The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  While some of her steadies betrayed a look of disappointment upon exiting Teresa’s boudoir, none of them looked capable of violence. Marta had seen the other types before; she even batted off a few. The only men Teresa had bewitched (to her good fortune) were losers.

  “This guy wasn’t a john,” Marta answered.

  “Yeah, I know,” the detective said. “But was there anybody else who might have been obsessed with her?”

  The one area where Marta was less than fully candid with the police was on the inner workings of the cathouse, for obvious reasons. Marta didn’t even reveal the correct name of the housemother, who conveniently disappeared the night of the fire and had not yet resurfaced. Troublesome johns seemed like they might fall under the category of house business. Marta decided that the detective didn’t need this extraneous detail.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  The detective moved on.

  Within a week his report was more or less finished. The only remaining facet of the case that still perplexed him was the Hebrew lettering sprayed on the back of the brothel.

  The exterior wall had been blackened by the smoke and soot that had belched out of the cellar, so nobody noticed this peculiar defacement for more than a week. But when Zielinski went to make a final examination of the crime scene he stared at the wall—realizing something was slightly askew, but unable to pinpoint what—until he distinguished the faint discoloration between the black of the fire and the black of the paint.

  More than any single element it served to make Zielinski think that Yankel shouldn’t be written off as a possible suspect. Aside from Teresa, Yankel would have been the only actor in this drama who would have known these letters.

  “Did you spray anything on the back of the house?” the detective asked Yankel the day after discovering the graffiti.

  “No,” Yankel said, and then, remembering something important, added: “But, come to think of it, I did see him—the crazy man—writing something on the back of the house when I came along!”

  Zielinski opened his notebook.

  “You previously said you saw him casing the house—like he was a prowler,” Zielinski said, carefully. “He was doing this after he vandalized it?”

  Yankel immediately saw that this addition did not help his credibility.

  “Well,” Yankel said. “I saw him finishing it up. I didn’t actually see him spray painting. He was putting away the cans. And then he went to the cellar. It all happened pretty quickly.”

  “How come you didn’t mention anything until now?”

  “I suppose I forgot.”

  Zielinski recognized the value of finality in these investigations. There was always something that didn’t quite make sense. The evidence here was too overwhelmingly stacked against the dead man to justify delving into a slippery secondary character. It was possible that the decedent had, indeed, spray-painted the back wall just as Yankel claimed. Maybe the crime was more motivated by religious animus than the investigators originally believed. (Or perhaps it was some toxic combination of antisemitic and sexual rage.) And while Hebrew graffiti was certainly an unusual thing for an anti-Semite to indulge in, Zielinski was well aware that people who are tormented by a topic study its intricacies. Maybe the dead man was leaving a message for an audience of one (Teresa) in the language she knew best.

  But the prime reason not to look into Yankel’s suspiciousness was that the police department received all sorts of clumsy hints from the prosecutor’s office that it would be best for all concerned if they wound down the investigation. Everybody was sick of Kreskol. A case related to Kreskol (even tangentially) shouldn’t receive undue attention.

  And so while there could remain an ongoing effort to identify the dead man, he was adjudged the most likely culprit. The case was closed.

  Two days after that quiet decision was reached, a few of the nationalist members of the Sejm introduced a bill rescinding official recognition of Kreskol.

  All revenue for improvements would be discontinued—not just frozen, which was Kreskol’s current legal state. Its name would be struck from history books—except where it would be identified as a sham. Not even the funds to keep Poctza services running would be approved. A few of the more strident voices in the Sejm tried to insert provisions in which Kreskol would be responsible for returning the investments the government had made in the town—but that was considered going too far. At least for now. (Several kingmakers in Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc* assured the grumpy backbenchers that they would look into a separate bill next year, but they should pass this one now.)

  “The obvious result from our investigation is that the town is a con,” Henryk Szymanski declared before the assembled Sejm. “Plain and simple. And we must distance ourselves. Whoever’s involved should be treated as a criminal. We must not be taken in.”

  Yankel watched the reports from his hospital bed with escalating incredulity. It almost made him feel some sympathy for his former townsmen.

  Granted, when Yankel was summoned before the Sejm to face Szymanski a few weeks earlier he grasped the politician’s odiousness. He wasn’t sure whether Szymanski really believed what he was saying, or had figured out a pat way to stick it to the Jews without having to be too explicit about it. Whatever way you looked at it, the man was a snake.

  However, when the topic of derecognizing Kreskol came up, Yankel didn’t believe anyone in their right mind would fall for such a risible fantasy.

  Numerous brainy, well-groomed figures appeared on television to declare that the populists in the Sejm were trying to make political hay out of a nonissue. Just as Zbigniew Berlinsky had elucidated all the reasons Kreskol was a hoax, they explained as convincingly why it couldn’t possibly be a hoax: Land would have to be procured in the forest. The town would have to be built without anyone noticing cement mixers or bulldozers going back and forth. The fact that there had been no working road before made this doubly difficult. A road would have to be forged and then dismantled before anybody noticed. Thousands of people would have to be induced to lie. Plus, there had been records of Kyrshkow before the war. Not a ton of records, to be sure, but this seemed fairly definitive proof of the larger narrative.

  And yet there was Szymanski and his allies reading the audit of what had been already sunk into Kreskol: Millions and millions for construction and land improvements. Millions for electric panels. Millions for a post office. Millions more promised for future endeavors.

  “The motive is there,” Szymanski declared to the Sejm. “The con has paid handsomely. And the sinister minds who contrived this know that this is only the first payment. Do we really want to invest many millions more in something that we’re not even sure is real?”

  The recent news from Kreskol about unrest and hostility toward official vehicles going in and out could well have had the ironic effect of boosting the arguments of those claiming the town was authentic. After all, if the town was only in business to scam Poland out of tax revenue, why should they suddenly be antagonistic and eager to distance themselves? But it didn’t work out that way. The populists were the ones invigorated by the recent news, and took umbrage at the fact that Kreskol’s gentile residents were singled out for abuse.

  “This town is filled with violent people,” Szymanski chided. “Dangerous people. And dangerous people do dangerous things. This is yet another argument for keeping our distance.”

  When time came for the opponents of the bill to speak, they summoned none of the zeal of the populists. “Szymanski and his party have not introduced a single piece of evidence in all of these proceedings to prove their case,” said the head of the opposition. “Their case is not partly speculative—it’s totally rooted in sheer conjecture. It’s a lie.”

  But, for prudent politicians, doubt is a more persuasive argument than certainty. The populists said that there was reasonable doubt about Kreskol’s origins—whereas the opposition contended that there was no doubt whatsoever. The wobbly members of the body convinced
themselves that the judicious thing to do was to pass the bill. Recognition could always be reinstated later. And what a lot of the prognosticators assumed would be an easy defeat turned into a narrow victory for the bill. Funds were cut off forthwith.

  A victory cry went up among the assembled legislators when the tally was announced. Even the marshal of the Sejm grinned with satisfaction.

  As the news came in (the day before he was to be let out of the hospital) Yankel felt a shock for which he was unprepared. He told himself that in the unlikely event the bill passed . . . well, what did he care? Kreskol wasn’t his town anymore. He knew what was true and what was a lie. The gentiles had been passing ordinances and laws to put his fellow Jews at a disadvantage since time immemorial. Was this very different? Besides, his singular goal was finding Pesha.

  And yet, as the female broadcaster spoke, he found himself so stunned that he was unable to speak. A nurse came into his hospital room with his dinner tray; he couldn’t look at her. He merely looked away as she set it down.

  Almost nobody in the hospital brought up the vote with Yankel. The only one who dared was his doctor.

  “How’s the news sitting with you, my boy?” he said, without bothering to say what news he was referring to.

  Yankel didn’t answer for a few moments.

  “I don’t really understand it.”

  That was to be expected, the doctor replied. (He courteously didn’t offer any of his own suspicions about Kreskol.) He handed Yankel a purple pamphlet with white lettering. If he was feeling blue he shouldn’t hesitate to call the number at the bottom. There were all sorts of resources for people with depression. He shouldn’t be afraid to try one out.

  Yankel didn’t thank him, as was his custom. He didn’t say anything. When the doctor left, he stared for a moment at the pamphlet and then dropped it in the wastebasket.

  That night, lying in his hospital bed for the last time, Yankel plotted his next step. In his reckoning, Pesha could have gone to one of three places: Israel, America, or back to Kreskol.

  He remembered the way that she spoke of their shared home with nostalgia. (For the moment, he ignored her equal impatience and exasperation with Kreskol.) He remembered how her eyes had watered when he mentioned the fact that her father had been worried sick since she left. He remembered how vexing and overwhelming she said the modern world was. If Ishmael was gone, the first place she would probably go would be Kreskol.

  Yankel’s reasoning was hardly watertight, but it made sense to begin a long search with the closest and easiest-to-survey location. The next morning after the administrators checked him out of the hospital he strapped his rucksack on his back, went to the bus station, and asked for a ticket to Kreskol.

  The young woman behind the ticket counter—with black-framed glasses and straight black hair tied in a bun—smirked.

  “There is no such place.”

  In the old days Yankel would have taken her posture with self-effacement and good grace. But those days were over.

  “Give me a ticket to Smolskie then,” he replied impatiently.

  Her smirk never quite went away. With a slowness designed to incite him, she accepted Yankel’s cash, counted it carefully (holding one bill up to the light), gave him his change, printed out a ticket, and gave him a receipt. Yankel just glared at her. When he left he rebuked her with a vulgarity that shocked not only the ticket agent but everyone waiting behind Yankel.

  Upon arriving in the Smolskie bus station late that afternoon, Yankel felt a shiver. He hadn’t been to Smolskie in more than three years and he hadn’t walked past the town’s modest bus terminal more than once or twice; but even this vague totem of his past threatened to summon the overwhelming, crushing sentiments he had been fending off. He simply stood in front of the bus station, not moving a muscle until these emotions passed. And standing frozen and devastated on the sidewalk—with an expression veering dangerously close to tears—he looked crazy.

  When he finally thought he could move without sobbing, he spotted a pool of drivers sitting on the hoods of their taxis, smoking cigarettes.

  “I’m going to Kreskol,” he said.

  At first, none of the drivers responded. Finally one of them said he would take him for four hundred zlotys. There were stories about cars being hit with rocks when they approached Kreskol, after all. It was a huge drive. And he had practically zero chance of getting a fare back.

  “Fine,” Yankel said, even though it was about a third of the money he had to his name.

  And so Yankel got in the back and watched as they drove out of town and the road suddenly gave way to farmland and become dotted with linden trees.

  “I used to get a lot of fares out to Kreskol,” the driver said. “Not so much anymore.”

  Yankel grunted.

  “You heard what happened this week?”

  Yankel didn’t say anything for a moment. But the man was just trying to be friendly.

  “Yes.”

  The driver took the hint that Yankel didn’t feel much like talking; he kept his eyes on the road as the lush fields gave way to the denser, more primeval forest. Yankel quietly took in the explosive greens and browns, and he looked through the thicket for the animal inhabitants of the wilderness—but they kept themselves too well hidden to be seen from the road.

  “Fuck.”

  The driver stopped the car.

  “What?” Yankel asked.

  “I missed the turn.”

  The driver cautiously turned the taxi around and headed back the way they came.

  The driver took his mistake as a good excuse to resume chattering—about how he hadn’t even seen the turn. How bad these country roads were. How now that they’d passed the new law the roads would get worse. And on and on.

  After they had gone back the way they came for half an hour, the driver stopped again.

  “Something’s off.”

  Yankel didn’t respond.

  “How the fuck did I miss the side road twice?”

  The driver was a young fellow with dark skin and a bushy beard. He looked genuinely flummoxed by the circumstance.

  He turned the taxi around again and drove the car in a slow crawl up the road.

  “Sir,” the driver said. “This is very, very strange.”

  “What?”

  The driver didn’t speak for a moment.

  “I have done this drive plenty of times,” he finally said. “Dozens. The turn is right around here. We’ve gone past it three times now—and I’ve been looking for it. But it’s not there. Something’s fucked up here.”

  The driver got out and began looking helplessly through the trees before he turned to address his passenger.

  “The turn is right around here,” the driver said, almost pleadingly. “Maybe not here exactly, but within a few hundred feet.”

  Yankel didn’t say anything.

  “Could the government have ripped up the road?” the driver asked. “They just passed that law, no? Maybe they wanted to close it up?”

  That was ridiculous. Yankel reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, but there was no signal all the way out in the forest. He opened the back door.

  “I’ll get out here.”

  The driver looked worried.

  “Are you sure?”

  Yankel nodded. He reached into his wallet and paid him.

  “Look,” the driver said, “why don’t you keep two hundred. I didn’t take you all the way. It’s only fair.”

  But Yankel was no longer paying attention.

  “It’s this way?” Yankel asked, pointing east.

  The driver nodded. “More or less.”

  So Yankel stepped into the forest. “Are you sure about this, sir?” he heard the driver call after him. “Maybe I should just take you back to Smolskie. No charge.” But Yankel didn’t respond, and after a few yards, he heard the taxi start up and head back the way it came.

  He walked over the jagged rocks and uneven dirt until night fell, wit
h a rising revelation: Kreskol had once again vanished.

  Yankel hadn’t ever heard of Leonid Spektor (he died when Yankel was too small to know him) or his solitary campaign to protect Kreskol from the wider world and its savage, ruinous ways, but he intuited that the hidden road was the handiwork of his fellow villagers. They had probably gotten it into their heads to do something similar to what Spektor dreamed up. Now that the pomp and attention that had been shone on Kreskol was gone there was a rare opportunity never to have its solitude disturbed again.

  Yankel speculated about what must have happened in these last weeks; an army of bearded men and sidelocked boys, marching in step, were led to the known edge of existence. The place from which all the town’s recent woes emanated. He could see Rabbi Sokolow (or, maybe, Rabbi Katznelson) commanding his troops: “Go—destroy the road!”

  And with the ardor and inspiration that God inspires, this horde would have let themselves run amok. The road would have been annihilated. The signs would have been pulled up. The gravel smashed. Trees felled. Others would have been replanted to mask the turn into the forest. The havoc could have been complete in only a couple of days.

  It might not have happened exactly that way; for all Yankel knew, it could have been the gentiles. Not in any official capacity, mind you. The government was too conscious of the world’s good opinion to take quite so dramatic a step. But the same could not be said of the peasants of the nearby settlements. Their sensibilities didn’t rock back and forth with the latest fashions; whatever crowns or governments came and went, they remained steadfast and true to the enemies of their fathers and grandfathers. Perhaps they did the heavy lifting of casting Kreskol back into oblivion.

  Who knows; maybe the two peoples reached an understanding and worked together in temporary alliance.

  When it got so dark he could no longer see his feet beneath him, Yankel stopped.

  He stretched out on a flat strip of dirt and closed his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. Rather, he was visited by the haunting thoughts that torment a man in moments of loneliness. He remembered the dead and the long lost. He thought of his mother. If she’d lived, she would be elderly by now. She died before he was old enough to fathom what she was truly like; most of what he could remember about her was reduced to her bewitching smile. But he wondered what she would make of all the curious circumstances in which tiny Kreskol had found itself the last few years.