weakness, her emblem of Jewish shame.
Gabriel had taken up painting to be closer to her. She soon resented this as an unwarranted intrusion on her private world; then, when his talents matured and began to challenge hers, she begrudged his obvious gifts. Gabriel pushed her to new heights. Her pain, so visible in life, found expression in her work. Gabriel grew obsessed with the nightmarish imagery that flowed from her memory onto her canvases. He began to search for the source.
In school he had learned of a place called Birkenau. He asked her about the bandage she wore habitually on her left arm, about the long-sleeved blouses she wore, even in the furnace like heat of the Jezreel Valley. He asked what had happened to her during the war, what had happened to his grandparents. She refused at first, but finally, under his steady onslaught of questions, she relented. Her account was hurried and reluctant; Gabriel, even in youth, was able to detect the note of evasion and more than a trace of guilt. Yes, she had been in Birkenau. Her parents had been murdered there on the day they arrived. She had worked. She had survived. That was all. Gabriel, hungry for more details about his mother’s experience, began to concoct all manner of scenarios to account for her survival. He too began to feel ashamed and guilty. Her affliction, like a hereditary disorder, was thus passed on to the next generation.
The matter was never discussed again. It was as if a steel door had swung shut, as if the Holocaust had never happened. She fell into a prolonged depression and was bedridden for many days. When finally she emerged, she retreated to her studio and began to paint. She worked relentlessly, day and night. Once Gabriel peered through the half-open door and found her sprawled on the floor, her hands stained by paint, trembling before a canvas. That canvas was the reason he had come to Safed to see Tziona.
The sun was gone. It had grown cold on the terrace. Tziona drew a shawl around her shoulders and asked Gabriel if he ever intended to come home. Gabriel mumbled something about needing to work, like Tziona’s friends who had moved to America.
“And who are you working for these days?”
He didn’t rise to the challenge. “I restore Old Master paintings. I need to be where the paintings are. In Venice.”
“ Venice,” she said derisively. “ Venice is a museum.” She raised her wineglass toward the Galilee. “This is real life.This is art. Enough of this restoration. You should be devoting all your time and energy to your own work.”
“There’s no such thing as my own work. That went out of me a long time ago. I’m one of the best art restorers in the world. That’s good enough for me.”
Tziona threw up her hands. Her bracelets clattered like wind chimes. “It’s a lie. You’re a lie. You’re an artist, Gabriel. Come to Safed and find your art. Find yourself. ”
Her prodding was making him uncomfortable. He might have told her there was now a woman involved, but that would have opened a whole new front that Gabriel was anxious to avoid. Instead, he allowed a silence to fall between them, which was filled by the consoling sound of Ma’ariv.
“What are you doing in Safed?” she finally asked. “I know you didn’t come all the way up here for a lecture from your Doda Tziona.”
He asked whether Tziona still had his mother’s paintings and sketches.
“Of course, Gabriel. I’ve been keeping them all these years, waiting for you to come and claim them.”
“I’m not ready to take them off your hands yet. I just need to see them.”
She held a candle to his face. “You’re hiding something from me, Gabriel. I’m the only person in the world who can tell when you’re keeping secrets. It was always that way, especially when you were a boy.”
Gabriel poured himself another glass of wine and told Tziona about Vienna.
SHE PULLED OPEN the door of the storeroom and yanked down on the drawstring of the overhead light. The closet was filled floor to ceiling with canvases and sketches. Gabriel began leafing through the work. He’d forgotten how gifted his mother was. He could see the influence of Beckmann, Picasso, Egon Schiele, and of course her father, Viktor Frankel. There were even variations on themes Gabriel had been exploring in his own work at the time. His mother had expanded on them, or, in some cases, utterly demolished them. She had been breathtakingly talented.
Tziona pushed him aside and came out with a stack of canvases and two large envelopes filled with sketches. Gabriel crouched on the stone floor and examined the works while Tziona looked on over his shoulder.
There were images of the camps. Children crowded into bunks. Women slaving over machinery in the factories. Bodies stacked like cordwood, waiting to be hurled into the fire. A family huddled together while the gas gathered round them.
The final canvas depicted a solitary figure, an SS man dressed head-to-toe in black. It was the painting he had seen that day in his mother’s studio. While the other works were dark and abstract, here she strove for realism and revelation. Gabriel found himself marveling at her impeccable draftsmanship and brushwork before his eyes finally settled on the face of the subject. It belonged to Erich Radek.
TZIONA MADE a bed for Gabriel on the living room couch and told him the midrash of the broken vessel.
“Before God created the world, there was only God. When God decided to create the world, God pulled back in order to create a space for the world. It was in that space that the universe was formed. But now, in that space, there was no God. God created Divine Sparks, light, to be placed back into God’s creation. When God created light, and placed light inside of Creation, special containers were prepared to hold it. But there was an accident. A cosmic accident. The containers broke. The universe became filled with sparks of God’s divine light and shards of broken containers.”
“It’s a lovely story,” Gabriel said, helping Tziona tuck the ends of a sheet beneath the couch cushions. “But what does it have to do with my mother?”
“The midrash teaches us that until the sparks of God’s light are gathered together, the task of creation will not be complete. As Jews, this is our solemn duty. We call it Tikkun Olam: Repair of the World.”
“I can restore many things, Tziona, but I’m afraid the world is too broad a canvas, with far too much damage.”
“So start small.”
“How?”
“Gather your mother’s sparks, Gabriel. And punish the man who broke her vessel.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Gabriel slipped out of Tziona’s apartment without waking her and crept down the cobblestone steps in the shadowless gray light of dawn with the portrait of Radek beneath his arm. An Orthodox Jew, on his way to morning prayer, thought him a madman and shook his fist in anger. Gabriel loaded the painting into the trunk of the car and headed out of Safed. A bloodred sunrise broke over the ridge. Below, on the valley floor, the Sea of Galilee turned to fire.
He stopped in Afula for breakfast and left a message on Moshe Rivlin’s voice mail, warning him that he was coming back to Yad Vashem. It was late morning by the time he arrived. Rivlin was waiting for him. Gabriel showed him the canvas.
“Who painted it?”
“My mother.”
“What was her name?”
“Irene Allon, but her German name was Frankel.”
“Where was she?”
“The women’s camp at Birkenau, from January 1943 until the end.”
“The death march?”
Gabriel nodded. Rivlin seized Gabriel by the arm and said, “Come with me.”
RIVLIN PLACED GABRIEL at a table in the main reading room of the archives and sat down before a computer terminal. He entered the words “Irene Allon” into the database and drummed his stubby fingers impatiently on the keyboard while waiting for a response. A few seconds later, he scribbled five numbers onto a piece of scratch paper and without a word to Gabriel disappeared through a doorway leading to the storerooms of the archives. Twenty minutes later, he returned and placed a document on the table. Behind a clear plastic cover were the words YAD VASHEM ARCHIVES in both Hebrew and English, along with a file number: 03/812. Gabriel carefully lifted the plastic cover and turned to the first page. The heading made him feel suddenly cold: THE TESTIMONY OF IRENE ALLON, DELIVERED MARCH 19, 1957. Rivlin placed a hand on his shoulder and slipped out of the room.
