Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  The baby began to suck feebly, then to wail, his tiny lungs huge with discontent, made larger by the chamber, like the long shadow of voices thrown against mountainsides.

  “Shh, shh,” Chiena hushed, trying to keep him at her breast. Wailing infants had been silenced when their cries threatened to reveal those hiding, suffocated in the arms that were their only world. What was one life, even one newly born and soft as oyster flesh, compared with many? Chiena softly sang to Hershel, Makh tsi di eyglekh, a lullaby from Łódź she had learned from a ghetto newspaper.

  Close your little eyes,

  Little birds are coming,

  Circling around

  The head of your cradle.

  Suitcase in hand

  Our home in ashes

  We are setting out, my child,

  In search of luck.

  Esther embraced both mother and child, calming them both. Motl covered all three with a couple more sacks and offered food. Cheese. Pickles. Bread. Instead, mother and child slept, Esther now the one singing a quiet song. She motioned to Motl: Chiena was still bleeding. Nothing could be done but wait for Avram to return with help. Motl remained near, keeping watch while the others slept too.

  * * *

  —

  They did not know if the unchanging half-light was half day or half night, nor how many hours had passed by the time Avram returned with the Polish doctor.

  “I’m Dr. Chaimovitch—Tania. I don’t often make house calls to such locations.” She smiled at them all.

  The baby was resting on Chiena, hardly moving. Chiena remained still. Esther lifted the sack so the doctor could examine both mother and child. The doctor came close, gently touching her palm to Hershel’s palm-sized back. She turned her head, listening, then placed fingers on Chiena’s neck. After a moment she removed her fingers, then leaned to kiss the brown swirl of Hershel’s damp hair.

  The doctor moved quickly, but in silence. If she were to be discovered, she would be shot with as little hesitation as with a Jew. She swaddled the baby in sacking and picked him up, cradling him against her. “I’ll keep him safe,” she said, and crawled toward the opening of the tunnel. “I know the way,” she said, and Avram nodded.

  He turned to Chiena, lying still in a pool of her own blood.

  “Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba,” he said, and moved a sack to cover her face. “Now we must move on,” he said. “It’s not safe to stay. May she forgive us for leaving.”

  * * *

  —

  What do miners know of mines—the tommyknocking rumbling and cold drafts, the otherworldly slurps of water and slurry? Like everything in the western, they keep going until they can’t.

  And so Esther, Motl and the others pushed forward, trying—like Lot’s wife—not to think of what they were leaving. Avram went first.

  “ ‘Despair is the most intense enjoyment, especially when one thinks about the hopelessness of one’s position.’ How apt to quote from Notes from the Underground when underground,” Avram said.

  “The most intense enjoyment isn’t your own despair, it’s other people’s. It’s hard not to appreciate what you don’t have,” Motl said.

  “That also Dostoevsky?”

  “No, Gitl. My mother.”

  * * *

  —

  The striped and jaundiced moon was visible through the street grate where the tunnel divided into three. They decided they would all take different routes to minimize the chance of discovery. If one group was caught, the others might still survive. They separated without more than a look or a nod. It wasn’t the time for spoken farewells. Once they started saying goodbye to those they might never see again, when would they end?

  Motl and Esther crawled into the leftmost tunnel. Above them they heard children’s voices, coughing, metallic clinking, rushing water and then quiet. Light through a grate, leaves intertwined in the bars, turned their tunnel as green as if they were in pond water.

  “Born again,” Motl said as he lifted up the grate and pulled himself up into a small fenced yard behind a stone building. “Stay low,” he said as Esther climbed out. He replaced the grate. “What gunslinging bandits roam the skirts of this stockade, I can’t rightly conjecture, but they’d be pleased to use our heads for target practice.”

  Ducking down, they splashed themselves with water from a trough, then extracted their Karaite headwear and identity papers from Motl’s satchel. Break open in case of Jewish persecution.

  “Like Buffalo Bill riding for the Pony Express, we still have post to deliver.” Motl indicated the Ḥakhan’s portfolio.

  “Berlin?”

  “We’ll be hiding in plain sight. They won’t look for us if we’re right in front of them.”

  “Also, if they unseal the portfolio, whatever the Ḥakhan’s other papers are, the list only makes us more Karaite.”

  “And after that, we go to Switzerland.”

  “To safety.”

  “And new life.”

  Through the slats in the fence, the street looked empty. They needed to be ready to explain who they were if they were encountered, to not surprise anyone. Never startle a bear, especially a bear with a semi-automatic.

  “My mother,” Motl said. “She could be anywhere. And alive.”

  Esther waited.

  “ ‘You can’t chew with someone else’s teeth,’ my mother would say. Also, ‘Make sure it’s your own tuchus you’re wiping when your tuchus needs wiping.’ ”

  “Wise words.”

  “I mean, when it’s not possible to save those you love, you have to at least save yourself. As it says in the Torah, There’s a time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted, a time for war and a time to plonk your keister in the saddle and ride the holy Hebrew hell out of the fire.”

  * * *

  —

  They slipped out the gate and into the street. “In the ghetto, we were Jews pretending to be Karaites pretending to be Jews,” Motl said. “I hope they see us as Karaites and not Jews pretending to be Karaites pretending to be Jews pretending to be Karaites.”

  “We’ll explain it to them,” Esther said. “Remember when we were driving out of Trakai, Lutski taught me this Karaite blessing: Gomitkum khadrah.”

  “ ‘Don’t shoot’?”

  “In Arabic, it means ‘May your week be green.’ ”

  “Good, if you’re a tree.”

  “Or a greenhorn.”

  4

  It was time to round up their car, furtively grazing inside a garage near the ghetto. Two steps toward freedom, one back, though in this case freedom meant travelling like Dante down through Hell and then up toward the bright trail of Heaven’s stars, namely, the cold and testicle-studded Milky Way of Motl’s Swiss glacier.

  They kept close to walls, feeling the need for protection, secure from gunfire, observation or storm. They came unexpectedly to the wide expanse of Didžioji Street, near the city hall.

  Two soldiers raised their rifles and stepped forward as one, in their jackboots. “Halt.”

  Motl and Esther raised their hands, then offered ID.

  The first Fritz squinted at Motl’s papers, then passed them to the second Fritz. He turned them over, apparently unable to decode the German symbols.

  “Karaites? This means Juden—Jews, correct?”

  As if anyone would proffer their own death warrant to armed men.

  “No—nein—officer, sir,” Esther said. “We are Karaites.” She touched the silk flowing from her headdress. “Not Jews, but from Crimea. We have permission from the Reich.”

  Permission: To live. To survive.

  The second Fritz cocked his rifle. “But you were Jews? You use Hebrew. You are—what is das Wort?—scroll-kissers?”

  “We left Judea before the Crucifixion. Our forefathers had no par
t in it. Not like Jews. More like Christians.”

  “The Czar and the Reich allow us…” Motl stuttered. “The Reich Institute for Genealogical Research…the Deutsche Volksliste…”

  “And we recognize Jesus as…”

  “What is in the satchel?” The first Fritz motioned with his rifle.

  Motl opened it and gave it to the second Fritz, who stirred around the contents then extracted the portfolio. He untied it to reveal the documents. Each was sealed with an antiquated red wax seal.

  “Documents we are bringing to Berlin. From our Ḥakhan. Our spiritual leader. For Reichsführer Himmler.”

  The two men regarded the sealed documents. They looked from the papers to Motl and Esther then back to the papers, then back to Motl and Esther, likely considering ideal Platonic forms as represented by the written word versus material reality as embodied by the corporeal presence of Motl and Esther. As corporals, they had not yet received advanced training.

  “Ja,” they said, with some trepidation. “You may go.”

  “Gomitkum khadrah,” Esther said. “As we Karaites say, ‘May your week be green.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  Except for a twilight filigree of spiders, the car appeared untouched. After they climbed in, they relaxed against the seats and sighed, an exhalation specific to neither the Karaite nor the Jewish tradition, but rather partaking of the more general human genius for expressing relief—ahh—though it is possible an “oy” and a “yesiree bob” was represented in their various utterances.

  5

  ON THE ROAD TO POLAND

  “So, we’re just going to keep barrelling west until we arrive at Himmler?”

  “Take a left at Göring, second right after Goebbels. If we get to Rommel, we’ve gone too far.”

  “You know there’s a war on?”

  “Those heading from Fort Laramie to Montana didn’t give the battle against the Indians no mind. Or those on the gold rush to California. But I do have a contact. An American Pole. Mordecai with the partisans gave me the name after I told him I was headed to Switzerland. Piotr—Peter—with the Związek Walki Zbrojnej, the ZWZ, the Union of Armed Struggle. They’re publishing bogus newspapers and pamphlets horn-swoggling people into believing there’s more opposition to the Nazis than is real. Nothing makes a varmint braver than other varmints.”

  “And nothing makes them more cowardly too.”

  “My mother would say that if there’s one bandit at the table and ten other people talking to him, that’s eleven bandits at the table.”

  “Or one bandit and ten scared diners. You’re a regular Sancho Panza with all these proverbs.”

  “In the absence of wisdom, there’s always my mother. Besides, our ancestors wandering in the desert didn’t have time for proper jokes, so they invented one-liners.”

  “More portable, too.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to just let history be a heap of fragments. Better not to connect dots, instead let it be one damn thing after another, a tragic picaresque.”

  “One damned person after another.”

  “I’m hoping, Esther, that that won’t be us.”

  “Motl,” she said, taking a hand off the wheel and touching his shoulder.

  * * *

  —

  They continued west. Though many people tramped the road, they saw no Germans, neither schnitzel-fond nor Schutzstaffeling, no partisans, neither arm-banded nor plain, no Hilfspolizeitrupping Lithuanians nor collaborating Poles, indeed no one Einsatzgruppening nor ersatz, not even a single anti-Semitic dog wishing to hump only Aryan strays.

  Until they came to a roadblock outside the beet sugar factory at Marijampolė.

  When they stopped, a townsman with a ratty moustache, a rifle and poor personal hygiene asked them to step out of the car. They stood together while he considered their haberdashery and the satchel slung over Motl’s shoulder. The man was clearly not thinking very quickly.

  “Stand over there,” he said eventually, and they moved to the shoulder.

  He climbed in the car and drove away.

  “How’s that for a one-liner?” Esther said.

  * * *

  —

  As they walked toward the train station, they encountered an old woman who sat at a rattletrap stall selling beets. She possessed two teeth, both stained purple, enough to anchor her knobbly pipe between them. With her black babushka, her wrinkled face like an ancient creek bed and the cloud of smoke she sat within, she appeared both earthly and preternatural. An oracle. She told them that thousands of people had been killed in Marijampolė, the great majority of them Jews. “I was there,” she said. Young men had been made to dig trenches then told to strip naked, climb in and lie down. Then they were shot. Next came the women and children, who didn’t comply and instead rioted. The gunfire was chaos. Many were buried alive.

  “The earth over the trenches moved for hours,” the woman said. “Until moonrise. Many of the shooters were students from the high school and university here. They’d volunteered. They celebrated all night.”

  She raised her single eyebrow and asked, “Thirsty?” They nodded and she held out a bottle of home-brew vodka made from beets.

  “A slug of this isn’t so much belly fire as electric shock,” Motl said to Esther.

  “But in a good way,” she replied.

  Outside a factory, Motl spotted their car. “One quick quip deserves another.”

  They crossed the road and hid behind a pine. “If the key’s there, we’ll steal it back from that rustler.” Motl ran beside the car and ducked down, squinting over the door. The key was on the dash along with some leather gloves.

  “Lithuania was Polish was Russian was Lithuanian was Russian was German and will be Lithuanian again,” Esther said. “One day it’ll be repatriated, just like this car.” She climbed into the driver’s seat and they pulled out onto the road and drove away. Esther began to sing the last verse—the only happy one—of a song that had won a ghetto songwriting contest:

  Like the Viliya River—liberated,

  The trees renewed in green,

  Freedom’s light will soon shine

  Upon your face,

  Upon your face.

  A shout from the road behind them. As he ran out of the factory and onto the street, it wasn’t exactly a light shining on the face of the man who had confiscated the car, it was more of an inner red glow. He flailed and spluttered in an idiom rich in plosives, fricatives and gutturals ripe with local colour. He shook his fist like a silent movie bad guy. “I’ll get you for this, you scoundrels!”

  * * *

  —

  It got dark. It got dark every night. They didn’t need night to remind them of how dark things were, though it’s true, endless light would have seemed a galling, unrelenting examination of what was unforgiving and cold.

  Earlier, Motl had fallen asleep against the door, the sun shining through the window, bright and dark clouds floating across his closed lids. Tiny illuminated rivers red with blood. Snakes like tendrils of fire.

  He climbed from a stallion, hand against its russet side, about to join Esther, who waited with a picnic basket under the cottonwoods. High overhead, a black bird with outstretched wings, lazily riding a gyre of rising air.

  She had spread a blanket and laid out bread, meat slices and cheese on plates. An apple. The shake and jingle of his spurs as he walked, pushing back his hat, wiping a sleeve against his forehead’s dampness.

  Something sudden in the brush.

  “Motl…” Esther called.

  He leapt forward, and his fist closed around its neck. It writhed, held away from the body, tail whipping his thigh. A diamondback, its tongue flicking in and out like a guttering flame. The heel of a boot on its neck and a quick bullet to the head, the shot reverberating from the distant
hills.

  The fangs had sunk into Esther’s leg, two red marks above her knee. A quick X with his knife and his mouth on the wound, sucking out venom. Her thigh salty and muscular, her fingers in his hair.

  “Motl,” Esther said, waking him. She’d parked beside a small, grim tavern. “Some food, maybe a place to stay.”

  A small town. A saloon. Motl knew how this worked.

  They walked in.

  “Karaites,” Motl said, indicating themselves and their hats. They were on a mission, he said, travelling to Berlin with important documents from His Excellency Hajji Seraya Khan Shapshal, the leader of their faith. “We’d be mighty grateful for some vittles, some lodging.”

  “You Karaites eat cabbage rolls?” the barkeep said.

  “Pork cabbage rolls?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then definitely, yes.”

  “And beer?”

  “Certainly.”

  Behind the bar, the bartender lifted two formidable steins from the shelf, then pulled two enormous porcelain tap levers toward him, filling both mugs with draft. The curtain of his large moustache was something from squirrel burlesque.

  Bursting through the kitchen’s saloon doors, the barkeep’s wife bustled toward them carrying two large plates. Butte-high stacks of cabbage rolls, perogies and a mesa of sauerkraut.

  “Eat,” she said. “You Karaites must be hungry. This is a time for hunger.” She herself was bountiful ground meat squeezed into a dirndl. “We have beautiful bed upstairs. Feather bed to make the mattress soft. Eiderdown to keep you warm.”

  She fetched the steins and set them on the table, the froth sloshing onto the cloth. “You can read your future in the bubbles,” she said. “Look close.”

  * * *

  —

  It was the first cooked meal they’d had in a long time. They ate and drank with the rapture of wolves, no time for words.