Rebecca Marcovici
Finding Rebecca Marcovici
I followed the caretaker out of the car through the dense brush and trees. I was wearing a thin silk top which was getting torn by the thorns and bushes. My arms were protected from scratches, but in the end my blouse was ruined. I kept trying to step on the thick thorny branches and knock them down with my foot so that there would be a place to walk through, to protect myself from injury. The caretaker led me seemingly blindly through the thicket of trees, brush and scattered graves which were marked by large coffin sized stone structures. The stones were marked with the names of individuals in Hebrew and in Romanian, and while it was clear they were gravestones, they were of a style I had not seen before. I tried not to step on top of any of the stone structures, although the caretaker and her four dogs didn't observe any such prohibition. The process of making our way to the grave was almost as overwhelming as being there.
The grave was inscribed with "Rifca Marcovici" with the date of 1938 (Rifca being the Hebrew translation for Rebecca). I brought two stones with me to place on the grave and the caretaker held the bushes back so I could take some photos. I scraped away the moss on the granite so that I could clearly see the date was 1938.
The caretaker urged me to leave and I somehow followed the caretaker back to the dirt road. When we found the taxi, the driver started to should at me that he wanted fifty dollars due to some paint scratches on his car that he said was from the rough road (all this being translated into Hebrew by the two ladies). I did not believe the damage was from the brief ride in the taxi and I turned my back on the scene. The taxi driver kepte shouting at me in incomprehensible Romanian. I walked off fast into the hills toward the remote parts of the cemetery. After leaving the angry taxi driver and the confused Israeli ladies and after watching the caretaker head (with her uneven painful gait) back toward the entrance, I walked away as far as I could from that chaotic, angry scene.
The expansiveness of the dried brushy space, being on tope of the hill overlooking houses in the distance was calming. But more than the view of the hill was a wave of comfort that came to me from all of my ancestors, my relatives and Jewish community members, buried in this place, and I stayed there awash, held by their arms and neshamot (spirits or souls). I was reminded of a passage in Sebald's "Austerlitz":
Evan told tales of the dead who had been struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan. At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closedly their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. An they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life, for the xperience of death, said Evan, diminishes us, just as a piece of linen shrinks when you first wash it...Hanging from a hook above Evan's low workbench, said Austerlitz, was the black veil that his grandfather had taken from the bier when the small figures muffled in their cloaks carried it past him, and it was certainly Evan, said Austerlitz, who once told me that nothing but a piece of silk like that speartes us from the next world. (Sebald, 2001, p.54).
I walked for hours afterwards, up a windy, hilly dirt road past some new houses being built into a completely foreign neighborhood. I decided to search for the Botanical gardens as I knew they were somewhere in the distance. At the top of the hill a woman drove her late model sports utility vehicle into the driveway of her ornate, large new house. My feelings of dissassociation were magnified by the contrast of the new construction and wealth against the decimated cemetery and erasure of the Jewish people. Seeking contact with the gentle solace of a natural place, I asked to be pointed to the Botanical gardens. I finally reached a main street and after an hour of walking made my way to the gardens where again I felt held, this time by living beings, the roses, the unusual trees, and a small lily pad garden with a sprinkler. It was hot that day, and I had been in the sun for hours. I put down my bags and walked under the sprinkler and let the water cool me down and wash off the cemetery visit.
