Note: below is a passage from my story, "The Old Cemetery", as published in Arc 29, Tel Aviv, 2022. It is adapted from my book "House without Doors" – (published in Hebrew translation as בית ללא דלתות), a fictionalized memoir of growing up in the Sephardic Jewish community of Curaçao, told in the voice of a twelve-year old girl as she seeks to understand the complexities of race, class, and gender relations in her Dutch colonial society of the late nineteen fifties.
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photo by my grandfather, Benjamin Gomes Casseres, of the Old Cemetery - Bet Haim
(...) It is quite an expedition to the Sementerio Bieu, with the refinery’s smokestacks and big oil tanks in the background of the old graves. I love to go there with Papi and Mami when they are making their films about the island. (…)
We have to park the car in a very poor neighborhood with tiny wooden shacks, where people live all day with the smell of the refinery, as the northeasterly trade winds hardly ever change their direction. Then we walk through the alleyways between the houses with people sitting on their stoops staring at us.
They know where we are going. They know where we come from. We obviously do not belong there – we live in places where the air is clean and there are no foul smells from the refinery - only when the wind turns, which does not happen very often, do we get a sniff of those smells. The people in that neighborhood live with the stench every single day.
We must cross a field of thorny bushes to reach the old stone wall of the cemetery. The smells are awful, but after a while I get used to them and the gray atmosphere so close to the smokestacks seems right for a graveyard. Then I think of the smokestacks of the crematorium, where Anne Frank was burned when she died, only a short time before her camp was liberated.
(…)
I love to walk among the graves and figure out who were these people who lived on the island long ago. Most of the gravestones in the Sementerio Bieu have pictures carved into them that give some clues about the life of each person buried there – a tree cut in two by a hatchet – if the person died suddenly at a young age; a ship - if he was a merchant, a captain, or perhaps a Jewish pirate.
Or there are scenes from Biblical stories about the figure the person was named after – Mordechai, riding his white horse, and Esther being chosen as the Queen; Isaac on his deathbed blessing his son Jacob; and Jacob dreaming of angels ascending and descending.
(…)
But the acid from the smokestacks is wearing away the gravestones – those of the rich and the poor alike - and the carvings are slowly being eroded. Soon, we will no longer be able to imagine the lives of the people who are buried there, and all the stones will crumble to pieces.
Yes, the Old Cemetery is a sad and lonely place.
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