A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  “That was beautiful,” she said.

  “It was about a boatman in a storm, but somehow it felt close to home.” He wanted to tell her about the pull of the village. Jaryk now believed that even before he’d come to India, on that evening when Misha had clutched his chest and Neel’s mother had settled his head on her lap, he’d been bonded into their service. Misha, taking his last breath, had passed the torch. Now it would be Jaryk they’d first have to kill before they could reach Neel or any of the others. All this he wanted to tell Lucy, though where could he begin?

  “I have to tell you a story,” he said.

  Lucy leaned into his chest. The house grew so quiet he could hear the wind through the curtains. “Me first,” she said. “There’s something I need to share.”

  Dinner at the Orphanage

  warsaw—july 20, 1942

  (Once so grand a table, it stands now woefully meager—bereft of candlesticks, bereft of baskets of freshly made bread—though still full with children. There are perhaps a hundred of them seated from one end to the other. Pan Doktor serves them from one side from a giant tureen of watery soup; Madam Stefa serves them from the other. The children indecipherably murmur.)

  pan doktor: Come now, Stefania, let us not put on such a dour face. I myself went begging to all the wealthy Jews and poured upon them such guilt that they could not refuse a portion. There is simply not enough. But the children need not know. Let us make a game of our lack.

  stefania (plopping onto each child’s plate a dollop of soup): I can count the potatoes with two hands. I can count the loaves of bread with one. Is that the kind of game you mean?

  pan doktor: Precisely, Madam Stefa—quite brilliant, really. Children, we have an announcement! (The children pause their murmuring.) For the main course, Madam Stefa has secured ten very special potatoes. These are not the normal potatoes you are used to. No, these are from the planet Rho. Eating just a bite of a single potato, you shall feel terribly strong. You shall not feel hungry for hours. Your mind will become sharp, and you shall study your books with joy. What say you children to such potatoes?

  (He cuts a single potato so finely he nicks his thumb, but covers the blood with a napkin before anyone can notice.) Who shall be the first to try this magical tuber?

  (All the hands raise.)

  stefania (whispering into Pan Doktor’s ear): But what will happen in two hours, Panie Doktor? Will they eat the honey of your words? How long will these games last us?

  pan doktor: As long as we allow.

  (After the meal is served, Pan Doktor retreats to his attic room. During the day, the room can become so hot as to dissuade visitors. The old doctor is thus surprised to find a bearded old man sitting at his writing desk.)

  pan doktor: You there—announce yourself!

  r. tagore: At your service, Rabindranath Tagore.

  pan doktor: But sir, did you not die last year, upon your bed in India?

  r. tagore: That I did, good Doctor, that I did. However, let it be known that time has remade itself within the walls of the ghetto. I do not mean anything cosmic. It is simply the result of the ingredients. Did you know that Shiva doesn’t appear until his disciple submits to thousands of years of sacrifice? But how can a human being live long enough to sacrifice so much? You see, it is a matter of time bending upon itself to accommodate beauty. How else can the perfect thing be made?

  pan doktor: Ah, but the perfect thing cannot be made. Of that, I am quite sure.

  r. tagore: Are you, though? Are you entirely certain?

  pan doktor: Consider, for example, the matter of our play. Rather, sir, your play. The performance won’t be shabby, I hope, but how can it be perfect? Hanna, who is to play the Flower Girl, has no flowers and must therefore use scraps of cloth sewn to resemble flowers. Mordechai, who is to play the Headman, has all but lost his voice, a strange bug having crawled into his throat. And Jaryk, who is to play Amal, barely knows his lines.

  r. tagore: You don’t say! Then why perform it at all, if so enfeebled? So altered from the source?

  pan doktor: Obvious, sir. How else to learn of death? How else to teach a child of his own impending—

  (A knock on the attic door.)

  pan doktor: Sir, would you mind hiding under the bed?

  (The assistant enters the room.)

  misha: Is someone here? Good Doctor, with whom were you speaking?

  pan doktor: Not a soul.

  misha: Indeed, then. I have received the words for the invitation. Szlengel was happy to provide his voice for the occasion. He has given us three lines. Esterka and I have made copies for everyone who will attend.

  pan doktor: Let me see it. Let me touch the ink with my own hands. (He reads.)

  It transcends the test—being a mirror of the self.

  It transcends emotion—being experience.

  It transcends acting—being the work of children.

  misha: But what is this test of which Szlengel speaks?

  pan doktor: The Test. Not this test. For it is the Test that you will find in your life, dear Misha, as I find now, awaiting death with a bum knee. For it is the Test that will seek your heart, rent as it may one day become, and then we shall see—I will at least see from my own little perch in heaven—how you answer the call, what kind of man I taught you to become.

  (Curtain.)

  The News

  On the town’s main road, they walked in long stretches of darkness and starlight. Jaryk asked Lucy to close her eyes as they moved farther from the row of shops. She gripped his hand as he steered her past potholes and cow manure. Once they were far away from the few street lamps, he asked her to look up. Above them, the blue dazzle of the stars, all those constellations that Pan Doktor would pretend he could name: Fortress of the Heart, he once called what Jaryk later learned was the Big Dipper.

  He told Lucy the story. “I like Pan Doktor’s version,” she said. “What a blessing to see the night like this.”

  He remembered a power outage in New York during the summer of their first dates, how the lack of light in the city brought to their lovemaking a quietude. Hardly a noise—everything he’d felt he kept inside until the final moment—and she, who other times was as loud as the rush hour, remained with him in that silence. If she’d been otherwise, she might’ve startled him from falling in love.

  He believed that if there was anyone who could understand what kept him here, it would be Lucy. At the dinner party, she’d pulled him away, saying she had important news, but for these last minutes of their walk, she’d grown quiet. He’d filled the space on his own, starting at the beginning.

  “So I ended up in jail,” he said, which he’d meant to come off as a joke, but which alarmed her, so he explained how he’d ended up in a prison hospital in Calcutta, only to be rescued by the Pals.

  They’d turned up the lane that would lead to the Bose mansion. No matter how slowly he walked, Lucy walked even slower, until finally she stopped. There were moments when Lucy wanted to be embraced, but he didn’t think this was one. The weight of her thinking kept him at bay.

  “So it’s been a difficult few weeks for me,” she finally said. “When I say difficult, I mean it’s like I’ve been balancing on one leg. It’s like everything that was solid before isn’t.”

  She whispered into his ear, “Jaryk, I’m pregnant.”

  The idea seemed so strange to him that he almost smiled, but there was enough light that he could make out her face. What it was telling him was that he should listen deeply, which he was trying to do: he was to become a father.

  “Me?” he said, because that felt like the only word he could muster.

  “You’re going to be a daddy,” Lucy said.

  He felt an awakening, as if a precious gift he’d saved since childhood, kept hidden from Pola
nd to Germany to America, could finally be unwrapped. Mixed with this came an old fear. What right had he to bring a child into this world of suffering? An orphan, a survivor, a friendless refugee—what right had he?

  “Okay,” he said. Okay. It came to him like a mantra, and he said the word again and again, until he believed it was going to be all right.

  * * *

  ………………

  At first the idea that he would be a father seemed impossible. With fatherhood came a moneyed job, a yarded house, a plan for the future, but he had none of these and so had assumed he was beyond the prerequisites for the role.

  “I’m exhausted,” Lucy said. “Just telling you has worn me out.”

  He began to feel protective of her. They headed back to their cabin, where she slept the night, and he watched her, afraid at any moment that she would require his services. The next morning, he brought her breakfast in bed. She accepted his overfried eggs, which he’d had to prepare in the near-darkness for fear of waking the butler.

  “Thank God it’s not spicy,” she said.

  “What now?” he said.

  “Now we figure things out, one day at a time. I want to see what you do here, how you’ve been keeping yourself busy.” But as soon as she said it, she began to feel queasy. He led her by the hand to the bathroom, where she threw up her breakfast.

  “It’s okay,” she told him afterwards, gulping down a glass of orange juice. “A few more weeks and this thing they call morning sickness—which, let me tell you, is not just in the morning—will be on the way out.”

  The professor found them at the dining table looking at each other with a mix of what must have been fear and wonderment and expectation. “Is everything all right?” the professor asked, and almost as one, Lucy and Jaryk said—“Mostly.”

  * * *

  ………………

  When they reached Gopalpur, he wished he could announce the news to the village men, but Lucy had told him to keep it quiet. It would have to be just the two of them who knew, at least for a while.

  He began by showing her around the village. The communal area of Gopalpur, where the football field had been turned into a theater, was in the center of the little valley. The residential dwellings were spread out on upper steppes to reduce the chances of flooding. There were sixty houses arranged in an elliptical shape up the top face of the slope.

  “Three hundred or so people live there,” he told Lucy. He held her hand. He kept her close as they walked up the steep face, pausing every few steps to ask if she was all right.

  “I’m pregnant, not old and weak,” Lucy snapped.

  He took her to Neel’s house, which was half the size of the professor’s living room. Lucy sat on the cool mud floor while Neel told her about his school life.

  “The town children are jealous because we are performing this play,” said Neel. “The town children have money, but we have our play.”

  “They have to walk ten kilometers to get to the nearest school,” Jaryk added. “That’s part of what we’re trying to do here. If people know about this community, we can raise money for a school in the village.”

  “A school? I thought you wanted to raise a racket, let people know what’s going on here,” Lucy said.

  “The professor’s trying to raise a racket,” Jaryk said. “And I’m thinking about their future. To have a life, you need schools and jobs.”

  Neel came over and interrupted. “Come, Auntie, meet my baby goats.”

  After their morning together, the boy had developed a ritual with Jaryk: whenever he saw him coming up the path to the village, Neel would run to greet him. He would take Jaryk’s hand, as if he were a bodyguard, a tiny protector, and would lead him to the stage for the day’s work. Maybe, with Lucy here, Neel had felt too shy for that, though now he again took Jaryk’s hand and led them to the back of the house, where twin kids had been born the week before. The mother eyed them warily at first, but after sniffing Neel, allowed Lucy to cradle her newborns.

  “You’re a natural,” Jaryk said.

  “Don’t start,” Lucy said.

  Down by the football field, Jaryk showed her the stage and the bleachers. All this he’d built with his own hands, he told her. They still had to sand, prime, and paint, but otherwise the space had come together.

  “In Warsaw, we used the dining room of the house and made a stage out of rotting wood. Windows came from scrap metal and twine. For costumes, we used pillowcases, cutting them into what we thought were Indian dresses. But here, we’re doing it properly. Everything is going to be just right.”

  “It’s really something,” she said.

  An old goat wandered down to rub its nose on the side of the stage, sending shivers through the structure.

  Lucy pulled Jaryk close and whispered, “Also, a man was murdered on this field. What have you gotten yourself into, Jaryk Smith?”

  Every newspaper in India was beginning to cover the event, which meant that The Telegraph and The Statesman were all reporting about the three hundred people of the valley, about Neel and the death of his father. In Warsaw the play had been the prelude to death, knowing as they did that the performance meant the cattle cars were not far behind, but here The Post Office—Dak Ghar, as they called it—meant life.

  Every time a newspaper ran an article about the upcoming performance, every time a luminary from the city promised to attend, the professor would celebrate by pouring a glass of his prized Johnnie Walker whiskey. “L’chaim!” he’d exclaim—To life! Still, Jaryk had developed the nagging doubt that the performance might also have the opposite effect, leaving the villagers worse off. In Warsaw, Pan Doktor didn’t believe till the very end that they’d send a house of children to the death camps, and yet the German authorities had done exactly that. You could never know what men in power would do, what evil they’d commit. When the time was right, he’d confront the professor about his doubts, but now there was no reason to worry Lucy.

  “My being here is good for them,” he said. It sounded grand, as if he were their ombudsman now.

  “It’s also good for our baby to be close to daddy,” Lucy said.

  Her return to the States was less than a week away, but he harbored the secret hope that she would remain longer. They hadn’t discussed when he would return; he’d been avoiding the subject. If he headed home before the play’s production, he would be reneging on his duty to the villagers; but if he remained, Lucy would go back to America alone. Every week, she would head to the clinic by herself, and every week the child inside her would grow without him.

  “I’ve traveled thousands of miles to see a village. What else do y’all do here for fun?” Lucy asked, trying to lighten the mood, Jaryk thought.

  They headed back to Shantiniketan to tour the grounds. The Pal children led the way around the Tagore estate, showing Lucy the Aston Martin Tagore had driven to Calcutta, sitting her on the steps of the house where Mohandas Gandhi had come to break his final fast.

  “These are the small moments of history,” Mr. Pal said. “One great leader giving another a glass of orange juice.”

  The children laughed at some joke they’d been exchanging, and soon Mr. Pal joined in. They were always sharing anecdotes, riffing off one another. When Jaryk dreamed of his own family, laughter around the dinner table was what came to mind. To have that with Lucy, they’d need to be married, wouldn’t they? Later, he would ask Mr. Pal for advice. He needed a guide, even if Mr. Pal had been married in a different tradition.

  At the town’s center, they showed Lucy the centuries-old banyan where Tagore’s grandfather had found spiritual largesse, where he’d forsaken his possessions and put down roots in wild country. Priya scaled up the limbs of the tree with ease, and when Lucy followed, it took every ounce of his will to keep from telling her to stop. He moved closer to the tree: in case she lost her footing,
he would break her fall. But she was a natural—soon she and Priya had scaled up ten or more feet to a steady limb, where they gazed down at Jaryk with a shared look of mischief and delight.

  During the war he’d come to believe it would’ve been better if they had all perished, every single Jew and Gentile, so that their story wouldn’t have to be retold, the horror of it relived. It had only been over the last year that gratitude for living had returned to him, all those mornings with Lucy waking in the tangle of her hair, and now in the village, the good mud settling into his nails. Why then did it feel as precarious as Lucy’s foot on a tree limb—this thing called happiness—this ache in the center of him? There were moments when he wondered if it would have been better if he’d never met her at all, never accepted this risk of love.

  “Come up!” she cried.

  But he couldn’t move. He shook his head, feet planted into the earth, arms extended should she fall.

  The Rehearsals

  For the next several days it rained. The family of boars by the Bose estate retreated under a canopy of garbage, the frogs chorused louder than the crickets at night, and the field was too waterlogged, Lucy was told, for work to continue at Gopalpur. Instead, the professor drove to the village and returned with the main cast. With everyone cramped into the den, the rehearsals began in earnest.

  At first it seemed like a comedy of errors. The children did not know their cues or when to approach the stage, or how best to deliver their lines. Lucy’s mother, who’d taught the piano with a combination of fierce grace and tough love to dozens of students over the years, wouldn’t have approved. The professor was too easy on them. Instead of correcting mistakes, he would smile and wave the scene on.

  She’d read The Post Office in New York, but it was an altogether different experience seeing it performed by children. Thirty years ago, Jaryk had done what Neel was now doing. Neel was also, it seemed, the only actor to not only have grasped the plot of the play, which was simple enough, but also the emotional pull of the scenes.