Yesterday we celebrated my 50th birthday. We decided for old times’ sake to have a picnic next to the church. It was Sunday and after the service there were lots of people, almost the entire parish. We had visitors. Several people from Jerusalem, Beba from Tiberias, Father Vsevolod, Friedman, Kopeishchikov, Nina and Syoma Ziegler, and a lot of children. Our favorite “little brother,” Julien Sommier from Akko, came; our crazy “little sister” Sofia, who lives on top of a cupboard because her small apartment is crammed with all the homeless people she manages to attract; an American lady professor; a Russian lady writer; and a Hungarian beggar who has settled beside our church. There must have been 50 or 60 people. We put out tables.
The children sang “Happy Birthday,” Father Vsevolod sang “Long Life” in Russian with his bass voice, then they all gave me presents, lots of foolish nonsense. Heaven knows where I’ll put it all. The children’s drawings were the best, both pretty and not taking up any space. Doctor Friedman gave me an amazing book about the art of the Cycladic Islands with its decorative marine beauties, dolphins, and shells. This is believed to be the art of lost Atlantis. It would be great to be an artist in my next life. Then Daniel came out with a big bundle, opened it, and took out a red sweater. It was the most unexpected present. He had knitted it himself! He unfolded it, laid it on the table, and said, “I thought I had forgotten how to knit, but my hands remember. I knitted all sorts of things with the nuns, they taught me how. They sold socks and sweaters in the market, during the war of course. They spun the wool themselves, but they didn’t have such good wool. Enjoy wearing it. Red suits blondes.” It is a big red sweater with a golf collar.
Later, when everyone had left, I went through the presents and found one I hadn’t opened. It was a round Bedouin mirror in an embroidered cloth frame, one of those things they had in their tents attached to the walls. I looked into it. A wrinkled, red, sunburnt face looked back at me, and light-colored hair, far lighter than I used to have because it was half gray, and small, pale eyes in pink eyelids. Dry dark lips. It was me. At first I didn’t recognize myself.
What would today have been like if 30 years ago I had stayed in Bavaria, in an outlying suburb of Munich, on the banks of Lake Starnberg?
June 2006, Moscow
L
ETTER FROM
L
UDMILA
U
LITSKAYA TO
E
LENA
K
OSTIOUKOVITCH
Dear Lyalya,
As I write, tears are streaming down my cheeks. I am not a real writer. Real writers do not cry. Those live people I saw beside the live Daniel were different people, mine are invented. Even Daniel is part invention. There never was a Hilda, instead there was a hard, authoritarian woman whose life is completely closed to me. There never was a Musa, a Teresa, or a Gershon. They are all phantasms. There were other people I did meet, but I have no right to make free with their real lives.
That marvelous German woman whose angelic image I have placed beside Daniel left her home in Germany and moved to a small Orthodox community in Lithuania. The abbot there is a Georgian, phenomenally musical, and sometimes sisters from Georgia come to visit him and organize such spiritually uplifting concerts that “Hilda,” with her German musical sensitivity, is reduced to tears. But what on earth am I sobbing about?
I will not give her real name, but I can’t deny myself the satisfaction, dear Lyalya, of telling you that she is one of heaven’s angels, not a human being. Only recently she arrived back in Lithuania from Germany on a small tractor she had urged under its own steam for 500 kilometers along village tracks at a speed of 10 kilometers an hour, a thin, graying blonde woman with a rucksack on her back, mounted up on the driver’s seat. Their community is poor and desperately needed a tractor. I could never have invented anything like that.
I am not a real writer and this book is not a novel but a collage. I snip out pieces of my own life and of the lives of other people and glue together “without glue” (pause …) “a living tale from fragments of days.”
I am terribly tired. Sometimes I go into Andrey’s room. From his window you can see a maelstrom of branches, and our diseased poplars, maples, and birches look much better from the sixth floor then from down below in the children’s playground. I look at the foliage—the leaves are still fresh and green—and my eyes are healed.
I am sending you a fourth part, in fact a fifth part of the whole.
My love,
L.
PART FIVE
1. 1994, Israel
F
ROM NEWSPAPERS
The whole of Israel was shocked by the events of 25 February 1994, on the eve of the Jewish festival of Purim. Many details remain unclear. On the eve of the festival, agreement was reached between the sheikh of the Cave of Makhpelah and Hebron City Council to allow Jews to pray in the Hall of Abraham in the cave.
During the night-time prayers of the festival, a large number of Muslims assembled in the adjoining Hall of Itzhak. The Islamic and Jewish calendars coincided on this occasion, so that the eve of the festival of Purim was simultaneous with the celebration of Ramadan. People were praying in both halls.
A Jewish settler of American origin, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, burst into the Muslim Hall of Itzhak and fired an assault rifle into the crowd of worshippers, killing 29 and injuring about 150.
Goldstein was put to death on the spot by enraged Arabs. Beneath the carpet of the prayer hall, iron bars were found with which Goldstein was killed, and also a large quantity of firearms.
A commission set up by the government to investigate the incident published a report referring to evidence from the intelligence services of preparations for a pogrom of Jews in Hebron. The commission has information that the shooting by Goldstein in the Cave of Makhpelah was a premeditated prophylactic measure. Two settlers from the nearby district, Rabbi Eliyahu Plotkin and Gershon Shimes, were detained as suspects.
Today the report runs to many volumes and the commission does not expect to publish its conclusions in anything less than three months from now. Public opinion in Israel is divided over the crime, and Goldstein himself is viewed in radically different ways by different groups. For some he is a national hero who laid down his life to save the Jewish population of Hebron from a massacre in the making. For others he is a provocateur and maniac. The interrogation of people associated with Goldstein, his friends and fellow thinkers, Rabbi Eliyahu Plotkin and Gershon Shimes, are of considerable interest. So far, however, their statements remain unpublished.
2. 25 February 1994, Hebron
F
ROM THE RECORD OF THE INTERROGATION OF
G
ERSHON
S
HIMES
“Did you drive Baruch Goldstein to the Cave of Makhpelah?”
“Yes.”
“At what time?”
“At about five in the morning.”
“Can you remember more precisely?”
“I remember precisely leaving home at 4:40. I looked at my watch.”
“Who was in the car apart from you?”
“My son Binyomin. Then Baruch arrived.”
“It didn’t surprise you that he was wearing military uniform and carrying an assault rifle?”
“Yes, but he said he was going to the Miluim.”
“When did you agree to give him a lift to Makhpelah?”