Mendel recalled that morning. He had stood in his nightshirt in the street outside his parents’ home and watched his grandfather—the massive Gronam—being carried back to the square on the shoulders of neighbors and friends. Simple times, he thought. Even the greatest of challenges, the battle against the railroad, all seemed so simple now.
The memory left him light-headed (so grueling was the journey from that morning as a child back to the one that, like a trap, bit into their lives with iron teeth). He stumbled forward into the wedge of Mahmirim, nearly knocking little Yocheved to the ground. He steadied himself and then the girl as they moved slowly forward, forging their way across the current of Jews that swirled, rushed, and finally broke against the hard floors of the cattle cars.
Mendel did not understand how the Rebbe planned to reach the tunnel alive, though he believed they would succeed. The darkness had been getting closer for so long, it seemed only just that it should finally envelop them, pull them into its vacuum—the tunnel ready to swallow them up like so many coins dropped into a pocket.
And that is how it felt to Mendel, like they were falling away from an open hand, plunging, as they broke away from the crowd.
In the moment that two guards passed the entrance to the tunnel in opposite directions, their shepherds straining on their leashes, in the moment when the sniper on the top of the train had his attention turned the other way, in the moment before Mendel followed the Rebbe into the tunnel, Yocheved spotted her uncle Misha and froze. Mendel did not bump into her again, though he would, until his death, wish he had.
Yocheved watched her uncle being shoved, brutalized, beaten into a boxcar, her sweet uncle who would carve her treats out of marzipan: flowers, and fruits, and peacocks whose feathers melted on her tongue.
“Come along, Yocheved,” the Rebbe called from the tunnel without breaking stride. But the darkness was so uninviting and there was Uncle Misha—a car length away—who always had for her a gift.
Her attention was drawn to the sound of a healthy bark, an angry bark, not the type that might have come from the sickly Jewish dog which had already been put down. It was the bark of a dog that drags its master. Yocheved turned to see the beast bolting along the perimeter of the crowd.
Before the dog could reach her and tear the clothes from her skin and the skin from her bones, the sniper on the train put a single bullet through her neck. The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear. Yocheved touched a finger to her throat and turned her gaze toward the sky, wondering from where such a strange gift had come.
Only Mendel looked back at the sound of the shot; the others had learned the lessons of Sodom.
The Mahmirim followed the tracks around a bend where they found, waiting for them, a passenger train. Maybe a second train waited outside every ghetto so that Mahmirim should not have to ride with Mekylim. The cars were old, a patchwork of relics from the last century. The locomotive in the distance looked too small for the job. Far better still, Mendel felt, than the freight wagons and the chaos they had left on the other side of the tunnel. Mendel was sure that the conductor waited for the next train at the next ghetto to move on with its load. There had never been enough travel or commerce to warrant another track and suddenly there was traffic, so rich was the land with Jews.
“Nu?” the Rebbe said to Mendel. “You are the tallest. Go have a look.”
At each car, Mendel placed his foot on the metal step and pulled himself up with the bar bolted alongside. His hands were huge, befitting his lineage. Gronam’s own were said to have been as broad as a shovel’s head. Mendel’s—somewhat smaller—had always been soft, ungainly but unnoticed. The ghetto changed that. It turned them hard and menacing. There was a moment as he grabbed hold of the bar when the Mahmirim wondered if Mendel would rise up to meet the window or pull the train over on their heads.
Leaning right, peering in, Mendel announced his findings. “Full,” he said. “Full.” Then “Full, again.” Pressed together as one, the Rebbe and his followers moved forward after each response.
On the fourth attempt the car was empty and Mendel pushed open the door. The Mahmirim hurried aboard, still oblivious to their good fortune and completely unaware that it was a gentile train.
On any other transport the Mahmirim wouldn’t have gotten even that far. But this happened to be a train of showmen, entertainers waiting for clear passage to a most important engagement. These were worldly people traveling about during wartime. Very little in the way of oddities could shock them—something in which they took great pride. And, of course, as Mendel would later find out, there had been until most recently the Romanian and his bear. Because of him—and the bear—those dozing in the last few cars, those who saw the flash of Mendel’s head and the pack of identically clad fools stumbling behind, were actually tickled at the sight. Another lesson in fate for Mendel. The difference between the sniper’s bullet and survival fell somewhere between a little girl’s daydream and a fondness for bears.
The Romanian had been saddled with a runtish secondhand bear that would not dance or step up on a ball or growl with fake ferociousness. Useless from a life of posing with children in front of a slack-shuttered camera, the bear refused to do anything but sit. From this the Romanian concocted a routine. He would dress the bear as a wounded soldier and lug his furry comrade around the stage, setting off firecrackers and spouting political satire. It brought audiences to hysterics. A prize act! From this he came up with others: the fireman, the side-splitting Siamese twins, and—for the benefit of the entertainers themselves—the bride. When the train was chugging slowly up a hill, the Romanian would dress the bear in bridal gown and veil. He’d get off the front car cradling his bride and pretend they’d just missed their honeymoon train to the mountains. The entertainers howled with joy as he ran alongside the tracks crying out for a conductor and tripping over a giant tin pocket watch tied to his waist and dragging behind. A funny man, that Romanian. And strong. A very strong man it takes to run with a bear.
When the Mahmirim appeared at the back of the train, all who saw them remembered their friend. How they all missed his antics after he was taken away. And how the little bear had moped. Like a real person. Yes, it would be good to have a new group of wiseacres. And they turned in their seats, laughing out loud at these shaved-headed fools, these clowns without makeup—no, not clowns, acrobats. They could only be acrobats in such bland and colorless attire—and so skinny, too. Just the right builds for it. Lithe for the high wire.
In this way, the Mahmirim successfully boarded the train.
They busied themselves with choosing compartments, seeing that Raizel the widow had space to prop up her feet, separating the women from the men, trying to favor husbands and wives and to keep the youngest, Shraga, a boy of eleven, with his mother. In deference to King Saul’s having numbered the people with lambs, the Rebbe, as is the fashion, counted his followers with a verse of Psalms, one word for each person, knowing already that he would fall short without Yocheved. This is the curse that had befallen them. Always one less word.
Mendel, who had once been a Mekyl but overcome by the wisdom of the Mahmirim had joined their small tribe, still hadn’t lost his taste for excessive drink. He found his way to the bar car—well stocked for wartime—without even a pocket, let alone a zloty, with which he might come by some refreshment. Scratching at the wool of his long underwear, he stared at the bottles, listening as they rocked one against the other, tinkling lightly like chimes. He was especially taken with a leaded-crystal decanter. Its smooth single-malt contents rode up and down its inner walls, caressing the glass and teasing Mendel in a way that he considered cruel.
Dismissing the peril to which he was exposing the others, Mendel sought out a benefactor who might sport him a drink. It was in this way—in which only God can turn a selfish act into a miracle—that Mendel initially saved all of their lives.
An expert on the French horn complimented Mendel on the rustic
simplicity of his costume and invited him to join her in a drink. It was this tippler who alerted Mendel to the fact that the Mahmirim were assumed to be acrobats. Talking freely, and intermittently cursing the scheduling delays caused by the endless transports, she told him of the final destinations of those nuisance-causing trains.
“This,” she said, “was told to me by Günter the Magnificent—who was never that magnificent considering that Druckenmüller always outclassed him with both the doves and the rings.” She paused and ordered two brandies. Mendel put his hand out to touch her arm, stopping short of contact.
“If you wouldn’t mind, if it’s not too presumptuous.” He pointed to the decanter, blushing, remembering the Rebbe’s lectures on gluttony.
“Fine choice, fine choice. My pleasure.” She knocked an empty snifter against the deep polished brown of the table (a color so rich it seemed as if the brandy had seeped through her glass and distilled into the table’s surface). Not since the confiscation of the Mekyl Rebbe’s cane had Mendel seen such opulence. “Barman, a scotch as well. Your finest.” The barman served three drinks and the musician poured the extra brandy into her glass. She drank without a word. Mendel toasted her silently and, after the blessing, sipped at his scotch, his first in so very long. He let its smoky flavor rise up and fill his head, hoping that if he drank slowly enough, if he let the scotch rest on his tongue long enough and roll gradually enough down his throat, then maybe he could cure his palate like the oak slats of a cask. Maybe then he could keep the warmth and the comfort with him for however much longer God might deem that they should survive.
“Anyway, Günter came to us directly from a performance for the highest of the high where his beautiful assistant Leine had been told in the powder room by the wife of an official of unmatched feats of magic being performed with the trains. They go away full—packed so tightly that babies are stuffed in over the heads of the passengers when there’s no room for another full grown—and come back empty, as if never before used.”
“And the Jews?” asked Mendel. “What trick is performed with the Jews?”
“Sleight of hand,” she said, splashing the table with her drink and waving her fingers by way of demonstration. “A classic illusion. First they are here, and then they are gone.
“According to the wife of the official, those who witness it faint dead away, overcome by the grand scale of the illusion. For a moment the magician stands, a field of Jews at his feet, then nothing.” She paused for dramatic effect, not unaccustomed to life in the theater. “The train sits empty. The magician stands alone on the platform. Nothing remains but the traditional puff of smoke. This trick he performs, puff after puff, twenty-four hours a day.
“After Günter heard, he forgot all about Druckenmüller and his doves and became obsessed with what Leine had told him. He would sit at the bar and attempt the same thing with rabbits, turning his ratty bunnies into colored bursts of smoke, some pink, some purple, occasionally plain gray. He swore he wouldn’t give up until he had perfected his magic. Though he knew, you could tell, that it would never match the magnitude of a trainload of Jews. I told him myself when he asked my opinion. Günter, I said, it takes more than nimble fingers to achieve the extraordinary.” With that Mendel felt a hand on his knee.
Pausing only to finish his drink, Mendel ran back to the car full of Mahmirim and relayed to the Rebbe the tales of horror he had heard. Mendel was the Rebbe’s favorite. Maybe not always so strict in his service of the Lord, Mendel was full of His spirit; this the Rebbe could see. For that reason he ignored the prohibition against gossip and took into consideration his student’s most unbelievable report.
“It can’t be, Mendele!” said the Rebbe.
“Their cruelty knows no bounds,” cried Raizel the widow.
The Rebbe sat in silence for some minutes, considering the events of the last years and the mystery of all those who had disappeared before them. He decided that what Mendel told them must be so.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that the gossip Mendel repeats is true. Due to its importance, in this instance there can be no sin in repeating such idle talk.” The Rebbe glanced at the passing scenery and pulled at the air where once had been his beard. “No other choice,” he said. “A solitary option. Only one thing for us to do …” The followers of the Mahmir Rebbe hung on his words.
“We must tumble.”
Mendel had been to the circus as a boy. During the three-day engagement, Mendel had sneaked into the tent for every performance, hiding under the bowed pine benches and peering out through the space beneath all the legs too short to reach the hay-strewn ground.
Though he did not remember a single routine or feat of daring, he did recall, in addition to the sparkling of some scandalously placed sequins, the secret to convincing the other performers that they were indeed acrobats. The secret was nothing more than an exclamation. It was, simply, a “Hup!” Knowing this, the Mahmirim lined the corridor and began to practice.
“You must clap your hands once in a while as well,” Mendel told them. The Rebbe was already nearing old age and therefore clapped and hupped far more than he jumped.
Who knew that Raizel the widow had double-jointed arms, or that Shmuel Berel could scurry about upside down on hands and feet mocking the movements of a crab. Falling from a luggage rack from which he had tried to suspend himself, Mendel, on his back, began to laugh. The others shared the release and laughed along with him. In their car near the end of the train, there was real and heartfelt delight. They were giddy with the chance God had granted them. They laughed as the uncondemned might, as free people in free countries do.
The Rebbe interrupted this laughter. “Even in the most foreign situation we must adhere to the laws,” he said. Therefore, as in the laws of singing, no woman was to tumble unless accompanied by another woman, and no man was to catch a woman—though husbands were given a dispensation to catch their airborne wives.
Not even an hour had gone by before it was obvious what state they were in: weak with hunger and sickness, never having asked of their bodies such rigors before—all this on top of their near-total ignorance of acrobatics and the shaking of the train. At the least, they would need further direction. A tip or two on which to build.
Pained by the sight of it, the Rebbe called a stop to their futile flailing about.
“Mendel,” he said, “back to your drunks and gossips. Bring us the secrets to this act. As is, not even a blind man would be tricked by the sounds of such graceless footfalls.”
“Me!” Mendel said, with the mock surprise of Moses, as if there were some other among them fit to do the job.
“Yes, you,” the Rebbe said, shooing him away. “Hurry off.”
Mendel did not move.
He looked at the Mahmirim as he thought the others might. He saw that it was only by God’s will that they had gotten that far. A ward of the insane or of consumptives would have been a far better misperception in which to entangle this group of uniformly clad souls. Their acceptance as acrobats was a stretch, a first-glance guess, a benefit of the doubt granted by circumstance and only as valuable as their debut would prove. It was an absurd undertaking. But then again, Mendel thought, no more unbelievable than the reality from which they’d escaped, no more unfathomable than the magic of disappearing Jews. If the good people of Chelm could believe that water was sour cream, if the peasant who woke up that first morning in Mendel’s bed and put on Mendel’s slippers and padded over to the window could believe, upon throwing back the shutters, that the view he saw had always been his own, then why not pass as acrobats and tumble across the earth until they found a place where they were welcome?
“What am I to bring back?” Mendel said.
“The secrets,” answered the Rebbe, an edge in his voice, no time left for hedging or making things clear. “There are secrets behind everything that God creates.”
“And a needle and thread,” said Raizel the widow. “And a pair of scissors. And anything, to
o.”
“Anything?” Mendel said.
“Yes, anything,” Raizel said. “Bits of paper or string. Anything that a needle can prick or thread can hold.”
Mendel raised his eyebrows at the request. The widow talked as if he were heading off to Cross-eyed Bilha’s general store.
“They will have,” she said. “They are entertainers—forever losing buttons and splitting seams.” She clucked her tongue at Mendel, who still had his eyebrows raised. “These costumes, as is, will surely never do.”
It was the horn gleaming on the table next to the slumped form of its player that first caught Mendel’s attention. He rushed over and sat down next to her. He stared out the window at the forest rushing by. He tried to make out secluded worlds cloaked by the trees. Little Yocheved’s farm must be out there somewhere, a lone homestead hidden like Eden in the woods. It would be on the other side of a broad and rushing river where the dogs would lose scent of a Jewish trail.
Mendel knocked on the table to rouse the musician and looked up to find gazes focused upon him from around the bar. The observers did not appear unfriendly, only curious, travel weary, interested—Mendel assumed—in a new face who already knew a woman so well.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories Page 4
