July 1986.

Susanna stretched her hand towards me. A delicate hand,

clenched, concealing a

secret.

When I opened it, I discovered a white kerchief,

neatly folded, tied with a matching white ribbon.

"This is my farewell gift to you," she said with a shy smile.

I took the parcel, feeling the sweat, the warmth, and the slight shuddering of her palm.

"Open it," she said.

I untied the ribbon.

Her initials were in the corner of the kerchief,

embroidered in a blend of pink-red letters.

I opened the white cloth.

In its center, like a drowsy kitten, I saw a red-golden lock of hair,

rolled like a spiral, shrunken like an embalmed skull.

"What's this?" I asked in astonishment.

"Don’t laugh at me… even if I sound… perhaps… a little florid and romantic…

This is my way to swear to you that we are allies.

It is a new covenant, a pact of trust, respect, and love,

between me (a Christian German woman) and you (a Jewish Israeli man)."

"But why hair?" I asked.

I failed to understand the symbolical meaning of her gesture.

"It's a custom. If you part with someone whom you wish to see again, you leave with

him a lock of hair. I know that a woman's hair has a religious and emotional significance

for you, Jews, also because of what happened in the Holocaust. I hope that you'll

regard my lock of hair as something like 'an eye for an eye' – 'a hair for a hair'."

"This is so noble…," I stammered,

as lines from Paul Celan's Death Fugue raced in my head:

"…your golden hair Margareta, your ashen hair Sulamith..."

I brought the kerchief close to my face and looked at the hair.

Its smell filled my nose with a familiar female scent.

The sunbeams shone on the kerchief 's frilled line.

I folded it carefully, capturing the rays of Ra within for keepsake,

as did the Egyptian priests millennia before me.

What a precious pact—I thought—not an everlasting covenant signed with blood

between us, Susanna,

or the Covenant of the Pieces, but a pact of radiating light.

No longer the light of calamity, but the light of amity in the folds of your kerchief.