Hold on to the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

their own ways of getting there. And indeed, it turns out that tomorrow, a “delegation of rabbis from America” is about to come, and they will go in a special bus. When will they arrive? When will they go? Where are they now? Impossible to know. Got to wait.
    I want to sneak away from them now, back to the big square. To go into an anonymous café with drunkards. To
be swallowed up there. But they hang onto me, wrapped up in their coats, accompany me to the hotel. Argue with outbursts of rancor, finally declare that the “secretary” will come to “guide me” tomorrow morning. They all press around, shake my hand. Downtrodden faces. So small. In threadbare coats.
    In the room the suitcase is waiting, with a few things. Makeup, passport. Will have to go on and move it. Impossible to hide in the suffocation under the blanket.
    The next morning, before I have time to ponder the other world in my dreams, the “secretary” is already here, dragging me with soft-limbed domination. Turning me around in dark streets, getting on and off trams, talking incessantly in the incomprehensible language, as if to herself. And I plod behind her, bending down to her, making an effort.
    In Kazimierz, on the bench across from the synagogue, the doorman of the “Mordechai Gebirtig Culture Club” and two old men are already waiting for me. It’s not clear if they’re beggars or rabbis. They came to welcome the “American delegation.” The doorman waving as he approaches, “Yes, yes!” One of the old men hurries me, opens the gates of the ancient synagogue of Rabbi Moshe Isserlish. For a minute, a separate hush. The figures that follow in my wake remain beyond the fence. A small building whose heavy walls are leaning, and a white courtyard. Inside the synagogue, there is still a warmth among the
wooden benches, around the Ark of the Covenant. On the tables are old prayer books. Black letters. And in the small enclosure crows land on the ancient tombstones sunk in the mist. For a moment the past seems to continue with all its softness, without any obstacle, in that distant murmur, up to the morning covered with mist, to me.
    And the doorman is already rushing me hysterically; he arranged with the gatekeeper of the Miodowa cemetery to be there, to open the gate. Hurry, hurry, got to get back in time for the “delegation of rabbis!” And thus, in single file, the doorman limping, the muscular Christian gatekeeper on his heels, and I behind them, we march between long rows of sunken, shattered gravestones, covered with mold. Names, names. I recite to them the names I’ve managed to dredge up from my memory, “Poser, Mendel, Groner.” Tombstones in long rows whose edges vanish in mist and piles of fallen leaves. Many strange names. Don’t find. A Christian woman with legs swathed in bandages rinses the graves with boiling water, raises her head wrapped in a turban to us: “Yes, Groner, saw it once . . . maybe there.” I still hold on, persist in reading the names, seeking under piles of leaves. But the limping doorman and the gatekeeper behind him are already hurrying out. We didn’t find. No maps. No books. No witnesses. Mission impossible. Only a delusion of mission. And time is limited.
    Meanwhile on the bench the number of idlers and “rabbis” waiting for the “American delegation” has grown.
According to the doorman, they are already in Krakow and will arrive very soon. Maybe you can find out in the hotel when they’ll arrive? No, impossible to know. I break away from the doorman, tell him I’ll come back in a little while, he should beg the rabbis of the delegation to wait, and I hurry to Wawel Castle, for the visit that was arranged. On the streets people in gray coats, buses, trams.You can even eat an apple. The body goes on functioning over the abyss between the worlds. And when I come back from the royal palace, from the halls with waxed floors whose walls are covered with embroidered tapestries of feast and