by Gary Barwin
“I know. I still have to look.”
“And after the ghetto, we’ll take the Karaite papers west?”
“Yes,” he said, though he didn’t sound entirely sure. “Whatever they turn out to be—I don’t dare break the seal.”
“My grandfather used to tell this story,” Esther said. “You’re in a train travelling from Pinsk to Minsk. A man across from you says, ‘Oy, am I thoisty.’ Then again, ‘Oy, am I thoisty.’ For hours, ‘Oy, am I thoisty. Oy, am I thoisty.’ And again, ‘Oy, am I thoisty.’ You can’t take it anymore. When the train stops, you jump up, burst out of the compartment, slide open the train-car door, run out onto the platform, return with a tall glass of water. ‘Here,’ you say, as if you had found Yahshua’s Grail itself filled to the golden brim with sacred water from a tap in the train station and would extinguish this man’s holy excoriating fire. ‘Slake your thirst, my friend. You say it is great and unrelenting. You say you suffer much. You say you suffer long. Not even when we were slaves in Egypt did Jews suffer so. And as for me, I suffer just hearing about it.’
“The man raises the glass in both hands like the victory cup of a great Viking then drinks the water in one long gulp. He smiles, his body opening like a river fanning wide into the sea. Before long, the train begins to move and you both settle—blessedly relieved, content, sated—back into your seats. Through the window, the land in its infinite variation passes by. Farms. Trees. Villages. Cows. Villages. Trees. Farms. More cows. Time passes. Five minutes. Ten. Then the man begins, an expression of exquisite sorrow on his face, a look of harrowing, soul-grieving memory in his eyes. ‘Oy, was I thoisty. Oy, was I thoisty.’ He claps his hand against his brow, holds his other out into the unforgiving air before him. ‘Oy, was I thoisty.’
“ ‘And what does this story mean?’ my grandfather would ask. ‘Cossacks may dance and kill, but Jews can kvetch. Also, life is suffering. It’s either now or soon or is just about to happen. And what can you do? Don’t travel from Pinsk to Minsk. Go somewhere else. The world is stuffed full of other places. You’d think it would plotz.’
“So we’ll not go to Pinsk or to Minsk. We’ll go to Vilnius,” Esther said.
“Also,” Motl said, “these days, it’s best to avoid trains.”
* * *
—
Back on the main road, northeast to Vilnius, they travelled through territory that was Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, then Lithuanian, then Polish, then Soviet, then German. And everywhere stuffed full of Litvaks. Those who kvetched, who sang, who studied, who danced, who braided bread and welcomed each Sabbath with resigned yet vital fortitude. Those who were bitter but did it anyway. Those who were Jewish only to others. Or to Nazis. Those who weren’t Jewish until they were. Those whose mothers wished they were more Jewish. The I’m-only-staying-alive-to-see-your-bar-mitzvah grandfathers. The secular Jews. The I-don’t-believe-in-God-but-I’ve-got-this-joke-about-Him-anyway Jews. Those who read and read and read and argued. Two Jews but three opinions. Or one Jew but three opinions anyway. And all of them wrong, even to the Jew himself. What’s a life without argument? Oh yes. Death. Except in these times. We’d be fine to take life in almost any form since it seems there’s so little of it going around. And what’s left is marched, starved, rounded up and extinguished the way yellow stars are doused by the black milk of day.
After a while, “So we’re really going to the ghetto?”
“Yes,” Motl said.
“But we are no longer Jews. We’re Karaites.”
Then a gunshot. Through the passenger-side window, a single hole; through Motl’s Karaite hat, two holes, on entry and exit; through the scarf Esther wore around her head, many holes as the bullet found its way through multiple folds, then through the driver’s side window, and flew free into the air, the air itself one vast and all-encompassing hole, an absence.
“We’re lucky,” Esther said.
“Or the shooter is.”
“Is it a warning?”
“What’s it saying?”
“Don’t have a big head? Life is random in beautiful, precise and surprising ways, but also horrifying and arbitrary?”
“I think it is saying, ‘Drive faster.’ ”
Esther stepped hard on the accelerator, and the engine nickered as it strained to comply.
“Do you think they were shooting at us?”
“Maybe. Or at someone across the road.”
“Or just into the air. Practising. Trying out the gun.”
“Or just needing to shoot.”
“At the world?”
“Maybe.”
“And we got in the way.”
“The way America got in Columbus’s way?”
“It’s one thing to aim. It’s another to pull the trigger.”
“I’ve shot a gun and I’ve seen them fall,” Esther said. “What’s inside me then? ‘Oh, please, get up, get up. Let me help you up.’ ”
* * *
—
Train tracks crossed the road and, ahead to one side, they saw a railroad station on an oasis of bare red soil.
“Sure fancy some vittles,” Motl said.
“Vittles?”
“Breakfast.”
Esther pulled onto the shoulder near the station. An old Jewish couple, stooped, defeated, hopeful, holding a suitcase that couldn’t even imagine having had better days, stood on the dirt outside the station since Jews were forbidden public transport, couldn’t use the sidewalks, had to walk in single file near the gutter. In front of them stood an abbreviated man like an oil slick, the twin beetles of his moustache twitching as he grifted them.
“For only fifty rubles, I can send money, or letters or parcels filled with any necessaries, to your family in the work camp. In Ponary. Or the other work camps. The Seventh Fort or the Fifth.”
“Do you know where our grandson is, our Johnny? Where he has been taken? To which work camp?” the old man said.
If he’d been taken to Ponary or either of the Forts, the only work he was doing was keeping the other corpses company. Maybe the last glow of his cells gave consolation or companionship to his neighbours.
“I know people. Fifty rubles and I can take a message, another fifty I can bring one back. I could do this for free, but in these difficult times a man has to eat, as I’m sure you understand. My children. I have many and they are thin.”
The old man pulled out a wallet, more dim and worn than he was, and extracted some bills. The grifter winced a rodent smile, pocketed the money before the couple could hesitate and reconsider.
“The message. What is the message for your boy?” He now had in his hand a grim-looking little notebook and a greasy pencil stump.
The man wrote down the missive wheezed by the old grandfather and amended by the doleful emendations of the old woman, pulling on her husband’s sleeve.
“Soon. Soon he’ll receive the message, and soon you’ll receive news back. You have my word.” Then the man slid back into the train station, a slurry of deception.
“Good. Good. Soon we’ll hear from our boy, our Johnny,” the old man was saying as Esther and Motl passed him, hoping their Karaite disguise held.
Inside, there was neither fry bread, biscuits, succotash, beans nor chuckwagon stew, only a ticket agent standing behind the bars of his wicket, drinking tea. Those nearby and on the platform gave only a quick, wary glance at Motl and Esther—Yochanan Firrouz and Sima Babovich. In such times, divergence was dangerous. Best to be part of the forest rather than be seen as one of the trees. Neither Christian nor Jew, Karaites were exotic anxiety.
“I know this tale,” Motl said. “We’re strangers come to town. We ride in, and there’s a chorus on the verandah, men leaning on the back legs of chairs, guns ready. Their women, curious, spying us through the break in the curtains, troubled by the anticipation of story and what comes from outside.”
“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “Sure you’ve got that headgear, but I don’t believe you’re Karaite—you don’t move like Karaites. But you’ll be useful.” He smiled, earnestly but slyly also. “We’re all outlaws. Part of the resistance. And you’re on your way…where? To the ghetto?”
Something in one of their faces must have confirmed it.
“Good. Then we can help each other. If you want to get into the ghetto without too many questions, you need me.
“A few days ago, I stood before a minefield. I watched as a black bird circled then landed. An explosion and soon its wings were smoke. ‘Only smoke, smoke, hovering smoke.’ I had to cross. To stay where I was would be death. To walk would be death. Where to step, to place my feet? So I imagined a song. I imagined a song and I stepped to its rhythm. Li-li-li-li. Li-li-li-li. I stepped into the field. I walked a mile and here I am and only part of me is smoke. Not more than before. And what was the song? Maybe help remember me what it was, because after that walk, I don’t recall.
“But I remember other things. On Yom Kippur, the very Day of Atonement, I witnessed the ‘cleansing’ of the Small Ghetto and its people. Proving that our God is a poet, a good poet, but a mamzer, and a shmuck. Now only the Large Ghetto remains. How did I survive? I hid in a coffin. It wasn’t difficult. As I said, part of me was already dead. And while I was in there, I wrote a poem. I said the coffin was a boat, an ark, my cradle, a badly made suit. Unfortunately, not an escape pod. But here I am. A partisan. And you’re going to help.”
“What do you need—an editor?” Esther said.
“Some would say, but being edited is the very thing we’re trying to avoid. We need to smuggle goods into the ghetto.”
“I’m looking for my mother and sister,” Motl said. “Gitl and Chaya.”
“Chaya saved my life,” Esther said. “So you’ll help us also.”
The man—he went by Avram—said, “You must wear this to be allowed in.”
An iron badge pressed with a star and an ID number.
“Now I’m Indian,” Motl said. “Or Inuit. This year, there’s a law. They must wear number tags in Canada too. I read this.”
They would be Jews disguised as Karaites disguised as Jews.
“But wait until we’re at the gates. It doesn’t pay to be Jewish too soon.”
They retrieved Avram’s suitcases from a locker and then walked back to the car. Once inside, the man pulled some cheese from his pocket and fragments of what were once crackers and ate distractedly.
* * *
—
They parked the car amidst the dust and empty oil cans in the garage of an abandoned house near the ghetto. Avram took out the suitcases and they tucked the contents under their clothes. Motl slung the satchel over his shoulder and they began walking to the ghetto.
“My house is down there,” Motl said, pointing to Visų Šventųjų Street. “I don’t want to see what’s happened to it, or who’s moved in.”
A tall wooden barricade blocked Rudnicki Street, the entrance to the ghetto, along with a sentry box and a sign that forbade the transport of food and wood inside. Also, Achtung! Seuchengefahr. A warning about the danger of contagion. Two Jewish Ghetto Police armed with German rifles stood guard.
Motl imagined the guns pointed interrogatingly at his face. “Smugglers? Contraband? You’ve got us all wrong?” he’d say.
But instead, Avram walked nonchalantly up to the guards and offered a wry smile. “Soon it is Shabbos,” he said to them. “I brought something for the kiddush.” He opened his jacket and revealed a bottle of vodka.
He told Esther and Motl to maintain a discreet distance while he did what needed to be done. They watched as one of the guards strolled around the corner and squirrelled the bottle beneath some rubble then returned to his post.
“So,” Avram told the guards, “yesterday after prayers, I told God a funny story about the ghetto, but He didn’t laugh. ‘Guess you had to be there,’ I told Him.”
Grim whinnying from the three of them as Motl retrieved the bottle. Avram said, “So long,” and slipped through the gates without being searched, as the guards continued to chortle.
As Esther and Motl drew near, they picked up the scent of rotgut skull varnish on the guards’ breaths, noticed their red, rheumy eyes. Avram had not been the first to offer them drink.
Esther pulled back her collar, revealing her iron badge. Then Motl did the same, and also lifted the wing of his coat to expose the illicit hooch.
The other policeman took the bottle from him with a grin and went to nestle it beneath the rubble.
“What happened to the first donation?” he asked his colleague when he returned.
“I left it right there,” he said. “For safekeeping.”
“Hey,” Esther said, interrupting their musing on the first bottle’s current location. “I just heard this good joke. A professor had a mummy and worked for years to figure out what pharaoh it was. Eventually, the mummy was confiscated by the SS. The next day, the professor got a call. ‘We know the mummy’s name.’ ‘Herr Obergruppenführer, how did you find out so quickly?’ the professor asked. ‘It was easy,’ the officer said. ‘He confessed.’ ”
Drink spins even old gags into gold, particularly when fear is involved.
On another wave of the guards’ laughter, Esther and Motl walked past the barricade. They found Avram waiting for them in the doorway of what had been a tailor’s shop.
“Come.” They crept through the convolutions of Vilna’s narrow alleys. Jewish rats attempting an arcane maze.
“Shh,” Avram warned, scouting for watchful eyes as they ducked into a short lane. Then he shifted two dented garbage bins in an alcove and raised a maimed hatch. Down steep steps and into a basement gloaming green in the dim light. Three small windows covered in mould. “They open onto an inside air shaft, not to the outside,” Avram said. “As Solomon said, ‘For God will judge every deed, along with every secret, whether good or evil.’ And in the meantime, it’s best to keep your secrets hidden from the Germans. Now, for what you have concealed.”
Guns, meat, books. The Holy Trinity of the Jewish resistance.
Esther had several salamis tucked around her stockinged thighs, a portfolio crammed with papers strapped to her back and bullets stuffed into her brassiere. And she’d weaponized her décolletage: between her breasts, her pistol.
Motl: the satchel; in his pants, a gun; around his waist, a leather journal, a book of poems in Yiddish; smoked meat in his socks. “Glad there were no dogs.”
Avram had books corseted under his clothes, packages of smoked meat wrapped around his legs. Hunting knives in his socks.
“We hide books and papers down here, the weapons we keep elsewhere,” Avram explained. “In walls, in mattresses, in the false bottoms of buckets. We carry forbidden papers mixed in with the documents the Nazis want us to collect. They want them for their Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question because, they say, there’ll be no one to ask once they’ve erased us all.”
“Like the Indianers. Maybe they’ll dress like us too.”
“This portfolio”—he removed it from beneath the straps holding it to Esther—“is filled with drawings by my friend Marc Chagall. And this journal”—he took a book from the waistband of his pants—“is Theodor Herzl’s diary.”
“And the book of poems?”
“Mine. If I’m risking my life, I need my own weapon against death.”
Esther took the portfolio and extracted a page. Chagall’s sketch of a dead Jesus in a Jewish prayer shawl, lifted down from the Cross and held tenderly by a chicken-headed ma
n with curly Jewish hair. An angel with blue wings. A three-flamed menorah. It was a William Blake vision drawn by the earnest hand of a sad child.
“The least Nazi thing I can imagine,” Avram said of the drawing. “Now the food. We give it to those who need it most—children, the old. Pregnant women. For them, we need to put meat on the bones of two skeletons.”
“And the guns?”
“We want to be ready.”
“For what?”
“Who knows? But that’s even more reason to be ready.”
Avram removed some brickwork, wrapped the books in cloth, placed them in the hollow then returned the bricks. A Nazi would observe only wall. “ ‘Help us turn to You, and we shall return. Renew our lives as in days of old,’ ” Avram said. The synagogue prayer when returning the Torah to the Ark. “Now to find your sister. And your mother.”
Motl managed to joke, “When I find her, I’ll ask, like every waiter attending a tableful of Jews, ‘Is anything okay?’ ”
* * *
—
They headed for a makeshift community centre in an unused Yiddish theatre. “A good place to begin,” Avram said. “We’ll ask if anyone’s seen them.”
Those in the ghetto were in the business of knowing who was there and who was gone.
There was a group of women kibitzing at a table in the lobby.
“Let me tell you, I know of one good Lithuanian,” a woman called Chava said.
“Maybe one, but not two,” another replied.
“All right, so maybe only one, but listen,” Chava said. “You know that Pioneer Camp in Druskininkai where the kids go? On the first day of the war, the leader, some guy called Sviderskis, stuck them all on a train—he didn’t ask for permission—and took them east into the Soviet Union, to Sarapul in Udmurtia, almost at the Urals. He saved them. See, a good man.”
“Okay, so a good man. But one good apple doesn’t change a bad barrel.”
They continued into the theatre, Motl’s heart beating a little faster.