by Gary Barwin
—
Everywhere was movement, flowing away from Kaunas. Families in carts, in cars, trucks, on horseback or walking. Parents anxious and already exhausted, holding their small children’s hands, moving briskly, even smaller children in arms—mother, father, sister, aunt. Bundles, bindles and suitcases, trundle carts. Gitl thought it was possible they could avoid attracting attention, two travellers in a chaos of travel. Did they look Jewish? They kept as far away as they could from Nazi soldiers or troops of White Armbanders—nationalist Lithuanians. When the Germans had arrived, the streets of Kaunas had been lined with Lithuanians throwing flowers and gifts and waving flags. What were they celebrating?
That Germans weren’t Russians. The Russians were Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks were Jews. With the Germans here, Lithuania could return to independence. To greatness. With a bit of murderous spit and Fascist elbow grease, it would become Judenrein, not just clean, but Jew clean. “The Jew shall die though every dog in Europe bark in his favour,” they said, not that many dogs were currently barking.
* * *
—
After half an hour of troubled silence, Gitl said, “So, Mr. Cowboy. You have a gun?”
In truth, the idea of a gun filled Motl with fear. His groin ached hot and cold at the thought, and his head ached more. They could hear gunshots echoing from inside the city, as if the sound came from the lights, the windows, the cars and storefronts. From invisible hands and from nowhere.
Where would he get a gun?
He could think of only three options.
Wrestle a Lithuanian. Kill a German. Pray.
And how to do any of those things with either skill or confidence? He knew how the West was won, one’s hinterland plonked on a horse, what it looked like from under a Stetson, or, at least, what it looked like in words. But now this rawhide maverick might be called to do more than squint and marvel at the bigness of sky, the nearness of stars.
“Why would I have a gun?”
“What are you, a schlepper? A real cowboy has a gun when they shoot.”
* * *
—
Travelling toward Kaunas was like descending level by level to the centre of Dante’s Inferno, finally to arrive at the lake of ice, the fate of the most treacherous.
Halfway there, just outside the town of Kaišiadorys, they came across a woman in a black dress, red flowers on the scarf she dragged behind her. She was muttering, wandering unsteadily on the side of the road. Motl stopped Herzl, and Gitl helped the woman into the cart.
“They threw them into the river. Bayla tried to swim, so they shot her,” she said.
Gitl gathered up the scarf and wrapped it twice around the woman.
“I was so scared,” the woman said. She had been upstairs and so had hidden in the attic when the partisans came and pulled her sister and frail parents out the door. She wanted to save them, to do something, but could only watch from the window, helpless. She’d been walking the road from Kaunas since dawn the previous day. She’d heard horror stories from others.
The Nazis and their special platoons of Lithuanian volunteers had gathered many men and women and forced them to walk into the forest. They’d made them dig their own graves. Then they shot them. Entire villages. Thousands of them.
“My Anya? Her granddaughter, Hannah?” Gitl asked. “They live together in Slobodke. In Kaunas.”
“They were having lunch,” the woman said. “I was so scared. They were having lunch.”
The woman could only repeat the elements of her story and was not able to answer Gitl.
“Eat,” Gitl said, and broke pieces of bread from a loaf and brought them to the woman’s mouth. But the woman wouldn’t eat.
“All right,” Gitl said, handing the pieces to her son. “So, Motl, you eat. You could hide behind a chicken’s shmeckelbone and still there’d be room for a homeland.” He ate.
Motl flicked the reins and they began moving again. The woman made to step out of the moving cart. Gitl tried to hold her back, but the woman resisted.
“So, we let her go,” she said. “Maybe wandering is as safe as going somewhere.”
Motl pulled Herzl to a stop, and the woman climbed down.
9
The sun slung low in the sky, a weary red.
“This is Kaunas. Slobodke district,” Gitl said.
“Yes, Ma, I know.”
The place looked deserted. Theodor Herzl’s hooves plodded over the worn-flat cobbles of Sajungos Plaza and then down Linkuvos Street. Shutters and doors were wrested closed on the fronts of the wooden houses, except where they were hanging or smashed in.
“My sister’s house. It’s down this street,” Gitl said with a great heaviness.
“Yes, Ma, I know.”
They trundled between the steep-roofed and homely bungalows, toward Jurbarko Street and the yeshiva on the corner, and stopped in front of Anya’s house. The shutters on the three windows were closed. Four steps led up to the half doors, both heaved open. Blood was on the steps and threshold.
Gitl jumped from the wagon, and Motl followed. The door was unlocked. It was dark inside, chairs tossed on their sides, the table overturned, silver Shabbos candlesticks in twin pools of spilled wax as if light had hemorrhaged and congealed. Motl lifted the candlesticks and put them in his pockets. The Lithuanians would be back. They had left these valuable things as they struggled to remove Anya, her husband, Moishe, their grandchild Hannah.
The room darkened further as Gitl went to stand in the front doorway.
“Gey gezunterheyt.” Go in good health. See if I care.
“Who are you talking to, Ma?” Motl asked. Was it God, her sister, those who broke into the house?
Motl slipped around her and out into the street. At the neighbours’, he hammered on the front door, calling, “What happened? Where are they?” Then, “It’s Motl, nephew of Anya and Moishe.”
“They don’t take them to the beach for ice cream,” Gitl said.
Motl hammered again. No response.
“Bluma. Lev,” Motl pleaded.
Finally, as if from deep underwater, a male voice. “They came this morning. We hid in the basement. Hannah was at camp.” Despite Motl’s further entreaties, Lev said no more.
“If Hannah is still at Pioneer Camp,” Motl said to his mother, “maybe she’s safe.”
Gitl climbed into the cart. “What we can do, we do,” she said. “We will find her. And my sister.”
Gitl directed them a few streets over. Gee. Haw. Gee.
Whoa. They stopped on a cobbled lane bounded by small houses.
A city slicker once asked a grizzled old rancher, “Surely it’s hard to live so far from civilization?”
And the old rancher replied, “Surely it’s hard to live so near.”
Motl longed for the boundless prairie, its inexhaustible horizon, longed to unhitch Herzl and ride away. But for now, he had to stay put.
“This is the house of the Chief Rabbi of Slobodke, Zalman Ossovsky,” Gitl said. “He came to your bar mitzvah.”
“I remember.”
“He’s a wise man. He will say where are Anya and Moishe. And what to do. And how to get Hannah.”
Gitl unfurled her legs and clambered down. An ornate iron fence, waist-high, enclosed the small garden. “It’s a display. His brother the blacksmith makes them,” she said. “Schmancy things for goyish graves.”
“Christians visit the rabbi to order goyish fences? Or Jews come looking for a Christian funeral?”
“If they were Christian enough to be buried a goy, then maybe they’d be Christian enough not to be killed.”
The house was hushed and dark. Gitl knocked delicately. “Maybe he sleeps. I don’t want to wake him too quickly.”
No answer. Gitl pushed on the door, which opened, and stepped forward slowly, as if enter
ing a tomb.
A shadowy shape, like a small bundle of rags on the threadless carpet.
Gitl fell to her knees, placed a gentle hand on the shape. A dim and indistinct pool had formed around it. It wasn’t wax.
“Motl…” she said. But Motl rushed by her, as if it were not too late. He ran into the rabbi’s study. The fireless grate. Like an autumn forest—a Hebrew forest of yellowed leaves—books and scrolls and papers were scattered across tables and chairs and in stacks on the carpets. An empty wine bottle, a broken cup, the worn velvet bag containing his prayer shawl.
In the dim light, he could see Rabbi Zalman Ossovsky leaning over an open volume of the Talmud. He’d been studying. It appeared as if the grizzled rebbe had dozed off for a few minutes, dreaming maybe of floating over a Torah-coloured field, joining a gesticulating and airborne flock of other greybeards, mumbling and admonishing and debating, the small villages of their communities before them, the great mountain of the Promised Land behind them, their children in the field below. But the rabbi was not sleeping. His headless body rested against the open volume of Talmud, his hands flat on the table as if he was to give a sermon, as if he were pleading, but blood spilled across the page, obscuring the words.
Gitl in the hallway not weeping, her hand still resting tenderly on the head lying on the carpet.
Motl motionless, trying to find a way to move, gritting his teeth against the grim memory of the adage, “One studies not only with the head, but also with the heart.”
* * *
—
Dusk-lit Kaunas was shadows and ghosts. The streets were all empty. Maybe the persecutors had stopped for supper. Nothing like a pogrom to work up an appetite. Motl and Gitl returned to Anya’s house. To be enclosed by walls. To have a world with limits.
“Maybe the half-hitched varmints won’t come back,” Motl said, hoping they had forgotten the candlesticks. Or had stolen their fill from others.
He pushed the table against the door. Might buy them time to make leg bail out the back door if the Lithuanians returned. Soon, there was shouting in the streets, screams, gunshots. All night Gitl and Motl hid, scrabbling in the sage field of dust under the beds, attempting sleep.
Gitl lamenting or praying. That sound which is both.
“Ma,” Motl said during one short lull. “Get some rest.”
“Who can sleep?” she said. “You know what the old crones say: if things don’t get better—they’ll get worse.”
* * *
—
Morning. A lox-orange sky. Outside, the street like a juddering film. German soldiers standing beside cars, old men in long coats, a man chased by another who was beating him with a long stick, the first clutching his head, shirt open, tails fluttering behind him, his prayer shawl dragging against the cobbles, his mouth twisted. Torah scrolls were strewn about like hallway carpets. The dead or wounded on top or beneath, nightmare bedsheets of words, the impotent babbling of scholars.
Smoke from the yeshiva door.
The neighbours’ home—Lev’s home—the door smashed.
Lev stood on the corner, bewildered, disconnected, as if he was standing somewhere else. Or nowhere.
“What has this to do with us?” he said. “Why always us?”
“Lev,” Gitl said. “Lev.” She spoke quietly, as if to a child woken in the night.
“They leave us nothing but our eyes to weep,” he said. “Bluma,” he said, and only now looked at the street, at a shape under parchment.
“Come with us,” Gitl said, steering him to where Theodor Herzl was tied in the yard behind the house, eating whatever he could.
Motl hauled Lev up onto the wagon bench. He harnessed Theodor Herzl and took up the reins. It was eighty miles to the Pioneer Camp in Druskininkai, where young Lithuanians and Jews could spend the summer outdoors.
An hour later, Lev had fallen asleep in the back of the cart.
“So, Mr. Cowboy?” Gitl said, pulling out a loaf of bread from beneath her shawl.
“Ma,” Motl said, flicking the reins, manoeuvring Theodor Herzl onto a side road. “I’m not hungry, but Lev, maybe, when he wakes up?”
“Motl,” Gitl said again, breaking open the loaf. Inside was a revolver.
“You think I’m only made of money?” she said.
10
Motl’s reverie as they rode. At the crack of merciless noon, Motl knocked back his Manischewitz and swung through the saloon doors. Main Street silent as a ghostless tomb, as if you could hear the sound of what was not being said, the sound of held breath, voices muted in horror and fear. Motl strode forward, his chest pushed out like a rooster’s, his two hands resting on the pearl-handled six-shooters given to him in gratitude after he perforated a scoundrel.
More than once.
Until he was scoundrel no more.
Down one end of the street, Big-nosed Fritz, the Nazi gunslinger, stood motionless, eagle-eyed in the pitiless dust, a storm cloud dressed in black leather.
“Quick, Motl,” someone said. “Draw your six-shooters.”
“Won’t help,” Motl said. “No bullets.”
“So why wear guns?”
“Style. Didn’t think I’d need ’em.”
Fritz’s ice-blue eyes regarded Motl without emotion. Did he wonder if the guns were truly unloaded? People said Motl only shot blanks, but would his two guns shoot blanks also? No one knew. Not even the flouncy belles dressed in scarlet at the curvy top of the saloon stairs.
“Fritz,” Motl said. “Let me explain my philosophy. In my world, all German soldiers are called Fritz whether you have three grandparents who are German, or four who aren’t German but speak German and maybe look German. Or maybe because you just look like a Fritz. But let me explain something else.”
He repositioned his hands and cocked his head.
“You see, Fritz, it’s like this. From where I’m standing, there’s only one of you and you’re all alone. I reckon if you know what’s good for your purebred potato dumpling hasenpfeffer self, you’d better get outta here.”
Fritz’s hands, pallid as doves, twitched their murderous wings in the direction of his holsters.
Without warning, the silence bled noise, a single gunshot rippling off the face of buildings, the echoes quickly disappearing as if this noon was nothing but dust and expectation.
Fritz stood still as the street itself stood still. Then one of them moved, falling onto the other with a dry and remorseless thud. Gitl’s rifle slid back out of view into the alley between what was Zalman’s Drygoods and Itzik Fridman’s tailor shop.
Motl raised his eyebrow and held it for a minute. As if to say, “I am a philosopher and all of us here have just learned something about the nature of being, justice and style. Especially about style.”
Then he returned his eyebrow to its default position, dark scrub across his sweaty brow, turned around and strode back into the saloon.
“Barkeep. Manischewitz. A double.”
* * *
—
Noon.
“The hoss needs watering,” Motl said. “Yonder, there’s a homestead.” With a “Gee,” they turned down a trail leading to a decrepit cabin squatting on the dirt of a scrubby farm.
“Is it safe?” Lev asked. “Are they Jews?”
“We’re safe.” Gitl smiled. She had her hand on the gun buried Freud-deep beneath her several skirts.
But something was awry, something about what they heard. Sure, there were birds, the burbling of the running river, the requisite wind in the trees, but it was as if the sounds had been replaced with replicas. Perhaps the entire world had been replaced with a replica. Something certainly was shot to pieces, the clockwork of the world deranged in its maniacal grinding.
Motl got down and led the horse to a dented water trough, and unlike the old saw, it drank.
“Howd
y,” he called. “Hello.” Like too many doors they’d recently encountered, the farmhouse door was open. He squinted around the jamb into the murk of the cottage.
“Hello?”
No one.
But the sound. A frail, birdlike whining. An injured animal? It was as if it came from the cottage itself. Motl pushed the door fully open and stepped inside. In the door light, he saw the small kitchen—turquoise metal stove, rickety table, broken chairs, blackened fireplace. A few cups, some mismatched plates, a jug turned on its side. There was a dark-red couch against a far wall, the stuffing like battered clouds billowed from slashes in the fabric. The wailing became louder. Feeble and desperate. Was an animal nesting in the cushions? A pup in distress?
As Motl approached, he saw the couch like a body, exposed insides covered in blood. There was an iron poker beside the hearth and he used it to carefully push the cushions aside.
The body of a man squeezed inside the frame, below the cut-open batting, wounds in his body corresponding to slashes in the pillows. A bayonet had honeycombed the man.
Wailing. A child, just a baby, lay pressed against the side of the dead man, unharmed. She was very pale, curly blond, her eyelashes translucent.
“Ma!” Motl called, then prised the girl away from her father, wrapping his arms around her. “Ah, little buttermilk,” he said. “Come with me and we’ll set everything right.”
“Once you were this pretty and small,” Gitl said to Motl, coming up behind, taking the girl from him and gazing into her tiny, tear-wet face. “But, I ask myself now, were the labour pains worth it?”
Motl found a spade behind the house and thrust it into the ground with a snick. “Might dig right through to Peking itself,” he said to himself. “Walk straight through the earth, out the other side.” An hour later he didn’t have a passage to China, just a shallow chute to the beyond.
Lev came from the cottage with a bottle of vodka. “In the couch,” he said. “Under the man.”