* * *
………………
When he wakes, moonlight is passing through an open slat of the stage, and he risks coming out. The stage still stands, the set almost as it was, as if they were preparing for an encore, but all the lamps that had been staked to the ground have been knocked free. The generator snores for no reason. The dressing area is strewn with torn garlands, the smell of burnt hyacinth in the air. A crow lands on a collapsed bleacher.
He carries Neel, still sleeping, up to the village huts, which are so quiet he’s unsure if anyone’s home. After the fourth knock, Hema bares the door. She’s holding up a lantern, and in her face he sees anger and fear but also relief. She takes her child from his arms, and Neel begins to stir, waking from his sleep.
“Hello, Uncle,” says the boy, still half asleep.
He wants to tell them he’s sorry for his part in the trouble that’s come to pass—the trouble he feels still coming. “Come with me,” he tells Hema, gesturing toward the fields. He can take the two of them to the Pals’, where they can stay until it’s safe to return.
“No,” she hisses.
“Please come,” he tries again, this woman who held Misha as he clutched his heart and took his last breath.
“No,” she rejoins. She raises her rifle from the hem of her sari up to the moonlight and speaks rapidly to her son in Bengali.
“This is our land,” Neel translates. “This is our fight.”
Hema strokes her son’s cheek, removes a smudge of dirt.
“Goodbye, Uncle,” Neel says.
Goodbye. He kisses Neel, his sweet sweet smelling hair. Then he leaves the boy who let him love this land that wasn’t his own.
Under the light of the moon, the stage is well illumined, and he surveys the damage to the collapsed bleachers. All his work wasted now. By the dressing area, he sees movement, remains crouched in the shadows until he can make out the man as Professor Bose. The professor signals for silence, and they walk together toward the road.
“I was searching for you.” The professor leads them to his jeep, parked in a clearing of taal trees above the turnoff to the village. “Now, that was beyond my expectations. That was extraordinary.”
Jaryk stares at him. He is not sure what to make of the professor’s celebratory mood.
“What we achieved tonight is the beginning of our revolution,” continues Rudra Bose. “Tomorrow, all the papers will be writing about us. What we did through art. What we did through nonviolence.”
“But someone was shot,” Jaryk finally says.
“Yes, it seems Rajan Datta was shot, but not by us. At least not by me.”
“What do you mean? You planned this in some way, didn’t you? This was your revenge for Rohan and everything else in your life. Isn’t that so?”
“Of course not,” the professor says. “I keep my personal life outside of my political aims. Look, unfortunate as Rajan Datta’s shooting may be, it gives us the press we need, the press Gopalpur needs to keep its story alive.”
He thinks of holding Neel in his arms and of Hema’s words: This is our fight.
“Listen, it is best we be off soon,” the professor says. “I’m afraid that you also are a persona non grata now. We shall head to the house, gather some supplies, then Rohan, you, and I will lie low for a few days somewhere. After that, we shall plan our next move.”
“What do you mean, ‘our next move’?”
“This is what we have worked so hard for. Revolution not just for Gopalpur but for all the poor peoples of India. Now is our time. Come,” the professor says, opening the door to his jeep, “let us continue our mission.”
The man Misha met in New York last autumn, when the idea of India was just that, is asking Jaryk to continue. If it had been Misha here instead of him, the performance might have gone differently, though who knows how Misha would have responded—how he would have met these words of revolution?
He remembers now that he saw the professor as the strangest person to have entered Seven and a Half Dimes, so outside the spectrum of the bar’s regular personalities that he had trouble staying with the conversation. Now, he and this man are balanced on a pendulum. After they went to free Rohan, he saw Rudra Bose in a different light, felt his flaws and desires. Now he believes the professor, whether by his own hand or through accomplices, shot Rajan Datta, a man he barely knows, who somewhere in the city might have his own family to keep. Rudra Bose has traveled past a boundary that he will not cross.
Leaves rustle underfoot as the professor waits.
“I’ve made my mistakes,” Jaryk finally says. “I wanted to help Gopalpur. I wanted to help Neel and his mother. I thought this play would give them a new life, and it still might.”
“Yes, it certainly will. They’ve learned they’re not powerless. They’ve learned they can alter their fate with art. Come on, let me give you a lift,” the professor says.
“Goodbye, Professor,” Jaryk replies, as he turns and walks deeper into the forest, from where he knows he’ll reach another clearing, and from there, a kilometer north, he’ll find a turnoff onto the main road, heading back to the city. He finds the North Star and, keeping it in sight, begins to run.
* * *
………………
The Sabbath. He’s lived thirty years of his life without celebrating the movement of the week into the day of holy rest, from sunset to sunset. The rules of the Sabbath do not permit running unless for good reason, but he has good reason. He is heading due north, nothing more dependable than the direction of heaven.
Misha, barely eighteen years old, is running beside him with his long legs, and he is doing his best to keep up, and the others—Chaim, Mordechai, Hanna—are calling his name. and there is no rain anywhere, just the weightlessness of sky.
For all his preparation he could not have known what it would feel like to stand before a foreign crowd, introducing the play from his childhood. A stone on the heart, a taste of salt on his tongue. When he said his lines, they felt as if they were emerging from a city deeply submerged. It did not matter that he was standing on a stage, being watched. Nothing mattered but the glint, the faraway memory, retracting and again emerging, that moment before they had stepped onstage, all the audience holding their breath, right before he and the other children announced their play. Holding Hanna’s hand, letting go of her fingers so he could walk alone into that bright room.
After the Train
germany—spring 1945
After two weeks in the displaced persons camp, Jaryk spotted Misha in the back of the soup line. At first he kept a safe distance because he thought it was only a Misha look-alike. The outline of the man’s face matched what he remembered of his oldest friend, but over the gaunt cheeks a dirty beard had grown, with wispy, lifeless ends, where bits of food tended to lodge from meal to meal. This man shuffled along after he had collected his portion of soup and bread: every few steps he would pause and look behind him, as if he were afraid of the bowl being snatched from his hands.
Jaryk sat one table to the left to steal glances. He thought he was only seeing things, but when Misha slurped down his soup, then licked his bowl clean and produced a look of such contentment, showing everyone who cared to see his gap-toothed grin, Jaryk couldn’t deny who was before him. He walked to Misha’s table and tapped his brother on the shoulder.
“You didn’t save me any soup?” Jaryk asked.
Misha stopped chewing his bread mid-bite. He looked at Jaryk but didn’t speak, and he supposed Misha was digesting Jaryk’s own transformation in those two years. He had lost weight; he had grown an older boy’s voice; he, too, had endured.
“You!” Misha finally said. “How did you live?”
Jaryk had imagined that as soon as Misha recognized him, he would be wrapped in a bear hug and carried around the camp like a jewel of the past. He wasn’t prepare
d for this question. It was earnestly asked, but he wouldn’t tell Misha the truth, then or ever.
“The morning they came to take us, I got separated from Pan Doktor,” he said. “I looked for the others, but I couldn’t find anyone I knew. So I ran to the countryside. There, I did what you taught me: I found the right food.”
* * *
………………
Up until the last days of September 1942, it had been possible to live by Misha’s training. Where Jaryk had escaped from the train was a long stretch of forest, and he found himself tracking the sunlight to sources of water and discovering, as Misha had taught him those weeks of summer camp, which fruits to eat and how to make a shelter. Nearby, there was a farm, and at night he would steal into the chicken coop and leave with a handful of eggs.
Then it began to get cold. The first time he awoke with frost over his fingernails, it was a Sunday. He knew this because the farmer’s family was wearing their churchgoing clothes, and it meant he might be able to sneak into their house for a bowl of hot soup, the kind with beets and thick strips of meat, or perhaps even some baked bread. He could barely wait until they were gone. They had a son a little older than him, and perhaps he would borrow the boy’s coat. His arms were freezing fast. He counted the screws that jutted from the wall of the barn door, where he hid until the family settled into their donkey carriage.
When the carriage left, he crept into the house through an open window, but he found that the grandmother had been left behind. She was sitting in a high-backed chair by the fireplace that took up half the room, and when he landed on the floor and locked eyes with her, it seemed that she had been waiting for him.
She didn’t say a word, but it was as if she knew exactly how many eggs he’d taken, as if she were counting in her head the price of his thievery. She rose from her chair and produced a switch from the folds of her skirt. He tried to escape, but she was quicker than she’d first appeared. She held him by the ear. She beat him so fiercely on his bottom that he forgot to weep.
But the next week the cold only crept deeper into the earth and the shelter he had made from leaves and branches wasn’t enough. It was the first time he awoke in the middle of the night wishing to be dead. He had known hunger on Chłodna Street and Sienna Street, but this was a different kind of pain. Now he was hungry, but also alone, and loneliness sharpened hunger’s bite. That week, he raked his nails against the maple trees to see if he could release their sap. His fingers came away bloodied, and he blamed Pan Doktor for giving them hope when none was to be had.
Next Sunday, he returned again to the house, wishing for the same: a coat and a portion of soup. The grandmother was sitting exactly where she’d been the week before. This time, she looked at him like she was disappointed. She watched him for a while, and as he stood there, he took note of the singular silver braid that curled down her neck, the heavy gullet that swayed as she rocked in her chair, and those eyes as blue as the sky above the river Vistula.
When he made for the vat of soup, she grabbed him and brought him back to the rocking chair. She pulled his trousers down and beat him thirteen times with the warm end of the rod she’d used to stir the fire. This time, he wept with shame. He wept for his own fate, for the fate of his community, for the fate of everyone who would soon be born into this wretched world. As the blows landed on his bottom, he felt a little grateful for the warmth of the fire, and his cheeks burned with the weight of such miserable gratitude.
The fourth Sunday he saw her, he could barely walk, so great was his hunger. It had been eight weeks since he’d talked with anyone, and his voice was parched, but he cleared his throat and spoke. “Your soup,” he said, pointing at the simmering pot from which he could smell the meat and vegetables, “smells so good.”
When she stood up to her full height, he didn’t take a step back. He only wanted a taste. Then he would leave. He wouldn’t bother them again. He wouldn’t even bother to make his shelter of leaves. Instead, after a taste of her soup, he would allow his body to float in the stream, where tiny sheets of ice had begun to decorate the surface with crystal rainbows.
She grabbed him by the ear. There was no hint of mercy on her face, but this time she did not beat him. Instead, she dragged him to the yard, all the while yanking on his ear, as if her purpose was to separate it from his head, dragged him to the barn, unlocked the padlock, and threw him in with the goats. A minute later, she came by with a cup of soup, grunting as he watched her for signs of his turning fortune. He didn’t wonder if she could speak. He didn’t wonder why the rest of the family didn’t take her to church. Instead, he drank the broth with his remaining strength, coughing as a strip of meat became lodged in his throat. She hit him hard between his shoulder blades, and he fell forward and kissed her feet.
Over the course of that winter, she beat him fourteen more times. Each time, it was done differently: an old wooden cane, a long paintbrush, the ladle with which she served him soup, even her callused palm. Each time, he cried louder and turned to look at her, but there was nothing in her face that resembled remorse. He began to believe this was the price of survival.
He never saw the rest of the family up close, and he supposed that was for the best. She had made him a warm corner in the goat shed. There, he would lie next to the two kids, while the mother would look at him suspiciously, but in the night he would sometimes find her nuzzling his chin, warming him, and if there was anything that allowed him to live for the next morning, it was the regularity of his beatings merged with the experience of those animal heartbeats, which were growing surer with each day, and the long white chin hairs of the mother goat, who steadily and with increasing pride would huddle as close to him as to her children, as if it were her duty to keep all three of them warm.
This was how he lived the twelfth year of his life. And with the spring and the thawing of the road, he saw a line of men and women. It was the longest line he had ever seen. For a while, he simply counted the arms and legs: thousands of the bedraggled passed the farm, smelling of rot and dirt. No one bothered to stop, but when he had counted as high as he could, he kissed the goats and ran to join that great zigzag. What finally pushed him—two thousand and thirty-two, he still remembered counting—a slow welling of terror, some old spirit who rose up as fierce as hunger, commanded him: Go.
He never looked back at the farm. He never wondered about why the old woman had kept him, barely alive. When Misha asked “How did you live?” it wasn’t possible to answer with the ungodly details. He had already rolled off the train. He had already left the goat shed, the smell of that soup, the taste of its spices on his tongue, and he had left the silence of that old woman, who spared no mercy in her beatings but who, for reasons he’d never know, showed him the way through the hardest time.
* * *
………………
It seems he is the only one on the road. Perhaps there are others at this time of night who fade like wolves into the hills above the villages. Once, he thinks he sees the shapes of families huddled on the grass, but he does not stop running. At this hour the night has given up its pretense of wariness, and as he covers more ground the light of the North Star becomes the road itself. The body’s directive to keep adrift. Breathe on.
Who knows how long until his lungs beg him “Stop,” until his knees plead “No more,” until he pauses at the boundaries of his own moonlit shadow. That lonely grandmother. A silver braid. What justice had caught her up? What had moved her to give him shelter, even as she mixed his chance at life with the kind of suffering that he would always remember?
A good thing he can’t remember her face. Just the pooling fat underneath her chin, and the thick, slippery, silvery braid, which would weave in and out of his vision as she beat him without remorse. A small price for what he had gained when he rolled off that train to Treblinka.
* * *
………………
In the warm Indian night, his sweat breaks through his clothes. He leans on a lamppost to catch his breath, feels a sudden coming of peace. What he is grateful for is only ordinary. The bamboo plant Lucy once bought for him, the baby-soft skin of her wrist, the way she can roll her tongue and whistle, stopping traffic for a block.
It is her he wants now. He has never liked the word regret, believed no choice is without reason, and now, sweat soaked and exhausted, miles away from any city or town, he worries what he’s done cannot be undone. The Lucy he knows is fire and light, and fire and light wait for no man.
“For family you must fight like a tiger,” Misha once told him.
He begins to run again. A thousand miles till home.
Second Trimester
She’s never been good at secret keeping. Back home, when Jeannie’s daughter Emily told her she’d had enough of their small town and was planning an escape, up north somewhere or maybe even Nashville, Lucy had tried to keep quiet, but Emily’s secret had come undone; soon the whole town knew about it, so that when Emily showed up at the bus stop around midnight, Jeannie was there to meet her, and her uncle, and her two brothers—half the town, actually—even Lucy’s father had gone out that night in his flannel just to call Emily home. She thinks of how kind he was that night, helping carry Emily’s suitcase, telling her the sadness would leave come morning. It’s time James Gardner knows of his grandchild.
His best moods come Sundays after church, so she calls him then, hoping the Lord’s grace will make the telling easier.
“Lucy, I was looking at our albums,” he says, answering the phone. “Saw one of you climbing Timothy’s oak. You must have been up sixty feet.”
A Play for the End of the World Page 24