Daniel Stein, Interpreter

Wiktoria, my dear, all sorts of dark thoughts come into my mind. I long to fall asleep and never wake up. Waking is dreadful. I am fine while I’m asleep. There are no dreams, there is no me, and that’s so good, when you leave yourself and your thoughts behind. When I first wake up I’m like a baby, everything has been washed and smoothed away, but then comes the blow. The two military men, a colonel and a sergeant, arrive and inform me of Andrzej’s death and everything breaks inside me all over again. Within a minute the whole reel has been run through, right up to the funeral with the sealed coffin. There is such a gaping hole in my heart.

No less unexpectedly, the director of the College of Music came to see me at the workshop, and the elderly lady who taught piano, Elisheva Zak. Here in Israel there is an accepted way of notifying someone of a death. They rarely just telephone, they come to see you. Every morning I relive the death of my boy and my husband. I am 46, in good health. The way it was for Metek, his heart stopping and his life being over, is not how it is going to be for me. I have another 40 or even 50 years ahead of me, waking up like that every morning, then dragging myself to the workshop and the sewing machine to stitch curtains, curtains, and more curtains. I need those curtains. I get a generous pension for the loss of my son, but if I wasn’t stitching I would hang myself. I wouldn’t even notice. I would do it without hesitation, without having to decide or prepare. It’s only too easy.

How bizarre and absurd life is. Thinking back, I can see now that my best years were the years of the occupation when I ran every night to the cellar of the bombed-out house next door along a secret path and through a narrow opening only I could jump through. And I really did have to jump because three treads were missing. I had to jump down into the darkness, into Metek’s arms. We would light a little candle because Metek did not like to hold me in the dark. He wanted to see my beauty. Oh, Wiktoria, all around was death, killing and more killing, but we felt as if we were in paradise, a paradise which lasted one and a half years. One thing Metek didn’t know, and I never told him, was that our neighbor Moczulski had been spying as I went in the night to Metek, and blackmailed me. What did I have? I had nothing except what women have under their skirts. He was old, and repulsive, and a villain, but he would call and I would go to him. He didn’t need me often, he wasn’t that virile. Afterwards I would just give myself a shake and go to Metek to cleanse myself of the vileness. Well, the Lord gave Moczulski his just desserts. He ended up in the labor camps in Russia after the war, somebody else denounced him, and gangsters in the camp cut his throat in 1947 or so.

Metek loved me and music, and of course he loved our children. That was his whole world, and I was at the center of it. It was because of me that he didn’t pursue a musical career. He was offered a place in the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1951 but I said there was no way I would go to America, so we went to Israel instead. That’s fate for you! He always did what I wanted. He said, “You took out so many chamber pots of my shit that you deserve a statue of pure gold.” Well, now I have my monument—two graves. Dearest Wiktoria, I really don’t want to go on living.

I’m writing all this in such detail because I want you to understand, and not be angry or offended that I have decided finally not to return to Poland. Please give my best wishes to Irenka and Wiczek and all or friends when you see them. May God be with you.

Your friend Grayna

3. April 1965, Haifa

L

ETTER FROM

D

ANIEL

S

TEIN TO

W

ŁADYSŁAW

K

LECH

What inexpressible sorrow, my dear Brother. Sic transit everything on this earth. I am deeply despondent and dismayed. I usually don’t have time for moods. A busy man can’t afford to have them, but the last few days have been filled with dismay and grief. I have buried one of my parishioners who committed suicide. I had known her since my first days in Haifa, a quiet Polish woman, more a village than a town person, but very likeable; one of those early risers who are kindly and cheerful in the morning but by evening have wearied and closed up like a flower. I am a great connoisseur of women, uniquely so for a monk. I see you smile wryly, dear Władek. My vows have probably saved the world from a great Casanova, because I like women very much. It is indeed fortunate that I am unmarried as I would cause my wife great anxiety by ogling other women. I find almost all of them attractive, but Grayna, of whom I am writing, was truly delightful. She looked like a vixen, with her russet coloring, her pointed chin, and sharp teeth like a little animal.

The war did dreadful things to people. Even if they survived physically, it crippled their souls. Some became cruel, some cowardly, some barricaded themselves behind a stone wall from God and the world. Grayna and her husband went through a great deal. She hid him in a cellar for a year and a half, endured no end of terror, and gave birth to her elder child before the liberation. She suffered a terrible rupture with her family because of the baby, and then they got married. He was a brooding, artistic man, a not entirely successful violinist. Their firstborn, whom I knew very little because he was killed in the year I came here, died on the last day of his service as a conscript. His vehicle was blown up by a mine on the road he was traveling back to Jerusalem from where his unit was deployed. At that very moment Grayna was preparing his welcome home party, but her son did not make it home. A few years later, Metek unexpectedly died of heart failure and she became totally withdrawn. I spoke to Grayna several times during those years and her conversation was invariably polite but completely without substance. I could see only that the threads which bind a person to life had been greatly weakened.

I know even more about death than I do about women, and again it is through the war. There is nothing more vile and unnatural in this world than war. How it perverts not only life but even death. Death in war is bloody, full of animal fear, always violent, and what I was obliged to witness—mass murder, the execution of Jews and partisans—was fatally destructive also for those carrying out the atrocities. People know very little about those who did the killing, but I was intimately familiar with them. I lived under the same roof as one of them, a Belorussian called Semyonovich, and I saw him drinking himself to oblivion and the terrible way he suffered. His sufferings were not just physical or moral, but an inextricable combination of the two. They were the torments of hell.

When I became a priest in a Polish parish I saw another side of death with the old village women dying after the war. I would be called to administer the Viaticum and there were times when I clearly saw whose hands I was committing them to. They were met by the Powers of Heaven, and departed with happy faces. Not always, but several times I witnessed that and so I know how death should be in a world which has not been perverted.

But suicide, Władek, suicide! The soul itself repudiating its existence. Poor Grayna! Extroverted people rarely resort to this act. They are able to find a way of projecting their suffering outward, sharing it with somebody, distancing themselves from it. She saved her husband’s life but found herself incapable of living after he was gone. They went everywhere together. She never left the house without him. In the morning he would accompany her to the sewing business where she worked, and come in the evening to bring her home.