I find Ewa just ridiculous. She lives the life of an empty-headed butterfly, fluttering from one man to the next. Every time she is happy, then unhappy, and she does not get bored by it all, if she gets depressed she just goes on holiday or changes her apartment, or buys another suitcase full of fancy clothes. When she comes to visit me she never wears the same dress twice. She brings two suitcases to last her three days!
If I try to say anything about it she starts yelling at me, I gave up trying to talk to her long ago, everything is my fault, even Witek’s death! For heaven’s sake, I was in a prison camp at the time, what could I do for Witek? And what could I do for either of them while I was tramping the front with my rifle, a tin of stew and a box of matches?
What could I do for them when I was sitting in a snowdrift for three days at a time waiting to derail a troop train? What does she know with her two suitcases of frocks? She comes to Israel and do you think she stays with her mother? No, she’s off to the Sea of Galilee or visiting some convent, she needs to go and see the Virgin Mary when her own mother is stuck on her own for months at a time!
I’m sure you think I don’t know how to get on with people and that’s why I haven’t any friends. Well what you need to understand is that this home I am living in is the best in Israel, and you also need to know that all the people here are bourgeois, rich people, bankers—the very people I have hated all my life, it is because of Jews like them that there is anti-Semitism! The whole world hates them and quite right too all these fine ladies and gentlemen! There are practically no normal people here, in the entire home there are only a few rooms paid for by the state and allocated to normal people, a few people who fought in the war or were wounded in the wars here, and heroes of the resistance. But why is Israel paying all this for me? It is Poland that owes me! I gave Poland all my strength, that is the country I fought for, the country whose future I lived for, and it threw me out, it betrayed me.
Anyway, Paweł, you get the idea. I want to see you. It does not matter all that much but I shall be 78 this year, and you and I played in the same courtyard and have known each other from the day we were born. I shall creak on a bit longer, but only a bit, so come and see me if you want to say good-bye.
I’m entitled to stay at a sanatorium once a year, a mud-bath spa on the Dead Sea, so if you do decide to come don’t make it December because I shall be there. Of course, they only let us go there in the low season because we’re getting it free. Or perhaps you will come in December and I will get you a room in the sanatorium. I will pay for it of course and we will be able to talk about old times there, so you would only have to pay your fare. Of course the sights in the center are not very cheerful, a lot of people in wheelchairs, me included incidentally. In spring, when it’s the high season, needless to say it’s only fat cats from all over the world who get treated there—and the veterans the heroes and all the old trash are not allowed anywhere near or they would spoil the look of the place. Our whole life has passed, Paweł, and the world is not a bit better than it was. You understand me.
Write before you come because Ewa is planning to come and I don’t want both things to happen at the same time. Look after yourself.
Rita
14. June 1986, Paris
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ETTER FROM
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AWEŁ
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ANUKYAN
Dear Ewa,
I have just returned from Israel, after going there to visit Rita. I am very ashamed not to have done so before but only after receiving a desperate letter. Knowing her personality, I can imagine what it cost her to write like that.
First of all, let me reassure you that nothing bad is happening with your mother. She is growing old like the rest of us, and remains just as peremptory and unyielding, just as loyal and idiotically honorable. I have never come across anyone so willing to take the shirt off their back and give it to the first person they meet. It is not easy to have her as a mother or even, under anything like normal circumstances, as a friend. In appalling circumstances, though, in the face of death, you couldn’t find a better person. She dragged a wounded companion on her back for two days. He was dying and begged her to shoot him, but she hauled him back to base, where he died an hour later. Who else is capable of that kind of heroism?
Ewa, you are a disgrace! Find the time to visit the old lady. Of course, she is made of iron, but try to find the time to stroke the hair of that diabolical old lump of metal.
Do not go on getting even with her. She is what she is, a real Jewish battleaxe, a Jewess with tight little fists she swings at the first sign of injustice. She is as intolerant and unbending as our forebears and she will go to the stake for her ideals. Anybody reluctant to be burned at the stake she despises.
Me, for example. I unwisely boasted I had received an award for my book about the partisan struggle in “Yiddishland,” and for my pains had a whole bucket of shit upended over me for selling our sacred past for filthy lucre. It has been translated into English and German and you are wrong to refuse to read it. There are a few words in it about your mother, too. I will send you the book anyway and the time may come when you find it of interest. Which language would you prefer it in, English or German? It is never going to be published in Polish.
As always, Israel made a great impression on me. I had not been to Haifa before and was very taken by it. More so than by Tel Aviv, which I find a dull city with little history. Haifa has almost as many strata as Jerusalem.
Rita has moved to a new room and has an amazing view from the balcony of the whole of Haifa Bay. You can see the River Kishon. There is a fairly dire industrial zone there with cooling towers and warehouses but from above, you don’t see the warehouses. I went there for its historical interest. As you are a young woman who, in Jewish terms, is wholly uneducated, you don’t know “Mame-loshn,” that is, Yiddish. Most likely you have never even dipped into the Bible, whereas I in my youth attended a heder and gained the rudiments of a Jewish education. So I will tell you that it was precisely here, near the source of the Kishon, that something extraordinary happened in the ninth century BCE, during the reign of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who encouraged the cult of Baal and Asherah. The prophet Elijah, a furious defender of the faith of the One God, organized a kind of competition in which he invited the priests of Baal to bring down fire from heaven to burn the sacrifices they laid on their altar. They called upon their gods at great length but to no avail. Elijah then laid a sacrificial animal on the altar of the One God, poured water three times over the altar, the sacrifice, and the firewood. He then prayed and fire immediately came down from heaven. Our side won. Elijah ordered that all the priests, 400 prophets of Baal and 450 prophets of Asherah, should be put to the sword immediately. That was done there and then. The people returned to the Lord, and Jezebel’s corpse was thrown to the dogs.
That is how our forebears understood justice.
Then I went up Mount Carmel. It was getting dark by the time we reached the gate of the Stella Maris Carmelite monastery. Just as I got out of the car (I was being driven by a very sweet person, a doctor from Russia who works in an old people’s home), a beat up motor arrived and out climbed a short man wearing a misshapen sweater and a battered straw hat. He was a monk from the monastery and, with a joyous smile, he told us all the sights which could be seen from this viewpoint by day. We thanked him and went on our way, and when we were back on the road, the doctor told me this monk was Brother Daniel Stein and very famous in Israel. It was only the next morning, when I was already waiting at the airport for my flight to Paris, that I put two and two together and realized that was the Dieter Stein I had written about in my history of the partisans. He was the one who led the people, including your pregnant mother, out of the Emsk ghetto! You keep asking who your father was. Well, that man did more for your life than your father. If not for him you would never have been born, because if he had not organized the escape, everybody would have been killed.