

The close of the Nazi death camps was a beginning rather than an end for those who survived. Told through the eyes of a child of Holocaust survivors, _The Gift_ lets us feel the pain and the courage that reaches into the decades beyond the war. Compelling and insightful. A memorable read.

\-- Barb Lundy, poet

Every time I read this memoir (and I have read it several times) I am awed by its beauty and insight. Every time I read this memoir I increase my own insights about how I can live my own life more fully.

\--Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

### The Gift: A Journey of Liberation

by

Ita Willen

SMASHWORDS EDITION

******

PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

The Gift: a Journey of Liberation

copyright 2005 by Ita Willen

Cover design by Loy Whitman

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

We have art in order not to die of the truth

–Nietzsche

*****

Table of Contents

Prologue

Winter

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

Epilogue: Passover

a note about the writer

Prologue

I would love to tell you everything. How it feels to be surrounded by an immense family of ghosts, grandparents who never made it past their forties, uncles and aunts younger than I am now, faces with eyes that shine out of single saved photographs. Nothing is left. Not a trace remains, not a single object, not a single grave.

I think about my Polish Grandmother, an Orthodox Jewess in her mid-forties. Some of her sons stayed in Poland, some escaped to Russia, one returned to die with her. Those who never left held by families with small children, apartments, furniture. The mother of many children. What was it like for her? What went through her mind as she saw herself stripped of everything: her home, her possessions, her family, her clothes and her hair, her life? I'm named after her. I can see her entering the gas chamber, naked. Echoes bounce off the walls. Children are screaming. There must be a thousand people in here. All of them naked. All of them about to die. What is she thinking?

She is only one of my ghosts. I have many. Too many to carry around. I would like to put them down but I don't know where. I can't forget them because every time I see my Father, there they are. There is his mother, younger than himself, with a turn-of-the-century hairdo and soft features. In the only photograph left of her the design on the bodice of her dress is geometric, intersecting triangles like a large Star of David around her neck. She wears it like a mantle, like a yoke. She is still young. She has many sons. She ls about to see into the heart of a terrible vision, Biblical in proportion, devastating as the Apocalypse.

Then, my Father's father. He's there too. A religious man. A disciplinarian. Bearded. Stern. Blue-eyed. In his fifties? Maybe forty-five? His hobby was memorizing calendars. He could tell you on which day any holiday would fall one hundred years into the past or future. What do you suppose went through his mind when he saw the camps? To him religion was the law, a form of discipline where if you did x and y, z would follow. Z turned out to be deathcamps, crematoriums, the ghastly living dead zombies surrounded by Darth Vaders, barbed wire, vicious dogs, men without mercy. Z turned out to be a swastika.

If I could, I would tell you everything. How it was to grow up in a house of mourning. But I don't know if words can convey the inner workings of a heart. I don't think I can tell you anything, even if I try. To tell the truth, I don't want to tell you anything. It's not worth the effort. And you don't want to hear it either. That's the beauty of it . You don't want to hear it and I don't want to tell it. It's like the moment before being confronted with some awful truth.

Why am I taking up this subject now anyway? I've always hated it. Always tried to escape from it. Wished I were anyone but who I am. Now I see that even these ghosts are beautiful, noble and silent as beacons in the night. They are just there. Something happened. Something of enormous, biblical, Cecil B. deMille proportions. A cast of millions. One of the major events of mankind, awesome in its capacity to engender questions. A lot of people think, well, this is what they get for being Capitalists, Communists, killing Christ. No doubt they're right. Let's not mince words. Let's take everything into account.

In my mind, next to my Grandfather and Grandmother stands an ancient person. One of their parents who lived with them. But was it a father or a mother, and whose father or mother I don't know. Just a tiny ancient person. Then the sons, many sons and a single daughter. Except for one, whose story I know, the uncles are vague ghosts to me. They have no faces. There are no pictures. They are young men, in their twenties, the younger ones single, the older married with children of their own. Their wives are mists, I can scarcely see them. A few small children are patches of light.

Among them stands my Father, among his brothers, his older sister at the end, one parent at each shoulder. My Father with blue eyes . His hand reaches out of the nimbus of ghosts and clasps the hand of a dark Russian girl with a face like a Byzantine icon. Hers is a family of ghosts too. I know my Russian Grandmother very well, but only because of my Mother's ability to portray her. She appears as a straight, beautiful woman with wavy black hair and milky skin, sharp-featured and clear-eyed. Her passions were opera and fine clothes. Her tragedy was that she married an idealist. Beside her is a little boy, my once living Russian uncle. At her feet are several dead children of various ages. My Russian Grandfather towers over them, dark as a gypsy, with a mustache. He died of TB in a makeshift hospital during the war. He once appeared to me in a dream. We met in my garden next to the cherry tree. He was consoling me, but said nothing.

I spend a lot of time in my garden. It's immense. At the top are strawberries. There are many fruit trees. It is a young garden created from a barren field. At first it lay in total sun. I planted a lot of corn and watched the clouds pass, feeling like a Navajo. Now the trees have grown, creating almost total shade. This suburb is out so far it's almost country. At the end of our block the prairie begins. Miles of rolling green hills under a wide blue sky. To the west the mountains, purple in summer, pink in winter, are visible from all my windows.

Looking at me you'd never know that at the center of my mind millions of naked people are whirling into an inferno. In the center of my mind is a Black Hole. Looking at me you might wonder where I'm from, but you'd never guess. Listening to me you hear no accent, nothing unusual said. Seeing me you see anything but what I am. I like the anonymity. I've come to like having a secret. You keep your secret, I'll keep mine.

It would have all been so much easier if I had actually been able to escape. I changed my name and face. I had education and mobility. How was it I couldn't escape? I must have put a million miles between myself and all this. Why couldn't I get away? What claim do all these people have on me? Why are they always there, in front of me, next to me, these ghosts none of whom has ever said a single word to me, not even in a dream?

I often dream of a Kafkaesque city. It resembles Manhattan. It could pass for a Polish or Russian city. It's a nineteenth-century city. It could be anywhere. It has strange little pockets of ethnic groups and a river which has become wider in recent dreams. The river has steep banks and at the water's edge a kind of grassy park where swimmers rest and weird boats are tied up. I wander around old sections which look like Kathmandu, narrow streets with tiny shops filled with amazing things. The overall city is grey and sometimes ominous. There is something medieval about it. But I have never found any of my relatives there. I've never met anyone I know. But sometimes my Husband is with me, helping me look for someone. It's Rose. I'm always looking for Rose.

Part of it may be that Rose is the only person I would try to look up if I were in Manhattan. I lived in her building and we were friends. She was ten years older. Jewish. She reminded me of something. Despair.

Actually Rose was not the embodiment of only despair but also of mystery and mysticism. She had a Tarot deck, practiced Tai Chi and dabbled in Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Her prized possession was a copy of Ouspensky's _In Search of the Miraculous_ , which I was always trying to borrow and which she would never lend me. In my dreams I'm always looking for Rose in a grey medieval city.

I can see her there in her dark apartment overlooking the silver and orange ribbon of river gliding past all her windows. She is there, surrounded by about a hundred dim rooms, lit by the faint blue glow of silent televisions. Oriental rugs and animal skins on the beds and floors. She is always alone. She looks like a gypsy with her small dark frame, hooked nose and glazed black eyes, her sweeping floor-length tunics, deep red, purple, black. All her clothing the color of bruises. She is waiting, dark, frail, childless, for her wayward husband to return. Occasionally he does, to do some work in his cutting room, hung from floor to ceiling with ribbons of film.

In my film of Rose the river-lit windows are like separate frames. Her pale face glows sadly in the maze of dark rooms, having found no trace of the miraculous. She has the doomed world-weariness of the Wandering Jew...but she has not seen into the inferno. That's her whole problem. If she had seen into it she would have done something with her life. She would have been conscious of being alive.

In my medieval dream city I sometimes find the right building, massive as the Great Wall of China, grey as a prison, but with many windows overlooking the hill of a park.

My own windows in Manhattan showed a bit of tree-covered slope as well. Off to the right was what seemed to be a park in summer, with a high ornate iron fence and many trees. When the leaves fell in autumn I saw it was a graveyard. My windows faced east and this graveyard was to the south. The windows of my dream building all face north, and I can never find her name on any of the mailboxes.

That my Husband appears beside me is fitting because he is the only person who knows about my black hole. He has his own. We are linked to each other by this tunnel. He is not really helping me because he doesn't know Manhattan and has never met Rose. But he keeps me company and protects me, though I am not afraid. I am leading him, wanting to show him some treasures of the city, and I'm frustrated because I can't remember the way and everything looks so different. Even my own building is barely recognizable. Maybe the problem is that I'm looking for a Manhattan building in Lodz or Prague.

We have never found Rose, nor anyone we know, and even within the dream I have the vague feeling that this is not the right city. Even so, she is there, somewhere. Of that I'm always certain.

Recurring dreams of a place may at first seem like disconnected dreams of different places. But if you are observant you will find that these are merely different sections of the same place. The light will always be the same. Mine is a very large city. The light is always the same kind of grey, violet, and dusky blue like the palette of a Remedios Varo painting. I am usually intensely interested in the contents of some strange little shop selling amulets, weird jewelry, ancient artifacts. There is a restaurant area that looks like Sanaa, not just medieval but Middle Eastern. I never buy anything, never eat anything, never find anyone I know. I can't imagine why I spend so much time there. The image of mystic, sorrowful Rose in one of its rooms like a glowing icon in a tomb is always with me. If you must know, she reminds me of my Mother. Or Myself.

If I could describe any of Varo's paintings this place would come clearly to your mind. Her palette is blue and grey and she has these mythical round cities. Through them sail angels without wings, pale pure creatures on boats blown by wind or riding strange bicycles. They are all surreally silent . You can tell that they never have and never will say anything.

For me, the main image is a woman who looks like Rose, or my Mother, or Me. She is dressed in floating blue rags and sits in a concrete windowless grey room, a cell. In front of her on a round table is a small casket. Her hand has opened the lid halfway. Inside she sees her own face.

##

I have pretty much given up trying to say anything about the Holocaust. I put away Speer's book too. I lost interest in it and went back to reading Kawabata with his exquisite surfaces and symbolic depths.

The heads of the sunflowers are bent over but all the bushes and trees are in identical shade of deep green. The aspens, sumacs, cottonwoods, elms, catalpas and even the pine trees are all the same late summer green. I don't care for the stasis of midsummer and midwinter. I long for a cold spell to shift the colors.

My Mother-in-law is here for a week. She has taken her widowhood well. But then, she is used to losing people. Both of her parents were dead by the time she was twelve years old. Her father had died of gangrene. Her mother lay in bed with cancer for two years. She took turns living with her many brothers who lived in Lodz, whose wives used her as a servant. She was the only one of the entire family to survive the war. He must have been in his forties then. He always looked old, with a badly pockmarked face. Like Pinchas, he was forever alone. I know nothing about his life to this day, though I could have asked his wife, but didn't. We talked about his being presently in Poland on a three-week trip, made for the express purpose of visiting his Grandparents' graves (as his parents have none), which, as specified in some Talmudic text, should be done before the High Holy Days. Like a pilgrim goes to Mecca, he has gone to Breslau, place of my birth, where the old Jewish cemetery evidently remains.

Most Jewish cemeteries were bulldozed and the headstones used for paving blocks. I can see myself walking down such a street. My inner self is always walking down such a street paved with headstones.

His wife, whom he married in later years, was emphatically vocal about her refusal to ever set foot in Poland for any reason, but I did not ask her how she survived the war. We merely agreed that her husband was lucky to have any graves at all to visit, as most of us have only smoke.

She was shocked to hear that I had been to Poland about ten years ago. I was not looking for any living or dead. I had not even wanted to go. Like her, I did not want to set foot in Poland. But my Husband, who was nostalgic for his homeland, thought I ought to see Breslau, the city of my birth, and Lodz, the city of my Father and his fathers. It was as dismal as I expected. I will never go again. Even though the Germans engineered the slaughter, Poland occupies an especially bitter place in my heart. Like a city in Hades it stands gray and smoky and even the living look like dead souls.

I do not ask the survivors how they survived, whom they lost, who peoples their memories and dreams. They would tell me. If they were ever to tell anyone, they would tell me. And in truth, I would like to know. But the ethic of silence prevails. I am afraid of opening wounds. I am afraid of an onrush of emotion. I am afraid the survivor will begin to tell me about everyone he lost and overflow with pain at the memories. I am afraid the survivor will fall apart on me into a weeping heap of bones.

##

Some people showed up at our front door one night, all dressed up, and formally invited us to visit their new Mormon Temple. They handed me some literature. I have seen the Temple's white spire, but had not known it was Mormon. And I never realized that the Mormons are into such weird things.

"A unique aspect of temple activity is proxy work for those who have died without the opportunity to accept the teachings and ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ."

"Scriptures refer to the Lord's ministry among the deceased in the postmortal spirit world (see 1 Peter 3:18-20, 4:6). As a result of this ongoing ministry all the people who have ever lived will have the opportunity to know the Savior and accept his teachings."

"And, as was done anciently, ordinances such as baptism are performed on behalf of the deceased by living proxies on earth (1 Corinthians 15:29)."

What a bizarre undertaking, and what nerve that they will not leave even the dead alone! There is a picture on the brochure of the Baptismal Font in Salt Lake City for baptism on behalf of the deceased. It looks like a giant gold cauldron supported by a dozen life-size gold cows. Let the insane be baptized over and over again and imagine they are saving the dead. I build a fire under the cauldron and cook them as in old movies about Africa.

Can they actually believe in this garbage about bringing all the dead to Christ? Spare me, spare my dead, from such insanity.

My Brother laughingly pointed out to me that Mormons concentrate primarily on their own ancestors and that it will be a long time before they get to mine.

Finally the color shift begins. The lower branches of the sumacs have turned clear red and yellow, clear as fire. Supposedly the aspens in the mountains are turning perfectly gold this year, with the cold nights. I think: I'm seeing autumn for the fortieth time, but it seems more like the thousandth time. Forty is such a small number and I feel much more intimate with the seasons than that.

For the Ladies Book Club I am reading _The White Hotel_ , a truly astonishing work. After a binge of rereading everything by Kawabata and finding his work more beautiful but less interesting than before, _The White Hotel_ is stunning in its handling of levels from illusion to reality. Kawabata, on every page, descends from his exquisite surface to symbolic depths, in a kind of simultaneity that is true to life. At every moment that we choose, we can move from surface details to personal symbolism and back without blinking. But the stages of disillusionment in _The White Hotel_ belong to the realm of Art, for only in art can the shift be so precise, stage by stage, in completely different lights. The author cuts closer to the bone with each stroke of the knife until all fantasy and illusion is hacked away, leaving only the bitter truth. This was a very disturbing novel, for many of its secrets are also mine and I have my own white hotel, but doesn't everyone?

What makes my Holocaust material so difficult to tell is that I do not wish to reveal the secret of my white hotel, and I have wracked my brains for a viable treatment of my own tale. But _my_ problem is that I have taken myself as the subject and there is far too much I can't reveal, whereas Thomas has his fictional character, and his work is one of the imagination. What has become of my imagination?

Suddenly I saw a gleam in which I told it all from a man's point of view: there she is, gypsy hair and years later, cropped: ethnic clothes spangled with mirrors and years later, wearing only black; dark eyes, even features, five feet tall and light as a feather, a mystic with unpolished nails and a pack of Winstons. I can see myself through a man's eyes, but he cannot see through my mind. It would never work.

Rajah's point of view would be interesting, if I could approach it from that angle. There she is, with all her hair, looking like a Hindu gone wild, actually a Jewess with a black whirlpool in her mind and a crazy skinny fellow for companion. She in a white mirror dress from Afghanistan, he in cowboy boots with a white chiseled face and long hands, a harmonica in his pocket, a sitar on his back and a bleached skull tied to the grill of his car. There they are. It that enough? Is that enough?

But how could Rajah ever know what kind of lover he was. Or what kind of madman? "Layla and Majnun," the ancient Persian tale, contained the whole story. But the bridge between this story and my attempt to escape the Holocaust is a fragile one, a cobweb hung between two regions of the mind, which can never be crossed by anyone unless they fly. And why should I let them?

It is impossible to tell the whole story. I would have to weave a stronger bridge between the mountain of dead bodies and the mountain of light. I would have to tell the story of this madman who tried to take me over the bridge and how I discovered my inability to leave my dead an my living behind.

How can I describe myself through Rajah's eyes when I can't even adequately describe him through my eyes? The old Brahmin who threw open the windows. Suddenly "reality" was "illusion," a dream of my life. Maya, goddess of the senses, the illusory world. Nirvana.

A circle of friends who were vegetarians had gone or would go to India. Introduction to the secret cult of the Guru.

I try to see myself through the Guru's eyes. I can see him sitting there at the "talks" in Maryland, in his white dhoti, his gray hair cropped close, western style, but barefoot, surrounded by flowers and incense, a hundred disciples on the floor at his feet, an immense round window behind him looking out on an incredibly beautiful scene of fields in early spring, a thousand shades of green, white fences, trees with pink blossoms, some white horses in the distance. The window was easily eight feet across and the view beyond like a painting, no, like a vision. The Guru said nothing and could sit in silence for twenty minutes at a stretch, until someone asked a question. Then he would answer with incredible precision, even my own. The questions I asked him, after he answered, never have to be asked again.

I remember that during our private session he asked me about my background. I was surprised that he needed to ask. I thought he could see through me. I said that I did not see what the details of my background had to do with Absolute Truth. I simply did not want to tell him that I was Jewish and that my parents were survivors of the Holocaust.

Now I can't remember whether he got it out of me or not. I remember my resistance. And his answer that he was merely curious. I think I did finally tell him and saw him nod and murmur "yes, now I understand," for most of my questions pertained to how one should respond to human suffering. But perhaps I withheld the truth about everything else. I try to sit in his chair behind the potted flowers and see myself through the Guru's eyes. Deep down I wanted to believe that he could see me, and see everything. In some respects he could, by the questions I asked, but the details of a life were not visible to him and I realized that he could not know anything about me unless I told him. But at that time I believed these details were irrelevant to the Truth.

When I cook a soup, as I am doing now, tonight, when I stand at the stove next to a large pot and skim the froth from the surface of the soup, watching the vegetables become translucent, I can see myself standing over a similar soup in Austin, tropical green sheets of rain at the windows. I can see myself in the miniscule kitchen in Manhattan, the vista of buildings gray and mauve in the evening.

I can see myself clear as a bell, through twenty years, as I stand skimming a pot of soup, transfixed by the luminous red of tomatoes. In Austin or Manhattan I would have had a mane of long black curly hair, might have stood in a long red skirt, embroidered blouse, smoking a joint. Here I stand, shorn of my hair, dressed in black, smoking a cigarette, in an immense elegant house, trying to get a small child off my leg. I still do my eyes Egyptian style. I still wear weird clothes, but seldom wear them, only in the company of people I know. I stand in a house the size of a cathedral, done ultra modern, like a bank lobby. Through my windows is a blue evening sky, past sunset, the twinkle of city lights and the White Mountains in the distance. And though everything has changed so may times I can still find the thread that makes me the same person stirring a pot of soup, the same person in a hundred different rooms, the same self like a string of pearls, each identical, the same self in a series of mirrors.

##

I inhabit three worlds of the living and one of the dead:

The world of White Mountains.

The world of green leaves.

The world of gray cities.

All my memories take place in one of these.

In the world of White Mountains is my childhood in Germany. I am there, blissfully unaware of anything having gone wrong with the world. The Displaced Persons' Camp is not among my memories. I remember the ocher stucco house, the ancient yard, the blooming park across the street, the pastry café on the corner, the mountains ringing the town like a circular postcard and me, playing with Hans. My blue-eyed Father beginning to do well in the thriving market of cigarettes, coffee and chocolate. My Mother, young and golden as the Russian icon that she is, alone and lonely in a strange land, but in love, spending her time in the immense ancient forest with me.

The world of White Mountains also contains my American youth and present. My youth was painful with the ever-growing comprehension of what has happened to my people and my parents, now overwhelmed by the impoverished alienation of the refugee. But my present is tranquil and the White Mountains have become friendly towards me.

I suppose the world of White Mountains also includes my fascination with Tibet and its realization in Nepal, which was the attainment of an old dream, when I finally stood in the streets of Katmandu and Patan. Here the shops were filled with Tibetan tankas, bronze and gold statues. The Temples of erotically carved wood. The immense stupas with their eyes and flags. My immense fear of encountering myself, oh God, spare me a confrontation with the contents of my heart.

I don't know why I was so terrified in Nepal. It was as if I were expecting some terrible revelation. As if I would come face to face with myself on the street and never be the same again.

And, in a way, that did happen, because for the first time I realized that I have nothing in common with the Indian, the Nepalese, nor even my beloved Tibetans. For the first time I faced up to being Jewish and not feeling it to be a terrible thing.

India in particular had that effect, when I saw how different my values are. For years I had imagined that I belonged in India, in some ashram, seeking Truth. Now I was forced to accept the realization that I could never live there. I abhorred the poverty, and even more so, I despised the wealth. I was appalled by the filth. I could not accept a culture in which begging is a recognized profession. I come from a people who have never begged, not even for their lives. And in the face of all this I realized that I come from a people who are good, clean, industrious, people who value knowledge, family, God and self. Compared to India the Jews began to look good. By the time I stood in the streets of Katmandu, in the courtyard of the Temple of the Living Goddess, I was a Jew, and for the first time it was not painful. I was actually glad to be a part of that ancient tribe that had built few great cities but many ethical systems and ideologies.

I used to think there was nothing worse than being Jewish after all that had happened. Who would want to be identified with a group of people the world had pushed into ovens, the killers of Christ, the Judas Iscariots? Who would want to proclaim himself to be among the untouchables, when one could get away with pretending otherwise?

The land of White Mountains is the high point of my consciousness, whether as child or adult. It is the place of innocence, before the awareness of evil, and beyond evil where comprehension finally dawns. In the Land of White Mountains I am innocent. I am myself without fighting myself. I am surrounded by a luminous light that turns the turning leaves of autumn trees into the stained glass of a living temple. It is where I am safe for eternity. Here, everything is pure. The knowledge of evil is the same as the knowledge of mathematics. It is there, but touches nothing. This is the mirror world that cannot be tainted by any image that passes its surface. This is the shining moment of an eternity that asks and answers nothing.

The land of Green Leaves, typified by Austin, appears like the Garden of Eden after meeting the serpent. There, in a place deceptively green with magnolias the size of dinner plates, I ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpents of knowledge, sex, politics, drugs, Eastern religions, Vietnam, all hung in the trees, green as the leaves, among the fruits of youth, deceptively sweet. This was where I bloomed like a hothouse orchid into a woman, queen of the jungle with serpents on my arms and legs, mystical Medusa with an Egyptian face and no trace of the Jews expressed. Free as a tropical bird with no past, no future, no baggage. Freely I tasted all kinds of fruits. Some were ideologies, others potions or chemistry, and some took the shape of men I knew in lighting drenched nights when the monsoons battered the flowers into perfume; and from all the faces arose the one, floating to the surface of my night like a moon, the white knight who, by standing outside my world, could lead me past the dark portal of my whirlpool. And I'm sure it was the face of Hans.

Then there is the City, bleak and ominous. The Polish city of my Father and his father. Grim, industrial. And the different city of my birth, war-torn, filled with lost people. The city is also Manhattan, seen first at age six, first shock of being evicted from the Land of White Mountains, and seen again in my twenties, upon leaving the Land of Green Leaves. And, of course, the city of my dreams with its cement streets and bleak buildings, narrow winding ways with curious shops filled with curious things, resembling at times all the ancient cities of the world, Alexandria, Rome, Sanaa, Katmandu, even Jerusalem; the ancient city as seen by Cecil B. DeMille in any number of pseudo-ancient films. It could be London or Prague, Moscow or Babylon. It is the descent to the lower realms. The archetypal city, manmade, Kafkaesque. It is not golden like Paris with its peeling trees and cafes. It is gray and somber, always winter. But I must admit the interiors glitter like brass work in Arabian souks.

So we have descended from the White Mountain realm of the gods through the Gardens of Eden, Allah or Shalimar with their lush sensuousness, down to the cities of man with exteriors of concrete and interiors of glittering dreams.

It is much like Borobudur, the Hindu temple overgrown by jungle in Moslem Java for 900 years. Recently UNESCO uncovered and restored it, and I climbed to the top of this immense structure in a pouring rain. On the lower levels were hundreds of life-size Buddhas sitting in the lotus position, facing all the directions, gazing open eyed over miles of jungle. At the top were immense Buddhas with eyes closed and their bodies enclosed in huge stone latticework bells to indicate their separation and detachment from the world.

So my motif is ancient and universal, but lucky is the one who can map out his own self. Probably two decades went into my mapping. All the places I have lived and those that appear in my dreams, all my memories and frustration and moments of realization fall neatly into place on the ascending or descending scale of the psyche.

I cannot choose the Land of White Mountains of the mind or the Land of Green Leaves of the flesh and deny the cities of human history and death. They are all equally mine for exploring.

Jung used the motif of a house, dreamed of being in the attic or the cellar. Levels of consciousness and perhaps the cellar held the most important things. The things which belong the most intimately to us, which we have buried away out of consciousness, the things we could not comprehend, the things we feared, our own death.

In my city the entire Jewish population is terrorized, brutalized, stripped and murdered every night.

Who was it, some survivor in Israel, speaking of the Nazis or Arabs or both, who said: "We win the war every day and lose it every night"?

But I'm lucky. For me, it is just there. It does not present a problem anymore. It is just there at one end of the scale, like the first inch on a ruler. It enables me to put things in perspective.

And against the perspective of the Boschian depths my view out the window onto autumn trees is wondrous. The aspen are golden as can be and tremble in the breeze. The sumacs are ruby, the plum and pear garnet, a treasure chest of trees.

As all the levels of Borobudur exist simultaneously, so do my realms, for the White Mountains can be seen in the distance, and the city of death can be visited any time I please, even as I sit here at this table drinking coffee. Upstairs, my Child sleeps. Through the open loft I can hear him breathe. The branches of the colored trees sway in the windows. A few white puffs of cloud move through the blue sky. Everything is moving, breathing, trembling with life.

It is on days like this that I wonder how Helen can choose to sit in the State Mental Hospital for fear of the outside world. She has no instruments of measurement if daily life in America and her middle-class existence seem so terrible. She has not grasped the scale of thing. Her involvement with religion perhaps showed her the White Mountains of salvation, but she has not seen the city of doom and the real depths of human degradation. On her scale salvation is on one end and everyday life on the other. Now, of course, it really is for her the lowest point of existence, for what can be more depressing and bleak than sitting in an insane asylum? Now she has found her true low point, the real lower depths, but dwells in them too long. We're made for better things.

I suppose there must be a lot of people who wander around in their lower depths all their lives. The Buddhists speak of the Self as a king in a palace who has never left one lower cell. He does not realize that he owns an entire palace. He sits in his cell, where the door is not locked, imagining he is a prisoner, not realizing that the door is open and that above him is an entire palace and kingdom which is his.

It is important to claim everything. The brilliant autumn leaves are mine, in my eyes. The pure White Mountains are mine, on my horizon. The city of death is mine, in my dreams. The map is inside me, like veins. The rivers flow through me and the streets paved with tombstones belong to me. It is all mine.

##

The corn is dry on the stalk. Pumpkins have appeared in stores. A snowstorm is predicted for tomorrow. Friends are having a costume party and I fantasize going as an American Indian, a Japanese geisha, or simply the Snow Queen, as one single snowflake, the personification of winter.

Again, as in a recurring dream, the sweaters are unpacked and summer clothing put away. Again the houseplants are brought in and I have started to bake. Again I will cut a few snowflakes out of paper to put in the windows. Carve a jack-o-lantern. Roast a duck. Have a fire in the fireplace. Drink some plum wine and wait for blizzards with the keen anticipation of a true recluse, but one who owns the entire Universe and all the seasons.

I fold up my map and embrace my Husband.

I know the way out but choose to stay in.

One cannot live in the Land of White Mountains. And the gray city, like Manhattan, is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

I guess the Land of Leaves is ideal as a place where Nature and Man meet. Neither all concrete nor thin air. Neither death nor salvation. Somewhere in the middle where the Buddhas gaze in all directions, exposed to the weather of the seasons, seeing the horizon but firmly planted in the present.

"We have art in order not to die of the truth," but we don't need to die of the truth either. It is there, like mathematics, like music. It's a dark music that can be heard in dark times, but the Buddhas are unmoved by darkness or light. They contemplate everything. It is all the same to them.

An image rises of a pool I used to pass in Austin. I would come down the stairs of my treetop apartment, go up the hill to the corner where a Mexican family lived. There was no longer any grass in front of their house, even though the entire town was green. In the dust there were always several half-naked children playing, their luminous eyes watching me.

I would turn the corner and go down into a leaf-green tunnel of a street bordered on one side by a park, barely visible through the trees. In a clearing, like an emblem, shone the blue interior of a swimming pool. I did not realize for many months that the pool was empty, until one day I crossed right through the park. The illusion of water had been so perfect, I just assumed there was water in it. I was stunned, like a Zen student by a Zen koan. It was empty. The interior was painted bright blue. I walked down the steps into it. And as I passed it again, after knowing the truth, I loved it even more.

### Winter

It is an absolute icebox outside, a foot of snow over everything and it's frozen solid. The temperature drops below zero every night. I freeze as I go back and forth with my Child, negotiating black corridors, as if in a maze in outer space.

The days are like the South Pole. I remember how as a child I loved best the polar bear diorama at the Museum of Natural History. It seemed so poetic, those white bears in their white world with only the pink and purple streaks of sunset for color. Now that is exactly how the world looks through all my windows every evening.

##

I love reflecting on the "talks" given by the Guru. He never said anything unless he was asked a question. If no one had any questions we all sat in silence. And his answers were always exactly what I expected and knew even at the moment that my question was forming.

With Rabbi T., on the other hand, the answers were always a surprise. I could never anticipate them. Perhaps he was not a guru in the classical sense, but a teacher of even greater magnitude because his unexpected answers, like Zen koans, always shocked me into awareness.

One day I drove clear across town to ask him a single question:

"How do you know how much to accept and how much to change?"

Buddhism is very strong on accepting everything. It was the key to enlightenment. Probably Judaism and Christianity also have doctrines of acceptance. How else could six million people be burned so easily? And the Muslims are entrenched in the will of Allah. Everything is fated.

And yet, I could not see how anything could ever be changed or improved by this concept of passive acceptance. India was ruined by it. The country is a mess. But never mind India. I was concerned with myself. Ought I to accept my life exactly as it was, or should I strive for change? And not so much either/or, but where is the line? Where do we stop accepting and start changing?

I burst through his door, found him in his living room and said:

"How do you know how much to accept and how much to change?"

"You accept it as you change it," he said without hesitation.

I was stunned by the ingeniousness of his reply.

"So you accept it all?" I said.

He nodded, smiling. "And you change it all."

Completely satisfied, I turned heel and left.

Rabbi T. was always ready for anyone, and a great variety of people came through his door. Even though his wife was seldom present anymore, it came as a shock to everyone—even him, especially him—when, after the last daughter was married off, she divorced him.

He was a Rabbi who had been the most respected man in town, whom everyone had regarded with awe. People from all over the country came to see him. His advice was sought on everything pertaining to the law. He always gave scriptural answers. He was the local sage.

Without synagogue, with no congregation, and now, no wife. Alone, by himself, on the west side, in his house like a hermit monk. He was living in the wrong century. In the wrong country. On the wrong planet. He was a man out of his element, without an element.

I sit at the table and look out on a snowy scene. The mountains are a muted blue in the distance, the sky is lightly overcast, the source of light from nowhere in particular, from everywhere at once, but through a screen, or as if the entire scene of mountains and rooftops were painted on a mirror, so does the background shine.

On the table before me lies a blue and gold Chinese embroidered mat, on it a Russian cloisonné salt cellar, which could have come from my Russian Grandmother, and a Fontani piece, one of the three wise kings. He wears a small gold crown and his pale robes fall around him as he sits on his camel in a intricate chair also painted gold. With the fine long fingers of one of hand he clutches the armrest for support. With the other he holds a gold casket on his knee. He is old and fine-boned, his white beard pointing the way, looking a lot like Rabbi T.

##

I agreed to make the family Hanukkah party here, but deep down I crave the Old English version of this deep-winter holiday season, with pine boughs on the mantelpiece and decorated trees, antique angels, red candles, silver snowflakes and the roast goose in a warmly lit house surrounded by miles of blue snow.

Hanukkah somehow doesn't capture that. I always think of the Maccabbees in an Arizona setting. Hanukkah is not a deep-winter holiday. It ought to take place in July. Grandfather, are you listening? I am moving Hanukkah on your calendars to midsummer.

It takes a deep-winter country to come up with a good way to celebrate the Winter Solstice. Christianity, Jesus Christ and all that are all right but I see them too in Arizona or New Mexico, in Palestine, of course, with its tawny deserts, brown hills, oases, palm trees and camels, minarets and crescent moon. It's not exactly deep in snow and freezing blue days and nights. It's not exactly icicles and snowflakes. Yet, the little Victorian touches and icons, the little religious details, don't detract from this pagan holiday, but kind of enhance it.

Essentially, Christianity and the Druidic Winter Solstice have nothing in common. It's kind of strange that they are celebrated together. Jesus and Santa Claus. Jesus is Santa, dispensing redemption all around. Redemption. That's a big word. How it got mixed up with the Black Forest cuckoo clock holiday beats me. Well, Russian icons fit in nicely; they too were created in a deep-freeze country. I say let's separate the Winter Solstice from the desert thing. Have a sort of Russian-English "Christmas" with lots of velvet, pine boughs, candlelight, good food with good friends on cold nights. And then the desert doings of Maccabbees and Messiahs should be an altogether different thing.

I love the small colored lights outlining houses in the pitch black nights, transforming concrete reality into a vision of light floating in space. The weight of things disappears and only the outlines remain, twinkling and insubstantial as a dream.

I love the decorated trees with intricate objects hanging from them like strange inedible fruit, things of lace and gilt, stars and toys from found childhoods.

And I love the fact that the planet tilts and that minute by minute the days will again become longer.

After seeing _Amadeus_ I had a bad night. The film had a terrible effect on me and brought out some forgotten dark side. Since childhood I had consciously aligned myself with the forces of goodness and light. I remember how I vehemently argued my case with a friend of Rose's who lived in the same building on the eleventh floor. She was a very depressed and depressing girl who believed the powers of evil were stronger than the powers of good. She had given up completely to the Prince of Darkness and believed, like Helen, that he ruled the world. I argued that good and evil, light and darkness, yin/yang, the forces of creation and destruction, had to be of equal strength, that for the Universe to exist they had to be balanced.

But that night, after the film, for the first time in my life I began to wonder if the dark side might not be stronger. To my Husband, in the darkness of our bedroom, I confessed to murderous tendencies within myself, hate and violence and anger, and wondered aloud if these tendencies might not be put to better use by the dark powers. It seemed pointless to cling to the good, positive, creative side of things. I felt as if I had nothing positive to contribute anymore. I felt I could easily kill anyone without a qualm. Even myself. That night the devil was strong as I wondered about joining forces with him to destroy the world.

The next day the feeling was gone but its aftertaste strong. I felt some real affirmation was in order, some purification, and some rebirth by New Year's Eve. In the Old Country, beset by such feelings, I would have gone to the Mikvah, the ritual bath of purification. That was what the Kohanim, the Priest class, always did after coming inadvertently in contact with death. And women after menstruation went to the Mikvah regularly.

It did not occur to me to go to a Mikvah. There is one, on the west side, near Rabbi T.'s house, where he sent me for purification before my wedding. I removed my clothes and all jewelry, washed my hair, was asked by the old woman in charge to remove even clear nail polish. The water, untouched by human hands, rested like crystal in a deep square pool, tiled blue. I had never been in a Mikvah before. I didn't know what to do. She made me memorize some Hebrew prayer and instructed me to think the words when I was completely under the water closing completely over my head, feeling cold at the top of my head like a fountain flowing into me.

I did not think of going to the Mikvah. I waited instead for some tangible transformation, some mystical cleansing. But nothing happened. My fortieth birthday passed. New Year's Eve passed. And then, there I was in a bookstore, dying to buy a biography of Diane Arbus, from which I walked away several times, but finally bought.

Diane Arbus' main distinction was as a photographer of freaks. In her photographs even normal people looked like freaks. I have been familiar with her name and work for many years and always found her pictures terrifying. It was not just that she was drawn to the grotesque. She could make even a Christmas tree in the corner of a suburban living room seem grotesque. Her photographs are harsh and naked and everyone in them looks ugly and deranged.

I was very interested in her life, particularly as she committed suicide. I have always been interested in suicides, always wondered about the reasons people killed themselves. Why would someone kill himself instead of going off to another place and starting a new life? How does a person get so boxed in that suicide becomes the only solution, the only way out? I could never understand it. And yet, that bitter night after Amadeus I thought of the death of all my illusions and the futility of existence and even suicide seemed easy because nothing meant anything. Perhaps through this biography I would come to understand how and why one crossed over to the Dark Realm.

But as I read the story of her terrible descent from rich Jewish child of department store magnates to haunter of carnivals, morgues, bondage houses, insane asylums, death row, skid row, transvestites' homes and freakish territories, I was horrified by the terrible waste of her life, even though as an artist she became famous. It all seemed so terrible, her journeys in Hades to photograph terrible things. It was as if she were forcing herself further and further down the ladder into despair, deprivation and death. All that was gruesome beckoned her. She would have loved the death camps. Perhaps if she had seen the death camps she would not have to look so hard for tragedy. She would not have looked for it at all.

As it was, she exposed herself to terrible things for the thrill of it and participated in terrible things until she completely ruined herself. She was busy ruining herself with a vengeance. She saw the hideous side of everything. Her photographs shocked people.

This got me to thinking about perspective. Anyone can look beautiful or hideous depending on what you want to see in them. She saw the hideous side, and I found myself saying no to it. No, I wouldn't want to see or portray things like that. If I were a photographer I would try to capture the miraculous, the elegance of nature, the beauty of things, the goodness of people, the innocence of children, the wisdom of age, the Zen quality of even resignation. No, I would not want to portray people at their worst, or look for terrible things in reality, except as an idealist might photograph some lost soul in the hope of drawing attention to his plight.

This realization brought about a silent affirmation, a kind of inner rebirth and realignment with the Forces of Light. I would much rather see the beauty in things. After Auschwitz one must look for beauty. The whole problem with people who had an easy childhood and have no image of Auschwitz in their minds is that they don't see that the ordinary world in which one is safe and fed and loved and sheltered is extraordinary. I realized suddenly what a wonderful effect the Holocaust has had on me. To be alive and healthy and free is like a miracle. Normal life is a miracle. That is the great gift I have received.

I remembered it last night on seeing Helen. She was temporarily out of the Psych Ward but doped up on medication and unable to cope with daily life whose details engulf her and in which she can find no pleasure or meaning. She is utterly hopeless about everything and wants only to return to the safe womb of the asylum where she need not do anything. She had an easy, sheltered childhood. Nothing hard or horrible has ever happened to her. She has never had to fend for herself, has never had to work, and has a loving husband and beautiful child. She never saw her parents, as I did mine, totally devastated and helpless. She never had to help them communicate with others because they didn't know the language. She never learned how to refrain from asking for things she wanted. She never saw them as humans with problems whom she might be called upon to help. It never occurred to her that her parents, in their old age, might need her. And now she finds ordinary life too difficult to cope with and is unable to get out of bed in the morning.

The utter meaninglessness of her existence makes her depressed and ill. Nothing seems worth doing. She cannot find a single reason to go on living. She is unable to find joy in anything, and ever her religion, which she embraced with such fervor, her Messiah, leaves her cold. She is walking death. How does a person get to such a point?

I'm grateful for the details of my life. I can find joy in baking a cake, dressing my Child, setting the table for a meal, watering my plants, looking forward to the garden I will plant in spring. It is true that my illusions are gone. I accept the demise of my fantasies and look for pleasure in doing the small task well. Dignity and nobility never die. Elegance exists in all things. As Rabbi T. used to say, even the act of drinking a glass of water can be sanctified.

The gold embroidered Chinese mat on the wooden dining table seems to radiate the feeling of richness and harmony. Every time I look at it radiating from the center of the table I feel like a queen. It is as if the Sabbath Queen is present every day.

Spring

A blizzard yesterday was beautiful to see through the windows. At dawn today it was still snowing intensely, on the diagonal, the rooftops and streets barely visible. But by 8:00 A.M. it had stopped, and the clouds lifted and moved on. Now the sun is shining brightly as if nothing had happened. The daffodils are halfway up and the crocuses have already bloomed, their fragile faces unafraid of nature. Spring. It always comes again. Resurrection as the planet tilts and the sun takes a higher curve. The caveman watching from his cave is relieved that the sun has stopped sinking lower and lower on the horizon. The vegetation is sparse, and so are the animals and birds that migrated. It could really mean the end of everything if the sun sank any further. There are days when this caveman really gets concerned. Things are just getting darker and darker. And colder, like a tomb.

Resurrection. The blade of grass turns green. The immense shift that takes place in the Universe can be seen right here, in this blade of grass.

It's wonderful to know that things do not just get darker and darker. No. Things always get lighter again.

The resurrection of Jesus falls right in with other spring rites. In a way, it is a beautiful image. Not just nature resurrects, but man too. I'm sure half the Greek and Roman gods were resurrected. It probably permeates all cultures, except perhaps those at the equator where things are always the same.

I wonder if anyone has looked to see if resurrection myths exist at the equator. I'm sure they do, for Death is everywhere, and even in the microcosm of the jungle, which is always hot and green, at every moment something is dying and sometimes else emerging.

It is Death that resurrection rises from.

##

We were invited to a wedding by a group of my parents' friends, survivors all. Mr. Silverman's son was getting married. I know Mr. and Mrs. Silverman better than I know their son, who is somewhat younger than me. Mr. Silverman is a short man with a wide beaming smile, a good suntan and a Renaissance mind. He is one of the few literate people in this group. Most of them spoke only Yiddish before the war, very little Polish, and some Hebrew. They did not get a secular education and knowledge consisted of learning some Torah, though few know even that. They are simple people, tailors, cobblers, bakers. It took simple, hardworking people to survive the Holocaust. Intellectuals died first, as in any cataclysm. Mr. Silverman is unusual in that he is well read in the classics, both ancient and modern, is widely traveled (in the course of his business) and takes an intense interest in a wide variety of things. He is a self-taught man.

I remember a dinner at my parents' house at which Mr. and Mrs. Silverman were present. My Father-in-law was an intellectual too. We thought he might like to meet them. Mr. Silverman regaled us with stories of Asia. Cambodia in particular, where he visited the City of the Dead, tombs built like houses, fully furnished, inhabited by the ancestors' spirits, where families met to pray and make important decisions. His descriptions were vivid. I have known him, as I have known all these people, since we all arrived here. I have known them over thirty years. They have known me since I was six years old.

I see these people at circumcisions, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. It is always the same group. I see the women around town and the men at group gatherings. Not a day passes that I don't see or hear or think about one of them.

Here they were, some three hundred strong, sitting at the ceremony in their finest clothes. The wedding was held at a synagogue across town, a few blocks from where I lived as a child. The west side. It has always depressed me, filled me with sorrow for those difficult times when we were refugees without family, without money, without language or skills, with nothing but ghosts and the terrible knowledge of what happened. We were a bunch of broken people in a strange land with nowhere to go back to. I remember when this synagogue was built. It's still the largest and most beautiful one in town, built from white slabs of marble and Jerusalem stone.

The ceremony was lovely, reminiscent of my own, though Rabbi T. was missing from this one. And then, there they were, drinks in hand, dressed in their finest, eyewitnesses to an event which now some groups call fiction. They are the people of the Black Hole with its whirlpool of naked bodies, mothers, fathers, brothers, children. They can see the faces.

But right now they are happy. Another wedding. All their children are getting married and having children of their own. Somehow they all survived economically in this country. Some of them made out quite well. Their parents, who are among the naked and the dead, would have been dead by now anyway. That is perhaps the only consolation.

There are Mr. and Mrs. Singer, Penny's parents. They are shocked to see me after so many years. It was at Penny's wedding that I met the man who introduced me to my Husband. That was the first time all these people saw me after my seven year absence. Then, I was afraid of them, of what they represented, of how they judged me.

Now I was happy to see them. They no longer appeared like a mental burden. They were not pitiful or dejected. Their faces did not depress me. I loved them. They were Survivors. They had _survived._ They were victors. They had surmounted all odds and walked away from the biggest plane crash in history. They could be proud of themselves for many things. Especially for being alive.

Mr. Singer, short and stiff, greeted me with a huge embrace. He was always a kind of outcast among the survivors. I used to see him every day with his fruit and vegetable truck, peddling his wares. We once lived on the same street. This street always filled me with bleak memories. Mercifully, the house has been torn down. He used to let me hop a ride on his truck, though I was forbidden by my parents to do so. His profession as a peddler could not have made him an outcast because all the others had also to do menial labor, having no skills among them save for a few tailors. A couple of them were butchers. Others, like my Father, worked in factories. Nonetheless, Mr. Singer was looked down upon. True, his manners were crude. He could not lay claim to any middle-class past. He grew up in a very tough neighborhood, probably could neither read nor write, had survived the war on sheer toughness and had actually become a millionaire here. But he is still an outcast.

Even having been stripped of everything, people still retain their notions of class.

There is Mr. Goldman, one of my favorite people. We had dinner once at his house. I clearly recall the conversation in which he told us about his escape to Russia at the beginning of the war, where he was put to work in coal mines. Life was so hard he decided to return to Poland. He knew the moment he crossed the border that he had made a terrible mistake. He had walked into the lion's den. He was sent, with his parents, to Auschwitz. He has seen everything.

Here he is, beaming broadly, suntanned, drink in hand, thrilled to see us again. We may be among the very few he has told his story to. Perhaps he had never told it to anyone before. His wife, a fair lady, survived the war passing as a Gentile. But he survived the Inferno. My uncle Heniek had gone back too. A girl he loved was going back and he followed her. He had been able to pass as an Aryan, and was able to move freely in and out of the ghetto. One day, the story goes, Heniek went to a cobbler in the ghetto to pick up a pair of boots. He got trapped there. No one ever saw him again. He was probably deported together with his other brothers and parents, to some death camp. Uncle Heniek died for love.

Mr. Goldman always reminds me of Uncle Heniek. I am older now than all of them were then. They were in their early twenties, younger even.

I remind Mr. Goldman that I remember and value his story.

"You must have regretted going back." I said.

"No. I never regretted it, not once."

"You must be joking. How could you not regret ending up in Auschwitz?"

He smiled distantly and I could tell he was telling the truth.

"I didn't regret it," he insisted, " _because_ I was with my parents."

He must have been twenty, twenty-two years old. All these people were eighteen to twenty-five during the war. They were the only ones to survive. My Father was nineteen when he went to Russia and twenty-four when he came home. They are all my Father's age, in their mid-sixties now. Their tormentors are probably the same age, perhaps slightly older. When Iris tells me to forget it because all the Nazis "died long ago," I say nothing. The Holocaust did not happen a century ago. There are plenty of survivors around, and they were the people who were decimated. Think of how many perpetrators, whom no one killed, are still walking around. And how many of the silent Germans and Poles who knew and did nothing, who did not help, are still walking around.

"That's why you survived," I heard my Husband saying. "Because you didn't regret it."

He's right. If Mr. Goldman had regretted it, he would have died of grief.

"I never regretted it," Mr. Goldman repeated smiling. "Not then, not now."

##

At an antique show the other day, in a bin full of old junk, I unearthed an enamel lady's Nazi pin. A round black pin with a red swastika. At the center of the swastika was a tiny bunch of edelweiss. The price was $4. The old woman in charge of the booth shuffled over in her tennis shoes to see what had caught my fancy. I was glad that I had not brought any of my friends with me to the show. Both American Jews and non-Jews would be appalled to see me studying this pin. If it were in better shape, I would probably buy it, as a memento. But it's peeling. It's a cheap metal thing.

"You can have it for two dollars," she offers, wagging her gray curls at me and looking at it too. We are standing over it like two children who found some strange thing at the beach and don't know what it is. The shape it's in, I wouldn't give her fifty cents. I say nothing and dig deeper. She is watching me intensely. I fish out a silver pin, heavy and well made. It is an eagle with two heads facing opposite ways.

"That is a very fine piece," she says. "It's Polish."

I examine it with my total attention. It is large, bigger than a silver dollar and heavy as a stone. Every single feather is in perfect detail. The price on the back says $20, more than I want to spend. I am tempted and while I am debating the matter with myself she suddenly asks, "What do you know about World War II?"

I look at her hand, meeting her watery gray eyes.

"Nothing," I answer. I put the pin down and walk away.

##

Early signs of spring. With fragile persistence flowers open silk mouths to reveal golden tongues. Buds swell on the trees and bare branches are tinged different colors, barely perceptible. Against a wall, forsythia bursts into flame, like Moses' burning bush.

Passover was the usual, like the same play put on every year, a passion play. The same lines are read. The same food is eaten. The same songs sung. The only changes are additions to the family and even they seem to have been always present. When we begin to lose members of the family, perhaps they too will seem still present.

It is somewhat like sitting in the Cambodian City of the Dead that Mr. Silverman told us about, for in a way our ancestors also are present at the Seder table. Not so much our ancestors as those who died in the Holocaust, because as the ritual dinner unfolds so do the memories. Fragments of fable are retold. The only thing that changes is my perception of it.

Rabbi T. used to say that the most important aspect of a ritual is not in how it's the same but in how it's different every time. He compared it to classical music, which he loved. He said you could listen to the same piece countless times, but that it would always be different; you would always hear something you had not heard before. It was never the same piece twice.

This time when the middle of three matzohs was broken, I thought of Christ being taken, or disappearing, from the tomb. After the meal, when children searched for and found the pieces and sold them back for money, I thought of Judas Iscariot and the pieces of silver, ransom for a soul. Jesus sat at the table like a shining presence.

My Brother, the master of ceremonies, insisted as usual that every detail be adhered to, but he did so with good humor. He had loosened up over the years. The havoc created by the three children made it impossible to be serious. We all already know the seder by heart. The blessings over matzoh and wine. The bitter herbs for bitter years. The egg in salt water for tears. The grated apples for bricks made of mud and straw. The lamb shank for the blood smeared on the door. The four questions. The ten plagues. The children of Israel in the wilderness with their God of Wonders.

It reminded me of a Passover seder I once attended at Rabbi T.'s house. We did not see the food until midnight and were nearly drunk on the four tumblers of wine. At my parents' house we had always just taken a sip or two and our glasses were much smaller. At Rabbi T.'s house tumblers the size of water glasses were used and at each blessing the entire glass had to be drained before the reading could resume. And every detail of the story was debated by every person present. All the deeper, symbolic meaning had to be unearthed. By the time we saw the food I felt as if I personally had come out of the desert. And that was one of the main points raised by Rabbi T. and the text itself: that we must each regard the matter of the Exodus as a personal experience, that we ourselves must each come out of our slavery, through our own wilderness, to our own liberation.

The lamb shank on the ritual platter and the telling of how the blood was smeared on the doors so that the Angel of Death would pass over also made me think of Christ. He seemed like a beautiful madman on a suicide mission. The kind of madman the pragmatic Jew never allows himself to be. And yet, there he is, big as life, bigger than life, God to millions. Could he have ever guessed it would be so? Yes, he was probably even that crazy. And the harder I look at him the more beautiful he becomes. I would have been willing to give him the role of Messiah. I just don't know what it means for the Messiah to have already come. What it means to Christians is irrelevant to me. What would it mean to someone like Rabbi T., the idea that the Messiah is here?

Too bad it was such a taboo subject for him. I broached it several times. He always brushed me off with a few words. They took one and made it three. They confused the Messiah with God. God and the Messiah were never the same thing. The Messiah is only a messenger. They turned him into a God. They paganized Judaism. He may have been the right one but he took a wrong turn. They could not restrain themselves from giving God a face and a name; whereas to the Jew, God is faceless and nameless and beyond any conception of the human mind. God the Abstract. God the mathematical formula.

But never mind Jesus. Let's say the Rabbi's Messiah had come. What would that mean? What would happen then? Does the world change? Does reality realign itself?

I do like the concept that the Messiah is already here and that reality has already realigned itself. The Guru always said that we are already enlightened. Everything is perfect now, you just have to see it. You have to adjust the focus. You have to do the realigning.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote that if the Fall could be brought about by one man, then the Redemption could also be accomplished by one man. In essence, Adam and the Messiah are the same man. Both are levels of consciousness. The fall from grace and the return to grace are levels of consciousness.

But the Messiah must not be here, not the Jews' Messiah, anyway. How could Europe have gone through such upheaval, how could the death camps and crematoriums exist if the Messiah were here?

I never hear Jews speak of the Messiah, though he appears in ritual texts read during the holidays. Rabbi T. once told me that the message the Messiah brings is a _clue_. With that clue the cryptogram of the Scriptures is transformed to tell an entirely different story.

##

Spring is breathtaking, always so beautiful. Even after seeing it so many times I'm still amazed at how bare trees burst forth with shimmering green leaves and bare ground is transformed by blooming flowers. The air is alive. Everything trembles with life and light, like a gigantic impressionist painting made of water.

The dry winter caused the loss of many trees. The pussy-willows, twelve feet tall, had to be cut down completely. The apricot trees died and one peach tree barely lives in one branch. But once the dead branches were pruned and the corpses burned, the living trees burst into bloom and the ground is a sea of white strawberry flowers mirrored by the white blossoms of the cherry trees. Walking down into the garden, with its many paths is like walking into a dream.

Birds soar between the trees, as from another dimension, and sing with the clearest voices I've ever heard. The ground shimmers and undulates with the fragile shade of new leaves. Everything is made of light. Everything glitters in the breeze. And, in the midst of this beautiful garden is my beautiful Child in a white sailor suit. He completes the picture. He fits into the garden scene perfectly. He plays with the shining water in his wagon. He pushes around his cars. He plays with the gravel and stones. He stands like a baby god in the middle of the garlic patch, the curling green stems reaching his chest. He is in charge of the hose, watering everything. Around him flowers begin to bloom and he himself is like a flower with his copper hair. With him in it, the garden becomes a magical place, the same kind of magical place Bad Reichenhall was in my childhood. The magic kingdom of childhood opens its gates to me again, and led by my Child I am allowed entrance.

#

Ah, my favorite subject again. Again I touch it with an eleven-foot pole. Weeks go by and I try to avoid it, forget it, talk myself out of dealing with it. Who needs it? Surely not I.

But then that whole Bitburg thing developed and so much media attention focused on it that I can't escape. The subject that I hate flashes at me from the tv screen, cool and luminously blue, from the lower depths: bodies, white and naked, pushed into mass graves by bulldozer; scenes of death camp inmates in their stripes, gaunt faces, striking eyes. And the stone crosses over the graves of the SS in the cemetery where the President made his stand. Poor man, but I'm glad he stood his ground, insisting that it all meant nothing, a meaningless gesture, a favor to the German government. It's true. It all means nothing.

Nothing can have any effect on the image of Auschwitz. No one can ever make it disappear. Just like having seen a painting like Picasso's Guernica or Van Gogh's Starry Night. Even if they hang you upside-down they cannot change your having seen it.

To tell the truth, my first reaction to the furor about the President's plan to visit Nazi graves was that it was a brilliant move. I thought: best to remind them of their own dead if you need to warn them and make them let you put missiles in their backyard.

Besides, Germany would be an ideal stage for World War III. It has the right karma. But it will probably start in the Middle East.

Well what difference does it make? None that I can think of. Every German must have lost someone in that war: a father, a grandfather, a husband, a brother, a son, some innocent sent to the Russian front who froze to death. Let them dwell on these, I thought, satisfied.

Then, all of a sudden, there was this huge wave of public emotionalism. The Jews in particular, and then the Veterans, and then the Christians, not to mention the press, all thought the visit monstrously inappropriate.

A fellow dinner guest at someone's house declared there was really no alternative because every German cemetery has SS graves in it. I hadn't really thought about SS members having graves, or even mortal bodies. Like bats from the caves of Satan they flew out and afterwards, back in again. It was a totally new idea for me to see them as these fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. Could humans do what they had done? It makes the truth that much more awful.

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."

Hannah Arendt wrote that it was crucial to see Eichmann as a man and not as a monster. If we make him into a monster, we distance ourselves from him. Only once we see that he was only a human being like ourselves can we grasp the magnitude of the tragedy.

I had distanced not just Hitler and Eichmann, but all of them. The whole SS did not seem human. I saw them as Hell's angels in the truest sense, emissaries from the devil. It is hard for me to see them as people with bodies and graves and gravestones and visitors who leave them flowers. Humans cannot do such things as they did. The very idea of gassing and burning millions of men, women and children is beyond imagination. And yet, it was conceived and enacted, and it shows us the darkest, deepest pit in the human mind. The tragedy of the tragedy. Rajah would have said, the sorrow that sorrow is. And then he would have waved it all away with the words: "But it is all an illusion."

I can live with that. It is an intense illusion. But even an illusion, a dream, is experienced. In my "dream" thousands of people walk around with numbers engraved on their forearms. The members of the SS were also tattooed in their armpits. Reality, illusion, either way the victims and the vampires are connected. And the witnesses, the survivors of the death camps, with their blue numbers running up their arms like haiku, walk around in my city, in my mind. They have seen the mountains of bodies with their own eyes. They must wonder how anything can exist after that.

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."

The Bitburg visit did not move me at all. It meant nothing, even as Elie Weisel talked his heart out, even as survivors in cities around the world staged demonstrations. It meant nothing. The vision of the Inferno will not change. Even my realization that the SS have graves changes nothing. They have graves. My people do not even have that. And it still all meant nothing

What woke me up, though, was the subsequent news that members of the SS Deathhead units were planning their own fortieth reunion. The evening news showed the quaint little town with quiet streets that was hosting the event.

I guess the surviving members of the SS Totenkopf would like to get together too, to reminisce about the war. They remember the death camps too, don't they? They were in charge of them, after all. I wonder what they think about it now. Do they ever dream about the carnage? How come no one looks into these things? Can I get a research grant to study the dreams of Nazis?

It infuriated me that they could meet so openly. The Russians would have shot them all, right there, in the idyllic town. I wondered why the Israelis did not come up with some plan to bomb the building.

It would be worth a suicide mission. If I were not entangled in daily life, I swear, I would do it myself.

Maybe Oriana Fallacci will interview a couple of them. I would if I were in her shoes.

But then, she is not in my shoes.

Then, a few days later, walking past a computer store in the shopping mall, on a twenty-five-inch monitor was a Nazi being interviewed in this small town, right in front of the building hosting the reunion. He was youngish, early sixties looking like late forties, tall and handsome, lean, well-tanned, speaking good English. He is a member of the Totenkopf come for the reunion. What is he saying? I am straining with all my might to hear his words, but even though I hear them they wash over me. The only sentence I can make out is that he thinks the President was right to visit a Nazi cemetery.

Meanwhile, hundreds of young German punkers are pelting the quaint gray building with eggs.

Four hundred SS members are in there, in these rooms, shaking hands, smoking, drinking, reliving old times.

I'm surprised there are so many. And these are only the few willing to come, in public, to this reunion. Think how many must have chosen to protect their privacy by spending this weekend in their own secret gardens?

But even four hundred is too many for me.

How I would have loved to enter those rooms and seduce them with my eyes and murder them in their dreams.

How I would have loved to rise from the floor into their midst like the ghost of my people, with flowing black hair and six million fingers.

Like the naked girl who jumps from a cake I rise from the smoke of the death camps and laugh in their faces.

I am not dead, I am refined. From the charred bones and ashes I rise like a diamond.

Look at me, you fools. Look at your bloody hands. Look at yourselves and at what you have done.

I curse you with nightmares forever.

##

My Child was hot as an oven. On the way home from the doctor's office my car broke down on a busy street. I managed to curb it. With a hot sick baby in my arms I walked to a nearby neighborhood which was much further away than it seemed. It was an incredibly hot day and I was so frustrated I felt like crying. But suddenly the thought came to me: "At least I'm not on my way to Auschwitz."

Can you imagine what it must have been like going to Auschwitz with a babe in arms? There must have been so many wailing babies, crying children, weary mothers, pregnant women who could barely stand on their feet, old people, sick people, frantic husbands, heads of households despairing over the turn of events. First they were ordered to move to cramped quarters in the ghetto, then eventually herded into cattle wagons, babies probably screaming for hours on end. Then, finally, the death camps, where infants were seized from their mothers and dashed into walls.

So it has done that for me, at least. No matter how bad the situation is I can think: "At least I'm not on my way to Auschwitz."

Yet, when asked where I am from, I want to say: "Tibet." If being the child of survivors had an effect on me, it's profoundest effect was in how far it made me run. The Holocaust is the cause, but what is of value is the effect: the long run all the way to Tibet, to Lhasa, to the Potala.

I would not have run so far if the reason for my running weren't so awful. Since I turned forty I think, maybe it's worth it, having that kind of skeleton in my closet, that bloody whirlpool of naked bodies in my mind, if it has caused me to be who I am now.

The "rebirth" I was waiting for came with the realization of "reality-as-Auschwitz."

Suddenly, I no longer regretted anything. I had made my choice and was satisfied with it. Other alternatives no longer held any fascination for me and striving toward them ceased.

All the things which once seemed so important pale in this new light. In "reality-as-Auschwitz" a whole new set of things becomes important and the old values seem frivolous.

In "reality-in Auschwitz" every comfort, every good day, every friendship, every small freedom seems a blessing. Every ordinary activity seems miraculous. To be able to go to the market and buy what I need. To have a Husband, Child, home. For being in Auschwitz and being doomed I cannot ask for anything more. We are all doomed and we are all in the compound. We must try to help each other and keep in mind that our own desires are not important, that many things are impossible in this realm of life we are caught in, and that what is possible expands with the expansion of our hearts.

It seems amusing now to recall how far I ran to escape, to the "strangers," through Buddhism, covering miles of ideas and terrain to get away from the Holocaust mentality. The only way out of the maze is up through the center.

What amazes me is how much personal work must go into many realizations. No one can give us the answers to our personal riddles. Other people can lead us to say things, and if we are listening we can hear the answers in our own words.

Speculation and thought: another form of work. No guru can hand you the solution because no one, not even a guru, can know the puzzle you are working on. People can hand you important pieces without realizing it. Bits of information come at us from everywhere, radio, tv, fragments of overheard conversations, random thoughts, splinters of dreams. But we must do the work ourselves.

No one can give us the answer because no one knows our deepest, most important question.

And we are unable to ask it because we ourselves don't know what it is. In some ways we don't know what the question is until we see the answer. And we can't see it unless we pay attention.

Attention seems to be the main ingredient. Attention in the Zen sense.

Letting the Universe act on you, but paying attention to what it is doing.

##

Raining today. Blossoming trees line the roads with pastel globes of color. The rain batters the blossoms to the ground. I can no longer spend time with Helen because I am angry at her. My anger is immense. What she has done to her family is reprehensible. If she cares not for her husband, what about her children? Or how about having some mercy on her parents? There are many things I might have done if not for having mercy on my parents.

Her illness is an indulgence. She does not care about anyone or anything. She is letting laziness prevail and wallows in her suffering. She is ruining everyone around her in the process and selling her rights as a human being for a mess of pottage. She does not want to clean or shop or cook but prefers to sit in an insane asylum which costs $10,000.00 per month and have everything taken care of for her. Her meals are delivered on schedule and she need not lift a finger.

For this she has ruined her husband, children, parents, parent-in-law, not to mention all her friendships and even her ties with her Messianic Fellowship. And for what? What is the nature of her illness? "Inability to function. Inability to make choices."

And yet, she _is_ making choices even now, and the choices she has made revolt me. Whenever I see her I want to shake her or choke her. I want to strangle her. She with her self-righteousness. She who is _saved_ and _knows_ the Truth. She who looked down from her pile of garbage and said the rest of us are doomed. Let her now eat her cold pizza by herself. She can take her Christian tripe and sit on it the rest of her life in some insane asylum and I don't care.

There was a time when I cared and did my utmost to help save her from this ruin, a time when I talked to her from the bottom of my heart as I have spoken to no one else: when I tried with all my arguments to either push her all the way into Christianity or to pull her back from it altogether, trying to convince her that she belongs with her own people, _even_ if they are doomed, _especially_ if they are doomed, as they are doomed in her mind to eternal damnation for refusing to accept Jesus Christ. But she sits on the bridge and won't move. Neither forward nor backward will she go. If she had the guts to go forward and become a missionary, that would be good too. Anything is better than this . She infuriates me with her stubbornness. Like the proverbial mule she starves between two haystacks. I have teased, cajoled, begged and screamed. She turns a deaf ear. She prefers immobility. She does not want to think, act, do. I want to seize her and hurl her through some plate-glass window.

There was a time when I was fascinated by and interested in solving the riddle of her madness. I had theories galore and cherished every clue. Then, a few weeks ago a thought struck me: something specific must have happened to her, some trauma, which she could not tell anyone. Maybe it had something to do with Lazar Rising. Anyone could see he was a lecher. I once watched him leching after a redheaded Russian woman at a party. But Helen was as plain as milk. It was unlikely that she could arouse even him.

Then my Husband said it was probably something that had to do with her child, the realization that she could not even save the soul of her own child, because the eight-year-old girl had begun to reject her mother's dogma. Perhaps this was her turning point, when she realized she had even lost her own daughter, that she had not been able to convince anyone, not even the child of her own womb.

And here I had imagined that her problem was one of guilt over leaving her loved ones behind when she goes to Heaven. That is not Helen's problem. That would be my problem. I wouldn't be able to live with the guilt of abandoning my parents, Husband, Child. I would be unable to accept Salvation with a clear conscience. I had transposed my own values and character onto Helen. I was totally mistaken. She does not have these concerns. She is not willing to give up her own Salvation. She is not tortured by guilt as I would be in her shoes. She does not have the same relationship with parents that I have with mine, or she would not be sitting in an insane asylum in the first place. She would have some mercy on them. She has no mercy on them. Her parents are not Holocaust survivors. Her parents were not shattered immigrants. She owes them nothing. She need not worry that they have already suffered or endured too much. She feels free to do as she pleases.

My entire theory of her illness was a fallacy because of my projections of myself onto her. I'm shocked to see to what extent my interpretation of Helen's illness was totally subjective. She did not crack under the strain of leaving her loved ones behind, because look at what she has done to them by going insane. Her insanity has done much more damage than her Christianity ever did. All she ever talks about now is Satan, how she followed Satan and must be punished. How she was led astray from the True Path. How there is no way back. She is punishing herself but also everyone around her. She has broken her mother's health and her father's heart.

##

A week of rainy weather. Everything a million shades of green. The garden has grown into a jungle. The corn and tomatoes were planted, peppers and sunflowers. The grapevines surrounding the deck unfurl velvet leaves edged in crimson. The view of the mountains becomes gradually obscured by the living lacework of trees.

The cherry trees will have a lot of cherries if we can protect them from the birds, which I actually invited into the garden by erecting a bird feeder on the sawed-off trunk of the globe willow that died of thirst. There are certainly a lot of birds, singing loudly all day long. I can hear them even when I'm inside.

While my Child naps I organize some of his baby things for posterity. My Husband brought home a large box with a bright label of vividly colored circles. Into it went what remains of the things my baby once used. There is not very much. Only the special things were kept. The tiny sleepers donated by neighbors were old and worn when we got them and even so, I passed them on to Helen's baby. The most beautiful and precious things he wore as a tiny infant once belonged to Iris's child. She did not ask for them back, but I returned them anyway after they were outgrown. I realized one day that if she had kept them for six years they must have been meaningful enough for her to have them back. There is almost nothing left to save for posterity.

I managed to keep everything made of velvet and velour. I fold and gently arrange them in the box, along with a few rattles, pacifiers and tiny cars.

To collect anything at all I had to overcome many hidden beliefs such as that there is no future. This is the result of having nothing from my past. Nor does my Husband have anything. Nor do our parents have anything from their prewar pasts. From our parents we will inherit a variety of things, ordinary and precious. But I do not have a single item from my childhood in Germany. And not a trace remains from our grandparents. I must have thought that things just do not last long anyway, until I saw that others had jewelry or china from grandmothers, or toys from their own childhoods. Mainly, it was reading about some debutantes who wore their _grandmothers_ ' gowns. I had assumed, I guess, that clothing falls to dust. Once I realized that things do not disintegrate and vanish, I began to keep my Child's precious things, perhaps to be used by _his_ child in the future.

It's time I began to believe in the future. With this treasure box I overcome the Holocaust mentality which waits to be stripped of everything, which always anticipates disaster and destruction, always expects to be on the run or dead by the time the future arrives. There is part of me that is always shocked to see that things have survived, like the house in Bad Reichenhall, which is _still there_. Like Bad Reichenhall itself. I had expected the whole town to be gone from the face of the earth.

Perhaps all this has more to do with coming to America than with the war itself, though in my mind the vanishing past merged into both. Being taken away from my childhood home probably had the deeper effect, and that was then fused in my mind with all that had been brought to America and which was left on the docks of New York by my weary, frightened parents. It was not worth lugging them any further. I never saw them again.

I am a displaced person, with no graves to visit, no familiar streets to walk down, no sentimental objects once owned by others, no fragment of the past. But my Child's things will be eternal, like the Dalai Lama's.

##

A gray green day. A letter from Seattle, filled with ideas, Nietzsche and Freud all over again.

Ideas are probably not that important. I know ideas have shaped the world, given birth to art, religion and science, created events like the Holocaust. But ideas only obscure the Truth, which is that there is no Truth.

There is nothing but day and night.

Probably our minds can never grasp the Universe and what it is doing or why

Summer

It has been raining for weeks. I don't recall this much rain ever. I don't suppose the trees and plants will rot—they don't in Austin or Seattle. Everything should grow very well if the sun ever comes out.

A stroke of luck at the supermarket placed me in front of the bedding plants at the very moment the green grocer came out and announced they were all "for the taking." I helped myself to white petunias, the only color left, and yellow squash which no one will eat, but I had wanted to try cooking with squash blossoms as they do in Japan. It made my day, a small detail like that, getting free plants. It was so hard to convey to Helen, with whom I've spoken three times this week after a two-month hiatus, that life is in the details.

Helen speaks of needing to hide from the outside world because of all the evil, violence and gangs.

"What gangs?" I ask. "It's a beautiful day. The sun has come out. People are planting flowers. Women get up in the morning and prepare breakfast for their families. Men get up and got to work. People are happy if they can earn the wherewithal for food and happy to prepare it to eat. They are happy to go to a movie or out to dinner once in a while. Out here, Helen, people are just trying to get through the details of life as pleasantly as possible. If there is ten percent evil, ninety percent of the people on this planet are busy trying to earn a living, raise their children, care for their dwellings, and plant a few flowers. Is there anything evil about that?"

"No. That's good," she said.

"I'm glad to hear you stay that. Maybe you haven't lost your marbles completely."

Her concept of evil is a mixture of misunderstanding sin, reading the daily papers, and being incarcerated in an insane asylum. From these she gets her perspective that reality is evil and dangerous and that she must hide. She is a voluntary patient and can leave anytime. She was supposed to go to a halfway house, but backed out. She must leave this private institution which costs $10,000.00 per month because the insurance limit has run out. She is going to the State Mental Hospital.

Reading a biography of Freud just confirms that he never really cured anyone. I don't think anyone can be cured by Freudian analysis. And here comes the letter from a friend in Seattle, the third or fourth on the same dismal subject that man's dismal state is due entirely to sexual hang-ups. Not only is this man a Nietzschean, but also a Freudian. He really believes what he say, that religion is the most insidious invention of man and that sexual hang-ups are at the root of all human problems, including wars. I love Stan but I disagree with him about almost everything. I find his persistence on this theme annoying because I believe religion to be man's most creative invention and because sex and its hang-ups just don't seem that important in the larger scheme of things. What is he going to write next, that the Nazis were sexually repressed? Even if they were, is that an excuse for murdering people?

I prefer to think that man is primarily a spiritual being, and only incidentally a sexual being, as everything in nature is a sexual being. I know about the power of sex drive. I have my share of hang-ups and repressions. But is that all I am? I should say not!

If I told him about Helen he would insist that she too must be a morass of sexual frustration. But even if that is true it is still not her primary problem. What he would see as a sexual crisis I see as a spiritual crisis. And I would even go so far as to say that the rise of the Nazis was the result of a spiritual crisis, that the entire Holocaust was the culmination of a spiritual crisis of both the Christians and the Jews.

How much better I love Jung's symbols, his collective unconscious, his anima/animus, and his image of man as moving through a mystical landscape towards self-realization. Enlightenment as man's true nature. To boil this all down to sexuality makes it such a paltry thing, not to say that sex is paltry, but cosmically speaking, how crucial can childhood misunderstandings be? Reading Freud's biography I can see how shocking and pioneering his work may have been to the Vienna of his day, but to get stuck there, in his theories, is a tragic mistake.

No doubt there are incidents in every childhood which could cause a psychiatrist to exclaim: "Aha, that's why you're ill!" A Freudian could find in Helen some childhood incident revolving on sex and attribute all her present problems to it. It's there. In everyone. But why do some people crack up while others don't, that is the question. Every child has encountered a parent naked. Every child has loved the parent of the opposite sex. Every child has misunderstood sex. Many children have caught their parents in the act. In Third World countries, with everyone sharing a room, it's probably common. To go back in memory and dig up one such incident and this is the root of your problems is so ridiculous to me that I wonder how Freudian analysis survived at all. It is like pinning all one's problems on having eaten a certain fruit which everyone else has eaten too, with no ill effects. We have all eaten the apple.

I myself can see how childhood incidents began a myth that grew to its fulfillment, beginning with the Gentile orphan boy, mistreated by the people who kept the house I lived in, in Bad Reichenhall. He was my first infatuation, certainly my first introduction to sex when I once watched him urinate in the bushes, and whose face I have never forgotten, even though I was only five or six, the face I searched for through adolescent and adult relationships with a combination of pity and passion. A span of twenty years was shaped by this ideogram, so I know that the childhood incident is important.

But Jung said: the myth is not enough. Discovering what the personal myth is is not enough for a cure. One must seize the myth and _change_ it. This is the power and wisdom of Jung, the element of being able to enter the myth and transform it, rather than standing outside it like a helpless victim. Being able to see the entire myth from its genesis to its conclusion is crucial to understanding how it has governed one's life. But why does one get fixated on a particular ideogram to begin with? Why did I latch onto little Hans in the first place? Why did I pick him for the theme of my myth?

This is where aesthetics plays a role. How beautiful is this personal myth going to be? How profound, how exquisite? Is it going to be a nightmarish mess that ruins our lives, or will it be an exquisite fable, exquisitely resolved? For the myth must have a resolution, lest it consume us. Therefore, aesthetics are very important, how we refine the myth as we live it out to its logical conclusion, and how we conquer it.

"Is it all written?" I once asked Rabbi T.

"It is, but we write it."

It is helpful, of course, to be able to stand back and see the myth, and I suppose that Freudian analysis may be useful in this. A man I once knew told me that he had been eight years in analysis and had discovered only one thing. His psychiatrist asked him to name his imagined ideal woman. He answered with Helen of Troy. The shrink pointed out this his mother's name was Helen. Isn't this the kind of work that we can do ourselves?

Freud did not help his patients transform their nightmares into myths of any symbolic value or usefulness. He took the great Oedipus and Electra myths and reduced them to something ordinary, trivial and frightening, rather than taking the ordinary, trivial and frightening things out of everyday life and transforming them into great myths.

That is the essential difference between Freud and Jung. It's a difference of direction. Freud brought the great myths and symbols down, took them apart and was left holding feces. Jung took even feces and transformed them into great myths through symbols and dreams.

That is the beauty of Jung's work. And I believe he was right in his attempt to transcend the mundane. There is more going on in this Universe, in this mind, that can be ascribed to one's stumbling into or out of the Garden of Eden. The shocks of childhood are not so much sexual as being a matter of disillusionment.

Every person, at about five or six, has a crisis of disillusionment, when the illusions of childhood suddenly fall away and he sees that the king is naked. It may be a Parent's death, divorce, new child, a move to another house, city or country. The discovery of something previously overlooked. It can be anything.

For me, it was coming to America and seeing my parents as refugees. It effectively ended my childhood. It matters not what it is. The child is ripe for the scales to fall from his eyes and they do, and any otherwise ordinary event can precipitate it.

I used to think I was alone in having my childhood end at six, by seeing my parents in such travail. Now I realize that everyone's childhood ended there, and if it didn't, they have a problem.

##

The wisteria blooms. It is probably the only one in town. I remembered wisteria from Austin, where an entire arbor of it grew. I have never seen one growing here, near these mountains. I believed a plant catalogue that claimed it was hardy, and my faith imbued the plant with faith. It has thrived and bloomed for seven years. The long purple clusters spill over the roof.

The tulip leaves have yellowed and been pulled. The cherries have already been eaten by the birds.

Every summer I have moments in which I must reconsider the value of things. The first time it happened, several summers ago, it had to do with cabbages. They had attracted hundreds of cabbage moths, little white butterflies. What to do? Spray the cabbages? I am not comfortable with poisons in the garden, and all of those white butterflies were so charming. Finally I decided that the cabbage moths were worth more visually than the cabbages were worth edibly. How much does a head of cabbage cost anyway? And this cloud of white butterflies was exquisite as it swirled in the sunlight at the bottom of the garden.

Now I no longer plant cabbages in the first place.

But the three morello cherry trees bore heavily this year, and though I wanted the cherries, an incredible variety of birds moved into the garden to eat them. At first I tried lengths of green hose snaked through the trees to frighten the birds away, but they paid no heed. Then I considered buying nets, the cost of which would have exceeded the value of the cherries. And who wants a garden with trees wrapped in nets? I began to value the birds more than the cherries.

The grapevines have completely enclosed the deck with their immense leaves, green on one side, gold on the other. Nothing seems to bother them and there are no choices to be made.

##

Went to visit Helen. A few weeks ago she wandered away from the State Hospital, bought some over-the-counter pills and swallowed them all. It was six hours before they found her. She is in a locked ward now.

I am directed down a long hallway and find a steel door with no handle or knob. I don't know how to get in. A passing person shows me a metal plate on the wall, high up, like they have outside intensive care units. I press it and the door swings open.

I enter a dismal room which has not been cleaned or changed in fifty years. The paint is that moldy color green. The orange vinyl furniture is torn. The windows are so filthy the light barely comes in. Several dozen loonies are lingering around staring at an ancient, blinking tv. They are all smoking and the room is filled with haze and an acrid smell.

Helen is allowed to take me to a courtyard for our visit. It is surrounded by a twenty-foot high brick wall, the ground a litter of weeds and broken glass with a small tree dying in the center.

Helen looks terrible. She has put on weight. Wears no make-up. Exudes a terrible medicinal smell. Her thick eyeglasses are covered with fingerprints. She shuffles and twitches, wrings her hands, but speaks clearly and seems to understand what I am saying. She answers coherently. Her answers actually make sense. But we are debating the power of Satan.

"You've got to pull yourself together and get out of here," I whisper like a conspirator. "You don't belong here."

"It's too late. My hands are tied."

As she says this I notice her hand are crossed at the wrist as if they really are tied.

"You cannot spend the rest of your life in a mental hospital. You are going to live another twenty or thirty years. That's too long to punish yourself. Just think! You still have so many years in which to do things! You could still do things!" I'm practically shouting at her.

"But my hands are tied, " she repeats endlessly. "I've trapped myself. I was tricked by Satan. I followed Satan. This is my punishment."

"But another twenty years of this is too long!" I'm shouting now.

"Not twenty years," she corrects me. "My punishment will not end when I die. It will last for _eternity_."

I feel like choking her. I am becoming infuriated again. What about Jesus, what about God, what about mercy, forgiveness and grace? "I cannot believe that God is so cruel as to punish you so terribly for so long."

"God is not cruel," she says clearly and calmly. "God is just."

This infernal courtyard is hot as an oven. I am wearing a black T-shirt. I cannot find a speck of shade. I have left my Child at a birthday party and probably ought to be picking him up soon. But I look at her and cannot tear myself away. I try again.

"Don't tell me you believe Satan is stronger than God."

"No, he is not stronger. But I have given him power over me and now I am trapped."

"OK. You have given Satan the power over you. Take it back. You have the power to turn this awful mess around."

"But my hands are tied. I belong to him now," she says firmly. She is cemented in her demented view of things. I am convinced she is not crazy. Doctors in three institutions have maintained that she could recover if she were willing, if she cooperated with them. But she has found a justification for what has happened to her. I am sure she has only made a wrong turn in her religious thinking. I am insane enough to think that something I say can make a difference.

"Helen," I start gently. "If you were tricked by Satan then you are innocent, no different than a lost sheep. You lost your way and fell into his clutches. You didn't follow him _deliberately_. You are really _innocent_." I speak slowly as if to a foreigner.

"I am not innocent. I am the worst sinner on earth. I was a hypocrite. My life was a lie. I followed signs. I let Satan trick me through the occult!"

"What do you know about the occult? You know nothing about the occult!" She has never even heard of the Tarot or the I-Ching. I know more about the occult than she does. She never played with astrology. She never let her daughter look at a fortune cookie.

"You know nothing about the occult!"

"I know all about it," she insists. "That's what got me here."

"Ok. Tell me about the occult. I want to hear about it. How did the occult get you here?"

"Through numerology. Satan tricked me with numerology."

I have to restrain myself from laughing. I look around to see if the sun has moved enough yet to cast a bit of shade along the wall. We are sitting on old bent metal chairs. I'm roasting.

"How did he trick you with numerology?"

She paused for a moment, weighing the decision whether to tell me. "It began when I was a child. My favorite number was 6."

"I see. The mark of the Beast."

"Yes."

"But that's 666 and yours was only 6. How did three 6's and one 6 get to be the same thing?"

"It's the same thing."

"Ok. Go on."

"And before I got married I had a dream in which the number 1999 figured. And my sister took a plane which was flight 999."

"And you feel free to turn it upside-down?"

"Yes."

"Well you just can't turn numbers around like that. If the mark of the beast is 666, then 6 is the number, not 9. 6 and 9 are different numbers."

"No, it's the same thing. Satan turns them upside-down to trick us."

"Ok. What else?"

"Well, my parents were married on the thirteenth, and his parents on the thirty-first, and I was getting married on the thirty-first too."

"So?"

"It was all ones and threes."

"So?"

"So I married him for the wrong reasons. I thought the numbers being the same were a sign that I was doing the right thing."

"You were doing the right thing. He's a wonderful person. You couldn't have asked for a better husband."

"But I married him for the wrong reason. I married him because my younger sister was engaged and I was jealous."

"Ok, I'm listening."

"And I had a child because my sister was pregnant and I was jealous again. I've done everything in my life for the wrong reason."

"You must have had a good reasons for joining your Fellowship and accepting Christ."

"No. I did that for the wrong reason too. I just wanted to be part of something."

"Listen to me Helen. Being jealous of your sister is not such a terrible thing. It's very common. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be part of something. There is nothing wrong with joining a Fellowship to make friends. These are not terrible enough sins for you to waste the rest of your life surrounded by loonies in the locked ward of a loonie bin."

I'm hot as hell and wondering if she has told any of this to the psychiatrists who could actually do something with this material. But she has already told me before that she is not telling them anything.

"All right, Helen. You are a sinner in need of punishment. Now you have been punished and you have punished your whole family too, and it's enough. You've got to turn yourself around and try to face God, and step by step you will get out of here."

"God will not accept me now."

"Ok. Jesus. Jesus forgives."

"Not this."

"Jesus forgives even murderers!"

"This is worse than murder."

"What have you done?"

"I've destroyed my family."

"But you are doing it even now! Why don't you stop!"

"I can't. My hands are tied. I'm trapped. Satan has me now."

Maybe she has lost her mind and I'm not seeing it, not accepting it. Her husband has divorced her. Her parents live in another state and seem disinclined to take her there. She has been abandoned in a nuthouse. There is nothing more I can say to her. I wrack my brains. I can't think of anything to say.

"You know," I say by way of conclusion, "you've really done me a great service. I was very close to accepting Jesus as the Messiah. But seeing what it has done to you has settled it for me. I'm grateful to you for helping me make this decision."

"You see," she answers. "I have even ruined your chance for Salvation. That is the power of Satan."

##

I dreamed I was in my dream house, a combination of the house I live in now ant the one on the west side where I lived as a teenager. The interior was immense, particularly the basement, which I have examined in previous dreams. The dream basement always has infinite rooms, rooms I never knew existed, filled with all manner of strange things, usually covered with dust and cobwebs. I always find things which seem useful and contemplate bringing them upstairs where they can be used, admired and enjoyed. First I considered a large bed, taken apart and leaning against a wall. I decided it would make an excellent guest bed and ought to be taken up to our guest room. Then I noticed a glassed-in credenza filled with antiques and unusual objects. There were also some interesting things on a low table. My Son, who was with me, helped himself to a clear crystal rabbit with its ears folded back.

Just as I decided to take some of these beautiful things upstairs, thinking it a pity for them to have lain unused for so many years, a strange man in a long dark coat and old-fashioned hat appeared and announced that he had returned to take possession of his room. "Now?" I thought. "Just when I've decided to make use of these things?" But I said, as if I were fully aware of his rightful ownership, "Of course, you can see that I've taken good care of your things."

Who was the man? He was kind of ominous, but in a familiar way. Why didn't I question his rights in the matter? Whose things were they? They did not, in fact, resemble any of my own possessions; hence they were not really mine. But I was planning to take them upstairs to my home, and the general assumption was that the entire house and its contents were mine to do with as I pleased. In other dreams of my dream house, no one has ever appeared to contest my intentions. But then, in the other dreams I had only contemplated making changes and had never actually touched anything. But I had not yet touched anything in this dream either. It was my son who had lifted the crystal rabbit with its folded ears.

I search my mind and memory for who this man might be. He reminds me somewhat of the ominous fellow, right out of Kafka, who approached us in Prague when we tried to enter a Jewish Museum. On seeing him I changed my mind and was relieved to hear my Husband say that this was not the museum he had in mind, but another place. My Husband felt in Prague the way I feel in my dreams, a vague sense of disorientation and frustration at not being able to find the places he wanted to show me. I was terrified in general of the entire city and of finding myself in Eastern Europe at all. My Husband wanted to show me Kafka's house but could not find it, and I insisted that time was short. We had not been able to find a hotel room in the entire city and wanted reach Poland by nightfall. My terror centered on entering Poland where, as my passport clearly stated, I was born. For me, Poland was a vast graveyard filled with pale ghosts and living murderers. My Husband was pulling me towards it, determined to show me what once was his home. He had convinced me by saying I owed it to my Father to see Lodz, where both our fathers are from. I was going, but like a lamb to the slaughter, pulling back internally, filled with fear.

When we encountered that man on the steps, in his long dark coat and hat, his face empty and pale as a ghost, my heart froze. I don't think my Husband even noticed him.

The man who appeared in the basement of my dream house reminded me of him.

But then I realized that they both reminded me of a man named Pinchas, who may have been frightening to me as a child. A Holocaust survivor who must have lost a family, an anemic pale bachelor with a limp who always dressed like the man in Prague and like the man in the dream. And always wandered around like a golem.

Yes, that's who it was, it dawned on me with a kind of horror. Pinchas was the man in my dream.

I tried to forget the whole thing.

But the next night I had another, similar dream.

I was standing in front of a two-story house, an older house I did not recognize, with a brass nameplate that read "Anna Freud." My Husband pointed it out to me, and I said, "Oh, that's not really her, it's the one who is chosen for her role at this moment."

While my Husband waited outside, my Son and I went in and climbed endless flights of wooden stairs painted white. At the top of the house we came to her door, with another identical nameplate on it, but no one was home. I knew it without even knocking. I had the impression that no one had been there for many years, that the door was not locked and that we could easily look around.

Suddenly, before even touching the doorknob, we were frightened by someone coming up the stairs, a man. I had the feeling he was the same man who had showed up in the first dream. I glimpsed his coat and hat. We hid from him, behind a bannister. He did not see us and we slipped down some other stairs, me in an old mink coat that seemed to belong to Anna Freud, though we never entered the apartment and had not taken anything.

Did I steal the coat as I attempted to steal the artifacts in the previous dream? If so, why am I stealing things in dreams? It so happens that I own an old mink coat, though not as old as the one in the dream. Mine is in much better shape. Doesn't everything within a dream belong to the dreamer? If they are mine, why am I afraid of the man who appears? And why does he claim my entire dream house, from the basement to the attic, from the guts to the mind?

Who is he? Is he Pinchas? Why don't I demand an explanation from him? He has fewer rights to these dream objects than I do. I should question him within the dream but I don't because he really seems to be the rightful guardian.

##

I was invited to join a Ladies Book Club by an old friend I had not seen in ten years. The meeting was last night, at one of the ladies' homes. I found myself the first to arrive at a wonderful house in the old section of town. I entered a series of rooms filled with carpets from India, Afghanistan and China. Lace curtains at the windows and freaky Asian masks and photographs of Hindu holy men on the walls. All manner of exotic artifacts filled the rooms, a collection more extraordinary than what I have ever found in my dream house with its infinite rooms.

A pale blond woman presided until the others arrived. Taken away by a ringing phone, she left me alone to examine everything at my leisure. The dark, original handcarved woodwork looked like something out of Bosch, and there indeed, on one of the mantelpieces, stood the Bosch triptych of _The Garden of Earthly Delights_. The dark carved furniture matched the woodwork and the entire place was like something out of one of my own dreams, down to the small Tibetan drawing on rice paper standing in the window next to me.

When the others arrived there were nine. We had each brought a dish for a potluck supper and the food was exotic and wonderful. It was like a trip back in time. Then we adjourned to an archaic little garden, reached through a rotting back porch, where we seated ourselves in an old grape arbor and talked for two hours about the books we might like to read and discuss.

The women were interesting and the entire evening had the quality of a dream. It was strange to think that a person I had not spoken to in ten years had opened this door for me.

When we were friends ten years ago, we found each other's values hard to take. I was too fresh from my wilderness experience to tolerate her materialism. When she had a child my pain became too great. I envied her perfect marriage, perfect home, perfect life, and now her perfect son. When I dreamed of making love to her, it all became too much for me and I broke off the relationship.

I felt she did not appreciate or understand what I stood for at a time when I was certain of myself but uncertain of the life I had chosen by returning. I was so out of my element at that time that I could not stand to see how at ease she was with all the aspects of her life. It seemed to boil down to the eternal difference: she was an American Jewess from a comfortable background and I was still, and even more than ever, a refugee. She had gloves on her hands and I had blood in my pockets. She fit perfectly into her life. It seemed I could never fit. I had made my decision to return to my Parents and my People after finding that my escape filled me with too much guilt. I had made my decisions and acted in accordance to them but could not muster all my emotions and psychic energy behind them. Large chunks of myself were still in Austin, Manhattan, or off in romantic fantasies of ashrams in India. I was a mass of contradictions and I was totally at odds with myself.

It was my blue-eyed Husband who set me straight, who pulled my careening train onto the track. Even today, after so many years, I am still amazed at his strength. I didn't think anyone was stronger than me.

It's a miracle I found my Husband. I was in a peculiar position. There seemed to be no one my age among the children of survivors. They were all younger than I was. I had been born in 1945. Of the children born between 1939 and 1945, none seemed to have survived. Even those born before '39 went straight to the gas chambers. The cut-off age was fifteen. Thirteen year olds smuggled themselves through to the labor side of selection if they knew enough to lie. In this town of two hundred plus survivors, all their children had been born in 1946, 1947, 1950. I was the oldest one.

There was one boy older than myself. Eight years older, a rarity. His parents had placed him with non Jewish people before they were deported. Let me see, he would have been born in 1937. Anyway, he survived in hiding. His parents survived too. After the war they came to claim him. The family he was with refused to give him up. I think his parents had to kidnap him. When I was twelve he was twenty. By the time I was eighteen he was gone. By the time I was twenty-five he was dead of leukemia, leaving behind a pregnant Swedish wife and a small child. Other than him, there was no one. Not among the survivors anyway.

Even though my parents would have been thrilled to have an American Jew for a son-in-law, I conceived a terrible revulsion for this group similar to the way I felt toward the rich in India who were able to indulge all their whims in the face of a million beggars. How could the American Jew indulge his whims in the face of six million dead? And anyway, they had rejected me as a child of refugees and I was never going to forgive them.

It was impossible to find a husband among them. I didn't even look. I would never have let any one of them touch me. I swept aside the whole group long, long ago and looked into the wider world of non-Jews.

A non-Jewish son-in-law, I knew from the very beginning, would be unacceptable to my Parents. And who can blame them? I didn't have to yield to their wishes, but what would be the point of coming back and sitting down among my living and my dead if I were not prepared to drink the wine?

When I looked into my Husband's eyes for the first time, those ice blue eyes just like my father's, I knew I'd found him or he'd found me. Three years older, the son of sole survivors, stronger than me. Why was someone born in 1942 to Polish Jews still alive? Because he had been born deep in Russia. And why had I not found him until now, after I had given up all hope? Because he had been in Poland all this time, all this time in the land of the dead, all this time, alive and waiting for me.

I knew, seeing his face, that he was my intended Husband. But, to tell the truth, I would have married him sight unseen. The frame of mind I was in, if one of my parents' friends had paid us a visit and told me he knew of a man three years my senior, whose Parents were from Lodz and who had survived the war in Russia and been in Poland until now, I would have said, "Please God, I'll take him."

It was finally finding someone cut from the same cloth as myself that saved me. That brought me back to human form and put all the pieces where they belonged. It took many years of marriage, journeys to distant places and having a son of my own to finally see that my perfect friend and her perfect Husband would have been ideal friends for us, for we had, after all, a great deal in common.

In the end I wrote them a letter asking for reconciliation. They were kind and curious enough to suggest meeting for dinner. I should say that the person who introduced us so many years ago was Helen, and in discussing her plight, we could still find a common ground. I found them very changed, more mellow, no longer the perfectionists. Then they went for a vacation to England and I did not hear from them again until she called with the Book Club Invitation. She seemed surprised that I accepted so readily to drive clear across the town at night to some strange home filled with strange women. But it was easy, as easy as stepping into the Lenore Fini painting.

##

According to my Mother, whom I interviewed at the first opportunity, Pinchas lived in someone's basement on the West Side. I never knew he lived in someone's basement, and the coincidence sent a shiver down my spine. But it was a commonplace occurrence because the new immigrants had a tendency to rent their basements out, even though they were renters themselves, and bachelors were ideal tenants since they were quiet and seldom there. My Mother pronounced Pinchas a very sad character who had survived a concentration camp, lived alone, never married, never even went out with anyone. I realized that "frightening" was not the right adjective because "sad" was more appropriate. He had lost something in the war he could never regain, as so many other survivors had regained it by putting their lives back together and having new families. He was very sad and perhaps, as a child, I had found his incredible sadness frightening. He had been permanently marked by the limp and the lost look on his face.

My Mother knew nothing about Pinchas' life before the war but said that my Father knew more. She expressed amazement that I should remember Pinchas at all. It had been about thirty years since I saw him, and he had been dead for twenty of them. Why should I pick him to enter my dreams as a mysterious, mildly foreboding character?

Perhaps he represents the Holocaust for me in its most devastating form: a man who survived but only as a shell, a golem. Will Pinchas be my guide to the Netherworlds of the Holocaust? He died, my Mother said, in a fall from a hospital bed, after a stroke. She insisted it was suicide. How could that be suicide to end a life that had no meaning?

##

At the Ladies Book Club the subject of Katmandu came up when I asked the hostess if, after all her travels, she still desired to go anywhere. She said "Katmandu, Nepal" and so, even after promising myself beforehand that I would not mention my travels, I told her that I had been there. This brought about an avalanche of questions from the ladies, some of whom were persistent in trying to find out _why_ one would or should go there. What was it about the place or the people that made it important?

It is a remarkable place with an intriguing culture, but one does not go to Katmandu unless he cannot live without going there.

"But if you tell us what there is about it, we might make a point of stopping there on the way to somewhere else," one lady insisted.

"It is not on the way to anywhere." I answered. "It must be one's inner destination. Otherwise there is no point in going. It is very, very far away."

Inner destination can lead anywhere for anyone. Any place is just as meaningful as any other, providing the meaning is brought to the journey by the one who makes it. Katmandu was my place. Anywhere can by anyone's place. A journey becomes a mystical journey from within, and there is no point in recommending Katmandu in itself. For me it was the most extraordinary place on earth. For me it was Tibet, after Tibet ceased to exist. Everything about it beckoned to me and the lure was so strong that I spent years learning everything I could about it. When I finally reached Nepal it was like coming home. The tankas, mandalas, stupas with eyes painted on them, prayer wheels, drinking bowls made from human skulls, ornate temples and carvings and erotic statues, the climate and the surrounding Himalayas, archaic architecture, narrow streets smelling of dung and incense were all familiar, deeply known. It was my physical arrival in a place I had already been.

The night before flying to Nepal, in the Royal Orchid Hotel in Bangkok, where we had a fitful night, needing to wake at 4 am to catch the flight, I had a vivid dream. I dreamed I was standing at a window through which I could see only a thick white fog. As I gazed, the fog separated and a dazzling mountain of changing colors became visible. I was so amazed by this scene that I turned to call the attention of someone in the room. But when I turned back to the window the fog was closing in again and in a moment nothing was visible.

Standing in Katmandu was something I never expected to actually do. It was one of those seemingly impossible goals or dreams we choose because of their impossibility. I didn't pick it out of the blue by spinning a globe with my eyes closed. It was a long journey, not just physically but internally.

As far back as I can remember, foremost in my mind was my determination to escape the Holocaust, the Jews, my Jewish self and all that it contained. I chose Tibet and by default, Nepal, where the old Tibet had gone after the Chinese invasion, because it was the farthest place, the furthest state of mind. My burning desire to escape the Holocaust mentality which pervaded my childhood and followed me everywhere led me to study Philosophy in the hope of finding better truths. Western philosophers left me cold with their ontological arguments and tautologies that proved only what they already believed. The existence or nonexistence of God was of no interest to me. I did not care whether God existed or not. I wanted to know _what_ it was that caused men universally to create gods. I wanted to know why I was here, why anything was here, why planets and stars and insects existed at all when it would have been so much easier to have _nothing_. Why was there _something_ , and why was I conscious in the midst of it? Reason and Logic could not answer me. None of the philosophers appealed to me, except Spinoza who said God was _everything_. But even that was a dead end and did not go anywhere for me. I wanted a grander, more arduous journey. I wanted to go really far away, as far as I could get from everything I'd known.

A Buddhism lecture given by the infinitely charming Rajah suddenly threw open the door and enabled me to step out of my background into a wide sunny landscape filled with dancing blue gods breathing Nirvana. It was such a relief.

#

In the middle of the afternoon, I inexplicably opened a library book by Martin Gilbert entitled _Holocaust_. I don't know why I checked it out, decided not to read it, left it on the kitchen counter for two weeks, unopened, then opened it at random in an idle moment. I found myself reading a chapter called "Eyewitness to Mass Murder" in which one Yakov Grojanowski described the scene at Chelmno, Poland where Jews and gypsies were gassed in trucks and buried in mass graves. He was one of the Jewish gravediggers in this nightmarish winter forest. I could not tear myself away from his terrifying descriptions, and when he got to the part where the Jews from Lodz were starting to be among the victims, I asked myself, "Is this where my Grandmother, Grandfather, uncles met their ends?"

He remembered the names and backgrounds of so many of his fellow victims who worked and died on that infernal spot that I found myself searching for Uncle Heniek who may have shared his freezing cell, in vain.

After rereading the entire awesome account I began to open the thick book at random here and there. On each page my eyes fell were names of Jews like myself, like my Husband, like my parents, like my Child. Here was a group of Jews burned in a synagogue. There, a group hiding in the forest for several years, an infant being smothered to death for fear its screams would alert the Polish or Germans to their hiding place. Fear and trembling, misery and death.

I was about to become totally immersed in this book when I noticed what a beautiful day it was outside and how my Child was lying in a shaft of light on the floor not knowing what to do with himself. "Why am I ignoring my precious Child?" I thought. Why am I subjecting him to the effects of this terrible subject?

I pulled myself away from the book, got on our swimsuits, threw together some things and took off for the swimming pool. Blue water, blue sky, blue mountains in the distance, hundreds of laughing, splashing children, rock music blaring from the speakers, green grass with parents reading paperbacks, a concession stand dispensing sweets and drinks. "How can the world still exist like this after all that has happened?" I thought as I stood in the water holding my Child. "How can it be that I am able to stand in this swimming pool, surrounded by all this joy and light after the bleak forest of Chelmno? How can these two places exist in the same world? Why hasn't mankind committed suicide?" And as I stood there surrounded by bright water, I began to cry.

Dante's guide was Virgil, but what did Virgil know about the Netherworld that qualified him as a guide? Pinchas, the pale broken Jew with a limp, I now accept as my guide. At least he is qualified. Pinchas had on his face everything I wanted to escape. He was meek and gentle, crushed and broken, limping along in dark baggy clothes. I don't know his last name, what he did for a living, where he lived, where he came from, what he'd lost. I was ten years old.

My Father who, according to my Mother, can tell me about Pinchas, did not return my call. My Husband joked that I had lost my informant.

"I don't need an informant," I said, "I don't need to know anything specific about Pinchas. I know what he stood for, what he represented for me as a child and that is all I need. He is a symbol, the lost soul of the Holocaust, the one who could not go on with his life even as he lived, after seeing what he'd seen."

And the details really do not matter. I am sure he lost his mother and father, brothers and sisters, sweetheart or wife and child. He lost his world. What he lost specifically does not matter, because he lost _everything_. And what he saw specifically does not matter either. I can imagine what he saw.

I do find it somewhat interesting that my subconscious mind did not choose a more important, more impressive guide, like Rabbi T. But Rabbi T. had not witnessed the Holocaust.

Pinchas is my least favorite name, and the man who carried it is my least favorite image of a Jew. Everything about him was sad and weak. I understand why he is my guide, why he claims everything from the basement to the attic. He is the essence of all I wanted to escape, of everything I wanted to hide or change: the weakness, the sadness. The inevitability of a bitter fate. The Jew as sacrificial lamb who goes to the slaughter without a sound. Passivity, resignation, I hated it. I hated weakness and fear and silence. I hated the way my people had been cowed. I hated the way my people had allowed themselves to be humiliated, stripped and murdered. And Pinchas personifies that cowed, frightened, weak, humiliated, sorrowful wandering Jew. He represents with his entire being the aspect that I hated most in my people and in myself. That was what I fought against. I would not be cowed and humiliated, even if I had to escape being Jewish. I would be something else. I would find a better religion. I would put hundreds and thousands of miles between myself and this sorry group of immigrants. It was too painful to be a part of them. I didn't need the details. I could see from their faces what they'd been through. And even though I did take pity on them, I felt I had to save myself from being associated with them and, mainly, from seeing reality through their eyes. That was what I feared most: going through life with a Holocaust mentality, seeing disaster around every corner, living in a perpetual state of grief and fear. Not me! I shook my fist. Not Me!

It was with a sense of vast relief that I stepped into an Eastern cosmology and found a river that flowed into a different ocean.

I am the way into the city of woe

I am the way to a forsaken people.

I am the way into eternal sorrow

Sacred Justice moved my architect.

I was raised here by divine omnipotence.

Primordial love and ultimate intellect.

Only those elements, Time cannot wear

Were made before me, and beyond Time I stand.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

–Dante

##

I sat on a bench in the garden this evening, the place lit by sunset and awash with blue shadows. The house stood out in clear relief, gold as honey, the sumacs and their shadows casting a tropical feeling on the walls. The immense angular windows rose like a cathedral. The lawn of light and long shadows stretched out to the border of pine trees, and an oblong cloud turned pink. I asked myself if I could ever have foreseen this setting, searching within my soul for some primordial recollection, some sense of familiarity, if only from an ancient dream. I had not envisioned being in a place like this. It seemed less familiar than some of the strangest places I've ever been. It was new, brand new, a newly created place. Or perhaps I was a newly created person. It looked perfect. A perfectly lovely, tranquil setting, with my Husband behind me pruning the poplars and my Child pulling his red car on a string. It was utterly quiet. What I wondered was why it had been given to me to sit in this peaceful garden instead of some hell. Who threw the dice of destiny and why should I have been so lucky? An ordinary sunset in my own backyard appeared to be a kind of Paradise in contrast to the images I was able to summon in my mind. And I thought again, as I do so often recently, what a great gift the Holocaust awareness was to me, that it could make the mundane seem miraculous. All those years of searching for the secret of turning the mundane into the miraculous, dross into gold, ignorance into enlightenment, and the answer turned out to be the very thing I was running from. This treasure turned up within me after returning home. Who would have thought that the image of Auschwitz could turn a backyard into Paradise.

Night has fallen. Strings of small lights left over from my Child's birthday and strung from the tall trees partly illuminate the garden. The house is dim, the windows open. A breeze blows through the rooms. It is in this tranquil place and in this tranquil state of mind that I am able to pick up the thread that leads to the Minotaur. All right Pinchas, lead on. I am ready.

If I am able to say something it is only because I am no longer trying to tell anyone anything. But I am able now to follow the thread within myself for myself. No one needs to understand it but me. These are things I cannot convey to anyone and would not even want my own Child to know. If the gift is great, I am the sole recipient: as everyone is the sole recipient of his own great gifts.

I will show what it is, but to attempt to organize anything would be impossible. Better to just flow with it and see the potent symbols as they arise. There is too much to attempt any chronological order, but the deeper mind has its own chronology and this is the one I use. Whether anyone can follow me is not important.

In my House of Death Rajah threw open all the doors and windows. Always dressed in black, the silver-maned Hindu revealed glittering scenes beyond the ruined walls of my house, beyond my people, beyond my history, beyond my God, beyond my parents, beyond the stench of death and despair where I saw a shining mountain looming out of the dark forest of human suffering. This was what I had been looking for. This was the quest, the journey I chose for myself. Not the one into the labyrinth. Pinchas I am ready. Go on.

##

The Holocaust book has a terrible effect on me. I don't know how it fell into my hands. It makes me hostile and angry. It doesn't matter _who_ it happened to. That it could happen to anyone appalls me. How ordinary men could throw themselves into the task of murder with so much enthusiasm is beyond me. Is there that much latent violence in us all? Hannah Arendt said it was crucial to see the Nazis not as monsters but as perfectly ordinary human beings like ourselves.

I always think I won't watch programs based on Holocaust material, but I always do. For one thing, my Husband is an avid student of WW II and always makes a point to see this stuff. But even if I were all by myself in an empty room I would probably be unable to resist turning it on for just a moment. And then I would be drawn in, as if to another realm, a realm of Black Magic in which human beings can sink to incredible depths of cruelty and then say, "Who me?"

That is the magic of reality, that Germany can smugly sit there now with its forests and gardens and cafes and say, "Who me? I didn't do it. I didn't even know about it."

"Yes you," I stab my slender index finger at Germany. "If not you, who? Who did it, tell me, who? Ah the Poles, yes I know about them. They hated the Jews. And the Latvians and the Ukrainians, you say? Yes, I know about them too. But you, you made it possible. You implemented it. You brought the mountains of dead bodies into existence."

The lights were turned off in the gas chambers when the gas began to take effect. Who thought of that idea? Who wrote the memo with instructions for that one? Who came up with the insane idea of using the hair of murdered Jewish women to fill mattresses? Who would want to sleep on a mattress filled with human hair? The hair of people you murdered. Who came up with that idea? Who were the idea men? Oh, the big wigs, not you. Now I understand. Higher ups, higher ups, everyone can point to someone higher up. You see, I already know all the answers.

Ah, Deutschland, how could you? You with your beautiful forests and exquisite music. You with your philosophers. And don't try to pin it on Nietzsche. I know Nietzsche. I've read every word he wrote. He had nothing to do with it. He is a truly innocent man. He would have despised you. It was his crazy sister with her infatuation for Hitler who so graciously loaned her dead brother's name.

I know you have nothing to say. You were a victim too, you hang your head, you had no choice, you didn't know, and if you did you were afraid to do anything.

So that's it. You are a nation of cowards. Now I begin to understand. The vampires in the belfry came up with all these infernal ideas as you carried them out because you were afraid. Is that how you want to go down in history? Is that your answer? That you were not basically evil and sadistic, but only afraid that you might be burned up too?

So you did know. What else could inspire so much fear but the truth? You must have known or sensed that terrible things were happening to people, and could happen to you. All right, we are making progress.

I am not out to defame you, Germany. Maybe any nation could have done it. Maybe any person is capable of it. I am willing to grant that it is a human problem. Man's inhumanity to man, that sort of thing.

Is it that the Jews were the easiest victims?

That's it, isn't it?

Behind your motorcycles and whips, your pistols and dogs, you are cowards. You picked the easiest victims, strangers in your lands, people who had not had a country, government, army or held a weapon for two thousand years. People whom no one would defend. You picked the most defenseless people on the face of the earth.

And then, they deserved it too. What could be easier? Everyone agreed that they deserved it. And what have the Jews done to so outrage the universe that they deserved to be herded into gas chambers and burned in ovens? They killed Jesus. Oh, of course, you will never say it, but I will say it for you. I am not afraid. I am not a coward like you. You will only say that you did what the Christian world wanted in their hearts to do.

But I will say this: we may have killed him but he was one of our own. What business is it of yours what became of him? Who asked you to make him into an Aryan God? We invented the Messiah and we will decide who he is. The Messiah was never synonymous with God. You want to take a Jew and turn him into a blond god. OK. Maybe we could all live with that lunacy. But why do you have to destroy the Jewish people who produced him? I know why. So that you can forget, deny that he was a Jew. Erase the Jewish people and Jesus the Jew can finally become an Aryan God. Well, it's a crying shame you couldn't come up with one of your own people. You couldn't even produce your own God.

OK. He is your God. We can be blunt. I admit it. We killed him. I won't even attempt to foist it off on the Romans. No need to. I confess. I'm guilty. Why don't you just kill me too? Or would you rather I committed suicide and saved you the trouble?

But wait. Let's take a good look at this Jesus. He was an ideal victim too, don't you think? He was meek, humble, without weapons, without hate in his heart. He was an ideal sacrifice who would not even resist. He might even insist on being crucified. In a way he was asking for it. Wasn't he the ultimate Jew, the quintessential victim?

Well I guess we are even now. Or does it bother you that I am still around? It bothers me that you are doing so well, prospering, leading tranquil lives and only a few years after the event, perhaps even a few hours after the event, the most horrible event known to mankind, you come to your senses after all that insane carnage and say "Who me?"

##

I think I 've had it with this subject. How much more agreeable it is to read about Jung and his travels to Africa. For me, transcendence is crucial. To get bogged down in the mire of a subject as painful and negative as the Holocaust serves no purpose. I mean, I could be in my garden.

If the purpose is sharing it with others, I'm not that altruistic. Others will have to find their own ways. My way is not into it but out of it. Pinchas, you will have to find someone else to guide through Hades. I am not going, do you hear me? Even in my dreams I am running away from him.

##

It is too difficult to go on. It is so much easier to look out the window. The two storied windows, angled at the top, are filled with shimmering aspen leaves. I can barely see an edge of the house across the street, its rectangle of green lawn, their pine trees and our pine trees which, when they grow a bit more, will completely close out even that corner. A window sheathed in living green, alive as protoplasm. I swear it is so much easier to look out the window.

I really do not want to go on. I hate the entire subject. I find it depressing. Why should I depress myself? I would much rather go into the garden.

What is this, the first day of sun after three weeks of rain? Even just watching the light drop into the room...onto the orange couch, down the apricot Chinese carpet, over the needlepoint pillows echoing its garden motif, flowing over the objects from Java, Bali, Katmandu. Yes, even Katmandu stands before me as a bronze tantric dancer with three eyes on her gold face. What is she holding? A mortar and pestle? A kind of mortar, yes...but the pestle is more like a half-moon blade. Is she Kali, grinding up the bones of millions and with her mouth whispering "Mortality"?

No, I really cannot go into it now. Talk to me in December. No, December is not good...I'm too busy. February maybe.

##

My Brother met Lily at a party and decided we _had_ to meet. She, visiting briefly from Brooklyn, is staying with her religious brother and his wife. Getting us together was not easy because her stay is brief and busy and I have a sick Child. But my Brother insisted on the importance of this encounter because Lily had been born "somewhere in the middle of Poland" in 1945 like me. Like me, she had been brought to a DP camp in Bad Reichenhall. Like me, she had come to America at age six. My Brother began to wonder if our Parents might have known each other and immediately began a great quest for connection, turning up nothing.

While awaiting this meeting, with a vague sense of dread, I must admit, I pondered what someone so much like me would be like. There was a kind of uneasiness about encountering myself. Then the feeling that she would be nothing like me. And then again the eerie sensation that it would be like looking into a mirror.

The meeting took place at her brother's house. There she was, dressed in a somewhat overly casual hippie style in thongs and an Indian print blouse with curly light hair hair gone wild, a somewhat interesting face, sharp featured and blue eyed. 1968.

I am much changed since I looked like that. My once wild hair is cropped like a man's and I wore a man's black jacket, black sweater, black pants, dark red lips and polished nails. I asked her how her parents survived.

Her brother told the tale of how their parents hid in the Polish forest for two years when he was five to seven years old. There were, he said, forty to fifty families. I asked him what they did for food. He said they stole from the surrounding farms. I mentioned that I had read in the Holocaust book about just such a group of Jews hiding in the forest and how distressing it had been to read about one couple who had to smother their infant for fear its crying would alert someone to their hiding place and result in the massacre of the entire group.

The brother exclaimed, "That is what my parents did to my two year old sister. They just kept piling on the blankets to muffle her cries and did not realize they had suffocated her."

I was silent for a moment, then stupidly said, "I think the other couple did it deliberately" and then regretted having said it, for really I had no way of knowing whether they had deliberately smothered a child as a conscious sacrifice, or whether it had been the accidental and horrifying result of trying merely to muffle a child's cries.

Who would smother a child deliberately? But to have done it accidentally seemed so much worse, so much more painful. I wondered if the story in the book had been told about this group, though there must have been many groups of Jews hiding in the immense Polish forests who may not even have known about each other.

"There are things that happened yesterday," he was saying, "that I cannot remember. But I have the clearest memory of that forest."

It was dreamlike to be hearing the same story from an eyewitness who was five to seven years old, the same terrible tale I had read only two weeks earlier. Like a recurring nightmare.

Before reading about it, I had never really thought about groups of Jews hiding in the forest. Living in the forest for several years, though deep down I must have known that was how some of them survived. I had never known anyone who claimed that distinction, but then, the survivors claimed nothing. Of the survivors I knew, most survived in Russia, that generous country that let them in, sent them to Outer Mongolia or Siberia, but did not kill them. Some survived the labor and death camps. A handful passed as Aryans. This forest, this Polish forest, now became a fixture in my mind as I tried to visualize it.

Although I wanted to ask him many questions about the details, I soon found myself in the kitchen with the women for want of a cigarette, for they were in the kitchen smoking. Once I'd had my cigarette I never left the kitchen, but decided to confront this other self of mine in depth before she left town.

So I met Lily, Lilah Ruchel, found her hip as 1968 and readily recognized her as the self I once was. I felt a bit out of sorts in presenting myself, with my short hair and banker's clothes. But I felt that if I could get her to visit me at my home my surroundings would reveal my true inner self.

The women readily agreed to visit me Monday morning for coffee even though it is quite a drive to this end of the world beyond suburbia.

My surroundings did reveal my inner self better than I could with my persona, which was created solely for functioning in suburbia. Only a year ago I finally cut off all my dark and wild hair. I knew even while I was doing it that my hair was my last symbol of what I had been, but it had become an obsolete symbol and I was forty years old and lived in plastik Amerika and it was not 1968 any more. I did not miss my hair until the evening I met Lily. But my house and garden performed admirably. I could see it through her Brooklyn eyes.

The house was large and airy, rooms flowing into one another without walls, the immense vaulted ceilings and windows, sparse modern furniture, and strange artifacts floating in that clear spacious silver light multiplied by mirrored walls. In the sunroom there is no furniture, just the orange couch and apricot Chinese carpet and the large Garuda from Bali sitting on the low slate mantle of the fireplace. The immense angular windows filled with shimmering aspens just outside. The bare dining room on a raised platform with a square black table on which Kali stands, one leg raised, both arms up, in her cosmic dance.

I followed them through the shining rooms, seeing it all through their eyes as if I were seeing the house for the first time. The rooms seemed immense and immaculate, but it was only the quality of the light. At ten in the morning there was plenty of light, but it was not the usual every day morning light. It was the light that dreams are made of. It was my house seen through New York eyes.

We had our coffee in the garden and I looked at it also with New York eyes. Having lived in Manhattan and dreamed so much about it, I know how miraculous is a garden such as mine. Lily stared for a long time at one spot and then said, "Is that a rose?" It was as if she had seen a unicorn.

Yes, I remember Manhattan well and I will never forget the light, the smell, the pace and feel of it. A blade of grass looked miraculous. I had never valued a blade of grass until then. So with a type of double vision I saw both Manhattan and these mountains with new eyes.

That was the best thing that Lily's visit did for me, the chance to see my house through her eyes. And it was absolutely beautiful, though I still could not understand how I had come to live in such a place that seemed so unlike me.

I will be sitting on the deck, watching the clouds, or deep in the garden pulling weeds, and it will look like a three-dimensional fairy tale. Even the clouds in the blue sky seem unreal. The trees, the shade, the light, the flowers all have a surreal quality. I enjoy nothing more than sitting there and seeing it with New York eyes.

My Child was sick for a week with a high fever and ear infections. I was terrified in the middle of the night. I called the doctor at 3 a.m. But we got past that and he's well and rosy cheeked again. Then I badly burned my leg on the hot exhaust pipes of my car, burning out a large hole I now keep filling with cream. Three spider bites didn't help either. I felt like Gulliver, besieged by little things.

It is the end of July, the height of summer, my least favorite season. All the trees are now the same shade of green. I look forward to the cool autumn weather when they will begin to differentiate themselves again. The onions and garlic have been pulled, opening new vistas and space. I always enjoy the stages, and stages is the right word for it because the scenes are like stage sets and the blue larkspur has center stage in July and then must give way to a second round of roses.

##

It is so hard to reveal ourselves to others. From a lifetime how do you pick a moment and say "this is me"? Sometimes what is of value is what we were. Sometimes it is what we have or want to become. When I wanted to show Lily was who I _really_ am, I brought out my Tibetan treasures: the bronze tantric dancer with face and hands of gold, the tankas with their geometric designs in morbid colors of blood and dung, the intricate prayer wheel of silver and bone. I still regret not buying the bowl made from a human skull and rimmed with small silver skulls around the edge. Then I could easily have shown anyone who I really am. The silver edged bowl made from a human skull would have been the perfect personal symbol. It was there for sale, on a blanket on the sidewalk, among other weird things. I looked at it every day when we walked to Durbar Square to visit Temples. But I was afraid to ask my Husband for it, afraid he would think me morbid, afraid to reveal that it was the one thing I really wanted from Nepal. But having seen it with my own eyes, in a way it is mine, locked like a treasure in my mind, and though I cannot take it off the shelf and show it to someone, I can evoke it and bring it back into existence any time. If possessions can reveal one's inner self, then this is my most valuable possession, don't ask me why.

The use of human bones is common in Tibet and Nepal. Besides drinking bowls made from skulls, trumpets are made from leg bones trimmed in silver. I was fascinated to learn how the dead are handled in Tibet where the ground is too hard for burial and wood too scarce for cremation. The bodies were taken to some special wasteland of stone where people known as "body breakers" broke up the corpses and hacked them apart. The pieces were then offered to the vultures. The chief vulture got the heart, and the other organs were distributed to the other vultures in ranking order. The vultures also stripped the bones and then consumed the bones themselves which had been ground up into a powder.

High Lamas, on the other hand, had their bodies preserved like the Pharaohs. The organs were removed and the cavities packed with herb-treated gauze. Then the body was put into lotus position and wrapped in miles of silk, packed in ovens with rock salt and steamed. After the body was thus preserved the silk wrappings were unwound and the body covered in gold leaf. Then it was placed in a room in the Potala with many other such bodies, where it took its place as a statue. The Lamas could stroll through this museum and view their former bodies.

For me this is the height of fascinating reading and possessing a drinking bowl made from a human skull the height of the art of possession. I cannot really explain this fascination of mine. I used to think it was something to do with being a Scorpio, whose tarot card is Death, as Rose once told me. That seemed fitting because I was always interested in the science of death, the process, the experience, the aftermath.

_The Tibetan Book of the Dead_ seemed a marvelous creative effort in describing the stages the psyche goes through after leaving the body, and I found it fascinating to learn that in meditation one can also explore that terrain. But maybe this fascination with death is also something to do with Auschwitz and the Nazi death machine. They did not save human skulls or do silverwork on bones, but they did try making lampshades of human skin. I wonder if anyone still owns one. God, what a reminder of mortality. It is said that Death is the most perfect Guru. This is true. In the face of death one can better taste life, and being alive and conscious is quite an achievement.

For three hours I sat in the garden with Lily and the subject of the Holocaust never came up. I meant to ask her for more details about the Polish forest where she had been born after the smothered child. I did not raise the subject and for three hours we sat in the garden and talked about everything but.

On her way out she stopped in front of some photographs in the hall. I pointed to the one of Pashupati and told her about how people come there to stay in little rooms and wait to die, so that they can be burned on the banks of the sacred Brahmaputra. It is kind of like going to Mecca or Jerusalem.

"They must be rich to be able to afford to wait to die," she said.

The comment surprised me.

"Oh no," I answered, "I'm sure it costs nothing. They are just meager little cells painted blue. Afterwards they are cremated here on the steps leading into the river."

She made no further comment.

I remember Pashupati very well. The ancient steps leading up to a high place with benches overlooking the temple complex, the waiting houses and the Brahmaputra River which flows into the Ganges. A snake charmer sat about halfway up. At the top I stood at the ledge and gazed at the ancient yellow buildings with blue shutters and bronze rooftops. Pigeons whirled in the sky. A silver bell was pealing with a clear silver sound that went to the center of my being. On the steps a cremation was in process. It was the most mystical moment of my life. Time stood still and ceased to exist.

A dead body is something almost no one in America has to deal with. In Third World countries people die in the midst of their families, or with a family member who waits with them at some sacred place like Pashupati, and it is then the responsibility of the relative to prepare, cleanse and burn the body. To sit and watch for several hours a parent, spouse or child slowly consumed by the flames is a sobering experience.

I was not affected as much by the abstract death of millions as by the mourners I was born to who did not have the chance to see the bodies burned or buried. It is a longer mourning that takes place when death has no fixed moment.

I once saw a cremation ceremony in Bali. The entire village was involved. The priest went on for hours with his chants, incense and silver bells. A modest cremation tower had been built out of wood and paper. On each side was a large swastika. At last, I thought, I will get to the bottom of what the swastika means. Here in Bali they have no conception of what the swastika has become. Here I can find out what it was, once, the origin of this symbol. It took our driver three days to bring me an answer. "Power" he said, it stands for _power. Pure power_.

The swastika is common all over Asia. At a Buddhist temple in Tokyo a large sand-filled incense burner the size of a cauldron was filled with bundles of incense, each wrapped in white paper bearing a swastika. In this sand stood and lay all these smoking swastikas. It was quite a sight. I allowed myself to purchase two small golden amulets, sold by the monks, with Buddhist saints on one side and swastikas on the other. They came in tiny cloth bags imprinted with intertwining swastikas. How fitting, I thought, that Japan should have been Hitler's ally. The German choice of the swastika as the symbol of the Third Reich must have endeared them to the Japanese. And they do have so much in common, their love of order and straight lines, primarily.

Order, perfection, absolute devotion to the Emperor/God, even unto death, Kamikaze, Hara-Kari. Aesthetics raised to the realm of perfect order. Even putting a flower in a vase, even drinking a cup of tea is elevated to a mathematical precision. If the Germans love straight lines, the Japanese love grids.

There was something eerie about Tokyo. A city of twelve million and not a cigarette butt or gum wrapper on the street. Policemen and cab drivers in white gloves and sometimes, white masks. Shinjuku subway station, the Grand Central of them all, the paper ticket stubs used by millions are collected at the end. Not a one lays on the immaculate floors.

Of the amulets, I gave one to Iris, who once nearly died in Berlin so negative were the vibrations there. The other has lain in its bag never opened.

I also bought a set of three paper lanterns, red and white and each emblazoned with black swastikas. It hangs in my kitchen, over the sink where I stand a dozen times a day. It doesn't matter what visitors may think. If anyone can display the swastikas in her home, I can. Being the child of Holocaust survivors gives me certain rights. I didn't realize until I saw my Father-in-law eating his soup with a silver Nazi spoon. Yes, I thought, to the victors go the spoils.

I recognized myself in Lily. But I don't think she recognized herself in me. I had run too far and covered my tracks too well. The part of myself that I showed her was incomprehensible to her.

##

I decided to try making dolmas out of fresh grape leaves, which I have growing all around the deck. For years I've made them with preserved, bottled leaves. I'm sure they don't use bottled leaves in Greece and the leaves from my own vines are free. The grapes themselves have not been useful, with tough skins and large seeds, though I did manage to squeeze some juice out of them last year. Maybe the leaves were worth more than the grapes, I thought. An unforeseen treasure.

I looked through some Middle Eastern cookbooks. Lo and behold, there were directions for using fresh leaves. Dunk them in boiling water for a minute. They turn to that seaweed color of bottled leaves almost instantly. Now I'm on familiar ground. Rice I always have on hand. Mint, I grow and dry my own. Next thing I knew I was up to my elbows in preparation, my kitchen counter, formica feigning driftwood, chosen by the previous owners, buried under leaves.

Rose taught me to make dolmas so many years ago, a lifetime it seems. She took me to Atlantic Avenue. It was in Brooklyn I think. Atlantic Avenue was a mecca of Middle Eastern grocery stores where she regularly went to buy spices and dried apricots from Turkey, which she squeezed in between the dolmas. In those days everyone was growing avocado pits. Not Rose. On her kitchen sink she had a mango pit suspended in a glass of water. It had been there lifeless probably for years. I didn't think it would ever do anything but by the time I said good-bye to her it had put forth a pale gold leaf.

Manhattan. How thoughts of Rose take me back to Manhattan, where I rode the subways every day. The gray cement city filled with hidden treasures. Then I bought my grape leaves. Now I go out to the deck, glance at the mountains and pick what I need. The grapes themselves are formed, as large as they will be, round, still green, perfect as jade marbles. The trees, tall and green, nearly obscure the mountains. In the deep shade, late summer roses float as if under water. It is a different world.

##

An absolutely sweltering day. Over two weeks temperatures straddling a hundred. The grass collapses in blue circles. The trees look tired and thirsty. The heat is stifling. I was sitting on the couch, my hair a frazzle, in an indigo batik dress I bought in Java after being soaked to the bone at Borobudur. My Child had just awakened from his nap, bathed in sweat, wet as a skunk, crying on my lap, my dress as wrinkled under him as a used handkerchief. The doorbell rang. I dumped my Child off my lap and answered it. Outside a blonde stranger greeted me like an old friend. He wanted to shake my hand. I declined. "Are you from Egypt?" he asked pointing to the plaster pyramid by the door with its kneeling women and hieroglyphs.

"No," I answer waiting to find out what he wants. He embarked on a lengthy, well rehearsed speech, smiling like a lunatic with his friendly overtures, telling me about a program he is in to train him to communicate with people which will prepare him for his own business in the field of management, but meanwhile, if he is successful, he can win a trip to Europe. He showed me a large laminated ID card with his picture on the front and pictures of Paris, London and Rome on the back.

"How do you think I am doing so far?" he asked.

"Very well. You are very friendly. I'm sure you have a good chance of winning."

"Where are you from?" he asked. Such an easy question. He has obviously been trained in the Dale Carnegie School of prying into other people's lives. He asks it easily. But I cannot answer. I cannot easily answer this question even from people I know. I weigh the moment. I am twice his age. I have never seen him before and will never see him again. I can afford to be honest.

"It's none of your business" I finally say.

"Well, never mind," he continues easily. Have you ever been to Europe?"

"Yes I have"

"Was it nice?"

"Yes it was."

"Well if you will help me accumulate the necessary points by subscribing to some magazines of your choice..."

"I'm sorry, but I am not interested."

"I'm sure you want to help me see Europe."

"But I'm not interested in any magazines."

"Don't you want to see me win?"

"I can't help you."

"Then why don't you just go back to wherever it was you came from!" he screamed and stalked away.

So easily said: "Go back to where you came from." Shall I go back to Russia where I was conceived, which I have never seen? Shall I go back to Poland where all my people were murdered? Shall I go back to Germany? Is that my home? Or how about Israel where I have never been but probably belong? "Go back to where you came from," the callow youth said to a woman in a Javanese dress with an Egyptian pyramid on her doorstep. I cannot tell you where I came from, you ignorant mouseketeer. But I can tell you if you want to get anywhere in this world you'd better stop tossing off so many personal questions because you are not entitled to the answers.

I come from a world that no longer exists.

If I had said I am Jewish, maybe it would have solved everything. But why should I tell him? Who is he, appearing on my doorstep with his questions?

A failure of communication, but the fault was mine. He doing quite well communicating, being friendly, interested, asking what he thought were pertinent questions that might lead me to talk about myself, which everyone loves to do. That is what they taught him. He did not realize his questions were loaded. He asked them too easily. I could have answered them just as easily with any lie. He would have accepted any answer I gave him. I could have told him anything. It is I who cannot communicate, who cannot answer the simplest questions.

But it is his fault too. Why can't he just say "Hello, would you care to subscribe to some magazines?" He must be asking himself what on earth was wrong with that lady, how could our "communication" go so amiss? It was the heat, young man, just the heat.

##

I dreamed I was in my gray city, next to the river on the sidewalk of a wide empty street. There was nearly no traffic, no people . I think Lily was with me, it is not clear. We were on this dead dismal street after being told this was where I could find someone I was looking for. The grassy bank of the river was gray and forlorn. The wind blew bits of garbage through the street. Not a soul was to be seen, and all the storefronts of the shabby buildings were boarded up. We were cold, frightened and lost.

It seems I was looking for a boy who once sat near me in some dream history class and who was now making gold artifacts. I'd seen his work when we were dream students. Ancient wolf motifs, I think. The entire dream is very hazy now. Among the abandoned stores was his, and we went in. I spotted him immediately in the back with his mother who was dying in a bed. A willful saleswoman tried to prevent me from speaking with him. I forced my way past her.

There he was facing me, blond and radiant as Billy Idol, the ultimate Aryan, beautiful as an angel. He allowed me to look at his jewelry. He was still into wolf motifs. While I was looking at the pieces he and his mother left and made their way up the windy desolate street. Lily and I went into the street after him. The bare trees contained horrible monsters which looked like animals at first but then resembled the lost souls of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, muscled men with tormented faces clinging to black branches.

Lily held him for me, blocked him on a corner next to the river, while I went back to his ancient store where he had left his jewelry. I took one of the wolf pieces from the case and left in its place a gold coin. I have absolutely no inkling of what this dream means.

##

At two o'clock in the afternoon it is wonderfully dark with great slate clouds split by lightening and the booming of thunder. It is incredibly still otherwise. Barely a leaf moves. Suddenly it is raining hard, the windows streaked with silver, a mercurial downpour.

Over the phone a friend told me about a paper she is writing on the International Laws the Israelis have broken in their dealings with the Palestinians. Knowing my background, she hastened to add how she will try to show how this has been unavoidable in view of the Holocaust, which puts the Israelis in a "unique" position.

I suppose her ability to look at it in terms of the Holocaust is thanks to me, but the Holocaust did not put Jews in a "unique" position which now justifies their acts. Every group of people, every individual, and every human disaster is unique. The Vietnamese are in a unique position. The Cambodians are in a unique position. The Tibetans are in a unique position. The American Indian is in a unique position. Who is not in a unique position?

The only reason Israel can do what it likes with the Palestinians is because it has the power to do so and not the moral right. Power is all. If they did not have the power, no one would give it to them. They get help of course, because of their moral situation, but no one helped them forty years ago when they were being burned. No, it has to do with the historical imperative that allows great nations to be built on the blood and bones of innocents. No one asks, "When is America going to be given back to the Indians?" The question is not raised because America is a great power, and if the Indians had to be destroyed in the process so be it; that is the price of great nations. Nations are not created without a price.

If the Palestinians, like the American Indians, are paying the great price, it is not because of the Holocaust, but because that is the price of building a great nation. The need for a Jewish State did have its roots in the Holocaust but only because the Germans lost the war. If the Germans had won the war and created their Third Reich which was to last a thousand years, the eradication of the Jews would have been justified as the cost of building the Aryan Nation, and no one would have thought any more about it than they do about the fate of the American Indians. Just as the Jews would have been the fodder of the German nation, so the Palestinians are now the fodder of the Jewish nation. And the American Indian, physically alive but spiritually broken, sits on dismal reservations and no one gives it a second thought.

That innocents should perish in this way is tragic. It is kind of like the species that are endangered by "civilization." They are in the way of "progress." The only thing wrong with the Palestinians is that they are in the way of progress and in the way of the building of a nation, which would never have been built if the Germans had built their Third Reich instead.

Fall

First I had an argument with my Mother over her inability to watch _Sophie's Choice_. She began to view it but turned the channel out of fear of what she would see and accused me of being insensitive. This outraged me for awhile. My Mother said that I was just lucky that I had not experienced the Holocaust firsthand, and that they had sheltered me from it. This was ludicrous and I said so. It is true that I did not experience the shock waves directly and as intensely as they had, but to imagine that they had successfully sheltered me from it was outrageous.

"We always avoided talking about it, "she said.

"That doesn't mean I didn't _feel_ it, "I nearly shouted.

"We know a lot of survivors," she said.

"I know them too!" I felt like screaming but I don't think I screamed. I felt like screaming "What do you think I've been running away from all my life!" but didn't. This is my starry Mother I'm talking to, my Byzantine icon. I restrained myself.

Then she confessed she had had an unpleasant conversation at the steam bath with one of the Mrs. Survivors who advocated seeing _Shoah_ and on seeing my Mother's appalled reaction called her "too sensitive." I said that I did not want to see it either but that _Sophie's Choice_ was worth viewing as a work of art and that it was not a question of being over sensitive or insensitive to subject matter dealing with the Holocaust. It was a matter of what had been done with the material.

Then I thought, why am I arguing with my Mother? So what if she implies that I am insensitive, unaware and unaffected? Let her think what she wants. Perhaps she needs to believe that she successfully protected me from it. I know where I stand and that's enough.

Then, having run out of things to read I went upstairs to my personal library and pulled from the shelf a book I've had for some time but had never opened: Albert Speer's _Inside the Third Reich_.

I too had avoided such material for fear I would find something out, something even more horrible than I already know, which I could do without. But now I was drawn to it and as I read the first few pages and found it quite easy to stomach, I realized something of great importance.

The survivors are unable to deal with Holocaust material in any form, which is not surprising. To them, books, movies, and any works based on this terrible human material is a blasphemy. They are correct in doing everything possible to protect their emotions. They cannot afford to reopen the wounds which have never really healed. The thin veneer of healing cannot sustain the slightest pressure. With the rare exception of someone like Elie Weisel, they themselves cannot create or produce anything from the raw material of their lives, nor can they view or stomach the creations of others. They are the mute generation, who cannot say anything coherent about their experience, nor can they extricate themselves enough to view it from any perspective other than their own. They have seen it and are speechless.

The second generation, though, can speak. As for me, I have plenty to say, if only I could find some language in which to say it. And I can read _Inside the Third Reich_ or even _Mein Kampf_ and try to see it from many different perspectives.

I find it fascinating to read this account by someone who was very close to Hitler and knew him as a man. I am infinitely curious to know what motivated this man. Where he got his ideas and what he thought he was doing. There is Hitler, redecorating buildings, eating ravioli, and walking in the mountains. There is Speer, 28 years old, having sold his soul to the devil for the honor and opportunity of designing buildings that would last a thousand years. Here is the high society of the Nazis, the mansions and palaces they acquired for themselves, the vision they entertained, the personal power they amassed.

Somewhere behind it all are the death camps.

Speer maintains that he knew nothing of the death camps, though he is apologetic and admits that had he wanted to know, he could have found out. He did not want to know. And he insists that he did not know. Here is a man who ate dinner with Hitler every night.

I am waiting to get to the part where he will say that even Hitler did not know.

That would be a laugh. A black laugh of course. All the lower-downs blame it on the higher-ups. Maybe the higher-ups can blame it on the subordinates. Even Hitler can say he didn't know, had no idea whatsoever what Goebbels and Eichmann were up to.

Ah well—what difference does it make now?

##

No, I had not wanted to see _Shoah_. The moment I learned of its existence I made up my mind not to see it. I was even angry that such a film had been made. Survivors interviewed on film. To me it was the same as torturing people on film. Why dig it up? Who needs it? The survivors don't need it. The children of survivors don't need it. And the rest of the world can do nicely without it too. No, I would not see it and kept my promise when it played at a theater, mercifully far across town.

Then a year later it came to TV.

Shoah. It sounds like a howl. Spare me, Lord, spare me having to see this thing. I know all I want to know. I already know too much. Why must it come into my living room? Wasn't it bad enough that it showed at a theater in this town? I don't want to see it, don't want it emanating from the corner of the room. Can't I be spared even this? How much do I have to know before I know enough? When will I finally know everything and be done with it?

My Husband blithely turns on the TV to watch. I am in the kitchen washing dishes. Over the counter I can see and hear it. Who invented these houses without walls? There is not even a door I can close. I already know it is only a narrative, nothing will be shown. But I know the power of narrative. Silent images are almost easier to withstand. Will I now have to witness the witnesses trying to keep from breaking down as they relate their terrible tales?

Like a fish on a line I am drawn from the open kitchen, around the counter, around the chairs until I find myself seated right in front of the screen, listening. I am listening with a thousand ears.

A barber is talking. He is being interviewed in his barbershop while cutting someone's hair. It is probably the only way he can control the rush of emotion.

He is my Father's age, speaking the same broken English, trying to remain composed. You can see what a tremendous strain his composure costs him.

He is talking about his duties at one of the death camps. With all I knew, I had not known until I watched _Escape from Sobidor_ that there were death camps at which Jews were taken directly from the cattle cars to the gas chambers. Somehow, I had always thought people lingered around, being worked to death, and gassed only if they were children, aged, pregnant, sick or worn out. Now I knew that entire trainloads of thousands of Jews each went directly from the platform to the showers, and in two hours it was all over. They had been stripped, gassed, the bodies had been hauled out and buried in trenches or burned, their clothing picked up, sorted and packed in bundles to be sent to Germany, and the entire camp was clean, showing no trace of anything, ready for the new arrivals, who met the same fate, whose forearms were not engraved with Satan's haiku.

The only survivors of these places were the handful who worked in the clothing detail, those pitiful Jews whose lives were extended by only four weeks by being selected for the Sonderkommandos, those who helped clear the gas chambers of bodies.

Now this little balding barber, his hands trembling, tells about his job as a death camp barber.

Of course, the victims were shorn first, before the slaughter. I know that. How is it I had never imagined the line of a dozen barbers doing it? Did I think the job was done by Poles or Germans? I had not met anyone who survived by being a barber. Here he is, a different species of survivor, who did not sort clothes or gold or corpses. He survived by cutting off the hair of doomed Jewish women, whose fate he knew, but could not tell for fear of spreading panic and thereby dooming himself.

How pitiful the description of how these naked women getting men's haircuts still wanted to look presentable and how he pandered to their vanity by pretending to cut stylishly and assuring them that all would be well. Just a haircut, a shower, disinfected clothing and soon they would be reunited with their men and sent to some work camp or factory.

His composure is costing him too much. His eyes fill with tears. He wipes them away with the back of his hand. He is coming to the brink of some awful truth, some story he has long wanted to tell, but can't. Even now with the camera trained on him, he cannot do it. Why did he ever agree to this interview? Did he think he could rein in his emotions and dutifully tell the tale as he had dutifully cut the hair of all those doomed women? In both cases he convinced himself that he was doing the best he could, under the circumstances. But there in Hades' barber shop he had no choice. Here, he did. You can see him cursing himself for ever agreeing to talk, regretting the whole thing.

He pauses. Takes a deep breath. Continues cutting some man's hair silently. A long silence commences in which he struggles to get control of his lips which are twisting in agony. He waves the interviewer away with his scissors and stands stock still for an eternity, doing deep breathing exercises for his plunge into some black ocean.

One of the barbers, he begins again, found himself cutting the hair of women he knew, the wife of a friend. He decided to tell her the truth, that she was about to die and would never see her family again. He thought that knowing the truth might give her a chance to compose her thoughts in the face of death.

But she ran amok. She created a panic among the women, who refused to believe her anyway.

He stops talking. He swallows hard. He frantically waves the interviewer and cameraman away, but they do not budge. He slips into Yiddish and starts to cry. "I can't, I can't. I'm sorry. It's finished."

You can tell that the camera was turned off. In the next scene the barber is composed again. He wipes his eyes and slicks back his thin hair with his hands. He continues.

The monsters in charge of keeping order held the woman back from the gas chamber. Then, when the gassing was over and all the others were dead, she was brought in before the barbers and ordered to point out the one who had told her the truth. She tried to refuse but was tortured before their eyes until she finally pointed the poor man out.

Both she and her barber were thrown, live, into the ovens.

For five nights _Shoah_ was shown, all fifteen hours of it. Survivors, SS officers, train conductors, Poles—all were interviewed. A Jew from the Sonderkommando told what the bodies in the gas chambers looked like, stripped and shorn, with blood burst from their mouths, eyes and ears, slimy with blood and feces. Oh God, spare me, don't I know enough yet? Must I know even this?

At night I lay in bed. Our bedroom is a blue loft, the bed facing the open wall overlooking the vaulted living room with its two-story tall stone fireplace and its three long narrow windows stacked along each side. Through the middle window on the right is a view of some townhouses across the creek. One glows white from a street lamp or moonlight, it's trees and shrubbery making it look like a skull. Every night I lie in bed and with my head slightly raised by the pillow I see this immense skull floating in the night. Every day I study the townhouses by daylight to find out which trees and shrubs are creating this terrible illusion, but by day the skull disappears.

My Husband's reaction to _Shoah_ was very strange, something I would not have expected. He was shocked and angry with himself, that he had lived at the scene of the crime for so long, even as an eloquent adult, and it had never occurred to him to confront the Poles as this French interviewer did, through a translator.

My Husband kept saying that it would have been so easy for him to confront the Poles who lived in the regions around the camps. He was fluent in the language—it was his mother tongue. He knew the locations of the camps and what had happened. How was it that the new regime had hypnotized him into viewing Poland as a victim? How was it that he had never viewed the Poles as murderers until he saw them now, still laughing, about those poor devils, the Jews, still believing the tales about suitcases filled with gold and the victims doing Hail Marys and turning to Jesus as they are being burned?

He could not get over the fact that he had been right there, at the scene of the crime, and had not asked a single question like: "where were you?"

Where was anyone in that nightmare?

It's amazing that people still walk around saying, oh yes, I remember the smoke, the smell. Oh yes, we knew they were burning Jews. They had it coming.

The skull rises up in the window, huge, looking over by bed. I must go tomorrow and chop those trees down. It must be a street-lamp on a white wall with two trees and a bush illuminated in a way I have never seen before.

##

Raining. Grey skies. Silver streets. Against this background the gold leaves look brilliant. Driving down the boulevard one is engulfed by an impressionist painting. The colors are full-bodied now and clear. A dazzling landscape washed clean.

The heat is turned on. The house is warm; all views are blocked by colored trees. My Child with gold hair and radiant face looks like an angel in an Italian painting.

Went to a Gun Show on Saturday to look at Nazi paraphernalia. There were tons. Daggers of all shapes and sizes. Guns too, but I concentrated on pins and "cloth" (armbands, insignias, etc.). A Nazi armband goes for $10. They also had the yellow Jewish stars. Can you imagine? I bought two Hitler Youth pins. Aside from Nazi stuff there were hundreds of beautiful enamel French Foreign Legion pins that tempted me, but I decided to stick to my original decision of concentrating on expanding my Nazi collection and not getting sidetracked. If I'd had the money I would have bought a dagger. I must tell you that I could not find a single person to accompany me to the Gun Show. The couple of people I approached were appalled. Nobody has a sense of humor or irony. I plan to wear the Nazi pins just to see if people are on their toes. And to you, my friend, I can confess that I even imagined sleeping under a quilt made of Nazi armbands. No such quilt exists except in my imagination. I would have to begin buying Nazi "cloth" to build up a big enough collection to make such a quilt. Maybe the swastikas and yellow Jewish stars combined. Can you see it? I can. A border of yellow stars. I am already sleeping under it.

##

I've been in a kind of limbo even though the days are beautiful. My Husband is distant. My Mother is not talking to me. My Father is silent for fear I will ask him something. I don't know what to do with myself. I seem to have no one to speak to. Iris never writes. One friend is buried in her basement with her craft projects. Another is immersed in a real estate course. Today, taking my Child to see the local bowling alley, I found a good part of the neighbor women there, bowling away. I feel like I'm dead.

My Child will not let me read, write, rake the leaves, or even sit in the sun, or talk on the phone when I do think of someone to call, like Helen, hiding in her mental ward. The only activity he doesn't object to is cooking. And I have even lost the will to cook. Is it the season or the stars? I wait for some breakthrough somewhere. Some door opening to something. Some glimpse of meaning. It is not so hard to understand how Helen lost her sense of meaning. I used to think I would always know how to find it. Maybe as one ages it gets harder to find.

Last night in a dream a man said to me: "There are twelve states I can't enter and five of them are in me."

##

The weather is still mild but rain is expected tomorrow and snow the day after. My Child falls asleep in the car on the way to anywhere, so I turn around and come home. He becomes verbal, flips out over light bulbs and big cats, takes notice of his teddy bears, wants to play with one small friend and not another. Words seem to make all the difference. He would always get frantic when I left him. Now he has learned to say, "Mama, be back." Understanding that concept and being able to say it has been an enormous mental step. Do we still make mental steps like that at 40? I think I did when it first occurred to me that at least I wasn't on my way to Auschwitz." That made all the difference too, permanently. Once a concept is grasped, it is permanent.

Here, let me help you. Do you have small children who are sick or driving you crazy? Imagine being on the way to Auschwitz with them. Days and days locked in some cattle car with no food or water and the stench of human fear and excrement. It must have been murder going to Auschwitz with small children. Or maybe you are so in love you can't bear the thought of separation. Imagine the person you love the most being beaten and brutalized. What about your parents with their ailments? How would they survive such a trip? Now look at your daily frustrations and see how miniscule they are. Or maybe you are pregnant, in the last stages. How much worse can it get? Put yourself on a train to Auschwitz.

I was thinking about the distinctions I had made about the White Mountains and the City of Despair and how I had come to the conclusion that ordinary, sane, day to day life takes place in the Land of Leaves, the middle world of trees and serpents, sex and knowledge, birth, growth and death, neither exalted by profound truths nor destroyed by despair. Ordinary life with glimpses into other regions, glimpses of Heaven and Hell, but only glimpses and the wisdom not to dwell in either very long.

My glimpses into Heaven include everything I know about Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, Vedanta, Tibetans, tantra, enlightenment, gurus, Zen, etcetera.

The glimpses into Hell show Auschwitz and Helen's insanity, among other things, bleak cities decaying and depraved, violence in all forms, suffering and grief, pain.

So I have Tibetan stupas and crematoriums, avatars in holy trance and piles of naked bodies. For on the one hand and on the other hand, these make a pretty good reach. I impress myself with the extent of my own reach. Never thought my arms were that long.

##

As we are driving to my parents' house, for some reason I think of Pinchas again. I recently ran into a fragment of fact somewhere that at the time of Jesus the Temple's High Priest was named Pinchas. How strange. I'd always associated the name with meekness. I don't know why I was thinking of him tonight as we drove through the cooling tree-lined boulevards with the lights of the city twinkling like water in the valleys.

I told my Husband about the first Pinchas dream, about meeting him in the basement. Then, in an attempt to describe him I said: "Remember that eerie man in Prague who scared us away from the Jewish Museum? He looked like Pinchas." Like Pinchas he had been pale, in an oversized hat and coat.

"That wasn't the Jewish Museum," my Husband said. "That was some kind of Jewish cultural center." Anyway, one look into this man's face and we turned heel and left. We were paranoid anyway, having been followed from the Czech border.

"Remind me to ask my Father about Pinchas, if I forget."

I did not forget to ask my Father, who supposedly knew him well, but to no avail. My Father claimed to have been good friends with Pinchas but could tell me almost nothing.

As we walked in the park I said: "What can you tell me about Pinchas?"

"He was from Czechoslovakia," my Father began. That I had not known. Now the connection with that man in Prague made sense, like a kind of premonition.

"Do you know if he had a wife or children before the war?"

"I don't know."

"What did he do for a living here?"

"I'm not sure. I think he was a charity case."

"What about his limp? Did he get that in the war?"

"No, it happened here. He fell out of a hospital bed. I think he had a small stroke."

"I thought that's how he died."

"No, that's how he got the limp."

"Oh."

"He was a sick man, but his mind was clear. A lot of people thought there was something wrong with his mind, but you could talk to him about anything."

"But you don't know anything about his life before the war?"

"No. But when he died, Rabbi T. and some other Rabbunim made the biggest 'leviah' this town has ever seen." I don't know what "leviah" is, although I've heard the word a million times. I assume "ceremonial burial."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why was he given such a big leviah?"

"I don't know. Maybe because he was humble and kind. He never hurt a fly."

I knew Rabbi T. very well. He was very arrogant. The entire Jewish community was terrified of him. Why would he choose meek gentle Pinchas for such a great honor?

"Was Pinchas a very learned man?"

"Maybe. It could be."

I would have called up Rabbi T. this very night and asked him about Pinchas, why he rated so high in his eyes, but Rabbi T. is dead. I would call up the dead if I had the number. I cannot stand the suspense. I wrack my brains for who I can call to ask about Pinchas. God, it was all so long ago, who knew him? _Everyone_ knew him, even me, ten years old. I can go down the list of the guests at my wedding, the same people who come to every wedding, survivors all, and ask: "Do you know anything about that strange fellow Pinchas who used to wander around the west side like a golem?" They will think I've lost my mind.

But that he should have been from Czechoslovakia is a useful fact. Right away it tells me why he was a loner. He was probably the only Czech Jew here. Most of the survivors I know are from Poland. So he was isolated here. Then, too, my Husband has told me that the Czech Jews suffered an especially evil fate because for them, being shipped to the Polish ghettos was terrible enough in itself. Being from a more westerly country they never dreamed how bad things could get, while the Polish Jews had known for a thousand years they were hated. They expected the worst, but even what they expected fell short of the real thing. But Pinchas did not exactly embody a westernized Jew. If anything, he looked like he came from further east. Maybe he came from some little backwater village, not Prague. But Prague figures in it all anyway.

I need to take a much closer look at Prague, weird city that it is. My favorite novel, _The Golem_ by Gustav Meyrink, is set in Prague. I am beginning to wonder if my dream city is Prague. I have been there but only for one day and in a terrified frame of mind, on the way to Poland. Kafka was from Prague. He foresaw everything. The Trial in which the accused does not know his crime sums it up. Kafka and the Golem and Pinchas. What a team.

On the way home, my Child asleep in my arms and the cool breezes flowing off the mountains into the car, I begin to interview my Husband, who knows Prague. I ask for a description of the river. Does it have steep grassy banks? No. It's developed, like the Seine, with sidewalks along the water. It's not wild. No, it's not wild in my dreams either. It's developed like a park. It has beautiful bridges, he tells me. Suddenly I remember a dream in which I was approaching my city at night. It glittered like a painting I had seen by Kandinsky, of a glittering woman approaching a glittering city on horseback. It had a river, with sidewalks along the banks. I stood on a bridge and dropped a blank canvas into the water.

"It also has the only, or is it oldest, Gothic synagogue," he is saying as he steers through the dark tree-lined streets. And then he says that probably I already know that this synagogue was designated by the Nazis to be the only remaining synagogue left on earth, to be used as a museum for Jewish artifacts and paraphernalia, antique Torahs, etc. collected _by the Nazis_ and shipped from as far away as Russia and Greece to be housed in this Jewish Museum. It was to be the only remains of the Jewish people after they were exterminated.

I am amazed. I have never heard of this. The Nazis creating a Jewish Museum? How strange. I would have thought they would want to eradicate every trace of their victims.

My Husband assures me that what he is telling me is true, that the collection contains the most beautiful and incredible things, ancient scrolls, ornately engraved circumcision tools, an altogether extraordinary assemblage of Jewish artifacts and antiques gathered from all over Europe.

"And this museum exists and still has all these things?" I imagine that after the war all these treasures were returned to their rightful owners, or turned over to Israel. I am sure this incredible museum must have been dismantled.

"It's still there," he says. "The whole collection."

"In Prague?"

"Yes. In Prague. In this Gothic synagogue. I have seen it."

##

I went to the library to look up something, anything on Prague. Neither Kafka nor Meyrink give any description of the city. Well, Meyrink develops the atmosphere of the city, but it seemed very much a work of the imagination. _The Golem_ was a fantastic story and his Prague is a fantastic city, in the sense of fantasy. I thought perhaps I could find some book on the real city, maybe even something about this Nazi-created Jewish Museum. But, no, nothing.

As I turned around in the aisle, at eye-level was a whole shelf of Holocaust books I hadn't known existed. There was the book by Martin Gilbert which I must have found in some other section, for now it was surrounded by many other books on this awful subject, several eyewitness reports by survivors of the camps, and of course the complete text of Shoah in case watching it had not been enough. Not knowing what possessed me, I promptly loaded up half a dozen books, hurried home with them and began reading at every odd moment I could find. But why in the world was I immersing myself in this horrible material? I know all I need to know about it, more than I need to know, much more than I want to know. And yet, here I was deep in the Warsaw ghetto, deeper in Auschwitz and Treblinka, literally buried in descriptions beyond belief.

What was I looking for? More information? Other than _MILA 18_ I did not have a real clear conception of what it was like inside the Warsaw ghetto. Young boys sneaking out through the cemetery to smuggle in food. Suddenly I thought about Heniek, the uncle who came back from Russia who had been able to pass as Aryan only to get trapped in the ghetto where he went to pick up a pair of boots. Suddenly I asked myself, what kind of ridiculous story is that? He must have been smuggling in food to his parents inside the Lodz ghetto. Why have I been fed this insane story about a pair of boots? Suddenly I get a much clearer picture of what being inside the ghetto was like. The starvation. My Husband's grandmother starved to death in the Lodz ghetto. Well, she was a very poor woman, I thought. She barely had enough food for herself and her son even before the Germans arrived.

But I didn't realize the sheer numbers of people dying of starvation. To tell the truth, I didn't have any conception of the sheer numbers of people inside the ghetto. 700,000 people in the Warsaw ghetto. About the number Moses took into the Wilderness. I didn't realize the ghetto was so huge. I didn't realize there were so many people still in the Warsaw ghetto at the time of the Uprising. I had the feeling that everyone had been deported already and that only a handful of holdouts were doing a Masada thing, which no one survived. I didn't realize that _after_ the Uprising there were still thousands of people left to be marched away.

I sort the survivors I know through my mind. Some of them were from Warsaw. Were any of them there during the uprising? It would not be that hard to find out. It had dawned on me in horror the other night that I knew two survivors who were barbers. Was that how they survived, cutting off the hair of doomed women? I always know, even without asking, that many of them concealed the truth for fear of being judged. No one really wanted to reveal how they had survived a cataclysm in which so many died. I could hardly blame them. I know there were many secrets and I honored their right to their secrets. But now, having discovered this cache of books, I could find out everything without having to look into anyone's eyes. I would get to the bottom of this nightmare and empty every drawer and dark closet until there was nothing left hidden of which I could be afraid. I would lift every stone until every detail was bathed in light. I would get to the end of this thing once and for all.

I always learn something new. The tiny details are riveting. Jack Eisner, author of Survivor, the first book I tackled, was fourteen when it all began. He described the Warsaw ghetto, the Uprising, and how after the Uprising they were all shipped to Majdanek. He is standing by the railway platform in a square surrounded by SS, Ukrainians and dogs, literally thousands of people milling around. A trainload of Jews from Holland has arrived simultaneously. It is utter chaos in the square as the Nazis try to separate men and women into two distinct groups, to prepare them for "selection:. Suddenly a young woman from Holland tried to give him her three-year-old girl, who is screaming. She is begging him to take the child. Without the child she thinks she can save herself; she knows the wiles of men; she is young and attractive enough to appeal to one of them. And perhaps she can save her child. He tells her he does not know how to save her child, does not even know how to save himself. They trade the screaming child back and forth a few times. She spots a bloody raincoat on the ground, hangs the child on his neck and covers it with the raincoat, then runs away, disappearing into the crowd. When he gets to the selection table the Nazis tear away the raincoat and see the child. "Is this your child?" they ask him. He says nothing. How old is he by now, seventeen? eighteen? It could be his little sister. "Whose child is this?" the officer bellows. Suddenly a middle-aged woman, a total stranger, runs out of the crowd, up to the screaming child and screams, "She's mine. I lost her." She picks up the child and covers her with kisses. The officer gives her the choice of going to the gas chamber with the child or going the other way without her. This woman, a total stranger, is torn, walks away, comes back, walks away and returns again, unable to make a decision. Suddenly the real mother rushes up, crying, and grabs her child. The SS officer looks at all three of them, decides he's had enough and shoots them all on the spot.

A typical story. One of a million, one of six million. I am not shocked. But Eisner sums it up so well. "How efficient those Germans are," he thought. "They create a dilemma, and they solve it."

##

We are having a 18K autumn. Gold everywhere, a rain of gold leaves. I rake and rake and look up to see a million more still in the trees. The entire city is aswirl in gold which drifts in the gutters and outlines the rooftops and stairs as in a Hundertwasser painting.

There are so many grapes on the vines I feel I must do something with them. The green Niagras had not been pruned hard because I was trying to get them up the banister, and so bore very little fruit, which we ate. But the Concords all around the deck are bearing heavily, purple as midnight, blooming with mist. With their pits and thick velvet skins they are not ideal for eating. One can eat a few, but that's about it. So many beautiful grapes, already sweetened by frost. I don't know how to make jelly. I don't even like grape jelly. Not about to get into making wine. I decide to make grape juice again.

With my scissors I cut the gapes, filling all the baskets I own. Then I picked the grapes off their stems and placed them in large pots. Raw grapes had been almost impossible to squeeze juice out of. I had the inspiration to cook them first. Next thing I knew I was up to my elbows in raw grapes, cooked grapes, strained grapes and grape mash in various stages. Filtering is the most trying stage. You can filter gape juice almost forever. Without filtering, it is a suspension of silver flakes. I filter three, four times. This is insane. I go from colander to sieve to wet flannel. I begin to think I might as well be making wine.

Awash in purple liquid. It stains my hands. Burns in every minor cut. I know instantly it is an eternal natural dye which will never wash out of anything. Who was it that allowed only Priests to wear purple robes, the Egyptians?

I filter the purple juice again and pour it into bottles. A violent rainstorm outside makes me think of two more huge baskets of grapes sitting on the open deck, soaking wet, and all the other grapes still unpicked. I will never be able to get all these grapes cooked and strained. Every pot and pan I have is coated purple.

Suddenly a solution flashes upon me. I pick them all in the rain, stem them, load them into plastic bags and stick them in my freezer. Let them sit there, purple pearls, together with the gooseberries. I will be able to cope with them in the middle of some blizzard.

Winter

Now Winter is really here. All the leaves are down and raked away. The last minor snowstorm did not stop the process of coloration, and so it was still fall as far as I was concerned. Now there is not a leaf to turn and snow last night blanketed the city. I get into a flurry of grocery shopping and cooking. I don't want to be caught without provisions in some major storm. I feel alive again.

During the one brief hour I have each day when my Child sleeps I must choose between so many things I cannot do when he's awake that usually I just sit down with the Nefertiti needlepoint. It shows a double profile, back to back, one in full color, the other in dark muted tones like a shadow. I can identify easily with the double woman. I can easily just sit on the couch facing the white window and speculate about my bright self and my dark double, but there are groceries to put away, lunch to organize, toys to pick up, his favorite light bulbs all over the place. Light bulbs are not such good toys for a child, everyone else is horrified, but he's crazy about them. _Light_ was the first word he said.

The sky is dark. The ground is white. The fallen leaves are placed in cartons waiting to be carted away. Winter again. Again and again. The carousel of seasons goes much faster now.

I dreamed I was on a journey to the high White Mountain, escorted by two Tibetan brothers who resembled no one I know. But I knew that I would marry one an have the other for a lover. I saw the White Mountain city that would become my home and where I would be the Princess of a Himalayan kingdom.

But just before we reached it I realized I had forgotten my Nepalese necklace of a silver face with a bejeweled crown, which I'd left at home. I decided to return to the world I know for three weeks in order to retrieve the necklace and tie up loose ends. But on returning I ran into all the people I've known and began to think that my future royal in-laws might, in my absence, change their minds about someone as old as I am, with a Husband and Child. Why would they, in view of all my karmic connections, want me to be the Princess of their Himalayan kingdom? It was with this sense of regret at coming back for a beautiful but ultimately paltry piece of jewelry that I awoke. In the last dream scene I was standing with my Child in my arms, realizing that I am needed here.

I thought about this dream for several days and thought it might make a good deathbed vision. In a deathbed vision you can just keep going.

##

We went to Austin for Thanksgiving. I had not seen it in fifteen years. I realize now that part of the chilly reception Austin gave us had to do with the fact that the town was deserted. I knew that on Thanksgiving weekend no one would be there. But I did not realize how cold a university town can be without its students. It was so chilly the whole time, for which we were unprepared and without proper clothing, that the whole experience, looked forward to for so many years, had a kind of hollow, icy feeling. In my memory heat was an intrinsic part of Austin, along with the flowering trees and rotting Victorian houses. Without the heat and humidity, it seemed like a completely different place.

We found Iris's house which, surrounded by new condos, looked like a weathered Roman villa, its intricate details softened by decay, mellowed by a million seasons.

Iris seemed distant. She was busy with her parents who had also decided to come for the first time in years. Though I _recognized_ her in that deeper sense, I could not understand how we happened to know each other and call each other friends. I could not remember what our friendship was based on. Rajah was the missing link. A good talk about the "talks" might have alleviated the strange feeling that we were strangers. Considering that the Guru had brought his entire family to Austin this year and that the Cairo and Paris talks had been canceled, so that the European disciples had come to Austin too, it must have been quite interesting. But I did not ask and she did not tell me.

A bitter glass of wine at Les Amis, a visit to the empty Barton Springs, lunch at the eternally ramshackled barbecue pit, a drive past the lookout café on the lake, which I'd completely forgotten. Fifteen years. A lifetime. I recognized places I'd loved and streets I'd walked through and houses where others had lived long ago. Where were they all now, the Marxists in tweeds, the hippies in beads, the dopers and dropouts with all their dreams? Gone. Swept away by time like autumn leaves.

The campus was still the same with its tower but it was all like an empty dream of vaguely familiar thingsww that no longer had any power over me.

With my long hair and Egyptian face I had once owned the place, its shady streets spreading out like the lines in my palm. I owned everything, the houses, the hills, the lakes. It was mine, and that sense of mine-ness lingered like perfume all these years, until now when, with my shorn hair, my blue-eyed Husband and red-headed Child I returned to the giant magnolia of the past and found it dried, a pyramid of dust in my hand.

And true to Mort W.'s prediction, the Red Chinese _have_ taken over. He hid at my apartment, the top floor of an old house buried in trees, because he believed the Red Chinese were after his secrets. When I helped him relocate to a "safer" place, he wanted to thank me by letting me choose any books I wanted from his vast collection. He even had a copy of Ouspensky's _In Search of the Miraculous_ but I had read it by then. I don't remember what I chose, but neither do I know where I acquired my shiny old copies of _The Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism_ and its matching _Upanishads_. I know I didn't buy them. A faint silver thread leads me back to that moment of standing with him in front of his books. I must have chosen them from his collection.

He asked me also at that time if I would take an LSD trip with him. I declined. He assured me he could take me to another planet. I believed him. He did in fact have some very strange objects, unlike anything I had ever seen, which he maintained he had brought back from other planets. I was not afraid of LSD but of him, his frail dark self with shining black eyes that looked as if they never had returned.

He believed the Chinese wanted his mind. When I took him to my window to show him that no one had followed him, a car drove by with a Chinese man behind the wheel.

Now the Chinese students were present in droves, highly visible because they had not gone home for Thanksgiving and everyone else had. They gave the empty campus a surreal quality, as if the place had been astro-projected to China, tower and all.

How may winters I dreamed of green Austin and the self I had left there under the flowering trees. It tasted like the bitter wine at Les Amis to realize that nothing was left. Only Iris. Her Serene Highness of Nothingness.

So comes the resolution of another quest. It was as intense an encounter as with Bad Reichenhall and Katmandu, an encounter with myself. But now I know that Varo's painting of the woman in blue opening the casket that contains her worn face is not really so remarkable after all. The same thing can be done with any small mirror.

"It is in vain that we return to places we once loved. We shall never see them again because they are situated not in space but in time, and because the man who tries to discover them is no longer the child or the youth who decked them with the fervor of his emotions."

"The voyage of discovery can be made only within ourselves. To revisit the places we once have loved, to seek out memories in the external world, is an activity which must always end in disappointment. The real world has no independent existence. It is our own creation.

–Marcel Proust

My illusions of Austin and the magic of my youth evaporated before my eyes, seeing it again so empty and cold. The dream of Austin fades until I can barely raise an image.

It is like LeGuin's _City of Illusions_. The protagonist wakes with amnesia and goes through a series of adventures through which he creates a new personality, a new identity. And his new self, with its new name and new love and new concerns becomes everything to him. Just as if he had been born and gone through childhood and youth. All he remembers of his original mission is that he must somehow get to the City of Illusions.

When he finally arrives at his destination he is informed that in order to remember his entire mission, he must agree to a mental wipeout of all that has transpired during his odyssey. In effect, he must give up the only self he had come to know. But the choice is his.

Must we choose to remember our missions at the cost of forgetting our experience? Have we a choice in the matter of giving up our illusions, our fabricated selves which we hold so dear? Are there greater truths for those who can transcend themselves? Are there truer missions than the ones our fictional selves are engaged in?

Rabbi T. used to say that we don't give ourselves enough options. That any self we could choose to be would be equally fictitious. That we need to understand real choice on the smallest scale because in terms of the Universe "an inch here is a mile out there." For him, even the tiniest choice was genuine and could make a tremendous difference in the outcome of our destination. As in space technology, the smallest fraction of difference in direction here results ultimately in a difference of millions of miles out there.

He always talked about the importance of choosing and of giving oneself genuine choices. He used to say that one is not always in a position to choose, does not always have the power to choose. But he maintained that one could always "choose to choose," choose to acquire the power necessary to make a real choice.

He himself seemed to have made almost no choices, having chosen an ancient path clearly laid out for him. Or did he in fact by his choices create the ruin around him? Had he, by choosing that path, completely chosen his own isolation? And then, perhaps, he did not see himself as ruined.

When a new young wife was found for him by his disciples, I drifted away. She was too near my age.

A year later, I was shocked to hear he was dead. I hadn't even known he was in the hospital. I had abandoned him. I didn't know he was dying, here in this very town, after so many years of loving him and being fascinated by his strangeness; after so many perfect answers the questioner didn't even see him frequently enough to know he was seriously ill.

His new marriage was part of it. But I had begun to drift away before. I had become disillusioned with him after hearing a very old story about him, a trivial story about a minor incident.

My Mother told me that long ago, when we were all living on the west side, Mr. and Mrs. Silverman, Holocaust survivors whom I know very well and whose son's wedding we attended, found themselves renting a house that had a garage. With no car, and being in dire straits like all the survivors, they decided to lease out the garage for $5.00 per month. Along came Rabbi T. who had a car but no garage. It would have been a blessed union except for one thing. Rabbi T. refused to pay the rent. He probably felt they ought to feel honored to be housing his car. Neither would he pay the agreed upon $5.00, nor could they evict his automobile. That was in the days when he was at the height of his powers. He continued to use their garage, at no cost, as long as they lived there.

It was just a minor story of perhaps a thousand different ones, but it outraged me. How could he have done that to survivors? Didn't he grasp how much they needed that extra income? Didn't he understand that these people were sacred? How dare he turn his arrogance on those who had lost everything? My heart changed towards him after knowing that.

I never told him why I turned away. After his death it was the only thing I regretted.

##

In the midst of an awesome blizzard I gaze at the Tantric dancer as I wash the dishes. I have put her on the window sill above the kitchen sink because, even though she is only twelve inches tall, she is very heavy and her pointed crown and the curved knife in her raised hand could really injure my Child if she ever fell on him.

Her face is painted in real gold, as is her neckpiece, necklace, nipples, harness on her hips, her bracelets, armbands, the knife and the bowl, the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. She has a third eye planted perpendicular to the other two. They are all open, as is her mouth showing her teeth. With one leg raised in dance, the entire statue is balanced on one foot.

What is the name of that strange knife she holds, and what is her name? I can get to the bottom of this without leaving my house. I have plenty of books on Tibetan art and Tantric iconography. Every piece of art produced is based on traditional designs, and every element has strict symbolic significance.

I go upstairs to my eagle's nest library at the top of the house. It is the only room that does not look like it belongs in a bank. The walls, painted gold, radiate like a lit chamber. The windows, covered with semitransparent fabric glued to the glass, look like giant striated jewels of rainbow colors meshed in gold, the outer light coming in as though through stained glass.

An entire wall of books and artifacts: Tibetan paintings are on these walls, along with Egyptian, African and Indian things on the shelves. It is my golden sanctuary three floors above the ground, with no outer view but infinite inner ones.

From an entire shelf of Tibetan books I pull Visual Dharma by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, who was the former abbot of a group of monasteries in Tibet.

I go through the pictures looking at classical tankas (thangkas) and statues, looking for one similar to mine. There are the classical tankas that my two paintings were based on. And there are many statues with many arms holding a variety of ritual objects in their hands. Ever present is the bowl and knife. The knife is referred to continually as only "hooked knife," which does not seem that precise. But it is the same one held by my Tantric dancer.

But the bowl, the bowl. Oh God, the bowl is referred to as a "skull cup." I had no idea she was holding a skull cup, like the one I wanted to buy on the street in Nepal. And worse, the text for nearly every image claims the skull cup is filled with blood.

And can you imagine that a skull cup filled with blood represents transcendental knowledge?

In his main right hand he holds a hooked knife which can be used to magnetize power or to slice through the aortas of perverters of the teaching. It is the symbol of 'upaya' (skillful means). In his left main hand he holds a skullcup filled with blood, which represents 'prajna' (transcendental knowledge). Skull cup and knife held near each other indicate the union of the two principles. The upper right hand holds a rosary of skull beads which signifies the gathering of power. The third right holds the skull hand drum, the sound of which awakens one from the sleep of ignorance. The upper left hand holds the trident which destroys passion, aggression and stupidity, the third left hand holds the lasso which binds the caprices of the confused mind.

I have seen these images many times, with two arms, four, six, eight, twelve arms, each holding a different thing. My dancer has only two arms and holds only the hooked knife and skull cup. Maybe her skull cup is filled with "amrta," the elixir of immortality. Nine out of ten supposedly contain blood but an occasional one is filled with "amrta." Maybe mine is holding "amrta."

Somehow I doubt it. I have the feeling that she is me and that the cup is filled with blood.

But there is no need to wonder. I can determine even this detail. I become totally immersed in the text, in my gold room, in the blizzard, until I find the clue I am looking for. I come to a chapter on Yidams. Yidams are personal deities. There are wrathful Yidams and peaceful Yidams. The wrathful figures wear a five-skull crown. They signify that the passions have been transmuted into attributes of dharmic action. The peaceful Yidams wear the raiment of archaic Aryan kings, beginning with a five medallioned tiara of gems.

I run downstairs to take a good look at my dancer. There are the five circles on her crown. I look at her closer than I have ever looked at her. The five circles are skulls.

I should have known.

##

A white sky outside. My Child plays with his light bulbs. He blew out all the electrical circuits the other night when he plugged something in. We were left standing in the dark, the house growing cold, dinner uncooked, the garage unopenable, we couldn't even get the cars out. I found a few candles and marveled at what precious little light they cast. I wonder if the point of Sabbath candles is to get by on their light alone. Precious little light but better than none.

Now the electricity works. It is snowing outside.

Reading Marguerite Duras I see myself. The slim dark-haired woman who calls herself "writer" and imagines she is at the center of great historical events. But I am shortchanged. How can an Activist in the sixties compare to being in the French Underground during the Nazi occupation? How can anything compare? I would have been in the Underground, any underground—it is just my nature. But the antiwar movement of the sixties now runs through my hands and means nothing. The Nazi Occupation has had a greater effect on me than SDS or PL, even without my having been present. Oh, I guess the Movement affected me, being so much a part of it, writing back letters from France which were published as articles in underground newspapers here. Letting the hair grow long and wild, wearing gypsy clothes, taking it all so seriously, taking myself so seriously, being prepared to both kill and die for some worthy cause, ah: youth! And then the sampling of hallucinogens, the music, the freedom of sex, the opening mind. And then the path towards Vedanta, Rajah, the Guru, India. All these things no doubt shaped me into what I am today, even as I sit in Suburbia, a housewife and mother with cropped hair and dark lipstick and a black Mercedes Benz.

And yet my journey through my own life is always overshadowed by the journey of my Parents through theirs. Now it seems that I was at play even when I took myself seriously. Compared to the Nazis, everything is play.

At a dinner for my Family, my Mother looks at all the food and says, "I remember during the war when Moniek [her younger brother, an infant then] was too sick to go to his kindergarten where he got his daily meal of the day. My mama asked me to go to his school and ask for his food, because we were starving at home. I was so ashamed."

This, standing in my kitchen next to me as I am putting the food on plates.

Suddenly all of cold, cruel Russia opens up in my mind, the bleak war years during which her father died, my Grandmother selling her clothes piece by piece for food, my Mother, aged fourteen, taken out of school and sent to work in a factory in another city where she would get some bread each day, because there was no food for her at home.

Black, war torn Russia, the widow with her children, the bitter winters of the war, all invade my warm bright kitchen with one sentence.

I see the dark, skinny girl plodding through the snow in the early dawn to pick up her baby brother's ration. Maybe she cried all the way. I am afraid to ask her. I'm afraid she will start crying now.

She also had an elder brother who was far away at some school when the Nazis pushed deeper into Russia. As the population pulled back in evacuations, they got a letter from his school saying he had taken ill and was being sent home. They put him on a train. He never arrived. He must have died along the way and been thrown out at some station platform as they did with bodies then. He must have been fifteen, sixteen. I have heard the stories a thousand times about how he never arrived, about how her father died, about the deprivation and despair.

I am afraid to ask my Father anything. I know they were all taken away and gassed and burned. I'm afraid if I ask him a single question he'll break down. I'm afraid to ask him the names of all his brothers. I'm afraid to ask him the age of his mother. I'm afraid to ask anything about his father. He is more careful than my Mother. He never lets anything slip out.

Suddenly I have no life of my own. It all dissolves at one stroke and I am standing on some railway platform somewhere between Russia and Poland and it is a gray cold day and I am terrified not for myself but for everyone.

Suddenly I look through my Polish Grandmother's eyes and see a different world. I look through the eyes of a doomed woman who knows her children are doomed, her people are doomed. How could they ever name me after her? I thought there was some taboo about naming children after people who had met with terrible ends. How can my life compare with this platform?

How can anything I have ever done overcome this platform filled with terrified people? She looks at her husband, but he is stoic with grief and fear. He cannot open his mouth to say a word. Is he consulting his calendars of the future to see if this day appeared? All around people are yammering prayers, and she cannot stand it. She feels like screaming. Inside she is screaming. But outside she wears her silent white mask of a face, lips compressed, fingernails digging into her palms, knowing deep down that she will never see her sons again, knowing deep down that this is the end of everything.

She does not feel the blows that rain upon her body when the movement starts. She no longer hears any voices. Her ears and mouth are stuffed with invisible cotton. She is like a sleepwalker, no longer cold, hungry, tired or afraid. She does not feel her twisted ankle or bleeding brow. Her coat is torn. She has lost her baggage. The crowd is surging all around her and she is drowning.

The long journey to some death camp. The death camp itself. She plods forward, a woman in her forties, now unkempt. She is past caring about anything. The long months in the ghetto have ruined her. She sees everything as from a great distance. It is all very clear, the barracks, the piles of bodies, the awful stench, the awesome misery. It is all very clear but has nothing to do with her. She floats through, numb, already dead.

She sees her husband and sons float away. He raises his hand in farewell, his lips very red, his mouth bleeding, his broad forehead glistening in the awful white light.

I am a woman walking on nails. Walking through a graveyard in which the dead are unearthed and the living are dead. They shout at me, strip me, beat me. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters.

Does it matter if she knows of me or I of her? It matters to me, affects me. I have her name. She lives in my memory, in my imagination. But even in the briefest glimpse of foresight she could not have known about me, that any of her sons would survive to have a daughter named after her.

##

I know American Jews who refuse to own a German car. It is their way of protesting what the Nazis did. But I drove a Volkswagen for fourteen years and parted with it only for a black Mercedes Benz 280SE. How do I justify that? Easy. To the victor go the spoils. It is a fifteen year old car in mint condition, with a tall grill and lots of chrome, double vertical headlights, orange fog lights, white leather interior. It has that classic look one sees in old movies. I like to think it even looks like Hitler's car. I would even drive Hitler's car. The star ornament on the hood may as well be a swastika.

American Jews have plenty of principles to stand on. Perhaps my attitude toward things German and my fondness for Deutschland itself looks like absolute forgiveness. It is not absolute forgiveness. It is absolute vindictiveness. They can keep their principles, it's all they've got. I want vindication and the satisfaction of helping myself to what, as the victor, is mine. It is victory because I am alive and will have a clear picture of their sins until I die.

##

It's been awhile since I talked with Helen. On the spur of the moment I called her up. She is always summoned from the depths of the locked ward to the payphone in the dismal lounge. They lock all the patients out of their rooms during the day. Since she does not go to make-work, exercise, group therapy or even to the cafeteria for meals (they are brought to her), she is always there, just a phone call away. But I seldom call because her voice always comes from the same pit and always says the same things.

"How are you, Helen?"

"About the same."

"How do you feel?"

"Not well."

"So, you are not making any progress? So you are going to spend your whole life in there?"

"Yes, but they won't let me. They'll make me go to an even worse place."

"There is no worse place, Helen."

"Oh yes, there is."

"Why don't you just pull yourself together and work on getting out of there?"

"It's too late."

"You've been saying that from the very beginning."

"Satan has my mind."

I take a deep breath. Until now, in all our conversations I've been trying to speak her language. Now I begin speaking my own.

"Satan does not exist. Get that through your head. He's a figment of your imagination. You've let your imagination run away with you. Satan does not exist!"

The Rabbi I talked into going to see her talked with her once and dropped the project. She did not mention Satan to him and he did not believe her problem to be of a religious nature. I need some kind of lunatic Lubavitch Rabbi to take an interest in her. This Rabbi wants her Parents to get her out of the horrible locked ward and take her home, to some hospital in their own city. But Helen refuses to go and, can you imagine, loonies have rights. They cannot take her against her will.

I find it mind boggling that someone who is in a mental ward is asked to make her own decisions. She has a sister too. Why am I beating my brains? Why doesn't her sister try to do something? Why has everyone given up on her? Or perhaps more to the point, why have I not given up on her? All she ever did was infuriate me, first with her self righteousness and now with her stubborn laziness. Why do I still call her up and try to shake her out of her stupor? She wants to go to a nursing home where she can lay in a bed all day and spin her wheels in that black song of Satan. Suffering, suffering. Why is she suffering so much? I can't stand it. She is doing it to herself and I cannot accept it. She is probably seriously mentally ill and I can't buy it. I find myself shouting to her.

"Six million people who wanted to live out their lives were stripped, tortured, gassed and burned. You, who have your whole life spread out in front of you, don't want it. That is a terrible sin!" I'm yelling into the phone. I slam the receiver down.

I may be the only person left in the world who is still yelling at her. Everyone else has thrown in the towel. I feel like wringing her neck with it.

##

Last night at the Ladies Book Club someone who knows my background asked me if I knew of any books written for survivors. I thought she meant books _about_ survivors. I mentioned a few. No, that was not what she meant. Then I thought she meant books by survivors, and mentioned some names. Still not what she wanted. Did she want books written _for_ survivors?

"Survivors don't need any books," I said. They were there. They have not written much either. The survivors, for the most part, are illiterate.

The Polish Jews who survived knew only Yiddish and a smattering of meaningless Hebrew. Many did not know fluent Polish, never learned Russian or German, can barely get by in English even today. The intellectuals went up in flames. Only those already used to a hard life escaped the hard death meted out by the Nazis. No, they are not a literate group, I'm sorry to say. They come from the homes of poor tailors with many mouths to feed. Even those from the middle class, like my Father, are not schooled in any language. Neither can they write about the Holocaust, nor do they wish to read anything about it. I know them all. I know them well. There is no need to find books for them.

No, it was still not what she was after. Finally she made it clear to me that she wondered if anything had been written for the _children_ of survivors, as one of them had been to see her husband-the-shrink and evidently was having some problems dealing with "it."

"Who is it?" I asked. "I know everyone."

She would not tell me who it was or the nature of the problem.

"Well, I don't know of such a book" I said, "but I have written something that may be helpful, about how the Holocaust awareness has actually turned out to be not a curse but a great gift."

She wanted to know in what way it was a gift. She was very curious. An American Jew, a psychologist herself, she was looking hard at me as we stood in the foyer of someone's home. God, how can one say anything in thirty words or less? How can so many years of searching, escape and return be compressed into a five minute conversation?

I offered my journal.

"Have you a copy?"

"No." She wouldn't take it. To me, it didn't seem to matter, didn't seem very precious now that its insights are intrinsic to me. I was willing to hurl it into outer space if there was one person out there who could benefit by it.

Suddenly I was presented with a whole new angle on whom my readers might be. All during the work on the material I conceived an audience of American Jews and non-Jews, people who stood at zero in relation to the Holocaust, for whom I would have to start at the very beginning. It had not occurred to me to address those who already know all the emotions but who had neither escaped nor resolved them. This is a very small audience and I assumed that by now they had all discovered the gift for themselves. That any child of survivors might actually still be having problems with it seemed strange. I mean, I have problems with it too. Sure we have problems, but it is nothing that anyone can help us with. Even the sage Rabbi T. could not help me, because he had no experience of it. How can a psychiatrist be of any use to me? This is the stuff that has to be processed internally. I guess that holds for any personal, cultural, religious or human problem, and psychiatrists are under the illusion that they are helpful there. But they are not helpful there either. Even in the role of midwife, of helping the patient deliver the material, they don't even know the nature of what they are delivering. I was kind of appalled that anyone in my position would have gone to a shrink for help.

If I were to address anyone who is having difficulty with his identity as the child of Holocaust survivors, I would say only this:

In attempting to escape it we open doors we never would have opened.

In confronting it we see what absolute bliss a normal life in peacetime is.

In returning to it, our selves, our parents, our people, we become quintessential Jews who choose the fate of our people. We choose Auschwitz with our people and attain nobility through that choice. One's self respect hinges on that ability and desire to go with one's people wherever they go.

That innate sense of nobility and self-respect comes from the recognition that one _would be willing_ to sacrifice everything in the face of doom.

Years of pain, frustration and anger melt away forever the moment one finally sees into his own deepest self and realizes he _would_ have gone with his parents, siblings or children even into the Inferno. If, for the love of one's family and people, one would have willingly gone to the death anyway, then suddenly living with it becomes very easy.

You know you would have gone with them. You would not have escaped while your parents were being hauled away, even if escape were possible. You would have gone with them. If you had known what awaited them, you would have gone with them. Recognizing that is the key to everything. You would have gone with them and you did go with them and you are with them now. And you have done the right thing by being with them, by not escaping. You could never have lived with yourself the other way. You have gone with your people, in your mind and your heart, and it was a noble, conscious act. That we get to live out our lives in peace, even while our hearts are with them, is the great prize. It is like being both dead and alive simultaneously. It is the greatest gift anyone can receive, to see both the meaninglessness and the meaningfulness of existence. Our choice to stay with our people is where the meaning comes from. It is the ultimate act of Love.

Say: The Holocaust is _mine_. It belongs to me. It is precious. Only a brave soul would choose to be born to survivors, people bereft and broken. It is a great honor to be born to survivors and thereby have tremendous insight into what happened without actually being touched by it. There is no blood on you. To not have the wounds but to feel the pain is a great gift. To be able to speak for those who are speechless is a great honor. Our Parents cannot speak. They can only feel. We are in the unique position of being able to both speak and feel. Our children will only speak, without feeling anything. We are as close as anyone can get to the fire without being burned.

We know what these people were like ten, twenty, thirty years later, how long their pain lasted, how eternal their loss, how infinite their grief, how intimately we are bound to it all through them. This insight is very special. We are very special. We are not the same as the people around us. We have double and even triple vision.

We carry many ghosts on our shoulders and have responsibilities towards them that others do not have. We have a mission which can only be defined and achieved internally. It is a great task to fulfill this mission. It is a very special and specialized task that no one else can do. It has to do with inner realization and transformation.

The Balinese, every hundred years, call forth the demons from the deep and through rituals transform them into gods. This is the kind of transformation we are called upon to do. We can do it little by little every day of our lives, or all at once in a flash of insight. The demons need to be transformed into gods. The curse needs to be transformed into a blessing. The package of doom needs to be transformed into the great gift of seeing that one lives even while holding the package. The package needs to be seen as valuable, which it is. It contains the values of our people who preferred to die together rather than live alone.

The act of transforming horrible material into a precious heirloom takes a long time, like turning a lump of coal into a diamond. But often it is the case that the transformation already took place and we simply do not see it. We are already holding the precious heirloom and do not know it. We are afraid to open it for fear of what it contains. We keep trying to dump it, escape it, be rid of it. But it has already been transformed. It is waiting only to be recognized as the most valuable thing we possess.

It is amazing that one can say anything. In fact, I feel as if I've left everything unsaid.

I feel as if there has not been one single thing conveyed.

I don't know what I would have to say to really say it.

There are times, most of the time, when I do not want to say it. And times when, for one reason or another, I try but cannot say it. And most of all there is the pervasive feeling that it is unsayable and that any attempts on my part are futile. Between all of that, I've said all I can. And what is there to be said, really? That I would have rather written a Japanese novel in which nothing is said but everything told?

It is a white cold day. The trees are bare. I always wear black, my favorite color because next to it other colors show up better and clearer. A few birds scatter through the sky. A few small purple and gold flowers push up. Spring seems far away but I have time. I am not in any rush. I just wear black and smoke too much and go through days marveling at the details, wishing for nothing. I have everything and nothing. To stand in the Universe and see it is all one can ask for. I no longer ask to know it.

"Sometimes there are no answers" my Father says.

"Sometimes there are no questions," I'd like to add. You run out of questions after you've asked them all. And that is a very tranquil state. It is what it is. I am what I am. "Is is" Rajah used to say. Is-ness is. It is pointless to say anything.

It has started to snow at a slant from the north. The length of winter does not bother me anymore. It can snow or the roses can bloom. I can be twenty or forty or sixty. The Universe remains the same. Good and evil coexist, and only human beings trouble themselves over it, create philosophies, religions, wars, personal anguish of all sorts, moments of elation.

Language falls short of many things. Reality falls short. Reality is what it is. The world is the world. The Holocaust is part of the world. We are all refugees.

I'm an American Indian whose soul was destroyed. I am a Black whose family was shattered. I am a Cambodian whose house was burned. I am a Jew whose body was burned. I am a forty year old woman who looks at the night sky from a small planet and sees a glittering structure spreading out around me. With long fingers I touch a perfect spider web and think of a Tibetan chant. I would rather have been Tibetan. But then I would have known nothing but that. Part of me lives in Katmandu. Part of me is in Peru. One of my arms lives in an ashram in India. One of my feet is in Jerusalem.

I would never have seen so much, or done so much, or heard so much, if I had not run so far. I wanted to escape not just physically but spiritually. I could have succeeded in escaping if it had not been for sentiment. Sentiment for my family and my people nailed me.

### Epilogue: Passover

Although the ritual was the same, this Passover was very different. As Rabbi T. had said, it was not the way in which rituals were the same that mattered but in how they differed.

"Why is this night different from all other nights?" is the classical first of four questions posed by a child at the Seder table. For one thing, since Helen went crazy from her Messianic mania, I gave up on Jesus as a viable Messiah for the Jews and no longer saw him in the lamb shank or in the broken matzo. Jesus no longer existed for me at the table.

Then, too, my super serious rabbinically inclined Brother loosened up enough to actually make a videotape of the proceedings which seemed kind of sacrilegious to me but who cared it if made him happy? He filmed the women in the kitchen, the children playing, the men talking. I felt kind of uneasy after the meal, just when I asked my Father something about the war, that my Brother dashed for the camcorder, announced that this was historical and zoomed in on us before my Father had a chance to open his mouth. With such a distraction I was afraid he would never speak.

What I wanted to clarify were the details of two of his brothers. I was unable to account for them in forty years of listening to stories. I had never really been certain how many children there were: six? Seven? Eight? Then a few weeks ago when my Parents were over for dinner my Father looked at my only child and said that he needed a playmate. "In our house" he said, "there were six of us." Finally I had a specific number. If I had not pressed for details before it was only because I was terrified of touching upon some tender wound, old memory, things that might sadden him.

Now, at this Passover I was determined to account for everyone. My Father with two brothers fled to Russia in the autumn of 1939, six weeks after the German occupation of Poland. They sent someone back to Poland with payment to smuggle out their parents. My Grandfather was away and my Grandmother would not go without him. So the smuggler brought one sister instead. I am not certain of the order but I am very close to the truth. That accounted for four. My Father, aged nineteen, two brothers and a sister. One of the brothers, Heniek, followed a girlfriend back to Poland and was trapped in the ghetto where he had gone to pick up a pair of boots.

"He was killed in the ghetto," my Father said.

This was news to me. I had always thought he had merely been trapped in the ghetto when the Nazis sealed it and that he had ultimately been deported to some death camp along with his parents. I never knew he had been killed in the ghetto.

"How?"

"In an incident."

"What kind of incident?"

"He was caught in some violence."

In some way it was a relief to find this out.

All right, we are getting somewhere, finally. But what about the other two sons? I swear I had always assumed they were older, married, with apartments and children of their own, that they led such separate lives that it never occurred to my Father to speak of them. Perhaps he did not know them all that well, since he was the youngest—or so I thought. I could swear that my Mother always said my Father was the youngest of them all.

My Brother aims his camcorder at us and I try to ignore him.

"Tell me about your other two brothers," I ask.

"What do you want to know?" My Father is not looking at me.

"Were they married?"

"No."

"None of you six were married?"

"No."

This comes as a surprise to me. I had created a whole fiction concerning them, with fictitious wives and fictitious children.

"Were they older than you?"

"No."

"They were younger? You had younger brothers?"

"Yes."

This is real news. How is it that I have not heard a single mention of any younger brothers?

"What happened to them?" I ask, wishing my Brother would take his camcorder to the kitchen and film my Mother and Sister-in-law washing dishes. But he does not move. There is such a long pause I regret I asked the question. Then my Father, in a very low hoarse voice begins to speak.

"One died when he was a child."

"How old?"

"Maybe six."

"What was his name?"

A pained expression crosses my Father's face. After a long pause he says, "I don't remember."

I'm beginning to regret having waded into the black water so deep, but there is no turning back now. I will never get this close again so I persist.

"What about the other one?"

What do you want to know?"

How old was he?"

"He was four years younger than me." That would make him fourteen or fifteen in 1939.

"What was his name?"

"Samuel."

I cannot believe my ears. I have never heard the name Samuel uttered in my family. My ten year old Nephew with the bottomless eyes is named Sam but only by coincidence. My Brother does not know this story either. I have never heard of this Samuel's existence until now.

"What happened to him?"

My Brother's camera is steady as a laser. My Brother has not said one word. My Father sighs and collects himself. He has nowhere to turn. The moment has finally arrived. Then, with perfect composure he tells me a secret he has been keeping for forty years.

"He was in the hospital. The Germans were in Poland and the ghetto was already sealed. He jumped from a window. He broke his leg and could not run away. A Nazi soldier was put next to him. Night and day they changed shifts and left him lying there, as an example to other people, until he died."

I am stunned. How long does it take for someone with only a broken leg to die? Two or three weeks from starvation, lying in his own excrement? Maybe, I pray, he had internal injuries. Maybe it took only a week. I cannot stand it. A fifteen year old boy left lying on the sidewalk, guarded by Nazis until he dies.

Suddenly I am sorry that I asked. This image is too terrible. Maybe he is sorry that he told me. Look how long he has kept his terrible secret. I am forty one years old and my Father has never breathed a word about this boy, never uttered his name, though for the last ten years he must have looked upon his Grandson of the same name with the most painful love. He must have realized how terrible this story was to go to such lengths of secrecy to spare me. And he was right to do so, because I have not been able to eat or sleep since.

I wake at night and see before my eyes the terrified crumpled body of a fifteen year boy forced to die slowly on a busy sidewalk in the awful gray city of my dreams.

I go out to dinner with my Husband. I look at the food but I see a miserable dying boy left in the midst of miserable city filled with miserable people terrorized by sadists. What humans can do such things as these? I try to shake off the image by suddenly telling my Husband the entire plot of a Japanese mystery novel entitled _The Master Key_. But I cannot shake it.

Then mercifully, I see who I am talking to. This is someone I can talk to. I apologize and tell him the truth: that I cannot shake the image and that is why I am talking like a lunatic. I confess to the image ruling my nights.

I stand in the garden. The trees are about to bloom. Again I see that boy on the pavement. How long did it take him to die? My Father probably knows even that. But I am afraid to ask.

And finally the worst realization that comes out of my little interview hits me, that my grandparents went to their fates _alone_.

I thought that Heniek, who returned, went with them the whole nine yards. Now it turned out that he had been killed in the ghetto. And I had fabricated two older brothers with families who went with them too, to their final hour. In my mind I had my grandparents escorted to their inferno by _three_ sons.

For me, that somehow made the whole ordeal easier to bear.

Now, for the first time I face the truth that these two people were alone. Imagine the guilt the surviving children carried. Imagine the guilt _all_ the survivors carry, to this day. Imagine the truth that all survivors know, the facts they do their utmost to conceal from their children, now twice as old as they were then. The fact that my Father kept Samuel's existence and death a secret all these years only intensifies the image now. I am afraid of what else he might tell me. What other secrets does he have?

The Holocaust is one of the few things in which the imagination can be exceeded by reality. The fact is always worse than anything one could have imagined.

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."

For the children of Holocaust survivors, the Holocaust is a feat of the imagination. Imagination in its most intense form, as a reaction to the vast silence and grief of our parents who, even as they speak, conceal more than they tell, for the sake of protecting their children.

And if anyone were to ask me how much I will tell my own Child, the answer is nothing because I have too much and too little to tell and I do not want his imagination working on it his entire life.

I would have loved to tell you everything. Perhaps I have told you nothing.

Let's just bow and back off.

Let's pretend we haven't met.

In the gray city of my dreams, the city which could be any city becomes Lodz. The thing I am always looking for and can never find is found, on the pavement, in the form of a boy.

Among the onlookers is Pinchas in his long black coat. He looks at me and sadly touches the brim of his hat in greeting, then limps away. I watch him going, disappearing into the crowd as I stand at the window, a hundred dim rooms behind me, like Rose, my Mother, my Self, with gold face and hands.

a note about the writer

Ita Willen was born in Poland in 1945, has a BA in philosophy from University of Texas in Austin and currently resides in Colorado. She was named for her paternal grandmother who died in a concentration camp, exact time and place unknown. In 1972 Random House published _The Grubbag_ , a collection of weekly columns she wrote (under the name Ita Jones) for the Liberation News Service from 1968-70.

