these crows: they caw like lions inside a minuscule square of sky just vertical to the
minuscule hanky-full of dead people. The old Jewish cemetery raises its invisible well
filled with tombs up to the feet of the sky, you do not see the end of it, the crows scream
up there: it’s here, it’s here. I had never seen a cemetery so high and so small, like a roll
of dead people that climbs and descends from the bottom of the earth up to the bottom of
the sky. Make room, thunder the crows, let the dead climb past!
I had not been told that the cemetery was so small. I had not been told that the
thousand year city leaves only the end of its nose of tombs and a few worn teeth visible at
the surface of the century. The tombs bury the tombs. Twelve layers of tombs.
I had not been told of the doll houses, the doll Synagogue, the doll people.
Everything dwarfed. Everything sacred.
Your Prague is not in Prague, as you can well see. Promised Prague is in the sky under
the earth.
I clutched the bars in my rusted hands. In front of me svelte distracted white the tomb
looked at me with its bright eyes of words. How alive and young you are, I thought.
While all the other ghosts in the palaces, behind the sgraffitoed walls, all the ghosts are
dead. ‘You have not changed,’ I said.
Hélène Cixous 291