by Gary Barwin
“Wait,” Jonas said. “When did it come to Jews killing Jews?”
“When they point guns at us,” said Esther.
Yankel-Hitler aimed the gun at his own head and began muttering, again and again, “Yisgadal v’yiskadash.”
“Problem solved,” Esther said.
“No,” Jonas called to the man. “Don’t give up hope.”
“Easy for you to say,” Esther said. “You’re no longer a Jew.”
“Yankel,” Jonas said. “Put the gun down. Put it down and we’ll talk. There are other ways.” He turned to Esther. “Put your gun away also. Or at least hide it.”
Esther nodded and set the gun on the wagon floor.
“Since when did you have a gun?” Motl asked, but she only smiled.
Then Jonas called again to Yankel. “Come have a drink with us.”
“You have something for him to drink?” Esther asked.
“No, but you have a better idea?”
Yankel had lowered the gun and begun ambling dejectedly toward the wagon, when, without warning, he lifted it again and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot faded almost immediately. Then Esther clutched her shoulder. As blood seeped through her fingers, Jonas grabbed the gun from the wagon floor and squeezed. Yankel stood as if he were trying to think of a word that was on the tip of his tongue. A red button, like those on a child’s clothes, began to form on his pale white forehead.
He fell to the ground.
Yankel on his back, his unseeing eyes reflecting cloud-crowded sky, cumulus wool batting for an endless coat whose warmth is everywhere yet whose buttons are nowhere. Or maybe his bill was vast yet the payment was nowhere. Either way, now he was dead, there was plenty of space for angels to dance on his unused tailor’s pins and for poor Yankel to go through the eye of the needle to the other side. No need to be Hitler or Jesus or Karl Marx. Like smoke from an extinguished fire, his fear hissed away into air.
Jonas jumped down from the wagon and approached the fallen tailor with trepidation. He’d read enough westerns to know that you could be killed even by a dead man, especially if they weren’t as dead as you thought.
Motl was solely focused on Esther. He tore off his shirt, and ripped it with his hands and teeth into strips.
“Motl, there’s plenty of rags. Why use your shirt?” Esther said.
“Mmmhhh,” Motl mumbled, ripping more of his shirt with his teeth. He tied several strips together and wound the long bandage around her shoulder. As the cloth reddened, he felt close to a swoon, but when his senses cleared, he found that he’d wrapped even more of his shirt around her and that the flow from the wound had eased.
Jonas had pocketed Yankel’s gun. Now he began rummaging in the man’s pockets. In time of tragedy, the dead teach us many lessons, their pockets in particular. A watch, a pocket knife, a photograph and a small black edition of Mein Kampf, pages cut out to hide a roll of rubles.
He took the watch, the knife and the money, and heaved the book into the field. The photograph was of a large family picnicking on a blanket, a horse and a black car in the background. Bread. Cheese. Fish. Wine. Apples. A bearded father, a stolid mother still in her apron, three young women, clearly sisters; Yankel the Tailor, smiling and proud, and, scattered about him, assorted children, all cut, as it were, from the same cloth.
“Jonas,” Motl called. “Esther is wounded, and night fast approaches. It could be life or death. We must reach some friendly house soon, for there’s no moon to guide us.”
“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” Esther said. “Of course there’s no moon. Besides, the bullet barely broke the skin. It’s just the shock—your shock.”
“We need to bury him,” Jonas said. “We can’t just leave him.”
“And Motl,” Esther said. “Next time you’re thinking of acting the brave cowboy, take my gun so you’ll have an actual gun not to use.”
* * *
—
They buried Yankel with the photograph of his family—Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw—got back in the cart and kept on. Soon Jonas turned the horse onto an even smaller, muddier path, “rutted as Fascist pizzleskin left in the rain,” he said, and hopefully free from entire Nazis, either imagined or real.
Motl said, “We need a safe haven, a dwelling place. I see a feeble light winking through the trees.”
“Hopeful as a yellow star,” Jonas said.
“A star of hope,” Motl said.
“Motl.” Esther put her good arm around him. “Motl.”
* * *
—
The wagon trundled on over the corrugations of the path. Rounding a spinney, they saw a small house across a field, surrounded by a posse of farmers. The men were mum, yet they seemed to thrum with anticipation, gazing intently at a man slumped on a horse, rope attaching his neck to an outstretched branch of a single tree.
“Wonder if he’d wished upon a yellow star?” Jonas motioned to the man’s coat, the identifying patch sewn on his sleeve.
“Like my mother always said at Purim, ‘They used to want to kill us. They still do, but they used to, also,’ ” Motl said. “We must save him. As the saying goes, ‘No noose is good noose.’ ”
The delirious overreaching humour of tragedy.
Standing to the side of the horse with the condemned man on it, a man with an eye patch held a gun.
“Save him how? There’s a dozen of them,” Jonas said. “And the pirate has a gun.”
“How can a cowpoke sleep under yeller stars if his heart is yeller too?” Motl said. “We used a gun once today. We can use it again.”
“First rule of being a hero: Do no harm. To us. We need to get out of here before they see us.”
“Not this cowboy.”
“What are you going to do—shoot the rope?”
“A gunslinger moves like a coyote in shadows. I’ll figure it out as I go. Today, we pistoleros shot Hitler.”
“These aren’t pretend Nazis. We need to go.” Jonas shook the reins. “Haw,” he said quietly. “Haw.”
Jonas’s horse exhaled dejectedly, considering if it would move again, a horse’s life apparently a never-ending procession between brief respites of grass.
The horse’s nickering was enough to attract the posse. The men turned.
“Hombres,” Motl announced. “We have travelled far and find ourselves mighty parched. We could use a gut-warming snort of revivifying lamp oil if available.”
And up he stood.
Just then, Jonas’s horse decided that it would, after all, haw.
What it did not consider was that its turn would unsteady Motl and he would fall, the men would run toward him, and in the confusion the horse beneath the noosed Jew would spook, buck and then gallop to freedom, leaving the man dancing a frenzied klezmer Tyburn jig until the branch broke and he too fell to the ground.
Motl was on his back beneath the historical sky, only he and the clouds to witness the one-eyed leader of the posse training his gun on the exact convergence between Motl’s continued life and his death.
Jonas called, halting the existential cavalcade of horse and wagon. “Whoa,” he said.
“If’n I were to pull this trigger, you’d be no longer thirsty,” the one-eyed man said to Motl.
“Or I’d be parched forever, since Heaven is dry.”
“Colandered with holes, reckon it’d be hard for you to keep the drink in.”
The noose-necked Yid, apparently not captivated by the sparkle of this repartee, staggered to his feet, raised the branch he remained attached to and swung it at the gathering of men. Those who were not toppled were lassoed between rope and branch and so, too, fell. An artful trick by the near-hanged man though it choked him indigo.
The thwack of wood startled the leader, who pulled the trigger, and Jonas’s poor old horse was sh
ot dead as a nail in a Litvak’s grave, free now to graze the Elysian Fields.
Not sure who else might have a gun, Esther leapt from the wagon and wrestled the leader’s gun away from him. In the land of the one-eyed, the one-armed is queen, even if she winces in pain. Pointing the gun at him, she ordered him to remove the noose from the neck of the gasping Litvak. Jonas, meanwhile, had retrieved Esther’s pistol and was sheepdogging the other men with the promise of bullets.
Motl remained down, his head resting against the hard sod, as the story unfolded above him.
“Who are these men?” he thought. “Not Einsatzgruppen, not regular Germans, not seraphic man-farmers radiating hay-gold beams of angelic light and luminous beneficence to person, beast, Slav and Jew. Rather, these agriculturalists seek to reap the sorrow sewn by the National Socialists, threshing both life and possessions as the opportunity arises. Farmers turned rustlers. The Nazis think themselves bratwurst braves with muscles like gopher mounds—but they are actually cowboys clearing out Cherokees. Which makes me more Indianer than cowboy, or else hundred percent Hebrew.”
He heard shouting, the sound of running, and closed his eyes.
“Perhaps my story is the story of the cowpunch who lay upon the red earth outside the Mein Kampfsite on the range and never rose again, though the yellow sun climbed and fell, men were hung, homesteads were burned, men drank, fought on empty main streets, shot each other through the back or between the buttons, spared each other, helped each other, found love then lost it, while others sought a Hebrew God who thought it no longer possible to write His poetry in these times and gazed instead silently into His corned beef in some transubstantial cosmic cookhouse. This broncobuster who had inadvertently parted the red curtains and led a delusional Yid into the backstage darkness, the sound and the Führer of his Hitler act now over.”
A horsefly settled on the scrubland of Motl’s unshaven chin and, batting it away, he recalled his shaveless revelation in Shnipishok, his resolution to stand and to retrieve.
His mother was in the belly of the Nazi whale, but, he decided, she had to have survived. Surely she remained alive from sheer bullheaded perversity and a conviction that the Almighty needed only the firm guidance of her maternal Midrash. What man, whether tailor, furrier or Godhead, really understood what was going on in the world? Didn’t HaShem misjudge and spill divine light from the vessels and shmutz up the universe? Who was left to clean up, as always?
And his sister, too, and her daughter. Alive. Ready to clean up.
And he had his own vessels to salvage from distant Switzerland. There were Jews to be created during this time of death and Rassenkampf.
So he must rise, although perhaps it was wise to strategically play dead until the crisis passed. It had worked for Jesus, and surely it couldn’t be long until the end of the world. The signs were strewn everywhere.
Before he could decide, he got kicked in the head. Darkness.
17
“Motl,” said Esther. “Motl.”
He was on a bed and beneath blankets. Esther leaned over him, granting him her warm breath and energizing scent. “I made soup.”
A spoon hovered near and as he opened his mouth to speak, Esther inserted it. The liquid was a hot comfort moving through his insides. His temples throbbed.
“You are lucky,” Esther said. “The farmers thought you were dead. The others weren’t so lucky.”
“Others?”
“Jonas and Isaak—the man they tried to hang. The Lithuanians too. I was able to hide.”
“Jonas, a good man—a righteous Gentile—may we survive to remember him.”
“Let’s not speak of it. At least, not now.” And she inserted more soup into Motl.
Later, she climbed into bed beside him. They slept.
* * *
—
Sun through the curtains. Esther waking, her arms around Motl.
“I’m holding on,” she said, “so the wind can’t blow me away like one of your tumbleweeds. In case I roll through the doors of the Reichstag or out to sea where seagulls will eat my eyes.”
Motl was half-asleep, dreaming of fire.
“Or maybe we’ll both be carried into a purple valley, covered in sage,” she said, and kissed him. “I don’t believe in hope, but I don’t believe in hopelessness either—”
“Can you think of something worse than being scalped?” Motl murmured.
“Not off the top of my head,” Esther said. “Now wake up. I want to kiss you properly. Before I’m dead, I don’t want to be dead.”
Here in history, a latitude and longitude, a mark on some kind of celestial day planner. How we find ourselves in a particular moment, a triangulation between tragedy, absurdity and beauty, space-time bent by emotion, and it feels like we’ve stumbled on something built into the fabric of the universe.
“Esther—” Motl began.
“Shh,” she said.
“I have this injury…”
She ran her fingers across his mouth. “If it isn’t your lips”—she tugged her scarf away and her hair tented about them—“smooching is possible.”
They smooched.
* * *
—
Later: “We can’t stay here. We need to leave.”
“I didn’t want to ask—where is here?”
“In the farmhouse. We’re alone. For now. We need to leave.”
“Let’s eat first,” Motl said. “Bacon, coffee, flapjacks. Maybe beans. Range fuel.” He opened cupboard doors but found only tea, sugar, a sack of kasha, a bottle of vodka and a dented tin of condensed milk. “This recalls what every seasoned cowboy knows,” he said. “It’s important to be flexible.”
They had tea loaded with milk and sugar and bowls of kasha, then they gathered their things—they had no things—and walked out the door.
A rattletrap of an old car was parked in the weeds behind the house. Esther tried a door, which opened with a buzzard-like rasp, and she climbed inside. She pressed the button to start it and, after hacking like an ancient asthmatic sheep, it did. Motl cleared the rocks, old farm implements and a broken chair from the weeds in front, then scrabbled in beside Esther.
“Back to the main road,” she said.
“Not an aficionado of the posse and the fatal necktie for which these byways are known?”
The road was empty except for the usual mud and ruts. The car, some medieval variety of Russian-made GAZ with its distinctive silver deer logo, sputtered and convulsed but kept going. Light rain began to fall and Motl had to lean out the window and manually move the broken wipers. Both of them scrutinized the fields and the road ahead—Nazis, armed Lithuanians, major potholes and the unexpected. Too late they discovered a seemingly innocuous puddle to be a small pond of surprising depth and the car violently lurched as a wheel struggled to clear it.
“Ugh.” A grunt from behind.
They turned to find a young man emerging from under a blanket in the back seat, pointing a pistol at them. “What’s happening? Tell me or I’ll caviar the windshield with your brains.”
“It’s likely, then, that we’ll crash and at least one other of us will get hurt,” Motl said.
“At least you’ll know who’s boss,” the young man gasped, then fell over, the wound in his chest leaking more blood, already having saturated the seat.
Motl seized the gun. “Seems I’m running this outfit now.”
The man said nothing.
“Are you deceased?” Motl asked.
“If he says yes, we’re in trouble,” Esther said. “I’d better pull over.”
He wasn’t. He was Lithuanian—but he would cease to belong to any earthly place if they didn’t find him a doctor. Esther tied her scarf around his chest and they set off.
“Semeliškės—the next town—do you know it?” Esther asked. “Is there a doctor there?�
�
The man said nothing for a long time, but then, eventually, “They’ve put the Jews in a ghetto there.”
He said his name was Kazimierz—they’d been at his father’s farm. It was his father’s car. He wanted nothing to do with either the Nazis or the Lithuanians and the war. When the other farmers had gathered in a posse, shouting, gathering rope to hang the Jew, he’d tried to pull his father back inside the house, but his father—the man with the eye patch—had broken free of him and taken the lead. Kazimierz had been shot in the melee after the branch had snapped and he’d staggered to the car to hide, then passed out. The other men had been killed or wounded and the wounded had run away.
When they drew close to Semeliškės, Esther nested the car behind stacked hay bales in a field on the edge of town. Motl dressed the man in his coat, and since he was unable even to stagger, they slung his arms over their shoulders and walked him, his head lolling.
And ran into Germans with German guns posted on the road as they walked into town.
“Ach, ein anderer drunken Lithuanian,” they said. “Can’t hold their schnapps for Scheisse.”
“A doctor?” Esther asked.
“Won’t help. He’ll have to sleep it off.”
Two Jews and a Lithuanian walk into a town. Past Nazis.
How?
The Lithuanian was drunk.
* * *
—
They came to a shlumpy yellow one-storey, its paint peeling and several windows boarded up. Outside, an old man roosted in a sclerotic chair, smoke rising from the woolly sagebrush of his beard, his visible skin the ancestor of a century-old raisin.
“Drunk?” he inquired.
“Wounded.”
“Dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Inside.” He indicated the door with his pipe.
In the inside dimness, an old woman formed of knackered satchels, knotted scarves and paleolithic prunes sat on a chair. Her voice, a husky gust. “I help,” she said, and got up and began shuffling toward a shelf of cloudy bottles. “Lie him by fire.” The majority of her gnarled finger pointed at the ceiling, but they knew she aimed for the defeated bed sagging near the hearth.