The Righteous Gentile
by Philip Graubart
|
Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
This time I made sure my mother was wide awake when I called. I phoned at 4:00 p.m. Israel time, 8:00 a.m. in Kansas City. After her coffee and morning run. “He never mentioned this family in Israel he was supporting?”There was a brief pause. I figured she was taking her time, searching her memory, trying to give me a full and complete answer. Really, though, she was just taking a breath for the onslaught that followed.
“Could you just give this a rest, Nathan?” she yelled. “You had 35 years to listen to his stories! No one kept any secrets from you. You just had to open your Jewish ears. Do I remember him supporting relatives in Budapest, Moscow, Tel Aviv? Sure. And he couldn’t spare few thousand dollars for me when I had to leave your father. So what? I got over it.
“And the girl you’re obsessing about — Miriam, or Helena, whatever her name? Honestly, I don’t really remember if she was a good guy or a bad guy. Listen, you think you were the only one who was bored out his mind when he told his stories? You think you’re the only one in the family who stopped listening?”
* * *
The next night, Heidi and I took a long walk along the beach from my grandfather’s sky-scraping apartment in North Tel Aviv to the ancient ramparts in Jaffa, four miles south. We held hands easily, naturally, like a long-time couple.
October in Tel Aviv felt like May in Kansas City — humid, warm, but with cool evening breezes providing blessed relief. I’d already made arrangements to extend my stay another two weeks. Now, as Heidi’s soft fingers clutched my sweaty palm, I thought of staying even longer. Maybe forever.
Heidi led me down a twisty, weed-choked cobblestone path to a pile of bricks and boulders that, Heidi explained in an unfamiliar professorial tone, were the world’s most ancient military site: ramparts that went back five thousand years. Jaffa was a strange Israeli city. No sacred stones or sites, the only thing it could boast of was the ancient art of war.
Yet it was also Israel’s best example of peaceful coexistence, with Arabs and Jews each making up roughly half of the population and living more or less in peace. Maybe all the great temples and mosques should be here, I thought.
We sat facing the midnight ocean. The very outer reach of waves wet our cheeks, so it looked like she was crying and smiling at the same time. “The real story is your grandfather. And the little girl — my grandmother. What happened that day in the forest? It matters.
“Forget about our supposed constitutional crisis. It’s just growing pains of a state that’s having a hard time becoming an adult. Believe me, one hour with our minister’s chief of staff, explaining the nuances of our invisible constitution and you’ll be bored out of your mind. Write the story of Helena and your grandfather.”
I squeezed her hand. “If I write that story, I’ll have to stay even longer. I’ll need multiple conversations with your grandmother. And your parents, when they come from England. And with you.” She grinned and squeezed my hand. The water on her face transformed what might have been a pleased smile into a sad, wistful look. “I can do both stories,” I told her. “I’ll still need that appointment with the minister. In two days, you said?”
She nodded.
“October 7?”
“October 7.”
We watched the ocean. I imagined ships headed for shore. Allies? Enemies? I wasn’t making distinctions. Just boats. In my imagination. “And you’ll sit in on the interviews?” I asked. “Translate for me?”
For no reason I could discern, she kissed me on my cheek. “I would,” she said. “But I’ve already got plans for that day. It’s okay, he’s fluent in English.”
“What are your plans?”
“There’s a music festival in the desert. I’ve been waiting all year for it. I’d take you with me, but it’s the only day the minister could see you. Anyway, it’s sold out.” She tucked her head under my arm. “It’s trance music. The beat, the melodies, lyrics, they radiate peace and light. Maybe you’ll want to do a story. I can tell you all about it the next day. I love the name of the show. It’s called the ‘Nova Festival.’”
That’s where she died. At the “Nova Festival of Peace and Light.” It took us a while to find out how. Was she raped and left bleeding, mortally wounded? Blown up by a grenade? Was her throat cut? Did her killer call home with bloody hands and brag to his parents? Was she stabbed in the neck? Executed with a bullet to her brain at close range? Lined up and shot? Hit by a stray round? Asphyxiated from burning car exhaust? Slaughtered by a vicious mob on her way to Gaza? Torn limb from limb?
Her grandmother screamed at me in the bomb shelter underneath her apartment, her cackling, keening sorrow somehow drowning out the missiles and anti-missiles. “You’re a reporter!” she shrieked at me. “An investigator! Find my granddaughter!”
By this time. every news outlet in the world was covering the new war, and I wasn’t without resources. I made a few calls. “They blew up her car,” I told Helena the next day, as missiles soared overhead and I shivered from a sweaty chill despite the ninety-degree temperature.
Somehow her hands were holding mine, as if she were comforting me. We were back in her building’s shelter, the only single individuals in a dark basement filled with whimpering children and shell-shocked parents. “A homemade rocket.”
She took in four quick gulps of air, but fought hard and triumphed in the battle not to collapse. She tightened her grip on my fingers and stared at me, begging for more information. “She would have been scared,” I said, my voice shaking. “But she wouldn’t have felt any pain. If that matters.”
She let go of my hands. “Of course it matters.” She called her daughter, who’d arrived at 11:00 p.m. the previous night, screaming, screaming, moaning, crying and screaming. That’s all I remember of that phone call.
* * *
A week later, I managed to finagle a seat on a plane full of reporters heading back to New York. I stopped by Helena’s place on the way to the airport to say goodbye.
Her hands trembled slightly as she poured Turkish coffee and urged me to sip down every drop. She knew I hadn’t slept in days, and she needed my full attention. She stood in front of her love seat, sighed deeply and dropped herself next to me. “I’ll tell you what really happened. I did save his life. I did. I swear to this on my mother’s grave.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“I saved him by pointing right at his mother.” She slowly extended her arm toward the TV, as if it somehow contained the soul of my great-grandmother. “There’s the Jew,” she said, still pointing, staring straight ahead. She turned her head toward me. “That’s what I told them. They shot her. And the baby. Right there.”
She looked quizzically at her outstretched arm, as if puzzled that it had gotten itself in a pointing position. She retracted it and placed both of her hands on her lap. “You think I was a Nazi? A racist killer. Six years old?”
I hesitated, but only for a blink of an eye. “Of course not.”
“Of course not,” she repeated. “You see, I had a crush on your grandfather, and he was eleven years old. He would entertain me. Teach me about stones, about frogs, about edible grass, about earthworms. Important things from the woods where we played. I wanted a brother. I knew that if the soldiers killed his mother...
“By the way, do you really think a six-year old girl can tell the difference between a Nazi and an Iron Cross killer? They had guns! If his mother were killed, he would come and live with me. That was my ideology. That’s what caused the death of your great-grandmother and your great-aunt. I wanted a brother. I wanted him.”
For some reason, I held my breath while she spoke. Then I exhaled as if I’d just surfaced from the bottom of a lake. “Why did he—?”
“Why did he tell the story the way he told it? Different to you than to my family? Different in America from Israel? Believe me, I have no idea. Who knows why people tell stories the way they do? All I can say is I was six years old. Five years later, he testified for me. He gave me this life.”
She’d been narrating the episode softly, with a breathy, nervous voice just above a whisper. But the volume suddenly increased. She erupted like an air raid siren. “You think I haven’t paid for my sin?” she yelled. “I lost a grandson to this ravenous country. And now another one! My precious Heidi! We don’t suffer in this Jewish homeland? Is that what you think? Two grandsons I have in this land’s army. Two! Will they die also because of me? Will God take them, too? I deserve this? Is that what you think?”
I shook my head. I was about to say, “I don’t think, I just write. My analytical abilities weaken when missiles are aimed at my head.” But my phone lit up with my taxi’s text. I left without a word.
* * *
I wrote my grandfather’s story, the different versions, for different people in different places. I mixed it up with the Gaza war and the October 7 massacre in a series of five 750-word essays. The managing editor posted each episode near the top of the homepage. But after the last one, she took me aside, and managed to stay off her phone for the full two minutes it took her to tell me my writing lacked that certain “umph.”
“It’s such a compelling, sad narrative,” she said, giving in now and checking her phone. “But after the fourth instalment — barely any clicks.” She shoved the phone back in her jeans pocket. ‘You’re so much better at sports, particularly baseball. I think we’re keeping you there.”
The next day, I got an email from Alon, one of Helena’s grandsons. He was still serving in the IDF, but was enjoying a few days leave. “I regret to inform you,” he wrote, “that my dear grandmother passed away this past Sunday. I know you will be saddened to read this. After the war, we plan to gather the family together and finally plant the tree for her at Yad Vashem’s forest of Righteous Gentiles. We hope you’ll join us for the ceremony.”
Copyright © 2025 by Philip Graubart
