by Elie Wiesel
Holding my head in my hands I try to think. I find it difficult; my brain has ceased to function. The end … I feel I have reached the end. Drained. Broken. I should be laughing, laughing as I have never laughed before. But I cannot. Instead, I am overwhelmed by a lethargy that will soon paralyze me. I think of Bontchek, Simha, my father and I try to imagine Ariel. I talk to them: “So you didn’t know, did you, that the Angel is a philanthropist, a friend of mankind?” As in the old days under the influence of LSD, I huddle in a corner of my room, but sadness, like an evil wind, chases me. With what is left of my energy I grab the telephone and call Lisa: “He is … alive.” She does not understand. I repeat to her the most extraordinary news in the world and she still does not understand. She thinks that I am ill, overwrought, that possibly I have lost my mind. Still she drops everything and jumps into a taxi. “Would you like me to tell your father?” “Oh, no, Lisa, please! Not a word to my father!”
I wonder about my father. He is capable of ruining this too, just as he ruined everything till now. I pity him: that is the feeling that suddenly dominates all others. How can one be so clumsy? He killed a man and it was the wrong one. Inexperience or bad luck? Fact is he missed. Anyone, even a fool, is capable of inflicting death: not he. He and his friends, avengers? What a joke! Faced with a professional they can’t hold their own. Poor Father, you’re nothing but an amateur. The Angel is not dead the way our dead are dead, he is not even dead the way we are; he is alive and mocking all of us as usual; he is winning, as he always did. To know how to kill, one must love Death. He loved it, you did not. He was Death’s accomplice while you were only its victim or, at best, its adversary. And, poor Father, don’t you know that it is not man but Death who kills? By killing, the killer celebrates Death! The Angel knew how to go about it; Death and he were on the same side; whereas you knew nothing. And now? Now it is too late. You know it well, Father: whenever man wonders: “And now?” it is already too late. And where do I fit into all this? Too late for me as well. For me, for you. Since I am not your real son, are you still my real father?
Poor Father. You bungled the attack as you bungled the rest. You endured the universe as one would an illness and life itself as one would a failure. Paritus is not your mentor and his meditations are of little interest: you chose the wrong idol as you chose the wrong prey. Better to have left both to oblivion. You failed the test. You failed the ancient glory of Davarowsk.
Lisa, always practical, takes over and calls the whole world: the State Department, the librarians in Washington, Harvard, Chicago, Yale and Reshastadt, asks questions in every imaginable language, implores and demands, cajoles and howls until she joins me, exhausted, on the floor.
“All right,” she announces. “I know everything. Wolfgang Berger or, if you prefer, Richard Lander, was lucky: the wound was only superficial. A scratch …”
She laughs, I cover her mouth with my hand: this is not the time.
“You must admit it’s funny,” she protests.
Her levity irritates me. A rich kid amused by the misfortune of others. I am filled with resentment—doesn’t she understand anything?
“No, Lisa. It’s not funny.”
“Then what is it?”
“Sad. Profoundly sad.”
“Sadness can be funny …”
“Stop!”
She does not persist. I continue:
“The one time that Jews react like anyone else, they are incapable of carrying out their mission! The one time they choose action over meditation, they fail! It’s not funny, it’s pathetic.”
We decide to go and tell my father and his accomplice Simha. No more remorse! No more penance! They have suffered for nothing! All their investigations and all their studies for nothing! All their guilt: also for nothing! It is our duty to tell them.
When he sees us arrive, my father becomes anxious: could something have happened to my mother? We try to reassure him but we don’t succeed. I ask him to call Simha: “Now? Right away?” “Yes, it’s urgent.” He obeys: Simha will be here soon, at nightfall.
I show them the photographs, they take their time examining them. Lisa gives them her report. My father is in a state; he does not stop muttering: unbelievable, unbelievable. Simha, emerging from his shadows, is rubbing his chin: impossible, impossible. In the bleak light of the living room they remind me of scolded children; they scarcely dare lift their heads. Impossible? Unbelievable? That’s what you are.… What foolishness to believe that in this society, justice could be done by the victims of injustice; what an idea to want to write History in terms of ethics and generosity. How naive can one be? Go call your third crony, that nice Bontchek, go ahead, invite him to your useless, childish meetings, go on, the game is over.
I leave them in the living room. Lisa and I run down the stairs. In front of the Lubavitch House, the crowd heaves forward to enter and listen to the Rabbi singing with his faithful. Three streets down, a church is drawing hundreds of blacks. On the avenue, there are addicts sprawled on the sidewalk, sleeping a troubled sleep.
We go to my apartment. Lisa is radiant. We are in love. At least one certainty.
The next day I feel better. I resume my studies. I write my papers. May ends with a success. I get my diploma. Good-bye, City College, good-bye, experts in phenomenology. Bontchek, would you like a drink? Another one? No, no: don’t start your tales again, I’ve had my fill of them! Simha, give me a present: smile, yes, come on, leave your shadows, you will not go to hell for a crime nobody committed, shake yourself, my great kabbalist: look for God in joy, He’s there too, I promise you. What if we went on vacation, Lisa? To the mountains, perhaps? What do you say? I love the mountains. You prefer the seashore? Very well, let’s find a sea in the mountains, shall we? Long live summer, long live peace!
Except that summer lasts only one summer. Return to New York. Unbearable heat wave. Gloomy father. It’s contagious. Leave him for good? I cannot. I don’t want to. In spite of everything and because of everything, I love my father, notwithstanding all those who like to hate theirs. Close the parentheses. I fall back into my routine, but I do need a job.
It would be so easy to pretend, to go on “as if.” So easy? Maybe not. In truth it is impossible to pretend. And it is a good thing that it is impossible, otherwise life, stripped of memory and meaning, would lack all warmth. To change events, to mold the imagination, to seize panic at the source, desire at its birth: all this is possible only when one does not pretend. You, Ariel, you give me pause, you make me wonder: I refuse to act and go on “as if.”
During September I write a lot. More than before, more than ever. To relax? To understand. To reconcile myself with my father. I follow his example: I write letters to Ariel. If he can write to his lost son, then I can write to my lost brother.
September 12
My dear Ariel,
I see you more clearly than I see myself; do you know that I miss you? Nothing would please me more than to be your big brother and guide you through tunnels strewn with treasures and to defend you against any wild beasts that might be lurking in the dark; nothing would please me more than to play with you.
Now close your eyes, try to close them, so as not to see us. Listen to yourself become silent, peaceful, hold back those screams that rise within you. Try to rest, Ariel. Ask for nothing, look for nothing. Try to accept, try not to make it worse. It is in your power—at last—to allow yourself respite.
There is peace in you; your eyes once looked innocently around you, your hands once felt the sweetness of a caress, your heart once fluttered anxiously. Let it become memory, not suffering: today’s deprivation does not mean that peace and gratitude do not exist. For Father’s sake, for mine, try to transform the peace of the past into a new peace, a necessary peace. Rekindle in your eyes your first vision of life, of your mother, our mother; of the sun, of trees; of shadows called Simha or Bontchek or Ariel; we must live and die with such visions for a deliberately empty gaze brings only more nothingness.
Simha and his shadows, Bontchek and his drinking, Father and his silences: look upon them with trust, give them your innocence or rather your thirst for innocence. Give them what passed for your childhood, or, better yet, give them what remains of your childhood.
Do not reject others. Accept yourself for yourself, for me. I imagine your face, beautiful and shining and troubled. Bow down, never mind if you get dizzy. And never mind if your tears flow. Be true to yourself, Ariel. Let your gaze come to rest. Stay like that. Your gaze; it contains all the intensity, the sum of what came before, before the exile. Here, there is only weakness and that is why man must find in these glimmers, in these signs, the strength to confront his destiny. Do you know that to join two words requires as much power as to join two beings?
Now you must sleep. You are weary, exhausted, as I am. Try to sleep in spite of it all, try to gather some strength for tomorrow. If for no other reason than that an image of peace, however awkward, however faltering, is seeking to follow you into the reality of death: a child runs in the forest and he runs without fear and he shouts because that is what he feels like doing, and he calls me because he likes me, that is the image; it isn’t much but I have no other.
You must close your eyes once more and be still and try to rest; don’t listen to me, listen to your desire to sleep; I am that desire. Listen to your past which is also, in more than one way, my past. And weep, let your tears flow, go on, let them, and then try to retrieve a smile, the first smile on your mother’s, our sick mother’s grief-stricken face.
Your brother
September 20
Ariel, little brother,
Don’t be angry with me, but I am irresistibly drawn to Germany. I think I must go there. The position I have found in a university will wait. I wish to see the site, the place where our father attempted the irreducible act on your behalf. The urge to follow in his footsteps has become overpowering.
I imagine that this seems strange to you. It has been weeks since I’ve thought about the ghetto, the screams, the killers. I felt I had reached a harbor from which no blood-stained shore was visible. I was wrong. It suddenly came over me again, last night. I had dinner with our father. Simha was there too, explaining the theme of anger in Jewish mysticism: there was, he said, a celestial, a divine blessing called Anger. Suddenly he paused, let his head drop to his chest, as is his habit before speaking in a personal, intimate tone, and continued: What would the sea be without the waves that whip her? What would life be without the anger that shakes it? And God, what would His creation be without Death, what would love be without hate?
When I got home, I called Lisa; there was no answer. I thought over what Simha had said and realized that hate was one of the things that I had managed to elude, and suddenly I didn’t know whether to be proud of it or not.
In truth, I am drawn to hate. I am drawn to the Angel. I need to hate, to hate him. I look upon hate as a solution for the present: it blinds, it intoxicates; in short it keeps one distracted.
It occupies my mind: and what if our father was right? In that case it would be my duty to complete his unfinished work, to correct his mistake, to succeed where he failed.
And so I have decided to fly to Reshastadt. To reopen the file. To reenact the fateful instant in time. It would be cowardly to shirk my obligation using the pretexts of legal prohibitions or the years that have elapsed. As long as the Angel and killers of his kind exist, the spirit of man will remain flawed. They have killed eternity in man; they have no right to happiness. By depriving you of a future they committed unspeakable crimes: not to remind them of what they have done would be an insult to you. If Richard Lander is happy it means that happiness is forever corrupt. If the Angel can sleep peacefully somewhere, it means that the world has ceased to be a haven and has become a jail.
Your brother
September 21, 3 a.m.
My little Ariel,
I am too excited, I am afraid I shall not sleep. I took a sleeping pill. I was dozing off when the telephone rang; Lisa wanted to come by. I said no, not now, tomorrow perhaps, I need to be alone. She didn’t insist. She hung up and I was grateful. Ten minutes later, there she was ringing my doorbell: your voice sounded sick, she told me. It has happened before: she knows when I need love.
A sick voice: is that true? A sick mind perhaps. A sick imagination. Otherwise why would I be going to Germany? Don’t tell me it is to recover.
Your brother
September 25
Ariel,
I envy you, little brother. They took you when you were small; you took your childhood along like a toy. Pure, whole. They have not sullied your life, my little brother.
For me, you see, things are more difficult. There are temptations that are too difficult to overcome and even more so to ignore. Such as to fulfill one’s life through suffering. Or Evil. Since Good leads to Evil, why not reject it from the start? The mystics of ancient times were confronted by this seemingly insoluble problem: the Messiah, they said, will appear the day that all of mankind will be either just or unjust. In that case, why not try injustice?
I don’t say this for myself. I am too weak. Too vulnerable. If I cause suffering I suffer twice as much.
I say this for those who are the incarnation of Evil. For those who have torn you from life, my little brother. Is it possible that their crime was part of some divinely incomprehensible plan? I consider the hypothesis and I am embarrassed; it is as if I were trying to comprehend the men who delivered you into the flames; it is as if I were trying to put myself in their place when, with all my soul, I yearn to be in yours.
I envy you, Ariel: you are in your realm, yours alone. You are, whereas I am becoming.
Your brother
ALL SORTS of tormenting thoughts race through my feverish brain as I settle into the empty compartment. As usual I am too early, since I constantly worry about being late: a mishap, an accident, a memory lapse, an obstacle, anything is possible. Result: I wait and grow impatient and am annoyed with all those horrid people who appear on time.
What am I looking for in Frankfurt? What am I going to do in Reshastadt? Reason would dictate that I take my little suitcase and go home. Take a trip with Lisa. Run with her in the sand, climb mountains, and sleep, yes sleep.
I am tired: the plane landed late. Then I walked to kill time. My legs feel weak. I have not closed my eyes all night. I shall sleep on the train.
I love trains. I prefer them to planes where, for an exorbitant sum, you travel wedged between a compulsive talker and a neurotic dinosaur. At least on a train you have the option to get up and stretch your legs in the corridors; you open the window, you breathe the fresh mountain air and if you so desire, you can always count and recount telegraph poles, cows, sheep, whereas the view from your little porthole in the plane, let’s not talk about it. Blue, nothing but infinite blue; such bad taste, it’s enough to make you sick. Maybe if I were in a hurry, but I’m not.
Well now, it is raining over Frankfurt. Just as it did long ago.
Long ago, my father took the same train, probably at the same hour, for security reasons: a train ticket is like an arrow in the dark, it leaves no trace. Instinctively I glance over to the platform: have I been followed? I reason with myself: don’t be silly, you haven’t done anything, stop acting guilty.
The station is dreary, dreary. Travelers run frantically to escape the rain. Strange: through the window I see them move forward in slow motion. Like the clouds in the sky. Trails of dusk creep into the noisy compartment. Doors slamming. The voices of porters shouting: this way, this way. A frightened child: Mother don’t leave me here, I’m afraid. So am I, afraid. Fortunately, the mother finds her child, the porters get their tips, everything turns out all right. It is growing darker, the footsteps are hurried, memories are torn: what must I do to prevent the hallucinations and the prayers and the fears from driving me into madness? I have a vision of our neighbor, the Hasidic Rebbe who is quoting Scriptures: And Moses walked bet
ween the living and the dead and the plague ended. His comment: man must learn to separate the living from the dead. Was this why I was on this train? To separate them? And what if that was a mistake? Oh, well, little brother, you know it as well as I do, better than I do: all life is the result of an error.
I am cold. Where on earth is my raincoat? I must have left it on the bed. I am going to catch my death of cold. What a joke: I am going to Germany to die of a cold.
Suddenly, I become apprehensive. I am no longer cold, I am perspiring. By chance, I am still alone in the compartment; no need to pretend. Night is falling, it is still raining; I am afraid of the rain and I am afraid of night. I am at a crossroad. I have started down an unknown path and at its end a stranger awaits me: I am Jacob, I am going to fight the angel; one of us shall die.
An image—an old one?—comes to my mind: the white room—an unpleasant, harrowing white—in the hospital or at the clinic. The soft, appeasing voice of the doctor who tells me not to worry, but I worry. The smile of a nurse who gently caresses my poor mother’s hand to reassure me, but I am not reassured. The outstretched hand of a man who tells me not to panic, but I am terrified, I am hallucinating.
I find it difficult to swallow, to breathe. I feel like screaming but I am dumb; like running but I am paralyzed. I can hear the rustle of wings and madness around me; yet it is unwarranted: no enemy is lying in wait for me, I am in no danger. The killer of Davarowsk? I cannot kill him since my father and his crew have killed him already. What’s more, I can leave. Give up. Nothing prevents me from ending the adventure. I can get my money back, I am free to get off this train, change stations, turn back and forget the Angel my father has killed, has killed badly.… Anyway, my father is blameless; he hasn’t killed anyone; he is innocence personified. Conclusion: let’s stop this foolish game before it goes too far, before the train begins to move.
