by Gary Barwin
“Stand,” one of the men said, and Motl, vodka-fuddled, did his best to comply.
“Follow,” said another and, as one, the four men strode to the door.
“Jump,” they said, and Motl jumped. The three men hopped down onto the track gravel behind him, then plunged into a nearby stand of woods, where an automobile lay camouflaged by branches. Only once before had Motl seen such a large and impressive car, and that only a few hours before as their train had pulled out of Kiev. He clambered over the running board and was instructed to crouch in the back while a blanket was thrown over him. It had the foul goulash stench of hopelessness and farts.
A hacking and shuddering as the engine came to, then the crunch of branches, rocks and gravel as the car found the dirt road.
After some hours of turbulent darkness, heat and regretful breathing beneath the blanket, the car stopped. Motl heard an unintelligible exchange of what might have been German between a voice outside the car and the driver inside. Then two gunshots. A call-and-response of blasts.
The car lurched forward, shuddering over the bumpy road and cornering fitfully. After a few minutes, quiet moaning. After a few more, one of the men said, “Vodka.” A multi-voiced grunt of assent then subsequent expressions of satisfaction as the flask made its rounds.
After many more hours, Motl was uncovered with a flourish of light and air, and he sat up. A splotch of blood on the arm of the driver’s greatcoat resembled the rust-coloured shape of Texas, blood dampened by vodka to sterilize the wound. The man stared straight ahead, impassively, both hands clutching the leather-bound wheel. Motl had read about such men, overcoming fate and bullets through sheer self-reliance, pluck and tenacity. And the duplicitous courage of drink.
They had arrived outside a train station of imposing scale.
“Stuttgart,” the driver said, and told Motl he was to board the train for Switzerland here. “You’ll be met inside the station by a Polish woman, Urszula. She’ll have a loaf of bread wrapped like a baby.”
“Thanks,” he said, and the men nodded. This, his only conversation with these three shaggy-lipped sherpas.
As instructed, Motl rendezvoused with Urszula. Her dark hair was tied under a red floral kerchief and, Motl noted, she embraced a loaf of bread, wrapped like a baby, in distinctive blue cloth.
“Michal—my nephew?” she had said loudly as she approached him, so that others around her could hear. “I didn’t recognize you. You’ve grown so big.”
Motl blushed as if he were actually this woman’s nephew.
They climbed aboard the train to Bern and sat near the back of the car. They whispered. Or rather, Urszula whispered and Motl leaned uncomfortably against the window.
“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end,” she said. “And the end we’d like to see is the bourgeoisie’s as we kick ’em out their easy chairs.”
These weren’t the words of someone on the Czarist side. Was this a test, the failing of which would cause Motl’s pale skull to be separated from his two-faced brain? Was Urszula trying to root out his allegiance? But she had shared the loaf of bread and Motl couldn’t argue with what she said about how the rich took “from each Jew according to their abilities, from each Jew according to their needs.”
“So, maybe I’m a Bolshevik,” she said. “And, if so, I’ve found the best place to hide: right under the Romanovs’ onion-domed noses. And without knowing it, they’re funding me to build a Bolshevik network all through Europe. To be revolutionary is to be good at turning your back on those who pay you,” she said. “So maybe you’ll turn with me?”
By the time they’d arrived in Bern and transferred to a horse-drawn coach for Zimmerwald, Motl was also quoting Trotsky. “There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.”
As far as Golubkov, the Czar and his stuffed Golubtsi know, Urszula said, she was on her way to Switzerland with Motl to assassinate Lenin, or Trotsky, or both. She’d been recruited as an imperial operative years ago, but not before she was already working for the other side.
“But don’t trust anyone,” she’d said. “Especially someone who tells you so. Everyone involved in this business holds a mirror in front of another mirror. Try brushing your hair in such a place and you lose an eye, if not the revolution and your life.”
4
ZIMMERWALD
SEPTEMBER 1915
It was the morning before the delegates were to arrive. Motl had never seen so many mountains. Or mountains of such size. They made the sky seem larger and farther away. How else could it contain objects of such immensity?
Beyond the village, at the foot of these Alps, sat a grand house inside of which was a Russian count, apparently protected by the bewildering turmoil of the lederhosen-inspired architecture of the half-timbered upper storey. The count lived surrounded by pots of caviar, silverware, caged birds and his wounded yet resilient entitlement. His dacha had been torched in the 1905 revolution, increasing the likelihood that he too would soon be noble barbecue, and so he’d left Russia. Though he was an aristocrat, he was a capitalist first. And a capitalist with debts. So, he would host this incendiary conference of revolutionaries in his new home—he who pays for the balalaika calls the tune, and the Bolsheviks would come armed with rubles. He’d hold his aristocratic nose and accept them.
But none of them knew that a small team of monarchists, both professional and amateur, had also gathered, sent by Golubkov and his cronies. And there were also, like Motl and Urszula, some counter-counter-revolutionaries, who had turned from the work they were supposed to do and who intended to eliminate all the monarchists they could find.
The following morning, forty revolutionaries assembled on the lawn of the great property for breakfast. The plan was this: while Urszula kept an eye on the dining delegates, ensuring that they weren’t assassinated by those still loyal to the Czar, Motl and a few secret comrades would start by knocking off the near-Romanov count.
Motl and his allies felt a tremor through their bodies as they stormed the grand house. They entered from the kitchen, each scooping a pastry as they stomped past. Each now with a comma of jam curling from the corner of their lips, they burst into the library, much to the surprise of the count, who was quietly reading about the taxonomy of birds.
Kingdom, phylum, class, family, gentry, serfdom, species, gout. A classification for people as well as birds.
They burst through the familiar order of class to lift their guns and their prospects.
The count stood, startled as a duck before hunters, and squawked his astonishment.
“Serfs up,” said one of Motl’s new comrades as he shot the count through his book of birds, piercing the coloured breasts of swallows and swans, and then the petulant pumper of this hereditary lord and landowner. The books around them were beautiful. A leather forest. Flights of like-coloured volumes bound by bands of gold and brown. Walls of dark shelves punctuated with glowing sconces and portraits of self-satisfied gout sufferers dressed in lace and velvet.
Motl froze. Though it had been the plan, he hadn’t expected that murder would result in death. At least not right in front of him. Then he quickly pocketed the count’s small volume—evidence? history? a connection with the mysteries?—as one of his hot-headed companions hurled a lamp against the wall, lamp oil dripping down between broken glass and bursting into flame. The revolution would be a firebird, rising from a fire fed by the roasting aristocracy. Personally, I’d have kept the summer houses and palaces and only cooked their soft landowning insides. But brazen revolutionaries can’t resist braising hell and so they torched everything.
Afterwards, it was chaos. Curtains, kitchens, bedrooms, cherrywood cabinets and dining room all on fire. Servants, a contessa, little dogs and puppy-like wigs, horses, chefs, maids, children running wild into the fields and gardens. Social
ist delegates on the lawn looking for water, not quite able to agree on the best way to coordinate a bucket brigade. Motl and his comrades mad with exhilaration and second thoughts and filled with wine from a well-stocked cellar ran from the weeping and yawping and the scent of roasting wealth. Motl made it to the end of the elaborate OCD gardens, hedges trimmed like the moustaches of a dandy. Then up the rising slope of an untrimmed mountain. Motl found the suggestion of a path and plunged up, leaving the conflagration of revolutionary progress behind. He ran until he could but walk and then walked until he was so lost he could not find himself. Deep in the breathless thicket, all he could find was his own cow-hearted terror, his own shaking hide aiming to become verb.
He had no choice but to continue up, an adolescent Sisyphus dropping his revolutionary rock and running. The crackle of his boots on the forest floor. His still-ragged breath. It began to snow and so he wept, his face a sludge of snot and tears. He was a whippersnapper who had lost his way fleeing from his first foray into history. A revolutionary only because he felt he’d spent most of the time running in circles.
What about his family? Golubkov threatened to kill them if he didn’t succeed.
The fire.
There’d been a fire. It wasn’t his fault. What could he have done?
He kept running until he found himself in an icy valley beneath a grey-white sky. He was on a glacier slid between two peaks.
A voice, as young as Motl’s, from the pines. “Hands up and drop your guns.” But Motl was a gunslinger without a gun. He had only the text on ornithology. He would subdue his challenger with a wounded disquisition on the manifold varieties of passerine, with talk of beaks, endothermic vertebrates and the delicate rustle of feathers as the night wind blows. Where to begin? Perhaps at the beginning: with the egg.
Unless it was the chicken. He’d cross that road when he came to it.
He had no knife to bring to this gunfight, but he could repeat a gunfighter’s words.
“I will not perforate your pine-scented chicken-pocked lady-balls with lead,” he said, “if you stop hiding like a girl and show yourself.” The best defence is a strong imagination, the illusion of the possible.
Silence.
“Does your heart pump your mama’s chicken soup?” he shouted. “Do you have the parboiled spätzli of a mouse between your scrawny legs? Come out or I’ll make red doilies of your weasel-guts.”
A shot from the dark woods. A bullet entered a tree a hundred feet behind Motl.
Then another.
“Show yourself!” the voice said.
Silence.
“I’m not moving,” Motl said, though in truth, he quaked. “Not even to jump into the path of your runty bullets so you can kill me.”
A confident nothing seems like something.
Then the voice said, “Samy. My name is Samy Rosenstock. I’ve come from Bucharest.”
Motl had exhausted the script. How would this scene unfold?
“Samy,” he said. “Come out. Let’s both stop shooting and I’ll not repeat the name Rosenstock to no one. Then I won’t need to tell them what name to write on your grave. Or that we walked away in peace.”
Silence.
Then another gunshot from the woods.
“Oh!” said Samy.
Between Motl’s legs the heat and fire of a volcano.
Then another shot.
“Oh!” said Samy.
Motl folded over a glowing magma of pain.
“Sorry!” said Samy.
And so Motl’s two vital cobblers were shot.
Off.
As Motl fell, he saw his testicles roll a man’s length over the glacier and into a crevasse where they would freeze solid—two fetal mammoths, hairy and still, waiting for the future.
* * *
—
“An accident,” Samy called, appearing at the edge of the woods. “I didn’t mean to. I’m a flâneur. I was trying to put the gun away. Anyway, I’m changing my name. It’s Tristan Tzara. I’m a poet.” And with that, he ran off.
Motl lay motionless for a while, moaning and bleeding. Then he sat up and packed his pants with ice. “Sometimes you’re cauterized with loss,” he muttered. “And sometimes you need to be frozen.”
Unable to stand, Motl was sure he would die, a desperado felled before his first real shootout. It’s only a duel if both cowboys know it is. And if they both have guns.
Motl fallen in snow, on the frontier between vision and oblivion. The lonesome howling of angels. A golem playing harmonica late into the night.
The afterlife? Motl thought. It’s the heavenly day after—after the tin-cup coffee, the bedding down with blanket and saddle, a red fire flickering against the vast black night—the next morning when the sun grapples its pink fingers over the horizon, like a man trying to pull himself up a cliff face, ready for the edgeless light of a new day.
A few hours later, disoriented and frozen half to death, Motl woke. It was a new life.
5
“I never can recall that day without doubling over,” my grandfather Motl would tell me. “Though I knew my seed lay frozen. Blue balls biding their time.”
And his quest these two decades later?
The mystic tikkun olam: repairing the world, healing what was broken. Motl had decided he would travel to this distant Swiss snowcap to retrieve his two prodigal dumplings and return them to civilized company where first sperm extraction and then impregnation could occur. And thus, history and his heart could defrost and the future begin.
But before this seminal event occurs, we need to talk about books and death. First, as always, books. Why? Because books tell us how to die.
Unless we die in the middle of one.
Then they tell us that we should have read faster.
VILNIUS, APRIL 1941
Sometimes the mortal soul requires nourishment and so, some three months before he ran from the barber’s, our brisket boy had ambled to Yankel the Butcher’s for a piece of meat. He’d wandered along Žydų gatve—Jewish Street—half-shut eyes filtering out the slant rays of warm spring sun. Were those cacti or his spiky-voiced neighbours kvetching? A stagecoach heavy with strongboxes or a piled-high potato cart? Soon, he’d be riding the dusty range beside purple sage. Now, the smoke of brushfire curled his nose. Something in the tiny garden surrounding his home was burning.
His mother, Gitl the Destroyer, illuminated by orange flame, skin glistening, eyes flickering in grim delight, stood over a pyre of books, crackling, their black type and yellowed pages released as smoke into the shtetl air.
“Why all the time you read of these rude grubers running with cows, punctuating themselves with guns, picking fights with Apaches?” she said. “Your head’s soft enough already. Read the Torah or the newspaper like a regular boy.”
Gitl, Destroyer of worlds. She had gathered his collection of westerns, poured lamp oil over the pile, then snapped a match into flame and ignited the musty butte of them.
What to do with these lariats of fire, this bonfire of fantasies? Motl, bucketless, panicked, unbuttoned his fly, ready to extinguish the flames, relying on such inner resources as he had.
As he did, the meat he had bought at the butcher’s fell from his coat pocket into the fire. “So finally these books have some practical use,” his mother said. “A real cowboy cookout.”
Motl plucked a charred book from the fire, its crooked black pages like broken slate.
Part of a horse, part of a cowboy and part of an “Indianer” remaining on the dark, almost-night cover: a half-burned copy of Karl May’s Mutterliebe. Motl, gripping it by an intact corner, held the title up to his mother, needing to say nothing more than this.
He tucked the smoking book under his arm, did up the buttons of his pants, then went inside.
What to do?
You can bu
rn a book or a library, but to really destroy a story you have to destroy the language and its people. Or write another one.
He went to his bed and slept, the smell of burning books entwined in his skin and clothes.
Rustlers, having discovered some whiskey-shickered cowboys camped in a night poked through by stars, took a torch and set fire to the cowboys’ bedding, their blankets, the saddles they used as pillows while the men slept. Only Motl was awake, having gone down into the coulee to cool himself in the crick water. What to do now that everything was on fire? He examined the face, the clothes, the shape of the rustlers and their horses, the way they moved through the short grasses, the things they said. How they tied the wranglers with their rope. How they shot one in the back. How they didn’t notice him watching from behind a tree on the coulee bank. How they rode off whooping and hee-hawing, stolen horses tied to their own. How their voices echoed off the distant range. The sound of the other men wrapping their dead partner in his singed blanket, clearing their throats instead of speaking or weeping.
Gitl shook him awake.
“Eat now. You’re hungry. Wishing for things to be different makes you hungry.” She held out a plate of the fallen meat, chunked on kasha, flakes of paper stuck to its dark, wrinkled surfaces. Motl picked at it, pulled a flake of story off and read it. “ ‘I’m lonesome,’…hollered…the Stetson…his Colt…a bitter wind over the horizon.”
Motl and his mother in their little kitchen, late at night. Silent save for Motl’s steady chewing and his mother’s surveillance.
When he was a toddler.
A small boy.
A teen, a young adult, a man in his thirties. Now.
She’d watched him on the train as they’d been sent to Siberia. Before his father had died of tuberculosis. As they celebrated and ate and got fat. When they were thin and he ate the only food they had. The food she’d given him.
She’d watched.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You’re a growing boy. And too skinny. Besides, I lose my appetite watching you eat.”