Yesterday we finally got on a flight. To be precise, the flight was to Caeplonia. This is a small Greek island in the Greek sea. If it feels more like the Caribbean than Europe, but in any event, this is mainly because of the color of the water.
My daughter could not contain her excitement, and I also got this contagion at some point, but only after we had finally sat in the 9th row of the EasyJet plane with our luggage.
While she painted, I read Yishai Sarid's novel, in its German translation. I had to take a break every few pages to process the characters in this story. The main protagonist is an anonymous historian
He works at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and runs tours in Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Nothing is new in this novel we have heard it all and seen some of the sites with our own eyes,, or have been told about them by our family members. But despite all this, this topic is never easy or more tolerable. Maybe even because of this.
After two and a half hours we landed at the tiniest airport on the island. After filling out the official government form I got a QR code. Without this code you cannot enter the country. Everything went smoothly.
Less than half an hour later I was already at a car rental company with the keys for a 20-year-old Fiat Punto. At first I was a bit angry, and I initially thought of making a brouhaha like in Israel, meaning to protest and make my voice heard, refuse to be humiliated, until someone calls the police.
But I was just too exhausted to do all this. And having read the novel, I finally understood what total exhaustion means. I loaded my two suitcases to our car and buckled up my daughter in the back seat
I sat at the driver's seat and turned on the radio. I found one station, which played traditional Greek music non-stop, and started driving. My daughter fell asleep immediately.
For an hour I roamed the winding roads alongside sheep and hens, cypress trees and oleanders.
I thought about January 2020, I thought about how I lost one of my best friends. How she just hung herself from the window sill of her home while her three daughters were sleeping their bedrooms.
I thought about April 2020, and how my grandmother went to sleep and didn't wake up, after years of pain, and how we buried her in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin, with all of the family members standing 1.5 meters apart.
I thought about how this all started seven months ago, not that much, and that in that short period I started working in three jobs, I lost two jobs, wrote 50 manuscripts and even managed to complete my new novel. And then I silently recited the Kaddish prayer. Due to the turbulent events of the past year, I already know it by heart.
A sad song blasted out of the speakers of this silver clunker, and I cried a bit. This did not feel liberating at all. And then I realized that I was not on the right course, so I decided to make a u-turn in some narrow trail full of sand. For five minutes I tried to put the car into reverse, but I couldn't, so I eventually got out of the car and pushed it with my bare hands until it finally stood on the right position so that I could continue driving.
A great start for this vacation, I thought to myself, but also to the second half of this crazy year.
