I could buy something to bring with me, but what? Flowers? Or maybe something for dessert? There was a guy on Daniel Street who sold contraband chocolate. It wasn't very good chocolate, but in these deprived times, it was a luxury.
But that would not take me long, and there would still be hours to go till six. Before that I would go see Henrietta to give her my report. To destroy her world. The thought dampened my heightened spirits, and the grin faded from my lips.
There was no escaping it. I had taken upon myself the burden of giving Henrietta bad news when I took on her case. Back then, I'd assumed the bad news would be that I had not found any trace of her son and did not think I ever would. The news I would deliver to her this afternoon would be worse, but it was my obligation to do so just the same.
And then the case would be done, and I would see Mira again.
I ran the talk I'd just had with her over in my mind, pausing when I got to the bit about Esther's and Willie's graves. Mira was right: Henrietta would want her son buried under his real name.
I thought about the two graves, marked with false names, untended for ten long years, and I knew that I was not yet done with this case. There was one last place I had to go, a final goodbye I had to say.
In the next block over was a bus stop. I waited for fifteen minutes till the bus came. It wound a long, circuitous route through the city. Forty minutes later, it discharged me at the entrance to Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery.
By the gate to the cemetery slumped a weary-faced old man on a three-legged chair next to a rickety table topped with fat candles in flimsy metal saucers. Seeing me approach, he pushed himself an inch higher from his slouched position.
"Light a candle for the soul of the deceased," he suggested in a muffled, thickly accented voice.
I shook my head and walked past him into the cemetery. The dead, I believed, could not be helped by the lighting of a flame. They were beyond such gestures. I did not believe in the power of prayer, either. I had seen it fail all too often in Auschwitz.
There was a small shack just inside the gate with a rectangular sign that read ADMINISTRATION over the open door. Inside, behind a cluttered desk, sat an overweight bearded man peering over the thick glasses straddling the tip of his nose at a copy of the
I cleared my throat. He raised his eyes and asked me what I wanted. I asked whether he could direct me to the graves of Esther and Erich Kantor. He consulted a ledger and read off the row and plot numbers. After giving me directions, he returned his attention to his text.
I walked up the central avenue fringed by long rows of bleached headstones. Here and there benches had been placed in the shadow of cypresses. Birds flitted from branch to branch, their chirping an incongruous merry note in this place of mourning. I saw no other visitors. I was alone in a sea of gravestones.
To my right stood a large stone marking the communal burial place of unnamed soldiers from the War of Independence. Why unnamed? Because, I suspected, these were soldiers who had survived the Nazi extermination campaign in Europe, and, like me, had arrived in Israel without family or friends. Some had gone to the battlefield straight from the ships that had brought them to the Holy Land and had not had time to acquire new friends before they died by an Arab bullet or artillery shell. Now they lay together in the earth for which they'd fought.
Pausing before the mass grave, I couldn't help but contemplate the different manner by which the dead are buried. Some have a personal resting place with a stone bearing their names; some are laid together with other anonymous dead; and there are those, like my wife and sisters and daughters and mother, for whom there is no grave at all. To those I could add the ones who are buried under false names, like Esther Grunewald and Willie Ackerland.
Two minutes later, I was standing at their graves. They had been buried side by side, as was customary with mothers and children who perished together. The headstones were simple white slabs, smudged black by time and weather, laid horizontally on a low stone base, slightly elevated off the ground. Each stone was marked by the Hebrew and Gregorian dates of their birth and death. The right one bore the name Esther Kantor; the left the name Erich Kantor. Below the names and dates was inscribed the traditional acronym entrusting their souls to the Bundle of the Living.
And there were the flowers.
The sight of them brought me up short. A scatter of desiccated petals and shrunken stalks on the headstone bearing the name Erich Kantor. Willie Ackerland's grave. There were no flowers on Esther's grave.
How long ago had they been left here?
In this weather, no more than a week. But the bigger question was, who had left them? And why?
