The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (22 page)

Friedman’s translation is far bolder and, I cannot help thinking, far more effective: “The sound! Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground!” Here, he makes no bones about wresting that disturbing singular noun, The sound! from the rest of the sentence entirely, so that it stands isolated as a pure exclamation of horror. The effect of this is twofold. First, it is both moving and somehow disturbing to think that the sound of blood shed in violence could be so terrible to hear that even God can react no more articulately than to cry out as a mere human might, as if clasping his hands to his ears: The sound! But what is really uncanny about this way of handling the strange Hebrew of the text is that is suggests, quite vividly, that even after it is shed, screams of innocent victims do not cease to issue from the earth where their blood was spilled.

W
E LEFT THE
cemetery behind and walked back to the center of town. There, we stopped in front of the house that stands on the site of Shmiel’s house, to take some pictures. As we did so, a tall young Ukrainian, with the blond crew cut and icon’s long face that you see all over this area, emerged from the spacious house and asked us, not without a kind of aggressive suspiciousness, who we were and what we were doing. Again, Alex talked; again, the same story. And again, the unexpected welcome. The boy’s face—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—split into a huge grin, and he motioned us all inside.

He says it’s a big honor, Alex said, not for the first time that day. He says, Please come in.

And so once more we filed in, and the boy, whose name was Stefan, begged
us to sit in the living room, where among the few decorations there was a modest reproduction of
The Last Supper
. He disappeared into the kitchen, and we overheard an urgent, whispered conversation between Stefan and his pretty blond wife, Ulyana. Soon after he emerged with a bottle of cognac and said something to Alex.

He’s inviting you all for a drink, Alex explained. We all made polite noises of refusal, until it became clear that to refuse would be rude. We let him fill our glasses, and we drank. We drank toasts to my grandfather, who was born somewhere very near the spot we were sitting on; we drank toasts to America, and to Ukraine. It wasn’t even noon yet. The high emotion and extreme improbability of the long morning was beginning to take its toll; we were all a bit silly. Ulyana bustled in the kitchen, and before long Stefan emerged holding two dried whitefish by the tails, explaining to Alex that he wanted us to take them home with us. He insisted on another round, and again we drank toasts. Stefan said we all looked alike, and I replied that this certainly reflected well on the honor of our mother. Laughter, more toasts.

Then, thinking of the long and spacious property outside, which ran a good ways down the road toward the church, and which had orchards of apple and plum and quince trees, too, I asked Alex to ask him how they’d come to live in this particular house. Stefan replied, with a smile, that it had belonged to his wife’s father, who’d acquired it after the war. From whom had his father-in law gotten it? we asked. The boy spread his hands in a gesture of bemusement, and smiled the same frowny smile that Maria had given us twenty-four hours earlier, when I’d asked about the castle.

He doesn’t know, Alex said, although I already knew what
nye znayu
meant. Even if I hadn’t known that this towheaded boy with the long, high-boned face of a beautiful Orthodox icon was saying
I don’t know
, I’d have expected it anyway. No matter: if Olga was the closest in time that we’d come to what we were searching for, surely the half hour we spent in that house was the closest in space. On that very spot, they had all lived; and, for all we knew, died as well. It wasn’t until Sydney that we realized how wrong we were.

As we walked outside toward the car, Stefan suddenly rushed up to us with a basket. It was filled with apples, tiny green unripe apples that he’d shaken from one of the trees. He held up the basket and thrust it in our direction, saying something to Alex.

For your mother, Alex said. So she will have fruit from the house that would have been hers!

It was a kind and touching gesture. But I knew that it wasn’t, in fact, the house
where my family had lived and my grandfather had been born, hadn’t been the house where Shmiel wrote those letters. We had already been told that that one had been torn down, either during the war, at the Germans’ behest, or immediately afterward, to make way for the larger, more modern ones constructed by the Ukrainians who, freed at last from the Poles and the Jews who, some of them had always felt, had overshadowed them, oppressed them, exploited them, were, at least until their own turn came, finally the sole inhabitants of the town.

When Cain’s crime is discovered, God announces his punishment: Cain, he says, will be more cursed than the earth that drank his brother’s blood; the earth will no longer be bountiful to him; he will wander the earth a perpetual exile. Much depends on whether we interpret Cain’s response to this dire news as a question or a statement. Does Cain declare, “My crime is greater than I can bear!” or does he wonder, “Is my crime greater than I can bear?” And is it “I shall be hidden from your presence” or “Shall I be hidden from your presence?” Friedman, writing for his modern audience, takes the text at face value—that is, as an abject statement: Cain has no idea how he will bear his guilt and his exile. Rashi, typically, worries about the hidden implications of the text.

For Rashi, a chastened Cain is asking a resigned, rhetorical question that assumes a negative response: he knows well that no, his crime is not greater than he can bear, that he will be able, somehow, to endure his sin, since (as Rashi points out), if God bears
“the higher realms and the lower realms,” how could it be that one man cannot bear his punishment? And he knows full well that no, he will not be hidden from God’s presence: for how, knowing God’s great power, could he ever be hidden from God? (A question, of course, that begs the perhaps more difficult question of why, if no crime is hidden from God, God allows the crimes to be committed in the first place.) For many people it will be difficult not to prefer this older reading, because it suggests that, at least in retrospect, Cain realizes that however far off he might go, into whatever seemingly remote fields and hidden places, the criminal will still be seen by the eyes of God.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
house that had preoccupied me during our trip.

This house, which is located in Striy, formerly
Stryj,
the small city between L’viv and Bolechow, still stood; the problem was finding it. It had belonged to Mrs. Begley, my friend’s mother, the one who kept correcting my pronunciation of the names of Polish towns. Despite my bad Polish accent, however, she was intrigued by my interest in her own vanished world, and soon after that first meeting, Mrs. Begley had me to tea at her apartment on the Upper East Side. At first she seemed skeptical about the intensity of my interest, but soon she was showing me things: old photographs, the Yizkor book from Stryj. She is not a sentimental woman—when she said not to bring any house gifts, that first time I went to her home for tea, in January 2000, and I brought a bunch of flowers, she was actually annoyed; or so it seemed then to me, who hadn’t yet learned to read her complicated signals—but she cried, a tiny bit, on that first Saturday at her house, when she was showing me the Yizkor book.

Seventeen,
she said, embarrassed and annoyed by her tears as she pointed to a blurry photograph of some vanished boy—a nephew, a cousin, I can’t remember now.
Seventeen
he was, he almost made it out.

Then she made an impatient gesture and made me sit at the table, with its fresh white cloth and its dish of pickles, its tray of slices of black bread and lox, the white plate with its formations of cookies and pastries. Her maid, Ella, a soft blond Polish woman in, perhaps, her fifties, nervously approached with a teapot.

You shouldn’t have done all this, Mrs. Begley! As I spoke I suddenly felt as if I were twelve years old, repeating, dutifully, the reflexive courtesies of my Long Island upbringing.

She gave me a look that wasn’t adorable. What do you want me to do? she said, a tone of voice that mixed irritation and indulgence. I’m a Polish Jewish lady. This is what I do.

I ate the salmon, the cookies.

And so it went over the next few months. There was something very formal, almost ritualistic, about these visits; until fairly recently she refused to call me anything but
Mr. Mendelsohn
. The phone would ring and a voice would say,
Mr. Mendelsohn, why don’t you come for tea next week, Friday would be good, yes, Friday, all right, I’ll see you then
. When I arrived she would be waiting in the narrow front hall, upright and elegant in one of the midnight-blue velvet hostess dresses she favored. I would proffer the flowers I’d brought, and ignoring them, she’d shake my hand instead and say, as Ella took the flowers away, Come have something to eat. The two of us would walk slowly down the hall into the dining room, and there we would eat the salmon and cookies and drink the tea, which depending on the weather was either hot or iced, and talk about my children or her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sometimes, after eating, we would go off into the living room, with its dozens of framed photographs of her son and his children and grandchildren, its deep sofa and fresh flowers, with that slightly stale air common in rooms in which there is not a great deal of swift movement, the air of contemplation rather than of activity, the atmosphere of a museum or a memorial, and she would sit in her chair in the corner, high-backed and authoritative, and I would perch on the edge of the deep soft sofa, and talk some more. Then, after not too long, she’d reach for her stick and, rising, as queens or prime ministers do when they want gently but firmly to indicate that the audience was now over, she would say
All right then, so good-bye and thank you
. She would offer me her knotted, cool, paper-dry hand, the way a deposed empress might give hers to a courtier who had known her before the revolution, and I would go.

By the time these visits were taking place, my grandfather, whose stories and secrets and lies I have spent a good part of my life preserving and unearthing and untangling, had been dead a quarter of a century, and with him all the others. And now here I was, having tea every month with this woman, who had been born only eight years after my grandfather was born, who was of his generation and his culture. This is why I felt, when I first started visiting Mrs. Begley, that something had been unexpectedly restored to me, that I had cheated death just a little, just as she had. I had missed so much, when those elderly Jews who had surrounded me when I was a boy, and who had, it turned out, known so much that I now needed to know, were alive. This time, I told myself in the months when I was first getting to know Mrs. Begley, at the onset of the new millennium, I would not let anything slip by, I would be conscious of every word, I would forget nothing. By knowing her, I thought, I
would make a restitution for all those others whom, because of youth or stupidity or both, I had ignored.

And so, immediately before I left for Ukraine, that summer in 2001, I had promised her that we would go to Striy and look for her house. A week or so before I rendezvoused with my siblings at Kennedy Airport I went to her apartment. She had things she wanted to tell me before I went, she had told me one day over the phone. So I went one Friday to her place. She was sitting ramrod straight in her chair in the living room, wearing a velvet gown, with her hand on her cane. We were all business that day: there was only iced tea in the living room as she dictated to me the names of the places I must see when I was there.
Morszyn,
she told me, pronouncing the name of a spa resort for which she still had promotional brochures, in Polish and French, from sixty years before.
Skole
. Then, her hand shaking almost imperceptibly, she drew on a piece of paper a map meant to indicate the location of the house she’d lived in when she was a girl in Rzeszów, a small city halfway between Kraków and L’viv. (I am holding the paper now.) Then she made me write down the address of the house in which she and her husband and then her son, my friend, had once lived in Striy. She was sitting there, austere, ancient, enjoying the fact that she was dictating to me, and pretending not to be excited.