by Gary Barwin
Whether the calf’s mother knew of Motl’s burgeoning appreciation for the profound and abiding relationship of Indigenous people with the land and of their dire experience with colonial expansion was unclear, but this Swiss Minnie turned rumination into action, potential energy into hot-footed joules, and charged at them with abandon.
Esther was able to jackrabbit up onto the stile, while Motl, being in greater proximity to the calf, was the target of the meat-tenderizing hooves of this protective Daisy. She ran at him over the short grass, blasting spurts of cow breath from her dilated nostrils, glistening pink caves of burbling phlegm, while seemingly propelled by the methane-bleating detonations of her muffler end. If her eyes had previously regarded Motl philosophically, now they had the askew strabismus of a meat boulder intent on rendering Motl’s corporeal materiality into a sack of insubstantial flesh. She ploughed into him, flipping him Schweiz over schnitzel, but it is difficult for a stampeding bovine to reverse and so this Henrietta had to make a circuit of the field in order to try again to pulverize her prey. This gave Motl time to drag himself over the stile before she fired up her beef engines and charged again on full power.
Motl fell onto the earth, looked up at the sky. He had not been made flat as paper, but had been broadsided and run over.
“Anything broken?” Esther asked.
Motl said nothing, only laughed. He had escaped the genocidal hankering of the Reich only for a cow to attempt to grind him into matzo meal and grits.
Then he stopped laughing. His ribs hurt and his entire body felt tenderized.
“Your shoulder?” Esther asked.
“The only part of me that doesn’t hurt is the bullet hole,” Motl said.
4
Esther helped Motl lower his cow-pressed Jew-jerky onto a seat on the Bern-bound train.
“Think of me as manna,” he said, “flattened by my fall from Heaven.”
When they arrived in Bern, they transferred to the train headed for Zimmerwald.
“Roadkill. You can say so much in two dimensions,” he said, but he slept most of the way to Zimmerwald, his body using all of its energy in an effort to reinflate.
Half-awake, he’d mutter variously:
“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly to the star-spurred dark.”
“Soon we shall multiply and our children will be spared the sword, the six-gun and the murderous banditry of one-balled Dolphie.”
He was saddle meat twisting within Esther’s embrace.
“I remember you, old friend, Theodor Herzl, I remember your patchy swayback, your fly-crossed eyes. I remember playing with you in the scrub of the chicken-filled yard.”
They’d arrive late in the evening and so would need to sleep one night at a pension. Early the next morning they would travel into the mountains, assuming Motl had regained his former health.
The local pension turned out to be the home of the Russian count where many years before Motl had attempted to perforate the bourgeoisie. Burned to the ground, it had risen from the revolutionary ashes, newly phoenixed as a small hotel. Like everything else, there was little that had remained the same. Motl recognized the stone walk cobbling up to the once-classical steps—which had been rebuilt in the porridge style, clotted and uneven—but the rest of the home had been reconstructed in an entirely new design.
As they entered, they heard the posh haw-haw of English, audible from what must be the drawing room amid the clink of glassware. “Gosh, it’s simply ghastly. One does so pine for a decent horse.”
“The English? Here?” Motl said, surprised.
“British supporters of the Reich,” the front desk clerk said. “A major general, a bank director, a baroness and a viscount. They’re friends of the Mitford family—you know, Unity Mitford, Hitler’s English girl who stood with him as he announced the Anschluss?”
Then came the explosive mewling of a baby from behind the dining room door.
“Polly, please remove little Dolfie. It is rather a struggle to join one word to another when he cries so.”
The receding squalling of the baby as the sound of plummy chatter and clinking resumed.
“He natters quite as Unity does now, doesn’t he?”
“Rather. Just like Bobo herself. But soon he too shall be giving speeches, I’m sure.”
Though his knowledge was imperfect, Motl had apprenticed in cowboy English and these upper-crust Brits were both horsey and mostly intelligible if filtered through the rarefied pomp of their imperious vowels. He was able to glean the gist.
“The baby,” they kept saying. “The baby.”
Motl and Esther climbed the stairs to their room.
A nanny came scurrying toward them from out of a bedroom, still bearing the child, a ruckle-haired cherub in knickerbockers and suspenders, thick as a gnome. The nanny was costumed in classic maid: black dress, white cotton pinafore, downcast class-aware eyes.
“Sir. Ma’am,” she said as she slowed to move past Motl and Esther.
“Such cheeks,” said Esther. “May I see the child? It would cheer me up.”
Esther made goggle-mouth baby sounds, and the child stopped kvetching and turned his mashed-potato face toward her, grinning.
“A strange time for his parents to take him on holiday,” Motl said.
“No, sir, his parents are not with him. There’s quite a kerfuffle back in England,” the nanny said. Then she added in a conspiratorial whisper, “He’s going to meet his father…for the first time.”
“Being conceived is messy. And it doesn’t get easier after that,” Motl said.
“And what does your mama think, my little Fritzchen Nudelprinz?” Esther asked, and chucked one of his dumpling cheeks.
“She’s at a convalescent home in England,” the maid said as the child not unexpectedly said nothing. “Wounded. But his father…They say his father is…his father is an important German leader. Maybe even the Führer himself.”
“We’ll have to wait for the hairs on his upper lip,” Motl said. “Then we’ll know. Also, if it turns out he wants to clear the land of Jews.”
“Please don’t say anything, sir. I should not have spoken of it,” the nanny said.
Footsteps. Germanic huffing on the stairs. The nanny and the Führerling disappeared quickly back into the child’s room. A gorbellied Nazi rose from the landing. First his balding, brilliantined hair, the binocular shine of his spectacles, black moustache like the hula skirt of a rat, his turnip cheeks and chin, then the tumescent heft of his torso surmounting broomstick legs.
His uniform was an overwrought suitcase, overrun with straps and buckles, insignia and badges, swastikas and the double lightning scars of the SS. He regarded Motl and Esther as if vermin had crawled up his nostrils.
“Guten Abend. Good evening,” Motl said.
Deep inside the vault of the officer’s sinuses, the vermin had begun to burrow, their scabby, scrabbling feet causing the cartilage of his nose to twitch. He showed no other sign of acknowledging Motl and Esther’s presence, and they were relieved when he twisted the doorknob and bellied his way through the doorway into the child’s room.
“I was never upstairs when this house belonged to the Russian count,” Motl said, “but I feel it burning with shame.”
They walked the hall to their room and sat on the bed.
“Tomorrow, we shall run into the mountains and find my conkers and at last I’ll have something to give life instead of being filled with nothing but what a ghost is filled with.”
“What’s a ghost filled with?”
“More ghost.”
Esther turned to Motl and lowered him onto the bed, kissing him.
“Ghosts are never anywhere except where they’re not,” Motl said. “They’re edgeless, like a sack of air with the sack gone.”
Do they speak with each other about Hitler’s
child? They do not.
5
The garden pink in the just-after-dawn. Once, it had been a circuit board of bushes and flowers, paths leading between topiary pruned into simple shapes, a battalion of clippers and gardeners employed to snip the world into compliance. Without the count and his maintenance of a moneyed Eden, it was more a roiling sea of stubby hedges, stunted trees and the occasional punctuation of flower. Motl and Esther picked their way along a gravel path, sharing a bagful of bread and cheese and a pot of reheated coffee they’d filched from the kitchen.
“Last time I was here, I legged it like a rabbit chased by kiotes. I’d no idea where I was going, but I’ve played it over so many times since, I think I know the direction.”
“Are there dowsing rods for this kind of thing?”
“I’ll pay attention to any twitching in my pants.”
“As any of us would.”
Travelling through a landscape from the past by memory was like dowsing—crediting, if not marvels, then ghosts.
A hedge at the end of the garden. Beyond it, a meadow, abruptly sloping up the long green cape of the alp. They straddled a bald patch in the hedge and began walking up the slope. Cows.
Small flowers. The golden pink of the sun rising into the mountain-scalloped sky.
“I’ve never climbed a mountain before,” Esther said.
“The best way to go is up.”
“Thanks. I’d never have figured that out.”
“It’s in the Torah. They do everything important on a mountain.”
“So it’s like we’re looking for the Ark and two of everything to begin the world again. It figures the Torah is all about men climbing mountains when really it’s the women in the valleys who get things done.”
“We’ll do plenty in the valley. Besides, I’m not so keen on mountains. Remember: Abraham and his knife, Isaac and his almost-sacrifice, and then, of course, circumcision. Like my father used to say, ‘As far as God is concerned, less is more.’ ”
“It’s one way to learn about your body: by losing some.”
“Tell me about it,” Motl said.
The tilted meadow ended in forest, and Esther and Motl slipped into the brindled dark, the aisles between the trees quiet, cool and expectant. Motl reached for Esther’s hand. When they could, they walked side by side or else Motl led, his arm stretched behind so he could hang on to her.
In a small clearing by a stream, Esther and Motl sat on a lichen-blotched boulder to rest. They shared the remains of the cold coffee, the bread and cheese.
“We’ll be a family,” Esther said.
“Yes.”
“When we have the child.”
“Yes.”
“We will start again.”
“Like Noah.”
“Two of every memory.”
“Yes,” Motl said. “Maybe they’ll cancel each other out.”
“I don’t know if it works that way.”
“Maybe not. You know, I never married.”
“I know,” Esther said.
“I was a cowboy. All alone. Well, my mother was always there.”
“You were a nice Jewish boy.”
“A nice Jewish cowboy.”
“Sure,” Esther said. “And your mother was the bean-master.”
“The cook and coffee maker. Yes.”
“Do you think there can be marriage with this war?”
“There can be children.”
“So, you mean yes?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, there can be marriage?”
“Yes,” Motl said. “Esther?”
“Yes?”
“The forest is a kind of temple.”
“A kind of synagogue.”
“Yes. So maybe it is a place where we could marry.”
“Yes,” Esther said. “Are you asking me?”
“Yes,” Motl said. “I am.”
6
They walked for several hours through the forest. When Motl and Esther emerged from the trees, Motl expected they would be standing on a frozen tide. But the glacier was not where it was supposed to be.
Motl and Esther climbed onto a rocky outcrop to survey the slope, searching for where the glacier had slithered. For twenty years it had crept steadily back; now the cold creature crouched behind a small undulation in the mountainside, waiting, as if to pounce or else in trepidation. Perhaps the glacier feared the ruinous depredations of the future. Motl nodded, a subtle indication of recognition, of—if this can be said to a glacier—warmth, as if greeting a friend from a past life. They walked over and climbed onto it.
“It was over here that they rolled, I think,” Motl said, indicating a fissure.
Esther scrabbled over the cold surface with her hands, digging at a shadow barely visible through the translucence.
“Uhh,” she said. “A squirrel.” She extracted the frozen thing and held it up.
“I was nineteen. Mine were not so hairy,” Motl said.
The glacier was a map, except everything had moved. Motl walked about the frozen wave, attempting to recognize its ruts and hummocks, its fractures and knobs, while Esther continued to dig beneath the pearlescent surface.
“Motl,” she said, and opened her hand. She had a palmful of bullets and casings.
“None of them look familiar,” he said. “Of course, it was more how they felt than how they looked that I noticed at the time.”
Several hours later, they had a collection of animal skulls, stones, teeth and wood fragments. Also numb fingers, despite using the coffee pot as a shovel and passing it back and forth between them. Motl had also found a pocket watch. It wasn’t working, unless its function was to mark 4:43 in the night or day of some undetermined week and month and year. And as they say, a stopped clock is right twice per day, just as you always find something in the last place you look, unless you don’t understand the principle of looking. Or finding.
They continued looking but not finding.
Late in the afternoon, they came upon a small hut with the cockeyed posture of the resplendently inebriated, as askew as their own shadows, tucked against some trees.
“Maybe we can camp here for the night?” he said.
“Can we get room service?”
“We’ll ask the rats.”
They left their few worldly goods in the cabin and followed the glacier to the edge of a near-cliff-steep slope. They sat and looked at the view. Far below, they could make out meadows filled with cows, the pension and the rest of the village, with its postcard of gabled houses.
“Reckon those British Nazis down there have room service?”
“Hot and cold running evil.”
“And the little Führerleh has a tiny plastic Europe to teethe on.”
Motl leaned back on his arms. Had he rested, just looking at scenery, since he had left Vilnius? Had he ever rested?
It had all been books and worry. After the destruction of the Temple, this had been the Chosen People’s chief recreation, their chief job.
“Ahh,” Motl said. His breath a visible spectre before him.
His hands sank into the snow, melting it with their heat. He felt something against his palms. He closed his fingers around it.
Mouse heads? Matzo balls? Apricots? The fetuses of mountain goats?
He was afraid to look. He feared they were something they weren’t.
The possibility of a thousand babies? A new village of Motls? A city of his children and their children and their children’s children down through the ages?
Motl and Esther would survive.
And when they were old, their children would bring them soup and they would live in a home while their children spent their money and sold their valuables and argued over their heirlooms and property and they would die happy.
&
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—
Motl held his hands out. “Guess which one?”
Esther looked thoughtfully at the back of each of his pale hands in turn, as if she could read what was within. After a minute of dramatic chin-holding and deeply thoughtful face-squinching, she announced, “This one,” and tapped the knuckles of his left hand.
Motl smiled and turned his hand over, opening his fingers in ostentatious display.
And dropped the testicle.
They watched with dread as it toppled from the cliff, then buffeted from crag to crag. It didn’t take Motl and Esther’s warmer route through the forests and meadow, but instead followed the colder route of the glacier. Rolling, it began to collect snow.
Though it became more and more distant, its size remained the same, for it became larger as the snow collected around it. Then larger still, until it was rolling over the snowy crags above the village.
Take the snow of a mountainside and roll it like a carpet. Take this entire carpet, a vast crystalline cabbage roll, and compact each end, turn it into a ball, a frozen somersaulting cherub, a scoop as large as a house. It was an icy comet hurtling toward the village. A torpedo released from Motl’s hand high above had attained near-limitless mass, incalculable velocity, and became a snow angel of death, its frosty scythe like an eyeball looking both everywhere and nowhere.
The snow had mobbed around Motl’s single clacker. And it rolled. Fat Man. Little Boy. Dame Fortuna. It rolled.
And in its wake, the snow on the crags began to unsettle. To dislodge. By the time the immeasurable colossus of this murderous snowball with Motl’s earnest and unaware single jibbly at its centre thumped blindly into the village, it was followed by an avalanche. His scudding boychik body-slammed the buildings. Chimneys, gables, the roofs, windows, walls, stairs, its pension and small outbuildings all crumpled, toppled over, destroyed. And then the torrent from the mountains buried the village. A mining disaster. A rock slide. A tsunami. A Biblical flood.