were standing so he couldn’t. All he had was the sound of the old man’s voice.
“I have a story to tell.”
He was relieved to hear their teacher sounded the same. When you listened to Pan Doktor, you weren’t sure if he was about to give you something serious, because the way he spoke, he might also be about to tell you a good joke, so you always had to be prepared for either a frown or a laugh.
“Can you all hear me?” Pan Doktor said.
“Yes,” they said. The black boot by the door turned his neck, looked outside.
“You have to close your eyes,” Pan Doktor said. “This is a meditation. Have you all closed your eyes? Pinhas, I see you with your eyes open.
“Now, children, imagine you are in a bright white room. There’s nothing in the room but you. It’s a wide white room. You are walking to the edge, where you think there is a door. It’s a wide white room, and you walk. You walk awhile, and you begin to hear pleasant music, the kind your mothers sang when you couldn’t sleep, and because you like this music, you keep walking. Then you see a boy, waiting there for you.”
“Who is it, Pan Doktor?”
“It’s Amal from the play. He’s been waiting, and he wants you to put all your worries into a little bag—do you see the bag that just came into your hands? So, one by one, take a worry you have, put it in this bag, and when it’s full, pass it to Amal.”
“What will he do with the bag?”
“Ah, Mordechai, what will he do with the bag? He’ll keep it, of course, and, from time to time, he’ll dump out the worries from heaven, which will make—”
“Thunder!”
“Lightning!”
“Yes,” Pan Doktor said. “Lots of rain.”
From the next car, they began to hear the weeping of men. The last time he had heard a grown person cry was the holy afternoon of Yom Kippur, when he’d seen a man in a fine wool suit beat his chest in the middle of Grzybowski Square, saying over and over, “We have stolen, and we have taken.”
A passerby had laughed. “What have you taken?”
The man opened his eyes. He said, “The sun, of course.”
It was true. That day it was only the clouds.
The train hummed an efficient rhythm. Perhaps fifty of them in that one car alone. The older ones stood, the younger ones sat on laps. Not a breeze, only the smell of sweat and piss, the floor slick with it. A few boys climbed on top of each other to look out a window that was covered by two rusty bars.
“Pan Doktor,” Jaryk said, pushing his way to his teacher. “Where is Misha?”
“I sent him off on a little errand. There was a rumor of an apple tree. I sent him to find this apple tree, to collect and bring back apples from the apple tree. The goal is to make a pie.”
“An apple tree, in our Warsaw?”
“Of course. There is still an apple tree somewhere in our city, and if anyone can find it, it’s our Misha.”
“Maybe it’s a small tree?”
“Tiny,” Pan Doktor said.
He imagined Misha combing the alleyways on his belly, turning up rubble and leaf to look for the smallest tree in the world, searching for the husks, the cores, the stem, and the fruit.
One and two jerks, Chaim rolled onto his lap—kicked—then the train stopped again.
“Here?” someone shouted.
He knew—they knew—they were far from reaching there, so no one bothered to answer. The talk had shortened. Only the necessary sounds now. Whatever kept the spit in throat, so thirsty on the bridge between. To swallow was the most important.
He looked over at Pan Doktor. Ever since he’d come back from Pawiak Prison, arrested for the crime of failing to wear an armband with the Star of David, the old man walked slower, talked slower. Everyone had
made room so Pan Doktor could stretch out his knee. The old man caught Jaryk’s eye and grinned. Then he stood up, took off his armband and tossed it out the window.
“Good riddance,” Pan Doktor said. Jewish Star, unannounced, caught the wind blowing through the eaves and fell through the car cracks and into who knew what town, what field, to settle on the legs of, who knew, maybe a moo cow, just as the milking man came to knock the new grass down.
* * *
………………
There were two windows on that train. One was covered by two bars, and the other, next to Madam Stefa, was open. They were both just big enough for a cat to crawl through, so it didn’t matter that one had been left bared.
* * *
………………
Sometime between living and dying the train again stopped. It was the moment Jaryk remembered more than any other. Thirty years, he hadn’t grown himself another version. Some memories were like that, bolted and nailed to the mind’s eye. You could try to change them, shape them into something they weren’t, but you would always be the boy with trousers that reached his ankles, the boy with a tweed cap found by Misha and given special; and the train was stopped now, who knows whether for a moment or for a longer time, and the guards were shouting now, because, he thought, someone ahead had jumped. He was holding Chaim’s hand—who he knew didn’t have the heart to move an inch—and the heat had already burned and he had already cried and Pan Doktor could do nothing because he was just breathing.
He thought, Jump, but the rifles had colored the air outside with smoke. Still, he could see it: the window was big enough not only for a cat but also for him, if only he jumped and squeezed through. Except the train had started to move again; the screams had died down. The soldiers had stopped firing. He looked at Pan Doktor, and Pan Doktor winked the way he did whenever a mischief had been made but no one was going to be told, because love was that kind of secret-keeping.
The train had started moving again, but he saw the sun through the window that was big enough just for him, and what spirit launched his body, what ghost slid him forward, because it was not his nine-year-old bones that did. Still, it happened. He jumped on Chaim’s shoulders. He pulled himself up. He went headfirst, and someone—he’d never know who—pushed his body through the gap.
He landed so softly on the sloping hill and rolled so quietly down the field filled with sharp rocks, holding his pain, that no soldier heard. For a while, he watched the train pass, expecting others to have followed, but no one else did. Not another soul had jumped on another boy’s shoulders and been pushed into the fields. Was he simply the skinniest, the fastest, or just the most daring of them in that car—the one most willing to leave the others?
Now he was alone again in the field of damp and moss. He heard water nearby, and he thought of Pan Doktor’s face. So much hope. His knees bloody with it. His left wrist bruised dark. So much hope in the wet grass under his palms that when the train gnarled away, the old trees called and he crawled his way from the light of the sun into the light of the trees.
* * *
………………
Sometime between living and dying the train stopped. It was the moment he remembered more than any other. Thirty years, he hadn’t grown himself another version. He heard the first gunshot, saw the two officers turn away, rushed to Pan Doktor’s side, who was breathing so heavily his whole chest heaved with the effort.
Jaryk pointed to the window, whispered, “We can squeeze through that.”
Pan Doktor said, “Not all of us can.”
He looked again. Not the darkness but the light of the waiting. He couldn’t tell if Pan Doktor would be afraid. Still, it happened. With one held breath, he jumped on Chaim’s shoulders and squeezed through. He landed so softly on the sloping hill and rolled so quietly down the field filled with sharp rocks, holding his pain, that no one heard.
* * *
………………
Sometime between living and dying. It was the moment. Thirty years, he hadn’t grown himself another. Some memories were like that, as stiff as Madam Stefa, who refused to sit the whole time. She stood; she guarded the window. On the back of the first gunshot, he bolted, but her legs were like a guillotine—how could he pass through? “If we all don’t go, you don’t go,” she said, as if he should’ve known.
He remained by her knees. To love your brother. But he had not stolen. He had not thieved.
* * *
………………
Sometime between living dying it was the moment thirty years he hadn’t when Pan Doktor removed his spectacles and lolled, “Not all of us can, but you can.” Pan Doktor was the one who lifted him up, and Jaryk squeezed through the back of the first gunshot crawled his way from the light of the sun into the light of the trees his knees bloody with the memory of his old teacher with no spectacles winking at that too-bright light. For he had been chosen—he had been reborn.
The Broken Train
new york—1971
Lucy Gardner spent her days listening to stories. When she’d first started at the city employment agency, she thought she was meant to match qualified candidates with good jobs, but there were never enough jobs to go around—the few that showed up disappeared from the register so quickly she began to think of them as brief points of light that did little but float false hope for the growing line of the newly unemployed and the regularly unemployed, to whom she attributed that particular listless walk, the casual shuffle that said “I don’t care” and the lowered head that said otherwise. In the end, her work came down to deep listening, and for this she was willing and suited, so much so that she earned a small following.
The regulars made a habit of it. After a few weeks of searching for a job without luck, they would tell her their best life story and their next-best. They were mostly men. It became her duty to see them through the day, the week, the whole New York winter. “You have a friend in me,” she’d say, and off they’d go, one confession after another.
Her coworker Miles Norton kept a plaque at his desk that said “A Decade of Honest Service,” signed by Mayor Lindsay himself. He gave folks a sober dose, rehearsed and polished over the years. He pruned down the dreams of the new ones and flattened the regulars whenever he said, “Sir, you need a reality pill.” Miles, who liked to flaunt his Ivy League degree, had complained to their supervisor more than once that Lucy spent too long with her clients, delivering her “touchy-feely Down South wisdom.”
Miles did not care for the heart-to-heart, and that was the way of this whole city, she supposed. She had come from a town with a weekly dance, which was held in the old church and always over by nine. She was mostly certain about God, and a year and nine months of New York hadn’t taken this from her, though sometimes, after a long day at the agency, she would feel her heart hardening—there were so many stories and so few cures. When she felt this way, she would climb up five flights of stairs and practice the Hula-Hoop on the roof. It was something Mama had taught her when she was thirteen and mad at the world. “Do it for ten minutes, and I guarantee it’ll clear your head.” Mama had been right. Staring at the skyline while she did the hula not only cleared her head, it gave her a way to shed the bruisings of the day to make room for the new.
This wasn’t at all what she’d imagined of the big city. When Mama passed after high school, Lucy had job-hopped from waitressing to working at Jeannie’s Pastry Shop. “The years of kneading dough and counting change,” she called that time. But the idea had caught on inside her, allowed her to make it every day for the five a.m. at the Country Diner, for she’d do what Mama hadn’t: she’d make a musician out of herself. It meant saving every penny, not even buying an extra pair of socks, taking on night shifts at her dad’s taxi dispatch.
When she was twenty-five, she applied to every conservatory in New York and was accepted by just one, and a good one at that, the Manhattan Scho
ol of Music. They gave her a scholarship for about half the tuition. Still, it was too much to balance classes and practice time with the job that was paying the other half of the bills, and after eighteen months of living in the residence hall, skipping meals, and practicing Mendelssohn in the middle of the night, falling asleep twice in a row during her eight a.m. theory class, she quit. There was no one to hold her to account. Mama wasn’t around to call or send her little notes of encouragement. Back before Lucy was even an idea, her mother had tried to leave Mebane, and she’d succeeded to a degree, enrolling in a conservatory in Atlanta, but eventually she’d married and come back to North Carolina. It was never easy to leave the vortex of your life.
So far Lucy had succeeded. She’d failed to make it as a pianist but had stuck to New York, though her father, from time to time, would chide her about coming home. She wasn’t sure what held her away other than the fear of going home with half a degree and the waning hope that someday she’d save enough money to study music full-time.
She met Jaryk Smith soon after she’d quit the conservatory. It happened on one of those last humid days of August when she’d head to the recorded music archives at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center to escape the heat. The third floor of the library was air-conditioned, and for hours she could listen to rare recordings of her favorite composers. Out in the streets everyone was listening to the the Rolling Stones or the Jackson 5, but in her cubicle she was transported into the orchestral works she’d learned to love.
The last few times she’d come to the archives she’d noticed a tall man who’d sit in the corner, and when he’d listen to music it’d be with his eyes closed, as if he were trying to memorize each note. She couldn’t help spying; he was handsome in a way that made her think of frontiersmen: broad shouldered, square jawed, and deeply brown-eyed, with long lashes.
A Play for the End of the World Page 5