by Gary Barwin
As we went by, Motl watched the man in the side-view, holding the long leather reins, elbows on his knees, his patient, calm expression. Time moved at the speed of him and his horse.
“When I see the space shuttle on TV,” Motl said, “it feels like it’s already the future. When I was a boy, we rode in wagons like the black hat there. We had the original Theodor Herzl to pull our cart—this was long before there was Israel. I was seven before Mr. Ford made his every-colour-as-long-as-it’s-black Model T, though it was years before anyone other than the rich and rim-worthy had one.”
“Remember you called me inside to watch the moon landing on our little black-and-white TV? It was so grainy—like NASA was doing video surveillance at a convenience store and a couple of astronauts walked in. I remember looking up at the moon that night, thinking if I squinted hard enough, I’d see the astronauts like gnats on the surface of the moon.”
“Another frontier, I reckon. Least there wasn’t anyone there to get rid of.”
“As far as we know, Zaidy. Maybe there were aliens?”
“Or the lost tribes. I never thought I’d live long enough to see man on the moon. Or to see a grandchild. I’m getting to be old, Giteleh. Old as hills.”
“Hills stick around a long time.”
“From my perspective, it’s all downhill.”
“Don’t think you’re ready for Yisgadal v’yiskadash yet.”
“Nah. But don’t wash all my clothes. Might not need them.”
“Okay, Zaidy. Just the underwear, then. I insist. So you can at least be buried in a clean pair.”
From when I was old enough to notice, I’d thought Motl had been fuelled by bad jokes and obstinance. Remaining here was a stubborn habit. Is the coffin half-full or half-empty? Doesn’t matter as long as it’s not yours.
We’d arrive late in the golden afternoon, drive through the ranch gates and meet my mother at her little cabin on the property. Would she be on the porch, her feet propped on a railing, reading, or in her garden, watering flowers, pulling weeds?
From somewhere in Minnesota, Motl had phoned the office to let them know we were coming. How did he think my mother would greet us? Motl kept those cards close to his vest. A Full House, a Royal Flush? The Hanged Man and the sloshed Empress slumped over her throne sharing big cups of bitter wine? Or maybe the Hierophant would be inhaling a spliff big as the three of swords. Motl had told the person on the other end that this was a special surprise, that we had news to share.
What news? That you can travel more than three thousand miles and still not shake your family? That you can’t escape your past life and the past life of your family? That your child and your father have you surrounded? That Motl had staged the biggest dad joke of all?
I didn’t want to just roll up to her cabin and knock on the door. She wouldn’t likely really be on her porch engaged in literary activities or out on the soil bent in domestic agriculture. The least we could do was to give her some notice. So she could hide the bottles, brush her hair and try to be brave as she waited for us.
I guessed Motl thought surprise was an essential part of the strategy, or else she’d chicken out and take off. Like Germany breaching the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and stomping across the Lithuanian border while Stalin had his pants down, taking a despotic dump in the little autocrats’ room at the Kremlin.
Motl’s plan was family therapy along the lines of breaking in a horse by bucking it out. For me as well as for my mother. But he was the man who’d travelled across Europe to retrieve his cobblers from a snowbank twenty years after they’d been remaindered. Was my mother the left and I the right?
If the world was a book, Motl wished to write its ending, having lived through several already. For him, my mother and I were a sequel. Not a final chapter, despite how it might look. His westerns had thought their Indians were final chapters, too, but it was the westerns that were over.
Here were Motl and me near the Canadian border in his Ford Pinto, and he put on the radio. What we heard was not “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” or even “Man of Constant Sorrow,” but “Don’t Fence Me In,” the singer asking for a plenitude of land under the pearly snap-button stars, being willing to be sent off for eternity as long as whichever entity follows through on the promise of the song also follows through on the promise of this song’s title and enables what we long for over yonder to in fact become true.
“I reckon it a near plumb-perfect thing,” Motl said, “but not a real cowboy song.”
“Are any of them?”
“As real as some cowboys. But this is Cole Porter. Though he did buy the lyrics from a guy born not far from here. In Helena.”
We arrived at the town of Sweet Grass on the US side of the border. We’d cross through to Coutts and then head toward Fort Macleod and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.
Near the border crossing, I slowed as I approached the line of Canadian flag–emblazoned booths. A six-lane road filled with hatchbacks, pickups, cube vans, semi-trailers, and trucks bearing hatchbacks, pickups and cube vans on their double-decker backs. Lineups of trucks always remind me of a procession of dinosaurs: slow, heavy, ponderous, and likely to emit sudden rumblings and snorts.
We got our blue Canadian passports out of the glove compartment, little books that supposedly confirmed who we were. A few rubber stamps of work and holiday destinations over half-tone images of national heroes and mug shots that made each of us look like, after the trip, we would continue our rich life of torturing squirrels, though still not enjoy it.
“A passport is like a licence for ourselves,” I said.
“When does it expire?” Motl said. “I’d like to know.”
The border guard had a moustache. Across the world, it seems that a disproportionately large percentage of male border guards had moustaches. Perhaps a symbolical protection covering the border between upper lip and nose. I reached out and gave the border guard the passports.
“Citizenship?”
“Purpose of your travel?”
“Residence?”
“Anything to declare?”
Motl began to convulse, heaving and spluttering, filling handfuls of tissue with dark effluvium. When he was able to talk, he said, “This is something I got in Canada. I’m not importing it. I don’t need to declare it. All this stuff”—he indicated the crimson tissues—“came with me from Toronto.”
The guard, likely fearing contracting whatever contagion Motl was emitting, quickly returned our passports and waved us on.
“My mother would have given him bread,” Motl said. “With money in it.”
“She’d have been arrested.”
“Not if there was enough inside.”
8
Highway 4 took us through Milk River, Warner and Lethbridge and then on to “historic” Fort Macleod. The downtown looked like an old western town, but we didn’t stop. We crossed the Old Man River—Motl tipped his cap to it—“From one old man to another,” he said. “We both understand erosion”—and took the 785 toward Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.
“Maybe we can go there with my mother,” I said. “It’d be good to have something to do.”
“As long as she doesn’t try to push me off. She’s not my easiest daughter.”
“You have another one?”
“I can only hope.”
“If you two get into it, I might jump.”
“Take me with you, then.”
Eventually, we arrived at the gates of the ranch. We could see the ridge of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in the distance. Several horses grazed in the scrub, a halter-hitched lead rope tying them to the fence.
“Let me out,” Motl said, pulling at the door.
There was a long driveway leading to the buildings, too far to walk.
“Let me out,” Motl insisted.
As soon as
I stopped, he began to cough, shaking his mortal body loose from his bones, his insides from his out. Then he climbed from the car.
“Shh,” he said, and, one palm up, slowly approached a beautiful red roan that nuzzled close to the fence. “Shh,” he said as it touched its nose to his hand. He stroked its muzzle. “Shh.”
I was surprised how gracefully he climbed the fence and slipped onto the horse’s back.
“Zaidy,” I called.
He leaned forward, unhitched the rope and rode bareback across the field.
“Zaidy!”
An old, sick man should not be venturing into the darkening fields, especially with no saddle or reins. If he had a coughing fit, he might fall. He might fall anyway. And he would get lost. Motl clutched the roan’s dark mane, urging the horse on with his knees. The horse cantered along the curve of fence until I could hardly see them.
“Zaidy,” I called again. I opened the driver’s door and stood on the floor’s lip, craning to see.
Motl rode out toward the sun as it sank low over the distant Rockies, colouring the grasses in pinks and roses. The air cooled, a spectral chill curling toward me. The mist or fog was like a vast herd of bison crowding the crimson prairie. The beasts were a twilight cloud, ghost buffalo no longer of this world. They were shadows on great hooves, creatures of smoke as if the plains themselves were smouldering.
The lead buffalo raised its huge head, a shaggy boulder on a torso-sized neck. It detected the scent of horse, of man. Its steadfast eyes reflected this diminutive Jew in blue polyester slacks, a beige cardigan and a checkered button-down, his face fissured as badlands stone. He rode in an arc around the herd, so that they were between him, the coulee and the fence.
“Oy,” Motl shouted, kneeing the horse to a gallop back and forth in front of them. “Oyyyyy,” he said, raising his arms, shaking his cardigan before them like a spear.
What was he doing? It was delusion. The buffalo spooked and began to run, their pelts rubbing together as they hurtled side by side over everything in their path. In peril, the animals were a tide of pure fear, a vast muscled rumble, a dark, unbroken wave of encroaching night.
Motl dropped the cardigan, slipped off the horse and stood before them, his arms wide open as they ran toward him. His shadow was the branches of a huge tree painted in darkness against the ground, stretched impossibly long by the sinking sun. The bison were the shadows of thunder.
I had not understood. Motl intended to be trampled beneath their hooves, turned to chopped liver and sour mash. He’d galloped into the sunset, dreaming of a deluded and epic death.
Had he known he would do this? The coughing. The slurry of black-red blood. He had been dying. But he had always been dying. As Sancho Panza said, “I have never died all my life,” but now Motl had chosen it.
The bison. What had been extinguished, what had once been lost, had once been here, had now returned to engulf him.
I gunned the car. I would drive the shadow buffalo away. I pressed the horn, a clarion call, a klaxon. I pressed it again and again as I drove. It was the blast of the shofar. A cry like the blaring ram’s horn of the great temple, which would shock the buffalo and they would look inward and repent of their route toward Motl. The car scraped against the rocks as I buffeted forward. I could hear Motl shouting over the buffalo’s quake but could not see him. Then a wheel swerved down into a ditch, and the car lurched to a crooked stop. I pushed the accelerator, but the engine only revved. I shifted into reverse but was wedged into the ground. I’d have to run.
The driver’s door was jammed, so I squeezed out the passenger side. All was dim, and I could no longer see Motl, the buffalo or their long shadows. I ran stumbling forward, calling out his name. “Zaidy. Motl. Zaidy.” I heard nothing. A distant thunder. The buffalo had retreated. I stood in an empty field.
Sancho Panza again: “Until death it is all life.”
Yisgadal v’yiskadash.
Sh’mei rabbaw.
* * *
—
Motl was gone. I felt at the end of a story, here in the fabled evening redness of the west, walking back from where he had disappeared into the sunset, just as he had always hoped. Our old Ford Pinto, Theodor Herzl, bashed and askew in a ditch, the dim outline of the fence before me. Motl had left me and my mother to carry on. By ourselves. L’dor v’dor. From generation to generation.
I arrived at the locked gate of the farm and the intercom attached like a mezuzah to the doorpost. It was the same kind of intercom we had at our local shul, which I’d noticed the few times Motl and I actually attended. There was a video camera so they could see who’s talking, who to buzz in. Almost all synagogues have this arrangement now. Never know when someone will gussy themselves up with epaulettes, insignia, righteousness and a semi-automatic then attempt to manifest what they think of as destiny and Ribbentrop-the-living-Molotov out of the congregants. Making living room by making more dead.
But here the locked gates were to keep people in as well as out. A reservation. A ghetto. A camp. The Garden of Eden with an electronic angel wielding a fiery sword guarding the gates.
Motl used to tell this Henny Youngman joke:
Guy comes up and asks to bum a couple bucks for a cup of coffee.
“But coffee’s only a dollar,” I say.
“So maybe you’ll join me?” he says.
Perhaps it’ll be like this with my mother, but instead:
“Couple bucks for a cup of coffee?” I say.
“Coffee’s only a dollar!” she’d answer.
“Think of it as paying me back for yesterday.”
I pressed the intercom and explained who I was. The gate buzzed. Open.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Now it seems to me the heart /must enlarge to hold the losses /we have ahead of us.” Since I first encountered them as a teenager, I often think of these lines from Marvin Bell’s poem “Gemwood.” To me they mean that while we must be ready for what the future brings, we must also be ready for the extent of the losses of the past and present as we continue to learn. Like the universe itself, both past and present never stop expanding.
I have learned much from many; their insight, learning, courage, empathy, their stories and their capacious yet thankfully non-medically enlarged hearts have helped me to explore the difficult histories told in this book.
When I got married, there was a videographer who surprised the family, including my grandfather, Percy Zelikow, with mostly cheesy questions. (“Gary, why do you love your bride?”) After some typical shtick (“I would like to address the nation,”) my grandfather, aware that he was speaking at an important moment in the history of the family, stared into the camera with an intensity I’d never seen from him, and spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust in his birthplace of Lithuania and of his family, his neighbours, whole communities, and of an entire world that was extinguished. This single moment has haunted me ever since.
This book weaves broad research with stories I learned directly from my family, including my grandparents, my parents, my in-laws, our family friend, Erwin Koranyi, and my great-uncle Isaak Grazutis, a painter, who as a child, literally walked himself to safety. He was an exceedingly warm, generous and positive man alert to life’s joys, humour, and beauty, and I greatly value the time we were able to speak together of his life. I am, of course, deeply grateful to them and to the survivors and researchers for sharing their stories and knowledge.
I thank Drew Hayden Taylor for advice and for several anecdotes that he generously allowed me to use, including some from the making of his fantastic documentary, Searching for Winnetou. I refer to a Mohawk-Jewish artist’s work and indeed that artist, Steven Loft, gave me important guidance at an early stage of writing. I learned much about Lakota Code-talkers and some great stories from online interviews with Clarence Wolf Guts. A conversation with Antanas Sileika provided an important
perspective about Lithuanian history. I closely read the poems of resistance fighters Abraham Sutzkever and Abba Kovner and adapted elements from their lives. My favourite tiny Norwegian cowboy, Tor Lukasik-Foss, offered some useful leads and inspiration at various stages. Ally Fleming provided some great lines and kind enthusiasm, and Martha Baillie shared her intense belief in the possibilities and important tasks of fiction. Amanda Lewis, who edited Yiddish for Pirates, continued to be a help in the early stages of this book. The passion and commitment to address difficult stories, not to mention research acumen, of Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch was a model. Cherie Dimaline shared some of her invaluable irrepressibility, insight, and the remarkable quip, “We’re genocide buddies.” I recalled her powerful talks often during the writing.
I have learned from long discussions with my daughter, Rudi Bromberg-Barwin, about everything, but particularly about genocide, Judaism, North American and Indigenous society and history, and I’m grateful for her commitment to thinking about what would make a just world.
The wry kindness and wise counsel of my agent, Shaun Bradley continues to guide me. Sarah Jackson offered essential editorial suggestions, copy editor John Sweet improved the book with his eegle-eye (yes, John, I know there’s two e’s there: stet) and Andrew Roberts created the remarkable cover (wow!).
I am extremely glad for the absolutely vital clarity, wit, compassion and good judgement of my editor, Anne Collins, whose wisdom and trust allowed this novel to complete its own eccentric quest and find its own jewels.
I thank the supporters of public funding of the arts for grants from the Canada Council and the Hamilton City Enrichment fund. A series of Writer in Residence positions were not only energizing but invaluable in providing me time to write. Thank you faculty and students of University of Toronto (Scarborough) and McMaster and Wilfrid Laurier Universities, and the staff and patrons of the Hamilton and London Public Libraries.