Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  Motl regarded the devastated, snow-engulfed village.

  “And that’s why we’re born with two.”

  * * *

  —

  He had not lowered his other arm. His hand was still held out, his fist closed.

  Esther touched it gently. “Is there something in this hand too?”

  “Yes,” Motl said. “I’ll be more careful. One is more than twice as rare as two.”

  He packed the coffee pot half-full with snow and then lowered his hand inside. “Night night, little one. It’s time for bed.” He placed the testicle on the bed of snow. Then he filled the rest of the pot. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the snow fleas bite. You have big days ahead,” he said, and closed the lid.

  “I wanted to see,” Esther said.

  “Soon enough,” Motl said, and kissed her.

  The mountain below was honeying with the lowering sun, the distant clouds rosy with the coming dusk.

  “We’ll shelter in the hut until morning, then decide what’s next,” Motl said.

  There was no lock on the door, but it required Esther’s battering-ram shoulder to open it. Inside, the place smelled like a cross-country ski, the wax tarred on, pungent cedar with the depth of dark. Several grey blankets were balled in the corner of a narrow, sauna-like shelf. A small stove, pot-bellied like a cherub of iron, had some logs piled beside it along with a box of Alpenhorn matches.

  Esther lit the fire with the long, red-tipped matches and kindling scraps while Motl secured a safe place for the precious coffee pot in a snowdrift nearby. Once they sat, they realized how deeply the cold had penetrated. They eased off their shoes, took off their jackets and lay back together under blankets, leaning against the wall, watching the flames like the writhing of orange mountain ranges.

  “A day of ups and downs,” Motl said.

  “But even the downs were ups,” Esther replied.

  They slept.

  7

  Motl woke alone, the blanket fallen, moonlight the colour of sour milk through the half-open door. The fire in the stove had burned to embers. Where was Esther? Even the goats were asleep.

  She must have gone to find a place to whiz in the woods.

  He went to the door to look out, but there was no sign of her outside. He walked to the nearest crest of the glacier. Nothing. He hadn’t expected disappearances once they’d crossed the border.

  A keening. Maybe the wind? There was no wind. Had she fallen? Was she hurt? An animal crawling out of the forest—a wolf, a bear. Motl rushed as best he could toward the wailing.

  Movement at the edge of the trees, nothing more than flailing shadows. A body. Esther twisting in pain.

  But something more. A creature thrashing. A wolf, a black dog attacking. No—a man on top of Esther. The officer from the pension. Heaving. His officer’s hat set beside them as if it were only waiting patiently for an appointment to be over.

  His hand covered Esther’s mouth, her arms—wings beating wildly—her legs hammered against him. He had torn her dress. His own dark clothes pulled aside. The shine of a gun in a holster now at his knees. Esther screaming into his hand. The dull thudding of his body against hers.

  “I knew I could find you,” the Nazi said. “The nanny confessed she’d told you about the baby.”

  Esther’s smothered roaring as she writhed to throw him off.

  “First, I fuck you, then I shoot between your pretty eyes,” the Nazi said. “And then I shoot your husband.”

  And without thinking, Motl, who had crept up behind him, reached for the officer’s gun, raised it and fired. A mute click.

  Then he realized. The safety. He pulled the lever, pressed the gun to the Nazi’s head, closed his eyes and fired again.

  The German shuddering. The German convulsed.

  In death.

  In climax.

  Esther pushed him off her and rolled away from the blood pooling beneath the Nazi’s head. Motl dropped the gun, said nothing, gathered Esther into his arms.

  PART FOUR

  This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of being uprooted: the dominion of the unreal over the real.

  —PRIMO LEVI

  1

  TORONTO,

  1984

  “God must beeeee a cowboyyyyy…” Motl, my grandfather, sang, not at the top of his lungs but at some location where he was able to produce maximum wobble with maximum volume. This particular location was the boys’ washroom at the Wandering Spirit Survival School. I didn’t have to worry about him frightening the boys. He already had. None would risk getting near such hideous, ear-cleaving ululation. Particularly in the stall of the jakes.

  “You okay in there?” I asked.

  “I should not be okay? It sounds good in here,” he called. “You know that song? It’s on the radio.”

  “Yes, Zaidy. I’ve heard it.”

  “Almost finished riding the porcelain horse, almost dropped the last chestnut filly into the stable.”

  “I need to know this, Zaidy?”

  “What, you’re not interested in your grandfather?”

  “Also, you probably shouldn’t sing about cowboys here. Home on their range and all.”

  My grandfather, in the ornery middle of his eighties, had come to the school to talk about the Holocaust to Anishinaabe kids. Because I lived with him, it was my job to wrangle this singing alter kaker western enthusiast, grandfather, survivor.

  My mother, Bella, liked to say she was conveniently born on her birthday. Though she was nearly not born at all.

  Who she might have been had rolled down a mountain and destroyed a village.

  Or was carried over the sea in a coffee pot.

  Motl and my grandmother Esther had found their way from Switzerland to the port of Marseille, from whence they sailed for Canada, Esther becoming increasingly pregnant. First she wasn’t, then she became more so. Until she noticed. And then Motl noticed, still carrying the coffee pot filled with a constant supply of ice begged from the kitchen and with what could have become my mother. If she hadn’t already gotten a soft pink toehold in the world, her two waterlogged fists ready for a fight once she was born. And then every day after.

  When they arrived in Toronto, the very pregnant Esther was admitted to Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, until the previous year called the Mercy Hospital for Incurables.

  “There’s always a cure,” my mother said. “Sometimes, though, it’s death. That tends to fix things. Permanently.”

  Thanks, Mom. Always helpful.

  The hospital had been rechristened in time for her emergence and Bella came out soaked in history, her DNA souped up by intergenerational collywobbles. Born and raised in a family of survivors, barely surviving, she did kvetch with operatic gusto until she found drink at fourteen, whereupon her complaints were declaimed with the angry zeal of a banshee.

  After she was born, Motl left Esther in the hospital and took his glacial companion, his faithful sidekick, in its coffee pot and walked past the Sunnyside Amusement Park and the Flyer (“the dippiest-dips on the continent”) to the shores of Lake Ontario. He removed his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants and waded up to his mashed-potato knees. He opened the lid of the pot and then, Yisgadal v’yiskadash, flicked its contents into the water.

  No Lady of the Lake reached out of the waves to clutch his precious treasure. What once had been one of the golden apples of his quest now floated like a duck’s egg toward Hamilton. Or like tashlich on Rosh Hashanah. Casting pieces of bread onto the surface of the water. Casting off sin.

  Motl stood on the rocky lake floor, coffee pot in hand, watching as a ring-necked gull swept from the sky, beaked his boy and flew away. It landed above the H of the Red Hots’ restaurant sign to eat its catch.

  How many children of Nazis are the right amount? None is too many. Which was also the Canadian
government’s policy toward the immigration of Jews during the war, though Motl and Esther were two of the none that managed it. They had a Nazi’s child. And here in Canada, when Esther gave birth, they became her parents.

  “I remember what Rabbi Zaltzman said at my bar mitzvah. ‘With each child the world begins anew,’ ” Motl said to Esther. “And judging by what was in his beard, he’d been around since the first beginning, so he would know. Our girl is no Nazi. She’s a half-pint turtle, a dumpling, one of my lost boychiks with a milky face and a sweet little blintz belly.”

  My infant mother scrabbling at Esther’s breast, finally settling, feeding, sleeping. Wrapped in a blanket, fists held up boxer-style, tiny brow tufts furrowed, a delicate network of blue veins under opalescent skin.

  “I look at you two and I see a goose and her gosling. A nursling and her mother. A dayling. An hourling. I see how we climbed mountains, escaped together, crossed an ocean. Survived.”

  2

  A lanky teacher strode toward us, tweed jacket over his Buffy Sainte-Marie T-shirt, his hair in a long braid.

  “Waubgeshig Harper. Call me Waub. Sorry I wasn’t here to meet you. Urgent call from my husband.” He held out his hand to Motl. “You must be Mr. Isaakson.”

  “Mr. Isaakson? I hide when I hear that name. It can’t be good news. I’m Motl to anyone who knows me and still puts up with me.”

  “Motl, then. Welcome to the Wandering Spirit Survival School.”

  “That name I like. We Jews are also always wandering. And we’re interested in survival. I survived.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” Waub said.

  * * *

  —

  Motl shuffled to the front of the classroom. Forty ten-year-olds were sitting expectantly at their desks.

  “Natives and Jews,” he began. “We’re like a rash. Try to get rid of us, sure, but you never can. We refuse to die. So, you and me, we’re genocide buddies.”

  His croaking chuckle, a violin buzzed by flies.

  He told them about the Nazi plan for the Jews. And for everyone else. Roma and homosexuals, the disabled, the mentally ill, all the others. He didn’t tell them about his testicles. Neither the European nor the North American. Nor the other stories he’d told me. They weren’t for ten-year-olds. The kids would instantly turn old, hair sprouting from their ears, all the freshness gone from their bodies. He did say he had been a cowboy.

  “But a Jewish cowboy isn’t a regular one. He’s more like you First Nations, because he knows something about being rounded up, about not being able to live where you want. About being run off by the cavalry. Hunted by regular cowboys. Though they were wearing brown shirts and jackboots.

  “But no matter how we’re filled with holes—even if we’re just one big hole under a Stetson—we keep riding. Or being dragged by our horse. We round up history, drag that little doggie behind us.”

  He looked around the classroom. Pointed a crooked finger at a shelf of books.

  “I hear you kids like stories about the end of the world. That’s not science fiction, that’s history. That’s the news. Once I was told by a Lakota that the world had already ended. For us. For you.”

  So this cowboy—this Jewish cowboy—saddled down in the teacher’s chair behind the teacher’s desk and hacked a handkerchief full of black mire from his esophagus, and he continued.

  “You know what those three dots in a row are called? Ellipses. They mean something’s missing. If you erase them, you have to put them back in to show you’ve erased them. We’re like that. We’re the absence of absence. We didn’t have a future, but we’re going there anyway.”

  He adjusted his handkerchief, folding the ooze into the centre, and hacked again. Then he origamied the sumpy cloth and stuffed it in the breast pocket of his cardigan.

  “I knew an Oneida during the war. A professor in Poland studying Indianers. Where else do you expect to find them? But in the middle of the Holocaust—he couldn’t wait? Last I heard of him, he escaped a tiger. And why not. After all, tigers are the same as Nazis, just with more stripes.”

  The kids were captivated by Motl. He had the charisma of being committed to his own eccentricity—not to mention his furious engagement with phlegm—but also a commitment to the stories themselves. And ultimately, behind it all, the wish to connect. He was going deep. With his coughing. With his obviously heartfelt feelings.

  After the presentation, Waub long-legged it straight toward us. I was ready to pull a bright bouquet of shame and apologies out of my sleeve.

  “An Indigenous professor,” Waub said. “An Oneida. In Poland? With a tiger? How many could there have been? I think it was my father.”

  “Did he have a mole, right here?” Motl thrust a finger at his left cheek.

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Then it was him. The guy I knew didn’t have a mole either.”

  And so it turned out Waub’s father was Mike. Mike, who Motl had abandoned in a tiger cage during the war.

  “Mike and Gerry. For forty years, I worried that I’d left them to be lunch for a tiger, and after that, something worse,” Motl said. “Who knew it’d choose freedom over fresh meat?”

  As Waub told it, Mike and Gerry had padded quietly past the cat. By the time it roused, they’d swung the cage door open and were down the stairs.

  “Must have thought they were white meat, letting them go by just like that,” he said.

  The tiger had then leapt from the train car, making a break for the Polish jungle rather than holding up for an Indigenous nosh.

  “Sometimes I wake feeling like I’m drowning. Like memory is drowning me in piss and shit,” Motl said. “Sometimes I haven’t been able to sleep because of your father. I’m glad to know he’s alive.”

  Waub peered into the past, which hovered in the air just over our shoulders, then explained how his father had died of a heart attack after his youngest sister had disappeared and her children were taken away. “It was happening to everyone. After all he’d seen in the war, and all that education…and he couldn’t do anything. He gave up and I think his heart just stopped.

  “But I haven’t given up. It’s why I’m teaching at this school—to do something positive. For our kids. And to teach them to do something for themselves, too.

  “And there’s also this,” he said, and pulled up his sleeve. A rough tattoo of numbers was carved into his forearm, the blue-green of algae.

  “But…you weren’t in a camp,” Motl said.

  “Same thing. It’s my Indian status number,” Waub said. “I had it done after I saw an artist who did it too. Once, I tried to get a phone number the same as this number. Not quite enough numbers, though. But if you add a one at the end, you get a sex shop in Sacramento. Figures.”

  Waub led us to the staff room. “Coffee?” He indicated a battered percolator. “I heard that a guy who used his camp number won millions,” he said. “So I use the numbers in the lottery when I can.”

  He poured us all weak coffee in mismatched cups, arranged them on the mug-battered table.

  “Way I see it, my job—all our jobs—is to help each other not die now that, as you said, the world has ended one time already.”

  * * *

  —

  We walked across the black rivulets of tar-repair in the parking lot and found my grandfather’s car. He’d named it Theodor Herzl because, though it’d been many years, he remembered his beloved shlumper of a steed, the horse that seemed to always head toward some hoped-for homeland.

  We got into Theodor Herzl. I rode shotgun, and Motl squirmed into position behind the steering wheel, refusing to put on his seat belt despite the increasingly desperate carillon of the dashboard.

  “What—I’m going to die young? Besides, at my age there’s more past than present. It surrounds me like quicksand. Or a huge fart. But though you have my mothe
r’s name, knowing you were born in the future helps keep me here.”

  “The future? Maybe that explains why I can never figure anything out.”

  “Okay, so my future. But one day you’ll be like me—a dried-up crick. Only irrigated by the damp of drool.”

  Motl heaved the gearshift forward and performed some kind of Litvak grand jeté with the pedals. The car gambolled like a filly across the parking lot.

  “You’ll tell me if there’s anything you think I should avoid,” he said.

  “Usually, I’d say death, but driving with you, I’m not sure that that’s possible.”

  3

  My mother was four when Esther died. No one was clear—or was willing to be clear—about exactly how she died, not even my storytelling grandfather, though I was able to, as he would say about the TV, “read between the lies.”

  It was late autumn. My mother remembers the sound of cars fissling through the leaves on the road and the morning sun, itself the colour of autumn leaves, pouring like syrup into her bedroom. Esther taking her by the hand down the stairs for a special breakfast of pancakes, whipped cream and strawberries. Motl was outside, fussing in the yard. Esther was dressed in long skirts, her neck wrapped in a surfeit of blue and orange scarves that looked like the autumn world outside. The family dog, Fritz, was slumped under the table, chin on his paws, waiting with sad eyes for scraps to fall, or a surreptitious hand to reach down with a splendid and greasy gift. Usually it was Motl, a wink shared sidelong with his little Bella.

  On this morning, Esther played a game with my mother, a nursery rhyme where she circled her fingers around my mother’s palm (“Meezhelah mayzhelah, boyt a hayzele”) and then ran them up her arm to tickle her underarm (“Kutchelah, katchelah, kutchelah, koo!”). It was the most content and cozy of mornings.