Do you know what my life is like? It’s like living in a minefield. I avoid danger zones, don’t think about this, don’t talk about that, don’t mention something else. In fact, I try to think as little as possible! It’s only with you that I can talk without fear of disrupting the unstable equilibrium of my idiotic life.
Love,
Ewa
18. December 1991, Haifa
L
ETTER FROM
R
ITA
K
OWACZ TO
P
AWEŁ
K
OCI
SKI
Dear Paweł,
You and I have lived our entire lives side by side we had the same ideals the same goals the same friends but as it happened the Lord has been revealed to me at the end of my days and now I want just one thing to share my joy with all my friends. When a person takes one step toward God God immediately takes two toward them. Only one small gesture is needed to acknowledge that man can do nothing without God. When I think how much energy and strength and what heroism we showed for the purposes not of God but of man I feel great sorrow. I am not asking you to come to Haifa knowing how difficult it is for you to leave poor Mirka but I would like to suggest a little trip to Belorussia. The thing is I have had a letter from an old geezer I was with in the ghetto and from which we escaped together. Anyway they are organizing a reunion of all those who survived and that Jewish priest is coming who helped us to get arms for the escape. It will be interesting to take a look at him. I invite you to come to Emsk where we will meet no doubt for the last time.
Ewa will take me but my English friend Agnessa may come with me too. Not to Łód
Moreover Paweł I will not conceal that I very much want to share with you what I have gained. I regret that my encounter has occurred so late but while a person is alive it is never too late. I pray fervently that our meeting should take place mine with you and yours with the Lord. May God bless you and your dearest.
Your old friend Margarita (Rita) Kowacz
19. January 1992, Jerusalem
L
ETTER FROM
E
WA
M
ANUKYAN TO
E
STHER
G
ANTMAN
Dear Esther,
I didn’t even have time to phone you from home, it was all so urgent. I had a call on the morning of 5 January from Haifa to be told that Rita had died during the night. Grisha immediately took me to the airport. By a completely monstrous route, with two changes and an eight-hour wait in Frankfurt, I got to Haifa and my mother’s funeral took place the next day. Many things today surprised, touched, and even shocked me. It is night now, I am full of impressions and cannot sleep, and then there is the time change. So I have decided to write to you. My mother looked beautiful. At the end of her life she had earned that! The tense, suspicious expression so typical of her all through her life had changed to one of serenity and profound contentment.
Shortly before she died, she had had her hair cut. She had gray hair and a dense fringe at the front instead of that schoolmarmish bun she walked around with all her life. It sounds ridiculous, but it suited her very well.
The funeral service was conducted with great ceremony. The coffined body was taken to the Anglican Mission in Jerusalem, a place whose existence I had never suspected. Before the service, in a very austere hall in the Mission, a Jew wearing a skullcap and prayer shawl came in, a perfectly ordinary-looking Jew, and recited Jewish funeral prayers over the closed coffin. I was sitting on a bench with Agnessa next to me. I was going to ask what was going on but then thought better of it. Let everything take its course. Next a vicar came and conducted the funeral service.
We went out into the garden and I saw how beautiful it was. Lemon trees were in bloom as they are in Sicily at this time of year. Several fruit trees were bare, and one had pomegranates but not a single leaf. The whole orchard was green and there were shrubs which looked like juniper, cypresses, and palms. The sun was bright and cold and everything was very still and dazzling.
“Now we shall drive to the cemetery,” Agnessa said and took me to the railings. Beyond them I saw an intricately eroded cliff of stratified rock.
“We think this is the actual Golgotha, the place of a skull. Don’t you think it looks like it?” Agnessa smiled, revealing her long English teeth. I didn’t understand but then she explained, “It is an alternative Golgotha. You see, at the end of the last century they dug up a water cistern here and came upon the remains of an ancient garden. This garden is new, planted not long ago at all. When they found the cistern they suddenly saw Golgotha, too, although it had never been hiding. This cliff has always been there but nobody paid it any attention until they found a grave in a cave. It seems very likely that it is the grave which Joseph of Arimathea prepared for himself and his relatives.” As she spoke I saw that the rock face really did look like a human skull, with empty cave eye sockets and a sunken nose.
She took me down a side path to a small door set into the cliff. A window had been knocked through above it. Right beside the entrance lay a long stone with a rut hewn in it which looked like a rail. Slightly farther away was a round stone.
“This stone is from a different place, it is slightly smaller in size than the one which sealed the entrance to the cave. That one has disappeared in the course of 2,000 years. If the round stone sealing the entrance is placed on this stone rail, it is easy to move, it simply rolls. That was still difficult for the women. They called the gardener to help them. Go in and take a look.”
I went in as if in a dream. I have after all been to the official Church of the Sepulchre, and on more than one occasion. There I walked into a commotion in an enormous space where one church jostles another and everything is fenced off and chaotic, and there are crowds of old women in black and tourists and servers. The church above the sepulchre has a queue to get into the cave, the tourists are snapping away with their cameras, the tour guides are rattling on in every language, and the whole thing said nothing to my soul.
Here, however, there was nobody and I was suddenly certain that when I went in I would see the abandoned grave clothes. The cave was divided into two crypts, and in the farther one was a stone couch. Goose pimples ran up my arms and I felt that recurrent chill of mine.
Agnessa was standing outside. She smiled. “It does look very much like it, doesn’t it?” It did. Beneath a great fig tree two women in long skirts were sitting on a bench with their large hands folded in their laps. One took a piece of pitta bread out of her bag, broke it, and held out half to her neighbor who made the sign of the cross over her mouth and took a bite.
Four men carried my mother’s coffin to the bus and we drove to the Anglican cemetery. There were no flowers. I had had no time to buy any and the other mourners, fellow Anglicans, put whited stones at the head of the grave as is the Jewish custom.
After the funeral the vicar came over. Like Agnessa he had long teeth and pale eyes. I thought they were brother and sister but then realized they were husband and wife. He shook hands and gave me two forms. On one were written the words and music of a prayer, a stave with clusters of black notes. The second was a certificate about the holding of the funeral service.
Rita always kept documents and papers in perfect order, so now she can rest in peace. Esther, dear, something I never hoped for occurred. I was completely reconciled with her. Later I will have plenty of time to repent and feel guilty and hard-hearted, but today I am completely at peace with her.