Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  Esther and Motl peered discreetly around the cabin. It was filled with books and papers, but there were no signs of newspapers or pamphlets. How do you ask an undercover resistance fighter if they’re undercover? “Excuse me, is your true identity concealed…and if the answer is no, how do we know if we should believe you? Also, we see your hidden publications aren’t visible, so do they really not exist?”

  The water boiled and Mike set a pot and some cups down. On the table in front of Esther was a ragged-eared, annotated bibliography. A partisan might fake a bibliography, but to annotate one takes an authentic egghead.

  Mike provided excellent biscuits, which they opted to immerse in tea.

  Then came shouting outside. Engine noise. German voices. Gunshots. The furious red of a fire burning large. Screaming. It was becoming familiar, but was no less horrifying. Before they could leave the cabin, the butt of a rifle bashed against the door. They stood up, hands in the air.

  “We are taking the Indians. They will go to the camp. Who are you?”

  “They’re not real Indians,” Mike protested. “They’re—”

  “Feathers, arrows, teepees. They look like Indians.”

  “We have papers,” Esther said. “Motl, show them the papers.”

  “I don’t look at papers,” the soldier said. “Papers can be made to lie. I look at faces and then I know.”

  “We’re Karaites,” Esther said.

  “Don’t know what that is,” the soldier said. “But from what you’re wearing, you don’t look like Jews or Poles. And you?” The soldier pointed his rifle at Mike, who had remained with his hands in the air, motionless. “Well, I don’t know who you are, but with blue eyes you’re not Gypsy, Jew or Indian. Unless you’re a Communist or faggot or both?”

  “Nein,” Mike said. “Of course not. Heil, Hitler!” He stretched his arm out, slowly making the Nazi salute. No sudden movement when the other guy has a gun.

  “Heil, Hitler,” the soldier responded instinctually as Motl and Esther saluted also.

  “Fritz!” A shout outside and the soldier turned to investigate what further Nazi-ing was required of him.

  * * *

  —

  Mike grabbed some papers off one end of the table and crammed them into his briefcase. Standing on the bed, they slung themselves out the back window and into the shadows between trees. They’d creep farther into the woods while they had the chance.

  “We’ve heard there’s a cabin nearby, and a man who lives there,” Motl said.

  “Piotr,” Mike said.

  “Yes, but we must be careful. Since it wasn’t you the Nazis were looking for, it’s likely that Piotr was actually the one the Nazis were trying to find.”

  They walked some way in a stream.

  “The only footprints you can track in water are Jesus’s.”

  7

  Naturally, Mike knew about Piotr. He’d sometimes taken long walks to get away from the counterfeit Indianers. Sometimes he took a copy of a Karl May novel with him so he could recognize this European Wild West.

  Sometimes he couldn’t see the West for the trees.

  The two had not actually spoken, but Mike had seen Piotr’s cabin, seen people leaving late on mostly moonless nights, plodding away with heavy rucksacks, heard them say, quiet and wistful as they departed, “Be safe, Piotr.”

  * * *

  —

  The cabin sat on uneven ground in a small glade. It was a kind of counterfeit, made to look as if it were abandoned, its windows covered with down-on-its-luck sacking to show no light.

  “If we don’t surprise him,” Mike said, “we won’t be surprised. By bullets, for example.” And he began to sing in an elastic and nasal Western twang:

  The cowboy’s a-prowlin’

  after cows and their cowlin’s

  his spurs are a jinglin’

  and the ol’ ki-otes call.

  This cowboy’s misery’s

  adding Injuns to injuries

  shooting at everything

  he knows nothing at all.

  And then he yodelled, some variety of coyote tooth extraction or ontological woe. “Just so he knows we’re not German,” Mike said after—praise Roy Rogers—he stopped.

  A small triangle of light as the sacking was lifted from the corner of a window.

  “Two Jews and an Oneida,” Mike announced as they came to halt twenty feet from the cabin.

  “Karaites,” Motl said.

  “What?”

  “We’re Karaites.”

  “Right, you said that. What’s a Karaite?” Mike asked.

  The door opened, and a short, grisly-bearded man peered out, a combination of hobbit and rabbi.

  “Quickly. Inside.” Piotr scanned the surrounding forest with squirrelly vigilance.

  They entered the cabin of a hoarder. Boxes covered the walls. A small space remained: a table with a mattress underneath, a chair and a printing press. Bread and cheese on the table amongst paper reams. Candlelight.

  “They call me Piotr. Who are you?” he asked.

  Now that they had found him, it wasn’t clear to Motl and Esther what exactly they were to do since his peril seemed greater than their own. It don’t pay for an outlaw to hide on the gallows of another.

  “Mordecai—a partisan we stayed with in the woods back in Lithuania—told us to look for a man named Piotr, and so here we are,” Esther said.

  “I’m not really Piotr, but since the first Piotr is gone, I am now Piotr,” the man said. “Cheese? Bread? Pamphlets, which outline the wide opposition and the conspiracy against Hitler in the Wehrmacht, including generals and officers?”

  “Is that true?”

  “Convince one fact to change, then maybe the rest will too.”

  They sat on boxes of unsupported truth and shared the bread and cheese. The meagre segments, stale and dry, required prolonged and committed engagement with the jaw. In between they spoke of Mordecai, the partisans and Lithuania.

  Eventually, Piotr said, “It’s probably safe for you to return to the Indianers’ camp. Now that it’s almost dark, the Germans will have left. There’s likely food left behind and shelter where you can sleep.”

  He led them through the dim shapes of the forest, showed them the stepping stones to cross the river, the deer paths through the thickest woods, until they returned to the Indianers’ camp.

  Bodies around the remains of the fire. Blood on the naked backs of those who tried to run, headdresses like killed birds. Teepees toppled, everything strewn about, pushed over, kicked in, set on fire.

  “It’s just like the Wild West to the Nazis,” Mike said. “They think they’re better than the people here and the land is for the taking, no one from the outside world watching or caring what they do. Hitler wrote, ‘When we eat a piece of bread, why worry the soil that produced it was won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about decimated Indians.’ Hitler said, ‘The Volga is our Mississippi,’ so the Germans can act as innocently as the Americans did.”

  A moaning from under a fallen teepee.

  “Motl,” Esther called. Together they pulled the skins and the long wooden beams away. Underneath, a man, his face wet with blood, one leg twisted, his black wig askew, the braids tangled. A small blond girl beside him, silent, also covered in blood.

  “My wife…my daughter…” he implored.

  Motl lifted the girl, placed her down on one of the teepee skins. Esther, her arm around the man’s shoulder, helped him sit up. He wept.

  “They tried to pull our daughter, Anna, away from me and Maja—her mother. They said they were taking her to a Lebensborn home to make a good German of her. She’s only four. Maja held on so tight, and they shot them both right in front of me. I tried to help, but they got me too. They thought they’d killed me.”

&
nbsp; Esther put an arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said.

  Sometimes words are an oasis, a salve when there’s nothing else.

  Motl signalled to Mike, and he knelt beside Motl and the girl, leaning close, listening for breath, feeling for a pulse. The child was dead. Motl covered her with the skin. A painted image of a red bear pawing at the sky.

  “The others?” Motl asked.

  “Taken to a labour camp,” Piotr said. “If they’re lucky. Or at least, less unlucky.” He looked at the man in Esther’s arms. “He, at least, still could use your help. I must go back to my cabin—I can’t risk discovery. I’ve work to do.”

  * * *

  —

  They decided the safest place for the man to sleep overnight was in Mike’s bed. After they laid him down, Esther wrapped a blanket around him and had him drink a cup of water. Mike pulled over a chair and a book. He would read out loud until the man slept, and then watch over him. Sobbing, the man finally did, exhausted by shock and loss.

  “What happened to them is hideous,” Mike said quietly to the others, “and yet here I am, an Indigenous person.”

  “It’s a grim fable. They chose to be someone else—until they couldn’t,” Esther said.

  “Who gets to choose?”

  “Not sure who I am at this point. I’m just trying to hang on before it all shatters,” Esther replied. “Because of what I see. What I’ve seen. You know the joke: ‘Why don’t Jews drink? Because it dulls the pain.’ But at least it’s my pain. If I’m shards, I’m shards. A smashed window is still a window.”

  Motl suggested that someone should keep a lookout. He’d sit outside the cabin in case the Germans returned. It was a grim fable of its own. Sitting in the dark in a destroyed village, bodies on the ground beside an extinguished fire.

  When the sun rose, they were able to see well enough to retrieve food from around the camp. They couldn’t risk a fire, and so they ate cold bannock and pork sausage with pemmican as they sat around the ashes in the central clearing. They’d bury the dead afterwards. Customs change in such times.

  “I wonder if it is safest to stay here or to go somewhere else?” Mike said.

  “How likely is lightning to strike the same place twice?” Motl said.

  “Depends if it’s Nazi lightning.”

  “Makes me think of the two bolts in the SS insignia.”

  “We’ve had one strike. They might come back to look for Piotr,” Esther said.

  “I should go with you two,” Mike said. “Maybe I could find a way home, or at least to where it’s safer.”

  The injured man, Krzysztof he’d said his name was, had asked to be helped outside when he woke so he could lie on a blanket in a sunlit patch near the cabin. He was sleeping again.

  Esther glanced his way. “What about him?”

  “Leave him like a newborn on the steps of a church,” Motl suggested.

  “Or at the tavern. I’m sure Karol and Grażyna would know what to do.”

  “Before we leave, we should at least cover them,” Mike said of the dead. “And some kind of ceremony—maybe what I remember of what we’d do back home. I think they’d have liked that. As my mother would say, ‘Misfortune cannot touch another without piercing us too.’ ”

  They cut the teepees into shrouds. They dug trenches. They laid the wrapped bodies in the earth. Esther pulled a chair close to Krzysztof, and they watched together, Krzysztof weeping and Esther wiping the tears from his cheeks.

  Mike broke apart a cigarette and burned its tobacco over a small fire.

  “Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw,” Motl said.

  “I don’t know much of my language, but what I know is important,” Mike said, and stood before the trenches chanting prayers in Oneida.

  Then they packed what few things they could fit in rucksacks—eggs, bannock, an assortment of Mike’s papers, a few books, blankets, a knife. They’d hike to the pine-shielded car, leave Krzysztof at the pub, then once again head west toward Berlin.

  As they were about to set out, they heard footsteps in the woods, and then a voice singing a new verse to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March”:

  This Jew, he’s taking great big risks

  printing pamphlets ’bout National Socialists

  it’s alphabetical, my last will and testicle

  but how else could my balls raise their fists

  Piotr had arrived.

  “I figure that even as Karaites you might need some contacts, especially if you get into trouble,” he said, and he gave them names of people who could help in Warsaw and Berlin. “And take these with you.” He handed Esther a bundle of leaflets tied with string.

  “What if we’re caught?”

  “If they search you, you’re already dead.”

  “I’ve been sitting here thinking,” Krzysztof said. “Now that it’s all gone, I know I should ask, ‘What do I want from life?’ But I can’t. Maybe I should ask what a cow asks at the abattoir door: ‘What does life want from me?’ We camped here because the world lost its mind and became unrecognizable. It was better here in the trees, together around the fire. We hoped for courage and connection, for something to make sense. Let me join you, Piotr. Let me help.”

  “Recover first,” Piotr said. “Then come find me.”

  He disappeared into the trees.

  “As my mother used to say, ‘Man can get used to anything. Even feeling better,’ ” Krzysztof said. “Can you help get me to the car?” Without the black wig and kohl, he wouldn’t be noticed, except for the broken leg. And being Polish. Schnitzel and lederhosen were safer than pemmican and braids. Or kielbasa and a krakuska.

  Arms around Mike and Motl, he limped to where the car was still undiscovered in its bower of pine branches and shadow.

  * * *

  —

  They left Krzysztof at the tavern—a surprise for when Karol and Grażyna opened up—and once more took the road west. It led past farmers’ fields, trees and bushes, geese, sheep and white-painted cottages, and while it was only a trick of the sun, the world was morning light.

  A country church.

  “Stop here,” Motl said.

  “You forgot to get baptized?” Esther said.

  “No, we need water.”

  “So, you do need to get baptized.”

  Esther parked the car.

  “I’ll stay here,” Mike said. “My people don’t go into churches. We’re not always allowed to leave.”

  So he waited in the car with Esther while Motl heaved open the large front door and stepped in. A priest was at the far end, ministering to something on the altar.

  “Howdy,” Motl said.

  The priest turned. He didn’t look friendly.

  The two men regarded each other, gazing warily over the length of the nave. The priest took a few deliberate steps toward Motl. Motl stepped farther into the church.

  “I’m looking for water,” he said.

  “I know what you need,” the priest said.

  For several minutes, there was silence, Motl standing inside the sanctuary, the priest at the chancel. Incense from the thurible rose to the vault. Both men unyielding, resolute.

  In the aisles, the light of votive candles was steady.

  Then the priest put a hand in the pocket of his cassock. “Don’t move,” he said.

  Motl remained still. Vigilant.

  Ready.

  There was a sudden flash as the priest whipped something large and bright from his pocket.

  Motl’s hands flew up.

  “The key,” the priest said. “To the rectory.”

  Motl followed him out a side door and down a cobblestone path into the kitchen of the stone cottage where the priest lived. He filled several bottles with water then gave them to Motl to put in h
is satchel. He also found some bread.

  “Where, my Karaite brother, are you travelling?” the priest asked.

  “Łódź,” Motl said, explaining that a relative, a Karaite priest, had fallen ill and he was on his way to tend to him and his cattle.

  Motl returned to the car.

  “In stories,” he said, “some things occur to surprise or build character. But sometimes, it’s just about bread and water.”

  8

  Twilight like smoke through the trees. They skulked down a lane into the woods to hide for the night. Shut-eye is best when one believes such sawing will end in dawn and not the business end of a gun.

  Mike shouldered his rucksack and walked a short distance from the car, where he made a shelter by slinging a piece of scavenged teepee tarp over a low bough. Esther and Motl climbed into the wide back seat and huddled under a blanket, talking quietly.

  Stars visible above the pines in the black night like countless gunshots that had missed their mark, instead piercing the sky, the dead looking down through pinholes of light.

  “Maybe my mother’s up there,” Motl said, pointing. “Which is the ‘Don’t worry about me’ constellation? Soon she’ll figure how to make the clouds pour soup, though there’ll be a chance of matzo balls.”

  Esther pressed close to him. He carried the scent of smoke. They both did. Washing was only a romantic’s ideal as they tumbled forward, a braid of ashes and fire, body and word, trying to remain in the cracks of history. Her lips against his temple, her fingers intertwined with his.

  “Esther.” His hand inching through the curls at her nape, his lips this time at her temple, then from her neck down to the soft ridge of her shoulder.

  Legs. Essential if one chooses pants or walking. Good also as a setting for loins.