by Gary Barwin
6
KAUNAS (KOVNO)
LATE JUNE 1941
We’ve spoken of books, now to speak of death. It won’t be a challenge. There’s plenty to choose from. A week before his trip to the barber’s, Motl attended a funeral a few hours away, in Kaunas.
Though not a professional mourner, Motl was sometimes paid to pray. He’d add in weeping at no extra charge. Someone said that eighty percent of life is just showing up. So the other twenty percent must include some kind of existential monkey business where you also show up alive. In the case of a Jewish funeral, unless it’s yours, showing up is even more important, because ten Jews are required so that there can be prayers.
Motl, having proven himself good at remaining alive, derived some of his income by being so. He was often paid to be the tenth member of a minyan.
“This being alive,” he’d say, “it’s a living.”
Of course, each one of the ten was required to be a man. But in such situations, there was no inventory of the contents of one’s trousers, and Motl with his patchy beard and perennial skirtlessness appeared as much their idea of a man as any. Who knows what someone isn’t hiding beneath his clothes?
Besides, it was no one’s business except the circumcising mohel’s. And it was too late for that. Also, he wasn’t not a man. He didn’t know what he felt. A steer, a gelding or something else than that.
And since the German invasion on June 22, no amount of money could buy enough mourners for all the dead. Besides, the mourners were the dead. And so here Motl was, mourning without pay.
It was Mendel the Carpenter’s funeral. He was a cousin once removed. And now he was removed forever.
Because all of life—everything—is, ultimately, like a book—even if that book is only a commentary on the book beside it—of course, it was raining. Bitterly. Ironically. Because it didn’t know what else to do. Motl pushed between minyan men five and six as they stood around the grave, the collars of their dark coats pulled up around their bent necks. The rabbi leading the chanting of the mourners’ Kaddish.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw.
Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name, the mourners chanted.
They didn’t say how Mendel, the dead man, had died. So many had been murdered these last few days. By German soldiers. By Lithuanians taking advantage of the opportunity and encouraged by Nazis. It was Lithuanians who had found Mendel walking a road around the north of Kaunas trying to escape a pogrom in Slobodke, the Jewish suburb.
They had brought Mendel back into the centre of Kaunas, to Lietūkis Garage at 43 Vytautas Avenue. Mendel dragged to the front of the gas station with other Jews.
Horse dreck everywhere, the garage also used as a stable.
Twenty Jews surrounded by armed Lithuanians. A crowd watching. Children on the shoulders of their fathers. Women standing on boxes.
“Norma”—move it—the Lithuanians shouted, and hit the Jews with iron bars until they fell to the ground and were made to crawl in the abundant shit of cart horses scattered everywhere. The Jews were forced to gather the shit with their bare hands. The Lithuanians continuing to beat them until finally the Jews stopped moving. The dead and the dying. A hose snaking on the ground, turned on to wash blood into the gutter.
Then a young man leaning on a club thick as a human arm, tall as his chest, raised his hand. Thirty more Jews in a line behind him.
A casual wave from him and one of the Jews steps forward. The man raises his club and beats him. With each blow, the assembled crowd cheers. Assistants pile the fallen onto the heap of already dead Jews, and the young man motions for another to come forward.
Mendel steps forward.
As he had to.
He was surrounded by Lithuanians with wooden clubs, rifles, handguns, iron bars. Every tiny compliance was another second more. A chance the future might change. A statement of belief that this couldn’t be true. That the world would wake from this dream. That he would.
When all fifty Jews were in a pile, the man put down his club, went over to a small black case and took out an accordion. He put the straps around his shoulders, unfastened the clip holding the bellows together, climbed on top of the heap of Jews. He placed his right hand on the keyboard, his left on the little buttons that were the bass notes, and began playing. This man, later called the Death Dealer of Kovno, blond, about twenty-five. He played the Lithuanian national anthem. The spectators sang.
Motl, standing at Mendel’s open grave, chanted with the other mourners.
B’allmaw dee v’raw chir’usei.
In the world which He created as He willed.
Mendel’s widow, Chiena, and Rochel, his teenaged daughter, standing on the other side of the newly cut earth, the naked casket awaiting its spadefuls of soil.
Chanting and trying to understand why. How can this be what He wanted?
And He had to include an accordion?
A neighbour had run across Kaunas to find his wife and daughter, who had been staying with cousins in another part of the city while Rochel went to school. Everyone running around him, thugs pushing victims into the River Vilija, shooting those who didn’t drown. Houses burning filled with screams, Lithuanian “freedom fighters” blocking firefighters trying to help.
When Rochel reached the garage, the cement was slick with blood, and water was still pouring from the hose, though no one remained alive. She approached the dead with horror and panic and fear. Tried not to look or notice anything, tried not to recognize or imagine. Then she saw her father’s thick red carpenter’s hand stretched out over his broken face. Of the rest of him, only the shoulders of his dark suit, soiled and torn, were visible from beneath the dead. The neighbour helped her drag his body into an alley and wrap it in a sheet, then haul him, like a heavy carpet, into a borrowed car. They drove away, their set faces holding in their grief and horror, praying not to be discovered. Arriving at the cousins’ house under a moon obscured by clouds, Rochel opened the door quietly, found her mother waiting, worried her husband had not yet returned.
7
VILNIUS
JULY 1941
Now we talk of leaving. In those days, the world having given up most of its spin, heavy as it was with dust and ash and the blood-soaked boots of war, Motl told me he would often dream he was a person of size, horse-wide, chesterfield-rumped, full as the pink bosoms of a cow, grown great from happy satisfaction and an intimate familiarity with cherry pie. Why? Because it would mean his story would have been one of ease and bounty. Of bounce.
“But to tell you the truth,” he’d say, “I was impotent and scrawny as a crack in the dried-up earth or a witch’s crooked finger accusing the world.
“Still,” he’d add, “I commend my heart for continuing to pump through those times. And while I could have rode out to where the sky was but a clot of buzzards in the pitiless heat, hankering in a circle for my weak nerves to expire so’s they could pick the historical flesh from my unfortunate spine, while I could have rode there and laid upon the inflexible earth of Lithuania, waiting for my story to be done and the satisfactions allotted my wispy soul to be spent and evaporated, I did not so lay for my heart continued its drumming, and it I did not wish to disappoint.”
And so instead, after he’d scuttled from the barber’s, he scurried to the clapboard house he shared with his mother in Vilnius.
His mother. Gitl the Destroyer. The source of an entire genre of jokes.
If she gave you two sweaters, a red and a blue, and you came to the table wearing the red, she’d say, “It’s so cold in here you need a sweater, big man?”
She was that thing beyond old, not a witch exactly, but a bristly gnarl of sheer stubbornness. Time and the world could not be allowed to think they could get the better of her. Not without her putting up two twisted dukes and fighting back.
“Also,” Motl said,
“I needed her. It wasn’t as if I was going correct myself. At least, not properly.”
When he arrived home, the door was bolted from the inside.
“Mama,” he said, knocking at the door. “Mama.”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me. Who else calls you Mama?”
“Maybe it’s a trick. How do I know it’s you?”
“Ask my opinion. When I’m wrong, you’ll know it’s me.”
She opened the door and looked up into the face of her only son.
“This you call a shave?”
“Mama, there’s no time. The Nazis are heading this way. We must leave.”
“Looking like that?”
* * *
—
Gitl could not conceive of leaving before Motl had a proper supper. And a decent night’s sleep. And a proper breakfast. Would there be food in the outside world? Would there be sleep?
And so they left as the dawn moon was setting in the cloudless sky, shadows crawling along the curving Vilnius streets, their hoss’s hooves clopping on the cobbles as they travelled under archways, over the bridge and across the Neris. Motl and his mother, setting out for the lonesome hinterland of Lithuania and the uncertain southeastern border.
The streets silent but for the wind and, through the windows, old men on their backs in bed, open-mouthed and sighing, not knowing enough to hold their breath while history came to town. Motl and his mama had hidden their possessions under the straw of their little cart, hitched up their hoss and left in the pale dark. So long, little home where discouraging words were not exactly seldom heard.
“Gee up,” Motl had said, and shaken the reins. And so his quest had begun.
* * *
—
What they carried.
Two silver Shabbos candlesticks, once Motl’s great-grandmother’s, in their shroud of wax.
His late father’s prayer book, worn soft as a glove from the touch of his hand. Did Motl believe the words it said? Had his father?
“Depends how much I need to,” his father had said.
What else? A knife. Matches. A bottle of schnapps. When finished, they could use it for water. In the meantime, it was a valuable salve for contusions, both inside and out.
In Motl’s pocket, some lint, a bent screw and a single clandestine book, the western Di Virginianer by Owen Wister, recently sent from America by Frank, his Cleveland cousin.
His mother had wrapped herself in shawls and, beneath them, her own mother’s good white tablecloth.
There were some apples and some oats to feed the pony. His father had called their first hoss Rasputin, because it seemed inextinguishable. Turned out it was as extinguishable as he was. Motl acquired another after they both were gone. Four days after trying out several bronco names—Silver, Trigger, Coco, Loco, Buttermilk, Blackjack and Champion—he named it Theodor Herzl, because, old paint that it was, it was rarely willing to go in the direction asked, but instead insisted on a path of its own choosing, which Motl imagined might be toward Zion.
They carried several loaves his mother had baked because, as she said, if they catch us and we have to die, then at least we won’t die hungry.
They brought no money. Why provide for the kerchief-faced Lithuanian varmints who would hold up the familial caravan only to shake shiny bits from its sacks? Don’t fill your pockets with salmon when you’re walking between bears. Besides, the saddle-skinned heroes of his westerns never carried money.
“And to be honest,” Motl said, “I had no money. Both my heart and wallet were empty.”
He’d decided they’d travel toward the border with Poland, then on to Minsk, in Byelorussia. The Germans had not yet invaded. And the Russians? When it’s a choice between a devil and a scoundrel, you choose the one who is not killing you yet.
Then, when he’d found a safe place to stow his mother, he’d head for Zimmerwald, to the glacier, to new life.
* * *
—
They turned south, clopping over the cobbles behind their old pony, wending their way between others who were also in the streets, leaving, or wandering, unsure what to do. Behind them, rising above the city, the Hill of Three Crosses. A giant could sashay across Vilnius, using churches for stepping stones, not ever touching ground, but that selfsame brute could also spit his chaw most any direction and slather a rabbi brocha-ing in prayer at any of a hundred synagogues of this Jerusalem of the North.
At least, for now.
They’d just passed the baroque frou-frou of the Church of St. Casimir when his mother held up her parsnip-root hand. “Stop,” she said. “Take me back.”
“But the Germans,” he began.
“Soup,” she said. “I left the soup on the stove.”
There were few as bullheaded as Gitl when she got a notion.
“Motl,” she said. “Now.”
Between their lives and the soup, she favoured the soup.
“Haw,” Motl said to Herzl, and steered him into an alley to turn around. The great Zionist nag stopped and stuck his big face in the leavings around Abe the Grocer’s door.
Then, a gunshot.
Herzl bolted. All they could do was hang on as the cart buffeted against the alley walls. Motl wrenched the reins, but the hackles in Herzl’s horse brain were urging his bones to outrun his skin.
Run, the hackles said. A horse is safest at full speed.
And so Herzl galloped along the alley until they burst out onto the wide road.
And sent a Nazi soldier flying, Einsatzgruppen over Schutzstaffel.
Then Herzl stopped.
Gitl looked over the side of the cart at the soldier. He lay on his back, gazing senselessly at the sky, apparently not quite certain what had occurred. Her dried-apple face, furrowed like the bellows of a mummified accordion, loomed into view.
“Bread?” she said, holding out a loaf.
Knee by knee, the soldier got up, brushing and rearranging, patting himself down, taking inventory, assuring himself of the tangible presence of his own body. Ja. It was there and missing no pieces. He found his hat a few feet away, his rifle beneath him. Blood dripped from a nostril. He wiped it with his buttonless sleeve. He returned his hat to his head, righting his rifle, which he held like a baby. Then he remembered the story and his face hardened. Blue eyes like two rifle sights.
He was a young man, fresh-faced and innocent. Apparently, having been stripped of his lederhosen, mountainside and goat, he’d fallen into the crucible of war and couldn’t tell his alp from his valley.
“Heil Hitler,” he snapped and, with predictable choreography, thrust a hand upward in salute and clicked his boots together. He was preparing to Anschluss the living Österreich out of both of them.
“Bread,” Gitl said again, and pushed a loaf toward him.
He stepped back, avoiding it like a knife.
“Mama,” Motl said, pulling on her arm. “Officer,” he said. “Mama and me are regretfully sorry for this mishap. Our hoss, you see…”
But then in one deft motion his mother tore the bread in two. The German raised his eyebrows and smiled. He was a boy again. Greedy. The inside of the loaf was stuffed with a thick stack of paper money.
“Bread,” Gitl said, and handed both halves to the soldier.
“Go,” the soldier said, “schnell!” and waved them away.
Motl flicked the reins. “Gee,” and they continued down the wide road, joining with others hurrying to the famous Gate of Dawn.
His mother’s bread was like so many other delicacies: it’s the ingredients that count.
* * *
—
Once, there were ten gates surrounding the city, but now only the Gate of Dawn remained, a sacred portal to the south. Once, Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, an infinitely younger and infinitely more Catholic mother than Git
l, came to the rescue of her people. Swedes had captured the city and the Virgin Mary, golden-beamed radiator of divine mercy, arranged for a few metaphysical God-strings to be pulled to crush the invaders. Nothing like dropping the heavy iron Gate of Dawn to spatchcock some Swedish soldiers on its sharp ends to make a point.
“Mama,” Motl said as they trotted in the direction of the Gate. “What about the soup?”
“Go faster,” she said. “Soon that Kraut will discover it’s only a few rubles on either side of a stack of old scrap paper.”
8
VILNIUS TO KAUNAS
Motl and Gitl, outside the Gate of Dawn, ten minutes down a side road leading away from Vilnius. Now Gitl insisted they turn round, head for Kaunas.
This was meant to be Motl’s quest and he expected to be able to call the route, but already with Gitl it was the cart before the hoss, telling the cowboy where to go.
“Ma,” Motl protested. “The only safe road is out.”
“Anya, my sister. Her daughter, son-in-law. Her granddaughter, Hannah.”
“But Kaunas?” Motl said. “No reckoning the blood in that Nazi-poxed hole.”
“You want we rescue her from somewhere else?” Gitl said, black eyes squinted to obsidian. An invitation to make the right choice but also a challenge. To re-evaluate his devotion to family. To his mother.
He pulled on the reins and turned Herzl around. His bollocks could wait.
“Kaunas,” Gitl said definitively, and for once even Herzl didn’t argue.
They wouldn’t go back through the Gate but would travel the perimeter of the city.
“Let’s keep quiet and mind our own business,” Gitl said.
“What business do I have to mind?”
“I didn’t want to be the one to say.”
* * *