A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

by Rita Gabis

  “Mergaitė,” one of the Lithuanians moving the group forward yells at Lili. He says it again. She imitates him for Irit and me, makes her voice gruff.

  On the crowded road, she’s wearing a woolen muff with a fur lining. It matches her coat, a muff with a zipper in it and a pocket that can hold a key or a bit of change.

  “Girl, throw it to me, you won’t use it again in your life.”

  She refuses, but in the shuffle of the crowd, the progress of night—just after the Lithuanian yells at her—comes a turning point, her consciousness shifts and suddenly, without any doubt, she understands that the rumors flowing among those trudging ahead and those walking behind are all false. They aren’t being marched away to work. They won’t return from wherever they’re going.

  When the crowd of thousands finally nears the turnoff to Nei-Svintsyan (Švenčionėliai) proper, where the train station is (perhaps they’re going to be loaded on to trains), the police and Lithuanians in uniforms steer the long, weary group off the road instead, into the forest.

  Almost immediately, in the distance, huge bonfires appear, and then a sound, like animals—not singing. “Shouting. Horrible. They were drunk, they had liquor there. My little sister was smart, she said to us, ‘You and Mamen will just be killed, you’ll be shot, but me—I’ll be thrown into the fire.’ ”

  CHAPTER 22

  * * *

  POLIGON

  JUNE 14, 2012

  June 14: the air is warm, thick, perfect mosquito weather. Rain clouds billow up behind us as we drive toward Švenčionėliai. Giedrė is quiet. Shy, I think at first; then, not shy—something else. She brought her blue umbrella, just in case. In some weird disconnect, I flash on Mary Poppins flying down with her big open umbrella, about to set the Banks family straight. The Poligon signage to the right of the dirt road said, “I masinių žudynių vieta”—“To the place of mass murder.” Ahead of us thin, scrawny pines cluster; farther in, alders rise, sweet briar already in bloom. I had come here a week earlier with my fixer Rose, but we did not walk beyond the memorial for those who lost their lives at Poligon.

  There are so many places of mass murder in Lithuania—perhaps too many to allow for specificity on a wooden sign. In Stalag 343, the Soviet POW camp in Alytus where Zinaida was interned during the war, mass death from starvation and exposure was a purposeful tactic; no one wanted the captive Russians or Red Army soldiers, not even their own leaders strategizing far behind the front lines, not the Germans. Most soldiers were too weak for transport to work camps closer to the front; none were worth food. The stalags were scattered throughout Lithuania, some close to the ghettos, some farther away (but not too much farther, in a country the size of New Jersey).

  But of course the vagueness of the sign is also another desecration, like the pile of human excrement in a coil at the back of the overgrown Jewish cemetery in Švenčionys. Did I mention this to Giedrė? I don’t remember. I was still sick from the bout of food poisoning. I almost called her to cancel. Instead I clutch my bottle of a Lithuanian version of Gatorade. When the lush green of late spring starts to swim in front of me, I take a big swig, and the path and tree line come back into focus.

  The left-hand turn we’d made off the paved road was not the ingress where Lili Holzman’s family and Chaya Porus’s family and Mirele Rein had been taken. Petras drives Giedrė and me, following forks in the bumpy dirt road on the way to the Poligon memorial identified by white markers paid for by someone from Britain, knocked down from time to time—kids, maybe. These are woods after all, almost a park, the long way to the Zeimena River. Not much to do in this part of the country. Not much left to knock down, tear apart, shit on.

  Petras stops the van by the memorial in front of the long hillock in the earth in the shape of an L, partially obscured by spring brush. Would a large group destined for execution have been brought this way, the unwieldy path, the risk of mass panic at the site of stakes marking off the length to be dug out? Better to go another way, gather the eight thousand or so in sheds, in an expanse where mines were set around the perimeters. It’s not the biggest killing site in Lithuania, nor the smallest. It’s a void. A black hole. Incomparable. It is, itself.

  Giedrė is hardier than I am at the moment. Petras stays back with his van. I want to stay back there too. Later, I would take pictures of the pit from every angle. Later still, I would light another yahrzeit candle at the memorial.

  “You can feel the souls,” Giedrė says.

  No, you can’t feel the souls, I think but don’t say, only spiritless heavy air.

  We’ve just climbed a little bit of hill. The sparse forest starts to close in. A sweet smell clings to the air—like the pepper bush from my childhood, but not that. Honeysuckle.

  A gnat flies into my eye; just hatched, delirious with new life. My heart bangs against my chest. I swallow the lime-colored drink the texture of corn syrup, ask Giedrė to slow down.

  The path turns into a wider road, the dirt loamy. Huge tire tracks have chewed up a parallel wedge of ground.

  “They aren’t supposed to do this.” Giedrė stops. “These are new,” she says of the wide welts in the dirt. Her voice is high and soft, a bit tremulous. This wouldn’t be happening, this trespass, if Blumke Katz were still alive.

  At the museum the week before, when she spoke of their walks, she mentioned that she and Blumke had found a few remnants of the barracks—the stables and long sheds where the thousands were shoved, where no private human endeavor was possible, where the kidnapped prayed and clasped hands and waited. Where some went mad and others prevailed and a woman leaked her afterbirth into the shadow beneath her. Through an opening in one of the barracks, during one of the days of their imprisonment, a Lithuanian guard, for fun, threw a grenade.

  The walk is roughly a mile. We are trying to find a trace of the lost archaeology of the barracks, blown up to destroy evidence. I don’t think of the man who pulled the pin from the grenade and lobbed it inside at the packed, despairing target. I think of myself, think I might vomit again. The sun drifts in and out. It’s hot. If not for Giedrė’s long stride, always a bit ahead of mine, I’d stop. Pride keeps me from turning around. Not reverence for the dead. In ten minutes, I’ll run out of the corn-syrup drink, and then the dizziness will return, and I’ll fall down. It occurs to me that I’m in exactly the right shape to take this road. That anyone who walks it should feel like vomiting. Anyone who passes the long, thin shadows of trees, the sky announcing the entrance of summer, should feel the earth spin and not be able to stop it.

  Then—woods break into a clearing. Giedrė points to a packed-down road on the right—wide, usable.

  “I think they were brought in that way,” she says.

  The road is sandy, stretches farther than I can see. One road? For eight thousand people? There must have been more than one. To my left, more woods, but it’s new growth, the birch and willow of today that wouldn’t have been an obstacle then. So maybe in that direction a second route was improvised—for captives who lived farther northwest. Perhaps a few charges were set off to break up the ground; perhaps brush was burned away.

  It is all so speculative, like looking earlier, near the memorial and the long tomb that breaches it, in a wide angle across the visible land, and trying to imagine where Mirele Rein hid during the shooting.

  I cross over the road to brush: sedge, willow saplings, a few large rocks. Suddenly my left foot sinks into a hole. I call out to Giedrė, and together we push away brambles and make out, underneath, a small corner of the foundation of a building, a structure. I want there to be a fence around it. I want it to be marked.

  Giedrė points ahead. I’m hot and cold, looking down.

  “See,” she prods.

  Beyond the declension in the earth—water suddenly, the Zeimena River, where salmon spawn and sand from the basin washes up on the road. To our left, at a clearing where someone had flattened the beer cans they flicked open, the remnant of a small fire blackens the ground. On
ly sedge stands between us and the lake the river makes here. We could roll up our pants legs and wade in. In the distance ducks troll their placid progress across the mirror; a breeze ripples every now and then when the sun shifts to clouds.

  I’m thirsty. I look back at the brush, where the remains of a building are hidden. “The water was so close, but we couldn’t get to it.” Had Lili Holzman said it? Chaya? I’d imagined the river farther away, but six or seven long strides and I touch it, could splash water on my face, fill the empty bottle of Gatorade. Proximity. It drops me through time. I forget the honeysuckle, the matches, and yahrzeit candle back in the van where Petras waits.

  CHAYA. I’M AT her table again with petits fours and rugelach and the awareness that even though the radio is on, I don’t hear it anymore. Her father was sick, thirsty. Everyone was thirsty. Lili Holzman. Chaya’s youngest brother. The teenagers and the grandmothers. Mirele Rein’s family who are named without enumeration, just “the Reins” in the shtetl Ceikiniai’s necrology (list of the dead), the shtetl spelled Tzeikinia in Boyarin’s translation of Koniuchowsky’s interviews. The family of Solom Aron was thirsty, Aron who will come a long way back from the Japanese front and use a wooden crate to carry the remains of everyone he loved who exist somewhere in a pile of femurs, articular bones, and mandibles of all sizes.

  GIEDRĖ LOOKS DISCONSOLATELY at the beer cans, then at the water. I hadn’t known it was possible to look at a river and at the same time be in the Bronx, be sitting at the long table cluttered, aside from our dishes, with the business of Chaya’s life, the papers she’d brought out for me, the Švenčionys Yitzkor book that I had, for so long, avoided looking at online.

  “POLIGONY?” CHAYA TURNED her face into a question. “Nobody knows what does it mean. Polish army kept their horses there. A camp? Barracks?” She remembered for me; across her face, incredulity first, then a freeze frame of panic, confusion. Followed very quickly by steadiness, resolve.

  “My mother never lost herself. She was oriented. She packed for every child—a towel, soap, candle, food.”

  She pronounced oriented with the accent on the third syllable: oriented. A small bit of music that will stay with me always, will, whenever her version of the word comes to me, make me think of her mother folding the towels, calculating quickly, pushing away fear, answering the questions of her youngest children. Modeling, for all of them, a resolute sturdiness.

  Chaya told me her mother was her best friend, that so many of the girls Chaya knew would come around to talk with her, be in her company. Oriented.

  I asked her if she remembers Germans.

  “For every one German, ten Lithuanians,” she answered.

  I know that part of her memory is more of a scrim, knew that the ratio of Lithuanians to Germans was actually much wider, maybe a hundred Lithuanians to four Germans. My maybe is not exact, so not reliable either. I made a note to myself to find a more reliable number and to look within it, around it, through it—and try to find my grandfather.

  We both had stopped eating the sweets on the table. A sip of coffee. Chaya paused, went on.

  “You cannot imagine. First of all, they were drunk. Didn’t care. If someone couldn’t go so fast, they were shot on the way.”

  Shot on the road I’d just swept past; Petras pointing out a thicket on top of a post—the good-luck stork nest. Giedrė quiet. Not really comfortable, but not unkind. Called to duty. Called to honor the memory of her friend Blumke.

  Chaya was seventeen. Her sister Rochl (Rachel) was a nurse, trained in gynecology. Their father, well, he understood violins and thread and pages and gold lettering. (Before the Germans came in, the Russian in charge of deportations had put the whole Porus family on the list for the Gulag. And so Chaya’s father made a stunning album—the Russian officer’s name in gold—and with that gift, during that terror, a reprieve.)

  “We saw a big fire—pieces of wood being thrown, but it looked like they were throwing live people then—children. When you came nearer—a bunch of”—she struggled to find a word that was strong enough—“hooligans.”

  A word for a woman with a keen sense of propriety, a word to lay shame on the men around the fire. Of course I knew what it meant, but it’s a word from the days of my father’s childhood and my grandmother’s life. It has less damning connotation in my here and now: the boys who toilet-paper trees on Halloween, who break into the girls’ locker room and spray shaving cream on benches and mirrors, who wouldn’t know what a take-down lever on a Walther pistol is. I looked up Chaya’s word when I got home from our meeting in Merriam-Webster’s—“Shouldn’t you hooligans be in school instead of threatening old ladies?”

  Chaya had said it with force, but I thought motherfuckers. I thought of the smoke and the drink, the sparks in the dark and the dangerous escalating fraternity of men inventing strange screeching songs. If there were those they meant to avenge, lovers, family members—entombed or pistol-whipped or violated by the Red Army—they’ve forgotten them, forgotten what their pay will be, drunk enough to work without pay. One of the hooligans tries to light a dead cigarette in the massive fire and burns his hand. Another man feels like king of the land, notices a younger punk watching him, maybe imitating his pratfall or swagger. Or maybe the punk thinks of what a pig the man as old as his father is, how, once the action starts—a stray shot—it could be possible, or not.

  What was my grandfather thinking?

  (“Yes,” my mother told me, in a random moment of recollection. “I remember he said that about the Jews. That they were Communists.”)

  On one of the early nights in the packed barracks, a guard yells into the crowd for a nurse. Chaya’s sister Rochl steps forward. She’s anxious to help a woman somewhere out there who is biting on a stick to keep from screaming or curled in a heavy ball on cold ground. So she follows the voice of the guard, and they lose her to the night. A few moments later a shot rings out.

  At that instant, the dark hair of Chaya’s father turns gray. Strand by strand, in the choke, the press, as the whole family strains to instantly recall the sound of the gunshot: Was it close, was it far, how close, how far? Did anyone hear a cry afterward? Was it her cry—the young woman who is part of them?

  In the morning Rochl comes back. In the morning Mr. Porus’s hair is silver, all the fine dark gone. His daughter has delivered a baby. Hope shivers among them: if the guards allow a baby to be born, maybe we are meant to live, to work somewhere.

  When the call comes for the barracks to empty, Chaya’s mother takes the pot she packed in her bundle, and outside they collect small rocks for a meager fire. A little water is given; maybe there are buckets the guards have put down among the mass of dazed children and grown-ups trying to locate their family recognizing neighbors, sisters. Water is warmed for the babies. Potatoes are baked in the coals, split into pieces handed around as Chaya’s mother’s pot is passed from person to family to another group, and suddenly becomes an anchor, a part of the life they just left, a vital possession, a gift.

  Wertvolle Juden (“useful Jews,” a term invented long before the Reich claimed it) who avoided transport to Poligon bargain and bribe the authorities, and a few days later bring a cart of bread and more potatoes from the ghetto in Švenčionys to Poligon. A slice of bread. More chunk of potato. More water warmed in the pot. More hope. But it’s a wild hope. It’s a hope that smells of finality. A hope that has to hold up in the land-mined perimeter, in the splattered brains of the old woman who just had to get to the water, the cries of the girls who are pulled out and raped in the night.

  Before me, Chaya mimes a spit on her floor to the side of the table.

  “Dogs,” her sister Rochl called their captors.

  Seven miles give or take south, back in Švenčionys, back among kitchen tables and phone books and the water pump in the square and the faucet in my grandfather’s house, the man who runs the largest felt boot concession in town, a man who is enamored of one of Chaya’s sisters, has gone to the authoritie
s (my grandfather, a German?) and declared that the Porus family, who have never worked in a felt factory in all of their combined lives, are his most valuable workers. To prove his point, he has had to regrettably stop production. He has no choice; it’s a pity, every day the factory is still, the goods aren’t shipped, the money doesn’t come in—money that has to feed the machine of war now as well as the factory manager.

  So the Porus family is to be released from Poligony. But first, they are searched. A call had gone out for a “contribution”—the gold of the Jews, the money of the Jews, the jewels—all of it had to be thrown into buckets. The Poruses are to be let go, but they must go without their wealth, their wedding rings, the rubles packed inside a double layer of Mr. Porus’s shirting.

  “Inside the barrack you could see coins and rings glittering in the dirt, thrown there by the people who would rather lose what they had that way than give it away.”

  Guards command the women and girls to strip. In the open air, Rochl, Chaya’s older sister, and Chaya and her mother are naked. Their clothing is shaken out. Every bit of cloth that was on their bodies is touched. Their bodies are handled and searched.

  “Even our vaginas,” Chaya punctuated with a look that could wither an army.

  Her naked sister spat, said, “I feel no shame, not in front of them—they’re not even human.”

  And so the women of the family remain intact. The women turn shame back on the men who touched them, watched them, laughed at them, men amazed at the turn of events that make it possible to order a woman to strip and bend over. The clothes go back on. Chaya’s father is perhaps suddenly stronger, a neurological switch thrown inside him—fear and escape.

  I TURN AWAY from the water. At the same moment, Giedrė and I start walking back the way we came. We are quiet. The walk back seems so much faster. Where the hulk of earth begins, there is a large old-growth tree. A maple, I think, because of the grooved bark, except for a square indentation cut and made smooth, the bark peeled away to the living tissue of the tree. There, a kind of bull’s-eye, a hard, fast surface just right for killing infants and small children by swinging them by their ankles or hips, saving bullet after bullet, as the soft fontanels and craniums shattered against the weapon the oak became.