The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  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?

  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 f
rom 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.