Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  “I also have homemade beer. Do Karaites drink?” he asked. “I know we Europeans do,” he said to Mike.

  Was it better to be unsafe with a drink or unsafe without one? They decided they’d stay for Tadeusz’s bread, cheese, onions and Pilsner. And a plate of perogies.

  “Jezusku! My mother knew perogies. I am lucky she taught our Marianna to make them because I listened. But that was before the war, and before Marianna…”

  And he filled their mugs with Pilsner.

  After a plate of perogies and fried onions, Motl said, “So delicious. My mother made such kreplach…such—”

  A look from Esther.

  “Such dumplings. Our Karaite virtiniai…”

  It was delicious comfort to eat and drink around a table in the shade, the whinnying and whickering of horses, the tail flicks, bees and flies, a fine intermittent breeze riffling the fields.

  They had some more cheese. Then more beer.

  Then they thanked Tadeusz, patted a few muzzles while the horses exhaled their hay-scented hot breaths, and all three climbed into the car and set off for the lone Polish prairie.

  11

  Mike was in the back seat now. He leaned forward. “So,” he asked, “what’s with all the cowboying?”

  “I’d give my pony and saddle to return to a stubby painted cottage on the range rather than roam these wild Sinai plains, exodusing the East in hopes of a new life,” Motl said. “But I’m a wandering cowboy, an ingenious knight, a Litvak rambling from the Pale, aiming to outride the sorrows of the world. The cowboy has no land but takes fate by the horns, wrestles it to the ground.”

  “You’re quick on the draw with the tongue-gunning,” Mike said. “I understand wanting to be something else. Me? I want to be myself again. Oneida. As I said, I don’t have my language, though I’ve learned some from elders. Maybe that’s why I chose to study these Indianers: at least I know more than them. Better to be an Indian who doesn’t Indian than to Indian without being Indian, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know where I’m from,” Motl said. “Just don’t believe in it these days.”

  “Well, your world is ending. Ours already did, but it’s not entirely gone. We’re beginning again. They can starve us, move us, kidnap us, separate us, ban our language and ceremonies. But no matter how many times you wash and wring a squirrel, it’s still a squirrel.”

  “Seems an unnecessarily difficult way to get nuts.”

  * * *

  —

  They spotted a checkpoint several fields ahead at the edge of a town. Esther slowed and reversed the car, intending to turn onto a side road they’d just passed.

  “Don’t think you’ll get by on looks alone,” she said to Mike.

  “My mother told me that,” Motl said.

  The car shuddered. She’d backed into a rock. When she drove forward, the car was askew, a tire flat, and they veered into a ditch.

  “Jesus, Joseph and Shmuel Leibovitch!” she cried. “We’ll have to get out and push.” But like kicking a hive of wasps, their antics had aroused the Fritzes at the checkpoint, and they started running toward them.

  “Out,” Mike said, and the three of them climbed out of the car and into the trees. The food and blankets were in the trunk, so they left with nothing except Motl’s satchel and gun.

  They ran out of the forest and across a field, crouching low, using cows for cover, and then back into another stand of trees. It seemed the Germans had not followed.

  “There were train tracks crossing the road a few miles before we got to the checkpoint,” Mike said. “We could follow them back to the station—maybe we can hop a train when the coast is clear.”

  * * *

  —

  And that’s what they did. When they reached their destination, they waited until the sun was low in the sky before they slipped out of hiding in the woods and crept alongside a freight train parked at the station. The boxcars’ shadows were blunt-toothed as they went from car to car searching for an unlocked door. Finally, Esther found one and heaved it open. They retreated to shelter behind a shack in view of the car. Best to wait to board until the train began moving in case the cars were checked. Once things got rolling, they couldn’t be stopped.

  Just ask Sisyphus.

  A ricochet down the couplings as the engine was started and the brake released. A shudder. As Motl, Esther and Mike crouched, ready to run, soldiers, shouldering rifles, strode out of the station and along the train, inspecting cars. One closed the door that Esther had opened.

  Motl tied a handkerchief around his face and took the gun out of his satchel. “I’ll move in like a bandit, stick my Colt in his kuchenhole and spätzle a few mine shafts into his brain. Then we do what we want.”

  “So we colander a Nazi then take a seat and ride to the next town? Maybe we could sit in the club car and have tea and scones too,” Esther said.

  “Let’s just open the door and jump in as the train moves. Not great for our train robber CV, but safer,” Mike said.

  A metal screel as the train began to move. The soldiers had reached the front end of the train and so they had a chance to scrabble aboard. First Esther, then Mike. Motl tripped and the train car went by. He clutched at the next one as he ran, heaved open the door—which luckily was unlocked—and scrambled in. Mike stuck his head out the door. Motl also. They looked at each other.

  “Yours has a better view,” Motl said.

  “At least while that bandana covers your face.”

  “Can you climb over to me?”

  “Both of us? You come here.”

  “Don’t think I can. We’ll just jump out together when it’s time.”

  Motl gathered up straw, cardboard and sacks from the floor of the boxcar to fashion something between a fainting couch and a nest. The motion of the train made it impossible to close the door. He lay out of sight, yet still tree shadows brindled over him as he attempted to sleep.

  On his own, he reckoned his losses. Had his family survived? His mother? What had happened to them? Did they suffer?

  Esther in the boxcar ahead of him, a single room into the future. Esther sleeping in the dark. Did she smile as she thought of him? Did she think of him? He imagined her hands on his shoulders, his forehead, his leg, her breath as she slept, her shudders and snorts as she turned, remembering in her sleep, muttering or crying in dreams. His darlin’. They crossed a sea of sage grass, russet hills in night shadow, the moon shining through their separate doors as they journeyed west together yet apart. There was war and death, but above Zimmerwald there was life and potential, his frozen ranchers that could rustle possibility. Esther and Motl, mother and father of what was conceivable. Of what could be hoped for.

  He hoped they could hope together. Perhaps they already did.

  They could father and mother, could pet and smooch, give and receive, could lover and lover. He’d be a new kind of cowboy, a new man in an old world, an old man in the new. Together they would travel to Zimmerwald, would make a new life.

  He was woken by hammering from the end of the boxcar. Something different than the ambient clanging and rattling of moving trains. Something urgent. Dire. A wolf’s howl amid a homestead’s lowing and bleating.

  Danger.

  The history of Jews and Indigenous people, a cowboy shoot-’em-up, an adventure tale. One narrow escape after another. One damn unbelievable thing after another. Apparently, this would be another.

  Two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for supper. This, also, was the woolly history of Jews and the Indigenous.

  Except the sheep has a gun.

  But so do the wolves.

  More banging. Mike leaning out of the car, shouting back at Motl. “We’re slowing down in the middle of nowhere. That means we’re coming to a checkpoint. It means we have to get off. Now. We have to jump.”

&nbs
p; As Motl stuck his head out to survey the situation, Mike and then Esther jumped for an embankment filled with weeds. They landed and then rolled through the weeds into a mucky trench at the bottom.

  “Motl,” Mike shouted as his car went past.

  So Motl jumped.

  He felt suspended, the train rushing past with an urgent hiss, the ground silent, patient, motionless. He was the single still point in the eye of an eagle. A bullet before it entered the body. Then he hit the embankment with a sudden bloom of pain, and rolled several hundred feet farther along the trench than Esther and Mike. He’d bit his tongue, and his mouth was filled with the bitter iron of his own blood.

  They’d been seen. A pack of soldiers came running toward them along the side of the track. They had sniffer dogs and handsaws. If they caught you, they sawed you apart. The sweet sadistic irony of not shooting you, but killing you slow. Of turning their horror and fears into this external misery. If the worst thing was outside you, then it wasn’t inside.

  Motl ran straight into the woods, then angled toward where Esther and Mike were headed. All of them stung by nettles, almost tripped by vines, holding their forearms up against the sharp of branches and needles.

  What is the sound of a Jew running in the forest? Same as that of an Oneida.

  The only difference, the choice of expletives.

  As Motl finally caught up with Mike and Esther, they heard dogs and so they kept running—along a small gulley, then down one side and up the other. Breeze from a swamp like the tender touch of the dead.

  “We’ll show them our Karaite identification,” Motl panted.

  “Don’t think they’re interested in paperwork at the moment,” Mike replied.

  Motl came to a climbable tree and climbed it. He hung his satchel high in the canopy, where it was hidden by leaves. “In the West, they do this to keep their food—and themselves—safe from bears.”

  He climbed down again, and then they all crawled into the swamp so that the dogs wouldn’t detect their scent. They sank into the fetid water between tall rushes, only their eyes, noses, the tops of their heads exposed. Escape is ninety percent waiting, ten percent leech bites.

  They could hear the dogs and the soldiers coming closer, then moving around the edges of the swamp until they faded back into the forest.

  “When they don’t find us, they’ll return,” Mike said. “We must wait.”

  And so they remained immersed through the night in the slurry, the quick beating of their hearts in the hot nests of their chests, their breaths in clouds as they exhaled. The cold was painful, knives cutting their bodies everywhere, but they didn’t dare move.

  Motl woke stuck against the earth, but realized that overnight a thin sheet of ice had formed around him as if he were trapped in glass, an outlaw in aspic. He thrashed—quietly, carefully—to break the ice, felt his feet nearly frozen in his shoes. Esther found fragments of water-saturated cheese and meat in her pocket, which she shared. It hurt to stay still. It hurt to move.

  The three of them crawled from the swamp on their hands and knees, tetrapods leaving the sea and smelling as bad. They lay in the morning sun on the side of a hillock, eyes closed.

  “Wonder what the poor people are doing today?” Mike said.

  “They don’t even have clothes to get slimy and cold.”

  “Or leeches.”

  A dog bark. Then more. The dogs were barking in German. It was worse than wolves. These were German dogs, thoughtlessly following their masters. The soldiers were returning.

  Motl and Mike slid down the bank and lowered themselves silently into the cold swamp.

  “Where’s Esther?” Motl asked, looking frantically around them.

  He couldn’t see her in the water or on the bank.

  “We have to find her,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Mike. “But when the dogs are gone. We’re no use if they catch us.”

  Motl hesitated. “Yes,” he said finally. “We’ll wait.”

  They waited for hours, crouched behind reeds, swamp water up to their chins. Hours. The Germans kept circling. Then eventually the barking and the voices receded.

  “I’m going now,” Motl said. “It’s too late, but I’m going.”

  He found no trace of Esther. Nothing but the stillness of the forest. A few birds hesitantly began to call again, as if the dogs had been tracking them too. Sub-avians. Gay, Jewish or Romani, disabled, Communist, Indigenous, or mentally ill birds, hiding in the trees, unable to fly away.

  Motl called for Esther, his voice muted by the forest. Mike called too.

  No answer.

  They slumped down against a tree. What had happened to her? What had she done?

  Can’t see the forest for the grief, the trees ignorantly stolid, refusing to fall, each a middle finger pointing at the sky.

  Motl stared at a rock by his feet. Farther away, a hollow tree, its empty trunk a prayer shawl draped around missing heartwood. He picked up the rock and hammered it against the hollow. A living drum. He hammered then hammered again. Then the stone shattered, fracturing in his hand. Motl fracturing, breaking apart, falling to his knees, forehead against the ground. Not in prayer but a bitter curse at the earth, at the sky, those in between.

  Then there was a cracking of branches, and a shuffling, half-naked figure, blood rivering its skin, staggered toward them, branches and leaves in its thickety hair, leeches and insects attached to its dripping clothes, a spectre, a haunted creature, arms grappling the air as if it were blind and lost and falling.

  “I went to find my ring. My mother’s wedding ring. The ring my father gave her. It’s the only thing I still had. I’ve become so thin that it fell from my finger while we were on the embankment, and I went back and then I was lost and the Germans came and I hid and…”

  She tipped forward as Motl ran to catch her in his outstretched arms.

  “Esther,” he said.

  “I heard the drum. I knew it was you.”

  Motl held her close.

  “I thought it would bring me luck. My ring. I thought it was important. But everyone is gone. It’s all gone. And my father. I left him.”

  Motl said nothing but carefully lowered her to the ground, where she leaned against him, sobbing. He held her ringless hand.

  Then the three of them, Motl, Esther and Mike, staggered to their feet and wandered farther into the forest until they found a grassy glade, where they laid themselves down. They slept like dogs, one eye open, meaning they listened for dogs and Germans as they rested, their bodies saturated with swamp water, fear, exhaustion and relief.

  It began to rain, a precipitation of cold fingers. Goosebumps from on high. When one has bivouacked in swamp water, such full-body baptism approaches holiness, fire not the first and greatest human achievement, but personal hygiene.

  Esther let the deluge wash away the mud and leaves and branches and smooth her tumbleweed hair. The three of them now skinny kittens bathed in a bucket, the poltergeist pong of the swamp no longer a noxious haze around them.

  Motl took off his wet jacket and gave it to Esther to cover her torn clothes. “I have to go back to climb the tree and get my satchel,” he said.

  Did they hear barking? Were there shouts? Motl and Esther climbed up together into the branches of a large tree. Mike climbed up another nearby. They disappeared behind the cover of the leaves.

  They waited, but the dogs and Germans, incorporeal or earth-wurst, did not arrive. Motl climbed down and surveyed the scene. “We should go,” he said.

  “Where? The train?”

  “Why continue to Berlin?” Mike asked.

  “The documents.”

  “But why not Sweden or straight to Switzerland, where we’ll be safe? Why risk your life for this?”

  “The Ḥakhan threatened that if we don’t deliver, there’ll be probl
ems.”

  “Worse than Nazis? When someone’s shooting you, why worry about cholesterol?”

  “Maybe the Ḥakhan will punish us by punishing others. As long as we’re Karaite, everything will be fine.”

  “As long as everyone else got that memo.”

  “They’re Nazis. They all got the memo. And you’ll be safe if you can just get papers that give you citizenship.”

  “Tell me about it. And while you’re at it, tell the Canadian government too.”

  “The train is still the best way out of here. It may not be safer, but it’s faster,” Motl said.

  “Like pulling a bandage off in one go.”

  “Exactly. Though it might leave nothing but bones, at least it’ll be quick.”

  12

  They searched until they found the tree where Motl had hidden the satchel. Once he’d climbed up and retrieved it, they crept to the edge of the forest. The checkpoint was just around the curve of track. They’d wait for the next train to be stopped, then, as it started to roll again, accelerating slowly, they’d climb aboard on the other side of the checkpoint, the Little Engine That Could Avoid Them Being Snuffed Out puffing as it chugged along, “I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can help them escape being shot or sawed up by sadistic Nazis and instead ride across Poland, their only possession vagabond hope and cross-cultural chutzpah.” Brave little train.

  They waited for several hours, then at last heard the soughing of an engine coming, the clanking as it slowed and was halted. Soldiers shouting.

  The train wheezed into motion.

  “Ready?” Esther said. “Now!” And they ran from between the trees and leapt up and grabbed the sides of the cars. They were cattle cars, the doors locked, openings covered in barbed wire. They stank.

  They scrabbled up the sides, grabbing on handles, nails and broken wood until they lay flat on the sloped cattle car roof. No leather-fisted Nazis ran down the track chasing them. The acrid fog of train smoke blanketed the tops of the cars like snowcaps on mountain peaks. Esther thought of her father’s beard hanging like a cloud on his not-seen-since-boyhood chin. His stratocumulus eyebrows.