The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  He wasn’t always this way. As a much younger man, a hard-drinking and who-gives-a-shit man, he dreamed of becoming a photographer. Not a wedding and family portrait photographer who lines up customers like bowling pins and imagines smashing them. No, he would be a photographer of the wild—human and animal—the chronicler of life’s cruelty and passions. At the precise moment the jaguar locked his teeth into a tapir’s neck, when a mother learned of her soldier son’s death or a street bum won the lottery, he would be there, clicking. The prizes would pile up, the announcements for exhibitions. Photographers would stand in line to take his picture.

  But, as it happened, he was too hard-drinking, too don’t-give-a-shit, and, other than preserving details of some girlfriend’s body, his Nikon remained shuttered. A buddy of a buddy got him an apprenticeship as a TV cameraman, and the rest was a blur of bouffanty hairdos and enameled teeth. He’d seen all the fads—the Asian anchor women, the Latinos and the Blacks—and watched the average viewer’s age inch past sixty. His own hair had thinned and whitened, his belly bulged so ludicrously that, looking down, he could read his own t-shirts. And meanwhile no jaguars, no gold star mothers or bums transformed into millionaires. No photographers, certainly, waiting to immortalize him. Only this morning’s forecast brought to some early-rising pensioners by Jennifer whatever-her-fake-name was. Jennifer the generically pretty. Jennifer the scarred.

  “A high-pressure front is moving into our region from the West,” he heard her say through his headphones, and wondered who in the hell knew what a high-pressure front was or even cared. “We can expect some mighty unstable weather.” The fear of instability, he momentarily hoped, would detract the audience’s attention from the craters on Jennifer’s cheeks. He might have felt sorry for her, the rookie struggling to overcome handicaps, the kid just trying to make her way out of backwater TV and into the Big Time. But he’d seen too many Jennifers come and go, ruthlessly pushing others off the set. The closest he’d ever gotten to a jungle.

  And this Jennifer had ejected the closest thing he had to a friend, Walter. Weatherman Walt, he called himself, and so did everyone, never bothering to learn his last name. A man his contemporary with the same early dreams eroded by fate and alcohol. Or so he heard more than once at the Tory Corner over cigarettes and nightcaps. Got to the point where he could scarcely distinguish Weatherman Walt’s story from his own.

  Plump, balding broadcasters were all the rage once, their ruddy faces glowing through the makeup as they rattled on about golf tips and rain. But that fad, too, had passed, to be replaced by homecoming blondes like Jennifer. Which was why he hesitated, befuddled, when his camera caught a sliver of Walt entering the frame.

  Jennifer saw him as well, maybe even faster than he did, for she stopped in mid-forecast and gasped. She had little time for much else. Girth notwithstanding, Walt could move. He barreled onto the riser and shoved her away from the blue screen.

  “Sorry, girlie,” Walt said, calmly enough, though his expression looked molten. “And sorry, folks, to interrupt your broadcast.” His eyes were wet fire.

  “What’s he doing here?” He heard the producer shouting into his microphone. “Somebody, get him off the set!”

  The noise made him wince, but no more. His only job was to keep the camera operating and focused, and that he did as Weatherman Walt addressed the lens.

  “Thirty years I gave to this shithole,” he cried. “Thirty fuckin’ years. And then one day, wham, fuck you, you’re gone!”

  Walt was sounding much like he did at the Tory Corner, after midnight, on his fifth round. Only there was an edginess to his tone, a rage. Still, the old forecaster kept his gaze fixed on the black disc that televised him throughout the Tri-state area.

  “So I just wanted you to know that you did this! All of you. You in the studio and you in your tidy little homes watching. You!”

  Walt repeated that “you” several times, each one louder, as if he were hyperventilating. The last one sounded like a scream and rounded his mouth into an almost-perfect O into which he inserted a gun barrel.

  “Stop him! Somebody stop him!” He heard roaring in his headphones and maybe outside them as well. Yet he didn’t move, didn’t pan back or away. Later, he was unsure if he joined the chorus of “no” and “please don’t” and “for God’s sake.” But whether silent or not, he never lunged for the set. He never left his camera but instead remained with his eyes pressing the viewer while Walt’s finger did likewise on the trigger.

  The shot nearly burst his eardrums. He may even have blacked out for an instant, as the next thing he saw was a squid-shaped splash of red and grey dripping down the blue screen. A patch of smoke, not unlike the animated cloud they often posted for rainfall, hovered over the set, and the studio reeked of burnt fuse box. People everywhere were running and flailing their hands. Only Walter the Weatherman lay motionless, his head on the line of duct tape that once showed him where to stand.

  “How could you?” were the first words he could make out, and he turned to confront Jennifer. Her face no longer pretty but contorted beneath splotches of blood that mixed with the pancake. “You were the closest to him and you just stood there.” She screamed at him, “You animal!”

  He listened to her holler but said nothing. He was shaking, he realized, but not only from shock. These were also the jitters he might have felt long ago up close and capturing that jaguar on film. Within seconds—right now, probably—the image of Walter’s eyes widening blankly as the bullet blasted out the back of his skull would be flashing far beyond the three states. And he, the unflappable professional, would finally be asked, “just how did you keep your cool?”

  Crime Scene

  Long after the door closed, she stood in her apartment and wished she could rope it off. Bright yellow tape wrapped around the bathroom and, of course, the bed, but also the living room and kitchen. All of them crime scenes.

  Victim and detective, eyewitness and accessory—she was all those and more: forensic expert. The bristles in the sink where she made him shave because his stubble chafed her. The toilet seat raised to reveal orangey streaks on the rim where he always missed. The mangled sheets and pummeled pillows. Everywhere, the evidence. His presence made palpable now by his utter absence, and by her own complicity.

  As if in the aftermath of some massacre, the proof was inescapable. The sofa’s misaligned cushions and the depressions in her fuzzy rug. Even the tabletop with its piles of junk mail now crimped. She stood hugging herself as she surveyed her own home as one who had never set foot in it and could hardly imagine inhabiting it alone.

  “Touch nothing,” she wanted to tell herself. “Don’t tamper.” Yet she found herself peeking under chairs and behind her dresser, hoping to chance on some mislaid button or cufflink. Then she opened the refrigerator and saw it. The cream cheese tub with its lid ajar and the deep groove gouged in its contents. “For chrissakes,” she remembered chiding him, pretending to be angry when she really wanted to sigh, awed by the humming light on his nakedness. “You might want to use a spoon…” she began but never finished as his finger brought the dollop of cheese to his mouth.

  Now that finger remained, a perfect cast, prints and all. She held up the tub and examined it, checked for the expiration date and wondered how long—a month, at most—she could preserve that impression. Tightly, she replaced the lid and vowed not to open it again for hours at least and not more than twice daily.

  In the middle of her apartment that would never be entirely hers again, she peered sleuth-like but shivered like a survivor. She sized up the scene and analyzed the data. Exhibits A and B, damning DNA in abundance. And the residue that could not be tagged or jarred: their mongrel smells, the gasps that lingered.

  He was gone but had left too much behind him. Precious lover, sloppy perp, leaving a trail that led unmistakably out the door. At that, too, she stared and wondered if its handle retained his warmth.

  Outside, in the hallway, she imagined, the yello
w tape would stretch, winding into the elevator and through the lobby to flounce in the predawn breeze. Not only her apartment, she realized, but her whole building and the city beyond would remain off-limits. Without him, the world itself was a crime scene.

  The Reenactor

  How much chicken soup can one man eat, I ask myself as the waiter shoves me yet another bowl. “Be thankful,” Wojchiech, my boss, snaps at me. “At the factory, they’re spooning out swill. And besides, you have to stay in character. It’s why we pay you twelve hundred a month.”

  In character, yes, I remind myself as I pause with my face hovering over the bowl. My eyes close, my lips flutter and emit some guttural grunts. That is the way they used to pray, I was instructed, before and after meals. So I pray, and I push back my sidelocks—payos I’m told to call them—and lift my wooden spoon. Only then, just before the first sip, do I catch my gauzy reflection in the broth. Behind the matzo balls which, like twin goiters extend from my neck, I see the sidelocks and the unkempt beard, the fur-lined hat I’m supposed to call a shtreimel, and the itchy collar of my made-in-China kaftan.

  “Hurry. Eat,” Wojchiech growls. “A group’s due any minute.”

  I slurp, I dribble—that’s in character, too—and scoop out dollops of matzo balls which once tasted sugary to me but now go down like sawdust. When there’s time, and when Wojchiech’s not looking, the waiter will sneak me a kishke or a knish or two. And I’m grateful, though a knish could make anyone gag. What I really want is a fresh-fried kielbasa or pork knuckle washed down with white sausage soup. What I really need, as I hear the bus pulling up and gulp down the last of the balls, is a brimming glass of wódka.

  Times are tough in our village, I know, and work’s hard to find. Not as lucky as me, others stand in line for government doles or deal in black market cigarettes. But all I have to do is wear these freaky clothes, the fake beard and wig, and memorize a bunch of bullshit. I just have to wait outside the L’Chaim Restaurant and Lounge for the tourists to come down off the bus. Then I dance a bit, bouncing from heel to heel on my clunky boots, with my hands flapping above my heard, and chirp “ay yai yai” and “bim boim bim boim.” I pass out menus and pose for selfies.

  You see, the secret of this town, its only advantage, is Jews. Not real Jews, dead Jews. Thousands of them. Half of the town once, they say, before the war. Dentists, teachers, doctors, butchers—all the good jobs they had. The good apartments, too. In this neighborhood, especially, they lived, with their kishke and kasha and klezmer music blasting all day. At least that’s what the tourists think. Filing off the buses into L’Chaim and other traps like the Mazal Tov Inn and the Altshul Museum. I don’t know. Maybe it was different. Maybe it was like today with people going around minding their own business, bringing up kids, fucking and cheating on their wives, doing their damnedest to get by. Just people. Life.

  But all that ended when Germans came—Szkops, we called them back then—and crowded the Jews into a few alleyways. They walled them in and shot anyone trying to escape. Where the Zabka market is now. A plaque shows the spot, though nobody but the tourists notice. The plaque says that the Jews froze and starved in those alleys for a year or so until one winter night the Szkops marched them out of town, straight down Kościuszko Boulevard and past the Jewish graveyard where, as kids, my gang used to squat with our backs to the stones with their fading Jew letters, gab, and smoke weed.

  A few minutes’ walk from there is this little forest—it’s still there—with nice trees and soft earth. A big hole had been dug, so all the guys with guns had to do was line the Jews up and, one by one, shoot them in the back of the head. They fell, row after neat row, until the hole was filled and covered up. A plaque hangs there as well, where the hole was. The tourists leave flowers and flags.

  These newest tourists have only cameras in their hands and handkerchiefs for tapping their eyes. Which means they must have already visited the little forest. Which means the last thing they’re thinking about is our borscht and kreplach special, complete with watered-down schnapps. This is where I come in. My job is to get them toasting l’Chaim to one another, to life or to hell with it or whatever, at fifty zlotys a shot.

  “What are you waiting for?” Wojchiech hisses. “Get your ass moving.”

  I make some more of those prayer-like snorts and wipe my mouth with my kaftan. Smooth out my phony beard and tuck strands of blonde hair under my shtreimel. Rising, my hands twisting above my head, I look pretty much like the people in the paintings on L’Chaim’s walls. Men dressed just like I am, their payos flailing as they dance around this scrolled-up thing. The paintings are everywhere—even over the urinals—along with pictures of candles and bread and silver cups. Jew-y things. Maybe the tourists know what they are, but I’ll be damned. I’ve never even met a Jew.

  Some of the tourists might be Jews, but they sure don’t dress like one. Americans, mostly, in their windbreakers and sneakers, their visored caps with all sorts of crap written on them, they peer at me from behind their cameras and smartphones and click photos of me bobbing up and down, ay aying and bim boiming and doling out menus. “Sholom Aleichem!” I bark at them. And “Es gezunterheyt!” Whatever that means. And slowly, most of them anyway, begin to smile. Some of them even want to eat, even though the food’s shitty and the prices downright criminal. All of which makes Wojchiech happy.

  My life meanwhile’s a mess. No steady job, no future. No money, which means no girl, and no hope of ever getting out of this shithole. Just smoking weed with the same kids who aren’t kids anymore but grownup losers like me, doing odd jobs, dressing up like zhids. Nothing like the people who used to live in this neighborhood—the dentists and the teachers and whatnot—who had real lives, real futures, until the Szkops came and marched them down Kościuszko to the forest.

  The tourists today are really buying into my routine. They stand in line to take selfies with me. The tables are full, and the chicken soup is flowing. Wojchiech is practically gleaming, reaching now behind the bar for the wódka bottle that he tips into a coffee mug and plugs.

  So it goes throughout the day and late into the evening. One tourist bus after another. More borscht, more schnapps, and Wojchiech getting happier and happier, slapping my back and toasting me with his mug “L’Chaim!” One could almost think that what happened to those Jews was this town’s only break.

  It’s nearly midnight when the last of the tourists stagger out for their hotel. The waiter’s long gone home and Wojchiech’s slumped down in a chair with his mug, a half-eaten knish, and his cheek on the table in front of him. The klezmer tape’s been turned off and the only sound comes from a clock with strange Jew letters instead of numbers on its face. Bim Boim Bim Boim, it ticks.

  This is the moment I wait for. To sneak behind the bar and see what’s left—no more schnapps or wódka but a half-empty bottle of Slivovitz that should do the trick. I swig it deeply and swig again as I slip out of L’Chaim and steal past the Mazal Tov Inn. The smack of my clunky boots echo in the courtyard of the Altshul Museum and then go silent as the cobblestones underfoot turn to pavement. Soon I’m on Kościuszko Boulevard, empty of traffic at this hour, with nobody around to screw up their eyes or make catcalls at some drunk in a Chinese-made robe and ridiculous fur-lined hat. The Zabka Market is closed for the night. But its yellow neon sign remains flickering, illuminating now and then the plaque that only the tourists ever notice.

  Kościuszko ends at a crumbling brick wall behind which stands the graveyard. Not really stands but slants this way and that, the tombstones like crooked teeth. Still, guzzling, I make my way through the most distant rows were the stones are no more than stubbles.

  The silence is so complete that I can almost imagine the Szkops cursing and shouting, the howl of their dogs, and the shuffle of the Jews too weak to plead or even cry. And from somewhere up ahead, strange, too-sharp pops.

  Then, suddenly, the forest. Into a chilly mist I stumble, drunk enough now to slip and break my neck, side
stepping the trees that seem to rise up ghost-like in front of me. I try to think, imagine what it’d be like to be somebody, not some underpaid clown in a cheap tourist joint, but a man with a family, a profession, with dignity. Maybe it’s the Slivovitz, but I try to picture myself with a life worth losing, a life that somebody—even tourists—might remember.

  Surprisingly, since I can’t see a meter in front of me, I find myself standing at the hole. The earth is sunken here and surrounded by a knee-high fence. I climb over it, trying not to stomp on the flags and flowers strewn on the ground or trip over the plaque in the center. But the booze has rubbered my knees. I fall to them and then, finishing off the Slivovitz and chucking the bottle, I let myself lie flat.

  Face-down in the spongy grass, I can feel the fog penetrating my kaftan, wafting up under the shtreimel. I wait like that for who knows how long, wrapped in earth and darkness. Waiting for what—a pop, a bang to the back of my head?—or for the guttural noises I’m supposed to make each day the sun comes up. The grunt of morning prayers.

  Prodigal Son

  He didn’t appear shocked or even surprised to see him seated on the stone. Flummoxed was more like it, or piqued. As though he lacked the patience, if not the time, for such meetings.

  “Why now? Why here?” he asked.

  “You’ve got a likelier place?” the older man replied as he often did, with a question. He, too, was not astonished, even though it was early afternoon and the weather pleasant. Even though he could no longer remember how many days he’d sat there ruminating alone. “And why haven’t you ever met me?”

  The younger one shrugged. “This may come as a revelation to you, but I have other things to do.”

  “A revelation and how.”

  “So,” the son said, kicking the turf toward his father’s heels. “To what do I owe the honor?”