Over the many hours at the prison Jaryk has had time to think about what he’ll tell the professor, what’ll he say to set their course. What he knows is that he won’t quit now. He let Lucy go back to America so he could save a village. A brush-up with the police isn’t enough to set him back. “What about the play?” Jaryk demands. “Rohan’s beating means we have to go forward sooner than we thought. No more delays.”
“Look at you,” says the professor, peering at him through the hair falling over his eyes. “You’ve grown to be a little like me. But nothing is without cost, as you’ve seen for yourself. If we hold the play, they’ll surely be there. Rajan Datta surrounded by his men. We’ll hold the play. You don’t have to worry, Mr. Smith. Just know that no one takes my friend from my home and walks away unscathed.”
“Are you planning something?” Jaryk asks.
“Do your part,” the professor says. “Then we will have met our obligation to each other.”
The play’s purpose is to give Gopalpur a voice, but now he understands there’s another intention, a more personal one. He can feel the professor’s agitation, as the man’s knees knock in time against the wood of the table. Stop, he wants to say. Stop, before you bruise.
They’re closer to each other than he’d like to admit. It’s simpler to settle scores than it is to raise a family.
Years later he’ll wonder why he didn’t press the professor, why he didn’t ask about the retribution that’s been planned, but in this moment there is the stained place mat and the silence between them. There’s the memory of a young man’s swollen cheekbone and the bruise under his right eye as he follows his saviors home. He’ll always remember that ride in the jeep, Rohan’s broken body against his, when the professor slowed down for each pothole and drove as if it were his first time on the road.
The Performance
gopalpur—august 27, 1942
The morning of the performance Jaryk gathers the child actors, and they practice their entrance, with Neel leading the cast. He tells them to walk as if they own the earth on which they stand. “Like this,” he says, demonstrating with long, exaggerated steps so that they laugh.
“Uncle, we are feeling nervous,” Neel says. Last rehearsal Neel forgot a few lines, and his timing has been less than perfect, but Jaryk doesn’t chastise him. After all, he knows what it’s like to stand onstage before a house of strangers.
“If you say to yourself that you’re relaxed, then that’s how you’ll feel.”
They’re nervous not only because they will be performing before hundreds but also because of the rumors that have reached the village, whispers that what happened to Rohan will soon happen to them. Last week the Flower Girl’s parents approached the professor; they’re concerned about all the attention, and maybe they could begin the show by thanking the government for the use of the public land? Maybe they could even start with an apology?
“Absolutely no,” Rudra Bose told them. He’s assured the parents that no harm will come to their children. Anyway, it’s for their collective benefit, he says. With all the journalists and dignitaries in the audience, no one will raise a hand against Gopalpur.
“What about the day after?” Jaryk later asks the professor in private.
“Perhaps they will get a permit to remain for as long as they like,” the professor says. “But these things are unpredictable.”
“What do you mean? I signed up for this because you said they’d have a better life. Are you saying all of this might not help after all?”
“Oh, it’ll definitely help,” says Bose. “It just may not help them right away, or it may not help Gopalpur but another village. Change is complicated. A shot fired in one village could mean justice in another. You can’t look at this so narrowly.”
The professor excuses himself to run an errand, and Jaryk spends the morning worrying about what will come once the media have left. Since Rohan’s beating, his being here—the protection he believed he offered—seems to matter less and less, and he’s no longer sure that the play will give them the cover that they need.
* * *
………………
At six o’clock that evening, the cast emerge from the village courtyard and walk down the staircase of the hill, marching past the kerosene lamps that mark the football field toward the stage. Neel carries their banner: Gopalpur Theater Players.
Jaryk spots the Pals in the front row and waves. They have come, warnings or otherwise, though they’ve left their children at home. If Lucy were here with him, he might’ve felt a sense of accomplishment. Instead her absence strikes him as a sign of his failure. He searches for her in the audience but knows what he will find; she has chosen, as he has, the course of her own life.
Neel’s hair has largely grown back for the role. Now he leads the cast into the dressing area, which is no more than an enclosed section at the rear of the stage, where they have hung sheets on bamboo poles. A few of the mothers are here to help the children with their outfits, and they treat Jaryk like one of their own. Despite his protests, Neel’s mother applies makeup to his face, smudges it to blend with his tan. She dabs a bit of rose oil behind his ear. “Good luck,” she says.
She has a name that he’s learned means gold—Hema. “Thank you for your kindness,” he tells her, knowing his smile will translate while his words will not.
He puts on a long gray wig and peeks out of the dressing area as the professor takes the stage. Almost every seat in the bleachers has been filled. The villagers are serving as ushers. A few have cameras on hand, awaiting their child’s emergence onto the stage, pride visible on their faces. Somewhere in the ether, he likes to think, Misha is watching alongside Pan Doktor and Esterka.
“Welcome to art changing history,” Professor Bose begins. “It is not often that I am able to speak to such a diverse audience. We have here represented men and women of the village, the city, and of many nations. I am so pleased to also have in attendance a member of the ruling party, Mr. Rajan Datta.”
Heads turn toward a frail man flanked by two policemen. Disparate sections of the audience clap, but the reception is tepid. Jaryk looks to his cast; luckily, they can’t see what’s happening outside the dressing area. This has been the question on his mind—how do you protect the child in a world that means to malign, trade suffering for suffering? At Pan Doktor’s orphanage, the charter was made by the children, but once they stepped outside they were in the land of their enemy, as the children of Gopalpur are now. Was there another way to save them, or was it only his hubris that had made him believe they were his to save? Now the first bloom of regret. All the warnings of the Pals, then of Lucy, gone unheeded; but there is no going back.
The professor is still talking. “For the sake of our honored guests we have prepared some pre-entertainment,” he says.
A poet enters the stage and recites lines in a cadenced Bengali, the rhythm of Calcutta’s traffic, the engines spurring up and dying down, no one going anywhere fast. Jaryk watches the poet’s hands for meaning; he has a way of motioning that reminds him of the flight of birds in the middle of a storm. The audience waits for each line, and Jaryk feels the quiet spreading in the theater. Is this what it will be like for the actors?
After the poet finishes, Rudra Bose returns to the stage, framed by the beginning of a sunset that will soon be muted by the passing clouds.
“The poet you heard tonight is not from Calcutta,” says the professor. “He is born and bred in a nearby village. He is educated at Presidency College and receives an honors in history. But he does not stay in the city. No, he returns to his family. He begins to run their farm, and he brings in techniques of science. In the early mornings, he writes poems. The poems he writes are of our brothers and sisters. Of those who have been here for generations. Of others who have fled recently from across the border. The poems he writes consider the crops, the water, and the land.
The trees that were planted long before the British arrived. All of this is the real news of the day. Not what we read in the Calcutta dailies. Not what is told to us by our government radio.
“Now the boy who is playing Amal here tonight has his own history,” the professor says. He walks across the stage in five long steps, opens his mouth as if to speak, then closes it again before continuing. “Amal’s real name is Neel. He is ten years old. Less than a year ago, Neel arrived here with his family. His mother and his father. They walked from Maimansingh to Calcutta to finally here, to what we now call Gopalpur. Neel’s father began to tend the land.
“He was not interested in elections or the changing of the government. After all, he had escaped one in total transition. A government in failure. He was surprised when representatives of our United Front visited him prior to the elections. They offered many things. Schools, better jobs in the city, relief from taxes. And Neel’s father, like all the others, stamped his thumb yes. Let this government have their new power. All the seats of parliament filled with their names.
“But after the elections Neel’s father and others asked about what they were owed. For a school in the village. For jobs they could walk to in the winters. That had been the deal, they said. Initially, they were entertained. Then, they were condescended to, but when they grew persistent in their protests—when one of them threatened to go to The Statesman with the terms of the deal—certain people began to visit this village. These certain people had heard about Neel’s family. They said they wanted taxes to pay for the new school, but nobody in Gopalpur had money. Afterwards, these men said the land wasn’t theirs at all. The land we stand on today, they said, is needed to build a new car factory. It was then that the gundas took action. The gundas, who as everyone knows, are hired and paid by our government.”
It strikes Jaryk that the audience have come for this political theater as much as they have come for the play. All quiet, not a hand fan, not a sneeze. All waiting for whatever Rudra Bose will say next.
The two policemen who’ve accompanied the politician stand up. That’s all they do: stand up. The professor notices and turns in their direction. “The gundas did things,” he says. “All manner of things. Some of these led to the murder of Neel’s father. Though the government has a different story. No official records. Like the Amal of The Post Office, Neel is without a father.”
The policemen begin to clap. Just the two of them, clapping as the professor remains onstage. Not the beginning Jaryk envisioned. He looks into the faces of the policemen—faces so ordinary and inculpable in shape—and he feels the fear entering his knees. It is the ordinary men who are sent to kill. The ordinary men who sent Pan Doktor to his death.
“What is it, Uncle?” Neel asks.
“It’s nothing,” Jaryk says. “Go be with the others.”
He’s taken Misha’s promise to the village farther than he could’ve imagined, but he’s also brought the tar of his old life. It was only with Lucy that he’d begun to remove himself from his own story, only in her love considered another version of the truth, but she’s nowhere near. The children of Gopalpur are alone with him.
The policemen stop clapping.
The professor continues, “What a pleasure to have appreciators of the arts in the audience, who applaud even before the play begins. But won’t you all give us another hand? Most of these children have never performed before, so won’t you make them feel welcome—won’t you show them your support?”
Slowly, the audience joins in, and Jaryk hears the goats braying in the fields above the theater. Without their masters to keep them, they’re on their own, wandering as far as their tethers will allow.
“There’s nothing to fear,” Jaryk says to his cast. “We’ve made ourselves ready, and now it’s time to go on.”
He says this to himself as much as to them. When Pan Doktor marched the children toward Treblinka, who knew that one would end up here? As it was for him, so it can be for Neel and the others—a life that surprises itself into being.
* * *
………………
For many years afterwards, Jaryk will refuse to discuss the performance of The Post Office in Gopalpur. When asked, he’ll say, “It was nothing special, I hardly remember it.” Yet that day will remain for him, as the performance in the ghetto remains for him—a point through which he’ll gather his bearings and say, “This happened.”
Late into old age, he will remember mundane moments: before Neel first takes to the stage, he whispers into the boy’s ear, “Break a leg,” then sees the expression doesn’t make sense to a Bengali, so he hugs Neel instead, wrapping him tightly in his arms. He’ll remember the sweet smell of Neel’s ears and the spot of talc on his right cheek, which he wipes off just in time. He’ll remember watching Mrs. Pal in the audience; she has a tic of turning over the bangles on her wrists as if she’s counting rosary beads. He’ll remember that the Flower Girl sneezes on stage but that no one in the audience seems to mind. In their silence, they support the children, will them to produce their lines with precision and clarity, and all the children rise to the occasion, turning to their mothers on their way off the stage to make sure they did good. He’ll remember saying his own lines as the Fakir, the wandering Uncle, though in his memory the lines will seem as if they are the words of a boy, not of a man, the words spoken in Warsaw from an open throat. He’ll remember the clouds that begin to clear as Amal lies on his deathbed. He’ll remember the lanterns illuminating Neel’s face and the boy’s long shadow. He’ll remember hearing the noise of the stage itself, the soft spots he failed to level. At times he’ll feel he welcomed the devil to the village—and shouldn’t he have known better?—but other times he’ll remember the play and believe it was for the best. All of these moments will come into focus before the final scene finishes, which it never does.
Neel lies on the child’s bed halfway into the afterlife, garrisoned by all the cast members, including Jaryk, and though he towers over everyone else, he no longer feels conscious of this. His lines are exhausted. They are all waiting for the Flower Girl’s last words. Jaryk watches Neel and thinks of the fragility of life, of how much this boy matters, though only to so few—a handful in the theater and the village—and beyond that space, how little a life might matter. The same is true for his unborn child, a thought that brings him back to regret, but he steels himself; there is one more line for the Flower Girl to say.
As the Flower Girl approaches the stage, he holds his breath. No matter, it will be over soon, he thinks, and he will be able to breathe out the whole effort, once she climbs the steps with her basket of chrysanthemums, once she walks toward Neel, who strains to lift his head, who asks her, “Will you forget me?”
“I will not forget you,” says the Flower Girl, holding Neel’s hand.
Instead of an exit, Jaryk has staged a moment he hopes will stay with the audience. He returns to the uneven platform they’ve called a stage, stands next to Neel, and says, “Hello, I’m Jaryk Smith. I was born in Poland.”
As he removes his wig, he can feel the audience waking from the spell of the theater. “You all heard the last line of this play,” he says. “Tonight, we’re going to have you say the line back to us. All the parents of Gopalpur are passing out notes that have the names of the children who live in this village. When I count to three, you’re going to read the name on the paper out loud and say to your child that you will not forget them. Then you’re going to take this name and this story of Gopalpur and share it with everyone you know. Got it?”
Last week he wrote the names of all the children in the village, one on each sheet of paper: Neel, Megha, Dushyant, Soumya…Toward the end he added a couple of extras: Rohan and then Misha. He waits for Hema to translate his words into Bengali.
“One,” he begins to count, trying to steady his voice. Whatever he’s done to help them, he prays it’s enough to last. “Tw
o…When I say ‘three,’ you’ll read what’s on your paper back to me.” He studies the audience, as taken aback as they are by his commandeering of the last scene. He takes a breath and says “Three” as the sound of gunshot fills the amphitheater.
The Flower Girl, her open mouth, the child’s body on the bed. All this he sees but he does not move.
He will remember little of what happens next. The versions of what remain in his memory will begin to confuse him. Mr. Pal calls to him from the audience, though he can’t make out the words. Then everyone scurries, the bleachers come undone, and for a moment he thinks of the great waste of their effort. The Flower Girl is the first to exit the stage, though he can’t remember whether it’s her mother who carries her off or if it’s the professor himself, who seems then to be everywhere at once—pleading for calm on the microphone, leading the children offstage, righting fallen chairs—but Neel and Jaryk remain as they are.
First, he’ll think it was the Flower Girl who was struck. Then he’ll see that it’s Rajan Datta, the politician, who’s been shot, who’s surrounded by policemen attending to his wounds.
He won’t remember whether it’s Neel who comes for him or whether it’s he who carries the boy, but either way, they will end up underneath the stage. He’ll wait there, whispering again and again “Are you okay?” but will be refused a response. He’ll rub Neel’s shoulders and his feet. He’ll say, “We wait until everyone leaves.” He’ll say, “Soon we run,” but for hours they’ll remain without another word.
Underneath the stage the darkness smells of cow manure. A certain sweetness from the wind traveling through the rice plateaus. Even after the constable cars have come and scoured the area, even after the only sounds he can hear are the village goats, who’ve wandered down to graze, they still hide, falling asleep in each other’s arms.
A Play for the End of the World Page 23