49. 1984, Haifa
F
ROM
H
ILDA’S DIARY
Met Daniel at Lod Airport. He flew in from the Vatican. Met the Pope. He told me all about it. I feel as if I am standing next to the burning bush. It is scary.
50. 1996, Galilee, Nof a-Galil
F
ROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
E
WA
M
ANUKYAN AND
A
VIGDOR
S
TEIN
CASSETTE 4
On 18 March 1984, Daniel was sixty. It coincided with Purim. We decided to give him a family birthday party. The weather couldn’t have been better, very warm and everything was already green. My Milka, as you know, survived the Warsaw ghetto, and any woman who has experienced such hunger is a little obsessed with food. When she cooks for a celebration she multiplies everything by ten. If there are gtwenty guests she cooks for two hundred. Well, on this occasion she cooked as if for a large wedding. At Purim it is traditional to have all kinds of sweets, so for two days Milka was cooking all manner of honey, nut, and poppyseed buns. Her elder son-in-law Adin brought a car trunk–full of meat and started cooking shashlyk first thing in the morning, heating coals, marinating something. Daniel, of course, had no idea of the scale of the celebration. Our grandchildren, at that time we had three boys and two girls, also made themselves useful rehearsing a play. Our large house, four rooms and two terraces, was as crowded with children and food as a beehive. Everything was buzzing, sizzling, and clattering. I was awarded the role of Haman, and in the morning my whole face was painted and I had bushy red eyebrows stuck on.
Children very much love Purim because they can stuff themselves with sweets and yell themselves hoarse. The producer was Moshe, our second son-in-law. He stuck a hessian wig on top of his skullcap, donned some kind of sack, and pulled red rubber garden gloves on to his hands to represent an executioner.
The entire family made a present for Daniel. On the seat of an old chair we moulded a whole life out of plasticine. Everybody lent a hand, Ruth, of course, more than anyone else. In the middle stands Daniel with a staff surrounded by three sheep. Our family is around him. Ruth modeled the figures very recognizably and Aaron, her elder son whom we have nicknamed Bezalel, draws wonderfully and has become an artist. So then, in the middle is Daniel and around him a great procession of little people, Jews in prayer shawls, Arabs in keffiyehs, Ethiopians, Germans in dreadful peaked caps, even with little swastikas on their arms, and a lot of mules and dogs. When everyone had been put in their place, Milka said, “Look, will you, we’ve forgotten Hilda,” so Aaron also sculpted Hilda, very lifelike and taller than anyone else.
Daniel had promised to come at about seven but was very late. Milka was incensed that the food would get cold, but still there was no Daniel.
He appeared only at ten o’clock when it was already completely dark, but the children had hung lanterns and lit torches all through the garden. You should have seen how they welcomed him, with a clamor of rattles, shrieks, and beating drums. Then he was taken to the table and there in the middle stood our present, covered with a silk tablecloth. Daniel removed it and was so pleased and laughed and then for the rest of the evening kept coming back to look at it and finding amusing new details. A toy David, our grandson, was sitting on Shloma’s back and had a cat on his head. Milka had a spoon and saucepan and there was a chicken in the saucepan. It was all so tiny that Daniel had to put his glasses on.
My grandchildren adored him and hung from him like a tree. At night when Milka had cleared everything away, Daniel, despite her vehement protests, helped her wash the dishes. When we were alone he told me he was being summoned to Rome by the Prefect of the Congregation for Matters of Doctrine of the Faith.
“The Inquisition? The Vicar of Loyola on Earth?” I joked, but Daniel did not go along with my joke. He looked at me in surprise and commented, “No, Loyola was the first general of the Order of Jesuits, but never headed the Inquisition. I hope they will not burn me at the stake, but some kind of unpleasantness is sure to follow.”
I had never seen him so distraught before. I wanted to find some way of giving him strength and said, “Don’t be upset. At worst we will find you a job in our moshav. Admittedly we don’t have any sheep so you won’t be a shepherd anymore, but we’ll make you a gardener.”
“No, I don’t think I will go. I won’t go and that’s that.”
About three weeks later he came to see us and I asked whether he was still refusing to go to Rome. “I shall have to go, but I have put it off as much as I could, until the autumn. I don’t need a quarrel, I need understanding.” He sighed.
He went to Rome in late autumn and returned very pleased. “Well, I asked, they didn’t burn you at the stake then?” “No. Quite the contrary. I was in Rome and saw old friends. Poles. I drank mead, and was treated to Kraków sausage.” “So what?” I said. “Why did you have to go so far. There are lots of Poles in Israel. You could even have found a few among your parishioners!” “That’s true, but it’s still pleasant to meet a friend from your old life.”
“Daniel, half the world are your friends.” He just laughed. “Yes, half the world. Not the first half, though, only the second.” It was much later that Hilda told me which friend it was he had met.
8 June 2006, Moscow
L
ETTER FROM
L
UDMILA
U
LITSKAYA TO
E
LENA
K
OSTIOUKOVITCH
Dear Lyalya,
I got food poisoning from eating something ridiculous. I’ve been ill for a day and a half and experienced a whole gamut of emotions: first puzzlement—after all, I eat absolutely anything and never suffer any consequences—then irritation at myself—why on earth do I eat absolutely anything, after all, the tomato juice which I unreflectingly chucked into the dinner had been standing on the buffet for who knows how many days. I remember exactly that I bought it last week to make a Bloody Mary which one of my guests likes. Then I stopped blaming myself because I really felt very ill. I couldn’t take any pills because I was vomiting every half hour from the bottom of my stomach. You can imagine that today my throat, flank, and stomach muscles are still hurting.
Then I remembered all my friends and relatives who had suffered long and painfully—and patiently!—before dying and thought yet again that the supplication for “a peaceful Christian death, painless and blameless” is the most important of all requests addressed to the Lord God. In the meanwhile I was endlessly drinking lemon tea, then soda water, then just water because I no longer had the strength even to plug in the electric kettle. As soon as I stopped drinking, the spasms of nausea became completely unbearable. All the unpleasantness was happening exclusively in the upper half of the organism.
Then Andrey came in and wanted to call an ambulance straight away. For some reason I knew that was not the right thing to do. Then, Lyalya, here is what occurred to me. Because by this time I had indubitably puked out all the tomato juice, I realized that I was expelling all the nightmare I have been gulping down these last months of reading, the painful reading of all those books about the destruction of the Jews during the Second World War, all the tomes of medieval history, the history of the Crusades and the earlier history of the Church councils, the fathers of the Church from St. Augustine to St. John Chrysostomos, all the anti-Semitic opuses written by highly enlightened and terribly holy men. I puked out all the Jewish and non-Jewish encyclopedias I have read over the last few months, the whole Jewish Question which had poisoned me more powerfully than any tomato juice.