Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted

by Gary Barwin

  “And now I reckon it might well be time to christen this current Jewish expedition to your mother with such a visit. A shave, and the hairs of my ears and nose pruned, my head once again made sleek as a saddle and reflective of the sun above, a beacon for your mother.”

  5

  A telephone booth in the parking lot of a diner, portal to another world, unassuming under the large sign: Don’t go far for dinner, dine at FARGO’S DINER. In the booth, two telephone books hung like hunted geese left out to age, feathers ruffled, bodies limp. Was the gander the yellow and the white one the goose? We fluffed open the sallow wings of the gander and scanned for nearby barbershops. Two Bits Shave & A Haircut was close. Cutthroat’s closer.

  The sign outside Cutthroat’s was a dapper Brylcreemed 1950s man drawing an outstretched index finger over his throat in the universal sign for death.

  “You trust this place?” I asked my grandfather.

  “A cutthroat is a variety of straight razor. Besides, what have I got to lose?”

  “Blood.”

  Inside, we were welcomed by the barber, an Indigenous man, tall and smiling, long hair falling around his skinny shoulders. He made a maître-d’ motion, upturned palm sashaying an invitation to the large barber’s chair. Motl shuffled over and was bethroned.

  “You remind me of Shmuel the Shaker, a barber from my youth,” Motl said. “Old Shatterhand we used to call him. Only Vlad the Impaler was worse. But you look like Winnetou, from the westerns I used to read.”

  The barber, Sol, flicked a bright barber’s cape open and spun it around Motl with a flourish, a magician removing the cloth from a table laden with dishes. Without ceremony, I sat in the second chair and watched in the mirror.

  Motl settled in as if for meditation, his eyes closed, elbows on the armrests, his hands held in yoga beneath the cape.

  “Shave and a haircut,” he said.

  Sol exercised monk-like fortitude and did not answer, “Two bits,” instead only nodding silently.

  “Every time you cut me, I take a dollar off the price,” Motl said suddenly. “I’ve been shaved by Nazis, and worse.”

  “To make skin into a lamp, you got to be careful to take it in one piece,” Sol said. “I’m no shaking Eichmann.”

  The haircut went quickly. As Motl predicted, it was all ears and nose with some limited topiary of the prairie of his head. “Shaved it when I was a thinning young man, hoping it’d grow in thicker. It never did, though now I could braid my back and tuchus,” he said.

  Sol adjusted the chair. Copious spurts of shaving cream turned Motl into an ancient sage lost in the thicket of his own chin’s curls.

  Sol winked at me and with a delicate movement of the blade made the tiniest nick on Motl’s cheek.

  “That’s a dollar,” Motl said.

  The next scrape of the blade over Motl’s whiskery cheek also ended in a calligraphic flourish and a minute red line. Sol winked at me again.

  “That’s two dollars,” my grandfather said.

  Motl began to say something else, but Sol moved the razor, a silver plough over a field of Jew, and Motl fell silent. Sol squeezed Motl’s nose with great tenderness and drew more blood from his upper lip.

  “Three dollars.”

  “Don’t know why the blade is so unsteady today,” Sol said. “We Indians are usually unshakable. But then again, we’re also inscrutable.”

  Another tiny flick and the pink of blood turning the shaving cream to strawberry sorbet.

  “We’re so inscrutable, we don’t even know ourselves.”

  “Four dollars,” I said.

  Sol dabbed at Motl’s cuts with a styptic pencil and said nothing.

  “I didn’t mean to insult,” Motl said. “I know you’re no Mengele. I just like a bargain.”

  “Cut rate. I understand,” Sol said, deadpan.

  Motl nodded with great respect, as if Sol had just quoted some obscure wisdom from the Mishnah.

  “My granddaughter and I are going to visit my daughter,” he said, and motioned in my direction. “Her mother. It’s been years. So maybe I’m nervous.”

  “I haven’t seen my mother in a while either,” Sol said. “She could visit. I’d shave her for free—it’d be a big job, but I’d do it. On the other hand, my daughter works in the bar down the street. See her every day.”

  “Good,” Motl said. “That’s good. Like my granddaughter over there. Lives with me. I keep her around to take the garbage out. To cook sometimes. Mostly at mealtimes. And to help me find my teeth when they’re lost.”

  “It’s not too hard, Zaidy,” I said. “Since they’re not dentures.”

  “You know, barber, that reminds me,” Motl said. “Some men go to the saloon to confess, to learn what to do. But we Jews, we don’t drink.”

  “Why not?”

  I knew what was coming. The joke was old as Esau.

  “It dulls the pain.”

  Sol nodded and raised the blade, ready to address the underside of Motl’s chins.

  “Instead, we Jews, those who don’t cultivate a beard and schmooze their rabbi, hairy cheek by hairy jowl, we go to the barber’s. That’s where we talk. That’s where we think. That’s where we make decisions. Unless we go to the deli or the poker table, or the golf course, or the shvitz. Okay, so we’re always talking, but once I was a cowboy at the barber’s, and I began my life again.”

  “And now?” Sol asked. “Have you decided anything?”

  Motl rubbed his face. “Not to go under the knife when you’re on the other end.”

  “On the bright side, you’re getting a discount.”

  “Is that what a pound of flesh sells for these days?”

  “Not much market for scalps, lately.”

  The scritch of Sol’s blade as it traced Motl’s chins. Then he wiped the remaining shaving cream and covered Motl’s face with a hot towel.

  “Finally, some quiet,” I said.

  “Mmm,” Motl said. “A hot towel is the old man’s meditation.”

  After a few minutes, Sol removed the cooling white cloth and revealed Motl, sleek and red as a saveloy sausage.

  “So—inner peace?” Sol asked as he raised the chair.

  And Motl, sitting up, grinned like a Tzaddik, a Jewish sage with an invisible Cheshire cat for a beard, the smile the only part remaining.

  * * *

  —

  Sol had a golden cash register baroque as the throne of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the size of a small pig. It would not have been out of place in a grand saloon, women on stairs girded with crinoline and petticoats, flounces and bustles orbiting their fuchsia undercarriages, polkas pounded from out-of-tune pianos, the clack of whiskey glasses on poker tables within a velvet universe of curtains and oakwork.

  Sol depressed a key and a number appeared on a gravestone-shaped card in the little window. Motl handed him a grimy sandwich of folded-over greenbacks, and as Sol pushed another key, the money drawer shot open with a jangle.

  “I deducted for the bloodshed, but gave you a tip because I didn’t die.”

  “Yet,” Sol said.

  We left Cutthroat’s through a jingling door. As soon as we were on the sidewalk, Motl began to hack again, spitting more blood pudding into his handkerchief.

  “Zaidy,” I said. “A hospital?”

  “Hospitals are for the sick. If I were sick, I wouldn’t have lived this long.”

  I took the wheel since Motl was still engaged in hauling his lungs into the daylight.

  “Don’t drive me to the hospital,” he said. “I’ve only swallowed a hair.”

  “Maybe, but by the looks of it, if we run out of road, you’ve enough tar inside to pave the way ahead.”

  We’d be in Montana by late afternoon, driving directly into the sun. I put on my sunglasses and the world turne
d to honey, golden light over strip malls and roadsides, drive-thrus and bus stops, and then, finally, the fields and river valleys.

  Motl tilted his seat back like he was still at the barber’s. “Gitl, I’m not sleeping. I’m just resting.”

  It must have been difficult for him to get any rest with all the snoring—a huge territory of his insides was invested in the juddering.

  6

  Gitl. I carried Motl’s mother’s name if not her blood.

  And even before we had begun our drive and he began to talk, I carried her memories. Motl’s, too. Memory in the way we lived. How we breathed. Each morning, I’d wake empty-headed and my mind would flood with their grammar. Great-grammar and grandpa.

  And Esther. Because she never left. In Motl’s world, everything was a translation from the original Esther.

  In school I was “Git” or “Stupid Git.” And, as everyone knew my kooky granddad’s penchant for the western, “Gitty-Up.” Throughout the cold slush of Toronto winters, old-world Jew that he was, he’d pick me up from school clad in the duds of a wrangler. Snap-button, yoke-backed shirts with flowers, a Stetson, boots with spurs. (“Training wheels for ice so’s I break the bronco back of winter and don’t fall.”) My few friends called me Jill.

  My mother was rarely able to muster out of her pill-and-booze-fuelled mental health crises to make it to the schoolyard, or to pack me the standard grade school lunch of mac and cheese, Alphagetti or baked beans. Motl became Master of the Microwave, Boyardee of the Range. He made “Surprise Eggs,” not only because the egg’s yellow eye would peek from beneath a medallion cut from toast, but because we were surprised if breakfast was not burnt and did not taste like a coal mine.

  I never knew who my father was. My mother said she didn’t either.

  “I want to know. What if he was a Nazi?”

  “Been there, done that,” she said. “We’ve enough Nazi fathers for one family.”

  The details of my conception were obscure, but I was grateful for Motl. He raised me with idiosyncratic dependability and the steadfast certainty with which he would have cared for a horse, keeping me shod, curried, trimmed. Throughout my childhood I was largely worm-free, my teeth were strong, and I was provided sufficient oats to grow. A stable childhood, let’s say.

  I had not lived another life, did not know that my grandfather’s sorrow, his compulsions, his living in two places and in two times but yet mostly shying away from talking about it, were not most parents’. My mother’s rages and fears, tears and intermittent affection, were not how most families were. Motl did what he could to help her, though much of the help she needed was to help her want to get help, to want to heal.

  She would lash out, often at random strangers on the street or in the grocery store. After one incident ended with some court-ordered therapy, I overheard her tell Motl, “I used to have a problem with violence. Now I only hit people when I’m angry with them.”

  And she was angry at a lot of people. But she did most of the harm to herself. Drinking. Drugs. Disappearing for days. Being with raging and violent men. Getting hurt.

  She was always angry with Motl. And except for the occasional outburst of bewildered mothering she directed my way, it seemed like she hoped that if she ignored me, I would go away, that she only need concentrate on looking back over her shoulder to her father and absent mother and not forward to me.

  Spooky action at a distance. That was my family.

  Motl had managed to doze off after his coughing jag, and now woke with a snort and began to dream aloud. “Used to dream I was a roly-poly pink baby, juicy like the soft heart inside me. I was perched on a great white horse, riding west under the scorch of the sun. Then I shrivelled into a chicken roasted on the spit of my own spine, until I was more barbecue than baby and all my juice was sucked into the cracked-dry dirt. I was one of those bog men, flat leather like an old glove, and I was ancient. Then I parched some more and became older still, and my horse was hard and knotted like black walnut, and I was nothing but bones and thorns in a cloak of dry jerky.”

  “And just now—what d’you dream?”

  “Chinese takeout.”

  We passed through the North Dakota capital, Bismarck, named after the blood-and-iron chancellor of historic moustache and eyebrows as well as of the German Empire. We were north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, making our way across territory once part of the Great Sioux Nation until it was dismembered in the Great Sioux War. This was all part of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s Last Stand, since it was where he last stood in his stovepipe boots before a Lakota named Big-nose allegedly shot him in the head and chest. They say the head wound may have been inflicted after he was already dead. They say always kill someone twice. You don’t want a witness to the first time.

  Farther west into Montana, we could visit a memorial to Custer and his Seventh Cavalry.

  “Imagine a monument to Nazis,” I said.

  “The families who aren’t there are the monument.”

  “I guess I’m kind of a monument too.”

  “The good kind. No one looks like me,” Motl said. “No one who is left.”

  If we headed into South Dakota, we’d end up at the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre where hundreds of Lakota—mostly women and children—had been killed by US soldiers. The majority of the warriors had given up their arms. I remembered a song by the Native American band Redbone that ended: “We were all wounded by Wounded Knee.”

  It wouldn’t be much farther to the gold rush town of Deadwood, on whose infamous thoroughfares once mosied Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Calamity Jane, gunslinging cherubim guarding the gates of Motl’s erstwhile-imagined western paradise. Or maybe Hickok and Calamity Jane had been more Adam and Eve, shooting apples from a forbidden tree, living in a place before law or modesty, Deadwood in a gulch near the Lakota’s sacred Black Hills, though to the settlers and prospectors nothing was more sacred than gold and personal enrichment.

  We crossed the Missouri River then, and hours later the Yellowstone as we entered Montana. We had reached the Badlands. We had about eight hours left to drive to get to my mother, so we stopped for the night at Glendive.

  “You know what I always say, Zaidy. ‘There are no badlands. Just bad people.’ ”

  A long sigh from Motl, suffused with more sorrow and regret than was usual. I had accomplished much in my few years, but this was a singular triumph I would not soon forget. A dad joke squared. A granddad joke. Intergenerational.

  7

  We woke early the following morning. Or, I should say, too soon after I was finally able to fall asleep in the serrated cough-storm, the tractor pull of snoring from the bed beside mine. There was a soggy cairn of pink-streaked tissues on the nightstand.

  We had planned to drive to Makoshika State Park to the lookout view of the Badlands, but Motl said he was too tired. “Someone kept me up, coughing all night.”

  Breakfast was Corn Pops or Froot Loops tumbled from a Plexiglas chute into a Styrofoam bowl, soused with milk from a spout and eaten with a plastic spoon. There was a brackish-coloured fluid to which we added a sachet of white powdered oil. If the fluid had actually been brackish water, it might have tasted better. Fortified with this range food, we climbed aboard Theodor Herzl and headed toward Circle, the next town on our route.

  “You drive,” Motl said to me. “I need the time to cough.”

  And as soon as the car doors slammed closed, Motl began. I could feel the chassis of the car roiling. A car and a human are one. A car and a human and the black phlegm of Motl are one. We drove.

  “Zaidy…”

  “Don’t take me to the hospital. Coughing is the only exercise I get.”

  “You’re not getting better.”

  “I’ve almost gobbed it all up. It’ll be gone soon.”

  “That’s not how it works.”
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  “It’s like being possessed by a dybbuk, but soggier.”

  “Does Dr. Hodenbruch know about this?”

  “It’s good for your mother and you to see each other,” Motl said, looking out at the stipples and creases of the Badlands. “A year and a half is too long.”

  “We could stop so you could get checked. It wouldn’t take long.”

  “I don’t want to see a doctor. I know what I need.”

  More wadfuls of Motl’s alleged dybbuk innards as he choked in the seat beside me.

  “There’s nothing like big sky, fresh air all the way to the horizon. It’s good for her here. She’s going to be glad to see you,” he said in a momentary pause from coughing.

  I doubted that. Last time we spoke, we didn’t speak. And the time we spoke before that, it was shouting.

  I’d quit university in Ottawa and had come home. It was eleven in the morning and my mother was beached under a comforter and an empty bottle of vodka. One fuzzy pink rabbit slipper and one bare foot stuck out. Between the rabbit and my mother, I’d have said that the fuzzy rabbit was more alert.

  “Mom, you okay?”

  “My mother killed herself and my father was a Nazi. How are you?”

  I sat down in Motl’s reading chair, clomped my feet on the coffee table.

  “How am I? My mother is also going to kill herself. It’s just going more slowly.”

  “I’ll try to hurry it up, then.”

  She shimmied and lurched upright, tottered across the room then staggered up the stairs. I heard clinking as she waded through empty bottles and then her bedroom door slammed.

  On the road toward Circle. A horse and buggy plodded on the shoulder of the road.

  “Amish?” I asked.

  “Mennonite,” Motl said. “I saw a church in Glendive.”

  We waited for the oncoming traffic to pass so we could scoot around the clip-clopping driver. A rabbi except for the Jesus in his beard-camouflaged heart.