by Gary Barwin
Himmler took the letter from the soldier and continued. “ ‘…masquerading as Karaites, are entrusted into the care of the Reich and, specifically, the SS, as a sign of the good faith and loyalty of His Excellency Hajji Seraya Khan Shapshal, in order that his most esteemed and respected Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler may attend to them in whatever manner he deems most appropriate for those determined to be Jewish Unnütze Esser—useless mouths—life unworthy of life.’
“Well,” Himmler said. “As it is written on the gates of Buchenwald, Jedem das Seine. To each his own. Do you not think so, Sturmmann Müller?”
“Yes, Herr Reichsführer. Die Juden sind unser Unglück,” the soldier Müller said. “The Jews are indeed our misfortune.”
The four soldiers pulled their Lugers from their holsters like gunslingers and pointed them at Esther and Motl.
“Die Meisterslingers, no?” Himmler said.
A knife tore through the canvas wall and Mike and Gerry were borne into the room on a wave of sinister ululations and fearsome whooping from a Wild West film. They had tomahawks but also guns. The uncanny appearance of a scene from a storybook massacre bewildered the soldiers, who didn’t understand their role in this or what to do.
“Go!” Gerry shouted, and the four of them—Mike, Gerry, Motl and Esther—disappeared through the rent in the tent wall, Mike grabbing the letter from the table as he ran.
Behind them, they could hear Himmler, apparently also bewildered by the raid, shouting foul-mouthed reprimands and contradictory orders at the soldiers.
The ringmaster was waiting outside.
“Follow,” she said.
* * *
—
They ran to the boxcar, near the tent where performers were stretching, drinking, adjusting, animals pacing restlessly around the limited world of their boxcar cages, before the second half of the show began.
“Here,” the ringmaster said, stopping them at the tiger cage. She gave a sharp look at the trainer, who unbolted the door, slid inside and offered a palmful of meat to the vast cat.
“In,” the ringmaster said, indicating that they too should enter the cage. Was it to be death by Fritz or feline, better to be gnawed by cat or executed by Krauts?
They sidestepped along the side of the cage, pressing against the bars on the supposition that even a few extra inches of distance from the tiger would be that much more safe, would provide seconds more life if it were to spring. A door at the end of the cage, painted with a scene of dense subcontinental vegetation, hanging snakes, tigers bright as flame against the shadows of the mango-strewn, bird-busy trees, opened onto a secret compartment. It might be de rigueur to hide behind bookcases, in basements, cellars, orphanages, attics or holes in the ground, but the Germans would never think to look behind the tiger. Who seeks refuge in fire when they leap from a pan?
By the time a squad of spirited Nazi soldiers came running into the area with their guns drawn, the trainer had bolted the door and was standing outside, murmuring to the tiger, intermittently snapping his whip as if preparing the animal for the upcoming act. The ringmaster had joined the performers in the green room and was deep in consultation with the contortionist.
A small opening in the roof of the boxcar allowed a thin column of light to reach the fugitives. Their pupils were dilated the size of dimes. And not only because of the dimness. While their escape had been an ironic adventure-story rescue, replete with storybook Indian warriors and an excess of feathers and whooping, it had also been very narrow, in the way the edge of a razor is narrow.
“We were almost dead Karaites in there,” Motl said.
“Or non-non-Karaites.”
“I’m alive, though at the moment I’m not sure what I am.”
“Not eaten by a tiger.”
“In any case, thanks.”
“Look,” Mike said, waving the pages. “The letter from the Ḥakhan. It doesn’t say what Himmler said it did. It says to offer you safe passage.”
“I always thought Himmler wasn’t good for the Jews.”
* * *
—
They huddled in the tiger cage. They were sure that the performance would be over by midnight. By dawn, the big top would be torn down, the circus packed and the train headed for a field in the next village. If they encountered Nazis there, at least it would be different Nazis. They waited.
“What if they forget about us here?”
“They won’t.”
“How long would it take before we ate each other?”
“Raw?”
“Would you eat a Nazi if there was no other choice?”
“I don’t know. Are they kosher?”
“Definitely treif. Most of them have cloven hooves.”
“What’s the blessing—the bracha—for eating Nazi?”
After they’d been hiding for only fifteen minutes, they heard a voice from the ceiling, someone muttering through the hole in the roof. An angel, but it was too early for angels. If they came, they’d come after the Nazis had found them and then only after they were executed. Jewish angels with cloud-white rabbi beards and goose-feather wings.
“Listen,” a girl’s voice said. “Ringmaster sent me. She’ll help two of you escape to Switzerland. Two of you. The Jewish ones. The others should stay on the circus train. Then do their vanishing act when it’s rendezvous time.” She explained the plan, then dropped some makeup and clothes through the hole.
There’s only one of the Ten Commandments that applies to circuses: the show must go on. And so, five minutes after the girl left, the trainer came to lead the tiger into the tent for its act, and Motl and Esther, as instructed, walked out of the empty cage, dressed as clowns. They’d painted their lips red and huge like sausages, and smeared their faces white; they wore ruddy and bulbous noses like the nipples of giants. Straw-haired dogs had curled then died upon their heads. Like tramps, they wore mangy oversized suits and floppy-soled shoes like slapsticks.
While the show continued and the officers gulleted peanuts and beer, the soldiers continued to prowl outside the big top, searching for the vanishing Indians, the wandering Jews. And Esther and Motl teetered to the centre of the ring with a squad of other clowns.
The ground beneath them was the deck of a writhing ship, the shaking surface of a jelly. The contingent world on which we mortals stagger.
“We make the minyan,” Motl said to Esther, observing the numbers of their new troupe, the necessary Jewish ten in order to pray. “Who knows who they are when they’re not clowns.”
One clown hit another on the noggin with a mallet. A different clown clutched his head. Still another fell down. In this circus, as with war, a single cause had bewildering effects.
Himmler had returned to his seat in the centre of the front row, his legs crossed, his hands resting on a walking stick, as if no incident had troubled him during the intermission. He smirked. He was amused. He enjoyed groups in ridiculous uniforms contriving to please him with their antics.
Esther fell down. No one had hit anyone with a mallet, but she was improvising. Then the first clown hit another clown. The effect before the cause.
Motl looked at his clown hand and made his fingers into a gun. He spun the imaginary cartridge, Russian roulette–style, then shot himself in the head. Three other clowns collapsed. Esther stood up. She looked at her hand. She made her fingers into a gun. She pointed it at her head, considering if she should shoot.
Then she pointed it at the audience and shot. Three clowns stood up.
Then all of the clowns made their hands into guns, and one stood against an imaginary wall, ready to be executed. Another clown gave the order, and all the clowns fired. They all fell down, except for the condemned clown, who remained standing.
Then Motl stood and pointed his gun at Himmler. All the clowns got up and held their hands against the sides of their he
ads, arms akimbo. “Oh, no!” they mimed.
Motl raised his other hand into the air, a rodeo rider holding on to rope, breaking a bucking bronc, the other gun hand steady toward the Reichsführer.
Then he fired.
Simultaneously:
Everything went dark.
The sound of a real gun.
The ungh of someone being hit.
Then, after a long minute and invisible confusion, the lights came on again. Himmler and his surrounding posse had disappeared. Motl was on the sawdust, clutching his shoulder.
The audience stood in a bewildered hubbub of carping and speculation. The clowns circled around Motl, lifted him up and then ran for the wings.
“Good Ladies and Most Gentle Men,” the ringmaster announced from the now-empty ring. “Within this round and sawdusty O, we expect all to be circus, that no shadows will fall. But today this war and its assaults and contusions have entered this tent. The dangers you see in here—our leaps and bullets, roaring mouths, our ballets in the sky—these are made for amazement and inspiration, not for thoughts of strife or mortality. The world has here pierced a performer and so, for tonight, our circus is at an end. Tomorrow and the next tomorrow, the circus will continue. Our clowns will clown, our acrobats will fly, our tigers will roar. We will again raise the big top and find reason for joy and belief. But for now, it is time for you to find your homes safely and without delay.”
And she bowed deeply to the empty tent and strode quickly away.
17
A lanky clown in yellow suspenders and a red fright wig appeared with bandages, tongs, vodka, matches and a knife. The standard circus emergency kit.
“Time for bullet hunting. Drink this,” he said to Motl, and tipped the bottle into Motl’s groaning mouth—anaesthetic via vodka-boarding. Motl struggled to gulp and not breathe the firewater, to avoid being non-metaphorically drowned. Then the clown tore his jacket and shirt and tipped the bottle over his shoulder, hooch pooling in the wound. Motl would have leapt up and run a vicious circle around the circus, hollering, except a gang of the big-shoed held him down.
“Esther,” Motl moaned.
“We put her in a dressing room so she can calm down—she thought you’d been killed,” the clown said.
The gang had more work to do after the clown went in with the tongs and the knife, spelunking for lead.
The bullet had disappeared.
They turned him over. There was a hole in his back. The bullet had come and gone, entered and left.
“Should’ve thought of that,” the clown with the tongs and knife said.
“Hold him up and you can see clear through,” another clown observed.
“He’s been daylighted.”
The clown poured vodka in the wound on Motl’s back. “Hold a glass up to his front. Let’s not waste it.”
The clown lit a match and touched the flame to the wound. The vodka flared with a cauterizing sizzle. Motl screeched and then passed out. They turned him over again and repeated the process, the scent of Motl-flesh filling the air.
The ringmaster arrived with Esther, who had been declowned and was now dressed in a tweed civilian jacket and dress, like a civil servant on her way home.
“Motl,” Esther said, rushing over, kneeling down and embracing him.
“The shoulder!” the clown warned as Motl woke with a gasp.
She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, then his lips. “Motl.”
“I’ve explained everything to Esther,” the ringmaster said.
Esther wiped the clown face from Motl and helped him change into a nondescript suit.
* * *
—
“That is the person,” Esther said.
In the tent’s shadows, a man, scrawny and harmless as a broom but, like a broom, deadly when used in the right way and at the right time. The perfect operative.
“The ringmaster made arrangements,” she said. “The man’s a toxic weasel, but he’ll take us to Switzerland. We have no choice except to embrace such fiends.”
“Hard to do while holding our noses.”
They began walking to the tiger cage, hiding behind tents and other boxcars, attempting to remain unseen.
“This is the story. The Nazis have been laundering stolen gold—Raubgold—in Switzerland. Himmler dropped by to arrange a little private deal of his own—a secret the ringmaster couldn’t help but overhear because, as she told me, ‘It’s true—no matter how much you whisper, you can have no secrets under the big top.’ So, we’re going to help Himmler, and he’s going to let us. He’s arranged everything. The only thing is…Mike and Gerry have to be sacrificed.”
“How can we do that?”
“It’s terrible, but there’s only room for two on the plane. And the plane is what saves us. If we warn them, though, it gives them time to escape and maybe they can make Gerry’s rendezvous.”
“It’s not right.”
“It’s a chance for us to have a life. Together. To survive.”
“Yes, but…”
“Gerry is a soldier. He’ll understand. He’ll know what to do.”
“My mother. Your father. Everything else. Now this. How much can we hold inside before we’re corroded, before we’re hollow and can’t breathe?”
The tiger had been returned to the cage after the show and was prowling the narrowness of its world with barely repressed malevolence. Esther leaned close to the bars near the hidden compartment and whispered to Mike and Gerry.
“There’s a plane for us to Switzerland. Motl and I must go. But the Germans have been told where you’re hiding. You have to leave. Now. For Gdansk.”
They heard the ruckus of a troop of soldiers coming toward the cage.
“Quick,” Esther said to Motl. “We’re to meet behind the dog kennel.” They crossed around the far side of the tiger cage and then hurried toward their rendezvous.
They both could hear the tiger’s cage door rattling. Howling. Shrieks. The tiger furious. There was no mistaking the sound of a big cat attack. Roaring.
Unintelligible cries. From which mouth? What was the language?
Gunshots.
Who had been attacked? Who had been shot?
18
“Now I’m a real cowboy. I’ve betrayed Indians who befriended me. Indians who saved me,” Motl said.
Motl and Esther had climbed in the back of an army transport truck that had been waiting for them, and settled between piles of large sacks as the transport rumbled over a dirt track across the field.
The operative held on to a strap on the wall. He caught their eyes and motioned to the canvas mounds all around them.
“The dead can possess nothing. What they had belongs now to the living. To their country. Gold in the mouth at death? Only the living are entitled to their teeth. Why should it be buried with them when it can benefit the Reich? The teeth of the Jews are rich in gold. They are bent dwarves with gold inside. Crooked-lipped vermin with glittering mouths.”
“These sacks contain…teeth?”
“They were dipped in acid and dissolved. Sent to a foundry along with wedding rings and turned into gold bars. You will transport them to Switzerland for the Führer. It is needed to win this war.”
Like so much else, they knew this was a fiction. It was code for “Himmler is a thief stealing from thieves but we will pretend there is honour there.”
There were Swiss accounts in the name of Max Heiliger waiting to receive this stolen gold. An ironic joke. Heiliger is “holy” in German and so the gold from teeth, glasses, wedding rings was melted and deposited as bars along with plundered banknotes and jewellery.
Motl and Esther balanced on the bench against the truck walls, holding on to the straps as the truck rattled toward the plane, surrounded by gold from the mouths of Jews. Silently speaking to them. Pleading with t
hem. Accusing them. Asking for witness.
* * *
—
The operative did not speak again until they trundled onto the landing strip.
“You are no longer Karaite, but Swiss. New names have been assigned to you. You are Denis and Sofia Genoud. Here is your documentation. Destroy your other papers. You may be searched after the plane lands. This is a highly confidential operation.”
And he motioned to them to climb from the truck and board the plane for the West.
Denis and Sofia. Motl and Esther, a married couple. Their new life would begin as Monsieur and Madame Genoud.
Motl regarded Esther, his not-really wife, wondering if their union could become true should his return to the mountains be successful.
The sacks, filled with gold from rings and hitherto grinning or grimacing teeth from mouths now finally closed, were loaded into a Junkers Ju 52 transport plane, an Aunti Ju, an Iron Annie. It had no other cargo except for the newly Swiss couple returning home for the first time to make a deposit at the National Bank, and the two pilots in the cockpit.
Luftwaffe Captain Fritz and First Officer Fritz, his co-pilot.
Monsieur and Madame Genoud climbed the rolling stairs and into the shadowy green glade of the Junkers’s belly. They flipped down two seats and strapped in. The guttural trill of the three engines, their propellers juddery as the plane heaved forward.
Motl held Esther’s hand. Together, they’d leap from this cliff, fall up into the air, survive that moment when the craft no longer touches the ground, earth and its gravity left behind like ballast, like forgetting, and the air takes you into its arms like an embrace. That moment when the teeth rattle.
A porthole in the side of the airplane. Other than dreams, the first time Motl had ever been in the air. He watched. The lights shining from the plane made the view uncanny.
Clouds as a continuous fabric of spirits. A killing field obscuring the ground, thousands of feet below. The countless breaths of the dead a white plain.