In the beginning
The front door of the house was ajar. Grace wondered for how long. The letter was dated seven years ago.
Grace's life began with emptiness and arrived at this letter. She was a miracle : her mother died in childbirth, she never knew her father. She came out of her mother's womb with a scream, without hope and without any future. Up to the age of sixteen, she lived in a Christian orphanage in Addis Ababa, raised by nuns, where she had a sheltered and studious childhood and adolescence. Grace was brilliant, smart and curious. At thirty-three, she was living in Jerusalem and working as a project manager in one of Israel's top architectural agencies.
Grace had discovered the letter the night before in her mailbox. It was handwritten in an old-fashioned calligraphic style. The paper was yellowed with age. Of course, letters could be lost for several years, but that it reached its destination after exactly seven years seemed strange to her.
Its contents were even stranger. The mysterious author said he had known her parents. He lamented the death of her mother, "a woman of great beauty, respected by all the inhabitants of her village," and informed her of the death of her father, "a humble and hard-working man" who had built a large house on the outskirts of Jerusalem from nothing. He stated that although her father's death was obvious to all his relatives, his body had never been found. At the end of the letter, the author added the address of the house and assured that, from now on, it belonged to her.
If you say he died, but his body was never found, then one of two things is true. Either he never existed. But if that was the case, who is my father? What difference does it make whether it is him or someone else, since I am here? Or he is not dead. But then what is he doing, why hasn't he done anything, what can he really do? What if he had not desired, not planned, not even imagined what happened? What if he had simply turned away, at the onset, to something else?
At first, Grace thought it was a scam. On the one hand, the image of her father and his love for his daughter didn't fit with his total absence from her life. Can you love someone you never knew? On the other hand, you don't leave a house like that, without a title deed, without a contract, without a will. But she had always been on the edge of an abyss, one foot in the void. There was the outside world, her friends, her work colleagues, the ambitious urban planning and construction projects of the architectural agency, cosmopolitan and divided Jerusalem, the misery and promise of the century. And there was her inner emptiness that just wanted to be filled, her heart that had never stopped bleeding. What was she risking by going to visit the house? She could always research its legal status, or simply forget about it and move on.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, under the dazzling Jerusalem sky, Grace pushed open the door of the house, leaving behind the sun and the hubbub of the street.