Authors: Mira Bartók
When I open up the newspaper the next morning, I read about the bombing of a bus in Jerusalem. Almost all the victims are women and children. It is the year of the Oslo Peace Accord and Israel-Palestine is anything but peaceful. My mother would say it is the Year of the Monkey. The Chinese Year, that is—a year of erratic genius, promiscuity, and a strong will.
After breakfast I hear a knock at the door. It is a young Israeli soldier holding out a bag of moist smelly cheese. I had met him in the town square the first day I arrived in Ma’alot. He saw me exit the cab, staring at my map, looking confused. I had protested his helping me that day, but he insisted on escorting me to Hilai, which was how he knew where I lived. I take the dripping bag from his hand. “Thank you,” I say. “Sorry, but I don’t have time to talk.”
The soldier doesn’t smile. He shifts the semiautomatic slung over his shoulder onto his back. When he speaks, his breath reeks of cigarettes and sour milk.
“You come out with me,” he says.
“I have a boyfriend,” I lie. “A
big
boyfriend.” I make a gesture with my hands to show how tall my imaginary boyfriend is. “He is very jealous.”
“He is in America,” says the soldier. “Etan is here.”
An hour later, there is another knock at the door. I think it’s the soldier again but it’s an elderly Jewish artist named Shalom from across the hall. He invites me over for tea.
His apartment is the mirror image of mine—sterile white walls, small bedroom with a single bed and chair, cramped living room with a hot plate and fridge. Shalom’s wife, Nishoma, is busy making tea, their fat yellow Lab sprawled out on the linoleum floor by her feet. Shalom tells me that since World War II, he can’t stand being alone. His wife and dog follow him from room to room. “They sit in my studio while I paint,” he says. “Even back home in Jerusalem.” He laughs and says it’s hard to fit the three of them—him, his wife, and Ishi, their dog—all in the single bed at Hilai.
The three of us chat and drink tea for an hour or so. Then Shalom starts telling stories about the war. I’m surprised he is so open about it. He recounts how he lost his entire family in the camps, except for his little sister. He had a young wife (Nishoma is his second wife), an infant son, nine siblings, a mother and father, and other close relatives. They all died. He and his sister were both placed in Dachau. Sometimes his sister, who worked in the kitchen, would steal things—a scrap of bread, a potato—and slip them
to her brother through the fence separating the men’s camp from the women’s. If Shalom was lucky enough to find a tiny piece of paper and pencil stub or piece of coal, he’d make a sketch for her. “I’d tell her it was a beautiful dream and that she should put it under her pillow that night.”
Shalom says it was a game they had played since childhood. If one of them woke up from a nightmare, the other would draw a new dream to place beneath the other’s pillow. I think of my sister and me in our little room on Triskett Road in Cleveland—her writing stories, me making pictures all day, side by side. I would have drawn a dream for her too.
When the Nazis heard that the Americans were on the way to liberate the camp, they forced the Jews to march in the freezing cold for miles to a clearing in a forest. The remaining survivors were made to dig one giant grave. The SS lined the prisoners up near the edge so they would fall in once they started shooting.
“But the Americans came,” says Shalom. “Before the first shots were fired.”
How is he able to tell me these things? They say that living through a traumatic childhood is a lot like living through the trauma of war. Here is a man who experienced the worst atrocities and I can’t even tell anyone that my mother is mentally ill. Is it shame that makes me hold my secret close?
Shalom says that when the Americans arrived, he had already passed out from hunger and cold. When he woke up, the first thing he saw was a dark empty hole. Even now, he says, he still dreams of falling into that deep abyss. Shalom’s story reminds me of what another man told me in Chicago. The man said he survived the war by hiding himself beneath the corpses in a giant mass grave. But I don’t tell Shalom. After an hour of this kind of talk, I can tell we are all tired of darkness and death.
“Want to see my drawings?” he asks, and opens up a portfolio leaning against the wall. The pictures are all happy ones—Chagall-like women dancing, flying dogs; exuberant and colorful scenes. Not one trace of sorrow.
The next day the soldier brings me a plate of sticky, rotting figs. He leaves it by my door while I’m at the Arab Community Center, trying to arrange the workshops I want to do with the local children. The day after, the soldier
leaves a bag of gooey dates. This time I’ve been to the Jewish Community Center trying to arrange the same thing. Neither community seems to be able to agree on days and times. Most of the Jewish children are religious and can’t meet on Fridays and Saturdays. The Arab kids are all Christians and can’t meet on Sundays. And no one can agree on a weekday or a time to meet after school.
One day, while I’m napping, I hear pounding on my door. I wake up with my heart in my throat. My first thought is: She’s found me! I crack the door open and there’s the soldier again, hands on his hips, gun slung over his back.
“I’m sleeping,” I say. “Go away.”
“I come back at dinner.”
“Thank you, but no.”
“We get falafel. You and Etan. I come back.”
After he leaves, I go downstairs to the office to talk to the building manager. She laughs and tells me that the army boys are harmless.
“He is stalking me.”
“Just because he carries a gun doesn’t mean he’s a stalker.”
“No,” I say. “He’s really stalking me. You have to do something.”
“I’ll talk to the boy. But don’t worry.”
“Tell him to leave me alone or I’ll call the police.”
“This is Israel.” She laughs again. “He is the police.”
One morning I wake up and write a letter to my mother, even though I have no idea where to send it. For my return address, I write the PO box number a friend has taken out for me in New York. But where do you send mail to a person who’s disappeared? I stick the letter in a drawer, sneak downstairs, and head to the soccer field for a game. Through the window, I can see the soldier standing outside the front door of Hilai, so I creep around to the back and hide behind the bushes until the coast is clear.
A Moroccan-Jewish team from Nahariya is playing an Arab team today. I am the only woman in the stands; the men sitting nearby leer at me. The atmosphere is tense. No one cheers for anyone; I’ve never seen such a grim group of spectators. The men shout obscenities at the players, even their own.
It makes me think about the ancient Mayans, who sacrificed the losing team at the end of the game.
A man sitting next to me tells me that there are stabbings at the games. Once, a Jew murdered an Arab and the friends of the dead man went to the town of the murderer the next day and killed him. The police intervened by hosting a reconciliation feast.
“Yet another occasion to roast a sheep,” the man says.
“I wonder how many sheep it’ll take to bring peace.”
“I’ve been here since 1948,” he says. “Don’t count on it.”
“A cynic, I see.”
“Listen, I love this place,” he says. “To me, it’s home. But if I want peace and quiet, I leave the country.”
I tell the man what my friend Nancy said an Israeli cabdriver told her once: “Listen, lady, if you feel safe in a country, you must be on vacation.”
“That’s a good one,” says the man.
“So have you ever been in a war?” I ask.
“Yeah. Fought in ’67, the Six-Day War. I was just a kid.”
“What happened?”
“Was on my way to Sinai with a couple friends from Eilat. We were on a camping trip. Not too many guns in the car, just the normal amount. We set up camp in the desert for the night and started eating dinner. Out of the blue another friend shows up. He says, ‘Listen, guys, you have to go. There’s a war.’ So we drove eight hours back to Eilat.”
“What was it like? The war, I mean.”
“Well,” he says, “one thing’s for sure. You never forget the smell.”
The soldier continues to come, early in the morning as I prepare for my day, in the afternoon when I’m napping, and right before dinner. Sometimes I don’t answer the door or I yell, “Go away!” I feel like I’m in prison. I can recognize the sound of his footsteps now, the way he creeps up the stairs and shuffles on the landing before he knocks. At night, I use the door chain and the deadbolt and sleep with a knife tucked beneath my pillow, a hammer beneath my bed. If I had a dresser, I’d push it against the door.
In early September, my friend Barbara arrives from Chicago to travel with me for two weeks. She’s old enough to be my mother but looks much younger than her age. Barbara has brought a box containing the first four books in my series. They’ve just come out in the States. The books are all written under my new name, Mira Bartók, not Myra Herr. Barbara snaps a photo of me smiling, holding up my books. Flipping through them is bittersweet. I miss my old name. I’ve only had my new one for a few months and I’m still not used to the sound. What else will I have to give up now that I’m no longer who I was before? Herodotus talked about an ancient people called the Atarantes who lived in the African desert; a tribe without names or dreams. Now that I’ve lost my name, will I lose my dreams as well?
I look at the title page of my very first book in the series and feel a little better. I’m glad that I didn’t change my first name too much—only from Myra to Mira. I couldn’t relinquish it or the story behind my mother giving me the name. She said she had named me for her favorite pianist, Myra Hess, who gave free concerts in London during the Blitz. Sometimes, during concerts, there were deafening sounds outside the National Gallery where Myra Hess played—sirens and terrible explosions. She played without stopping even when a thousand-pound bomb sat outside the building. Once, she gave a man a precious orange to fix the leaky roof so no one would get wet or be distracted from the tenderness of Ravel. I think of Italy and the night America bombed Baghdad, how the sky glowed an eerie dark green on TV, and how, that night, despite the bombs, the city was filled with brides.
The day after she arrives, Barbara and I drive with Dennis to the northwest border of Israel and Lebanon to a place along the coast called Rosh HaNikra. In Hebrew the name means “head of the cave,” and in Arabic it is known as Ras-A-Nakura. We have come to see the caves at the foot of the white chalk cliffs. Centuries ago pilgrims carved stairways into the rock so caravans could get through. The labyrinthine network of grottos was formed by seawater pounding against the soft chalk walls for thousands of years.
The weather is perfect: clear sky, low humidity, a cool breeze from the sea. The three of us go into the caves to explore. The water is so translucent that
in some places we can see twenty meters down. There are only two tourists in the first grotto we enter—a Swiss woman and her boyfriend. They are kissing beneath an elegant stalactite swirling over them like filigree. Stalagmites rise up around the lovers like crystal towers from the floor of the cave. Athanasius Kircher wrote about these speleothems—stalactites and stalagmites—in his Mundus Subterraneus, strange subterranean forms made from water seeping through bedrock. I could lie down and sleep in this cool, dark palace of crystals and chalk, the only sound, my breath and the water dripping from above.
We leave the grotto and search for a refreshment stand. On the beach, looking out at the sea, I feel a weight lifting. It’s the relief from the stress of being stalked in Ma’alot, relief from something else too. I become giddy with laughter and want to jump in the waves, release something back into the sea. I picture myself escorting my mother and the soldier to the shore, helping them with their bags into a boat. I say goodbye and push them off toward Cyprus and farther on to Greece.
On the beach, everyone is in love. There are couples everywhere—lovers and soldiers holding hands, kissing, eating ice cream with semiautomatics slung over their shoulders. The sun is setting when we finally leave and drive back to Ma’alot. When we arrive, the town is quiet because it’s Shabbat. That night, I have the first good sleep I’ve had in weeks. The next day I catch the tail end of a story about missiles attacking some spot along the northwestern coast. One of the people killed was a Swiss tourist. Was it the woman we saw kissing in the cave?
It’s mid-September when Barbara and I travel to Jerusalem. We meander through the maze of old stone streets to the Western Wall, where Jews have come for centuries to mourn the destruction of the Temple. According to Muslim lore, it is the place Muhammad tethered Buraq, his great winged steed. We stand in an open plaza and watch bearded Orthodox men in black hats daven, shuffling in place, lost in prayer. I find their movements disconcerting. They look like my mother bobbing back and forth because of tardive dyskinesia. I think about how she told me once that before she died,
she wanted to travel to Israel with my sister and me. I remember her pile of magazine pictures she kept beside her bed: a photo of the Western Wall, one of Moshe Dayan with his black patched eye, a stern portrait of Golda Meir, and publicity shots of her favorite Jew, Sammy Davis, Jr., standing with the Rat Pack, smoking, holding a martini in his hand.
At their post, above the wall, flanking both sides, soldiers with long-range rifles stand guard. Behind the wall and beyond is the Dome of the Rock; to the left, the ancient stables of Solomon. Visitors stick everything in the cracks of the Western Wall—notes, prayers, money, stones, even chewing gum. I write a wish for my mother on a slip of paper:
Please help her.
I roll it into a tiny scroll and push it into a crack between two big yellow stones. “Just in case,” I say to Barbara as we are leaving.
Barbara and I place stones on graves everywhere we go, an old Jewish tradition, and I collect small stones from the ground to take back home. I take them from every place I visit in Israel. On the walls surrounding one cemetery, there are holes from rockets and gunshots. In the Orthodox part of Jerusalem, a young boy hurls a pebble at my back for carrying a bag on Shabbat. I’ve also forgotten to conceal my hair beneath a scarf or a wig. We walk toward East Jerusalem, into the bowels of the medina. Barbara and I wander down streets of stone buildings and boarded up stores; almost every shop is closed, for some reason. “Must be a holiday,” I suggest.