The Memory Palace (30 page)

Someday, I will live in a quiet green place, off a winding country road. My house will be small but warm, and the rooms awash with light. The floor will be terra-cotta red. My studio will be like the simple room of a scribe, filled with pots of paints and sheaves of paper-thin gold. There will be an arched window in the room with luxuriant vines. Outside, I will have a small, enclosed garden, dense with vegetables and flowers, lavender, basil, and rosemary, the herb of remembrance. And if I look out the window at just the right moment, the garden will be illuminated in the golding hour of the day.

On Love and War

I recently made a rough map of the Arab world, including a scene of the last conflagration in Afghanistan—the latest Great American Witch Hunt. In my day, they went after the artists and writers, the union organizers and Communists. Now it’s people with turbans. Someone’s always fighting someone, somewhere. I remember young men from school, going off to war. I remember Lester Goodman who I loved, the only boy I ever loved. Lester took me to concerts, to plays. Lester and I, we could have had a life. When Lester came home from the war I had already met the bastard father of my girls. Some boys from my neighborhood didn’t come home. They say they died there fighting but I think the U.S. government sent them to the camps. They did it to the Japanese, why not American Jews? I was lucky. I could have been somebody’s lampshade. Thinking of that old Kashmiri song: Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now?... Whom do you lead on rapture’s roadway far, Before you agonize them in farewell? Never have I kept The Enemy at bay, nor have I been lucky in love or war.

Isn’t one’s true abode any wild place, any firestorm or night of discontent...?

Gretel Ehrlich,
Islands, the Universe, Home

I am a refugee,
my mother wrote in her diary from 1992.
I’m looking for my children and the key to my home.
In the fall that year, my mother wrote her first letter to me after her disappearance two years before:
Dear Daughter, Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Four more years till the Year of the Rat then eleven more to go. Baruch atah adonai, elohenu melech ha’olam. One may think an enemy has passed, but how can one be sure?
I was traveling in Israel at the time, but she thought I was still living somewhere in Europe:
My only motherly advice to you in travel
, she wrote, is to bring your own linens, towels and especially washcloths. And consider purchasing a World Atlas and Almanac. By the way, the people here in Chicago are not friendly.

From her diaries, I learned that when my mother moved to Chicago, she began studying geography and several languages, including Italian, German, Hebrew, and Spanish. She also reviewed the Russian, French, and Yiddish she already knew. It appeared that she was planning on tracking me down overseas. She drew maps and labeled each country in four different languages and made charts with pictures of things she wanted to remember the words for, such as
mother, daughter
, and lost. She filled out a passport application but got stuck in the place where they asked for her birth date. She wrote
1926, the year she was born, then crossed it out and wrote in 1940, then crossed it out again. My mother was also reading a book called
How to Locate Anyone Anywhere Without Leaving Home
. She hired a private detective to hunt me and my sister down, paid him $200, then changed her mind, and hired a different man. She also cut out the weather forecast each week from a section in the
Chicago Tribune called
“Weather for Travelers” and kept track of the rise and fall of the dollar in the rest of the world. Should she stay or should she go?

After I returned from Italy in the winter of ’91, I signed a contract with HarperCollins for a children’s book series on world cultures, based on the work I had done at the Field Museum. My sister begged me to change my name. Our mother could find us through my books once they came out in stores. The day I went to the courthouse in Chicago, the judge asked me to declare why I was changing my name. “I’m a writer and have decided to take my pen name as my own.” How easy it was to lie, make up a different identity with a new Social Security card, new credit cards and picture IDs. What if I had told the truth: “I am changing my name because I don’t want my mother to find me. I don’t want to take her in and support her, keep vigil all night so she doesn’t set my furniture on fire. I am changing my name because I am selfish. I want to be an artist. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.” When I returned from the courthouse a bouquet of flowers was waiting for me from my sister with a note:
A rose by another name will still be sweet.

In the summer of ’92 I decided to take a three-month break from my book series and go to Hilai, an artists’ residency in Israel’s Upper Galilee. In exchange for housing, I was expected to do some kind of community cultural project. My plan was to bring together local Arab and Jewish children through writing workshops. I had done a similar project in the 1980s teaching art to American children along with Guatemalan children displaced by the U.S.-Contra conflict.

A couple of weeks before I left town, I spotted a woman walking by the Heartland Café in Rogers Park. She looked just like my mother. Could that be her? It was eighty-five degrees but she was wearing a dirty wool cap and
coat, pushing a cart full of garbage bags. Why wouldn’t she move to Chicago? Even if she believed I moved to Europe, wouldn’t I eventually come back? At the time, I didn’t know that she was already living there drawing maps of the Middle East and memorizing the Song of Songs: “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.” When I boarded the plane for Israel, my mother was beginning her studies in Hebrew and the Kabbala. We had been living parallel lives in the same city for nearly two years without knowing it—me in a quiet basement apartment in the Gold Coast home of my friends Bob and Nancy; my mother in subsidized housing, run by Jesus People, on trash-strewn Wilson Avenue, just a few miles from my home.

A man sits in a refugee camp, cutting pieces of paper for hours. He’s never seen a pair of scissors before and the wind rises up from the mountains and blows the tiny slips into the air like flecks of snow, and the man keeps cutting and a silent crowd gathers, and the wind rises again and more slips of paper float away. It’s someone else’s memory, not mine, a story a friend tells me about the Ethiopian refugee camp next to my apartment in Israel. The scissors had been a gift to the man from his son, whom he had been separated from for ten years. What gift would I give my mother if I could see her once again?

It’s a hot August day and I’m walking to the Arab horse stables in Tarshiha, next to the Jewish town of Ma’alot where I am staying. I stop outside the refugee camp and peer in. I can see where the man must have sat all day, making confetti after years of loss. I watch some Falasha children trace their hands with colored chalk on a long concrete wall. When they left Ethiopia they were told about their exodus only an hour before the plane took off and weren’t permitted to carry anything except the clothes on their backs. All they had with them were their hands and a name. I haven’t seen my mother in two years. What did she carry with her when she left her house behind?

When I arrive at the stables, I run into Dennis, an American journalist who is staying at Hilai. He looks out of place with his blond hair, faded red baseball cap, his big map shoved into his back pocket. On the trail, Dennis
lags behind, while I ride on ahead. My horse breaks into a run and Dennis disappears in a cloud of dust. I take the mare down curving roads, galloping hard.

I enter a biblical landscape, beyond the olive groves, tobacco fields, and farms. A lizard darts from beneath a rock; another follows. I lose myself in the movement of the horse, in the red-ocher earth, the open sky. I gallop down goat paths, past rows of tobacco plants beneath the harsh sun, past pheasants, doves, snakes, a mare and its little foal. I don’t want the day to end, the machine of muscle, the whirl of hooves below. When I’m in motion I feel safe and free—on a horse, a bicycle, skating on a pond, swimming in the sea.

When I return to the stables, the stable owner’s wife offers me
za’atar
on warm pita with thick Arabic coffee, fresh creamy labneh and olives. I sit and wait for Dennis in the shade. What would it be like to move here—to a country I feel no love for or attachment to, even though my Jewish friends in America say I should?
I hope you marry a Jew,
my mother always said.
You could honeymoon in the Holy Land.
Growing up, I didn’t know any Jews and was even beat up once in St. Mel’s playground for “killing Christ.” Afterward my mother told me it was because I was one of the Chosen Ones. “Just don’t tell anyone,” she said. “Next time they’ll slit your throat.” But on the way home from Tarshiha, it’s the Orthodox Jewish kids from the local yeshiva who attack me, bombarding me with stones for wearing shorts on Shabbat.

Later, that evening, I take a walk with Dennis to the edge of town. Ma’alot, a Jewish settlement built in the fifties after the War of Independence (what Palestinians call “The Catastrophe”), is much greener and cooler than the ancient Arab town of Tarshiha, where the stables are. Dennis and I sit on the side of a rocky hill and look out at the distant lights of Peki’in and Lebanon. The southern security zone, the supposed “buffer zone” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) created to protect northern Israeli Jews from infiltration and attack, is only ten kilometers away. Rows of cypress trees surround us—Lebanon cedar and pine trees planted with money from American Jews. The Arab towns surrounding Ma’alot look like constellations twinkling beyond the hills. A coyote howls nearby. We listen to gunshots over the border and watch the stars. The lights remind me of the lights in the memory room
for children at Yad Vashem (meaning “a Hand and a Name”), the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The room is made to look like the night sky, one star for every child. I wonder how many stars are in the room; is my mother alive or dead?

“Where do you think the soul goes, Dennis?”

“Is there a soul?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Well, if it does exist, it must die in the body, then live on in people’s memories.”

“So much nature, so much violence.”

“What do you mean?”

“This hillside in Galilee—it’s so lush, all these flowers and birds, this valley of trees. But then everywhere you go you see the IDF, thick as locusts. And they’re just children. Little kids with AK-47s on their backs.”

I want to tell him, or tell anyone, about my mother. But what would be the point? Why burden anyone? Dennis and I talk about war, about Israel/Palestine’s complicated past. He tells me he was in prison in the sixties as a conscientious objector while all his buddies went off to Vietnam. He doesn’t say much about it, though, and seems like he is holding something in too. We sit in silence again. The gunshots get closer. I think of the shootings on Erie Street where I used to live, my grandfather’s basement arsenal, the refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank where families have lived for generations waiting to return home, and all those souls at Yad Vashem. Do the souls of the children live in the room of stars or do they wander their old streets in Vilnius, Warsaw, Budapest, and Berlin? And the souls of the children who died during the Intifada—where are they now? What if my mother falls dead on the street? How would I know?