STAR OF DAVID
“I know you look at me and want what’s best. I am glad you
are here, I know I’ve said this before, and I know you only half
believe it, but believe me it’s true.”
“How can I believe it? There’s so much good stuff out here.
Come. Get out of this room of gloom. We’ll go eat, drink, and
find something playful we can enjoy. I know if you would just trust
me you would never lock yourself in this place,” gesturing around
the room, “again.”
“My trust in you is without end. But it is my trust in humanity
that has no place left to go.” Long pause. “If you need
to hear. If you think you need to hear, because I can assure you no
one should ever do anything but beg to never be next to this story,
I will speak of it this once to you. And though I have heard people
say that to speak of hardship is the only way to let go of it, understand
that the part of my heart which holds this story is so burnt away to
speak of it is to unearth a festering corpse which can bring no peace,
only strength to the nightmares that are now like my family.
“And it makes sense that I should start with family. Perhaps you
thought in my childhood you could find the puzzle to unlock my melancholy,
but you are only half right. You see my parents never mistreated me;
in fact they worked hard to see me through to a good life and one of
my own choosing. Though we had our share of pushing and pulling the
only thing that could be said as detrimental in my rearing may have
been the lack of emotionality between us, there were no great falls.
My Mother a loner, I think she married more out of ignorance and social
pressure then the desire to be two as one, and my Father so confused
at the traumas of his own family that he bade us all safe distance and
emerged himself in his work, left me with more the caring of nannies
than a family unit. So I’m sure it would have gone until in the
traumas of adolescence I would have either rebelled, retreated, or repeated,
but for one thing at the age of seven that was to change my direction
so completely.
“I’ve never spoken on any siblings but let me show you a
picture of my sister Esther. This is she; I think she’s just turned
twenty. She’s a senior in College, she finished young as my parents
were proponents of accelerated education, and I think just before I
took this she had told me about her plans to travel around looking for
a place with a school or job that might keep her optimism in the world
alive.”
“She’s stunning.”
“Yes everyone can’t help saying that, but for me I hardly
saw her outsides, except in the expressions she made to me about what
it was like to be considered stunning. Like being given a opulent life,
she could not help but find her ego expanded, but I do not think she
took much to the string that were attached to it. Sometimes I thought
it would break her, but the vibrancy inside her heart always shored
her up.”
“You two had a falling out?”
“No never, that is not were this story leads. What was missing
in my family, someone to share with, someone who could give without
expectations of every seeing a return, someone who I could love without
any confusion, and who would love me back twice what I gave, came to
me the day my Mother brought Esther home, cradled in her arms. Esther
and I were as close as two siblings ever could ever be who were not
born connected. We were not only the best of friends we were our family,
together we covered all that was missing, and from then on all our lives
were family in it’s best definition.”
“So she’s overseas then.”
“Yes, somewhere.”
“Haven’t you heard from her at all?”
“I heard from her often for a while. She went on that trip after
school, you know the one that every college student whose eyes have
been opened to the world, the western world, starting with the classics,
must find a way to take, backpack, eurail pass, and hostels all some
part of the equation. So she did and traveled everywhere. She had faith
in the good that she said was in all people, and so was not afraid to
go places where violence the mayhem had been. I say been for she would
not go where their was fighting now, only where it had been, or was
coming. She was not the solider type.”
“Did she give you that locket, I’ve always seen you rubbing
something under your shirt, but tonight is the first time I’ve
ever seen you pull it out before.”
“Actually it’s I who gave it to her. Before she went I gave
her one exactly as the one I’m wearing here. This is the stare
of David, and inside a ‘hi,’ which most simply translates
‘Life.’ I’m not religious mind you, but now I must
wear it like the chains of Christmas past, or perhaps Hanukkah, not
to mix my faiths too badly. The thing is my parents, neither followed
either of their conflicting ethnic or religious backgrounds. I once
did a study of our family on family and found more than once one side
of our grandparents were probably killing off the other side. Not that
difficult with half Jews, though as is written in the Torah, my Mother
being Jewish did pass down to my sister and I an inheritance to Judaism.
And my sister at one point in her life had practiced, being always the
stronger of us, always the more inquisitive; she wanted to see what
our heritage offered. And though she decided the practice was too rigid,
she did come to believe that she had the obligation to stand as a Jew,
to make her objection heard to any racism that followed a people who
faced obliteration simply because of their beliefs, and not because
they had ever tried to force themselves on the land or the beliefs of
others. She had a hard time with the Zionist in Israel, but she felt
this was a separate issue from the need to remind the world of the racism
the Jews had know for thousands of years. I never had that strength.
In fact I have in my life hidden that I was Jewish, or stood by in the
shadow of racist remarks in order to guarantee my safety, or even just
my amenity. But Ester was not like that, and when I saw this I knew
how it would please her so to be able to wear it.”
“Anyways I heard from her often. The Western Europe trip inspired
her beliefs that the world had reason to hope even more, for every time
she saw the problems in our over spun capitalistic communities, she
also came in contact with groups of people trying to find better, for
humane ways to fix the world. And the organizations that she came in
contact with couldn’t but help to drawer her to the East where
so many had lost that hope. We have all heard of genocide, a term so
wonderfully scientific, something we’ve come so easily to accept
as it roles of our tongues. We let it pass in and out of us like any
other part of the day to day. We have no idea what it can mean. I suppose
even Ester had no idea, but I got letters saying she felt she had to
go; she had to see if she could help.
“Then somewhere past Dantsa, letters stopped. After 3 months I
started making frantic enquiries. Almost a month of this and then someone
who I had actually made human contact with at a subdivision of the U.N.
called me and said that the last town she had been in had fallen and
her contacts in Yugoslavia convinced her that Ester was most certainly
dead. For days I cried. I was sure I could not go one without her.
“Still I didn’t believe it, or perhaps I believed it too
much, for two days latter I was on a plane and then a train, and even
pretending to be part of the press on U.N. convoys trying to track her
down. If she was dead I wanted to stand at her grave. I still carried
her beliefs; I was thinking that war, that her death was what must have
linked honor to killing. If I were to go on I thought it would be as
the carrier of her beliefs, I would take from her the fallen flag and
march on.
“And she is still out there. What I came to hear I tell you is
just as much a collage of what has happened to humanity, and what when
I close my eyes passes these days as sleep. When you ask me to join
you, to take part, I tell you I cannot because I did not find her, because
what I found instead. Because my outstretched hand was there and the
what happened found me cowering in a corner, until in the end all was
sucked out of me, not even the feeling of loss remained. And this is
why I am but a shell.”
“If you never found her you can still have hope. You know she
would want you to go on as life's participant.”
“Why do you make me go on? I have told you that it tortures me
to think of it as I always do, and to speak of it is like trying to
breathe underwater. Are you not my friend, will you not let it be?”
“I am your friend forever. And if the only way I can remain so
is to say nothing, I will be mute. But could it not be that you are
unable to decide what is best, what even you’re Sister would want
here. That you must find a way to live again?”
“If that could only be. I can see that you must hear the story
to its end, and even then I would be surprised if you understood. But
I say again there is no coal left in this cinder. You cannot breath
the flame back in. If you must hear this story I will tell you, but
I can give you no more.
“For a month I walked among the horror of the endless killing
fields. There were few to find to tell me anything for so much had been
laid to waist. No one I spoke to could give me hint of Ester, but in
that month I came to see a side of man that suffocated any humanity
within me with out repent. Still I could not give up, Esther was still
in me.
“I was searching through a U.N. relief tent in Biast. It was difficult
even to enter. So much suffering, and so real to me because the faces
were so like those I had grown up with. Each could have been a neighbor
or a best friend. I had talked to three or four when a young woman,
being brought back to life from six months in a camp where her village
use to lay, said she had heard a story about a Jew from an old woman
down at the other end of the tent, she said she did not now her name
but I could not miss her, simply look for the oldest looking woman I
could find. When I found her, and it was not difficult for she was without
doubt the oldest looking woman I had ever seen, her skin so creased
and face so drawn I’m sure she must have feared going to sleep
for that she would be carried out in the morning with the rest of the
dead but for the fact that her fingers twitched even as she napped there.
Though I was desperate to talk with her I could not bring myself to
disturb her, and sat myself next to her bunk to wait. I needn’t
concern myself though, for after five or so minutes, with no movement
or change from her but that in her fingers she suddenly said in a soft
but very rough voice ‘What do you want.’
“A tear dropped from my eye at that moment. I had not cried since
I had left the States on this journey and I would not cry again till
I returned, except for that one tear that fell just at those words spoken
in a language that I had come accustom to as one of the suffering of
the world. ‘What do you want?’ I wanted anything but to
hear now what I had come so far for and was sure this woman of all the
others I had spoken to could give me. I wanted the suffering of the
world to end. I wanted to live in a world where violence was no longer
the great byproduct of man’s existence on this planet.
“’I hear you know of a Jew, a Jew from America.’
“Her eyes, blackness swimming in pools of blood, opened and I
stared as if Pandora. And I could not turn away as she took me in to
the hell she had passed though and now carried with her always.
‘You are family of the Jew girl? She wore a stared crucifix like
the one you wear. Yes I was with her in Lanstk.’
‘They say she is dead. Did you see her die?’
‘I have seen much death, I have seen my own death so near it’s
breath has brushed the hair out of my eyes, but what I saw of the Jew
girl was much worse.’ There she had said the words, with no warning
or clue that everything that were in my thoughts were as easily brushed
away as telling someone what time it is. My mind was well prepared for
this, but my body still shuttered to its deepest core. I think know
that that was all this women planned to say, she did not look she could
give anything, as so much had been taken from her, but she must have
seen there was something we shared, something of the walking dead between
us that made her go one. ‘When innocence and death meet the way
they did with the Jew girl there is a horror so deep, that even the
heart that is long dead moans from the grave.’
‘Can you tell me?’
‘I can, but perhaps I should not, there is a tear on your cheek,
and I have not even begun.
‘I must. I can promise you I can save my tears for another day.
But you must know, I must know.’
“’Yes you must, I know.’ And then we sat there for
a moment and breathed. ‘No one knew names in Lanstk. We had been
brought in from many places. Most whose words got to me spoke of watching
nothing but death all around them. Some came from towns of a couple
thousand and said they thought they were the only one still alive. Others
new of a few who were half when they were carted away, but they had
no idea where they had been taken. And in Lanstk there were few moments
to share. We were put alone, or under guard of those who would come
and shoot you if you shivered much less spoke. Those who were there
had come because they either had been the only one of thousands to live,
or because they had been captured by the non-military who felt unable
to kill you there, or because you were pretty. Lanstk was if nothing
else their brothel.
‘And that is of course why the Jew girl could not help but be
brought there, even though I think it was a mistake. I think she had
been taken by solders who did not realize it might not be good to take
an American who had come to their country not ours. But I never had
the chance to ask her, I only guess this because when she arrived she
looked as if she had not been taken, and as when she came there were
a group of solders yelling at each other and with her, at that was the
only time I ever saw solders talk with a woman. I think they had decided
to take her back instead of put her in with us, but then they saw that
star crucifix and began to ask her if she was a Jew. She said something
then in a language I had never heard, I think it must have been the
language of Jews, for when she said it one solder said she was a Jew
and that she had murdered Christ and no one would care if she lived
or died. I think she spat at him or it is possible she even hit him,
but what ever she did it was the last thing she did that was not done
to her. I had seen this much before, it was like the stories told to
children around a fire on a winter night, how once wolves were the princes
of the forest and they did what ever they wanted. And when there was
no food in winter they would find and circle a child tearing and eating
even as the child still cried. The wolves have come back, but their
want and hatred is much worse. The Jew girl was beaten and raped many
times. They cut and burnt holes in her and spoke of Christ. I could
hear some solders complain that they had beaten her too much, and that
soon she would be good for nothing. After many, many hours they dragged
her away. I never saw or heard of her spoken of again. The next morning
they pulled me out and made me clean where she had been. There was a
lot of blood to be scrubbed off. I used torn cloths that must have been
those of the Jew girl. And just before I was finished I found this’
she touched my star, ‘waged in the crevasses, but I could not
take the chance of keeping it, I am not a Jew.’
“’A two days later, and it can only be God who let me live
on to that point, I was grabbed by a soldier and told to help take bodies
into a truck that was going out of the compound to bury them some place.
I think I helped carry the Jew girl, but the body had been rotting and
it was impossible to be sure. Though the hair still had beauty in it.
That kind of beauty is hard to wipe away. Then all those who helped
with the bodies were told to get into the trucks and I heard one of
the generals say ‘when they are all in the hole, kill them too.’
And in the way that the world has be turned to darkness I thought ‘Ah
this is the way it should be.’ But when the truck was coming around
a slow curve I simply fell out the back, as it seemed just as good a
way to die. But I did not die. Instead with broken bones I walked across
the border to this tent. I often wondered why God had saved me, it seemed
like I was meant to die for such a long time. Perhaps it has been so
that I could tell you the story you have come to hear. What God plans,
we shall never know till we have passed beyond this world.’
“She said no more, nor did I. It was as if we had both been used
up. As if humanity had left us and the soulless shells could continue
in the motions, but life was gone, there was no way to contemplate it,
it was all gone. I went from there to the airport, in fact I did not
even go back to my room. My cloths, my books, even my plane ticket.
I left it all. At the airport I used the remainder of a credit card
to take the next plane out. I think it has been five years now since
then and I will never stand over the grave of my sister and I will never
be alive again for I have seen the illusion of humanity.”