“Not an hour of suffering for your dear friend. I packed all his things back into his suitcase, if you wish to look.”
The twin to his own suitcase lay in the corner, just as pristine and an ugly shade of green. He touched the handle gingerly, conscious of the professor’s stare. “I need a moment alone,” he said.
The professor left the room, and he sat down on Misha’s bed, bringing the suitcase onto his lap. Misha had bought the luggage years ago at a yard sale, but they hardly traveled, Misha having made a few trips to Florida, twice scouring Naples for retirement condos but never having the money to sign.
Inside the suitcase there was a set of Hawaiian shirts and the linen pants that Misha had proclaimed were suitable for tropical weather. He tried to find Misha’s smell in those clothes, the vodka and the pomade he massaged into his beard. Maybe there was a trace, but it was mostly the mothballs he noticed, which had kept the suitcase insect-free. Besides the clothes, there was Misha’s India guidebook. Misha had marked through Jaryk’s copy but mostly spared his own. He’d circled a few pages like “Important Numbers to Call in West Bengal” and “Basic Bengali Words,” but mostly the book had been left unblemished, though in the middle there were newspaper clippings about a village called Gopalpur and a piece about the professor himself, whom the article described as “debonair” and “cunning,” words that Jaryk had never heard spoken about an academic. Searching the inside pocket, he found something encased in bubble wrap. It was the little wooden statue of an elephant with a boy astride it that Misha had made him after they’d returned from Little Rose, the farm he and the other orphans would retreat to in the summers.
He remembered the night at Little Rose when a storm had passed through, bringing lightning but no rain. A lilac bush burned, and the smell reached the children, who were huddled by the door of their dorm. Perfume and sulfur—but no rain. They were too scared of the storm to sleep, so Pan Doktor told stories, holding up a candle, making shapes with his fingers. Wild horses, a duck wobbling in stormy water, an old elephant standing on two feet like a man.
When they returned to the orphanage, they found the SS everywhere, the black boots marching up and down Krochmalna Street. Jaryk had cried for Little Rose, those days in sun, the light on the cornstalks. He shuffled around the rooms believing it was he who’d led the black boots into Poland, that some spilled milk from long ago—the reason why he’d been given to the orphanage by his own aunt, proof of his tainted birth—was why they’d come. It was Misha who saved him.
“It wasn’t you,” Misha said. “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t Pan Doktor or anyone else. They’re just evil, and evil comes when it comes.”
Misha made him something to quell the tears: an elephant with a little boy that was to mean: There is a faraway land where boys ride elephants to school. “Someday, we’ll go there,” Misha said.
For months, Jaryk had kept the carving under his pillow. He’d hidden it underneath his shirt when they marched to the cattle cars for Treblinka, had hidden it all the way to the displaced persons camp, and had even sewn it into his military blanket on the relief barge headed to America. When Misha found them their first apartment in Brighton Beach, Jaryk had crowned their mantel with the carving, where it stood for a while as their sole ornament. He’d thought he lost the piece when he moved into his own place years later, but Misha had saved it. Here it was in this country they’d once imagined through the stories of Pan Doktor.
Jaryk ran his fingers along the frame of Misha’s bed, along the pillow, along the plain blue sheets. One by one he refolded Misha’s clothes into his suitcase, but the statue he took with him, as if it were a trophy.
* * *
………………
Downstairs, Mrs. Pal was coordinating a feast, ordering the butler to carry vats of food to the dining-room table. “You must be famished,” she called.
“I could eat,” Jaryk said, finding a place, though he wasn’t hungry.
The professor looked on bemused as Mrs. Pal had the butler set food on the table, prepare the cutlery, and fold napkins onto Jaryk’s place mat. It was a meal indeed. There was one bucket for a yellow lentil mash, another for steaming basmati rice, and a third with a soupy vegetable concoction that smelled like aubergine and onion.
“Well, it’s cooking without proper ingredients or proper time,” Mrs. Pal said. “But for tonight it must do.”
“Just for tonight, yes?” the professor asked.
“Oh, we’ll be off early morning tomorrow,” said Mrs. Pal coldly.
The butler joined them. After wiping the sweat from his face with his lacy napkin, he was the first one to dig in.
“I keep an egalitarian table,” announced the professor. “In any case, Rohan and I have known each other a long time. We are each other’s company in this town.”
Jaryk didn’t mind, though Mrs. Pal seemed offended. Still, the butler’s loud chewing soon became eclipsed by the collective sounds of the table. Even though the Pals had been snacking the whole car ride, they ate ravenously, shirt cuffs rolled, sari ends held back to achieve graceful motions from bucket to banana-leaf plate to mouth that struck him as being oddly athletic. Still clumsy at the art of making a ball of rice in his hands, Jaryk ate carefully, wondering, as he managed a bite, how Misha could’ve weathered such food, all his life a man of meat, cabbage, and liquor.
“Misha ate at the village every day,” the professor said, as if guessing Jaryk’s question. “He said he loved the home food.”
“Which village?” Mr. Pal asked.
“Gopalpur,” said the professor.
“Oh, Gopalpur,” said Mrs. Pal, as if she were speaking of a maligned uncle.
“For that week he was here, Misha went every day. He started to form a bond with the children. That’s where we’re performing the play, you know,” he said to Jaryk. “Misha said that you’d change your mind and eventually co-direct the production.”
“I’m not sure I can. Let’s take this one day at a time,” Jaryk said.
“Why isn’t your friend here?” Avik asked.
“Well,” Jaryk said. “Misha didn’t take care of himself too well. He didn’t eat good food like you do, and it was a long journey to come here. One day he fell asleep and didn’t wake up. I’m here to get his things.” He looked to Mrs. Pal for help.
“Priya, Avik, this is adult conversation,” Mrs. Pal offered.
“We had no choice but to cremate,” the professor said to Jaryk, as if the children weren’t there at all. “There are no funeral parlors within a hundred kilometers. The deed was done at Gopalpur. I can take you there tomorrow, so you can see the place for yourself.”
Jaryk looked around the table with its unfamiliar foods, at the butler who ate with his mouth open. He was slow to trust, but the Pals he thought he knew. At least the children acted like children. The professor was a different matter; something in his story had lured Misha here.
“I’ll go to the village tomorrow,” Jaryk said. “But only if the Pals come along. They are my friends. I see you have all these rooms. No one staying in them.”
The professor folded his hands on the table. He pulled at the ends of his mustache, surveying the children who might make a mess of the place. “There are many rooms here,” he finally said. “We were a big family once, and now I’m the only one who’s left. Anyway, we’ll all go to the village tomorrow. Just know it’s not a tourist trip. There’ll be work to do for everyone who comes.”
“No worries, I have muscles,” Avik said, showing off his biceps.
At the head of the table, the butler groaned. Jaryk wasn’t sure how much he’d understood of the conversation, but he thought Rohan sensed the old ways had been interrupted. Now he’d again have work to do.
* * *
………………
That night Jaryk slept in Misha’s bed. He dreamed he was walking on
a road with a hanging moon. The moon was the size of his arm; the road led to a room with a river running through it. On one side of this room, Jaryk and the few possessions he’d had when he first arrived at the orphanage: a pocket light, a small bottle of hair oil, half empty, and a needlework he believed to have been his mother’s. On the other side Madam Stefa and the children from the school. Stefa was in a high mood, and for once, she wasn’t afraid to let it show. She pulled Hanna’s ear and joked with Chaim about his pant cuffs being too long, but it was all for love.
There was no way to cross the water between them, so he watched as Stefa comforted his brothers and sisters. She fed them soup from a giant vat, and she let them pinch her cheeks, she was in such a mood. He waited his turn patiently, but the river swelled; who would cross such water? He waited some more. He was still a boy, but he knew the first and last thing about waiting.
The universe rewards those who wait for their destiny, then pounce accordingly. Who said that? On the other side of the river, the boys and girls were dressed like brigands, wanderers, and musicians; soon, the time would come for them.
Misha worked across the Wall and would teach them German. Umschlagplatz.
Once they’d gotten to ride on a carousel. It’d been for show, though they didn’t know it at the time. The chairman was there, as were high-ranking officers of the SS. The carousel had been worked by the arms of starving men, he now understood, but back then he and Chaim and Hanna had loved the feeling of being launched into the air, only to fall again toward the earth.
“It’s just a dirty carousel,” was all Misha had said.
Those were the days the Vistula swelled with the dead.
Once, Stefa led them too close to the path of the black boots, and an officer had interrogated her in German. He still remembered how that fear felt in his belly, but during that interrogation, neither he nor his friends had screamed. They’d hardly fidgeted until the officer had let them be on their way.
“What changes is not the world but you,” Madam Stefa had told them afterwards. “Even those terrible men were once beautiful children.”
* * *
………………
That morning the professor was nowhere to be found.
“Busy man,” Rohan said with a shrug, when Jaryk had asked about Bose’s whereabouts.
He was annoyed, but there was nothing to do but wait. The Pals joined him for a cup of tea. All morning they chatted. Long, winding conversations from which Jaryk learned more about Mr. Pal’s profession. His guide had aspired to be a lecturer at Presidency College in Calcutta but had done poorly in his exams. “The tour-guide business came after a great deal of lost prestige,” Mr. Pal said. “No one in our family had done such work. There were foreigners and their desires to see a different India.”
“That is old news, Mr. Pal, and not very interesting to our friend,” said Mrs. Pal.
Mr. Pal moved on to a tale about their honeymoon in the south of India, when their bus had broken down and Mr. Pal had to devise its repair with little more than a pen and a wrench. Their stories hung in the air like a lazy summer sunset, and he felt nourished by their company. By asking for their help back at the hospital, it was as he’d done in his childhood with Pan Doktor and Stefa—turned strangers into allies. If there was anything he’d been blessed with, it was this gift. He thanked the Pals for having interrupted their lives for him. The money Mr. Pal had asked for but hadn’t yet collected felt insufficient to repay their kindness. Being in a house with an unfinished roof and reminders of Mr. Pal’s failures as a businessman didn’t help, so Mrs. Pal had agreed, he’d suspected, to give the family a change of scenery they could afford. In so doing, they’d become accidental friends. “I’m lucky to have run into you,” he said.
“We feel the same,” said Mrs. Pal.
When they’d first asked him about why he’d come to India, he’d skirted around the truth. Now, he said that it was for Misha; his friend’s death had pulled him here.
“What was he like, your Misha? I feel he is all around us,” Mrs. Pal asked.
“Well, we’re not related, but he was the only family I’ve ever had. We lived in the same New York. I mean, we went to all the same places. It was hard to be in the city and to know he was gone for good.”
“So this is your pilgrimage,” said Mrs. Pal.
“Something like that,” he said.
The children met them at the breakfast table and challenged him to a game called kabaddi, which, they explained, involving running around obstacles and tossing stones. A few minutes of running after Avik and Priya in the courtyard and Jaryk lost his wind.
“I’m not as fast as I once was,” he announced.
At Pan Doktor’s orphanage, he’d been the fastest boy. He remembered the August of 1940, when after a request from Pan Doktor reached Chairman Czerniaków, who in turn asked the commandant, through some blessing—or maybe a clerical error—the whole orphanage had been allowed outside the city.
It was the summer Jaryk had discovered a gift for whistling tunes he’d heard just once on the radio. His cheeks were still pudgy, but he was big for a seven-year-old and had begun to take advantage of his size, elbowing smaller boys for the choicest piece of egg-glazed bread, taunting Hanna when she struggled to skip rope, pushing Mordechai into a blackberry bush.
Misha was ten years older and had helped restore the summer camp. For weeks he’d been ferrying supplies from Warsaw. He’d repaired the woodwork inside the dorms; he’d made peace with the wary farmer, whose fields were a stone’s throw away. When Jaryk and the other orphans arrived, they would have no idea the Germans had scavenged through the place.
In the late afternoons, Misha took Jaryk into the woods. Misha knew a great deal about which fruits you could eat and which ones would give your stomach an ache or worse. He told Jaryk about the differences in color between poison and life, the differences in texture between berries that would taste tart but fill you up and the sweet ones that would leave you retching for hours. Later those lessons would help Jaryk live on the land like a bison, digging through the frost for sustenance.
Every Friday before the Sabbath began, the boys would be broken up by age to hold races, with prizes for the winners: scarves woven by Madam Stefa, a promise of a trip to the carousels with Miss Esterka. After the races they would bring in the divine presence of the Sabbath, the feminine glory and power of rest, by singing wordless songs at the top of their lungs. They would sleep, nearly atop each other, two boys or two girls to a single bunk.
Jaryk never asked why he was the one who was taken under Misha’s wing, but that was how it happened. On Thursdays, Misha would take Jaryk to the cornfield, and he would make him run, back and forth, between the sides of the golden stalks, until Jaryk’s heart was ready to burst. Then they would rest and share an apple, while Misha talked about form, about how a boy should run. “Hold your arms like this,” Misha would say, “so that you are moving with the air and not against it. Let your feet fall heel-first, then just let the toe land, and you’ll be the fastest boy.” And by the third week, he was the fastest of them all. He won the right to Madam Stefa’s coffee cake and a promise by Pan Doktor to see the castle of the kings at Kraków. After the races, he would go to Misha, coming in third, then second, then finally a decisive first, and he would say, “How did I do?,” to which Misha would respond, “Do better,” “Better,” and “This time you did good, Jaryk.”
* * *
………………
The next morning someone woke Jaryk by shining a flashlight in his face. It was still dark, even more so without the night’s lidless moon. Maybe the sun was rising on the other side of the house, but he wouldn’t wager it.
The flashlight clicked off, and he could see the professor’s hands shaking from what he imagined were the effects of an entire pot of coffee. “It’s time to go,” said Rudra Bose, wearing wh
at looked to be the same blue shirt the butler had worn days before.
“Go where?”
“The village. Meet me in the courtyard in five minutes.”
In the courtyard, the sun was rising slowly, grazing the lower branches of the walnut tree. The professor had passed through a gate in the back and was beckoning him to follow through a path in the rice fields that looked more like mud than road. The wind still felt cool at this hour. He had to jog to keep up with the professor’s lengthening shadow, thinking he was indeed out of shape—the years of tending synagogue catching up—when the professor stopped and pointed to something in the ground.
There were snakes swimming in the paddy, congregating where the professor’s flashlight hit the water. The largest snake was an arm’s length, and smaller ones circled around. Beside the professor’s feet, there was a pile of shed snakeskin, which in that light looked like a stretch of rope made from indigo and silver.
“Don’t worry,” the professor said. “They’re barely poisonous.” He uncoiled one of the shed skins for Jaryk.
It was cooler than the muck Priya had massaged onto his face to calm his sunburn. He traced along the blue veins.
“I will wager that you don’t see this in your New York,” the professor said.
He could imagine the professor showing this same patch of paddy to Misha, the same family of serpents stretching their tongues toward the silt. Misha would’ve laughed. Afraid of snakes, he still would’ve laughed his way out of the awkwardness, out of the fear.
“I wanted to show you something about our country that you’d only see if you looked closely, if you spent the time, as I do, walking along this field every morning.”
Jaryk could look closely. Ever since he’d been a little boy, he’d cataloged his life as if he were making a map of its details—the brand of the pepper grinder, the exact way the rabbi tilted his hat on a Saturday morning—for it was by noting the details that he could sense the suffering that lay ahead. Those years Pan Doktor and Madam Stefa had pretended they’d had more food stored away, he’d suspected the truth. He’d seen the blood on the old doctor’s thumb from slicing the meat thin so they’d all have a piece. No one else had seen, but he had.
A Play for the End of the World Page 13