A Play for the End of the World Read online

  this is a borzoi book published by alfred a. knopf

  Copyright © 2021 by Jai Chakrabarti

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Chakrabarti, Jai, author.

  Title: A play for the end of the world : a novel / Jai Chakrabarti.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. |

  Identifiers: lccn 2020045419 (print) | lccn 2020045420 (ebook) | isbn 9780525658924 (hardcover) | isbn 9780525658931 (ebook)

  Subjects: lcsh: Holocaust survivors—Fiction. | gsafd: Love stories.

  Classification: lcc ps3603.h33548 p58 2021 (print) | lcc ps3603.h33548 (ebook) | ddc 813/.6—dc23

  lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020045419

  lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020045420

  Ebook ISBN 9780525658931

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art: Gris Foncé (14) by Katrien de Blauwer

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  ep_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  For anyone who’s crossed a border

  in search of home

  sooner would a crow turn white

  than Poland be Poland again

  we were told and also

  that the Lord God had gone away

  as far as america

  and wouldn’t be back

  —from “childhood 1940” by jerzy ficowski

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Prologue

  Part 1

  THE WANDERER

  PAN DOKTOR’S MARCH

  SIXTY MILES EAST

  THE BROKEN TRAIN

  Part 2

  AN ORPHANAGE

  MISHA’S CALCUTTA DIARY

  THE VILLAGE

  THE BLESSING CIRCLE

  Part 3

  BEE HIDES

  THE DINNER PARTY

  DINNER AT THE ORPHANAGE

  THE NEWS

  THE REHEARSALS

  THE RUINED TEMPLE

  Part 4

  LABOR DAY

  THE BUTLER’S DISAPPEARANCE

  THE PERFORMANCE

  AFTER THE TRAIN

  SECOND TRIMESTER

  OFFICE HOURS

  A CHOICE

  THE PIANO

  RETURNING

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  author’s note

  On July 18, 1942, weeks before the deportations to Treblinka, the Polish-Jewish educator, medical doctor, and author Janusz Korczak staged a play at his orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. The performance was an adaptation of a Bengali play, Dak Ghar, by Rabindranath Tagore.

  Dak Ghar literally means “The Calling House.” Nowadays it’s translated as The Post Office. Rabindranath Tagore wrote Dak Ghar in a village in India in 1911. A couple of years later W. B. Yeats produced an English version. The play was then translated into many languages, and eventually a Polish copy ended up in the hands of Janusz Korczak, known to his children as Pan Doktor.

  The play is about a dying child living through his imagination while quarantined. Pan Doktor chose to stage the play to help his orphans reimagine ghetto life and to prepare them for what was to come.

  prologue

  Warsaw—July 18th, 1942

  The set has been assembled. A piece of cawed wood that is to mean window. A watercolor Hanna has painted of the sun that is to mean sun. A bed they’ve borrowed from the boys’ dorm—no easy feat dragging it up and down the stairs for each rehearsal—that is to mean child’s bed. Wooden blocks Misha carved to mean child’s toys. And nine-year-old Jaryk is dressed like a boy from India, at least what they’d imagined a boy from India would look like: a pillowcase fashioned into a turban, a prayer marking on his forehead.

  From the dressing area Jaryk spies much of Jewish Warsaw gathered in the great room of the orphanage. Szlengel opens with a poem of which he’ll remember the lines “What does it mean: afar?…How to explain the word to a child?” Afterwards the old piano is carted out, and Szpilman plays Chopin.

  He waits behind the makeshift curtain, drinking the music in. Last night, they weren’t sure if they’d be able to stage the production at all. So many of the other cast members had come down with food poisoning, no one knew from what; maybe it was the stale eggs, someone said, or the vaccine they’d been given days earlier. All night their stewards Pan Doktor and Madam Stefa tended to the children with saline drops and lime water. By morning the worst of it passed, and he and his dearest friend, Misha, built the makeshift dressing area, no more than a long curtain hung from the ceiling, which he now stands behind, waiting to make his entrance.

  Pan Doktor introduces their play. It’s from India, Pan Doktor says, and it’s called The Post Office. “How do you help a child in this world? How do you teach him about what’s to come? The afterlife?”

  The play’s about a boy, Amal, who has an incurable disease and must stay indoors on doctor’s orders. All day Amal watches the world through his window and imagines the King will soon come to visit him. He makes friends with the villagers through his window, sees other boys playing outside, and invites them near his house, offering up his toys just so he can watch them play in the dirt. This is what first caught Jaryk: how generous it was to let other boys play with your favorite things.

  Amal is visited by a whimsical wanderer—a fakir, one of the words of Bengali he’s learned. The Fakir teaches him how to play in his mind, how to imagine a faraway land across the mountain with waterfalls. Jaryk has never seen a waterfall and, like the boy in the play, can only imagine what one is. Misha has tried to describe the rush of water against the mountain face, though really, what could Misha know about such things?

  Pan Doktor finishes his introduction, and Jaryk goes onstage, feeling as if he’s been cast under a spell. When he lies on the bed, it’s as if he is no longer himself, half starving, afraid of Pan Doktor’s health, of what the black boots will do next. Instead he is a boy in a village in India, somewhere between life and death. He is dignified, and he is human. He is majestic, a child. All eyes are upon him as he readies to speak—

  amal: Uncle! Well, hullo!

  the good uncle: Amal, my boy. Let me have a look at you.

  amal: Surely today you will let me play in the courtyard, Uncle. The sun is out and I wish to see the mountain, and I wish to hear the call of the King’s men.

  the good uncle: I’m sorry, my dear, but you’re under strict orders. We’ll need you to be inside. I have many books for you to read, so you may turn out a scholar, unlike your uncle.

  amal: But I have no wish to be a scholar. What I want is to be—

  (Jaryk pauses. He looks around the dining hall, where chairs have been placed in the clamshell formation that is to mean theater. There is his teacher Esterka, who is mouthing his line: “What I want is to be—a squirrel.” A squirrel, what a strange thing to want to be, but no matter, he knows the line. He knows the feeling of wanting to be something else and somewhere else. To be in the woods again, away from the walls of their city-within-a-city. To be in the wild. Yes, he kn
ows that feeling. He knows his lines, most of them anyway.

  He sees Pan Doktor and Madam Stefa in the audience. Pan Doktor has to sit on account of his bum knee, and Madam Stefa stands beside him. Can it be that she winks at Jaryk? Misha is off to their right, a toothpick in his mouth. Jaryk is not sure if Misha is glowering at him, or smiling, or both.

  What he wants is to hold this moment for as long as he can, for time to lose its wheels, for all of Warsaw to be held in step, for then he can keep the feeling he has now. This certainty of being part of a family, of being held so firmly there is nothing he can do to disavow this love. Who knows when it will be taken—what they have built together—who knows when the black boots will come?

  There is Esterka again, encouraging him. No better teacher will he have than her. No better father and mother than Pan Doktor and Stefania.

  Jaryk rises to his full height so he can deliver his call to the farthest corners of the room.

  In four days the Germans will begin the deportations of Jewish Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka; not even Pan Doktor’s orphanage of two hundred children will be spared.

  But on this night they are in the thrall of the theater, as if they’re all children in India, as if over the mountain lies the waterfall with its constant rainbow, as if this and all the bounties of the earth await them just beyond the bend—)

  part 1

  The Wanderer

  calcutta—june 1972

  Morning in Calcutta. The Foreigners queue was filled with longhaired imitators of Ram Dass, a flock of missionaries, and young businessmen pursuing the promise of an urban India. The other line was crammed with locals carrying suitcases stuffed with a country in gifts. All were eager to move past the chain-smoking customs officer and be on their way.

  Except Jaryk wasn’t in a hurry. A heaviness in his knees held him at the Wait Till Call circle until a mustachioed guard with a shoulder-slung rifle prodded him forward. Jaryk paused at the immigration booth with his green suitcase, a sturdy, ugly piece of luggage that was seeing its first taste of the East. It was Misha’s suitcase, so he carried it with no small amount of pride.

  “Purpose of visit?” the immigration officer asked him.

  He was here to retrieve and carry Misha’s remains back to Brooklyn, but no one would understand that. “Tourism,” he said. “Sights of the country.”

  He was stamped and cleared and followed the herd out of the frosted doors of the airport. Outside, the air was a dense concentration of humidity and heat. As soon as his shoes touched the asphalt, he felt he’d come overdressed. Under the humid cover, the crowd swelled and dispersed, swelled to disperse. At first, it seemed like a single leviathan, colorful and noisy, but then he spotted a pattern. Lines of men and women waited to greet their loved ones while other lines queued to enter the airport. The family members shuffled nervously, checking each face, until the match was found; then, not a moment wasted: the whole group would absorb the arrived, and all together they’d head for the road.

  He watched his fellow passengers make their way to the taxi stand. Their journey was first complicated by the ambush of men hawking marble statues and shawls, further complicated by the group of boys and girls who smiled, crooned, and cried their way to American dollars. Once the tourists made it through, they were swallowed by a row of taxi drivers, each crying out his own warring price.

  When they’d last been together in New York, Misha had told him the first day would be difficult, but this was more. This was the madness brought on by too many people. He took off his shoes and socks and waited in the shade until all the passengers had left. There was no hurry; he was good at waiting.

  It took an hour, but the arrivals crowd eventually thinned out. He was left with the hawkers, who sat on the opposite curb and passed a cigarette around. The panhandling children drew a square of hopscotch in the middle of the road, and the winners of each round ate candies they’d begged off a matronly passenger on her way to the taxi stand.

  The hawkers noticed him and yelled something in his direction—a curse, most likely, guttural and foul—and laughed and enjoyed their cigarette and cards. It was still too hot for shoes, so he stayed barefoot, though as soon as he left the shade his soles felt like they were on fire. This too shall pass. The mantra came to him easy and free, and he held on to it as a group of children surrounded him. One prodded him in the belly and giggled. He tried to smile back, but he didn’t have it in him. Instead, he handed out the ballpoint pens he’d brought as alms and, when they wouldn’t leave, all of the American coins in his pocket.

  When he saw a taxi pull up to the curb, he skipped toward it. This driver was better dressed than any of the other men he’d seen, and he wore an air of superiority, as if he didn’t need the business at all. “You are going to burn your feet,” the driver said in a crisp British English. He was middle-aged, with a protruding belly, thick glasses cut square, a dark corduroy jacket patched at the elbows, and white, nylon slacks. Why he wasn’t sweating through his clothes was a mystery. The driver cocked his head and asked, “Where can I take you?”

  Jaryk took a strip of paper from his coat. It had become sweat stained to the point where he could barely make out the letters. “Sudder Street,” he said.

  As they turned off the airport road and onto the bypass, a patch of cloud opened up. At first, it was only a bit of sweet rain. Through the half-open window, he let his fingers get wet in it, but at the next major intersection, with no warning, the adjacent clouds joined in to make a full monsoon. The stray dogs on the street hid under canopies; the traffic slowed in a single heartbeat; a line of coconut trees swayed in the same direction; five women on the sidewalk, all in red saris, took off their shoes and sprinted. This was the India of the flesh. His sweat proved it, the stink released by the rain proved it, that smell of rot and burning bamboo.

  “Are you staying with family here?” The driver squinted and searched for the house number on Sudder Street.

  “No, it’s just a guesthouse.”

  They found a boarded-up building with a sign in English, New Guest Stay, hanging off the second-floor balcony like a loose tooth. “This was in the guidebook and I called,” Jaryk said. “Are you sure this is the right street?” The rain had persevered until the streets were ankle-deep with water. With a suitcase and a sore back, he didn’t like his odds. Jaryk flipped through his guidebook and pointed. “Okay, what about this place? The Park Hotel?”

  “You can pay for Park Hotel?”

  From the way the driver was looking at his clothes, Jaryk suspected the place would dig a hole in his budget, but he didn’t like the accusation of limited means.

  “You know, sir,” the driver continued, “there is one place, more authentic, with cheaper and better living. Not so far.” The driver took off his glasses and smiled. Jaryk focused on the outline of the man’s face: it was a perfect oval, a shape that made him want to trust.

  “Authentic,” he said, against his better judgment. “I like that.”

  * * *

  ………………

  He had agreed, but after a while it seemed they were heading back toward the airport, toward the open stretches of land that had made the city seem not like a city, and several times Jaryk almost asked him where they were going, only to let jet lag hold his tongue.

  They swerved off onto a narrow dirt road. The driver said, “We are almost arrived.”

  Down the road a zigzag of mud huts. Bare-chested men under the shade of banana leaves. By the tube well, a row of women waiting to draw water, saris soaked, and by the trash dump, a hangout the driver identified as the suburb’s only phone station.

  Children played in the mud, footballs bounced knee to knee. He recognized a weariness in these boys and girls, a lethargy in how they shuffled from the road to make room for the car. They looked like they were used to being hungry, and when hunger was present trouble was never
far behind. Still, he was a head taller than any grown man he’d seen. If things got murky, he could hold his own.

  The driver began whistling a tune, and as he moved from melody to melody, the rain eased up. Now it was the quiet sun above them again, boiling the roof of the cab. Jaryk thought about what he had left behind, which was Lucy. Lucy, and not much else. By now, she would have found his apartment empty, along with his letter. She would’ve called Rabbi Samuel and the rabbi would tell her what little he knew, or maybe she wouldn’t call anyone at all—that was the darker possibility: she’d come to loathe him without knowing the whole story.

  The driver slowed to a stop. They had reached the end of the road.

  “We are arrived,” said the driver. “P. K. Pal Guest House.”

  The house before them had outgrown itself: it was three floors of brick, and the top two levels looked to have been afterthoughts. While the foundation was the same sturdy whitewash stone Jaryk had seen in so many other houses along the road, the second floor was a light shade of rose, and the third level, which jutted out at a nearly perpendicular angle to avoid pressing against the limbs of a nearby coconut tree, bore no resemblance to either, being a roofless structure with holes to mark future windows.

  “This looks like someone’s house,” Jaryk said.

  “It is the house of P. K. Pal. I am Prosanto Kumar Pal, and sometimes, when the feeling is right, we take guests.” Prosanto Pal smiled and revealed a row of teeth so perfect they could only be false. “For fifteen rupees, you get a large room plus the cooking of Mrs. P. K. Pal. But please, if you do not want, I can drive you to the Park Hotel for no extra cost.”

  Jaryk fingered the loose stash of rupees in his pocket. He couldn’t afford any sort of fancy hotel. Fifteen rupees and home cooking were sounding more and more like the right choice. Also, there were the children who ran out from the arms of their mother. A boy and a girl. The girl with two long pigtails and pink sandals. The boy with thick glasses a size too big; when he ran to his father, he held on to them with one hand.