A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  “What we have means a lot to me, but I’m not one for talking about my past. Can’t we have a relationship in the now? Like what that guy says, Be Here Now.”

  “Ram Dass? Seriously, Jaryk? You told me you thought hippies were lazy people.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re all wrong. Be here now, Lucille.”

  She rolled her eyes at him, but they had a nice time after dinner, heading to the flea market at Stuyvesant Town. The market had spilled out onto the Avenue C Loop, and though it was nearly sunset, most of the vendors were still selling their wares. They saw artifacts from all over the world: tattered muslin from Persia, kilts from Ireland, woks from central Asia, and little dolls from Russia. She bought the dolls and unscrewed one from another to reveal the little bodies waiting inside.

  It was the beginning of November, and the breeze had turned cool. Jaryk wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and they walked back to her apartment. They were good together because their silences were good together. They knew how to keep quiet and still be in love, and perhaps for an earlier version of Lucy, that would have been enough. But she wanted more. She wanted to go deeper into Jaryk, and maybe that was where things began to break.

  * * *

  ………………

  The next Friday, she donned dark glasses and a picnic hat and headed to Temple Beth Israel on the Upper West Side, where a small crowd milled around the gates of the synagogue. She didn’t expect to see Jaryk. From what he’d said he kept the books, but when it came time for services he was nowhere to be found. Still, she scanned the crowd nervously. Aside from the men’s head coverings and the faint melodies coming from inside the synagogue, it wasn’t so different a feel from a Sunday outside the Mebane First Baptist.

  She went into the synagogue and sat in the back. There was no cross, no Jesus anywhere, but there was a beautiful chandelier with only a single light that worked. Months later, when she’d return to the synagogue, Jaryk would show her his good work, with all the bulbs restored—saying, “This is for you”—but now almost all the light came from ugly steel lamps that had been placed by the pews, which made the place seem more modern than it was. The mahogany finish, the old scrolls, the gilded candle holders, and nearly everything else seemed from a distant era, as if it’d been rescued from another century.

  She wasn’t sure what she was hoping to find, but whatever it was, her gut told her it would be here. Her gut said so, even though Jaryk had said he didn’t have a religious bone in his body. She didn’t believe him: everyone kept a place for God. Everyone, whether they did or didn’t believe in Moses or Jesus or whomever, had room for the divine. Besides, why else would he work at a synagogue if God didn’t touch or tempt him, at least a little?

  She studied the crowd. Next to her there was a young woman whose hair was done in an immaculate bob. She was balancing her toddler on her knee while skimming a prayer book. Catching Lucy’s stare, the lady smiled. “Are you new here?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Lucy said. She felt conscious of her hat, its wayward droopiness. Her dress, also, was a shade of rose, while nearly everyone else was wearing white.

  “Don’t worry,” the woman said. “You’ll love it. The cantor is amazing. The way they do the Dvar Torah here—pure joy.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Lucy said. She didn’t have a clue about what the lady was telling her. Back home, Jews had been a foreign country: you didn’t go, and they didn’t visit. Here in New York, she supposed, they were everywhere, aligned with the backbone of the city. She couldn’t help being curious.

  When the cantor came out, the room grew quiet. Somewhere in the second song, her heart opened to his sad melody without words; it took her into a place of low-moving nimbus clouds, and she sank into her seat and let the music gather inside her. This was the part she’d loved about church in Mebane—when Mama would play the organ and nearly everyone would sing along with her. It was when she heard or played music that she could feel God rise up in her like a benediction.

  Afterwards, the service wasn’t unpleasant, but she left when the rabbi started to speak. He was hunched with age. When he began his sermon—if that was what it was called—she felt as if he were directing his words to her alone. “Let the truth be said, even between lovers, especially between those we love,” he had said, just before she’d snuck out the door.

  * * *

  ………………

  The next time she and Jaryk met was on their lunch break. Jaryk had trekked down to City Hall Park. He brought her an arrangement of tulips and lilies that looked as if they’d been sent from a faraway country. She took them and said, “You don’t have to do that, you know. We’ve been dating for two and a half months.”

  He looked confused. “So flowers are for beginning couples?”

  “No, it’s sweet. You’re sweet. What I mean is, we haven’t gotten past flowers.”

  “Gotten past?”

  “First, you give flowers,” she said. “Then you share something about your life.”

  “Why are Americans always in a rush? Why do they put so much into talking, talking, talking?”

  “Because that’s how we get to know each other, Jaryk.” And there was another reason for the rush. Lucy had been receiving a steady stream of wedding invitations from her school friends for the past few years. She wanted to start her own family. If this Jaryk Smith wasn’t up to snuff, if he stayed inside his fortress, she couldn’t afford being with him. The walls had to come down, and soon.

  She said, “I went to your synagogue.”

  She wanted to look into his eyes, but he was staring at his hands and wouldn’t meet her gaze. She went on, even though she felt she was punishing him in some way. “It was a beautiful Friday service. The cantor’s got some voice. He made me cry. I was bawling, actually, and I didn’t even know what he said. Then he sang a melody without words. All those sad songs.”

  “They’re niguns,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The wordless melodies the cantor sings, they’re called niguns, and he was welcoming the Shechinah, the feminine presence of God.”

  “Well,” she said, “for someone who doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, you seem to know a thing or two.”

  “Just a thing or two. I told you I grew up without much God. We did the High Holidays, but that was it. Why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

  “Jaryk, it’s nothing bad. I just wanted to see another side of you. That’s all.”

  “Fine, I’ll show you,” he said. “But you might not like what you find.”

  She understood that he was cautioning her, that maybe they were on the brink of something breakable, but he was earnest all the same. There were men you could go to war with, and men who would squeeze the sidelines all their lives. In that moment, she thought she knew which kind Jaryk was, and she imagined the two of them growing old together. They would sit by a fireplace in the open country drinking coffee with a little bourbon. Every Friday night, he would sing her those old wordless melodies.

  * * *

  ………………

  It was the twentieth of December and the last night of Chanukah when Lucy visited the house of Misha Waszynski. As she stepped off the train at Brighton Beach, she got a whiff of sea air mixed with the smell of burning trash; all around, she could feel the tide of a neighborhood falling into decay: every other shop was boarded up, and gutted cars had been left on the street. Coney Island was one of the few places you could get a good tattoo, and a couple of men outside of a parlor looked at her in a way that made her wrap her coat closer around her body, and she thought back to her first date here—how safe she’d felt in Jaryk’s company.

  Underneath her old coat, she was wearing the same velvet blue dress she’d worn to her conservatory audition; her lipstick was a modest red; her long, wavy hair had been rehearsed into a bun, which showed off the fine
curve of her neck; her nails had been manicured and polished to the color of Minnesota frost. Because this evening felt like a meet-the-parents. She had been so patient, and this evening was a serious step. She checked her makeup again before she knocked on the door. She waited a minute, but no one answered, so she knocked again.

  Whenever Lucy had felt nervous as a little girl, her mother told her to imagine the people she saw as animals, and that’s what she did now, turning the street of ogling men into anteaters and skittish zebras. It calmed her nerves until Misha Waszynski finally came down to open the door. She named him then: Woolly Mammoth. He had an unkempt beard with patches of gray, and there was a mass of hair sloping over his forehead and covering his right eye. His forearms were thick and full of complex tattoos. There was one on his neck that she’d always remember when she thought of him—of a marlin breathing fire. A dragon fish.

  Misha squeezed her in a hug. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr. Waszynski,” she said, deep inside his embrace. “Jaryk’s told me so much about you.”

  “Misha. Call me Misha.”

  Jaryk was upstairs in the kitchen. All around him lay the implements for an enormous meal: two heads of cauliflower, sliced portobellos, onions and rosemary, a thick chunk of pig—Jaryk’s beloved country food. A little electric menorah had been placed by the kitchen window.

  Misha clapped him on the shoulder, and they exchanged something in Polish, a ribald joke, judging by the rhythm of the syllables, and soon the three of them were sitting around Misha’s kitchen table, drinking a sweet vodka that tickled Lucy’s throat as it went down. When they were out together, Jaryk hardly raised his voice, but in Misha’s presence, he let his head roll back when he laughed, which he did a lot, and he drank a lot, too. Over the evening, all three of them ate and drank generously. They talked, too, but mostly it was Misha telling anecdotes about his work as a freight loader at Fulton Fish Market, where he handled the nautical treasures of the world. “Big responsibility,” he said. “Little fish, big fish, and even bigger fish.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, noticing a statue in the center of the table, next to the salt and pepper. It was of a boy riding an elephant, carved from a single piece of wood, small enough to be tucked into her purse. The apartment had few decorations, so she immediately felt this one carried meaning for Misha, though it wasn’t ostentatious.

  “Ah, that’s a gift I made for Jaryk when he was nine years old. I made sure to take it back when he moved out on me.”

  “Well, I was the one who managed to smuggle it all the way from Poland to America,” Jaryk said.

  “Can you believe I’ve known this beanpole thirty-plus years?”

  “You were a beanpole back then, too, you know,” Jaryk said.

  “Thirty years, huh? Tell me how you met this handsome man,” Lucy said to Jaryk.

  Jaryk poked the pierogi on his plate. His eyes were swimming in a murky happiness that made her feel afraid. “Misha’s a better storyteller,” he said.

  “It was before the war,” Misha said. He was smiling. Then he wasn’t. “It was before the war that we met.”

  Misha had large hands covered with sun spots, warning signs from his liver, and he did the same thing Jaryk did when he didn’t want to go on—he looked into his palms as if he were a fortune-teller—but she felt with him a more porous boundary; plus, she was here, in his house, and she wasn’t willing to let go. “Please, tell me about that time,” she said.

  “Well, it was Korczak’s orphanage, you know,” Misha began. “Korczak was a good soul. We called him Pan Doktor. He was our people’s heart. He had a way, and he took little Jaryk in. How old were you when Korczak found you?”

  “Seven,” Jaryk said.

  “Seven years old,” Misha said with a low, dry whistle. “Seven years old and Janusz Korczak takes him in. Believe it? You must believe it. Child wandering the streets of Warsaw in the September of ’39, right as Germans storm in, and what does Korczak do? He takes another boy to add to his one hundred and ninety-one children. I worked for Korczak, you know? I was the junior carpenter of the house, and of course I kept my little brother Jaryk out of trouble. As long as I could, that is. As much as I could.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?” she said.

  “What do I mean?” Misha said a little too loudly, but not unkindly. “We are the only souls left of that story. Everything, everyone else, burned.”

  “But you and Jaryk,” she said, feeling free to speak as much as she dared, “the two of you—how did you make it?”

  “Me and him?” Misha said. He poured a shot of vodka into his cup, then took a swig straight from the bottle and chased the motion with a fit of coughing. “Me, I won the lottery. Had a job outside the ghetto. When I came back, nobody. Didn’t see this one—” he poked Jaryk in the ribs—“till the DP camp. Two years after. Was a scarecrow when I found him.”

  “DP camp?” Lucy asked.

  “Displaced Persons,” Misha said.

  All the noise of the street gone. The three of them, the leftovers on the table, the drink in her hands. She felt a murmuring by her ear, shook her head to clear the feeling. She tried to poke Jaryk in the ribs the way Misha had. “And you,” she said. “How did you escape?”

  For a long time, he didn’t answer, and she noticed that he was moving his fingers underneath the table, as if he were tallying a large sum.

  She repeated her question. He shifted his jaw left to right, right to left. She could hear Misha breathing: an old grizzly waking up to roam.

  “I’ll tell you,” Jaryk said. “If you tell me one thing. What were you doing on the sixth of August, 1942? What were you doing when the Germans came?”

  She tried to connect the date with a memory, even if it was carried over from her parents, but nothing came to mind. “I wasn’t even born,” she said.

  “Then please,” Jaryk said. “Don’t talk about what you don’t know.”

  “Jaryk,” Misha said.

  Misha put his hand on Lucy’s, but she still felt the hot white light of shame on her face. With Jaryk, there was a line, and she had been pressing and egging him to go beyond it, when all he wanted was to forget. She left the table and started washing the dishes in the kitchen.

  * * *

  ………………

  Afterwards, she went back to her own place. She knew what had been said couldn’t be unsaid. Their relationship had begun in the bliss of an America she understood, but all along there’d been this other story she’d been scratching at. As the vodka began to wear off, she thought about a boy from kindergarten who’d joined in the middle half of the year and, like Jaryk, had a lonesome way to him.

  They’d all given him his distance, even the teachers. Lucy’s parents had told her to stay away: “He’s suffered.” At first, like all the other kids, she left him alone, as he played on the swings and the jungle gym, grunting each time he peaked in the air; but then, after a while, she began to approach him. At first, he would hide in the sandbox when he saw her coming, but then he loosened up, or maybe she grew on him. Either way, they became friends, and one day he showed her something.

  They were by the elms at the edge of the schoolyard. All the other kids had headed inside with the first rain, but not them. “Come,” he said. He had a funny way of talking, like he was underwater. She did, she came closer. Overhead, there was a skirmish of geese. She glanced up to see the commotion, and when she looked at him again she saw that he’d stretched his tongue out of his mouth. In the middle of his tongue there was a coin-sized gap. Beads of rain ran through it.

  She was repulsed, but she was also curious to see more. It was the first time in her short life those two feelings had traveled through her body at the same moment, and her spine tingled with the energy of it. They were getting soaked. Soon, the teachers would be out looking. He put his tongue back in his mouth and she said
, “How did it happen?”

  He shrugged and turned back toward school.

  That’s the way it worked in one version of her memory: her asking him the question. In another, he stretched his tongue toward her, and she stuck her little finger in the hole, and she felt the pulse of his mouth, the work of his heart. She felt the whole memory of him. He’d slept in a shed and had gone half his life without a good meal. Just two towns over, she’d later discover, a boy left to fend for himself.

  * * *

  ………………

  The week after they had dinner at Misha’s, Jaryk and Lucy didn’t see each other. Partly, with the new year around the corner she assumed Jaryk would be busy at work, but there was something else: she felt she’d opened a door into his suffering. Her mother had once chastised her, “Leave the dead for the dead.” What she meant was that Lucy shouldn’t dwell on other people’s woes—she should stick to her own—but it was an unfair accusation. All her life, her mother had been the same way: making friends with the homeless man who hung around Hoffman Pond, mending his old clothes and giving him fresh pairs of socks, inviting him for dinner three nights in a row, until her father complained and ended things.

  Her father. He had been calling since Thanksgiving, hinting that it was time for her to visit—they had not seen each other for nearly a year. She’d lied and said that recent layoffs meant that it would be impossible for her to leave the office for long, but she agreed to come for three days. He accepted that, though it was clear he’d hoped for longer.

  She boarded a bus at Port Authority at eight o’clock at night and crossed into the Carolinas the next morning. The bus’s lights were dimmed until dawn broke over stretches of farmland. She saw leaves of tobacco and ears of corn that had withstood the first frost. Well-fed cows peered at her through wooden fences, and she spotted in their midst a baby calf. The closer to home they headed, the more churches and roadside diners retook their place of prominence. The Lord’s name was on the highway billboards, above the flashing marquees of racetracks and next to the room rates that announced Vacancy.