The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  Moscow had gone off the deep end.

  He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, then, his eyes brimming with exhaustion, blew out Aharon’s kosher candles and slept for thirteen hours.

  The morning of the second day, after Aharon brought him tea and bread, Misha had a long bath, thinking, working the angles, neck-deep in the mammoth tub. He went downstairs to the kitchen; there, amid slicing and mixing machines mothballed for the winter, he found the resort’s ancient telephone.

  His first call was to the penciled telephone number from the passport, somewhere in New York City, at the appointed hour for emergency calls. Misha guessed a pay phone: he could hear traffic. No response, just breathing and scratching of pen while Misha dictated his new address and phone number in his clumsy Hebrew. Shiloah’s terror of wiretaps, he remembered. He’s got wiretaps on the brain. The second call, to Eleanor in Washington, yielded no answer.

  Leaving Aharon to his midday prayers, Misha went for a walk, following the curving dirt road away from Ezrath Israel, toward the break in the trees where the lake was.

  The lake was Indian-summer warm. He swam, then found a large flat boulder. He stretched out there and managed to sleep.

  He dreamt of wheeling birds and a great white building honeycombed with closed offices and long hallways and men in uniforms. A car drove down a massive corridor, big as Versailles. A wall of Pacific-blue water followed the car, cresting, thundering at him. The man from Amtorg floated past … Misha snapped his eyes open, heart pounding, shaken, sure he’d awake in the stone bowels of a Moscow prison.

  He reached Eleanor’s house that night on the cranky old telephone, after ten, while the peripatetic Aharon buffed the lobby floor, great dragonfly wings thrumming down the hall. She wasn’t home, said a woman’s voice, a Southern accent, bemused. “She’s leaving for New York tomorrow early,” the voice said before ringing off. In the background, he could hear the radio playing Benny Goodman.

  On the morning of the fifth day, the lowering sky was streaked with clouds threatening rain. A rattletrap truck arrived, barely painted, its engine running on and shaking the vehicle even while the driver got out and went to its back gate. Someone had roughly painted over Diamanti Brothers Lumber on the driver’s door, but Misha, wrapped in a blanket in the front porch hammock, could still make out the phone number: EG578, somewhere in a place called Atlantic City, wherever that was. He sat up and gazed at the driver, now lowering a shapeless kit bag, then two more and the faltboot in its cylindrical canvas sheath. Misha recognized a familiar Greek fisherman’s cap and the thick spectacles: brawny David Kauffmann, Reuven Shiloah’s slope-shouldered go-between. Kauffmann had been Misha’s contact with Jerusalem during the early years at Cambridge and in Germany, supervising Misha’s kayak “bus service” in and out of the new Reich.

  Kauffmann carried the four bags to Misha’s doorstep, and he wasn’t moving them an inch farther than the dust at his feet.

  “What is this place?” Kauffmann muttered.

  “A resort,” Misha replied, hands thrust in his pockets. “A resort for the Orthodox Jews from the city.”

  Kauffmann looked at the overgrown grass. “Cleared out your place, your office, everything. You’re so hot, you’re glowing.” Misha said nothing as Aharon brought Kauffmann a tall glass of water. “I got everything I could carry out of your apartment: your typewriter, books, anything I could move fast.”

  “My horn?”

  “If it’s there, it’s there. You should be asking a different question.” Kauffmann took off his leather cap and ran his hand over his pate. “‘Am I worth it?’ We’ve—Reuven has—we’ve stuck our necks out for you. Half of New York is after you. Here.” Kauffmann took a pair of books from the kit bag and handed them over. “From Reuven. Where’s the dog? I heard there’s supposed to be a dog, a big one.”

  “I’ve never seen a dog.”

  Kauffmann shrugged, boarded the rattletrap truck, and left. Misha looked at the books in his hand: La Ciudad de la Habana. Beneath that was a Spanish-English dictionary. There was no inscription.

  The first of the autumn rains came; sheets of water rent the fading leaves off the big maple in the side yard. Aharon’s silent diligence with a steady parade of pots and buckets in the attic kept the lower floors dry. The old house had grown on Misha; he liked the clapboard monster’s odd mix of heavy-curtained Old Kraków and cheerfully empty-headed Americana, the kitsch photographs of Al Jolson and Ethel Merman next to photographs of the Holy Land and Franklin Roosevelt and the yellowing wallpaper with cowboys and Red Indians and the plastic deer grazing on the kitchen window ledge.

  Kauffmann had indeed brought the cornet. Misha walked his horn into the barn and climbed into the hayrick. He had a small folio of sheet music, old big band tunes, but nothing he wanted to try cold. He ran a few scales, spitting and wincing. The first few notes scraped out, hanging painfully, but within a minute he found his lips weren’t totally lost. He tried “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” which worked out rather well, attracting a dog of no known provenance, possibly the one whose absence had perplexed Kauffmann. Misha let rip. The dog watched, wide-eyed, then scurried off, leaving Misha to play until his lungs burnt.

  The rain began again, a steady tapping on the barn’s tin roof. Afterwards, he squatted in the empty hayrick, sore-lipped and pensive, occasionally clicking the valves of the horn, knowing he’d slid far down the steep mountain of jazz. The sound of a horse’s hooves grew, moving on up the rough road.

  XXVIII

  Astalemate while they took one another in, almost five years’ silence between them. “I should start calling you Farmer Misha,” Adela Braudel declared, not moving. “The beard, the clothes, all a bit rustic, especially the smell.”

  He fingered the valves on his horn. “I was in the barn. Playing.” In the laneway, the cart horses clipped away into the distance.

  “You’ve been playing, all right. Idiot: those two are all over the papers. The Soviet embassy has lodged a formal complaint against the American police, the mayor … they’re turning New York upside down looking for the killers. What were you thinking? Reuven is ready to write you off, you know that? And after all he’s done for you. You know what he once said to me? ‘Della, he’s worth it. If we had twenty Mishas, we’d have a country.’ Some hero you turned out to be. You know where I’ve been the past two weeks?”

  “I have no idea,” Misha allowed.

  “In and out of the Rothschild Palais in Vienna. Trying to ransom Jews out of there. From the Gestapo. All very correct, all very sickening. You should see their eyes.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “Unfortunately, you haven’t. I need to move—I’ve been sitting for hours. Make some tea, please, will you?” And she strode away, her blunt black hair thrown back by the wind, her umbrella dead vertical. Misha watched her from the kitchen while he waited for the kettle on the gas ring, floating through the deep sea of dying grass, very beautiful, smoking and examining the forest trees in the rain.

  He emerged from the kitchen with the tea, but she’d already returned, her hand on the rail at the foot of the main stairs, no woman of his. “Where are you going?”

  “Kauffmann tells me the room at the back of the third floor has a big canopy. I’m going to have a long nap.”

  “How’d he know that? He never went upstairs.” Adela ignored this. “You want me to wake you?”

  “No.”

  He reached for her bag, but she was there first.

  She climbed the stairs, the hem of her skirt swinging in reproof as she strode away from him. He listened to her footfalls move across the bowed floorboards. Misha stood motionless. Whatever calculations enter into all this, he thought, this moment had better be reckoned among the debits. Then the pipes sang and Adela’s bathtub thundered with the good Sullivan County water.

  Aharon laid them a fire and then vanished tactfully somewhere upstairs. Misha pictured him praying under the eaves, as close to heaven as he co
uld get. An awkward silence followed while Misha poured fresh tea, broken only by the crack and pop of the firewood.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked after a careful glance at her.

  Adela stared straight into the fire, strain in her eyes, cracks all over her. “What we choose now, that’s what our children will come to think of us. Me and you. It’s not politics, not café debates, or point making. It’s something that … that’s the end of our families, our Europe, scattered all over the world. It’s the end of our time. That’s what I see.”

  He sipped his tea, letting her come to him.

  “We’re three in a boat: you and me and Reuven,” Adela continued. “The Comintern, this paramour of yours, it’s blinded you in one eye. Don’t close the other. Walk away from us now, you’re lost. And that will break my heart.”

  “I wish I had your trust in the ways of the world,” Misha said.

  “What if you were told you’d die tomorrow morning? What then? How would you square the circle?”

  “I’d say I played well and rowed straight and I loved as best I could.”

  She shrugged, cupping her tea mug close in both hands. “Two years ago you’d have said it differently.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, yes. You’d have said, ‘I’m a Jew before anything else,’ then taken anyone who disagreed with you outside. You’ve changed.” She pulled back her hair and fixed him with a sharp glance. “I’m going for a walk. Want to come?”

  They followed a path through the high grass, down to the fence at the edge of the estate where the forest began again, then to the east, toward the road from town, not talking, Misha a contrite distance behind her, watched by a bevy of motionless dark birds on the telephone wire.

  The creek ran high with the autumn rains. In the evening shade the air was sweet but uncomfortably cool, Adela’s pace economical and fast. La femme est la campagne de l’homme, he’d read once. He hadn’t understood the aperçu then, but he grasped it now with a vengeance.

  They’d always walked well together, driven as she was; they were well matched that way, he thought morosely. He’d just about worked up the nerve to speak when Adela reached back and clutched his arm. “My God, look!” She spotted the antlers first as a magnificent stag broke cover from a head-high hedge of scrub and leapt straight up, its legs and neck at full extension, a beautifully muscled milk chocolate arc hanging in midair then breaking downstream, sure-footed even among the wet creek bed rocks, a tremendous clattering rush of power away from them. With a final defiant toss of its antlers, the stag disappeared into the brush.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that? My God!” She laughed, all nerves, still holding his sleeve, listening as the stag’s hooves thrashed through the forest and into silence. “I need a smoke,” she announced. “Let’s sit down.”

  He’d spread his leather jacket over a massive pine stump and offered her a seat. She lit a cigarette: that was when Misha noticed the ring, crowned with an exquisite honey brown jewel he couldn’t name. “I love Canadian cigarettes,” she said, holding the match until it was cool. “Much stronger than those hopeless American things.”

  “I haven’t asked: where have you come from?”

  Adela waved her cigarette package. “Montreal, raising money.”

  “And?”

  “They have me buying Jews from the SS, Vienna, Berlin, Munich. An awful, awful business, ransoming people. The SS steal the biggest Jewish property they can lay their paws on and set up shop. In Vienna, it’s the Rothschild Palace and an SS lieutenant, obersturmführer—or unter?—I can’t remember, barricaded behind a desk, huge thing, fit for a king. I go in with a lawyer from the Joint, an Austrian, not a Jew, a brave fellow. Secretaries and underlings come and go with files and more files and coffee and cake, finest china and silverware, all looted, I’m certain. There’s thirty staff—people coming and going all the time, moving paper, totally inhuman. And all very correct, thugs pretending manners. And the process? It’s sickening. The SS have records of bank accounts, auction sales, confiscations: the German mania for records. So you can’t lie to them—the game is to flatter and tease and edge them sideways. Complete hell. God, let’s talk about something else.”

  Adela gave nothing else away, leading them back along the town road, silent. A mail truck passed them, so Misha checked the mailbox while Adela walked on ahead, exploring the copse of fir behind the barn. There were a half dozen envelopes, bills and circulars and two small packages from a religious bookstore in Brooklyn.

  Walking back from the mailbox, Misha heard barking and laughter. Adela was playing with the big dog. Misha went inside and tossed the mail on Aharon’s spotless desk, thinking to make more tea. The old phone began to ring as Adela came into the kitchen, passing close to him, still wearing her German hiking boots and smelling faintly of lavender, pink from the heat of the walk, her hair damp from the exertion and clinging to her temples in ringlets. She picked up the handset: “Louis, hello …” Her voice trailed off ominously. Misha caught her expression: Someone’s dead, he guessed.

  “Burned them all?” Adela was saying, her voice taut. “My God. My God. What about Essen? Did Dr. Vogelstein get his visa? Did he get the family out? My God. How many? It’s the end, Louis. It’s the end. Any word from Munich? To where? Dachau? All four brothers? I thought Markus was in Argentina. What does the radio say?” She waved at Misha. “Is there a radio here? Shortwave?”

  A persistent autumn rain pecked at the glass in Mr. Sherman’s front door. They huddled around the general store’s blackened oil stove for warmth, the shortwave radio on the counter. They listened, the two of them and Aharon and Mr. Sherman. “… in a statement to the foreign press corps in Berlin, a propaganda ministry spokesman said that the Nazi leadership had no hand in the quote spontaneous end quote attacks. Meanwhile, all over the Third Reich, the synagogues burn. This is Frank Gibbons in Berlin for American Mutual Radio.”

  “Can it get international shortwave?” asked Adela, her face set.

  “Not so much up here in the hills, miss,” Mr. Sherman said kindly. “You got family there, miss? It don’t look too good.”

  “No. No family. We both worked there. We have many friends and colleagues.”

  Aharon spoke, very softly. “I have a friend in Colmar—Benjamin. We were at camp together, just down the road, the same bunkhouse. The letters from him stopped last fall.” He turned his glass in his hand. “I think about him all the time.”

  Mr. Sherman, a gentle, potbellied fellow in a woolen shirt and spectacles, asked: “You want to take the radio, miss? I can live without it for a coupla days. G’wan. Take it.”

  After dinner that night, as Adela read in her room two floors up, Misha and Aharon did the washing-up by kerosene lamp. In the night clouds, geese were flying, great chevrons of them, southbound for Mexico.

  “They sleep at the lake,” Aharon said, listening to the cries.

  “Maybe I will too,” Misha replied.

  Misha and Adela patrolled the front porch in silence, watching the stars. A nearly full moon enameled everything an icy blue-white. A cold breeze grew and a handful of leaves fluttered down onto the porch planking. “Reuven’s found you a job with the Joint in Havana,” she said at last. “You’ve a new life. You’re Karl Halvorsen. You can start all over again.”

  “So: I grow a mustache, get a tan, meet a few Spanish girls, that the plan?”

  She wound up for a crisp backhander, but this time he caught her.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Look, the ash—” He flicked the burning cigarette ash off her chest, catching the weightless shape of her breast. They stared at one another for a good long moment. He broke the stare by taking the pack of cigarettes from her hand, tapping one out. “What’s the story with your ring?”

  “None of your business.” She turned her back to him, the smoke rising over her shoulder. “You’re making a mess of your life. Samuel and your mother—such heartache you’ve caused,” Adela sa
id quietly, “you don’t know.”

  He could see his breath, proof he was here and alive, against the cold softness of the coming winter. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Grow up. At least I’ll have what I know I want: I want a homeland for my children.”

  That stopped him. “Your children?”

  “Yes. For my children. An Israel. In my lifetime—this year in Jerusalem.”

  “Della. Sit down. Let’s talk.”

  “Don’t try your sad choirboy face on me. I know you,” she warned, pulling hard on the cigarette. “I was in Paris last month, I went to the cafeteria at the Russian Conservatory by myself. Ate pelmeni, drank two vodkas, the waiter hovering, worrying I wasn’t going to pay because I’d had my best coat stolen and I must’ve looked like a Russian down on her luck. I didn’t care: I ate the pelmeni and drank the vodkas and I missed you.”

  Misha moved closer to her, but she stepped back. “Don’t you dare. I would have done anything for you, you know that, moved in with you, done the laundry, cheered you at the boat races. I was yours. Do you know how lucky you were? You had me. Now you don’t have me. You don’t.” She was white-faced with fury, her arms tighter yet across her chest. “Look at you. Your Moscow friends have turned on you, you fool—now there’s only us. A fine experiment.” She waved him off, dismissing him. “I have to go—there’s a car coming for me.” From somewhere she produced an envelope. “Your ticket. Welcome to nowhere. I hope you like it.” She turned to go, then turned back. “You know, it’s better you have her.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t ‘who’ me. The American. The economist.”

  “You’re well informed, aren’t you?”

  “Here’s a prophecy: you’ll have her for a short time … and me, your whole life. The angels are watching, Misha. Both of us. You’ll see.” She let that hang, then flung her ring hand at him. “And this? I found it. Between the cushions of a seat on a train. Near Kraków. It’s amber. Russian amber. Goodbye. No, don’t say anything.”