Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted
Page 1
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2021 Gary Barwin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2021 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada and the United States of America by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
This page constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Nothing the same, everything haunted : the ballad of Motl the cowboy / Gary Barwin.
Names: Barwin, Gary, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200268171 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200268198 | ISBN 9780735279520 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735279537 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8553.A783 N68 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Text design: Andrew Roberts
Cover design: Andrew Roberts
Image credits: (cowboy) © MoreMass / Shutterstock
a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
In memory of my cousin,
Isaak Grazutis
who walked into thin air
and returned en plein air
and my grandparents
who carried it with them
The facts are sonorous but between the facts there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that astounds me.
—CLARICE LISPECTOR
the future is already over…that doesn’t mean we don’t have anywhere else to go.
—BILLY-RAY BELCOURT
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
1: Vilnius (Vilna): July 1941
2: Siberia: August 1915. Twenty-Six Years Before
3: Siberia to Zimmerwald: August/September 1915
4: Zimmerwald: September 1915
5: Vilnius: April 1941
6: Kaunas (Kovno): Late June 1941
7: Vilnius: July 1941
8: Vilnius to Kaunas
9
10
11
12
13: Strošiūnų Forest
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Part Two
1: On the Road to the Vilnius Ghetto
2
3
4
5: On the Road to Poland
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Part Three
1: Switzerland
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part Four
1: Toronto,: 1984
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Acknowledgements
Permissions
About the Author
PART ONE
Poets are fakers
Whose faking is so real
They even fake the pain
They truly feel
—CHARLES BERNSTEIN (AFTER PESSOA)
1
VILNIUS (VILNA)
JULY 1941
Motl. Jewish cowpoke. Brisket Boy. My grandfather.
As usual, he was bent over the kitchen table, his mottled and hairy nose deep in the pale valley of a book, half-finished plate of herring beside his elbow, half-eaten egg bread slumped beside a Shabbos candlestick. His old mother was out shopping for food while she still could.
So, this Motl, was he a reader?
If the world was ending, he would keep reading.
The world was ending. He was still reading.
So, what was this book he had to read despite everything?
One of the great westerns of the American frontier, of course. Even though he knew that Hitler adored them.
“The master race should be brave as Indianers,” Der Führer had said, and sent boxes of Karl May’s Winnetou noble savage novels to the eastern front to inspire his troops—those same manifest destiny soldiers crossing the country with orders to kill Motl, his mother and all the other Jews.
Did Motl intend to do something about this?
Yes. He would sit at the table, his shlumpy jacket turned up at the collar, his hat like a shroud of mice askew on his sallow head, and read.
Was Motl a man of action?
“If parking his tuches all day and all night on a chair doing nothing but reading is action,” his mother would say, “he’s a man of action. Action, sure. Every day he gets older and more in my way.”
Why was he still reading this western?
Because Motl, this Litvak, this Lithuanian Jew, this inconceivable zaidy, my grandfather, this citizen of the Wild East—that brave old world of ever-present sorrow, a sorrow that had just gotten worse—had chosen the life of the cowboy.
He would be that hombre who sits on his chair and imagines being calm and steady and manly, speaking only the fewest of well-chosen words, doing only what he wanted and what he must under that vast, unpatented western sky.
“And why not?” he would say. “Should my life be nothing but the minced despair and boiled hope of an aging Jew, too thin to be anything but borscht made by Nazis? I choose to think myself a Paleface chuck line rider of the doleful countenance, a Quixotic Ashkenazi of the bronco, riding the Ostland trail. Like my mother said when I told her I wanted to be a doctor, ‘Mazel tov, Motl. Nothing is impossible when it’s an illusion.’ ”
He would say, “What’s the difference between a Jewish cowpoke and beef jerky? It’s the hat. And feeling empty as a broken barrel. Jerky don’t never feel such hollowness, least not by the time it’s jerky. But the cowboy, the cowboy keeps riding. He don’t look back. Eventually, if he’s lucky, he too becomes leathern and feels only what jerky feels.”
Motl. Citizen of Vilna. Saddlebag of pain. Feedbag of regret.
At forty-five, he had a history. As a Lithuanian Jew, he was pickled in it.
But though neither he nor his mother knew it at the time, something had changed. Somewhere, deep down in the overworked mine shaft of his imagination, it had been determined that he would set out on a perilous adventure, this time of his own choosing. He would get up on his horse and ride.
And he would have a child.
At his age.
And avoid being killed. Sometimes you have to save your own bacon, when you’re a Jew.
* * *
—
The next day, he went to the barber’s. Even a grown man will cave in to his mother’s demands that he groom if she won’t make food for him. Eyes close
d, a Texas reverie floating through his mind like the scent of campfire, Motl lay back in the red chair and awaited his shave.
But then:
“Under a hot towel, a cowpoke can think big thoughts, but to act he must stand up,” he said.
He stood up.
For a moment, the towel hung from his jowls, the Santabeard of a Hebrew god. Then it fell away.
“Barber,” Motl said. “I must seize these last days while the possibility of life remains.”
The barber said nothing, wet blade held between trembling fingers.
“The kabbalists speak of repairing the world, healing what is broken. It’s my time,” Motl said, looking round that hair-strewn palace of strop and whisker, that little shop of Hebrews. “Barber, I thank you, for I have learned much under your towel.”
Shave and a haircut.
—Did the barber, Shmuel, expect payment?—
Two bits.
Did Motl toss him these two coins before his impromptu departure?
Having had neither shave nor haircut, he only waved, then hightailed it into the bright sun of Shnipishok, that region of Vilna whose name sounds like scissor blades. He ran through its streets, feeling open to possibility and getaway.
Did Shmuel chase him with his blade?
Let’s say it was a close shave.
* * *
—
This day, as the towel fell from his bristly chins, Motl saw beyond his scraggy self and straight into his crimpled yet resilient heart. He understood that it could become pink and new as the callow fundament of a child. How? He recalled that there remained a means by which he could become procreator and thus begetter. In this time of murder and loss, to make new life would be to make life new. It would be a salve for the broken world. He could say, both to his child and to himself, “It is worth being born into this world. It is worth being born.”
And this fathering, would it involve the usual squirming ministrations known since our ancestors first began to beget?
It would not.
But first, he had to retrieve his old saddle of a kvetching mother and get them both the galloping Gehenna out of the Einsatzgruppening hell that Vilna would soon be.
The cavalry were coming, or—raised as they were on Karl May—they’d more likely imagine themselves Aryan elves of the plains, Rhineland braves with bellies like six-packs of strudel.
Noble cabbages.
Coming to lead their band of Lithuanian Lakota against the godless yellowstars, locals happy to have the excuse for an anti-Semitic whoop-up.
Besides, if a boychik cowpoke was going to ride off in quest of new life, who else to bring but his mama?
But first, before he even retrieved this mama, we must go back nearly twenty years and speak of the family jewels because, in the end, that’s where all roads begin.
2
SIBERIA
AUGUST 1915. TWENTY-SIX YEARS BEFORE
The First World War. Blood, fire and rising smoke. Like many Litvaks, nineteen-year-old Motl and his family were exiled to Siberia, far beyond the Pale. Chaos and dismay on leaving. Litvaks in shtetls and town were given orders to be gone by daylight, or else be shot. The panicked packing. The search to find wagons. Everything stacked into rented peasant wagons. Motl was sent to rescue Torah scrolls from the study house, from the synagogue. Torahs were wrapped in the coats of dead relatives then buried under the exiled family’s possessions. Hand-wringing. Weeping. His mother lamenting, wringing her hands. Lamentation from every house. Finally, at the train station, they were loaded like premonitions into cattle cars. Disease and starvation on the journey. Children, the old. Parents. Their houses burned down behind them.
“Sometimes I think it’d have been better if we Jews had never been born,” Motl would say. “But who has that much luck—maybe one in a million?”
Welcome parties on arrival: pogroms.
But some survived. Motl survived.
The Ural Mountains. The edge of Siberia. A thousand miles to the east. Motl and his family lived in an incapacitated shack, sleeping together in a gap-toothed single room as if in a cabin on the prairie. Motl, his mother, father, his sister Chaya, his cousins Hershel and Pinchas, his aunt Anya. Each morning, his grandparents Abe and Faigel hacking awake with blood and phlegm, sputtering their Model T lungs.
“Oy, Gott, if you’re punishing me, at least remind me why, so I could enjoy the memories,” Abe said.
Other cabins crowded round and only squirrels outside, the wind inside, cold blades slicing through the slats. Not the lonesome prairie, except far from home.
Motl, gangling and uncertain, sits in the sun beside a wending river, reading a western. A village youth wanders by, lifts a thick stick from the stick-covered ground, raises it behind Motl’s head, intending to acquaint Motl’s brain with the outside air.
A shadow crosses the page. A circling vulture? An editor’s too-late hand? Motl twists in time to raise his own hand, the stick a downward blur snapping into his open palm. Motl stands, turns, wrests the stick from its owner, loses his balance, topples toward the youth, knocks him down. Motl, falling, thrusts his arms out to catch himself, and the stick, still clutched between his hands, spans the villager’s spindly throat, a one-finger cutthroat sign.
Motl, finding himself part of this deft accidental choreography, pratfall as martial art, gazes into the youth’s eyes, surprised and fearful, recalls the hero’s droll words from the western, now toppled in the grass like an injured bird: “A warrior should suffer pain in silence. But you…you may scream if you’d like.”
The gasping villager was unable to exercise the option. Then, from the path, a soldier in a greatcoat.
“Jew?”
“Yes…I…”
“Litvak?”
“Yes.”
Single words, unless spoken in the throes of passion, seldom result in happiness.
“Stand. You go see Golubkov now.”
Motl rose and brushed the dirt from his debilitated trousers. Was he to be hobbled or hog-tied only to be scranched and boot-hilled in a lock-up by these Czarist brutes? He left the young villager with the stick now delicately balanced across his skinny gizzard. Dead? Unconscious? Only the vultures knew for sure.
The soldier led Motl along the riverbank to a squat stone building, outside of which sat a Russian captain, drinking tea at a small lace-covered table.
“Who is this?” the captain said.
The soldier saluted then muttered a few words at close range into the captain’s fleshy ear. Then he pushed Motl forward.
“Golubkov,” the captain said, introducing himself to Motl. The patronizing greasiness of his voice made Motl feel the urgent need to wash. Golubkov lifted a teacup to his fuchsia lips, his dainty slurps like the death throes of a drowning fly.
“Perhaps I will send you where the peckersnot will freeze in the spout of your little Hebrew samovar. Or perhaps,” he said, placing the teacup on its saucer with a clatter, “you could be useful. We don’t like Jews to create trouble. Unless we ask them to.
“So,” he said, pausing to lift the lid of a squat silver sugar bowl, silting up the liquid of his cup with heapfuls of sugar. “In two weeks, enemies—enemies of Czar Nicholas and of our Mother Russia, enemies of this necessary war—will gather in a village far from here to hiss and mutter. They will attend a secret socialist conference to plot the demise of Europe. Secret except our intelligence reaches even into the mountains. They will meet in Switzerland—in Zimmerwald—in the shadow of the Alps where robins and skylarks sing. These execrable Marxists will pretend to be ornithology enthusiasts attending a conference of birds. You will travel there and kill who you can. There is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, and there is Trotsky.”
“But what do I know of killing? Why choose me and not a soldier or spy?”
“You’re not impo
rtant, so I have nothing to lose,” the captain said. “Except money. I have staked money on a little wager. Last night at the officers’ club, I bet that anyone, anyone at all, even a Jew, could assassinate one of these Bolshevik eggheads—they’re more manifesto than man. And you, my friend, are just the kind of anyone I was looking for. The private here tells me you handle a stick with surprising expertise. I’m counting on you to be successful so I win my wager. And so is Mother Russia. But of course I sent others this morning. Many hunters and one goose guarantees a good supper.
“Understand that we are very interested in these socialists. We are very interested in having them shot. And know this, my young comrade,” he said. “If you’re not successful, we’ll murder your entire family.”
Again, the fuchsia suction as Golubkov raised the slurry of tea to his lips and waved them away.
3
SIBERIA TO ZIMMERWALD
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 1915
By that afternoon, Motl was on a train travelling west across Russia carrying imperial-issue cheese, Cossack pickles, an extra pair of Czarist underwear and the soggy western, which he’d been allowed to retrieve from where he dropped it by the river. After some days’ travel, the train neared the border at Tarnopol, only recently captured by the Central Powers. Three greatcoated men, each with a moustache like the overgrown pelt of a shaggy marmot, entered the car and loomed over the passengers in the seats near Motl. They gazed with mild yet meaningfully unrelenting eyes until everyone but Motl left. Then they sat down.
“We sit down,” they said, as if to claim reality for themselves.
From inside one of their greatcoats: vodka. A silver fish-embossed flask was passed from one thick hand to another (“To Czar Nikolai!” they toasted) and then to Motl, who had no option but to splutter down a compliant snort of the blistering solvent.
There was silence until the train slowed and stopped between stations.