Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  He motioned to the Persian flowers of the carpet. “Please. Sit.” Shapshal slid to the floor, the susurration of his silks like a breeze shimmering through leaves. Motl and Esther lowered themselves slowly, Motl’s knees crackling like footfalls on those leaves, now fallen and dry.

  “We have made you Karaites, and so have preserved your lives,” the Ḥakhan said. “We have been asked to produce a list of true Karaites for the National Socialists, and your names—your new names—have been inscribed there.”

  “We are very grateful,” Esther said.

  “Yes,” Motl said. “You saved our hides.”

  “And, I hope, the flesh and souls inside. I ask two things: That you leave the country immediately. And that you transport documents that contain, along with money to aid your journey, and some other papers which must remain hidden, the list that was requested.” An infinitesimal inhalation, a micro-sniff, a signal. A man emerged silently from the shadows, carrying a satchel. He opened it and removed a leather portfolio closed with a wax seal, which he held out to Motl.

  It hovered there, waiting. Clearly, Motl would have to take it—to accept possession.

  What could he do?

  “A kind of Pony Express?” he asked.

  “Hmm,” Shapshal said. “You will carry these documents to Berlin. I have provided the details.”

  “Berlin?”

  “To Himmler.”

  “You ask the ant to travel up the anteater’s nose?”

  “As Karaites, you’ll be safe, and you’ll be Karaites as long as you take these documents to Himmler. If you fail to deliver—Well, perhaps you know our traditional food, kibinai. So delicious, ground mutton and onion in a beautiful pastry. You, my little lambs, may find yourselves so minced and shrouded.”

  They didn’t know exactly what this meant, but it didn’t sound good.

  It sounded like they had no choice but to deliver these documents.

  “There’s a man heading west who can take you part of the way,” Yefet said as they left the kenesa. “He’s going to Warsaw carrying papers like you. He’ll be waiting behind the second blue Karaite house on Trakų Street.”

  * * *

  —

  Simhah Lutski was hairy and small, more wiry coyote than man, and he greeted them from the back seat of the dingy black car they found parked, as expected, behind the blue Karaite house.

  “Welcome! Yochanan Firrouz and Sima Babovich. Already I know your names. They told me! Who will drive? I suppose it’ll be Yochanan. I don’t drive, but I am a skilled passenger. I can sit, I can sing, I can tell stories, and I sleep. And though I have no meat or cheese, I do have some bread.”

  Esther and Motl had a brief exchange. Though a woman at the wheel would attract more attention, it was better that Esther drove, as Motl’s success in refraining from contact with trees, soldiers or ordinary citizens was not assured as he did not know how to drive.

  Motl, wearing the satchel, walked around and climbed aboard the passenger side. “I ride shotgun,” he said to Esther. “Though you hold the weapon.”

  Esther started up the car and they headed out of Trakai, and Simhah Lutski began demonstrating his exemplary abilities as a passenger.

  “I was thinking of way back when everything was wild frontier, except for the Garden of Eden. You could hear a grunting and a snoring. It was Adam asleep on the ground. He was dreaming whatever there was for the first human to dream. He was lonesome by himself except for all the green things and fruits and animals. And then his rib became a woman. What seemed made of man became woman. She was there all along in the man’s body. The Eve of Adam became her own Eve. And after, you could also make an Adam out of Eve. There was never two separate things, man and woman. They were always part of the one thing. One thing becoming another. A fleshy human thing in the middle of Eden that wanted an apple. I mean, this was before shoes.

  “Also, belly buttons. When you look at the paintings, Adam and Eve both have them, right in the middle of their perfect hairless bellies, just above the leaves. If Adam and Eve weren’t born but made, why did they have belly buttons? Was God just practising making belly buttons to make sure he knew how? Or was it where the snake bit them while pretending to be an umbilical cord, all part of its sneaky knowledgy convincing act?

  “I want to ask about this, hear what the sages think, the ones who sit up late into the night, pull their long beards and argue in dusty libraries for hundreds of years. But the Karaites say that you don’t get to ask these wise men, you just have to read the book. I’d like a guide. It’s okay to walk around, but it’s better to have a map if you want to get to where you’re going.

  “Still, it’s as they say, better a live Karaite than a dead Jew.”

  “Right,” Motl said. “Can’t ride a horse if you’re dead. Besides, in these times, being alive is the best revenge.”

  * * *

  —

  “Where are we going?” Lutski asked. “The fastest way to Warsaw is usually toward Warsaw.”

  “First, an errand,” Esther said.

  “The Ḥakhan gave you another mission?”

  “Don’t worry. You can wait in the car. Unless it’s not safe. Then you hide.”

  “We’re going to Ponary,” Motl said. “Karaite vigilantes coming to take back what’s ours. Then we’ll mosey on west to Warsaw and Berlin. Where the sun sinks like the heart of an executed man over the rest of the Reich. Where our little job for the Ḥakhan will end and we can escape the Reich. And my original quest can begin. Like Adam, I intend to make a new life from a lost part of myself.”

  “But Ponary…” Lutski protested. “While I was away, my family was taken there. Afterwards, I saw villagers wearing their clothes. Heard them say, ‘I bought this jacket for fifty kopeks but found five hundred sewn into the lining.’ Maybe that was my family’s five hundred kopeks.”

  “We’re Karaites now,” Motl said. “Outlaws dressed as tinkers and traders, pedlars and opportunists. We’ll ride into town, say we’re looking to buy watches, clothes, eyeglasses, gold teeth. We’ll be practically invisible among so many other people looking for deals. Nothing hides you like capitalism.”

  “What is it you need to take back?”

  “My mother. My sister. If they’re alive,” Motl said. “They’re like gold—except they complain more.”

  * * *

  —

  Close to Ponary, they saw Lithuanians walking in the opposite direction along the roadside as if on the Oregon Trail. Jews also, walking or packed like soon-not-to-be-livestock into trucks, herded by men with guns. Lithuanians. Germans.

  An Einsatzgruppen checkpoint. Rifles pointed through the windows.

  Who are you? Where are you going?

  “Vilnius. It’s not safe here. We’re Karaites. We go to our community,” Esther said.

  “Karaites? You mean Jews?”

  “No, no. Do we look Jewish? Here are our papers.”

  A soldier held the documents by their corners, turning them over, regarding them as if holding a dead rat by its tail, looking for plague.

  “Karaites?”

  “Yes—we go to our Ḥakhan, our leader, at the kenesa, our church. And maybe, on the way, get a deal on a suit or a dress or some new shoes.”

  The soldier grinned knowingly. “Ja. Sehr gut. Many have been vacated by their former occupants.” He waved them on. “Also, watches and gold teeth,” he called as they drove away.

  “It’s true?” Lutski asked. “We could buy these things? I have only little money. I could use something to trade. If I’m to end up in Warsaw, I don’t want to starve. When I was a boy, I had to steal bread from those who stole bread. And often it came with a side of fist. But you feel less hungry when you’re hurt. Or unconscious.”

  Some minutes later, they saw a cart piled with clothes and a variety of baskets stopped at the
side of the road. “Let me out,” Lutski said. “Wait while I buy.”

  Esther hit the brakes and Lutski ran like a mustang through a gate toward the plunder.

  “I leave him to his stolen teeth,” Esther said. “May they help him smile.” And she drove away.

  * * *

  —

  Ponary had been designed as a Soviet fuel depot deep in the forest south of Vilnius, but never completed. Now the pits excavated for oil storage tanks were a place to execute Jews. Esther negotiated the car down a gravel track and parked in a space between trees. They disguised the car with branches, leaves and dirt and decided to wait until nightfall to creep close to the pits.

  The moon was full and luminous as they wove through the trees to the edge of the woods, making a shadow forest of the dark pines’ columns on the clearing. Near them, a boy, about eleven, slept against a large accordion in the black lee of a shack, an arm slung over the instrument as if they were two siblings sharing a bed, or a boy and his hound snoozing. A star was sewn onto his jacket, its yellow turned night grey.

  “If we succeed, this is a quest. If not, it’s a pilgrimage,” Motl said to Esther.

  The boy sat up, looked quickly round. “Who is it?” he whispered.

  “Come with us,” Esther whispered back. “We’ll help you.”

  “I can’t. They’ll find me and kill me. Or my family,” he said. “I’m only here because at the end of the day, they want music.” He looked fondly, regretfully, at the accordion. “Polkas. And waltzes, mostly.”

  Motl passed him one of Simhah’s loaves. “Eat.”

  The boy scanned them suspiciously, then took the bread and ate it with desperate enthusiasm. When it was gone, he turned his gaze on Motl and Esther. His eyes: the world was nothing but sorrow and longing.

  Motl passed him more bread. As the boy ate, he and Esther surveyed the field beyond him, filled with uneven grass, small hillocks and ditches. They tried to understand, and gradually they came to see the incomprehensible. The ditches were filled with bodies.

  “Some crawl away,” the boy said after he’d finished a second small loaf. “Wounded but not killed. They wait under the other bodies until night, when they can escape. They run or creep into the forest. I don’t know what happens then.”

  Motl and Esther imagined the bodies, ghosts awoken from the nightmare ditches, disappearing like mist between the trees. Alive, but their lives scarcely more certain or solid than will-o’-the-wisps. Desperation, sorrow and will an uncertain current, fluttering them forward.

  Why had he returned Esther to this Boot Hill of horror and desolation? It was weeks since his sister had slipped into line behind his mother and enabled Esther’s escape into these woods.

  “How could I have dreamed they were alive?” Motl said. “I imagined my mother escaping, if only to keep cooking in the face of history. I could hear her saying, ‘What is history compared with my soup? What did history ever do for me?’ Even if they are alive, they’re long gone. How could we find them? They’ve disappeared into war. It is like soup, everything boiled beyond recognition.”

  “Of course, it’s terrifying and probably futile,” Esther said. “But we must try to learn the stories of those that are living as well as those that are dead.”

  They sat beside the boy, who eventually drifted to sleep as the moon set.

  Esther—once again in the place where her death had been certain and where she’d been saved—remained silent, her arms wrapped around Motl.

  A bird call from in the forest and a flutter of motion, the scurry of an animal.

  “Come with us,” Esther said just before dawn, shaking the boy. “Your parents want you to escape. Maybe the soldiers don’t know it yet, but eventually they will kill you. And your family.”

  The boy gazed at her, considering, but before he had decided, they all heard footfalls. Two Nazi sentries, rifles rested on their hips, striding across the grass. The boy stood suddenly and dashed toward the woods.

  Gunfire resounded against the trees, the boy’s back filling with patches of blood, dark grey in the pre-dawn light. The boy kept running as if untouched. Then he fell forward, his reaching fingers resting on the soft loam of the forest floor.

  “Ja,” said one of the sentries. “Ja.”

  Motl and Esther pressed themselves against the shack’s wall, shimmying around the far side, the few feet between their hiding place and the forest a second of naked vulnerability.

  “Now,” Motl whispered, and keeping the shack between themselves and the soldiers, they made three ridiculously exaggerated What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf? strides into the trees, then crouched down and waddled deeper into the woods.

  They said nothing about the boy.

  What was there to say about the boy?

  What waltzes did he play? Who taught him accordion? What was his name?

  * * *

  —

  The stars above them a thousand knives. They found the car deep in the woods, still buried in its sarcophagus of branches, dirt and leaves. Thankfully, it hadn’t been discovered. They cleared it off and drove it back to the road leading away from Ponary. They couldn’t risk being on the road, yet they couldn’t risk being near Ponary. They crept along, taking side roads, until finally they chose a small path, ropy and rutted, that snaked into a grove of trees. They rumbled the car slowly into the woods, not certain where the path would lead and what they’d discover at its end. A witch’s cottage, a bear’s den, or Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian collaborators dancing around a fire, picking their teeth with the bones of children and roasting Rumpelstiltskin on a spit. “Admit it. It’s really Rabbi Stiltstein, isn’t it?” they’d say.

  “This road couldn’t be German,” Esther said. “The infrastructure of evil is well paved.”

  They parked, then lay down together in the back seat of the car.

  “Okay, cowboy,” Esther said, kissing Motl. “We’ll use each other as blankets, see what dawn brings.”

  Motl lying in the dark, listening to the twitching around him, rodents, Esther, trees, restlessness. Outside, the defeated exhalation of the wind. What could it do? If it lifted the killers up, it’d have to put them down somewhere.

  A creak, likely one branch rubbing against another. The sound, vivid as scent, twitched in his mind. The scrape of a violin. A memory.

  He was a small boy and someone—was it Hershel, the neighbour?—had brought a fiddle into the kitchen. Its voice was like his grandmother’s, raspy and indomitable. But it rocked and swayed, whereas old Faigel’s jowls were the only thing that moved unless she was cheek-pinching or sighing the pains of her ancient bones.

  They’d pushed the chairs aside, along with the Shabbos table with its white cloth and braided loaves. The silver-bright candlesticks burning low.

  His father began to croak his own song along with the fiddle. Ay yi yi.

  Oy yoi yoi, he sang, and rocked back and forth.

  He was short and squat, with thick blacksmith arms and a white, trimmed beard below his round spectacles, which glinted in candlelight. He had cleaned the soot and ash and grime of the forge from his hands and arms and face and wore a fresh new apron as if he would spend his day of rest ostentatiously demonstrating his worklessness.

  Lili lili lili li, he sang with the fiddler, who sawed a roiling nigun, a wordless song, or rather one to be sung with only lilting syllables, each sound meaningless individually but, taken together, able to carry whatever burden of joy or sorrow the singer wished.

  Then his father reached out for his mother, sitting stolidly at the table beside her own mother. “Gitl,” he said. “It’s Shabbos. We must dance.”

  “I look like a girl? A maideleh with a figure like a sapling, maybe?”

  “You do to me. At least when there’s music.”

  Ay yi yi yi. And he took her hand in his and pulled her toward h
im. Nijinsky and Pavlova they were not. More like Wild Bill Hickok and Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel and Calamity Jane.

  For one moment, as they torqued around the kitchen, Motl saw what might be a smile wrestling with his mother’s pursed lips.

  Then—oy yoi yoi—his father reached for him and he was dancing between his parents as if between two bears.

  He was giggling and his father kissed the crown of his head and his mother said, “One day you’ll have a family of your own.”

  And Faigel, his grandmother, sighed. And the fiddler began another tune. Lili lili li, his father sang, and Motl joined in, almost inaudibly, his thin voice cracking, a small bird being born from an egg.

  PART TWO

  When the woodsman first carried his axe into the forest, the trees whispered to each other, “At least the handle is one of us!”

  —TURKISH PROVERB

  1

  ON THE ROAD TO THE VILNIUS GHETTO

  Light beams filter through the trees and into the car window. Esther and Motl awake together in the back seat.

  “The ghetto,” Motl said. “We’ll find them in the ghetto.”

  “Which one?”

  “Vilnius. It’s closer.”

  “No, I meant which family member?”

  “Very funny. There’s an old saying—maybe you know it? It takes a hero to avoid a wisecrack.”

  “Like that one.”

  “Glad you understand,” Motl said.

  “I do. And Motl—Motl—I’ll go with you, but you do know that there’s little chance that…”