The Cemetery Plot

by Martin Lindauer

September 24, 2010 

“You don’t know where zayda’s grave is?” I asked my father, not hiding my astonishment. A red-eye from Brooklyn to Jerusalem, a four-hour layover in Frankfurt, a cab from the hotel to the cemetery at the Mount of Olives, a schlep up the hill from the gate--and all for nothing.

Before we left home, dad had phoned Tanta Esther, my aging aunt, zayda’s sister, and scrawled a set of numbers on a piece of paper for grandfather’s section of the cemetery. But he had missed or not heard the row number.

Dad ignored my pained look and stiff with arthritis shuffled to the next row of graves and scanned the headstones while studying, with a shaky hand, the scrap of paper with the incomplete directions.

Dad hadn’t made it to zayda’s funeral almost a year ago, held a day after he died, as is customary in Judaism. Not enough time to pack and make flight arrangements. Now, too frail to travel alone to the traditional viewing of zayda’s tombstone, the “unveiling,” he had begged me to accompany him. I reluctantly agreed, not seeing the point of risking a sick old man’s life for someone already dead.

Dad trudged to one of the graves and squinted, under the glaring desert sun, at the inscription chiseled into the white granite slab. No luck. “Gevalt,” woe is me, he cried out. Weeping, he hobbled to the next marker.

I had to do something but what? Pray? I hadn’t asked God for anything since final exams in high school, not believing, not after the Holocaust, that He bothered with the affairs of man, let alone gave directions.  Still, I whispered a Sh’ma, a Jew’s belief in one God, a generic mantra for times of trouble. I remembered, as a child, zayda giving me a nickel for every perfect recital and I still recalled the three short introductory lines.” Please God,” I murmured in English as an addendum to the memorized Hebrew, “I’m not asking for much, or for me, but show us the way to the damn plot.” 

A man approached. Despite the heat, he was wearing a black suit and hat but no tie. Must be a Rabbi, I thought. Makes a living by reciting the Kaddish for tourists who don’t know the prayer for the dead. 

“Can you help us, sir?” I pleaded as the stranger came closer.

The Rabbi, if that’s what he was, said nothing but made calming motions with his hands. He peeled the scrap of paper with the missing information from my father’s trembling hand, studied it for a few seconds, and beckoned us to follow him. He led us to the cemetery office, a small building not visible from where we stood on the slope of the hill with its sea of graves. In the cool shadows of the office he gave us a cup of water and we drank thirstily as he thumbed through the pages of a large ledger with yellowed paper that crackled as he flipped through it with a wet finger. Without saying a word--the Good Samaritan must not have known any English--he gave us a sign to come with him.

Within a few minutes we found zayda’s grave. We said the Kaddish, reading from a phonetically spelled out page in a prayer book that the dark-suited stranger held in front of us. Following his lead, my dad and I pried two small stones from the parched earth and placed them on zayda’s headstone to indicate we had paid our respects.

My father pulled out a ten-dollar bill from his wallet. “Take it, please,” he said to our silent guide, who shook his head in refusal.My father spoke in halting Yiddish. “Fur dyna kinder, dyna kinder,” and repeated it in English. “For your children, your children.” Our helper pushed my father’s hand away, turned toward the setting sun, and walked down the hill, his head bent over the prayerbook we had recently read from, lips moving silently, and disappeared against the silhouetted skyline of Jerusalem below.

Caught in the late afternoon light I spotted the golden roof of the Dome of the Rock, holy to Muslims, according to my guidebook. Somewhere in the shadows below, I read, was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, special to Christians. Hidden from view was the Wailing Wall, which my travel book translated into Hebrew as the Kotel, a place revered by Jews. Was it possible, I wondered, for prayers to have more power in a sacred city?

I looked down at zayda’s grave and saw that one of the memorial stones was missing, the one put there by the stranger. He had set his at a distance from ours, close to an edge, and it must have fallen off. I kneeled and ran my fingers over the rocks and pebbles littering the barren ground, a hopeless task, but I felt it was important to find his stone. Struck by a sudden thought, I stopped my search, looked up at my dad, and asked, “Could it have been an angel who helped us?

Martin Lindauer has published short fiction, essays, and memoirs in the New Vilna Review, Poetica, and the Shofar Literary Review, among other publications. Comments are welcome: mblindauer@earthlink.net