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soccer balls, transistor batteries, caviar, kitchen
utensils. It's hard to imagine how the money from
these odds and ends justifies the wait.
Flashing our U.S. passports, we skirt the line,
driving on the wrong side of the road. Finally,
we come to the main checkpoint. One final question-and-answer
session on the Soviet side of the
border, and we're ushered through.
Here, the line of cars waiting to cross into
Poland is twice as long.
A few miles out of Brisk, the border city, the
landscape quickly turns rural. It's flat like the
Midwest, but it doesn't look like the Midwest.
The light is different for one thing, more diffuse,
and the shadows are softer.
Even the air is different. The road is lined
on both sides by an arcade of trees. We pass fields
of mown hay and corn, and fields where cows
are grazing.
There is an occasional cluster of small
wooden houses painted ocher on top and red on
the bottom, with bright blue window trim. The
picket fences along the road are also painted blue
and white, which I think are the colors of the
Ukrainian flag. We drive past a man in a motorcycle
helmet collecting flowers on a slope, a
woman lying on her side next to a couple of grazing
cows, some men fishing in an irrigation ditch.
We arrive in Lutsk around sunset and pull
up to the Hotel Ukraine, just off the main square.
The decor inside is grandin a desolate way.
The ceiling in the lobby is encrusted with sugary
pink-and-white plaster molding, but otherwise
the lobby is bareno furniture except for a
wood-paneled filing cabinet with locked drawers.
Joining us for dinner in the hotel restaurant
is an 80-year-old Ukrainian Jewish man and his
son, who traveled a day and half to get here. The
father is a heavy-set man with white hair and a
vaguely wedge-shaped head. His handkerchief is
out all through the meal as he mops the sweat
from his face.
We learn he had three sisters and three brothers,
all killed during the war. He tried to convince
them to run when the Germans came, but
they refused, chiding him for being a panic-mon-
APPENDIXES 405
ger. People at nearby tables are looking at us. Our
conversation is in Yiddish, so everyone must
know we're Jewish.
The next day, after a couple of hours on the
road, Zbignew turns off onto a dirt driveway.
Galena, our official Intourist guide, rides with us
in the front seat. My father asks where we are
now. "This is Luboml," she says in a casual way.
"This is it? This is it?" He sits up straighter.
We drive along a cobblestoned street that turns
to dirt. The houses give way to a hilly field
sparsely dotted with low, spindly trees. We turn
off the dirt road and start driving slowly across
the grass, the minivan leading the way.
There's a mysterious car behind us now, a
beat-up old Lada with a few people inside. We
can't figure out who these people could be. The
van ahead of us stops in the middle of nowhere.
Three small Ukrainian kids are sitting in the grass
a few yards away watching us.
Over a small rise in the field is the site of a
mass grave where Luboml's Jewish population
was massacred and buried in October 1942. A
rusting fence marks off an area about the size of
a large living room. There's a monument inside
the fence made of black stone with an inscription
in Ukrainian.
Bernie Meller reads it aloud but doesn't
translate. I know it says something like "Here lie
5,000 Ukrainian citizens murdered by the fascists."
The people in that car behind us are the
town's three remaining Jews. Hannah, her grown
daughter, and an old man, neatly dressed, with
patent leather shoes on his feet.
Bernie has taken memorial candles out of his
travel bag. He and Victor try to light them, but
the wind is too strong. Another man from Luboml
who lives in New York, Nat Sobel, has nightmares
about the ground here, that it starts heaving.
That's why he couldn't come with us.
Dolores Meller says a lot of people have that same
dream.
Standing over the grave, one feels sure that
terrible things have happened here. The ground
still looks freshly tamped, it looks uncomfortable.
I am standing on the very spot where the war