Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  Her fingers proceeding along his thigh, a combination of lightning and a fall into an abyss.

  “I’m not…I mean, I want…I wish…”

  Esther lifted his hand onto her breast. “My heart. My breathing. The ghost of who I am inside. Where it’s dark. Safe. Can you feel?”

  A scream in the woods. Then many.

  “Kiotes.”

  “Ghosts,” Esther said.

  “Wolves.”

  “Hold me.”

  The howling surrounded them as if wraiths moved in the dark. They locked the car in case wolves could lever the handles with their jaws.

  “What about Mike?”

  “Do his people not know what to do with wolves?”

  “Maybe. But he’s unarmed.”

  “Then I hope he is good at climbing.”

  They lay close, shadowed by blanket, listening, eventually sleeping. What were wolves or kiotes when there were Nazis about?

  * * *

  —

  Morning. Mike’s shelter was abandoned, but they found him nested in a tree, hardcover books like fallen fruit scattered on the forest floor around it. Copies of Winnetou: The Apache Knight, Old Surehand and even the original German Winnetou der Rote Gentleman tumbled open, on the ground.

  “I threw them at the wolves,” Mike said. “They ran. The next best thing to a fearless warrior is a book about one.”

  He lowered himself to the ground, put down his rucksack, then yawned and stretched the kinks from his spine. “Trees are okay, but it’s more comfortable to chop them into beds before you try to sleep in them.” He gathered the westerns, slipped them back in the bag with his other papers. “Breakfast,” he said. “Motl, can you trap us a gopher?”

  Eggs. They had eggs. Also the rest of the bannock. They built a small fire beside a stream and cooked. Motl cut some pine twigs and made tea from the needles. “I read about this, but you have to be careful—some, like the flat-needled yew, will cause your guts to writhe like a rattler.”

  “I know,” Mike said. “I was sent to Boy Scouts in Toronto. After I was taken from my reserve. But I also remember this tea from my father when we went fishing. And coffee with lots of milk and sugar, the way my dad liked it.

  “I’d kill a Schutzstaffel for some coffee right now. Of course, I’d kill one anyway, but the coffee’d be nice.”

  9

  The road toward Warsaw. Esther driving. Mike shotgun.

  Motl, half-asleep on the back seat. Reverie rather than reveille, a fenceless roaming. Muttering, mostly to himself.

  “It’s German-speaking cowpokes who ride the pages of the westerns I’ve read. Rheinstein cowboys schnelling their appaloosas with Bavarian spurs, squeezing Sudetenland horse ribs with knobbly blond Austrian knees, the backs of their brains tickled by half-remembered Schiller from gymnasium schooldays, ‘Ode to Joy’ Ludwiging their lips while they sprachen ‘achtung kleine doggies’ at the steers in Deutsch and eyeball the twinkling Reichsternen up above. But to be a Jewish cowboy is to be more Apache than those Eurosavage bratwurst-coloured Österreich rustlers, stealing across the plains like the herd of plagues they drive.

  “What are we if we’re not leather-faced steer punchers—chopped liver? We’re more than Karl May cowpokes or costume-party Indianers, blood brothers because our quantified blood is judged less human. We wake on our bedrolls after a shut-eye of only the usual dreams and find ourselves transformed into vermin.

  “And then the ‘blintz’-krieg. We’re crammed into ghettos, starved, unable to leave, our houses appropriated, our gelt and our goods stolen. A betrayal of tears, learned from Americans.

  “Mike,” Motl said, sitting up and leaning over the front seat. “You’re the first real Indian I’ve met.”

  “And you’re the first Jewish cowboy.”

  “ ‘Wrangler of the sorrowful countenance,’ ” Esther said.

  “More an agnostic buckaroo. Lapsed or at least Reform,” Motl said. “Not so sure Moses rode down the black Sinai hills, two stone-cold westerns in his saddlebags. Least if he did, someone first had manifested the helluva untermenschen destiny out of his Hebrew hiney and exiled his furry prophet face for the as-long-as-green-grass-grows-and-water-runs duration.”

  “We’re not so much trying to get out of Egypt as get it back,” Mike said. “Or at least, as my mother says, ‘to be well treatied.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  That morning they drove past fields of rye and potatoes. Pig farms. Pastures pocked with cows and their ripe or crusted patties, the audible cluck and crow of poultry. Barns both tumbledown and recently painted. Fallow lands where the cultivation of scrub, subjugation, abandonment, weeds, farm implements and rust clearly flourished. Farms where hope was not a viable crop. Fields green only because it took an unseasonable resistance to do anything but just keep going, hoping for the German outbreak to pass.

  And then they arrived at a corral beside a stable, barn-red with white trim as if from a child’s drawing or Motl’s softcover brain. Esther stopped the car.

  Palominos, gold, brilliant white and yellow, cream and champagne. Muzzles mottled and skewbald. Amber eyes. Green, hazel, brown. White manes rippling as they ran, tails foamy as waves.

  The golden steeds of myth, heroes and gunfighters, honeyed by amber light.

  Billy the Kid, the Clantons, the Earp brothers.

  Winnetou’s father and sister, Intschu-tschuna and Nscho-tschi.

  Old Shatterhand and Winnetou riding bareback on Iltschi—Wind—and Hatatitla—Lightning, their hooves touching neither sage nor brush, scrub nor ground fouled by Nazis nor cavalry.

  “Swack my jingo,” Motl said. “This cowboy longs for the feel of leather beneath him, the sudden undulation of the gallop.”

  “So now you want to get lucky?” Esther said. “Had your chance last night.”

  “I’m afraid that’s as different as whiskey and soap. I’m saying I could cotton to riding one of those broncs.”

  “Let’s not attract attention,” Esther said.

  “But they think I’m Aryan and you’re both Karaites.” Mike was out the door and at the gate. A stocky Pole in a frowzy suit jacket and a battered straw hat, held together by a tawdry fabric band, was leaning on the top rail. Mike spoke to him. They laughed, nodded and pointed at a few of the horses. The Pole made some cryptic yet philosophical hand gestures—perhaps “Why not?” “How can it hurt?” “As if we’re all not going to die soon anyway?” And “If that man still in the car is an idiot with limited understanding and suffering a terminal illness, surely I could grant him this one wish?”

  Mike arrived at the car window. “These horses are used for ‘therapeutic horseback riding’ at the Göring Institute—that’s Ernst Göring, Hermann’s nephew—but I explained that you Karaites are from an ancient horse-riding tradition. You pray to them as you ride.”

  “We are?”

  “Motl does,” Esther said. “A lapsed buckaroo still hankers for horse sweat.”

  “Are you trying to seduce me?” Motl said.

  “Maybe.”

  “So, Motl, he says he’ll allow you to ride.”

  “I only ever harnessed Theodor Herzl to a wagon. I never climbed on. But, Mike, you can teach me.”

  “What do I know? I grew up in Toronto. We had a car.”

  “I’ll show you,” Esther said. “It’s like riding a bicycle, but wider. And the bicycle might choose to kill you.”

  “Won’t he notice?”

  “Karaites ride Karaite horses. And they use Karaite commands. Also, I told him that you’re both sick and simple.”

  The Pole in the haystack hat examined Motl and Esther as they walked toward him. In their Karaite headgear, they seemed like a vision from the Arabian Nights. Exotic Orientals wise in the way of stallions. Silk would flow as they floated over th
e minaret-shadowed sand. And Motl was the terminally ill simpleton out for one last ride.

  Since the Nazis usually euthanized “life-unworthy-of-life” like him, the Pole figured he must be a prince whose father sent magic carpets laden with open-sesame spoils to fill their coffers.

  “I am Tadeusz,” the Pole said, opening the gate to let them in. Then he called, “Shusha,” to a glimmering palomino. “Here.” And the horse brought its white-striped nose snorting over the gate. “Good boy.” Tadeusz bridled the horse, then passed the reins to Motl. “Hold.”

  He whistled, and a boy ran out from the stable carrying a saddle, slipped through the rails of the corral and strapped it to the horse.

  “Stefa, Bialy,” Tadeusz said, calling a champagne mare and a stallion the colour of a gold coin. The boy saddled them too, and handed Mike and Esther the reins.

  “So now, you ride,” Tadeusz said. The boy opened the gate and they led the three horses into the open field.

  Mike and Esther both took hold of the pommels, stepped into the stirrups, kicked out at the horizon and scissored their legs over the saddles, settling themselves on their horses.

  What was a cowboy to do when there’d been an incident with his prairie oysters at the crossroads of his legs and now he must grand-jeté up onto his hoss as if it were nothing but a pony-headed broomstick and he a rodeo clown? Take the bit in his mouth, wince like the sun had juiced lemon in his eyes and get the job done. One foot in the stirrup, a lifted leg, and Motl fell, his back on the damp grass, Karaite hat rolling like a fallen coin.

  The sky. A bell jar over the earth, beyond it the endless and irresponsible universe. Clouds: doltish billows juddering the blue. Then Tadeusz’s sardonic face looking down.

  “They make it more difficult when they stand still,” he said, passing Motl his hat. “Maybe Karaite horses are different. But I know you are not well. Let me help.”

  He held out his hand. Motl untangled his foot from the stirrup and stood.

  “Not so easy being a cowpoke,” Motl said. Then, “Or a Karaite rider.”

  Tadeusz helped him up onto the horse, patting the long knolls of its golden neck. “Easy now, Shusha. Easy.”

  And then Motl was a cowboy. High upon a golden horse, you could see farther, know what brewed over the horizon. The wind spoke directly to you, whispering as it brushed past your face.

  “Shusha,” Motl said, and the horse knew what to do, cantering toward Esther and Mike, who had already trotted their horses to the end of the field and were waiting, looking back.

  Esther said, “Now I’ll teach you both how to ride.”

  “I actually know quite a lot about horses,” Mike said. “Just didn’t want to be Motl’s ‘Little Red Riding Instructor.’ ” He turned both palms up and shrugged.

  “Then, Motl, I’ll just tell you what my father taught me: Keep your hands down. Relax your legs. Don’t clothespin. Look where you’re going, not at the horse. And breathe. Remember to breathe, else you’ll fall off and become hoof mash.”

  She showed him a few tricks with the reins, and he walked the horse in a few figure eights and then trotted out the letters of his name. They were now ready to ride the road between fields. Motl took the lead, beginning slowly then spurring the horse forward, exhilaration filling his chest with a hive-like buzzing. The horse broke into a gallop, and Motl, like Kafka’s Red Indian, instantly alert, leaned against the wind as they quivered over the moving ground. Spurs? Were there spurs? He didn’t need them, maybe he had shed his spurs then thrown away the reins—he needed no reins—he hardly saw that the land before him was smoothly shorn scrub, and together they were one thing—the horse and Motl, the air and ground, future and past, they were neither cowboy nor Indianer, Jew nor man, grief nor fear, history nor its angel, wind nor storm, or were all of them at once.

  Then he was clutching the horse’s neck as he realized he was unable to slow her, panting, electric with fearful joy and the present.

  Mike was beside him, “Shusha, whoa, Shusha, whoa,” and the horse began to slow, and then Esther was on his other side, “Whoa. Whoa.” Soon they were walking slowly, and Motl steered the horse into a field of long grass. Shusha stopped beside a rock, flat as flagstone, nosing it. Sniffing.

  A fringed red scarf half-visible underneath. Esther climbed from the saddle, pulled on the scarf. The stone lifted, revealing a mouth lined with moss-covered stones. A stone-lined cavern. A hole to store potatoes. But what about the scarf? Daylight fell on blankets, coats, the shadowy shapes of people huddled at the cellar bottom. A whimpering. A girl whimpered until a hand covered her mouth. “Shh.”

  “Don’t worry,” Esther said. “We weren’t looking for you. You’re safe.”

  A family hiding in the dank. The girl crawled up to them as Motl looked over the fields, over the horizon, ensuring no one was watching.

  The girl reached to touch the horse’s nose, petting it. The horse sighing, its long-lashed eyes steady on the girl. “We’ve been underground for so long,” she said.

  A man’s voice. “Raisel, you must come back. It’s not safe.”

  Esther embraced the girl. “It’ll be all right. The war will end.” Wrapping the girl in the red scarf.

  “Ask Tadeusz to bring more food if he can,” the girl said. “We’re so hungry.”

  She crawled back underground.

  Motl got down from his horse. “I want to see,” he said. “Esther, you and Mike can ride while I do.” And he crouched then slid into the darkness of the entrance. A rope to lower himself down the sloping, slippery surface. The cellar was surprisingly deep; perhaps it had been an abandoned well, further excavated to become this crypt for potatoes.

  “So, you’re joining us?” An old man, bent and knobbly as his own knees, greeted him in the dark. His tumbleweed beard twisted over his chest. “Were we expecting you? We expect many things, mostly Nazis. And death. Is it a holiday you’re hoping for?”

  He and his three daughters had been living like moles in the low tunnel for many months. His wife had been shot as she left the synagogue, his synagogue, for he had been the rabbi there.

  He lit a small lantern and guided Motl farther into the cave.

  “She died in my arms,” he said. “I ran from the bimah, from the open Ark, from the unfurled Torah, I had been teaching a boy to chant—and I found her on the threshold, fallen. I held her and prayed. I, a rabbi, could not remember the psalm’s words, nor their proper order.

  “The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.

  The Lord will guard your going and your coming from now and for all time.

  I lift my eyes to the mountains—from where will my help come?”

  His daughters, sitting on ledges in the cave, wept as he recounted the story. Motl thought of old folk tales where maidens turned into lakes of silver tears.

  From his jacket pocket, the rabbi produced a small prayer book. “My wife’s. I keep what she held close with me. Near my heart. But we have been safe here. Thanks to Tadeusz and his family. They have risked their lives for us.” From another pocket, he took out a revolver. “Can you fix this?”

  “Papa,” the girl with the red scarf said.

  “I keep it for protection, but I don’t know how to make it work,” the rabbi said, and passed the weapon to Motl. Motl had read about Sharps. Henrys. Derringers. Peacemakers. Colts. He could smell their gunpowder, the click of their hammers, their flash and crack. He could see an outlaw topple to dust on Main Street, a Lakota from his horse, or buffalo sink to its knees. He could imagine a gun’s feel in his hands, its handshake of power and promise. How holstered six-shooters on each hip would charge his walk with grace and swagger. But he had never pushed a cylinder to the side, placed ammo in its chambers, spun it with satisfaction, glee or steady resolve, pulled back a hammer and aimed, squinting into the future with fortitude and the certainty
of fate. As a young man in Zimmerwald, he had been handed a loaded gun, but he’d immediately given it to a comrade, as if it had burned him to hold even for a moment.

  Motl turned the rabbi’s gun over. He imagined it would be the weight of a sparrow or fish, but it had the heft of a book or a small chicken.

  “I can’t help,” he said. “I’ve read so many things, but I know nothing.” And he turned to leave.

  10

  “You hit your head,” the rabbi said, leaning over him. “You were out cold.” He dabbed at Motl with the girl’s red scarf. “Have some water.”

  Motl lay on the ground, his head on the knee of one of the daughters. She put a cup to his lips. He drank.

  “Use the rope, if you can,” the rabbi said. And Motl got up and pulled himself unsteadily on his hands and knees up the mossy stones and into the blaring light of the field.

  “I was knocked out for hours,” Motl said, touching his temple. “They showed me a gun. They gave me water. His wife’s heart was in his pocket.”

  Esther said, “I know not to believe everything you say. You were only there for five minutes. But I was worried.”

  “Any longer and we might have left you,” Mike said. “Figured you were never coming back.”

  Esther helped him hoist himself back onto the horse. She pulled the stone across the entrance, smoothing the earth around it. She climbed back on her own palomino. They returned to the path. They rode.

  They said nothing to Tadeusz about his underground cache of sentient potatoes, only nodded and smiled with quiet respect as they trotted into the corral.

  He raised an eyebrow at the cut on Motl’s temple.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve been on a horse,” Motl said. “I fell. The wind. The fields. The horse. Like I was flying from the war.”

  “ ‘If I had wings like a goose, I’d fly away…’ ” Tadeusz began singing, the tune itself having mostly already gone south. He sent for the boy—his son—to get a bandage. They corralled the horses, then Tadeusz offered them food.