A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  She didn’t write to him at the Indian address. She understood the grief of losing someone as close as Misha had been to Jaryk, but she wouldn’t be at his beck and call. She buried his letter underneath her mattress, where she kept all things she couldn’t throw away but was otherwise displeased by. That evening, she walked alone over the Brooklyn Bridge, smelling the air from the river, marveling at the construction that had kept the bridge standing for a hundred years, and, despite her anger, she wished Jaryk were with her to see the sight of gulls giving chase to the schooners docking at the pier. She missed his smell, the feel of his hand on the small of her back.

  * * *

  ………………

  A week turned into two—the sun made the field at Tompkins Square Park barren with a northeasterly dust. One evening, Lucy unburied Jaryk’s letter and reread the part that described his task—to help stage a play he and Misha once performed in Janusz Korczak’s orphanage.

  She was still upset but also curious about Korczak and about Jaryk’s childhood in Poland. A coworker tipped her off to a place called YIVO where she might find some clues. She went to their archives and read the few translations that were available of Janusz Korczak’s life. There were only the barest facts: Janusz Korczak, or to those who loved him, Pan Doktor, a native of Warsaw, Poland, a literary personality, a pioneer in children’s education, and the head of his own orphanage. During the German occupation of Poland, Korczak had remained with his children, though his influential friends outside of the ghetto’s walls had on multiple occasions offered him ways out of the country. The last that was heard of him and his orphans was on the sixth of August, 1942. On that day, the 192 children in the compound, along with ten staff members and Korczak himself, were taken to the embarkation point, loaded into cattle cars, and driven to Treblinka and their deaths. It was a story without any loose threads. There were no known survivors. All the children shot or gassed or starved to death. That was the way of a death camp. But Misha had survived. So had Jaryk. Between them, there had to be a story that lay outside the books.

  * * *

  ………………

  When July came, it had been four weeks since Jaryk had left for India. At the office, they finally had hired a replacement for Albert. His name was Jonas and he’d moved up from Monroe, Louisiana. Really, he was a musician, he told Lucy, but he’d studied social work so he could make his way to the big city. He had an accent that made hers seem more urbane, and when he said “big city” there was a note of wonder in his voice. She offered to take him out after his first day of work, but when five o’clock rolled around, she began to feel nauseous and out of breath. She blamed the chow mein she’d had for lunch.

  He’d seemed so excited to discover the city, it broke her heart a little to cancel on him. “Rain check?” she said.

  “Anytime,” he answered.

  He was handsome and, like her, had lifted his life away from a small town, searching for a dream he hadn’t entirely defined.

  That night, she lay on her side, a cold towel on her forehead. Nausea came and went. It was difficult even to read, so she thought of Jaryk, tried to imagine what he was up to in the land of holy cows. She turned her face toward the one fan in the room, and images came to her: Jaryk posing next to a Bengal tiger, Jaryk on a boat floating down a river as wide as an ocean.

  * * *

  ………………

  The next morning, she awoke feeling lighter and went to work with lipstick on. Knowing that Jonas would be there made her want to shine. He was so well presented, with his blue blazer and his silver cuff links, as if he meant to make a good impression no matter what.

  Her first client was an old regular, who just came to talk, so they got on about the grandkids and fishing off the Long Island Sound, but halfway through she started to feel an ache in her belly, but it wasn’t bad enough for her to leave her desk. She grinned through it, then saw Glenn Adkins, whom she’d been counseling every week for the better part of a year. Glenn used to manage a dozen men at a textile mill that moved south, and since then he had failed to hold a steady job. At forty-six, he was too old for either deskwork or manual labor, he’d claimed, but really she knew he missed bossing people around. So he crashed from one odd job to the next, hoping to regain what he’d once had. His latest gig, which she’d helped him find, was working security at the Met on the night shift. A month on and his eyes were sandbagged; he had a hard time holding his head up.

  “What am I working for?” Glenn started. “My wife left me. My kids are grown, and anyway they don’t want to talk to Pop. So who cares?”

  “Honey,” Lucy said, grinding her teeth to keep the nausea at bay, “I give a damn even if you don’t.”

  “Listen, will you come see me play jazz? I’m going to take a night off, do a real show.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” said Lucy. She had to excuse herself to the ladies’ room, where she deposited the morning’s cereal.

  An elderly coworker from the retirement bureau helped her clean up. “You need to take care of yourself,” the woman said. “This early on, before you’re showing, nobody understands.”

  “Oh, it’s just a stomach bug from street food,” Lucy said, turning away thoughts of any other possibility.

  Miles told her to go straightaway to the doctor, but going to the doctor had never been her family’s custom. Her father had steeled her against going in for the small worries, preferring to administer to cuts and bruises himself, and stomach upset wasn’t worth bothering anyone about, so she felt a little ashamed when she had to let Jonas call her a taxi.

  Back home, she threw up once more, an expulsion so violent it left her feeling peaceful. That’s when she noticed a blue jay chirping at her window. What a marvel that the bird had come, sallow city streets and all, its plume dusty, but still…When she made to get a closer look, he was gone in a final glimpse of blue. She tried to count the weeks since her last period, and the effort helped her fall asleep.

  Sometime in the late afternoon, the phone rang. She’d resolved not to take any calls until she felt like herself, which at that moment seemed would be never again, but the phone kept ringing, and finally she got up to answer it.

  “Hello,” she croaked. At first it was like hearing the ocean through a conch shell, and she imagined it was Jaryk on the line. He’d finally thought to call her, thought to tell her he was okay, and she felt a great yearning for him, for what they’d built together.

  But it was Jonas. “I’m just calling to check up on you,” he said. “You seen the doctor yet?”

  “Who are you, my father?” Lucy said, though she was flattered that he’d called.

  “Don’t be tough. I know how you people from Carolina can be. By the way, Miles was asking about you. Should I say you’ll be back tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ll be in fighting spirits.”

  She looked up the closest clinic in the yellow pages and headed there straightaway, hoping to get a pill that could set her stomach at ease. Miles asking made her uncomfortable. She had a feeling he was out to get her. He was always bringing up his degree from Columbia, and she didn’t have any more than a community college certificate. If it hadn’t been for Albert taking a liking to her, she wouldn’t have gotten the job. Some girl from Carolina with a good smile but little experience in the field—it took a stroke of magic, she knew.

  At the clinic, she waited alongside folks who reminded her of people who came to the Municipal Building. Anxious like her, and a little bored, a little desperate with all that waiting, that smell of sickness and disinfectant hovering around them.

  It was two hours before an elderly Indian doctor, whose last name was so long that he went by Dr. C, saw her. Dr C listened to her story of the street food and the ensuing bouts of stomach sickness, how it was the worst of times for her to miss work, their case load being heaviest in the summers. He felt aro
und her stomach—too gently, she thought. “Are you sexually active?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “but every time we used protection. Me and my boyfriend, that is. Right now, he’s in India.” Bringing up India with an Indian doctor helped to ease her anxiety. “Do you know Calcutta? He’s going to a village near there.”

  Dr. C raised his eyebrows, which, Lucy ventured to guess, had never been trimmed and were the only hair on his face without a streak of gray. “Miss Gardner,” he said, “it may be best for you to undergo a small test. As you may know, protection is not one hundred percent. There is always a small chance of the unexpected thing.”

  The unexpected thing. The news settled on her even before the nurse drew blood. While she waited for the results, she thought of all her girlfriends from Mebane who, over the last few years before she left, had had babies and so, entering a new part of their lives, had grown distant from her. She had babysat for them to keep up the veneer of friendship, but it wasn’t permeable land—her solitude, their blossoming families.

  The nurse who came to tell her didn’t bother to take her back into the doctor’s office. “It’s good news,” she whispered in Lucy’s ear, and Lucy clutched her hand for dear life.

  * * *

  ………………

  She walked with the news, feeling changed already by the knowledge, a different person who stepped out onto Houston than the woman who’d entered. At first, elation lifted her spirit and left her feeling cool, though the sidewalks were hot enough to grill meat on. Soon that elation gave way to terror. How would she raise this child—alone—and in this city of all places?

  “What’s up, Mama?” someone catcalled.

  She walked along Broadway, then Bleecker, turning onto Mulberry to pass by the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. Her feet had begun to ache, but there was comfort in the ache—it held back her fear. She began to feel as if she had entered a mysterious chapter of adulthood, thus far forbidden to her, forbidden those early years with Connor, when a child was out of the question.

  Six weeks was what the nurse had said, which meant that it had been just before Misha’s death, when they’d been in the sweetest place.

  The being inside her: could it already hear her voice? Could it—could she (a girl, she wanted a girl)—feel her heart’s rhythm? The last few years, she’d noticed herself studying babies on the street. Once, she’d even stopped a mother to ask about her stroller, pretending she was expecting. In Mebane, as she’d cuddled her girlfriends’ newborns, she began to feel the cousin of what could only be called jealousy. Now, as she walked up Houston then watched a couple herd their children into the stop at Broadway-Lafayette, because she had no desire to go home, she followed them into the station.

  The parents were probably her age, maybe younger, and the children, a boy and a girl, were maybe both preschoolers. The way the mother pointed out the platform graffiti announced that they were from out of town. When they boarded the uptown D train, they searched for a map, but the car had been stripped. They wanted their children quiet, but the boy and the girl refused to sit still, playing jungle gym on the poles, smiling at a homeless man who winked back at them.

  Right before Rockefeller Center, when the mother had had enough, she yelled, “Both of you, sit—or else!” The father studied her dubiously, then cradled both children into his lap.

  Witnessing that embrace, Lucy felt fearful of parenthood, its enormous challenges, and what would it be like for her, with the father of the child living on another continent, gone for who knows how long? Jeannie, who ran the pastry shop in Mebane, had raised two daughters alone, and when Lucy had come by to work her part-time shift, she’d seen the struggle of single parenting.

  From Texas all the way to the Supreme Court they were debating whether a woman could have an abortion, though in this town the act had been legal for two years. Even knowing about that possibility, or that she could give the child away, Lucy knew she wouldn’t do either. Maybe it was her upbringing or just the bonds of the flesh, the love of an unknown sentience forming inside her. She didn’t know how Jaryk would receive the news. He was a man of rituals—an everyday job, sonatas in the hallway, a call to Lucy at exactly the same time of day—and yet he was made of unknowns: who could say what Jaryk would do?

  The family got off at the next stop, and Lucy was left alone to simmer. The compartment felt too small, and every time the train veered hard, she felt it in her body, worried about her unborn being jostled. Of course, that was silly. It was deep inside her, protected, and safe for the moment. She wished for that same kind of cocoon for herself, somewhere she could retreat to until she figured things out with Jaryk. She didn’t even have a phone number for him, she realized.

  When she got off the subway, she was on the Upper West Side, and the first wave of office workers were returning home.

  She thought about what her mother would have done. Her mother, who could navigate her way out of storms by ear alone. When the world hadn’t made sense to Lucy as a girl, her mother had said, “Go talk to the pastor—but really listen,” and she had, which was all right, because Pastor Hoffman loved her like his own daughter and would talk to her for hours, explaining in his clumsy way the difference between wrong and right.

  Now, in the deep of a good muddle, she went to Jaryk’s rabbi. She knocked on his office door at Temple Beth Israel, and he answered by saying, “Not at this hour, Yehoshua.” She didn’t know what this meant, so she persisted, knocking again. “Hello?” she said. “This is Lucy.”

  “Lucy?” he said, from across the door. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me,” she said, mostly because she wasn’t sure what else to say, partly because she thought it would open the door.

  It opened the door. On the other side stood an enormously old man, who seemed disappointed to see her, as if he’d been expecting a divine apparition, but she parlayed his reaction with, “I’m Lucy, Jaryk’s friend.”

  “So you are,” he said, maybe for a moment imagining that other Lucy whom he’d supposed her to be. In his prime, the rabbi might have been the tallest man in any room, but now he was so stooped he was level with her. His long gray beard had curled around his belly, which, like his fingers and his forearms, was a size too large. He had thin wire-rim glasses, which shook a little as he spoke, because he had the habit of jittering his head as he projected his words into the air. “Jaryk is an old soul,” he said.

  She expected him to go on, but he stopped there and appraised her. His eyes welled up. His whole form became the sadness his words missed.

  “He’s gone away,” she said. “And I thought maybe you could help me in my figuring?”

  “Figuring,” the rabbi said. He chewed on the word before he led her out of his office and through a dimly lit corridor into a padlocked room marked Books and Other. He flipped through a set of keys he had chained to his belt and opened the door only after considerable searching.

  It was a high-ceilinged room true to its name—Books and Other—with books and voluminous folders and parchments stacked floor to ceiling, rising in places to tower above the unfinished woodwork. Each row of stacks led to another artery of the room. The rabbi mumbled under his breath. Several times he inspected a book from the middle of a heap without upsetting the delicate geometry.

  Finally, the rabbi stopped in front of a particularly disheveled pile and gave one manuscript particular attention. “There’s a story from the midrash,” he said. “It’s about an orphan who lived in the Second Temple, before it was destroyed. This boy worked as an assistant to the priests in the inner chamber, and whenever a priest opened the door, he would think, Here is my father, here my father comes. But no, it was never his father. He had to be content, therefore, to live as the other boys, except without the regular allowance of love. For this reason, he did not see the beauty of the chamber, where the ark was stored. He did not value in his
heart the immeasurable love of God. For this reason, he waited for his own shadow, and his shadow neither came nor left his person. When he was old and gray, he had lived a life of worry and waiting. Is this a way to live?”

  “No,” Lucy said, because she supposed that was the right answer, but then, she’d never been good with stories where the moral was unclear. She needed the rabbi to speak directly. “Do you know why Jaryk left?”

  The rabbi tapped his nose. “Perhaps,” he said. He led her through several more rows of books and into one of the dim corners of the room. He combed his way through a pile of newspapers and file clippings and held up an article. It had a photograph with another bearded man, who looked like a soothsayer. “Rabindranath Tagore,” the rabbi said. “The article is in Polish, but you may have it. Tagore wrote a play, Lucy, and I believe Jaryk may have felt some affinity to it. At least, he spoke about the man’s philosophy. The last time we saw each other, he confessed he was taking a journey.”

  Lucy remembered the book of Tagore poems Jaryk had given her early in their relationship. Sometimes she’d stroke the leather cover, imagine the feel of his hands.

  “Now let me ask you something,” the rabbi continued. “What is our Jaryk to you?”

  It was the first time he had met her gaze. The whole time they’d been together—was it a minute, half an hour, a half day, browsing those layers of manuscripts?—he’d avoided her eyes, but now she saw they were the color of icy blue water and from them spread a deep curiosity: What was Jaryk to her? She had spent nights at the library reading about his Warsaw before and after the war. She had even become familiar with the history of Grzybowski Street, the thoroughfares and the alleyways that would have made his world, but what was he? A year of being together and what did it come to? She saw him in her mind: the chiseled angles of his face, the graceful bend of his neck, the way his hand knew the small of her back, the furrows along his temples carved from living in a world she couldn’t see. What was Jaryk to her? Sometimes you had to cross over oceans to answer a question.