“Why can’t we just buy them at Treblinka?” she said, not moving from my side.
“You’ll see why when we get there,” said Johnny. “There’s nowhere to get flowers. Either come, or there won’t be any roses.”
They walked away, between the narrow white buildings, to the flower stand in the large main square. Chloe’s head was down, as if he was talking to her but she didn’t want to listen. I took the opportunity to saunter up to Blake and, as casually as a backwards baseball cap, ask him why he didn’t wake me to go stay with Chloe in the middle of the night. I thought it would be good if we cleared the air.
I wish I had kept my big stupid unthinking mouth shut.
Blake did a double-take, and got loud. “Are you kidding me?”
“I just want to know, man. You woke me that time—”
He pulled me away from Hannah.
“You’re messed up, bro,” he said to me. “You’re asking me why I didn’t wake you? Ask yourself why you were flat out when your girlfriend was nowhere to be found in the middle of the night in a foreign city. Why you made your bed, put on your PJs and tucked yourself in under the covers. Go ahead. Ask yourself. I’ll wait.”
I raised an apologetic hand, began to say I’m sorry, but he didn’t wait and didn’t let me finish. “Even after Johnny came to tell us where she was. You heard him. I know you did, because you asked him questions, opened your eyes, stared at him. But what you didn’t do is get the fuck up. How is that my fault?”
“Blake, I’m sorry.”
“You’re messed up,” Blake said. “What’s going on under your very nose would make any other dude’s red blood turn to lava, but not you, no. You’re too busy having a boy-crush on a bum who’s five thousand kinds of trouble, which you can’t see because your head is up the ass of that baseball statue you’ve been caressing in your backpack.”
“Blake …”
“I swear, man, start acting like her boyfriend. You know the only reason he’s taking liberties is because he thinks you don’t give a shit. I beg you, Mason, don’t prove him right on this one, too.”
Before I could defend myself, he stormed away, disgusted with me. I was ashamed of myself. Blake was right. What was I thinking? I followed him, wanting to beg him to forget what an asshole I was, but just then, a band of middle-aged backpackers assailed us with beaming smiles and loud voices. It took a few minutes of my mind being very much elsewhere to realize they were the group we’d been waiting for.
Hannah
I don’t know what everybody else is so miserable about. It makes them act not nice toward Johnny. Blake and Chloe have really shut down. And it’s a shame because he’s a remarkable boy. After five minutes in the van on the way to see the ancient horrors none of us particularly wanted to see, he somehow made the whole day better and more interesting.
He is a perfect guide. In every way. He is quick-witted, not an arrogant douchebag like that geo-tourist Gregor. He tells us only what we need to know and doesn’t bore us into stupidity with useless extraneous info, just so we can admire how clever he is. He is polite to everyone, even Blake, smiles all the time, and listens to people’s questions. He jokes that there aren’t any stupid questions, only stupid people.
He’s brought bottles of water in a cooler for all ten of us, which is astonishing considering no one else thought of bringing anything except our backpacks. Plus he’s easy on the eyes and he sings like that guy from Bad Company, who sounds like he’s got a Harley Davidson in his throat. We’re lucky that he found Chloe and me, but I’m beginning to think I’m the only one who thinks so. He seems to be upsetting the hell out of everybody. Even Mason, who never gets upset at anything.
Neither does Chloe usually. The reason she and I get along so well is because she’s always sunny and optimistic. Even when I’m down, she finds something positive to say. She’s the one who says of course we’re going to make our train, even when we’re clearly not. She’s the one who says, no, you won’t get a sunburn in Riga, it’s too far north, even though my skin is so fair. Yes, that dress looks lovely on you. You’re not too tall. You’re just right. You’re perfect. She doesn’t judge me for some of the things I’ve done, I hope, and she is a good listener, and she’s funny. She gets along with everybody. Everybody likes her. She is friendly, like a guy you’d want to pal around with. If Chloe were a guy, she’d be the one you’d invite over for a Saturday afternoon after your wife left you for another man. She’d bring the beer, the humor, the easygoing; she’d make you some food, and put extra beer in your fridge, and fix your screen door if it was broke. She’d feed your dog without being asked, that’s Chloe.
I depend on her completely, which is why it’s so baffling what’s been happening since we got to Warsaw. She has barely talked to me. Blake too. Mason’s head is in the clouds, but Mason is not my go-to person. Chloe is. And she’s failing me. I desperately need to talk to her, and she keeps making every excuse not to be left alone with me for a second. Here’s an example. In the morning we were waiting for the backpackers. For an hour we sat twiddling our thumbs on a wall outside, while Blake and Mason bickered, and Johnny played guitar and Emil smoked. She and I could’ve talked. But we didn’t. She pretended to listen to Johnny sing, not that I blame her, because when he sings, it makes it near impossible to do anything else, even breathe, but come on! Not even for five minutes? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was avoiding me. My paranoia talking.
And earlier this morning, what was that all about? I come back from the bathroom, feeling like crap, looking like crap, and Blake is gone, and Mason is yelling at me to hurry up, like we’re going to miss the school bus. After we hooked back up with Blake and Chloe at some new hotel, things only got weirder. Blake and Chloe were grim as if they’d just had a fight, which is par for the course, they’re always arguing about something or other, I pay no attention. But they both looked so mad, and no one would explain anything, and every time I asked, they both said, nothing’s wrong, nothing! Even Mason didn’t look happy. Then I caught Johnny staring at Chloe. She had just woken up, and wasn’t looking her best. I was slightly embarrassed for her, and I wanted to quietly tell her to go get herself together, but then I saw Johnny secretly eyeballing her, thinking perhaps that Mason and Blake were so busy being all ticked off that they wouldn’t notice. I don’t even know how to describe it, the look in his eyes. A profound dazed something.
Then I realized why. She was standing in front of three boys and not wearing a bra! And of all the girls in Warsaw, Chloe really needs to wear a bra. She’s not like me, she can’t get away with walking around braless in cute little halter tops. The thing is, she knows this well, and usually keeps her 34DD self tightly under wraps. Her mother has done a good job instilling a sense of the respectable in Chloe, and the more she’s developed, the more circumspect she’s become until you almost can’t tell how buxom she is. So for her to be standing, hands at her sides, oblivious to the boobs spilling out of her loose tank was shocking. Had she been sleeping? Then why was Blake sitting in the chair, all dressed? Was he just sitting there looking at her while she slept? How weird. But if she was awake and in that state, that’s almost weirder. I finally managed to get her to the bathroom, but as she walked across the room, her breasts swayed back and forth. I blocked the view of her as best I could from Blake and Johnny, and before she went inside, I whispered to her, Chloe, bra! And to thank me, she slammed the door in my face.
So like I said, everybody’s testy. I don’t know why Blake is not talking to Chloe, or why Chloe is not talking to Mason, or why Blake is angry at his little brother. And yet here we are, ladies and gentlemen, our dream vacation and no one’s talking to anyone.
I suppose I could ask Chloe what’s bothering her, but I need to talk to her about my situation first. Then we can talk about her. I don’t know what she has to be upset about. Everything is so easy for her. Though I have no idea why she’s wearing a nice dress to go to a field in the forest. She barely wore a n
ice dress to her own prom.
“Mason,” I asked, before we boarded the shuttle bus, “what’s the matter with Blake?”
He shrugged. Which didn’t mean he didn’t know.
I sat next to Blake, in the front just behind the driver’s seat so I wouldn’t throw up like before. “Are you okay, babe?” I asked him and took his hand.
He blinked, squeezed my hand in reply, leaned over and kissed me. “I’m great, sugar plum,” he said. “Too much traveling yesterday. I hardly got any sleep. I wish we had a day at the beach to recuperate.” He kissed my hand. “Never mind. Barcelona soon enough.”
“Soon enough,” I agreed, eking out a smile, my heart catching when I thought of the day ahead, the week ahead, the months ahead.
Johnny was in the passenger seat next to Emil, twisted around to face us, telling us things. Emil scares me a little bit. He keeps eyeballing me and smoking. He’s giving everyone else funny looks but he’s eyeballing me. Chloe and Mason sat behind Johnny, across the narrow aisle from Blake and me. Chloe wasn’t paying any attention to Johnny even though he was telling us incredible things. She just kept staring ahead, kind of at him, but not really, holding that stupid bouquet of flowers in her arms. Mason looked directly at Johnny, but that didn’t mean he was paying attention. Mason has a way of doing that. Pretending he’s listening, yet not hearing a word you say. I don’t know how Chloe puts up with it. Blake and Chloe are much better listeners. Except they sat barely a foot away from each other in the aisle seats and never looked at each other or spoke to each other. Not once.
“So what were you and Chloe fighting about when we came in?” I asked Blake quietly.
He shook his head. “We weren’t fighting. I was upset because she changed hotels and didn’t tell us where she was.”
“Oh, I agree. That was inconsiderate of her.”
“She apologized.”
“Did she apologize for paying for two places when we’re only staying in one?”
“Let it go, Hannah,” Blake said. “That was a smart move. I wasn’t upset about that part.”
It was as if he wanted me to ask him what he was really upset about. But I didn’t. I let go of his hand. “Our cash is not infinite, Mr. Moneybags.” Especially mine. And it was about to become a lot more finite. Many things were about to become a lot more finite.
“We brought extra,” he said, “for the just in case.”
“Not me. I don’t have any extra.” Though I most certainly do have a just in case.
“I’ll cover you, babe. Stop fretting about the money. Money is the least of it.” He got a sad, faraway look in his eyes.
The least of what, I wanted to ask. Except I knew.
What am I going to do?
How am I going to manage another two weeks before we go back? I can’t hide this. I’m sick right now. It’s all I can do to not ask Emil to pull over so I can throw up by the side of the peaceful hillock that Mason is admiring. Blake is oblivious to me because he is fixated on the annoying bunch of people around us. And Chloe, I don’t even know what she’s thinking about. She’s staring forward past Johnny as if in a trance.
Does anyone care what’s happening to me? Why am I being punished like this? It’s not fair.
Stop it, Hannah. Don’t cry on a minibus. It’s unclassy. And Blake will see.
I turned to the window and wiped my face, and of course Blake, irked up to the eyeballs, didn’t see. But you know who did see? Johnny. Sitting at the front, straddling the seat backward, he honed in on me, focused me in his sights. The look on his face was one of compassion, as if he knew. This complete stranger had somehow divined the truth about my desperate situation. His face when he finally looked away was blank. Maybe it’s him, not Chloe I should talk to. He’s the only one not oblivious to everyone else. His eyes are always raised. How do the rest of us stay so wrapped up in our own heads and lives and hearts and problems that we don’t see what’s a breath away from us?
Mason
After we left Warsaw and had been driving a while, the villages disappeared. There was almost nothing around us. For miles and miles all I could see outside my window was a dense and desolate pine forest on sandy loam earth. The villages were as sparse as joy. Inside our bus, though, there was raucous amusement. Everybody was talking, laughing, making jokes, asking questions. I’m glad Chloe let me sit next to the window. But I wonder how they’re going to quiet down when we get to where we’re driving. Sandy loam is good for growing roses, if the soil is properly irrigated. I don’t know if anyone is irrigating this soil, but the few poor houses and streets we drove by, many of them have beautiful, large roses around their fences. I mentioned this to Chloe, because she likes flowers, and she was holding beautiful red roses in her hands, clenching them, almost. She blinked and came to, as if that was the last thing she’d been thinking. I pointed out the window. She leaned sideways, against me, to look. Then she said, “I’m surprised they grow so well here. I know how hard it is to grow them successfully.”
“I know you do. That’s why I showed them to you.”
“Yeah. But they need drainage, and fertilizer, and lots of nutrients. This soil looks too dense. Packed too tight.”
“Yet they grow.”
“Yeah.” She turned back to the inside of the bus, away from the sad little huts with their blooming roses.
Between the thick forests lie swamps. I think before the roads were paved, travel through these parts must have been difficult. Sand combined with marsh makes for silty mud, feet deep, through which tire tread gets stuck and burrowed into, like grooves in quicksand.
Johnny said it wasn’t far, only sixty kilometers or so, but why does it seem as if we’ve been driving for hours? I asked him if he’d been here before. He said he had come here a little while back, with his father. He was non-specific. He was telling us about why the Germans built the death camps so close to Warsaw and yet in the middle of nowhere. He said it was to hide what they were doing, and yet be close enough to the Warsaw ghetto to get all the Jews from there to here. Blake asked where the ghetto was, and Johnny told him there was no more ghetto, like in Vilnius, and Blake shot a glare at Hannah and said he wouldn’t know about ghettos in Vilnius. Don’t fret, said Johnny, there aren’t any. Then Blake asked where the Jews lived now and Johnny said there were no more Jews. Not in Vilnius, not in Warsaw, or Krakow, or Trieste, where there had been a large Jewish community. And Blake asked if there were any Jews in Barcelona, and Johnny said there were never many to begin with.
Then Johnny told us—though I don’t know if anyone other than Chloe and I heard him—that the railroad that went through here was often used by Poles on their way to Bialystok, Cedlec, Lomza. During peaceful times many rode alongside these trees, paying little attention to the dull landscape of pine, sand, and marsh.
It would be hard to notice the insignificant town of Treblinka amid the heather and dry brush, and its plain, ordinary train station. It would be even harder to notice the spur off the main railroad line, just a pair of tracks vanishing into the dense and lonely woods, pine woods so thick that it almost looked as if the spur had been a long-ago mistake, which the forest crowded over and time forgot.
This spur, said Johnny, leads to a quarry four kilometers inside the forest, a quarry of white sand that was mined for industrial and urban development.
That quarry now is an empty sandlot, he said, surrounded on all sides by forest. The soil is infertile, and farmers don’t cultivate it. Nothing grows there. Wasteland has remained wasteland.
“This barren wilderness,” Johnny said, “was selected by the Gestapo and approved by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler for the construction of a human slaughterhouse, the breadth and likes of which the world had never seen.”
No one heard him but Chloe and me.
Blake
The tour group that hired Johnny and his bus and ominous driver was a peculiar bunch of ducks. They showed up an hour late in full Indiana Jones gear. They had on khaki cargo
pants, vests with dozens of pockets, fancy hiking boots, wide-brim hats to keep out the sun, and lots of cameras. Yes, they were all good on the cameras. There were five of them, three men and two women. The men carried an SLR each, a Nikon, a Canon, a Pentax. The camera bag they brought was the size of Johnny’s duffel that contained his whole life. In this bag, they had five or six lenses for each camera, flashbulbs, filters, extra batteries, cleaning solutions, a small screwdriver kit, in case, I presume, either the cameras or their eyeglasses went kerflooey, and extra lens caps.
“You sure you don’t have a printer in there?” I quipped, thinking I was being witty, and the bald man slapped me on the back and pulled out a black cuboid.
“Canon makes the best one. It’s light,” he said. “You can carry it anywhere, and it prints pretty well. Would you like to see?”
“Um, no, that’s okay.”
He stuffed the miraculous prism back in the bag.
They were older than us by some forty years. They were too enthusiastic by half. They included even the truculent driver in their bonhomie, pumped our hands, slapped our backs, asked interminable questions about what and where and how, commented about how wonderful it all was, and then launched into a five-person harmony about who they were, where they lived, what they’d seen so far, and where they were headed.
Apparently they had been friends since high school, just like us. They grew up in Arizona, in Carefree or something. More like care-less, as in, could not. I laughed out loud at my own inward joke, unfortunately not at the most appropriate time as they had just finished telling us that the wife of the fifth wheel with them had recently passed away. They said “passed away” in a hush-hush voice, as if they didn’t want the fifth wheel to know. Their names were kitschy and rhymy and alliterative. I thought they were joking with us. Brett and Yvette and Dennis and Denise. I didn’t catch the widower’s name because he was all by himself and couldn’t poetize. They said they loved our names, and they loved our tour guide’s name.
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