Mary of Nazareth (28 page)

         

AND THAT WAS WHERE I BELIEVED MY BOOK ENDED.

What happened next is the best-known story in the world, I thought. Quite apart from the Gospels, countless painters, writers and, in our own day, filmmakers have told it in a thousand different ways over the centuries.

During the several years it took me to research and write this novel, this portrait of “my” Mary, I had made an effort to imagine what this Miriam of Nazareth, born in Galilee, was like, to imagine her as a real woman, living in the troubled kingdom of Israel in the year 3760 after the creation of the world by the Almighty, according to Jewish tradition, the year that was to become the first year of the Christian era.

What the Gospels have to say about the mother of Jesus could be written on a pocket handkerchief. A few vague, contradictory sentences. This void was filled by the imaginations of the novelists of their time, the authors of the apocrypha that flourished up until the Renaissance. These had given rise to a none-too-convincing image of Mary, tailored to suit the tastes of the Roman Catholic Church, and showing a complete ignorance of the history of Israel, of which Miriam was a part.

But the destiny of a book is not sealed in advance. The wind of chance blows over the pages, scattering them, disrupting their carefully planned order, challenging what has long seemed obvious. The fact is that the characters do not exist only on paper. They demand their own lives, their share of surprises. And those surprises disturb the sentences and change their meaning.

         

As chance would have it, then, I found myself, just a few days after finishing a first draft of my novel, on my way to Warsaw, the city of my birth. I was going there to finish
The Righteous Among Nations,
a film about those people—some Christians, some not—who saved Jews during the Second World War, often at great risk to themselves.

I had never been back to Poland since arriving in France as a very young man. I had conflicting emotions about this return: not only the nostalgic but ambivalent pleasure we all feel in returning to the scenes of our childhood, but also an old anger that could never quite be wiped out.

The Warsaw I discovered was quite different from the Warsaw of my memories. That febrile, turbulent world, suffused with the voluble, colorful Yiddish of my grandfather Abraham, a printer by trade, who died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, had vanished. It had been wiped out as thoroughly as if it had never existed.

As Joseph of Arimathea said to Miriam of Nazareth, anger blinds us even when our cause is just.

No sooner had I arrived in Warsaw than my one desire was to leave as soon as possible. To escape the past and those who prefer to ignore it, who have nothing more to teach me. The only reason I stayed was an appointment that had been arranged some weeks in advance with a woman who, I had been told, had saved two thousand Jewish children from the ghetto. Canceling the appointment would have been an unforgivable insult.

And so I went to see her, reluctantly. How wrong I was: Destiny was lying in wait for me.

I climbed three rickety flights of stairs and found myself face-to-face with an old Polish woman with finely drawn features and a youthful expression. When she smiled, her eyes creased and she looked as mischievous as a child. She wore her white hair short, in the style of a schoolgirl in the 1930s, held in place by a barrette just above the forehead. She moved cautiously, with the help of a walking frame.

We exchanged small talk for a while, trying to break the ice. As her name was Maria, I told her that I was writing a book about Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Her face lit up. “You've come to the right place,” she said. “I also had a son named Jesus, Yeshua.”

I stiffened. She took no notice of my unease and started talking about the ghetto. When I asked her how she had managed to save nearly two thousand Jewish children, to my surprise she started to cry.

“We should have saved more. We were young, we didn't know what we were doing….”

She dabbed her temple with a tiny lace handkerchief, and opened her mouth as if about to say more. Then she thought better of it, and silence fell between us.

Over the last twenty or thirty months, I had lived very little in the present day. I had been like an addict, intoxicated with visions of an imaginary Galilee, its infinite plains and dark wooded slopes. I had sailed across the dazzling surface of the Lake of Gennesaret, trod the dusty paths of the white, fragrant villages that had long been swallowed up in the mists of time. Now all of a sudden, those dreams had faded, and in front of me there was a square table covered with a plastic tablecloth, surrounded by three plywood chairs whose blue paint was flaking.

Disconcerted, I forced myself to carry on. I remarked that she had not answered my question.

She looked at me with a kindly, somewhat amused expression. She had no intention of answering me. She now asked a question herself.

“Do you know why so much of Warsaw is raised above street level? You must have noticed that to get to most streets, you have to climb up a few steps.”

I nodded. Yes, I had noticed, but I had no idea of the reason.

“After the war, the survivors didn't have either the money or the time to clear away the ruins of the Jewish houses. Nor did they have time to take away the bodies that were still buried beneath them. So they just bulldozed it all flat, sweeping away what was left of the courtyards, the alleys, the washhouses, the wells, the fountains, the schools…. Once they'd razed everything to the ground, they built houses for the living over the houses of the dead. When you climb those steps, you're treading on the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.”

We fell silent again, both embarrassed. There always comes a moment when the horrors committed by men leave you speechless.

Involuntarily, I found myself staring at the number tattooed on her forearm. She noticed, and covered it with her withered hand.

There were two windows in the room, looking out on one of those communal courtyards so frequently found in prewar buildings in Warsaw. In a corner of the room, there was a tiny white pasteboard chapel, adorned with a picture of the Virgin Mary by Leonardo da Vinci. Between the two windows, behind a sheet of glass speckled with dirt, I saw a photograph of two men side by side, one young, the other old.

Noticing that I was looking at the photograph, she smiled and said, “My husband and my son.”

Then, seeing that I was fascinated by her son's face, she added, “You can see it, can't you, even though the photo's not very good? In him, there was only mercy.”

I studied the photograph more closely. It was true. I noticed that he had that curious look men have when they know what is in store for them. His long hair gave his face an air of fragility, at odds with those strong hands folded over his stomach.

“I used to love his hair,” Maria said. “As silky as a girl's. Of course, they cut it off. Incredible, isn't it, that obsession they had with hair? Like the Philistines terrified of Samson's hair.” She shook her head, lifted her walking frame, and brought it down on the floor in an angry little gesture. “That mountain of hair they had at the entrances to the camps!”

Again, all I could do was remain silent.

I thought to get up and leave with those all-too-familiar images in my head.

She must have read my thoughts. She threw me a mischievous look and said, “Before you go, I'd like to give you something.”

She stood up with the help of her frame. With small cautious steps, she walked to the one closet in the room. Turning her back on me, she rummaged in a drawer and took out a tube-shaped object wrapped in an old Yiddish newspaper. She half turned to me, one hand gripping the aluminum support of her frame, and with the other handed me the object.

“Take it.”

“What is it?”

Beneath the partly torn newspaper, I could feel something hard. I took it out. It was a cylinder made of very thin wood and covered in leather as transparent as skin that had grown darker with time, and as hard as horn. I had only ever seen this kind of object behind glass in museums, but I recognized it. It was one of those tubes used in the Middle Ages to protect writings of some importance: letters, official documents, even books.

“But this is valuable!” I cried in astonishment. “I can't possibly—”

She swept aside my protests. “Take it away and read it,” she said, and closed her eyes.

“I can't take something as valuable as this! You must—”

“It's all there. You'll recognize the words of a woman who wasn't much listened to in her time.”

“Mary? Miriam of Nazareth?”

“Just read it,” she repeated, walking over to the door with little jerks of her frame, this time dismissing me in a way that brooked no reply.

         

The newspaper protecting the case came away by itself, burned as it was by time. I had to struggle a bit to take off the cap. The wood and the brittle leather threatened to break beneath my shaking fingers.

Inside, I found a strip of rolled parchment, which had been carefully wrapped in a sheet of crystal paper.

The parchment, already crumbling at the edges, stuck to the pads of my fingers as soon as I touched it. I rolled it out on my hotel bed, inch by inch, afraid it would disintegrate at any moment.

The parchment had been awkwardly folded. Fragments of text had come away where the folds were. The brown ink had faded and was blurred in places by damp stains. The handwriting was small and regular. My first thought was that the script was Cyrillic, but that was only my ignorance.

To my surprise, as I unrolled the parchment, I found a number of small sheets of squared paper. They, too, were yellowed by time, but they were only a few decades old. This time, I immediately recognized the language: Yiddish.

I sat down on the edge of the bed to read them. As soon as I started, my eyes misted over, and I found it impossible to go on.

I stood up, went to the minibar, took out the few small bottles of vodka that were there, and poured them all into a glass. It was a mediocre vodka, which burned my throat. I waited for it to take effect and for my heart to stop pounding.

January
27
, the year
5703
after the creation of the world by the Lord, blessed be He.

“You, You, holy one, whose throne is surrounded by the praises of Israel, it was in You that our fathers trusted. They believed in You and You saved them. Why not us? Why not us, Lord?”

My name is Abraham Prochownik. I have been living in a cellar on Kanonia Street for months. I may well be the only surviving member of the Prochownik family. Thanks be to our neighbor Maria.

I hope the day will come when the Christians revere her as a saint. I, a Jew, can only hope that she will remain in the memory of men as one of the Righteous among nations. May the Almighty, the God of love and mercy, protect her.

If anyone finds these papers, I want it to be known: Maria saved hundreds of Jewish children. She was deported by the Nazis—may their name be cursed for all eternity—as a Jew, with her son Jesus, whom she called Yeshua, and her husband, her son's father. Father and son both perished in the camps, but Maria escaped with the help of the Catholic Zegota network.

It took ten generations from Adam to Noah, says the Treatise of the Fathers, for the long patience of God to be revealed, even though the generations did all that they could to provoke Him, before He swallowed them up in the Flood.

How long do I still have to live? Only the Lord, the Master of the Universe, knows that.

And only the Lord knows, as written above, if there are any other Prochowniks left apart from me. We were once an illustrious family. According to the legend handed down by my father and grandfather, our ancestor Abraham (whose name I bear) was crowned king in the year 936 of the current era by Slavic tribes who had converted from Paganism to Christianity. The most important tribe was that of the Polanes and our family had been living among them for several generations.

The Lord God of Wisdom no doubt inspired Abraham, and he refused the honor of being king. He told the Polanes that it was not right for a Jew to rule over Christians, that they should find a leader among the members of their own families. He suggested that he appoint one of their peasants who produced the most corn. The man's name was Mieszko, from the Piast family. The Polanes followed his advice and the peasant became Mieszko I.

The Piast dynasty was a long one and always behaved well toward the Jews.

At least if you believe our family legend.

Grandfather Solomon never doubted it. He took it all as absolute truth. The only time he ever raised his hand to me was when I made fun of him one day by claiming that our ancestor Abraham had been nothing but a poor penniless boot maker.

For grandfather Solomon, the one irrefutable piece of evidence that our family had once been great was our family heirloom: the scroll which Abraham Prochownik was supposed to have received from the Piasts to show their gratitude.

On the day of his bar mitzvah, every boy in our family had the right to open the case, unroll the scroll a little and contemplate the writing.

According to grandfather Solomon, this scroll was given to the Piasts by none other than Saint Cyril himself when they were converted. It is only a copy. The original scroll was written in Hebrew and Greek. But both the copy and the original contain the same thing: the Gospel of Miriam of Nazareth, Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Grandfather Solomon used to tell us that Helena, the mother of Constantine the First, the Roman Emperor who converted to Christianity, brought it back from Jerusalem. She claimed that the original scroll, made of papyrus as was the custom at the time, was given to her by a group of Christian women when she visited Jerusalem in the year 326 of the current era to build the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the very spot where Jesus was crucified.