by Gary Barwin
“In the West they call that ‘coffin varnish,’ ” Motl said. “Though they say a corkscrew never pulled no one out of a hole, it sure helps with putting a body in.”
They sat together, leaning against the back wall of the house, sharing the bottle, listening to Gitl around the front, speaking to the little girl: “My Motl, when he drinks, he becomes another person, and the other person wants a drink too.”
Finally, Motl and Lev staggered back inside and stood unsteadily to consider the sheet draped over the couch.
“You take the legs,” Motl told Lev. “I’ll get the other end.”
Equal parts lifting and dragging, they carried the dead man outside, Lev weeping as they went. “Bluma,” he said.
They covered the man in earth, taking turns to lift and drop spadefuls of dark soil.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw.
And Motl thought of lines from an old song.
Where a body dies,
someone lies down to sleep,
Where a body dies,
someone wakes.
They returned to the shack. The little girl was now asleep in a half-closed dresser drawer, and Gitl had prepared some food for them, a concoction made of weevily flour and near-brackish water. No point using up the fresh bread.
“Sling your teeth over this,” Motl said to Lev. “It’s like chewing saddle.”
“Next time, learn to boil for yourself some air,” Gitl said. “Though you seem good at that already.”
After they ate, they sat around the table. There was nowhere else to go unless they gathered on the empty coffin of the couch and its sundered pillows.
“So, what about the baby?” Lev asked. It was clear she shouldn’t share their treacherous path toward Hannah. It was already too dangerous. Besides, she would only make it more difficult for them. “We need to find somewhere to put her.”
“Where? The moon, a cabbage patch, Christians?” Gitl asked.
“Somewhere she’ll be safe. There must be someone who’ll take her.”
* * *
—
Through the farmhouse windows, the sun shrugged over the red edge of day, twilight merging into night. The fields stretched out black and gloomy. One dim star gloamed uncertainly in the southwest sky. The silence was broken only by a faint pattering of leaves in the night wind. Gitl lit a candle that cast flickering wraiths of shadow about the small cabin.
A small, dishevelled bed was pushed against the side wall. “I don’t share anyone’s sheets,” Gitl told Lev. “You sleep there.”
She gathered the wounded pillows and threw them on the couch. From a small dresser she gathered skirts and dresses and smoothed them over the pillows. “I must sleep fast. The baby will wake soon—such a big fresser—she’ll be hungry.” Then she lay down and covered herself with an overcoat. One quick oy of a sigh and she was out.
There was a loft below the gabled roof, actually more of a shelf a few planks wide. Motl stood on the dresser and hoisted himself up. He attempted sleep on piled burlap sacks and rags, but he twisted and tossed. You can be lonesome even when your ears are filled with other people’s snores, lonely even when you smell their feet. And so Motl’s mind drifted in the dark.
A vast heave of purple uplands, castle-crowned cliffs. A town on the edge of the sand-rimmed wilderness, and therein a village girl with snow-white skin. She plucks goose feathers, plunges ivory hands deep into brine-filled barrels, the hands themselves quicksilver fish. Yet still she is redolent of almonds, braided loaf, raisins. A candle-bright smile, teeth new white as a Shabbos tablecloth. And now the long reach of late afternoon shadow. As the sun sinks, she clangs the dinner bell, hailing ranger-riders for grits and sausage, her father shuffling in from the smithy or yeshiva study house.
Ah, floral-skirted rider of stallions, she who would ride with him through violet sage in the evening’s purple shadows, beribboned hair honey-gold as the long light. His Dulcinea, his prairie girl.
And Motl, this song in his head always: Oh, in the drowsy farmyard, the open corrals, the green alfalfa fields, I already love you, would seek for you the places where grief, fear and rage do not rampike my spine with fear, the untried canyons of the fissured heart. We’d ranch in a homestead in the high range, cliff-rimmed and sealed by boulders where through a rock face crack only the cool stream escapes and above birds fly free. We’d sleep within the grove of cottonwoods, concealed from the world and its miseries. I’ve seen you on the cobbles of Yatkever Street, beneath the arch of Gitke-Toybe Lane. I’ve dreamed of you bathing in the mikvah or playing queen onstage. Your curls and blushes, your radiant eyes and coral lips. Your rindles, your coulee. I would quest mountains, seek what is bereft, my hope cryogenic and awaiting the future. Together we elide time, we leap past and present, two angels floating above history, our alabaster feathers raised by thermals in a troposphere beyond pain.
Somewhere together in this ardent, angel-feathered sky, Motl passed into sleep and dreamed of nothing until dawn.
11
Half-light glimmered through the cabin, and he was woken by the sound of the little girl wailing. The couch empty, the door open, chairs knocked down. Motl climbed gingerly from his roost, looking carefully around, then slipped his head through the door and surveyed the yard. He stepped outside and made a circuit of the little house. Theodor Herzl was gone to some unknown Zion, as was, likely before him, their cart.
“Ma,” he hissed. “Ma!” No response. “Lev?”
He saw one of Lev’s boots fallen in the hay-strewn dust behind a tree. A braille of splashed blood nearby. Lev and Gitl had disappeared, the baby, still wailing, left behind.
“Ma!” he shouted, though he knew it was futile. “Mother. Mother. Mother.” But he held himself back from panicking. If he began, when would it end?
“It’s okay,” he called to the little girl inside. “It’s okay.” Knowing that he had only the ritual of the words and the soothing sound of his voice to make it true. He went back into the cabin and held her and rocked. “First thing we have to do, my little blintz,” he said, “is to find you some food.”
* * *
—
They set off immediately. On foot. He’d find somewhere safe—another farmhouse, a town—or a traveller, someone on the road who looked kind, or at least not murderous. In war, if you’re not an enemy, you’re a friend. And a friend might as well be family. Someone who would take this foundling. This surviveling. “Look,” he’d say. “So blond. She’ll bring you safety.”
As he walked, he scanned for signs of Gitl and Lev. Of the horse. As soon as he found a place for the baby, he’d find them.
He held the girl under his jacket, as if that would protect her from everything, and he began jogging. But Motl had little experience. Babies aren’t books and they wriggle. The girl heaved and wailed and thrashed, then slipped from his embrace and fell onto the stony path.
“Oh my little pitseleh,” he said as he gathered her up in his arms. “Hush, hush,” he said, imitating the young mothers he’d heard in the market.
The pale peach of her head was bleeding and Motl could do nothing but cup his hand against it and keep going. They had already been on their way for help.
Motl came across an old man sitting in a small black car parked by the side of the road. The driver—a Lithuanian named Józef—saw the blood still seeping through Motl’s fingers where he cradled the baby’s head and found a scarf in his car and offered it. “For the bublitchki,” he said. The bright-coloured cloth carried the powerful scent of flowers, perfume rising, a field full of lavender and weapons-grade honey—the smell of the old man’s lost wife, killed in a German air raid. He was not only giving up something that had been hers, but her powerful presence, which found its way through his nose to the deep parts of remembering. But in truth, Motl thought, if the scarf was anything to go by, her smell billowed through the world like
a scented monsoon, throwing everyone to the ground as her memory insisted on survival.
Józef told them that he wasn’t able to help but he had a cousin who could. She was alone, her husband was gone, and maybe she could look after the baby. It’d be good for her to have something to do.
But why trust this man, or his cousin?
If he was to search for his mother, for Lev, for Anya and Hannah, if he was to continue on his quest, Motl would need someone to look after the baby. Travelling with her was beyond his abilities, and besides, she had already been hurt in his care.
And this was a baby. You’d have to be more than the usual percentage Nazi to harm a baby, and one that wasn’t even Jewish.
12
He arrived in the luminous dark, a sliver of moon, a milk-like spill around clouds. He crept down the long lane, keeping to the line of ragged trees, the little girl held close under his jacket. She’d whimpered for hours, finally falling asleep.
This had better be the right farm, he thought. Else we’ll be strung up like Hebrew hogs. He touched more than knocked on the farmhouse door, then stepped back into the shadows, ready to disappear entirely.
A sliver of amber door light, then a rectangle, coffin-large.
“Józef said you’d help,” he whispered to the woman who’d appeared there.
She closed the door. Motl waited, unsure if weapons and puncture would be involved in their next communication.
“Here’s bread,” she said when she came back, passing a loaf to him. “And a sausage.” She told Motl to hide in the milk house, down the end of the garden, and then closed the door. Until he had a chance to properly speak to her, he thought it too risky to give her the baby—he hadn’t even opened his coat to show her—so he carried her with him into the milk house and they found straw and the remains of an old chair. He settled the baby on the chair and she lay back, her eyes half-closed. He fed her torn morsels of bread, tipped her mouthfuls of water from a bottle.
They slept, the girl on the pillowless chair, Motl bedded down uncomfortably on a meagre pile of humped straw beside her.
The chill of early morning, the sky pink as a cow’s nose.
The woman’s voice outside. “They’re here,” she said. “They’re in the farmhouse.” She pointed to a small window at the back of the shed. “Climb out, cross the brook, hide under the hedge. I told them I would get them milk and some breakfast.”
The woman scurried back up the path. Motl gathered the still-sleeping baby, stood on the back of the chair and clambered from the window. The brook ran quickly but was shallow, just a stippling thing. Motl rolled under the hedge, only his boots and pant legs cold with creek water, and kept quiet.
Soon he heard shouts about the farm. The baby still slept and Motl turned to song. Or rather, he imagined his head its own opera house, closed the doors and sang.
don’t say nothin’
ain’t safe to question now
here in this world
moon jumps over cow
It was a chant, a charm, a place to go. There was death and tragedy, but he understood the tale, could always reckon some kind of sense in the western’s cut-a-rust melodies.
He bunked down to wait it out. The sun bright when he woke.
The woman stood on the opposite bank. “They’re gone. An hour ago. I waited till I thought it safe.”
Motl looked at the baby. Still asleep? She’d hardly moved in hours, her body limp. She was getting worse. “The baby…” he said.
“I can see.”
He leaned close to the baby’s frail mouth, lips red like a wind-flower, hoping she still breathed.
“Bring her to me and I’ll help,” the woman called.
“Shh,” Motl said, holding up his hand.
He heard nothing, but her small exhalations were warm on his ear. Alive. She was alive. He covered her with his jacket and stepped gingerly across the crick with this small bundle of girl. He delivered her into the woman’s outstretched arms.
“Mergaitė,” the woman said in Lithuanian—little girl—and carried her into the house.
Motl followed her, dazed by sleep and fear. Chickens ran free, their sudden propulsions, aimless pecking and idiotic bawk-bawking some kind of metaphor. Small rue flowers and yellow herb of grace grew around the edges of the yard with bees entangled in their blooms. What was his tale? Where would he go next? The Motl story: His missing mother. His missing balls. His fear and survival.
He’d make sure this nameless baby was safe and then—could he find his mother? Should he attempt to cross the Nazi frontier and make it to Zimmerwald?
By the time he’d entered the slate-floored kitchen, the woman, through some kind of maternal enchantment, had the baby propped on a chair and was spooning cabbage soup and dumplings into her expectant face. Also, since she was not able to say anything beyond babble, the woman had christened her Sofia.
“Look, she eats like a warhorse,” the woman said.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. Then, indicating himself, he said, “Motl.” And then, “But what’s your name?”
She was Lena, and her husband had been gone for weeks. He’d left to work at an aunt’s farm but hadn’t returned. She didn’t know what had happened but worried he had stayed away because he’d helped anti-Nazi partisans in the past and was in danger. Maybe he was hiding in the forest.
“Leave this girl with me. Sofia. I will keep Sofia safe.”
Lena packed him a sack of food—sausages, a bottle of milk, bread—then told him to go. What choice did he have? She told him it wouldn’t be long before the return of the lethal White Armbanders. She could say the girl was her cousin’s child. And not Jewish.
He thanked her and left through a field of cows grazing on stubby grass spackled with purple blooms and poppies then plunged into the primeval broccoli green of the surrounding forest. There’s never a straight route between trees and so he took the knight’s path, zigzagging away from the ravenous Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian pawns.
13
STROŠIŪNŲ FOREST
Motl in the forest, creeping uphill between pines. His plan: hide and make a plan. Determine which direction leads away from history.
First, though, he would search for his mother.
He thought of a time before his bar mitzvah, his mother at the table, peeling something. It was dusk, there were candles.
“When a crook kisses you, count your teeth. When you’re born, count your days,” she said. What was she peeling?
Joy.
Her philosophy was based on excoriation—stripping away the happiness of the present, layer by layer, until there was nothing but the dwindled, scraped and unalterable past. “When I was young, it was worse. It was more difficult. But it was also better, because we knew what was true,” she’d say.
The cool damp of the forest air. The sweet, acrid, spongy crunch of pine needles. The green-filtered, perpetual coniferous dusk. Somewhere Lena’s husband was hiding with other anti-Nazi partisans. Maybe the easiest way to locate resisters was to pretend to be a Nazi and they’d find him. However, there could be unintended consequences. Death, for instance.
And what was the greatest act of rebellion? Living. Unless first place went to creating life. When found, his Lost Boys would be agents of change. Thunder from the mountain. While Nazis obliterated, he would create. His pearlescent homunculi would leap onto stallions and ride. And soon a skimmy or two would be born, Jewish and alive.
Motl wandered, scanning the woods for geography, figuring a butte or arroyo, cutback or wallow would be the best place to hide if on the dodge. He read the ground for footprints or story as would Winnetou or Hiawatha. There was scat of several varieties. Paw prints. Broken rock and lichens. But nothing legible as human.
Then the sound of a rifle being cocked. He’d found the human.
“Hands up
.”
“I have no gun,” he said. “Only candlesticks.”
“Lay ’em on the ground,” the voice said. “And slowly.” Voices and guns poking out of the wilderness were becoming commonplace for Motl.
Carefully, Motl removed the candlesticks from inside his jacket and set them on the forest floor. The trees were reflected in their smudgy silver and seemed to gather about as if the forest were a room at Shabbos.
From behind the bristle of branches, first the barrel of a rifle and then a red-headed woman appeared, swaddled in what once might have been clothing. She was followed by a squat man, himself bristly as the forest, a patchwork of lichen, paw prints, broken rock and scat.
The man stooped to collect the candlesticks and then backed away.
“I have sausages too,” Motl said. And then, in slow motion, drew a gnawed one from a pocket. “And,” he said, pausing for effect, “I have bread.”
A tableau in the forest. Man holding out half-eaten sausage. Man opposite holding candlesticks. Woman with pointed gun. A Litvak Mexican Deli Standoff. The barely discernible flicker in the man’s eye as he looks at the sausage. The woman’s bread gaze.
“I have more,” Motl said. “Also, something else you should know. I’m a Jew.”
And so, armed with only the ingredients for a nosh, Motl survived his first showdown, with, it turned out, two outlaws who were Jewish and on the same side.
He followed the couple farther into the forest, where a small group—Robin Hood–like—was sheltering together. A group of odds and sods, driftwood escaped from the tide. There was a scoliotic doorway constructed of logs leading to a low-lying cabin that they’d covered over with leaves and branches. They had been living on food they pilfered from local farms, but because of recent raids by gangs of White Armbanders over the last few days, such forays had become too dangerous. And so these desperadoes were eager to chaw the vittles bagged in Motl’s sack. Even their tapeworms were hungry, as the old ranchers said.