Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  Dimensionless sky above. A vacant eternity.

  Sorrow in a place so vast, it might well have evaporated into nothingness. Infinitesimal. Like a dove, an insignificant speck above a loss-flooded world.

  If this was an image of Heaven, Heaven was empty or huge beyond conception. Beyond the human.

  A rumbling as they passed over cumulus. Motl imagined a limitless herd of invisible bison running the breath-white prairie, a stampede’s turbulence.

  There were wisps above the cloud cover.

  Shrouds that had floated free, risen from the clouds, buoyed by voices below.

  Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw.

  The voices of the dead. Praying for each other. They were remembering.

  Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach

  l’alam ul’almei almaya.

  They were singing for the living.

  The melody reached into the future. Sorrowing. The melody rose into the present, like mountains visible above the clouds. Consoling.

  * * *

  —

  The gold from teeth was behind them, clanking, and they were flying above the clouds. There were wedding rings making the passage over mountains.

  “Look,” said Motl. “Do you see?”

  “The clouds—mashed potatoes made of air?” Esther said. “Poland and Germany and Lithuania, the war—somewhere behind us? The sky, like it was cleaned by the colour blue? Escape?”

  “No, over there. See the peaks of the mountains?”

  “Yes.”

  “See that valley where there’s snow?”

  “Yes.”

  “See that glacier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what’s waiting for us there?”

  “What?”

  “Our future.”

  PART THREE

  The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.

  —REBECCA SOLNIT

  1

  SWITZERLAND

  The airport had a wide tarmac road beginning nowhere then, without warning, arriving there. Beside it, an incongruous Arts and Crafts–style house, its roof mollycoddling a profusion of gables. Rocking chairs beside its exposed-wood porch contained contented Nazis taking an Einsatzschloff, perhaps counting sheep that couldn’t get over the fence they patrolled. As the travellers descended, the German soldiers woke up and then ran onto the runway, marshalling the plane with a hurried “all clear” Sieg Heil and then additional arm waving, apparently suggesting the pilots slow the plane down.

  One of the Nazis drove a small truck up to the plane and began unloading.

  In the terminal, there were no customs agents.

  “What do you have to declare?” Motl imagined one of the soldiers asking.

  “Teeth,” Motl would say.

  “Incisors or molars? Brushed or not? Jewish or non-Jewish? Do you floss?”

  Instead, they were approached by a banker in a money-scented business suit that spoke of conspicuous ironing.

  “Monsieur and Madame Genoud, I am Monsieur Denaud. I welcome you to Switzerland on behalf of the National Bank. If you will be so kind as to wait outside, I will request my car.”

  Motl to Esther: We don’t believe in borders, just in fencing.

  Esther to Motl: Wash and Fold. Delicates or Whites. Banknotes, jewellery, stolen gold. We launder it all.

  They went out onto the porch.

  “Switzerland. It’s all around us,” Motl said.

  “It’s a clever design,” Esther said. “For a country.”

  For Motl, not the William Tell apple split from a quivering son’s head but Tzara’s between-the-legs bull’s eye of his own apples, lost in snow.

  His quest. Finally reachable. Retrieve these hairy grails so life could begin anew.

  His mother, his sister, Hannah, his family, lost. Esther’s family: grandfather, brother, father. Gone.

  A child.

  They’d have a bairn, a wean, a sprogget, a kiddiewink. A lamb, a foal, a newling. Something to rekindle life itself.

  A begetter, he’d make of himself an ancestor, a circumcised forefather with this bedwetter, this baby, an angel of history flying like a dove into the now-possible future.

  Motl. Thrustless stallion by proxy. Procreator. Breeder.

  Father.

  And Esther, a mother, her world become a womb. A wound healed. Consoled. Salved. She could whisper her father’s words in its tiny pink ears, delicate mollusc shells, the child protected by their hope, their love.

  The wisp of souls lost to them, gathered in diapers, in this bassinet of their embracing. A thousand years before, when their people squinted into time, they imagined this coupling, this mewling, this little Jewish piglet.

  A black limousine appeared from behind the airport house. A chauffeur stepped out and offered them an open door. The banker was already inside, sprawled back against the seat, legs spread, a cigar like a bulrush clamped between his teeth, his exhalations turned to blue exhaust. He gestured to the black leather across from him.

  “The truck with your capital will follow us to the bank,” he said.

  There was no mention of Nazis, of nationality. Monsieur and Madame Genoud were simply customers who wished to make a deposit.

  * * *

  —

  They were expecting to arrive at a grand marble bank fronted with Corinthian columns and baroque scrolls, to be greeted with the precise politeness of bank officials handing them flutes of champagne as they entered.

  “Monsieur Genoud. Madame Genoud. Welcome home. We thank you for trusting us with your deposit.”

  Then a brief ceremony where they’d sign papers and gloved officials elegantly removed the sacks to somewhere in the vaulted interior of the bank and then the two of them together would walk down the many white steps to the pavement where they would begin their new life free of teeth, obvious Nazis and fear.

  Instead, they were transported in a cigar-blue cloud through postcard-green fields spotted with chalets and bell-wearing cows come down from the hills. They travelled as the dog flies, at least in dreams, meandering from one vague scent to another, a yarn-tangle of a route, untrackable, the truck with the gold following them. Eventually they stopped in a small village in the crook of a valley, with a church, a school and a small bank building.

  The chauffeur opened the door for the banker, who handed him the stub of his cigar then motioned for Esther and Motl to follow him into the bank. It would have been the perfect place for a heist, mild-looking tellers standing behind their wickets and a lineup of a handful of locals waiting to deposit their market earnings. “This is a stickup. Everyone on the ground.” Motl waving a pistol, Esther pointing and guiding people to the tile floor.

  “Your money or your life,” Motl says to the teller.

  “You want my life? It’s much more exciting to be a bank robber.”

  But instead, the bags of loot were carried into the bank by the chauffeur. “Monsieur and Madame Genoud would like to make a deposit,” the banker said to the nervously bowing branch manager, a man apparently made of loose change, obsequious sheep and a metronome. Bent as a sixpence and as thin, silver dollar–size lenses askew on the minuscule alp of his nose, he scurried before them the way one would kowtow to a grenade rolled through the door.

  “Sir. Yes, sir. This is a welcome pleasure and a delightful surprise. We’re honoured to assist you. Certainly. Most certainly. We’re truly grateful for your business, Monsieur and Madame Genoud, most appreciative. Honoured indeed. We want only to serve.”

  Perhaps his wife and children, both his testicles and his little dog had been taken as collateral to ensure he accepted the gold as legitimate and asked no questions.

  Two tellers hefted the bags through the wickets and carried them into the vault. Their contents
were not counted or assessed, but a small leather passbook was offered to Motl and Esther, already filled out. There were also previously prepared deposit forms for both Monsieur Genoud and Madame Genoud to sign, which they did with a fountain pen and the awkward flourish of the newly flush and recently renamed.

  Another flurry of servile appreciations and skittish bows from the branch manager. Surely his twitching chipmunk of a heart would soon quaver itself into bursting, spewing fragments of paperwork and sycophantic quisling sugar like volcanic ash settling over the inlay of the bank floor.

  They left the bank and returned to the open door of the waiting limousine, the chauffeur handing a lit cigar to the banker.

  “Perhaps in the interest of safekeeping and prudence, I could be trusted with your passbook,” the banker told them, and then slipped the slim book they surrendered into his breast pocket.

  2

  The moon a bullet hole bleeding light visible through the window of the pension where the limousine had taken and deposited them after the bank. Motl on their bed, Esther sliding his jacket and shirt off his bandaged shoulder. A Nightingale intimacy of unwrapping gauze, then a damp handkerchief circling the wound’s edge.

  Motl winced and said, “Give m’ hoss to the nipper. Tell him to heed the wind an’ don’t look a buffalo in the eye coz then you’re too close and will be made pemmican in the stampede. And give m’ gun to the clowns. These times, a red nose could use more than a barrel-imitating finger.”

  “I’ll give them your bullets too,” Esther said. “Saying ‘bang’ isn’t enough, even with a real gun.” She smoothed his temple. “But rest, Monsieur Genoud, rest.”

  And Motl, shirtless, lay back, taking Esther with him.

  “With the hole right through you,” she said, “you could work as a key fob.”

  “Better than a hitching post.”

  Out the window, the sheen of moon over mountain snow. The divided sky. Starlight harrowing Poland and Lithuania. A repose of stars on the slopes of Switzerland.

  “We’re only here because of who isn’t,” Motl said.

  “That’s how history always works.”

  “Sure, the past betrays, but we shouldn’t.”

  “What can we do? We’re here.”

  “The war. Our families. Mike and Gerry.”

  “We warned them.”

  “We almost literally fed them to the lions.”

  They listened to the wind and the distant sound of trumpets, some incongruous nocturnal emission involving tubas also.

  They slept.

  Motl woke, his arm around Esther. “Madame Genoud.”

  “Monsieur Genoud.”

  She was naked. He kissed her. Her small shoulders. Her greying hair, thin fingers, broken nails. He ran his hand over the small nubs of her spine, the fine hairs on the back of her thighs.

  When he was a boy, Motl had once found himself with a girl in a storage room of the synagogue. He held her hand. Kissed her once. They had stood together awkwardly until they heard voices, then he hid while she slipped away. After twenty minutes, he emerged sweating. He had seen her the next day but was too overwhelmed to speak.

  She had died in an accident when she was still a teenager. This Yuli, this lanky girl. He thought of her, his only kiss until Esther.

  “Mon petit chou,” Esther said.

  It was as if he were swimming without water, without any knowledge of swimming. Or water.

  She moved his hand. “Like this, Monsieur Genoud.”

  What had he expected? His heart shaking, his hand nearly numb with fear and expectation.

  The fine reddened veins of Esther’s eyes. She rocked on the bed. He thought he might feel like leaping, a stallion or man broad-chested, sun-leathered and strong, but instead he felt electric, miniature, whirring like a train set, pins and needles prickling through his body. And though he knew it ridiculous, an image conjured by anxiety, he imagined his hand reaching through the curtains on the bimah, reaching for the Torah, hidden, powerful, charged. The ringing of the tiny bells in its silver crown.

  Which reminded him of a story. A rabbi lived on the slope of a hill above the shtetl and because it was a mitzvah, a sacred good deed, to celebrate the immanence of God through the coupling of married bodies, because it was propitious to procreate on Shabbos, to shmintz with one’s Faigel, he tied bells on his bedstead and opened his windows so the entire community could hear the silver ringing as he and the rebbetzin passed shards of divine light from one vessel to another.

  “Oy mine God,” the rebbetzin would say.

  “I’m good, mine Faigeleh, but I’m not the Almighty Himself.”

  Then, “Gevalt,” the rabbi would say. “Think I just smashed a tablet.”

  But the congregation would hear only the divine jingling like Van Gogh starlight over the town and know that the rabbi and rebbetzin were making the priest with two backs, making up for lost tribes.

  Motl’s nervous hand between Esther’s legs. Esther rolling on the bed. Esther shuddering, weeping, shuddering. Then moving his hand away, holding him, kissing him. The two of them turned silver by moonlight.

  “I wish I could…” he said. “I can’t shoot…not even blanks.”

  “A cake that doesn’t rise is still sweet,” she said. “Especially on Passover—did our ancestors shlepping around the desert have time for it to rise? Besides, doesn’t it say somewhere in the Torah that everything doesn’t have to work for it to work? Or was that my bubbie?”

  She brushed the hair back from his forehead, her other hand beginning the wandering toward, as she said, “the promised land.”

  “And besides, there’s pleasure,” she said.

  “What’ll that do?”

  “Relieve some pain.”

  “And what’ll that do?”

  “Sometimes even cowboys bite the bullet and accept a little joy,” she said.

  He reached for her hand, and they lay there, hands intertwined, two tangled spiders at rest.

  “After we find them in the mountains and we take them to a doctor…” Motl began. “And they defrost and he…Esther, I was hoping for this…I mean, Esther, would you consider…would you be willing…would…would you bear my colt?”

  “Bear your colt? That’s so romantic.”

  “It’s because…I feel so awkward.”

  “Imagine me.”

  “Right. So a child—could we have a child? We’re not too old. My mother was your age when she had her first child. Me. We’d be father and mother. Parents. Together.”

  “It usually works something like that.”

  “We’d make a new life, a new world. We’d start again. We could go to America.”

  “But first…”

  “First, we search the glacier.”

  “Yes. For your two little lost Abrahams, like kittens, they must be so cute. Twin fathers of the Jews.”

  “Unless together we’re the great patriarch Moses, bringing the tablets down from Sinai.”

  “Well, I’ve already been on fire.”

  3

  Morning. They strolled into the farmlands outside the village, walking small paths through the fields. It wasn’t only that the air was fresh, but that they could breathe differently. On the other side of the border they’d have travelled to the end of history. Here, it would be like a wake behind them.

  Esther pointed out a verge of blue flowers.

  “What you reckon—cornflowers?” Motl asked.

  “Gentians, I think. If you asked what colour I feel inside, I’d say I was filled with that blue,” Esther said. “Blue like the brightest of nights.”

  “And crowded with bees. Look.” They crouched to examine the blooms more closely.

  A fat one—if bees can be said to be fat—disappeared into the blue trumpet of a flower. It was a long time before it
returned, covered in pollen. It took off, following a zigzag path, tacking over a fence toward its hive.

  “Maybe I’m the blue of a gentian inside, but I’m also that bee. All this stuff sticking to me,” Esther said.

  “We’ve been deep in the same sad flower.”

  “And sticky with what? What we’ve left. What’s gone. Who’s gone.”

  “And grief. Grief made lacerating by guilt.”

  “That’s some sweet honey, way beyond clover.”

  Wildflowers in the meadow. The drab joy of cowbells. Mountains and picturesque gables. Warm sun. They walked, their outsides, at least, charmed and lulled by this music, their insides gentian blue.

  “Last night,” Motl said, “I was talking to the concierge, and he told me Göring was injured in the Beer Hall Putsch and so, according to Der Stürmer, his beloved little Edda wasn’t his. They say her father was a syringe. Göring was furious about the article. He didn’t want anyone to know their Reichsmarschall was all Luft and no waffe.”

  “Bet he wishes the Putsch had taken place in the mountains.”

  “Anywhere but between his legs.”

  * * *

  —

  At the end of a field they came to a fence with a stile and legged it over. The steady dun eyes of cows considered them philosophically from under their long, tender-hearted lashes. The motionless Bessies appeared like features of the landscape—hillocks with udders—as if the rolling field had eyes and a constant, unassuming temperament.

  Calves were clustered around their mothers, waiting to grow as large as leather sofas.

  “Look at those droop-eyed rusties,” Motl said. “The little wind-bellies. If I had a horse…”

  He held his hand out as if feeding sugar to a pony, though all he could offer was sweat salt, palm lines—heart, life and love lines to be read by their wet snouts—and an expectation of reward.

  “Here, little buttermilk,” he crooned. One nonplussed calf regarded Motl warily and shuffled in his direction. Apparently it didn’t know that Motl was well-read in both the major arcana of the cowpunch—the ropes, guns and ten-gallon hats—and the minor ones—the whiskey, Texas hold’em and boots—of the range-riding buckaroo.