The Tragedy of Izaak Levinsky || bxb

II

1938.

THAT ENTIRE WEEK, I COULD NOT stand being in the same room as my father, and later, when it came time to bury his body, I could not look at him either. The time I had spent in such terrible isolation and solitude, something that unlike my life later in Australia, was not self-imposed, had damaged me irreparably and completely.

I spent that week in the second room of that little upstairs house. My aunts, uncle, grandparents, and my mother took shifts on watching the body - no more than two or three hours at most - and the rest of the time was spent in the bedroom, talking quietly about things I could not care about and no longer remember.

There were seven of them altogether - my mother, Małgośka, another two aunts, an uncle, and my mother's parents - all of whom ignored me (excluding Małgośka, of course), but that was fine because I ignored them too. My own grief and fear was far too loud, and I couldn't deal with seven other people on top of it. I spent a lot of my time in that wondrous place between sleeping and waking, where everything isn't particularly real, and nothing particularly matters. Looking back, it's easy to make comparisons between my mother and I and how we dealt with such a great loss - I internalised most of it, whereas my mother lashed out - but back then, I remember feeling so guilty that I wasn't there taking care of my mother like my grandparents, or my aunts and uncles. I was convinced I was going to hell, and it would only be a short time before I would be condemned to death, like my father (for to suffer such an awful and sudden death, he must've done something so sinful and unapologetic).

My Aunt Małgośka was the only one who cared for me in that endless week. Every day she'd make me eat, make me wash my face, make me drink. I was so angry at everything, but so apathetic towards myself and my health. For all I knew, I died in that room, watching my father's body. But Małgośka kept me awake and alive, and without her I probably would've rotted away without my family noticing.

In all that endless pain and self-tormenting, it's a wonder that I got anything done. But fuelled by the thought and memory of my dead father, and with the unconditional support from Małgośka, I taught myself the Polish alphabet, and how the letters came together to make sounds and words, which became sentences and paragraphs, and could build and build until they became stories and worlds. These letters allowed me to escape to a place where my father's dead body wasn't in the next room, and where Time and Death were my friends, and they never could hurt me or anyone I loved.

My father's burial was set to a week and a day after he had died, and my uncle and my grandfather took him down to they synagogue - the place he had so cruelly been murdered - and there they wrapped him in a linen, and we all turned up in the little graveyard, still wearing the clothes we were wearing when he had died - (baring me, but only Małgośka and I knew about that).

They lowered him into the ground without a coffin, just like Jewish law told, and piled the earth on his shrouded body. I squeezed my eyes shut, but I did not cry; I had not cried since that awful day-and-night all rolled into one, and even if I had wanted to, the tears would not come. My mother was crying awfully though, ugly sobs wracked her body, and she would forget to breathe until someone would touch her on the shoulder, or on the back, or on the face.

How odd it was being the only one unable to cry! Two of my aunts, who hadn't particularly liked my father, were crying, and yet I wasn't. I cannot quite describe the guilt which began to gnaw at me, wild and cruelly. He was my father - why couldn't I cry? But the tears refused to fall still, and I was a sinner.

After my father's death there were so many things to deal with. As a child I had not recognised it, but when my mother died, I was forced to deal with tedious things like money and the council estate housing. Papers needed to be signed, and offices needed to be alerted. It must not have been particularly different with my father, and although I could not remember the same sort of forms and government people visiting, I knew there were loose ties, and the little upstairs house was one of them.