The Girl Who Stole Everything by Norman Ravvin

Author:Norman Ravvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Everything is Horseshit

Once the city’s outskirts give way to farmland, the drive to Radzanów offers a tableau of Polish countryside. Simon passes one little town after another, each marked by an introductory sign in green and white, and then, upon leaving, a sign with the town’s name struck through with a diagonal line. The outskirts of Radzanów are lush and green, irrigated by the Wkra River. The roadway runs through sparse pine forest until a puzzle of buildings appears, one and two storeys tall. Then he is in the central square and parks at an unmarked corner. A crowd is gathered in the centre of the square. Equipment is being loaded out of white cube vans. A film crew is in town. Some hover around the craft services table, sampling sandwiches and drinking coffee from paper cups.

A woman stands on a sidewalk near to where he is parked. She is dressed in office-professional black and is marking something on a clipboard. She is the only figure on the square not wearing the film crew’s de rigueur semi-camouflage. Simon feels that he knows her from somewhere. But this is impossible. He watches from where he sits, parked at the curbside. It’s a remarkable scene. The town square is packed with vehicles, a forest of lighting equipment, actors in costumes meant to look like some old-fashioned kind of dress. They are familiar too, but in a wholly stereotypical way. There are women and children and grizzly-bearded men. Are they dressed as wartime refugees? A few look distinctively like religious Jews. The women wear long skirts, down to their ankles. The boys wear caps. The girls have their hair in braids, which lie on their chests. Some of the male actors wear long black coats and paste-on grey beards—an approximation of Chassidic garb. These made-up Jews huddle against the stoop of the old brick synagogue. Simon knows it’s the synagogue from Mike’s handwritten guide—“Look for the red-brick building across the square from the church,” he wrote—though Simon could have guessed this on his own. In Brooklyn, Mike had told the story of a wedding in this synagogue before the war, which was interrupted when the women’s gallery collapsed to the floor below. The brick building, standing opposite the big church on the other side of the square, is distinctive in its surroundings. Its Moorish flair, the round windows high up in its façade, signal its Jewishness.

Something is holding up the shoot. Cars pass on the far side of the square where the road is not blocked. The drivers rubberneck, slowing to witness the scene. Simon wonders if what’s being filmed is a scene out of the town’s past. A horse-drawn cart laden with hay trundles by. The cart driver raises a hand in salute. Was he from prop services or the real thing? Who is he saluting? The fake Jews? The carnival of city-dwelling film techies and their spending power? No one takes any notice of Simon, as if he and his car are invisible.

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