Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  Then Esther walked her daughter through the neighbourhood to nursery school. They kicked leaves as they went, kept an eye out for acorns and chestnuts, watched the squirrels scuttle up the sides of trees. Esther took my mother through the door of the synagogue to the school, unbuttoned her grown-up purple coat, hung it on its designated hook and then brought her into the playroom. She hugged my mother, waved goodbye through the door and turned to leave. But she turned around once again and went back through the door, hugged my mother and then, waving a final time, disappeared.

  Esther went back along the golden street and then out to the yard behind their house, where she told Motl she was tired and unwell, and asked him if he would retrieve my mother from the nursery after work. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, lay down on the brocaded covers to sleep and did not wake again.

  There were sleeping pills. There were other medications. But no one was able to speak of what happened. A mother of a young child. A wife. A survivor. Until she was no longer any of those things.

  Remembering, Motl’s eyes became unfocused though they seemed inclined to sorrow.

  “We lived through much. We escaped it together. She was a star shooting through the darkness. It was still so soon after the war, not everyone had even found their way home. We were both so happy that—no matter how it happened—she was able to become a mother, that we were able to have a child, that we were a family.”

  How could a mother who had endured so much, who had escaped so much, who had a future again, how could she not continue? How could this mother who’d seemed so happy, so content, who’d seemed to finally have created a new life after the old one was broken, how could she have such pain inside?

  “Sometimes a war continues long after it seems to be over. Sometimes the past is a time bomb ticking until its appointed and sometimes unexpected explosion,” Motl said.

  But he continued this family, this family of two. Motherless. Wifeless. Only partially surviving.

  And somehow, so far, Motl himself had survived. If everywhere both inside and out is a minefield, if bombs pock the way forward and back, pit your brain and your guts, courage is just keeping still. Just standing on the ground as steady as you can. And loving your child.

  * * *

  —

  Theodor Herzl, deep in its combustible Ford Pinto heart, must indeed have been consumed with zeal for aliyah—for a return to Zion—since in Motl’s hands it didn’t necessarily follow the painted conventions of the road but rather veered on a path of its own desire, fording traffic medians and encroaching on curbs.

  “My philosophy is, ‘As long as we get where we’re going,’ ” Motl said.

  “You mean the hospital?”

  “I was thinking,” he said. “Those ponies at the Survival School, wet behind the ears, looking at me as I told them stories. If I can talk to them—well, maybe it’s time to visit your mother. But first, lunch.”

  Before I could say anything, or even collect my thoughts, Motl straddled the dotted line, cut across oncoming traffic, sparking an irritated gaggle of car horns, narrowly avoided a streetcar and jauntily assumed two parking spots.

  “You think I don’t know they honk? They figure it’s because I’m an old man, but the world is crooked, and I’m just trying to drive straight through.”

  * * *

  —

  “Motl,” a woman behind the counter at United Bakers Dairy called as he shuffled in. “Vos makhstu?”

  “How am I? You tell me—you’ve got a better view.”

  “In one word, ‘good.’ In two words, ‘not good.’ ”

  “It’s true. Even my aches have aches. And the aches are the parts that hurt least. But you know my granddaughter, Gitl?”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized. How old?”

  “Twenty.”

  “So grown-up. And thanks Gott she doesn’t look like you.”

  Seconds after we made it to a booth, the waitress arrived, hair piled high on her head like a haystack. “Don’t tell me what you want, I already know what’s good.”

  She soon returned with two full platters. She did know what I wanted.

  Almost everything.

  She put the platters down with one hand and, with the other, tilted a coffee pot expectantly over our cups.

  “So, Gitl, you’ll come with to see your mother?” Motl said.

  I gazed down at my blintzes, moving the slurry of cherries back and forth over their pale bellies.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Coffee or your mother?” the waitress asked.

  “Both,” I replied.

  “Good,” she said, and poured the coffee, deposited a handful of creamers and then left to become involved in the lives unfolding at the tables beside us, brandishing the coffee pot like a dark beacon.

  * * *

  —

  My mother lived and worked on an equine therapy farm outside Fort Macleod, Alberta, near the famous Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. Youth lived in residence, helped feed and curry, saddle and water the horses, and learned to ride. Certainly, none of the horses were named Herzl, but maybe Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, R. D. Laing. Who knew where they might veer?

  My mother had her own issues, but she was good with horses. “A horse just looks at you and understands,” she’d say.

  Once, Motl told me a story from when my mother was young. He’d sent her to school, her pony-emblazoned lunch box packed with the requisite sandwich and juice.

  On the playground, a boy approached. “If you give me your lunch, I’ll bring you a horse tomorrow. A real horse.”

  She gave him her lunch.

  “But why?” Motl asked her later. “You knew he wouldn’t really give you a horse.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I hoped so much it could be true.”

  “This story says a lot about your mother,” Motl told me. “When you have such hope—when you even hope for hope—it’s not long before you have it no more.”

  To get to my mother would mean thirty-six hours of driving together in a Ford Pinto, Theodor Herzl turned to memory machine, to story hatchback. Exhaustion, distraction, boredom and the long road would turn the car into a confessional, a witness stand, an isolation booth, a speech balloon, and Motl would tell me his stories. Though we’d spent long hours together—playing chess, going to the library, listening to music, watching TV, even many “I need you for your brain” times when he called me over to move things for him—he’d never spoken to me, to anyone, about the war years. The visit to the Survival School was the first time.

  “Last night,” Motl said, “I saw this television show where Japanese glue broken dishes back together with gold to make a new dish. It’s meshuga, but I like it. Between your mother and me, I don’t know who’s the bowl and who’s the glue—maybe you are?—but it’s time to fix it.”

  Motl’s plan was to head south from Toronto and drive through the US—from Michigan through to North Dakota and Montana. We’d travel up to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, where the foothills rose from the prairie over the squinched bottom of Alberta.

  “Always wanted to see it,” Motl said. “For eleven thousand years it was where buffalo were run off the cliff, so their bones built up like the graveyard of a lost city. But the name isn’t about buffalo heads being smashed in, though of course they were. A Peigan boy stood underneath for a better view. Never mind raining cats and dogs. It’s his head that was eggs.

  “It makes me think of being broken open and everything floating out, sticking a hat on my head so nothing essential spills out and then walking away. And while I’m thinking about being empty, remember to bring some vittles. Some places, there’ll be nowhere to stop for miles.”

  We didn’t tell my mother that we were coming. Who knows how she would react? It was better to surprise her, her father and daughter driving int
o town, two mysterious characters from the East climbing out of the stagecoach, looking left and right at this new place they have arrived at, stopping at the local saloon to ask her whereabouts.

  4

  Motl had me call into the pizza place where I worked and launch into a soliloquy about a family health crisis requiring me to urgently leave the province, the day of my return uncertain and contingent on intimated metaphysical concerns including death. When I’d called in pretend-sick before, I’d made my voice weak and wavering, coughing intermittently, doing my best to wheeze in the middle of clauses. Really, I was attempting to represent my inner state, my wheezing-in-the-middle-of-myself emotions, which were the cause of most of my frequent mental health sick days.

  It was more difficult to mimic the carpet-pulled-from-under-you worry of this kind of emergency, though Motl and his insistence was a kind of health crisis. His driving alone was cause for concern. If I did nothing else on this trip, taking the wheel as much as he would let me and, when he was driving, watching out for cars, ditches, moose, buildings, cliffs, semi-trailers, lakes, rivers and six-lane lift bridges raised in front of us was in fact avoiding a family health crisis, namely, my zaidy and me becoming chunks under a tzimmes of pulped Pinto.

  It’s not that an old coot like Motl couldn’t necessarily wrangle a car without destroying himself, oncoming traffic, and any nearby witnesses and their possessions, it’s just that he had entered that gristle and earhair stage in the life cycle of old men where the world irritatingly refuses to be in the correct place, to progress at a reasonable speed and to consider his perspective as primary. As a result, inside his skinny spotted chest, he had grown the compensating, self-protective heart of a mule. He would drive the way he dressed: if his decisions had been good in 1950, they were good now.

  Why was I going? To keep him safe, of course. But also, his previous journey—though he had never spoken of it beyond the barest facts—had the aura of legend. We might travel that legend now. He might tell me stories.

  And like binder twine, Motl and his eccentric western cosmology might rope us together. Not so much a repaired Japanese bowl as a hay bale of a family. If not happy, then we might at least glean what was left over.

  And my mother.

  Sometimes she was most present when she was gone, most distant when she was with us. We were closer when she wasn’t here to make it more painful, though she made it painful most of the time.

  South to Sarnia, then across Michigan.

  There was an undulating rhythm to our driving. Coffee bought at one rest stop, sipped one-handed as we drove, then consigned to porcelain at the next rest stop, where more coffee was acquired. It was a dialysis of the double-double, creating the nervous enervation of the long road where we were both alert and sleepy all day.

  Grand Rapids then the ferry across Lake Michigan to Milwaukee.

  Motl horking dark red into tissues, balling them up, collecting these snowballs in his pocket until it bulged. He didn’t throw them away.

  “Are you starting a collection?”

  On the ferry, he stood at the gunwale, dropped them one by one into the choppy drink. They churned on the surface for an instant, became sodden then sank below, large burgundy-and-white petals trailing behind us, Hansel and Gitl in a soggy cherry blossom horror film.

  The apparition of Motl’s roseate sputum

  Petals on a wet, black bough

  I couldn’t help being reminded of Ezra Pound. I didn’t just abandon a degree in English to guarantee myself a place in the lucrative and fast-paced world of contemporary poetry by refusing the institution. I needed to know enough, but not too much, through reading.

  “Once, for her birthday, your mother and I went riding,” Motl began as soon as we had driven off the ferry and were on dry land again. “We were in a line of horses, following a sandy trail across the open fields. I was at the tail end, nothing but dappled and chestnut rumps to see, your mother right behind the guide at the front. The horses tramped over a rock where the path veered into forest. Her horse tripped and fell on its side. A horse isn’t made to topple. A couch isn’t meant to fall over. Or a bed. I could do nothing. Horse traffic was bumper to bumper, and I could see your mother’s little body half-covered by a sofa-sized mare. ‘Bella!’ I shouted. ‘Bella,’ but she was silent. I slid off my mount, almost made kindling of my legs when I got tangled in the stirrups, and scrambled over to your mother. She was beneath the horse, patiently lying in the sand. Between horse and the path, a hollow, and your mother’s legs were safe there. She was murmuring to the horse, telling it not to worry, that they could just rest until someone helped them.”

  “Are all your stories about my mother to do with horses?”

  “When Esther died, your mother cried for ten days.”

  “And you?”

  “I cried with her. I hadn’t cried since I was a boy. Even during the war. Even when the two-bits were plugged from under my Lone Ranger in the war before that war.

  “Which reminds me. Lone Ranger and Tonto are prancing about on the range. Over a hill, a thousand Indigenous warriors appear, shaking spears, guns, fists, treaties.

  “Lone Ranger says, ‘We’re in a real pickle here, friend. What are we going to do?’

  “ ‘What do you mean we, paleface?’ Tonto replies.”

  Motl’s laugh was a burbling hurdy-gurdy deep within his chest, and he thumped himself as it transformed into hacking.

  “An old joke. But a good one, Zaidy,” I said. “I remembered it when you were talking about Jewish cowboys. We’re palefaces.”

  “Not pale, but on the other hand not not pale, either. Pale-of-Settlement faces.”

  “Guess it depends on who the warriors are.”

  “You mean if they’re Nazis?”

  “That’d make anyone’s face pale.”

  * * *

  —

  As we drove through Minneapolis toward North Dakota, Motl began telling me of years before, when he and Esther had travelled to Canada.

  “I was sick much of the time on the boat from Marseille. I remained in our windowless cabin below deck, not so much a stateroom as a cubby for bilge-water immigrants, their pockets empty except for lint and hope, though it was often hard to tell the difference, hope so often comprising only the fluff of what is left over. I staggered out of the cabin, bent over, clutching the railings, looking for ice for the coffee pot—I’ve told you about the coffee pot, yes? After I got the ice, I’d hobble back to bed, trying not to have my insides become my out. I slept with the pot beside my bed, like a baby in a bassinet, trying to quiet the sloshing waves of my inner sea. Esther, however, became the table tennis champion of the ship. She learned how to shuffle cards one-handed, like a poker-room shark, after watching a pinstriped nabob puffing on a thick cigar perform the trick with his stubby, diamond-ringed fingers. She acquired a small world of English. Hold. Captain. Deal. Fold. Seasick. Whiskey. Dollar bill.

  “During the weeks of our ocean voyage, her belly humped, and she felt your mother quickening.

  “Your mother twisted and punched, wriggled and hiccuped, booted the soft walls of the stateroom of her womb with zeal. Your mother Charlestoned and polkaed, did the dog-paddle of an exuberant Labrador retriever. Esther sang to her. She whispered stories and spells, rhymes and songs. And when my insides were not deluged by the surge and slosh of my own quickening, I leaned close and told her of the brave old new world we were travelling to. Its mountains and prairies, its firewater, rivers, buffalo, turkeys and skyscrapers. Its movies and locomotives, cowboys, immigrants, tycoons and Indigenous nations. We had seen death and now we were joined by this life, this child that we would raise far from the cemetery that had been our home.

  “There were nights when Esther and I stood together on the deck of our boat, an island beneath wall-to-wall sky, the broadloom of stars, the prairie of the heavens. We remained still
while Europe floated away, the flotsam of years behind us, Canada, like a vast life raft covered in moose and snow, drifting east to greet us.

  “We knew we would land in Halifax, and then we’d take a train, but we didn’t know how far we would continue to travel. A drowning swimmer only thinks of the shore. A stampeding buffalo thinks only of the buffalo in front of him.

  “One night I held Esther as we stood close by the railing, blustered in the salt air, the seagulls yawping high above us. My arm was around her, my hand embracing her belly. Behind us we heard the rasp of metal against metal, a repeated chafing. Chhtt. Chhtt. Chhtt. A squawkless gull, able only to hiss. It was the unmistakable snick of scissors. We turned to see a young man in shirt and suspenders cutting at the air with a pair of barber’s shears.

  “ ‘I’m keeping in practice,’ he said. ‘I snip like a violinist. Like Heifetz. I apprenticed with an uncle since my bar mitzvah and when I get to Toronto, I intend to open my own barbershop.’

  “His name was Harry. He was travelling to meet a girl from Radomsko. They’d been betrothed since before the war, and she and her family had an apartment on Bathurst Street.

  “ ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Toronto is the Warsaw of the West, but on a lake big as a sea. My girl’s family will get you work. They’ll find a place for you to live. You can’t take chances, not with your wife in her condition.’ ”

  The highway sign said FARGO, 100 miles.

  “For years I’d dreamed of the Wild West,” Motl said. “Like where we are now, but full of possibility. Prairies, buttes and coulees. Box canyons, wild sage and sierras. Herds and cowboys, Native tribes, chiefs and warriors. The chance to grizzle and broil, peer out from under the dusty brim of a ten-gallon, six-shooters ready to make stories from men and their blood in the middle of Main Street. To be Knight of the Not Yet Entirely Doleful Continent.

  “But because of this barber, I rode an iron horse from Halifax, squinted my way down the streets of Toronto, where Esther and I raised our child. My perilous quest commenced in Vilnius with a barber and, on the shores of this Native world, it so continued.