by Gary Barwin
Mordecai passed cups of tea round to everyone except Matis, who at some point had disappeared into the woods. Esther, still wrapped in a blanket, had moved close to Motl, leaning against him. The small group of them sipped the brackish tea, listening only to the song of wrens and woodpeckers, and, as always, for the sound of footsteps.
After Motl had laid down his spoon, the battle with the porridge finally over, Esther led him through the woods, and dropped the blanket into the leaves. She took his hand and held it against her chest. She looked at him, silently. Then she pulled off her dress.
She held herself against him, ran her hand through the tangle of his copper-red hair and gently touched his stubbled face. Whether she was hanging on or trying to disappear, was attempting to make human what was unreal or had lost her senses, Motl didn’t know.
She unbuttoned and slipped off his shirt, but as she made to unbuckle his belt, he stayed her hand.
“Esther…”
“Shh,” she said.
“Candlesticks,” he said, and removed them from his pants.
Then he gathered the fallen blanket around them and they held each other in a huddle in the leaves on the forest floor.
Had Motl ever been with a woman? A man?
“Everyone is given the same life, but collects their own scars,” Esther said.
“Mine make it hard to sit down,” Motl replied.
“It’s okay,” Esther said. “We’ll be careful.”
“I’m not sure I’m able…”
Gunshots, shouting, the sound of breaking branches and running. Motl and Esther under the blanket, flattened against the ground.
The White Armbanders or else the Einsatzgruppen had found the camp. There was nothing Motl or Esther could do. Gather their scars and be silent. Hope there were no dogs to scent them. They remained hours after it fell quiet, until the sun was a hot fist in the sky and they were baking in the blanket.
“Is it safe?” Motl whispered eventually.
“When has it ever been safe?”
“I mean in comparison.”
“We should check on the others.”
They got dressed and crept toward the camp. Motl held his breath, listening. If evil existed, did it have a sound? A rancorous ache, hissing through the veins like sleet or steam? But if this were evil and not only devastation or terror or pain, it meant God or punishment or the monstrous beyond the human. Beyond what was broken on earth.
They crawled from trunk to trunk. Once there’d been a border between past and future, between the world when it had been imaginable and when it was not. He was a lost horse on a salt plain, parched tongue unable to speak or swallow. Desire made a mirage in front of him. This could be not real, this desiccation of the chest, nothing inside but broken glass.
Esther was the first to peer around a tree into the clearing. “Turn around,” she said. “Leave.” Everyone had been shot. A soldier was stationed, waiting for the others to return. Esther and Motl must bolt like a spooked horse, but in silence. Like two elves in a school play, feet cobweb-soft, they crept away through forests. Like Indianers in a book, Motl thought, tiptoeing over trenches, boulder, fissures, fallen trees.
After an hour, they arrived at a rutted wagon track. It was more hole than road except for the parts that were road, which were themselves filled with holes. A man lumpy and uneven as the track sagged on the bench of a wagon, carving a piece of stick. If greed or murderousness could be seen in the bones, this mostly folded man was clearly harmless.
“What are you making?” Motl asked the man in the wagon.
“A smaller stick,” the man said. “We’re poor. It’s entertainment. In summer, my wife wears the winter boots while I wear the summer boots to market. In the winter, she wears the summer boots while I take the winter boots. Both have holes, but if it weren’t for the holes, neither pair of boots would fit.”
“And so, too, our lives with holes at either end,” Motl said. “Please take us to Ponary.” Then quietly to Esther, “I need to find my mother and sister. If they’re dead, I need to see it with my own eyes, but it’s possible they survived.”
“Ponary. It is hell.”
“Twenty rubles?”
“Are you Jews?”
“Why?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“What are the Nazis or the White Armbanders going to do—take us even more quickly to Ponary?”
“Dangerous for me.”
“So, thirty rubles, then. I need to find my mother and my sister.”
“I wouldn’t do it even for twice that.”
Motl turned around and made to walk away. Bargaining for beginners.
“But I’ll do it for nothing—because of your mother—but maybe, because I’m willing, you’ll pay me thirty-five rubles anyway.”
Esther and Motl clambered into the clutter of sticks, sacks and old clothes in the wagon’s bed.
“Where are your stars?” the driver asked.
“The lucky ones are long gone.”
“The yellow ones.”
“Only star I’ll wear is a sheriff’s,” Motl said. “Like the deputy who buried an hombre who still wore his gun. Went off in the casket, killed the preacher, so he charged the dead man. Carrying a concealed weapon.”
“I know that tale. So you, too, read of box canyons and sharpshooters chawing through the Badlands?”
“Let’s say I’ve camped my nose in a chapter or two between bookmarked sage and flyleaf coulee. But I left everything behind in Vilnius. I have nothing: books, family, home. My father was a Jew. My mother also. And you?”
“A Christian. Since last Thursday.” The man held out his hand. “My name is Jonas. Also since last Thursday.”
They shook. “Howdy.”
“Esther,” Esther said, offering her hand too, since he’d apparently forgotten about her. “Howdy.”
Then “Yah,” the newly Christian Jonas said. His horse, with a disconsolate shrug, began to shuffle forward, the customary direction for shuffling. The wagon followed with a doleful shudder, Motl and Esther nestled amid sticks and clothes.
“It won’t be fast, if we get there at all. Not the Pony Express, more of a Ponary Schlep,” Jonas said.
“Your horse have a name?” Esther asked.
“Only the one his mother gave him. And I never met his mother.”
“At home, we had an old horse called Rivka, poor sad thing with one blind eye. I’m glad she didn’t live to see what’s happened—she wept enough with her good eye as it was.”
They followed the path as it meandered through the woods, Motl and Esther ready to turn their bones into sticks beneath the rags if anyone appeared, the horse stumbling over both holes and road.
“I have forged papers,” Jonas said after a while. “A cousin of a friend of mine gave them to me. So it’ll take more paperwork before they kill me.”
It began to rain.
“This is nothing,” Jonas said into the downpour. “My wife and I hid in a hole below a closet for more than a week. Water dripped on our heads the whole time. There was no room. My feet were in my wife’s face. ‘What should I do, eat them?’ she said. But soon she became so thirsty from pneumonia, she wanted to drink her own blood.
“They have many ways to kill us,” he said. “Disease, death marches, throwing us out of our homes and then packing us together somewhere else. And, of course, bullets. There’s more bullets in Europe than stars above it.
“And Alfy One-ball Schicklgruber said, ‘Why should Germans worry that the soil that made their bread was won by the sword? When we eat wheat from Canada, do we think of murdered Indians?’
“And here I am with two Jews and a horse slouching straight toward Ponary as those Teutonic cowboys clear the plains.”
15
They travelled through the rat-grey afternoo
n, the road empty but for mud and holes. And one rabbit, three squirrels and a deer, all of which came and left in peace, given that the travellers were weaponless and unable to secure their mortal flesh for vittles.
As they travelled, the travellers spoke:
“My father was a religious man,” Esther said. “He studied at the yeshiva and wanted to become a rabbi, but instead became a blacksmith, taking over his father’s smithy when the old man could work no longer. No one, not even his father, was as devout as he who said a prayer before each prayer, and then one after. He believed his ten fingers were a minyan and that working was devotion, each hammer blow forging glowing red psalms from iron.
“ ‘The tong of tongs,’ he’d say. ‘My beloved.’
“He was a contented man, a haimshe gnome with bulging arms, face covered in soot, never happier than when clomping home to family, white linen on a table set with silver candlesticks. His father, his wife and son, and me, his daughter, waiting for him to welcome Shabbos into our home.
“Three weeks ago, they came in the night, hammering on the door. I answered in my nightclothes.
“ ‘Let us in.’
“ ‘I must first put on some clothes.’
“ ‘We’ve seen the likes of you, naked many times. Open up or we will smash the door.’
“And so these police pushed their way into our little kitchen, led by a local guide as if on a safari. Meyer, a Jew and a drunk, showed them the homes of all the Jewish men in town in exchange for being killed a little later.
“The captain kicked over a chair and slammed his fist on the table, demanding money. The others gathered the men, confused like small children in their underwear, and had them face the wall. My grandfather, and my brother. My father—I thanked God half-heartedly and provisionally at that moment—was in another town that night, having gone to deliver an ornate gate, his specialty, to a church.
“They stomped through the rooms of the house, taking jewellery, taking cash.
“One shook me and pointed a revolver at my head. ‘You must have more?’ And I gave him a key to a box containing rubles I had saved. My mother had hidden jewellery in her sleeve, and when they found it, they made her stand with the men, then marched them all outside.
“ ‘Wait,’ I called. ‘I have bread for them.’
“ ‘They’ll not need it where they’re going,’ Meyer said.
“It was the last time I saw them.
“Buildings were burned and the men of the village, and my mother also, were marched to pits already waiting for them. The old, the weak, women and children were all who were left.
“I left our village as soon as it was dawn. I hoped to find and warn my father. But soldiers were marching on the road, and I had to hide for hours in a haystack until the way was clear. I was certain I would not be safe if I were seen.
“My father had come that morning, while I was hiding in the hay. His family, his friends—they were all gone, like rats, as if the Pied Piper had a gun instead of a flute, and alas there were many such pipers. Next they came for the children. I don’t know about the old people. I heard all this only later, from Leya Razovsky, the village shadchan, the matchmaker—we both escaped from the village, though I fled much sooner.
“Our village had two rabbis. The police seized one along with the other men, tore his beard from his chin, wrapped his parchment body in a Torah scroll and burned him. The other, a young man, his chest smooth as a new apple, had hidden in a room beneath the mikvah and emerged from the burned-out building to find the men gone. My father, distraught and shocked, asked this rabbi if he could kill himself. The pain-struck Litvak, if orthodox, consults the rabbi before acting on impulse.
“The rabbi—may his contemptible and cramped imagination cause him pain forever—told my father that suicide was a sin. ‘Suffering proves the existence of God. It’s a test. The act of faith, the act of believing that God hasn’t forgotten you, sets the believer apart.’
“Easy to say when you’re still alive.
“I’d say, in times of war, it’s not what you believe, it’s what others believe that matters. Except in the most extreme circumstances, what you believe won’t kill you. You keep on.”
“Me, I believe nothing,” Jonas said. “Where is it going to be better? In the past? In the future? Unless they can blast me back to when I was studying the parsha for my bar mitzvah and I snuck behind the outhouse and kissed Shoshana Levinson. Five years later we were married.”
“I don’t know where my father went and what he did,” Esther continued. “I asked as much as I dared, I searched for news in nearby villages as much as I was able, but then I had to escape myself, else all of us would be lost forever.”
* * *
—
It began to rain again. Around a bend, the three travellers encountered three women, two of them carrying babies bundled in rags. A mother and her mother and a sister. The babies’ mother was laughing uncontrollably.
“Twins,” her mother explained. “One of them is dead.”
“We were hiding in the cemetery and they found us. They threw a rock—from a broken gravestone—and it hit her,” the sister said. “ ‘We’ll let the other one live,’ they said. ‘So you’ll remember.’ After they left, she began.” She motioned to the laughing woman. “She only stops to sleep, and she sleeps only sometimes.”
“She won’t let us bury the child,” the mother said.
“You have food?” Jonas said, rooting around in a sack behind him. He gathered some near-rotten potatoes and dropped them into the large pocket the sister opened in her apron. “Now, let us help,” he said, lifting a shovel from under the seat. “It must be done.”
The sister gave Esther the dead twin and held back the mother, who struggled but kept laughing, while their mother held the still-living twin. Esther wrapped the motionless twin in a sack for a shroud. Motl dug a hole in the field by the road and they lowered the little girl in.
“Everywhere a cemetery,” Motl said.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw.
He offered the spade to the mother so she could add the first spadeful of earth over her baby, gone. The blade turned over to express regret, as is traditional, though one is duty bound to return one’s family to the soil. The mother continued struggling, continued laughing and wouldn’t touch the spade.
“Just do it quickly,” the woman’s mother said. And so they did.
Jonas found a large rock as a headstone—there was no time to think of the formal end of mourning and unveilings a year away—and Motl used the shovel to scratch, if only temporarily, the Hebrew letter beit for Bela, the child’s name, into it. They stood silently around the grave for a few minutes in the rain and then the three travellers climbed back into the wagon and rode off. The women stood in the field, the mother’s banshee laughter tangling with the rain until finally they heard only the rain.
16
They rode for an hour after that in silence and drizzle, no sound but the creaking of the wagon and the steady clop of the horse.
The road sloped down into a shallow dale and just as they were ascending the small rise on the other side, a small man ran into the middle of the road, his tiny black eyes burning at them.
“Sieg Heil!” he shouted. “Sieg Heil!” His arm shot up in the Nazi salute. “Achtung! Achtung! Sieg Heil!”
His blunt-cut hair lay askew across his pale forehead and his moustache was a stunted black brush across his twitching lip.
“Achtung! Achtung! Sieg Heil!”
“Holy Scheisse!” Jonas said. “It’s goddamn Adolf H. Aryan Christ himself.”
“Sieg Heil!” the man shouted again, and raised his arm as if in spasm. “Sieg Heil!”
“What the actual Himmler?” Esther said. “He’ll get us shot.”
“Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” the man kept shouting.
>
“What should we do?”
“If I had a gun,” Motl said, “it’d be a gunfight. But since he doesn’t seem to have one either, it’ll be a very quick showdown.”
“We should get out of here.”
“Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Achtung! Achtung!”
“We’re dead.”
“Look,” said Esther. “He’s by himself. It’s some other delirious house painter who thinks he’s only got one ball.” She shouted, “Go away. Find a carpet to chew somewhere else.”
“Sieg Heil! The fate of the German people for the next thousand years depends on me. Sieg Heil!”
“If he’s Adolf Hitler,” Motl said, “then I’m Jesse James.” He reached for the imaginary six-guns at his hips. “I’ll Poland some living room into his chest. Then we’ll see how much destiny is manifested. When his blood’s done soaking into the soil, Goebbels or Göring or Old Shatterhand himself can cover up the holes as if they were at Ponary itself.”
“History is my struggle! We Übermenschen will triumph!” The little man began not quite goose-stepping toward them. Duck-marching.
“I think I recognize him,” Jonas said. “He’s Yankel Fridman, the tailor from Krekenova, though he used to have a beard then and seemed less…Nazi.”
“I will blast the Nazi out of that little schnayder before I’m done,” Motl said.
Esther to Motl: “So many Hitlers, so little time. So do something already.”
“The Herrenvolk! Die Herrenrasse! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”
“A gunslinger only challenges the vaquero worthy of the duel,” Motl said. “I’ll not fight this puddin’ foot.”
“Like the saying goes, ‘You’re all kippah and no cowboy,’ ” Esther said. “ ‘All Jew and no Jesse.’ ”
Before Motl could answer her, the pseudo-Führer shouted, “There’s only one solution to the Jewish question!” And as if there were any doubt as to what he meant, he raised a Luger.
Without hesitation, Esther reached into her boot and pulled out a gun and pointed it at the ersatz Adolf.