Noah’s ark

He is bidding farewell to their unblemished souls. Rubbing herb potions in their gaunt skin. Rocking their numb bodies in their ritual dance into the beyond. Laying their frozen corpses into the barren soil. Whispering gypsy blessings. Talking to them as he is locking forever the door towards the earthly realm and opening the one which leads towards the darkest abyss, deep sorrow is getting to him. It is sewing the holes in the ground but it never stops tearing new ones in the souls of the living.

The grave-digger Chergen is called upon only when someone dies – to dress them, to dig a grave and burry them. They say he is no good for anything else. They look at him as if he has the plague. They invite him neither to parties nor weddings. They say he would invite the Death upon them. It is an omen of evil to have the grave-digger enter your house, moreover a gypsy grave-digger. Ezra was digging up a pile of ragged peasants’ shoes. He used to try on the shoes of the deceased who Chergen buried. Ezra was a brave walker in the steps of the Death. The anteroom to the other world was keeping him alive. Nobody was going to look for him in the graveyard. Nobody was willing to visit Death unless Death herself called upon them. Ezra the Jew has been living in the graveyard for some time now. The gypsy grave-digger has been hiding him in the back shed. He has been stocking rags as well as the castoff clothes of the deceased. The place stenched of acid and doom. Chergen was staring right into his tattered braize vest, at the place where once was a star, now gaped a hole.

Before meeting Chergen, the star had still been weighing upon his chest. Ezra was constantly trying to hide it while roaming the streets. He used to cross his arms in front of his chest attempting to conceil it. Despite this, people recognised him. Everybody knew who he was. As if the nazis had stamped him with a boiling hot metal Jewish star. Ezra was only seventeen. The ones younger than him believed in the so called “far away travel” from Pirot to Poland. The older ones knew the truth but nobody dared to speak it out loud. Ezra was neither a child, nor an adult.

Before March forty-three he used to haul coffins to the local church. He was afraid not from the dead, but from the living. He would carry the dead to the graveyard together with some other Jews. To Ezra all deceased were unfortunate human beings – Serbs, Tuks, Germans. He would close their still eyes praying to God for their souls. He didn’t despise even the Nazis. He would drag their frozen corpses to Chergen in the graveyard, where the two of them would prepare them for the world beyond.

In that foggy March morning of nineteen forty-three, the Germans commanded rudely all the Jews to line-up in sharp rows. In a rough mechanic manner they twisted the numbered wrists of their victims. The train wagons were waiting, acrimoniously belching hot steam choke-full with coal dust. Chergen was also there. They used to call him only when there was death. The Nazis did not desire to soil their hands with Jewish flesh. That was why Chergen and the rest of the men had been forced into becoming their accomplices. They had to push the endless masses of Jews into the train wagons. They had to stuff the condemned into the one way train to death. Then the grave-digger noticed the boy. Ezra was waiting his turn at the very end of one of the last lines. He couldn’t see where his family was. The older ones were far ahead in front of the train engine. The German sentinels were marching around the scared people in a tight combat formation, keeping a strict eye upon every one of them. Ezra, however, was somewhere in the farthest end of this unfortunate sea of doomed people. When the sentinels changed posts, he kneeled down instinctively and in just a brief moment hid himself behind a corner. He jumped in one of the coffins previously brought to the train station by Chergen, who had had to fulfill the Nazi’s orders. Screams and heartbreaking prayers echoed in his ears. He could clearly recognise the voice of his mother Ahava and his grandfather Shail. Fierce blows started to crash down upon his bony weary shoulders. The “adventure of excitement” felt putrid. The mothers were desperately trying to cover the eyes of their children – all in vain. The poor souls wete tearing to blood their nails onto the iron walls of the train wagons. They were as if pressing the air with their bodies, chocking to death, smashing one another.

The train produced a horrifying whistle and set off. Ezra felt petrified with terror. He couldn’t feel the earth below his body. He only knew that he was being carried somewhere. Then he was vigorously thrown to the ground with a rough thrust. He had difficulty breathing. He was thinking that he was two meters underground already, when Chergen opened the coffin lid.

Since then the coffin turned into his secret shelter. At daytime he buried the dead into the barren soil. At night he slept into the coffin. In the darkest of hours, the shadows of his most probable dead by then family, crawled from under the screaching coffin boards. Their silhouettes were twisting and wriggling upon the coffin’s walls, they were weaving their gloomy shadows in between the crevices in the rotten wood, drawing dreamy pictures of the days long gone by. His mum was kneading hala. She used to sing. Her tender hands were fondling the dough as she was braiding the bread. There was his grandfather Shail. He was summoning Ezra to the world beyond. The old man wanted them to reunite and be together. Sometimes at night Ezra stepped timidly into the gardens of death. But… he always returned to the realm of the living as he was chosen. Chosen to be spared. Chosen to stay alive.

Militsa Ivailova Ivanova

Varna