A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  part 2

  An Orphanage

  (The nine-year-old sits by the upstairs window. All week he’s wanted to roam the streets, but Pan Doktor has said in his stern voice that it is not safe. All afternoon Esterka, his beloved teacher, has watched him from afar. She knows his moods and so, approaching the window, can feel that he is full of surliness and suspicion.)

  esterka: Strangest thing, we’re looking for someone to be the hero of the play and I come up here and I see the handsomest boy standing by the window. I just wish he would join us for auditions. What do you suppose?

  (The boy continues to stare out the window.)

  esterka: Hanna is auditioning for the part of the Flower Girl and Mordechai wants to be the Village Headman and Misha the Uncle. Even Pan Doktor will play a part. Better to play or better to be left out?

  (The street is quiet. Not even a donkey walks its furrows. Esterka touches the boy’s shoulder.)

  esterka: One other thing—the hero of this play, he was like you in many ways. Would you like to hear about him?

  (The boy nods faintly.)

  esterka: Like you, he wanted very much to leave his house, but he could not. All day he looked at the mountains and wanted to bathe in waterfalls, but his guardian said he couldn’t do any of that.

  boy: So…what did he do?

  esterka: He learned to see the world in his mind. The mountains, the clear water pools, all of the King’s road.

  boy: Why can’t I be by the window?

  (Enter a thinly bespectacled, respectably balding, noticeably limping man. He possesses an ease around the boy earned from a lifetime of stewardship.)

  pan doktor: Because you have a cold and by the window there is a draft and if you catch more of the draft you might catch more of a cold.

  boy: Let me see who’s there. Lift me up and I’ll see.

  (Pan Doktor raises the boy to the window. The street is empty. A cold sun falls through the glass.)

  boy: I see a man with raspberries on his head and a donkey with two tails I see Hanna skipping rope on a roof I see Misha carrying the biggest cake I ever seen.

  esterka: Will you come down with us now? Will you take part with the others?

  (The boy smiles his gap-toothed smile, leaves with Esterka.

  Pan Doktor keeps by the window, observes the patrol of a soldier in uniform. The soldier strolls from the apple tree to the gate of the house.

  Pan Doktor watches a man dressed like an inspector nod to the soldier and pass the gate. The man is blue-eyed; full-bellied; long-stepped.

  On the bottom-most floor, he passes slow-moving children who are making a stage: a frayed green mat that is to mean grass, a hollowed door hung by twine that is to mean window. Up the stairs rumbles this man dressed like an inspector; blue-eyed; full-bellied; long-stepped.

  The man meets Pan Doktor by the upstairs window.)

  igor newerly: I’ve heard the news and rushed back for you, Pan Doktor. I’ve brought a note that will take you past the Wall. Close this orphanage. If you do, some may still escape. Upon my God, you will escape. Let me hold your hand, sir. You are so thin. Please, come with me, Pan Doktor. This cannot be your end.

  pan doktor: Come with you? Why, dear sir?

  newerly: They will take you all. The Ukrainians and the Latvians are here. There has been talk. You know what will happen. You know that crossing the Wall is no longer simple, even for me. I may not be able to return, though I wish to give you a thousand chances. Do not waste this life. Presently come!

  pan doktor: Ah, but I cannot leave unless two hundred children can fit under my coat and pass through the Wall unscratched, but two hundred children cannot fit under my coat and so I cannot pass the Wall unscratched. Excuse me, dear Igor, but I must make arrangements for the play.

  newerly: A play? Good Doctor, are you gone mad? What for?

  pan doktor: Dear Igor, a play for the end of the world, of course.

  Misha’s Calcutta Diary

  I don’t know where else to begin but around my last days. I mean I’ve been told with not so much doubt that I am good as dead. They wanted to make a surgery of me, start with a pacemaker and end with no heart at all. I saved them the trouble, all the nurses who’d fuss, the doctors who’d speak in that voice serious enough to make believe they cared when they didn’t one way or the other way.

  I am thankful the heart attack came on the second of the month because it is on the second of every month that Gladys visits my apartment to collect the rent. Long time ago when I forgot to pay on the first instead of making explosion she baked me a cake—it was an upside-down orange cake (and who knew cakes could taste so good upside down?) though over the years she has baked everything in her collection: lemon meringue, double chocolate, key lime pie, carrot cake (my favorite)—and so I have come to expect her each evening of the second of every month, making a pot of tea to have with a slice or two or three of her offering.

  She came in because she heard my teakettle sounding a perfect note and no one to open the door or to answer the tea. I am telling you that Gladys is a good woman, and were she not married to a decent man perhaps there would have been something between us. In any case, she opened the door with her landlady key and found me clutching my heart.

  Later, when I woke up in the hospital, she’d say, “You were listening to some old Yiddish croon. That’s what did you in.”

  I did not think so. I have Yiddish music on the turntable at all times—songs sad enough for my beard to get wet—but that was the first heart attack of my life. I am fifty years old, too young to have the heart stop working as it did. Anyway, I checked No on the boxes that asked if I would do this procedure or that one, or if I would change my eating ways (double No on that). I keep little love for doctors, have not seen one since I got a fishhook stuck in my hand, and that was only for the stitches.

  So, I didn’t tell Jaryk about the heart attack or the diagnosis, congestive heart failure, or all the ways I could now stretch my life a little longer. I hardly saw him after coming back from the hospital and before going to India. Gladys had her eye on me, and Jaryk was with Lucy. I didn’t want to get in the middle of that. I had Gladys promise that she wouldn’t tell Jaryk neither. I wanted him to be able to fall in love without a dying old man getting in the way.

  Besides Gladys, the one person who did know was the professor. I felt it was only right to explain why I wanted a one-way ticket. It was a long shot that Jaryk would come along. I knew that from the beginning. The professor looked at me and said, “It is a good place to die.”

  That is what he said, no squeamishness at all about my going. He wants me there to help the village people. I know that, and I know he wants his own name in the papers. It’s the first time in my life I can help poor people with my hands and history. It is the first time that something from my life can be used for the sake of others. I cannot go back and become what Pan Doktor was to Jaryk and me. I have not lived that life, not at all.

  But I remember what that play did for us. It made our days bearable, all that ghetto heat, all that feeling that reminded us just how unloved we were any time we stepped a foot from Pan Doktor’s house. We knew we were meant for death. Even the littlest ones knew. Especially Jaryk. Not once in my days in America did I meet a nine-year-old boy who seemed to know something about dying, but so many of our orphans did. So many of them knew exactly what it was. We had that play to make believe death was something honorable and exotic like a vacation to somewhere with cliffs and gentle currents. I don’t know now if that is true, or really anymore what death is—though surely I will soon enough—but I think in my heart that it is better for children to believe the kinder story.

  This boy Neel who will play the boy Jaryk played is wise beyond himself. They took his daddy from him, and now his mama is armed with a rifle.

  I w
ill stand in this village long as I can. I will protect them, for I have a fight or two left in me. That day they came to harass they yelled at me, confused I’d come, and I yelled right back. I laughed in their face, and the gang turned back around. I don’t know how long I can do this, but I will till they put me in the earth.

  If I ever see Jaryk again, I want him to know that there is still time for us to help others as Pan Doktor and Madam Stefa did. They could’ve run, but they did not leave us. I could go back and die in Gladys’s apartment, but where’s the joy in that?

  Anyway, Neel knows me now. His mother knows me, and there is something fetching in her eye whenever she tries to pronounce my full name. At least we have settled on Misha and I have found hers, which is like a song into itself, Hema, which means gold, the professor says, like the lines she draws along her palms, which shine in the afternoon sun. If I were not an old man set for death and if she were not in mourning and if there were not between us a language and the distance of many countries, there might’ve come something special for us—something maybe a little sweet, like Gladys’s upside-down cake.

  The Village

  When night came, the constables outfitted Jaryk’s room with a radio. The gift felt like an act of mercy—an insomniac’s best ally. It was a proper Marconi with metal dials greased with oil and an antenna, which at its full wingspan nearly touched the low ceiling. He shuffled through to settle on what seemed like theater. Dramatic whispers, muffled shouts. The actors were speaking so close to the microphone he could imagine he was listening to them in the studio. Musical interludes filled the spaces between one soliloquy and the next; the music was sad but tolerably so, as if what the melodies conjured were a familiar guest, recently diseased.

  Misha would never have approved of such music. He was a man who loved the big bands. They’d searched the city for the brass troupes that came touring from New Orleans. Elaborately suited men in pompadours playing through the other side of night. Misha’s beard shaking to Louisiana rhythms.

  Listening to Calcutta radio, Jaryk didn’t understand the words, but he thought the melody was Lucy’s kind of melody (she had, after all, been enamored of his cantor the one time she’d slipped into his synagogue), and as he fought for sleep, he tried to imagine her life in New York. Maybe she would be out with her girlfriend Renée. Maybe she would be arguing with her dad in Mebane. Or maybe she would be reading a book with the warm air coming in through an open window, the nail polish drying on her toes.

  He’d wanted to keep the possibility of India away from her. He didn’t think the trip would ever happen; even in May, after Misha arrived at his apartment with a set of passport pictures, he hadn’t believed he would end up here. So, he didn’t involve Lucy, out of expediency, he first thought, though it was likely there was more, a liminal fear he did not wish to address.

  It was a question of who could know the whole truth. If he told Lucy about the play, she’d want to know more, how he’d been able to survive the deportations when all the other orphans hadn’t. This was what he wouldn’t reveal to anyone in the world. It made life with Misha a brotherhood. A shared history. A refuge where there was nothing and no one to impugn.

  Though even with Misha, he hadn’t offered the whole truth. He hadn’t told Misha what he’d done that day to escape. Instead, what Misha knew of their last day in Warsaw, when Misha was working on the other side of the ghetto’s walls, was what Jaryk believed to be a reasonable version of the truth: that in the chaos of the deportations, he’d gotten lost from the others, that he’d then wandered and made it to the countryside, where he’d taught himself to survive until the war ended. At first when they’d met in the DP camp, Misha had pressed to know more, but Jaryk had kept the truth to himself; he hadn’t dared explain that last day with Pan Doktor and Madam Stefa—how he’d jumped the train and left them to survive on his own in the woods. Now there was no one left to tell.

  When the attendant came to deliver his breakfast, the radio was murmuring slow morning songs. He’d hardly slept, but he still wanted to see the sun. The deputy had informed him he was free to go as soon as he secured “proper transportation,” but he still felt like a prisoner. He asked the morning watch if he could venture outside, and in a somber procession, they led him to the prison hospital grounds.

  It was a fragrant, humid morning. Along the length of a football field protected by sentries and high concrete walls, dozens of unwell convicts milled in loose groups. They were all dressed in white; some were shackled at the wrists but could still loiter around; a few, he noticed, were escorted at all times by guards. They looked so young. College boys with bandages on their foreheads, or eye patches barely covering a swelling bruise.

  His presence triggered a fierce whispering among the prisoners, and soon the field was hushed. They were all watching him: the constables, the prisoners—even the washerwoman hanging uniforms on a clothesline had paused her work.

  “What?” he said. “What’s the problem?” What could he do for them? What had Misha planned to do for all the poor souls here? It wasn’t his war. It wasn’t his fight to take on.

  The last time Jaryk had seen Misha was at the Brighton Beach apartment, a couple of days before they were supposed to fly to India. Misha had set his traveling clothes out on his bed.

  “Will I look funny in these?” Misha had asked, holding up a pair of beige shorts.

  Jaryk couldn’t remember Misha ever wearing anything but long, dark pants, even from their time in Poland. “You will absolutely look and feel funny in those,” Jaryk said.

  “Bah!” Misha spat. “Live a little, will you?”

  Afterwards, Misha had shared what he’d gathered from his research. They were taking youths from the city, lads who’d rather be studying economics or writing poetry, or the ones they’d corralled from the villages, who had no money to their name, who fashioned bows and arrows from the wood of their ancestral trees. The problem was familiar: they wanted to live in a world where everyone—even the refugees from Bangladesh—had their share of workable land, but wealth belonged to the old guard.

  Now he didn’t return to his holding room, though that would have relieved him of the attention. Instead, he closed his eyes and allowed the morning sun to bathe him in its light.

  When he looked up again, the prisoners had resumed their shuffling. Even the constables who’d brought him down had returned to their own pursuits; they were passing around snuff and dealing a deck of cards. He felt the soft, trilling sounds of Bengali create a veil of anonymity that rested above him, a layer beneath the rising heat of the day, so that, his eyes closed, he could imagine Misha in his largeness, in his perpetual busyness.

  It was Misha who’d taught him to wear a watch. On the eve of his beginning work at the synagogue, they’d headed to Chinatown with a mission. Misha believed that wearing a watch helped turn a boy into a man. So, they combed the street vendors and the basement shops along Canal until at last, on Mulberry Street, they found the perfect one: its original scrawl of Montefiore half-erased by wear, with a silver band and a gold-tipped windup pin, and when Jaryk put it on, Misha said, “Now you are free to go.”

  The next day, Misha took off work to accompany him to the Upper West Side. Too nervous to simply walk inside, Jaryk asked that they first get a feel for the neighborhood, so they circled Temple Beth Israel, sniffing the place out like detectives. At the time, his bookkeeping experience seemed questionable; while he’d been noticed at the docks for his ability to quickly add and subtract the prices of cuts and subsequently been promoted to working Fridays in the office, coordinating delivery routes and schedules, he didn’t know if this work was a bookkeeper’s work. He doubted his experience and doubted himself, but Misha told him, the moment before he walked into the dim hall of the synagogue, “If you pretend you know bookkeeping, then you know bookkeeping.” Misha meant that he should seem confident—be a model of sturdiness and resolve—
but Jaryk could also smell Misha’s anxiety, and it was this pinch of failure from a man who wasn’t afraid of much at all that pushed him to knock on the rabbi’s door.

  On the prison grounds, as he wound up his well-worn Montefiore watch, Jaryk found himself weeping. He turned his body away from the groups of shuffling men, so there was no one to see.

  * * *

  ………………

  The news about Misha’s death came from Professor Bose, who’d called him at Rabbi Samuel’s office and repeated the facts half a dozen times before Jaryk accepted the situation for what it was. Now he could put the story together for himself. On the sixth day of his India visit, after Misha had found his way to Professor’s Bose’s estate, his heart had stopped, or perhaps it had not simply stopped but sputtered its way to a final exhaustion; he liked to believe that it had not been a struggle, that whatever pain had come had diminished quickly. On this point the professor had agreed, “He died in his sleep, probably no pain at all.”

  The professor had said he’d kept the guest room intact with Misha’s things. Jaryk wanted to collect Misha’s possessions, sleep in the bed where Misha took his last breath. He didn’t sit shiva when he got the news that morning, or at any time the whole afternoon as he made arrangements for the funeral; but in the evening, he lay on his couch and flipped through Misha’s picture album. Of the album’s two hundred pages, only about a dozen were filled: there were a few pictures of Misha with his coworkers at the docks and a few pictures of Jaryk, a younger version, on their early trips to the far reaches of the boroughs, but otherwise the album was empty.