by Gary Barwin
They closed their eyes. Their breath would return, their hearts would slow.
Beneath them: voices.
“Buy my boots. Buy my boots,” a man called out in German. Some bitter, debilitated laughter greeted him.
“He doesn’t know he’s already dead,” someone said. “Though I’d take even the illusion of new boots.”
Children’s voices. Adults’. The elderly. Crying. Wailing. Moaning. Weeping. Sobbing. Snivelling. Listening from the roof, they became connoisseurs of these expressions of sorrow, of hopelessness, of pain. Their boxcar chests filled with such feelings also.
They held on as the train rumbled forward, not yet sure what would happen next. What happened next was that midges and mosquitoes found them in the dusk. They sat up, flailing.
“They say you can tell a Jew by the terror in his eyes, so maybe you’re all Jews,” a voice said.
A young guy in a military uniform that looked as if it had maybe been in several previous wars leaned against a small chimney on the roof of the boxcar ahead of them.
Imagine you reach to scratch yourself and find another body in bed beside you. Or you’re in the half dark clutching the roof of a Sonderzüge special train transporting Jews to a ghetto in Poland and there’s a stranger on the roof of the boxcar ahead of you, sitting up and talking to you.
“Come here often?” the man said. “I ride mostly for the convenience, but also for the scenery. The club car service is second-rate, though.”
Nothing like a wise guy to pass the hours before possible death.
He was speaking Polish, which they all could understand, but his accent twigged something for Mike. To him, the other boxcar rider sounded Indigenous.
Of course. Two Indigenous men meet on the roof of a train in Poland during the war. Sounds like the set-up for a joke. Except the train is full of Jews. Okay, so that’s another kind of joke.
But one Indigenous guy says to the other—
It turned out that the man, Gerry, was Lakota—an American soldier behind enemy lines. A communications expert, his mission had been to parachute into occupied Denmark and communicate with the Allies from there. In the Baltic night, his plane had been intercepted by the Luftwaffe and chased into Poland and shot down. He parachuted through flames and landed on a cow in the dark.
Besides surprise and displeasure, he didn’t know what the cow thought of an American dropping in from on high. He couldn’t tell if it was a Nazi cow.
And so the second Indigenous guy says, “You enlisted?”
“Good way to get off the reservation, get paid and learn something. Also, a general told my father I had to. My father was working in a restaurant near the base when the general came in, puffing away on a cigar. My father comes home and says, ‘Gerry, the general wants to see you. So go get a haircut, take a shower and put on clean clothes. When you get there, don’t stand closer than two feet from him, make sure to salute, and give your full name.’
“ ‘What did I do?’ I asked. ‘Am I in trouble?’
“ ‘Don’t know. What did you do?’
“So my father and I go to the base and we’re taken into the general’s office. We both keep our distance and salute.
“ ‘Your father tells me you speak Indian.’
“ ‘Yes, General, sir.’
“ ‘And you write it too.’
“ ‘Yes, General, sir. Lakota Sioux.’
“ ‘Like the warriors in the movies I watched as a boy.’
“The general opened a drawer and took out three tumblers and a bottle of bourbon, poured us each a couple fingers and slid the glasses in front of us.
“ ‘That’s enough with the “Yes, sir” and the “General, sir.” I want to talk man to man. Are you brave?’
“ ‘Brave enough to drink bourbon. Though I’m only seventeen.’
“ ‘Good. Brave enough to help your country? The Krauts are intercepting American communications. We’re going to make their heads spin and send messages in an Indian language. In Lakota Sioux. I need you to enlist.’
“ ‘Yes, sir. I mean, just yes.’
“ ‘You okay with that?’ the general asked my father.
“ ‘Yes, sir,’ my father said.
“ ‘Never met an Indian before,’ the general said. ‘You guys were first in this country.’
“ ‘Yes, before Columbus. Before he was even born. Before his grandmother too,’ I said.
“ ‘I like your spunk, son,’ the general said. ‘We need spunk. Know anyone else who knows Lakota?’
“So I told him about my friend Roy White Bear, and he enlisted too, and we learned all about communications. Military radios and how to make code out of our language. I worked for a bit in England and France. Then they stuck me on that plane to Denmark, and now here I am holding on to the roof of a train like I’m trying to ride a steer. What about you?”
Mike explained they were heading for Berlin.
“Because Poland isn’t close enough to certain death?” Gerry asked.
“Always better to go to the source,” Mike said.
“You do know that the train is going the other direction?”
Esther and Motl looked at each other, on the precipice of surprised laughter rather than trouble. With the world upside down, why shouldn’t they be going in the wrong direction also? But what to do when you find out you’re escaping into the fire?
Gerry was heading for a rendezvous in the countryside near Gdansk. A midnight plane in a potato field, or else a small boat in a cove on the coast. No point planning to avoid bears if you’re going to end up eaten by wolves. He’d find out the details when he was closer.
“Come with me. You don’t have to stick with those two,” he said, indicating Motl and Esther. “Maybe it’s as dangerous as Berlin, but at least it’s sooner.”
13
The track curved through dark woods. The train clattered on past the Dopplering of owls and the dark saraband of bats. Over a bridge, through towns and over another bridge, then the train began to slow and finally shuddered to a stop. They waited—Esther, Motl, Mike, Gerry and perhaps others more invisible than them—trying to breathe silently, trying to blend with the train.
Then they saw flashlight beams scanning the sides and roofs of the cars, searching for an infestation of Jews, stowaways, undesirables. The lights were coming closer to their cars.
“Climb down,” Gerry hissed. They waited until the light swept the side of their car, and after the surveillance moved away along the train, they climbed down onto the gravel. Gerry motioned at them to follow him. Ahead, a boxcar was open. “Inside!” There were crates stacked against the walls of the car, and they squeezed behind them.
They waited.
Light beams turned the car into a shadow play, then it became dark again. After some time, the train moved again. Inside the crates, the rattle of glass. Clinking.
Bottles.
Gerry pried one open and raised a bottle by the neck. “Vodka.” He pulled the cork and swigged, then passed the bottle to Esther, who also took a swig. And so to Mike.
Motl, sporadic aficionado of the bottle, infrequent enthusiast of Bacchus schnapps and kiddush hooch, did also hose his insides with firewater, and so caused his tender liver to buck like a stallion. He staggered to his feet, unsure how his legs were attached to the floor beneath him. Then he realized he’d left his mouth ajar and decided to use the fortuitous occasion to deliver some extemporaneous oratory.
“The moon shines bright as a sheriff’s badge in the leather sky, and I have had a vision. I know the future.
“The world is broken. Black hats have come in storm trooper boots and brown shirts reckoning to destroy everything. But I see a world without the hankering to Anschluss, to Siberiate or to Big any Little Horn.”
Motl threw a hand up above
him and was almost thrown by the force.
“Now see this invisible six-gun held high in the Ashkenazi air where it glints and shines and tells us we can keep riding through death and shadows blacker than night.”
Motl shakily waved the imaginary Smith & Wesson of his hand past the faces of those before him.
“We take this God-sized six-gun and we spin its cylinder”—here he spun his cylinder fingers—“we spin it like Dame Fortuna’s Wheel and one of the bullets finds a way out. It bursts into the tunnel of the possible and into the world of light.
“And now you ask me, what happens next?
“And I stand here on my own two feet and tell you that this beautiful silver bullet shoots the world right between the eyes. It shoots the evil that’s got in there. Between Nazi and Jew. Cowboy and ten-gallon. Between the Indigenous and their land. It kills it dead. All that’s left is the body and, outside of it, the big frontier, not of America, but of what we hope for, a place for new life. We blow everything apart so it will grow back as something good, a second chance from everything wounded.
“With this. With this here gun.” And Motl waved his hand yippee-ki-yay style and toppled headfirst into the pile of crates. Esther and Mike steered him to a tarp on the floor, where he remained insensible until dawn, abrading their ears with the cacophonous juddering of his lax and copious nose flesh.
* * *
—
Daybreak was birds knocking into wind chimes as the vodka bottles shook. The vodka shook inside them, too. It had been a brief escape from their greater escape. They lay on the floor, their heads and guts in various states of hanging over.
“I was thinking,” Motl said. “If someone ever asked for my story—and they weren’t prattling to my grave or to the wind because they didn’t know where I’d ended up ending—what could I say? Nothing’d be quite right—like having gas during High Holidays: your one end’s prayer, the other’s plotzing. We’re middle fingers, but also raised fists and a hand on the shoulder.”
“Me,” Esther said. “I have only one thing to say that matters. ‘I’m here. The bastards didn’t get me yet.’ Unless, of course, they did.”
“No horse, no hat, no saddle, no cows. The only part of the cowboy that’s left for me is the riding,” Motl said.
“What does that mean?” Esther said.
“Saddle sores and a place to go. And, hopefully, survival.”
“And maybe a story?”
“Like tits on Jesus—nice for decoration, but useless.”
“That a Jewish proverb?” Mike asked.
“No, just something my mother would say.”
“Well, if stories don’t change anything except stories, then stories change things,” Mike said.
“That an Oneida proverb?” Motl asked.
“No, just something an old high school teacher would say.”
“You think the world’s asking us something?” Esther said.
“You mean like ‘help’?” Gerry said.
14
They felt the train slowing again. It wasn’t clear where they were, but out the open boxcar door they could see a large tent across a field, some variety of red-striped big top as if a circus had set up its wonder, horses, lions and little cars in the middle of war-consumed Poland. Maybe this was the best time for a circus. What is the opposite of a Nazi invasion? A circus.
“The circus,” Gerry said. “It’s the classic place to hide. Let’s head there until we figure out where we are and what’s next. The thing I didn’t tell you was, I was on the wrong train too.”
They leapt off the train and into the grass. Rolling was not high on the list of enthusiasms of the post-inebriated belly, but still they rolled until they all lay at the bottom of the ditch. They waited until the train had passed and the vodka ceased whisking their insides like omelettes.
“Do we just walk up and say we have a master’s in Circus?” Esther joked as she sat up.
“Yeah, I’ll tell them my thesis was a critical study of the Marxist ontology of big cat dung,” Mike said. “You can’t imagine how many clowns I fit in one footnote.”
“You know, at my Catholic university we never mentioned the elephant in the room,” Gerry said.
“So you majored in advanced big shoe studies?” Mike said.
“Maybe they need a western act,” Gerry said. “Mike and I will play Indians, both originally from Drohobycz. Motl, you’ll be the cowboy, originally from Białystok. And Esther, you’re Miss Annie Oakleyevitch from Bratislava. We’re a Wild West troupe and we got stuck in Minsk when the war broke out. Our circus was labelled a Jüdenzirkus because it was run by Jews, and so shut down. Since then we’ve been travelling, looking for work.
“ ‘Yes, sir,’ ” Gerry hammed. “ ‘The Oklahoma Spurs and Stripes Wild West Show and Nature Circus was where we was raised and schooled in the western arts by actual true live Indians and cowboys. Me and my compadres would be right grateful if you could help us out a spell. We’re powerful worried about what to do but also, I could rightly say, powerful splendid. We dazzle and amaze the common man, charm the dimes from his pants.’ ”
They crossed the field and walked into an array of scattered pup tents, carriages, horses and a variety of circus people gathered around cooking fires, doing circus people things. Large, thick, tiny, piebald muscle-bound men and women, loud, laughing, melancholy and in between, young and old, ate, sewed, drank, joked, repaired and napped. The motley encampment of a small brigade on a campaign of conviviality and ragtag marvels.
Circus train cars were parked on the rail spur, which branched from the main track where the train they rode in on was now stopped in the distance.
No one from the circus either noticed them or seemed to be responsible for anything other than themselves, and so they walked on to the big tent, parted the canvas flap and went in.
A beefy, red-faced man, arrayed in a bright-green tailcoat and a stovepipe hat, stood in the centre of a sawdust-floored ring, his impressive brass-buttoned gut as streamlined as the rotund belly of a rowboat. He boasted the Spanish moss beard of an Orthodox priest and repeatedly cracked a whip, not encouraging any animals but seemingly directing the air itself, each crack like a lightning bolt. His eyes, too, held the sudden and unsettling energy of lightning. High above him, spangle-suited acrobats flipped about ropes and swung lithe arcs while hanging from trapezes. They heard roaring and growls from outside the tent—ill-maintained and nearly feral animals or engines. A clown staggered out of a door, seemingly both lame and intoxicated, his two legs feral also and certainly ill-maintained. Then he fell, a blur of red spots and gaudy tartan, somersaulted several times over the sawdust floor and suddenly telescoped to stand upright before the ringmaster.
“Guests,” the clown said. “We have guests.”
They thought they had not been noticed.
“It is hours before showtime,” the ringmaster said. “Send them packing. Packing. Send them packing.”
“There they are.” The clown pointed across the ring at them as two more clowns, huge as dancing bears, came in through the entrance flap, possessed the ground and blocked their exit. Though they sported white greasepaint, exaggerated smiles and large red noses, their expressions were threatening.
“Come,” the ringmaster said. “Come here. Let me see you.”
The quartet of interlopers hesitated, but the hoarse, sweet breaths of the clowns behind them were like spurs and so they moved into the centre of the ring. Above them, the trapeze was still, the acrobats hovering like waiting vultures.
Gerry crossed his arms over his puffed-out chest and frowned with gravitas.
“I am Chief Black Heart, Lakota from the Sioux Nation. This my blood brother I name Steadyhand.” He indicated Motl. “This German killed a buffalo with his bare hands. And a gun.”
Motl grinned and shrugged as if he didn�
��t even remember.
Gerry laid his arm on Esther’s shoulder. “Miss Annie, most sure shot in all Oklahoma. And my friend Fire Tongue, a Dakota. He ride like arrow.”
Mike nodded solemnly, keeping his eponymous tongue to himself.
Gerry opened his arms, inviting the ringmaster to behold: “The most excellent Wild West show in the Reich.”
Impressive pause.
Then he said, “We would like to join your circus.
“Imagine Winnetou and Old Shatterhand in your ring. Imagine the horses—Wind, and his brother Lightning—as they blast past the audience at a gallop, riders balanced, standing on their saddles, lassos like snakes flying through the air, bullets piercing the edges of playing cards. The wisdom of the Sioux, sharp as arrowheads or a tomahawk blade.”
“Take them to a train car,” the ringmaster said. “Take them.”
And the trio of clowns placed their gloved hands on each of their shoulders. “This way.”
The clowns led them out the other side of the tent and up the steps and into a bright painted car.
“You will wait,” one of the clowns ordered.
The car was like a hotel room. Red velvet couch, leather chairs, beds, clothes scattered over dressers and bundling out of drawers. A side table with bottles and a plate of bread and cheese.
The clowns closed the door, and they heard a click as the lock was drawn.
First thing: bread and cheese.
Next: mugs of Pilsner.
“Chief Black Heart?” Mike said to Gerry. “Why do you get to be the chief?”
Gerry crossed his arms. “Ancient Sioux wisdom: power comes to those who tell the story.”
They clinked glasses, and settled in to wait.
* * *
—
An hour later, the lock was drawn back and a woman entered. She had the same red face as the ringmaster, the same lightning eyes and the same stovepipe hat, which she placed on the floor beside where she sat.