by Lily Brett
“It’s in the heart of the old city,” Ruth said. Edek conferred with the driver again.
“He says you cannot drive in the old city.”
“We don’t want to drive,” Ruth said. “We don’t have a car.”
“He says he has got a better hotel,” Edek said. “It is only two miles from the old town.”
“I want to be in the old town,” Ruth said. “I don’t want to be stuck in the depressing outskirts of the city.”
“He says this hotel, what he recommends, the Demel, is famous for their excellent cooking,” Edek said.
“We’re not going to Kraków for the food,” Ruth said.
She felt furious. Who did Edek think he was talking to? He was talking to a Lódz taxi driver, not the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine or the travel editor of the New York Times.
“I used a top travel agent to make this booking,” Ruth said to Edek.
“The same travel agent what did book us into the Grand Victoria in Lódz?” Edek said.
“The Grand Victoria, unfortunately, is the best there is, in Lódz,” said Ruth. What was wrong with her father? Why did he instantly trust every Polish cabdriver he came across? Why didn’t he see the shifty expressions and the greasy glances?
Marek was looking down at his lap. He looked uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry to have this argument in front of you,” Ruth said to him. “It is just the tensions of travel.”
Marek shook his head, as if to ward off Ruth’s explanation. “You do not have to explain to me,” he said. “We are nearly there,” he added. And smiled. He had the sweetest smile, Ruth thought. She wondered how old he was. It was hard to tell. He looked about eighty.
They arrived at the cemetery. Edek paid the driver. Ruth was struck by the quiet outside the cemetery. There was a strangely peaceful silence sur-
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rounding the cemetery. Could silence be peaceful? she thought. Silence could certainly be frightening or ominous or suspenseful. She saw no reason why it couldn’t be peaceful. Silence could be imbued with whatever you wanted to imbue it with, she decided. This silence felt peaceful to Ruth.
A sign outside the cemetery said CMENTARZ ZYDOWSKI. Jewish cemetery.
Ruth knew that Israel Poznanski had bought the land for this cemetery and donated it to the Jewish community. She knew the cemetery had been opened in 1892.
Marek had the key to the cemetery in his hand. All three of them were standing in front of the gate, which was the entrance to the cemetery.
“I want to introduce myself,” Marek said slowly. “My name is Marek Kowalski.”
“You told us this, already,” Edek said. Ruth glared at him.
“I have some more to tell you,” Marek said. “I come from Lódz. My mother was Helena Kowalski. My father was Tomasz Kowalski. My father died when I was eight years old. My father was not Jewish.”
“He does speak a good English,” Edek said, under his breath, to Ruth.
Ruth glared at him, again.
“My mother was Jewish,” Marek said. “I was in hiding with my mother, Helena Kowalski, during the war. My mother died last year. She was ninety-five. I am seventy years old.”
Ruth was shocked that Marek was only seventy. She was very moved by Marek’s touchingly formal introduction of himself. No one introduced themselves like that anymore. No one thought it was necessary to tell anyone any more about them than their latest accoutrement, a car, a piece of jewelry, or an item of clothing, revealed.
“Thank you,” she said to Marek. She looked at him. It was hard to believe that he was only seventy. He looked so much older.
“Let us go inside,” Edek said.
Marek unlocked the door. “Would you like to walk for a time first?” he said to Ruth. “Or would you like me to tell you about the cemetery before we start?”
“We will walk,” Edek said. Ruth didn’t mind. She wanted to take in the atmosphere. To feel the cemetery before she heard what Marek had to say.
Just inside the entrance to the cemetery was a mound of earth.
“This man had to be buried above the ground,” Marek said, pointing to T O O M A N Y M E N
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the mound of earth. The mound looked forlorn and alone. The buried man was not far enough into the cemetery, Ruth thought. He was too close to the front gate. Too far from the rest of the dead.
“They did not have time to bury him?” Edek said.
“The ground was too frozen,” Marek said. Edek looked closely at the small marker on top of the mound. “He did die two years ago,” Edek said to Marek. “The ground was not so frozen in summer.”
“That is true,” said Marek.
“I suppose they did forget,” Edek said.
A few flowers and branches were scattered on the mound. Ruth was glad that not everyone had forgotten this man. Ruth noticed an old red plastic cup lying near the side of the mound. She kicked it away.
“We will start our walk, then, on one of the two principal axes of the cemetery,” Marek said. They looked around for Edek. He had already run off and was halfway down a small path. “We will follow your father,”
Marek said to Ruth.
It had snowed lightly overnight. Small patches of white snow dotted the earth. A gray mist thickened the air. The leafless trunks and branches of trees had a light white frosting. This part of the cemetery was quite unkempt. Large tufts of weeds sprouted up against the sides of broken tombstones. Even the weeds had a ghostly beauty.
Ruth walked behind Marek. She could feel something falling away from her. Something lifting. Her limbs felt relaxed. What was she losing?
she thought. She was losing her headache, she realized. She was losing the stomachache that led, so frequently, to nausea. How did she know that these things were leaving? She could just tell. She stopped beside a particularly high pile of weeds and tilted headstones. The weeds were entangled with fragments of stones that must have come from nearby graves. She could see bits and pieces of abbreviated inscriptions on some of the stones.
She wanted to clear the weeds away. Put the broken stones back together again. Mend the tablets and markers and memorials. She knew it couldn’t be done. It was a bit like Humpty Dumpty, she thought. She was immediately shocked by that thought. How could she be so irreverent?
How could she think about a nursery rhyme here? The words to Humpty Dumpty went through her head. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s
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men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Maybe it was not so irreverent, she thought. Maybe it was appropriate.
Two exquisite headstones, side by side, caught her eye. Sculpted, in relief, across the top of each headstone was a broken tree. The tree was broken in half. The top half, with all its branches and leaves, was draped elegantly almost to the bottom of the headstone. The smaller of the two headstones had JAKOB HORWICZ in a diagonal bar across the left-hand corner. The inscription on the other headstone was in Hebrew or Yiddish. The broken tree must symbolize a truncated life, Ruth thought. Marek came up to her. “The broken tree symbolizes the end of life,” he said.
Edek found Ruth and Marek. Edek was slightly out of breath. He had come running back from whatever part of the cemetery he had been in.
“You seen enough?” Edek said to Ruth. Ruth was shocked.
“We’ve only been here for five minutes,” she said.
“How many minutes do we need to be here?” Edek said. “A cemetery is a cemetery.”
“A few more,” Ruth said. Edek shrugged his shoulders and walked off.
“Don’t lose us, Dad,” she called out after him. He laughed.
“You think I am going to let you leave me in the cemetery,” he said. “No way, brother.”
Ruth smiled at Edek’s combination of the two colloquialisms, “no way,”
and “brother.” “Well, just make sure you can see us,” she said.<
br />
“Okey dokey,” he said. Ruth almost laughed. The Lódz cemetery was making her father more Australian by the minute. She smiled at Marek.
“This is difficult for him,” she said, nodding in the direction of her father.
“Of course,” Marek said.
Ruth walked ahead of Marek. She was glad to be on her own. She was quite pleased that her father had wandered off. Well, he hadn’t exactly wandered off, he had run. As though he was running from a ghost. Maybe, in this place, he was.
Ruth realized that a large calm had descended on her. She felt steady and unstrained. The trouble that so often brewed and bubbled in her brain had been quelled. As though someone had poured a balm over her, and hushed her anxiety. She felt almost groggy with peacefulness. Almost slug-T O O M A N Y M E N
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gish with a quietness she had rarely experienced, as though she had been injected intravenously with a tranquilizer or sedative.
What had pacified her? she wondered. Was it her proximity to people she had always felt close to? The proximity to the dead? They weren’t her dead. She knew that. Her dead weren’t buried like this. Her dead were burnt in outdoor ditches or baked, like roast meats, in ovens. But these dead, the dead in the Jewish Cemetery in Lódz, were the closest to her dead, her family, that she would ever get. She knew that.
She kept walking. She felt so calm she wanted to cry. Was this calm what normal people felt like? Were there people who lived without the edginess and tension and nervousness that were normal for her? She didn’t know.
She passed a group of stubby stumps, the remains of tablets and markers, sticking up from the ground. They looked like big, thick, broken, gray teeth. She felt sad. What had been there? Who was buried beneath that piece of earth? Buried beneath those sunken and broken stone molars and bicuspids, with only cracked and shortened marble dentures as markings.
She arrived at a whole field of headstones still upright, still in one piece.
The headstones were dwarfed and enveloped by tall, wild weeds. Ruth couldn’t reach them. She was pleased that they were at least intact, if out of reach. Some mushrooms were growing around the foot of the tree Ruth was standing beside. The mushrooms looked alive. Healthy and vigorous.
Cemeteries were probably composed of agriculturally enriched earth, Ruth thought.
She looked for her father. She couldn’t see him. She didn’t want to call out to him. She didn’t want to disturb the silence. She felt it would be blasphemous to shout in this place. You never knew whom you might startle.
She really had to stop thinking of dead people as being alive, she thought.
It was no good for her to think this way. How could dead people be startled? That was absurd. She called out to Edek. There was no response. She looked around her. Nothing else had moved or changed. Nobody was bothered by her shout. She couldn’t see Marek. Maybe he had followed Edek. She wasn’t worried. She was sure she would catch up with both of them soon.
There were symbols on many of the headstones and tombstones in the cemetery. This was quite different from the plain, unadorned monuments and memorials in the Jewish Cemetery in Springvale, Melbourne. Plant
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motifs were common here, and a pair of hands in a gesture of blessing was engraved and embossed on small and large stones and columns and arches.
The symbols often referred to aspects of the dead person’s life. There were books for scholars of the Talmud and a basin and ewer, a pitcher with a flaring spout, for descendants of the Levites, attendants in the temple, and for teachers of the law.
Images of extinguished candles represented the end of the lives of some women. This was an allusion to the lighting of the candles on the Sabbath, a job always done by women. An alms box was a symbol of generosity or charity, and a crown signified fidelity in a marriage. Ruth was fascinated by the graves and their symbols. She had read about the burial symbols of Jews, in Manhattan, months before she had left for Poland. She had known that she would be visiting the Bracka Street Cemetery. She had read that there were over one hundred and eighty thousand graves in the cemetery.
There was a balance and harmony in the cemetery that was palpable. As though its inhabitants were as cohesive in their death as they were in their lives. As though the community of scholars and teachers and lawyers and workers and watchmakers and artisans and industrialists and rabbis and doctors were still alive. Although they had shifted into another dimension, unchanged. Ruth could feel the symmetry, the unity. She could feel the love in the community, the husbands and wives, the families.
“Where were you?” Edek said, in a loud voice. Ruth got a fright. She jumped.
“Marek and I was looking for you everywhere,” Edek said.
“You gave me an awful fright,” Ruth said.
“We was worried about you,” Edek said.
“I’ve looked for you a couple of times,” she said.
“Well, we are together, now,” Marek said.
“Okay, forget about it,” Edek said to Ruth. “I did find you.”
Marek put down his yellow shopping bag.
“This cemetery has been designated a national monument of the example of nineteenth-century architectural thoughts,” he said.
Edek groaned. Ruth hoped that Marek hadn’t heard the groan.
“The architectural thought that is being recognized is the turning of existing fields and small farms close to the town into a place for the burial of the dead,” Marek said. Edek kicked at some dirt with his foot.
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“Okay,” Edek said, briskly.
“One of the architects who drew up the plans was Adolf Zeligson, who also designed the preburial hall,” Marek said.
“Thank you very much,” Edek said. He went to move on.
“I have not finished yet,” said Marek. He looked hurt.
“Forgive my father,” Ruth said.
“Why should he forgive me?” Edek said. “I did not do anything wrong.
How did I know that he was not finished?” Edek looked wounded, now.
“I didn’t say you did anything terrible,” Ruth said to her father.
“Are you ashamed of your father?” Edek said.
“No, of course I’m not,” she said.
“Maybe I was right. Maybe I should have stayed in Melbourne,” Edek said.
“Let us look at the mausoleum of Poznanski,” Marek said.
“Oh, Poznanski,” Edek said. “He was very rich.”
“Very, very rich,” Ruth said.
“Where is Poznanski’s grave?” said Edek.
“Not far,” said Marek. “Follow me.” Ruth and Edek followed Marek.
Ruth felt sorry for her father. She shouldn’t have apologized for him.
She should have been more sensitive. He was eighty-one and she had dragged him into a cemetery. A cemetery saturated with dead Jews. Edek probably had relatives who were buried here. The names on the graves were probably reviving many memories for him. Difficult memories. She should be taking more care of her father, she decided.
“Wow,” said Ruth, when she saw the mausoleum that housed Israel Poznanski and his wife. It was enormous and imposing. It stood above and towered over everything else in the cemetery. Ruth had never seen a mausoleum of this size built for a Jew. Four columns supported a large dome.
Arched windows were built into the dome. Ruth walked up the steps of the monument. A locked wrought-iron gate prevented her from going inside.
She peered inside. She could just make out the intricate work of the mosaic tiles that lined the interior of the dome. The monument Poznanski had built for himself. It was quite beautiful, Ruth thought.
“It is very big,” Edek said.
“It sure is,” said Ruth.
“I think it is too big,” Edek said.
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“A lot of people might agr
ee with you,” she said. “But I think it is beautiful.”
“You always must like what normal people do not like,” Edek said. He turned to Marek. “That is my daughter. If ten people does like something, my daughter for sure will not like it,” he said. Marek looked nervous. He clearly didn’t want to get involved in any domestic disputes.
“Israel Poznanski and his wife, Eleonora Poznanski, are buried here,”
Marek said. “Inside is a mosaic which is comprised of approximately two million pieces of glass.”
“Two million, oh, brother,” Edek whispered.
“This is possibly the only Jewish tomb in the world decorated with mosaics,” Marek said.
“I did never see something like this, on a grave,” Edek said.
“You haven’t seen many cemeteries,” Ruth said.
“I seen enough,” said Edek. He looked annoyed with Ruth. “I was trying to be nice to him,” Edek whispered to her.
“He can hear us, Dad,” she said.
“He cannot hear me,” Edek said. “He is an old man.”
“Can I take a photograph of you in front of Poznanski’s tomb?” she said to Edek.
“What for?” he said. “A photograph in a cemetery? I will be in a cemetery myself soon enough. I don’t need a photograph in a cemetery.”
“Okay, okay,” she said.
“Here are also other monuments for the families of the wealthy Jews,”
Marek said, pointing to nearby sites. “There are the tombs of the family of Marcus Silberstein, the Prussaks, the Jarocinskis, the Rapaports, and some other important Jewish families,” he said.
“The Rapaports,” Ruth said. “They must be the Rapaports whose palace your father bought.”
“I suppose so,” said Edek. He paused for a moment. “We was not rich like these rich Jews from Lódz” he said.
“They were mega rich, I think,” Ruth said.
“We was normal rich,” Edek said.
“These mausoleums, sarcophaguses, and tombstones are made in a variety of materials,” Marek said. “Black granite, white marble, sandstone, T O O M A N Y M E N
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wrought iron. They are built in many styles. Neoclassicism, Historical, Art Nouveau, Modernism.”
