by Gary Barwin
They stripped the man down to the hole in his chest, and the old woman poured a slurry from one of the bottles over it. Steam hissed and rose as the young man shuddered.
“Kazimierz, Kazimierz,” the old woman crooned, and poured green fluid into the steam. “I know your baba.” Kazimierz only moaned. The woman stuck her oblique finger into the wound and stirred.
Kazimierz shouted, “Plek ne, plekshne! Blundering clod woman. Dog doctor. Shundaktaris!” And then appeared to pass out as the woman pushed her finger in up to the last conker of a knuckle. Her cockle-shell lips pursed and, with tilted head, she seemed to be listening to the heavens.
“Ah,” she said, and jerked away as if having snatched a fish. Her finger was covered in blood and some beef-like chum.
“This little boy,” she said, displaying the bullet she’d retrieved, “makes big trouble.” Then she uncorked another bottle and tipped it over the wound. A kaleidoscopic purple-and-blue swirl drained into Kazimierz. Next, she crumbled broken green leaves over the hole, pressed a larger leaf over it, and retrieved a needle and a thread spool.
“Hold,” she said, and Motl and Esther held Kazimierz’s shoulders. The woman stitched a circle of thread and then a red cross-hatching, eventually pulling the skin taut. Surgery by an expert in sock repair.
Kazimierz remained unconscious, blessedly.
“A gunslinger punched through the hide needs bunk time to heal,” Motl said as the woman tucked a blanket over Kazimierz.
“Laima,” the woman responded. Her name.
Then she ladled soup into bowls and placed them beside dark bread on the table. The old man, drawn by the scent of food, wobbled in the door.
“Tadas,” he said. His name.
They spoke little until Esther asked about children.
Children? Without children they’d be just dust with withered legs waiting for a puff of wind to scatter them over the fields, no reason not to return to where they were once but seed. They had sons and a daughter.
Where were they?
Lina, she had moved to Trakai, the nearest large town, to marry a Karaite sales clerk and have a boy, beautiful little Gvidas, who—is it really possible?—they’d seen only a few times last year, how is that right when Trakai is so close? Their eldest son, Simonis, had been killed fifteen years earlier, fighting the coup d’état against the democratically elected government, and still they ache with loss, such a good boy, so handsome and brave.
The other son, a policeman, had been living in Trakai before he joined the 11th Battalion of the Schuma, the Lithuanian Auxiliary Police, which became the PPT, a security battalion forced to work with the Nazis. What could he do? They were sure he wouldn’t kill Jews or Poles or Russians, they knew their Jurgis. No matter how much they hated the Russians, surely he could never become like the murdering Nazis or their Lithuanian collaborators. Also, they’d heard that he’d deserted and was hiding, maybe with the Karaites in Trakai. He’d be able to blend in because his skin was dark for a Lithuanian, dark as a Karaite, and his hair was brown, as if he’d been born Romani.
The couple knew Motl and Esther were Jews, though they weren’t wearing stars. So how did they recognize their Jewishness? How do you know it’s raining? In your bones, you just know.
Kazimierz could stay, but the Jews could not. Old man and old woman as they were, it was no longer time for excitement and their house was small, no place to hide. Also, there were better places to go. Trakai, for instance. They knew there were Jews who had been able to get papers saying they were Karaites. And maybe they could look for Jurgis, their hidden son, while they were there. They could ask the Karaites.
Karaites. Who were they? Motl and Esther wanted to know.
Depends who you ask. They were Jews, or at least they had been Jews. Maybe. Like chickens had once been pterodactyls. Or a car had been a horse. Or, more exactly, as an ox is a cow. The Karaites had spoken Hebrew and prayed from the Torah. It was the seventh century or the fourteenth. A long time ago. Were they descendants of the Khazars? Either way, they’d ended up in Crimea and eastern Europe, and for a variety of arcane reasons, both strategic and religious, the Czar had exempted them from Jewishness—it was like being granted a pardon—and thus from the rich panoply of persecutions available to the modern Jew. And so later, the Nazis had exempted them too, because of the Czar, but also because the Nazis had asked some Ashkenazi rabbis and scholars.
“Are these people Jews like you? Should we kill them also?” the Nazis had asked, and the rabbis and scholars said no. It would take a particularly bitter variety of misanthrope to condemn others to die with you when you could say a single word and save them.
“On the other hand,” the old couple said, “if our Jurgis wasn’t able to escape the Auxiliary Police and is still with the 11th Battalion, he’ll be in Ponary killing Jews. Maybe you’d know some of them?”
18
The golden hour. The barley light of the sinking sun makes you aware you’re moving through the slow honey of your story. Motl could have been riding, half-asleep, drifting west through the warm winds and sagebrush, holding on to the pommel as his horse’s hooves drummed quietly and steadily through the gauze of his reverie. But he was in the car with Esther as she drove to Trakai, riding shotgun or, more exactly, handgun, as he still had Kazimierz’s loaded pistol and was on the lookout for danger. It was madness to be on the road, but it was madness to be anywhere, except perhaps in a cellar beneath a trap door, on the moon, or in Switzerland, on a mountain, safe as a testicle.
The old couple had given them the Trakai address of their daughter, Lina, on Karaimu Gatve—Karaite Street—near the old castle. They were to ask her if maybe she could tell them where to find a Karaite, since their kenesa—their synagogue—would be closed for the night.
Then tell her to bring their grandson, beautiful little Gvidas, to see them maybe once in a while.
* * *
—
A Karaite house has three windows: one for God, one for family and one for good ol’ Grand Duke Vytautas, who centuries earlier had invited the Karaites to Lithuania to form his personal guard. Also, one supposes, the windows were for the view: looking out of, or gazing into, observing activities either illicit or quotidian. And to put the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost off the scent.
Lina’s house was painted yellow and the luminous rawhide moon glinted blond in each of its three windows. Esther rapped on the blotchy door.
A face appeared in one of the reflected moons as if surrounded by a lasso of holy light. Motl and Esther stood docile and un-German as two full-grown Jewish babies left on a doorstep.
The door opened a crack.
“Lina,” Esther said. “Your parents—”
“My parents!” Lina said. “They can’t have died, don’t tell me this—age has cured them into jerky. They can no more die than a saddle can.”
“No, it’s—”
“And I cannot tell them where my brother is because I do not know…”
“No, we’d just—”
“And I cannot bring them the child.” She inhaled sharply and held her breath.
They were all silent. Wind in the pines. A blues-harp dog keening from a distant yard.
Then Esther said, “We too have lost our family.”
More silence.
Finally, Lina opened the door, sat them at her table, brought cups of tea from a tarnished samovar and some kybynlar, half-moon pastries stuffed with mutton.
“There’s much my parents don’t know,” she said, sitting down too. “They’re old. They may be too leathered to die, but not to be hurt.
“My husband was a Karaite, yet he was shot by Germans when I was at the market. Perhaps his being a near Jew was good enough for them. Then they shot my baby, my Gvidas, my little moon, for no reason at all.
“I would not wish this death on their Nazi children, n
or on them for their children’s sake. May they carry like a heavy stone always the gasp of Gvidas as he died, the convulsion of my heart when I was told. May it fill their nights and days so they do not become old with time but maimed with these thoughts and seek a high place from which to leap. There is no high place here and so I keep on. I help those I can. For example, I give you more tea.” And she filled both their teacups. “Being Jews, you understand.”
“How do you know we’re Jews?” Motl asked.
“As my mother says, ‘How do you know you’re drinking tea? You just know.’ ”
“I do know. And I know this is Christian tea. In a Christian cup…But the sugar, the sugar is Jewish. How do I know? Because it’s hiding. Your parents thought you could help us parlay with a Karaite who might permit us to bed down for the night. We’re travelling to Ponary to find family.”
“You travel toward hell itself.”
“That’s why we’re going. They could use some help there.”
“You can sleep here. One night only. I have loved a near Jew and his child and so I will help you,” Lina said. “Tomorrow, I take you to the Ḥakhan, the Karaite leader, at the kenesa. Until then, you must hide in the cellar. I’ve learned that the Nazis suspect even the unsuspected.”
“And inspect even the uninspected,” Motl said.
“We thank you for your kindness,” said Esther.
They dragged the table to the side of the room and rolled back the carpet to reveal a trap door.
Lina hauled it open. A square of darkness exhaled a chill.
“I have no more oil for the lamp, but here’s a candlestick and some matches. I will get blankets. Also, some of my husband’s clothes.”
Thick with clothes and woollen toques, they gingerly descended the ladder. Lina dropped blankets after them. There was scuttling.
“Prairie dogs,” Motl said.
“Or underground sheep.”
“They’re shy.”
The cellar wasn’t anything more than a narrow burrow with a louring ceiling, malodorous and unsettling.
“Imagine we’re squeezed together in a stagecoach,” Motl said. “Travelling the Oregon Trail on a winter night.”
Esther unfurled a blanket and wrapped them together. More scuttle of prairie dogs. A sack wheezed dust as they lay down. They did not wheeze, but they did sigh. A summation of the last weeks. Fear. Grief. Tenderness. Contentment. A few moments of rest.
Motl blew out the candle.
* * *
—
They woke to footfalls like the pinched rapping of hammers. The raspy consonants and smirking umlaut singsong of German voices above. Chairs scraping and falling against the floor. The scuff of the pushed table.
“Give me the gun,” Esther hissed just before they were blinded by a square sun. Motl scrabbling the floor around them for the pistol as the black ghoul of a Nazi silhouette loomed.
“Ungeziefer. Jewish vermin.”
“Here.” Motl pressed the gun against Esther’s hand. Pointing up, she squeezed the trigger. A shout of Ach, the shadow falling like a crow tossed from the sky, a body dropping beside them with a disquieting oomph.
More shouting. Another black ghost. Esther fired again. A shout of “Scheisse,” and the wraith descended, slamming against his colleague in grim parody of a wrestling move. The trap door crashed shut. Further furniture rearrangement and then quiet. Only the quick breaths of Motl and Esther, the pounding of blood in their temples.
Then a Germanic moan. Then silence. They waited. And listened.
Nothing. A quiet pure as Aryans.
If any neighbours heard the shots, they stayed away.
Motl and Esther held hands beside the two Nazis, dead, somewhere in the dark.
“The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi,” Motl joked, but neither of them laughed.
* * *
—
After many hours, they felt a change in the air, then heard Lina whispering through the barely raised trap door, “You must go.”
Before them, the bodies of the Nazis darker than the cellar save for the uncanny glint of insignia and a gun still in the second soldier’s hand. Esther uncurled the fingers and pulled it away. She rolled the body over and it toppled onto the stone floor with a thud. She frisked the other. Nothing but cigarettes in a silver case, a handful of loose gold teeth rolled in a handkerchief, an expensive-looking watch and a roll of shabby bills.
“Render unto Esther the things that were probably Jews’,” she said.
19
The kenesa was being watched closely for fugitive Jews and so wasn’t safe, Lina explained. They were to go instead to Trakai Castle, a brick-towered pile on its own island in a lake, which looked like it was home to squat and ruddy fairy-tale dukes. After five hundred years, renovation was needed. Workers ferried boatloads of stones, bags of tools, homemade vodka and their almost complete lack of ambition for anything but that vodka, adding a few more stays to the old girl’s aging corsets.
The single raised boardwalk to the island castle would have a couple of sentries posted, so Lina led them to an overturned rowboat, oars stashed beneath. It was early morning and the lake was still.
“Thank you,” they whispered to Lina, the simple phrase filled with all their complex stories, then they turned the boat over and slid it into the water.
The lapping of the oar blades as Motl pulled them across. They heaved the boat onto the narrow shoreline and stowed it between trees.
They straddled a broken-toothed window low in the castle wall, trying not to be floss between the shards. Waiting for them inside, they found a stoop-backed older man named Yefet, a Karaite, his scraggly hair the unkempt white of chicken feathers. He led them through dim passageways to an obscure brick-vaulted room lit by lager-coloured light. He removed a stone from high in the wall and produced some papers.
“These will make you Karaite,” he said with a smile. “Now, here’s how to pass. Don’t act like a Jew because, as they say, if you look like a Jew, shrug like a Jew and tend toward an ironic yet earnest engagement with the inscrutable, numinous, ineffable mystery best approached through speculation in the context of tradition, intellectual community and daily ritual, then they’ll probably say you’re a Jew.
“Also, I’m going to give you new names. Motl, you’re Yochanan Firrouz, and Esther, you’re now Sima Babovich. And wear this traditional Karaite headgear.” He rummaged in a trunk and produced for Motl a round black hat with a white top like a lid, more hat box than hat. Esther: a lace shawl flowing from a domed black headpiece, with a fringe of coins.
“Any more tips?” Motl asked.
“Don’t be seen by Nazis.”
Yefet stared at them, then reached again into his trunk and pulled out new clothes for them both. It wasn’t that their old clothes were particularly Jewish, but rather that they looked as though a rag-and-bones cart had run over them several times before they were trampled by a goat. And not the cleanest goat.
20
With their new names and costumes and papers, they’d be able to leave Trakai and travel wherever they needed to go in relative safety. There was still a war going on, after all; not only Katzes and Greenbergs but cats and dogs as well were sometimes casualties. Yet first, Yefet insisted, they must have an audience with the Ḥakhan, the Karaite leader, the self-styled “His Excellency Hajji Seraya Khan Shapshal.”
And so Esther and Motl followed Yefet out of Trakai Castle, this time by the front door, and strode over the boardwalk planks. The sentries did not salute but nodded.
Who goes there?
If only they knew.
The kenesa gate reminded Motl of the iron his father and grandfather once hammered and twisted into ornate shapes.
“We make gates to keep the rich people out,” his father would say. “Except when they come to pay for them.”
/> A Magen David—a Jewish star—was braided into the gates’ slender bars.
“The Ḥakhan ordered it removed,” Yefet said. “But we couldn’t remove it without removing the whole gate. There was a star on the kenesa tower also, and the Ḥakhan had it taken down. Too Jewish. It was replaced with a rising sun.”
“How do you know it’s rising and not setting?” Motl whispered to Esther.
“Ask the Nazis. It’s up to them.”
They passed through the gate and entered the kenesa by way of large brown doors.
“Your shoes. Take them off,” Yefet said. “It’s a kenesa, Yochanan, not a field.”
“Right. Of course.”
Inside, there were no pews, only carpets in the manner of a mosque. Gold-painted beams of light shone from the twin bread slices of the Ten Commandments high up between the columns of the elaborate altar. Below the tablets: the Ark.
“It’s not like a synagogue,” Yefet said. “There’s only one Torah inside. What’s good enough for Moses is good enough for us. We don’t require a sequel. And if we want to know what it means, we just read it. We have God to tell us what to do. Why would we need rabbis?”
The Ḥakhan, Seraya Shapshal, entered from a side door. He wore a long, sleek silk jacket with a large, bright star brooch over an ornate embroidered shirt and matching glossy skirt. On his head, a two-coloured shashia, a short fez with no tassel.
“Our new Karaites,” the Ḥakhan said, spreading his arms in ostentatious welcome.
To Motl he looked more Arabian Nights conjuror than religious leader. Do we bow? he wondered.
“We are Karaites,” the Ḥakhan said. “Not cucumber farmers from the East, but a nation of warriors. Hitler and the Patriarch, like the Czars of yore, know that, before the betrayal of Jesus, we had travelled from Judas and Judea and so, unlike Jews, we bear no blame for his crucified demise. We hold both Jesus and Muhammad to be prophets who speak the wisdom of Moses and his Pentateuch. Though our numbers are not abundant, we are strong as the sacred oaks that take root in our burial places and in whose branches sing the plentiful birds of Heaven.”