by Gary Barwin
They gathered round, sitting on rocks and fallen logs, sharing Motl’s small store, and recounted how they’d arrived there. Three of them, Tzeitel, Pinchas and Mordecai, explained that they had been sardine-packed in a trench but had survived.
Sardine-packed: making Jews lie down beside each other, alternating head to foot, so more could be crammed in. Then machine-gunned. Then more piled on like logs. And again. Thousands. Women and girls often made to strip naked. Terrified Jewish boys ordered to go through the bodies and take gold teeth and rings. Sometimes pulling the teeth before the person died. Boys made to play accordion or violin for the drunken soldiers in between killing, or else their parents would be shot next. The parents shot anyway.
“Everyone was dead,” Tzeitel said. “I waited until night and then I crawled away. I became a maggot, a snake, but I crawled away. I crawled away and survived.”
“A woman called Lena helped me,” Motl said. “I was hoping to find her husband—do you know him?”
“He’s over there.” Mordecai pointed toward a man, almost obscured by branches, sitting some distance away on a fallen tree. “Matis.”
The man said nothing.
“He doesn’t speak. He was accused of being a Jew,” Mordecai explained as if that explained anything. “They scalped his beard.”
Matis’s face was fissured like badlands, all red knurls.
“He went to help a relative with her farm and was taken by surprise and attacked by the neighbours as he attended the chickens. After that, he cannot—or does not—speak. He does not want to be alone, but yet he does not—yet—want to be with others. And he won’t return home, for his own safety and, especially, for his wife’s. He won’t even allow us to send a message. So he remains between we Jews and the forest,” Mordecai said, then carried some bread and sausage over to Matis, holding it out tentatively to the man, who looked fearful.
“It’s okay,” Mordecai said. “It’s a sausage, not snakes. It’s from Lena. She’s safe.”
Matis took the food, holding it as if a bomb were in his hands and he hadn’t decided whether he wanted it to explode. Finally, he ate.
They watched in silence as if observing a deer motionless between trees.
Then Tzeitel stood and began to speak into the forest. “One day, years from now,” she said, “when I have lived a lifetime in America, or maybe Africa, one day when I have lived for years far from here and I have become a crone who can only dribble and hobble, totter and leak, on that day I will return with my children and my children’s children. I will take them into the forest and I will shout: ‘Nazis, Lithuanians. You who were my neighbours and chose to murder us. I have lived many lifetimes and yet I have returned. I have returned with my children. I have returned with my children’s children. I have returned so you can see us. An old grandmother with her children and their children. You are nothing now, and I have survived.
“ ‘And I have returned to speak to the dead, also. To tell you that I have lived. I have lived to see my children and the children born to them, and all of us mourn and remember you who are buried in the soil beneath these trees. We live in your name and in the name of your children and their children who were never born. We take you with us always, for without you there can be no future.’ ”
And then she sat down and took a bite of sausage and tore a piece off the bread. “But here I am imagining that I’ll live to the end of today or tomorrow,” she said, and took a vigorous chomp on the bread.
“I’ll never come back—even if I do survive,” Pinchas said. “If I’m lucky—wherever I am—I’ll feel like a ghost. And this place itself will seem a ghost. Nothing the same. Everything haunted. As if seen through gauze. Of course, a ghost is all gauze. But gauze makes sense, for everything is a wound and being a ghost is a dressing, a protection, instead of returning with no veil. Haunting would be awful, though not as excoriating as reliving, like a living wound. It’d be like watching one of those films we’ve heard the Nazis are taking of all of this and seeing your father lying dead in a trench. Or your mother chased down the street, beaten with a stick. And then you recognize yourself fallen to the ground in the main square, clutching your head, keening, hoping to die.”
Mordecai went into the cabin and returned with a box that clinked as he walked. “There’s a farmer nearby. Grows potatoes, carrots, beets. We were going to do like usual—borrow a few supplies for supper—but he was standing like a murderous scarecrow at the end of his fields with a loaded gun. We could have shot him, but these days a village needs even its idiots—so we took some beer instead. Standing where he was, he didn’t see us sneak into the barn. But don’t worry, we didn’t take all of his beer.”
“Yet…” said Tzeitel.
Mordecai handed each one of them a brown bottle and passed around an opener. “I’d say, L’chaim—To Life—but that seems too on the nose.”
“I’d rather be with you all than with the best people I know,” Pinchas said, raising his bottle. “To our health.”
“Our health,” they said, and drank for a time in silence.
After they emptied their bottles, Mordecai issued them each a second. Then several more.
“There was this sheriff,” Motl began, feeling the beer. “Travelled to the frontier. Didn’t start out as a sheriff, but his trunk got lost and he stepped off the train with nothing except a star he’d found beneath his seat. Now, he wasn’t really sheriff material. His trunk had been filled with books and a single change of gitch—he’d reckoned on becoming a schoolteacher. He only put the star on his chest because he was frightened when he stepped off the train in a dark, deserted place. The townsfolk found him asleep on the bench at the station next morning, saw the star, figured he was the new sheriff they’d been waiting for. Now, though he was no sheriff, he was no fool. He became not only the sheriff but also the town undertaker. A win-win situation. There turned out to be something strange about Sheriff Elijah—Eli. He insisted on burying every man still wearing his gun. And always in the place they fell, whether outside the whorehouse or in the middle of the main street. After a year or so—this was the Wild West, after all—there were dozens of men buried with their guns all over town.
“Then one dark day a notorious gang, the Mazikeen Rangers, invaded the town. Dozens of motley varmints wearing black bandanas and each emanating some startlingly noxious odours. They drank all the whiskey in the saloon then stood pickled in the main street with their guns drawn, saying, ‘This town is ours.’
“Sheriff Eli walked into the middle of the street, cool as a dead man, and took out a little book from inside his vest. He kissed it—a quick little smooch—and then returned it to his pocket. ‘Now, boys,’ was all he said. And from beneath the ground, all those men buried with their guns began shooting. It was like lightning and thunder from the earth itself. After the clouds of black powder cleared, the townspeople observed not a single Mazikeen Ranger standing. Instead, they lay in the dirt, sweet black smoke rising from perforations in their all too mortal remains.”
The partisans looked down at their bottles, whether meditating on the bittersweet triumph of the dead or the sad impossibility of such a story, it wasn’t clear. Eventually, half-asleep, they all wandered into the cabin.
It wasn’t as shabby as Motl expected. The dank, cramped insides of an old cow, birch logs as support beams. The beds were potato sacks filled with other potato sacks. Mordecai, bearing one of Motl’s former candlesticks, led the way, cupped hand in front of the flame as if supporting an infant’s vulnerable skull. Tzeitel and Pinchas shared a sackcloth bed, pulling a cartful of rags over them as they settled down. Motl was offered his own hummock of old rags near the door. Mordecai gave Matis, Lena’s husband, a revolver and sent him outside to be first watch. Motl must have looked surprised.
“If there’s anyone we can trust to keep a lookout, it’s Matis,” Mordecai explained. “He’ll warn us of the
sudden appearance of a tree. Or if the moon looks treacherous. And if he uses the revolver on himself, it’ll wake us and someone else can take over.”
After some minutes, Motl heard whispers and squirming from Tzeitel and Pinchas’s corner of the cabin. “When life gives you lemons,” Motl’s father would say, “find someone to screw.” But he hadn’t meant it this way. At least, as far as Motl knew. Eventually, he fell asleep to the muffled gyrations of their music. He followed the red frills and satin of buxom women as they ascended endless stairs to a room above a saloon. But then he was on a horse pacing toward the sunset on a clay-coloured prairie. He was sitting backwards, facing the frail woman riding with him. They looked at each other mutely—her blue eyes turning him into a deep pool of cool water, tiny surface scintillations everywhere, wavelets like tremors over his body. Then the sun flashed on the shiny leather of the saddle, the woman disappeared, and there was an agonizing incandescence between his legs.
“Motl,” his mother said. “Watch where you’re going.”
And indeed, he was following a long line of horses into a grim stockade, many thousands of Natives imprisoned within. A Nazi in a wide white cowboy hat stood grinning beside a gallows, eating a bagel shish-kebabbed on a cavalry sabre. Then the earth gave way as in an earthquake, and Motl fell into a deep crevasse with many others, who he took to be Lakota.
He was still falling as Tzeitel shook him awake. “Motl,” she said. “Time for your watch. And Matis needs your bed. Don’t fall asleep out there, or else you’ll never wake. Because we’ll shoot you.”
The goal of being on watch is to ensure you’re looking at nothing and that it stays that way. Motl sat on a stump outside the cabin and peered into the dark trees and the darker darkness between them. A Nazi dressed as a shadow. A collaborator wearing emptiness. He saw no one. The sibilance of an invisible breeze rustled the imperceptible leaves. The footfall of a footless ghost. Squirrels. A night bird. His own snoring.
He tugged his own face to wake himself, stood up and scrutinized the trees, glared into the night. Could his mother emerge from the forest? Where was she? He did and did not want to think about it. His little cousin, Hannah. A picaresque of grief: one scene after the other where someone is lost. All this before the hero comes to town, a stranger with a past so scarred it has formed an impenetrable mantle and he can speak only in close-lipped terseness. And in the distant hills, an Indian warrior whose impressive copper-coloured six-pack and unblinking horizon-gaze demonstrate his immutable resolve in the face of death. Both images binding to the stereotype receptors in the European brain.
Something in the woods. A snapped branch. A grunt. The rustling of…a rustler? Motl reached for his holster. But he was a sentry without a gun.
“I see you,” he said to the darkness. To the now-silent forest.
He held his breath. Then he heard footsteps. Sniffling. A woman’s voice. “What?”
Motl froze. “Don’t move or, black as the night is, I’ll make daylight of your head.”
“Relax, Motl, it’s me,” Tzeitel hissed from behind him. “What is it?”
“I heard something.”
The click of a rifle cocking. Tzeitel slipped past, gazing intently into the murk.
“A deer,” she said.
“It was something human. I heard a grunt.”
“Matis. He groans as he sleeps.”
The thud of a sack against the ground. Followed by whimpering.
Tzeitel ran toward what moaned.
“I—I fell out of the tree,” a woman said.
“Apparently,” Tzeitel said, her rifle pointed.
“Don’t kill me—I just escaped.” The indistinct heap moved slowly into a sitting position, becoming distinguishable as a woman. “They killed my mother, my brother and grandfathers. They were going to shoot me.”
Tzeitel helped the woman—Esther—into the cabin. She took the blanket from her bed, wrapped her trembling shoulders and lowered her onto the bed. Pinchas tore bread from a loaf and passed it.
“Motl,” Tzeitel called. “Don’t stop watching.”
After several hours, Esther, unable to stay asleep, crept out of the cabin and sat on a stump beside Motl.
How is the world organized—how is our story made? A horse gallops toward distant mountains. Are two, three, four feet off the ground? What bucko can tell? What is happenstance, coincidence, fate? We cling to horses, try not to fall off.
Motl and Esther. Bashert. Fated.
A line leads from Esther toward a trench of fallen bodies. A bubbie pushes ahead of her—I’m old, too old to wait in lines—and then fusses over her, insists she tie up her shawl tightly—it was cold. Then another woman—a nurse who was made to work for the Germans—marches up and pushes Esther aside. “Go,” she says. “I must stand with my mother. I’m not leaving her.” She has an armful of supplies, which she gives to Esther, and so Esther, trying to look official, carries them in the direction of the infirmary and then slips into the nearby woods.
The old woman, it turned out—could it really have been any other way? Esther was certain—was Motl’s mother. Gitl. The nurse? Motl’s sister, Chaya. How many feet on the ground? Like the horse, Esther ran and ran. She bolted through the woods. Did her feet even touch the forest floor?
This woman, Esther, was alive because of them, she explained to Motl, and wept.
Gitl and Chaya, it must have been, had fallen side by side into the trench. Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw.
Motl sat on the stump, visualizing the trench. The bullet inside the rifle, waking in the cartridge, twisting as it moved through the black barrel and out the muzzle into the open air. Its path through the crisp morning. He saw it arriving at his mother’s small shoulders, saw it make a hole in the dark fabric of her wool coat, enter the smooth place between shoulder blade and spine, saw the bullet find its way into the small chamber of her heart, through the turbulent pool of her blood and out the other side. The bullet bursting from the ribs, breaking a button off her coat and then flying across the trench and into the distant woods, where it was lost to him.
He saw his mother fall.
He saw her fall onto other bodies, the two tiny pieces of broken button falling with her.
Her last thought? Surely she’d reached out to him. He was far away, somewhere—alive—in the world. Surely she’d sent him her last insistently loving instructions. Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die. Or else, my kleine, my son, she would say, I’ll kill you myself.
And his sister beside her. Until she’d joined her in line, his mother had thought she was dead. And now alive again, so briefly. Maybe his sister had known her work under the Germans was nothing. She’d soon be discarded. But she could choose her own death. With love and gratitude. With her mother. The final act of devotion. You can’t destroy me or my family: we leave the world as decent humans, as Jews, our human being-in-the-world a protection even from the despair of death.
Or maybe she was just scared and needed to be with her ma.
For Motl, this crack in an already cracked world was a crack directly underneath him. If only he could fall through and be lost. Or at least, like some parts of him, freeze solid, awaiting better times.
14
But what now? Grief would turn him to fallen leaves, to mulch. These deaths would take his legs, his bones. So instead, he imagined a long bar and a bottle sliding from the barman. His hand opened to receive it. Whiskey then more whiskey. He’d fill up until his heart was insensate as brined pickles. He’d finish the bottle and turn his brain into a pillow.
But soon, Motl would have to decide. Return to the quest for his two faithful Penelopes, waiting patiently there above Zimmerwald? Join these partisans in their small raids and contingent forest safety? Or take on his mother’s duty to find Hannah, if she still lived, if she could be found, if he himself would not be killed as he searched?
Dawn. Matis stoked the fire until the flames leapt.
“He’s better in the mornings,” Pinchas said. “He fades around noon.”
Mordecai, who’d stood the last watch, leaned his rifle against a tree, lifted a kettle of water for tea. Pinchas stirred a drab paste of obscure grain with an old spoon. Tzeitel helped the blanket-wrapped Esther to a place by the fire. She returned to the cabin, came back with two candlesticks.
“Maybe you got these from your mother?” she said softly, and passed them to Motl, who cradled them, infant-like. His mother and sister, extinguished.
Then he stuck them down his pants. “Pinchas, could I get some of that chow? Looks like good glue for guts.”
Pinchas shovelled out a glop of the stuff and Motl began negotiating the eating of it.
“So you want to know why I have no hair?” Pinchas said, one palm running over his scalp bare as a prairie oyster, a sallow, pockmarked moon. Motl said nothing, but Pinchas continued anyway. Hiding creates its own form of cabin fever.
“When I visit the barber’s, it’s more ears and nose than head. Less clip, more polish and shine. My father and his father lost their hair early. And so I was worried, and so kept my scalp furrowed to grip each of my hairs tight. Then one day—I was in a meadow overlooking the sea—I lay with a sweet girl I loved among the flowers and yes I was happy and at peace. And for once in my anxious life I unclenched my body as we lay under the blue sky with the soft wind over our naked skin. And I released my hair, which fell about us onto the green grass, never to grow back. Or at least, that’s what I tell everyone.”
Motl continued to paste his insides with porridge, nodding to acknowledge Pinchas’s presence.
“I learned some months later,” Pinchas said, “that the girl was shipped to the Soviet north. She died starving and forgotten on the train. If I had hair, it would have turned white.” Pinchas paused a moment then resumed stirring the porridge, as if in its drab depths he could divine something about either past or future.