Three runaways for a mourning at the Western Wall

First runaway: In front of the Holy Sepulcher, the first ray of the day breaks through after a biblical storm in Jerusalem’s Old City. Natascha tells me she has already seen the tomb of Jesus Christ—so have I. I choose to stay with her outside for a cigarette. Her face reminds me of someone close.
“By any chance, are you from Krakow?”
“I am. How did you know?”
“Someone I know who looks like you says her family descends from a former king of Poland.”
“My grandfather told me the same story when I was young.”

Second runaway: At Yad Vashem, she suggests a drink at the memorial’s cafeteria. Once again, we have already seen the museum. Both our families were in Lyon during the war: mine was saved by priests; hers reached Switzerland. We joke about Tinder’s likely success in a place like this and leave laughing, before rejoining the delegation—this time in tears, for far better reasons than ours.

Third runaway: On the last day, Natascha—who has already seen Masada—suggests staying behind once more. I get off the bus. We brunch on the hotel rooftop, spend the day at the beach, then head to the airport. Like me, she lost her father, a renowned political journalist; her mother writes biographies. Her flight leaves from another terminal, but she is early and walks me to mine. She hugs me and thanks me for making her stay more pleasant. I am sad and wave goodbye.

One mourning: Back in Paris, listening to Ofra Haza sing Naomi Shemer, I collapse in tears, thinking of the note I placed in the Western Wall for the second time: “I would have so much liked to make this trip with my father.” He took his own life on November 6, 1982, after the massacres of Sabra and Chatila. I was two years old. His marriage to my mother was failing. He encouraged her to join a press trip to Tahiti, where she had a relationship with the father of a half-sister who looks so much like Natascha. They met again twenty-five years later and finally lived together in Patmos—where Saint John wrote the Apocalypse—until today.
Those tears were my father’s, but also the Temple’s. The Talmud says the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by the tears of a man abandoned by his wife for one of his employees—tears that caused a flood and buried the Holy of Holies, on the 9th of Av, the saddest day of the year, Tisha B’Av (Gittin).

It took three runaways for us to mourn the Western Wall.