by Elie Wiesel
All these events came to me from afar, from outside. They glided over my consciousness like warm water, or like sand.
However, this isn't what I would like to tell you about. With a bit of luck, everything I could tell you about took place mostly inside me. I imagine you have immense powers over me, but can you read what is not said aloud? Can you guess what the heart manages to conceal from the brain? Do you know what it's like to feel madness in oneself as one feels blood flowing in one's veins? A living kaleidoscope of colors and shapes, faces and destinies: Is it my being splitting in two? I feel I am simultaneously a child and an old man; do they hate each other? Not at all! Here they are embracing. At the edge of a river, I see myself on the opposite bank. One minute I am living among biblical characters, but a second later I am in the midst of a crowd applauding the takeoff of a spaceship bringing travelers to the moon of their dreams.
Wherever you are, you may be smiling and saying to each other with pride: Oh, what an imagination, eh? Only that's not what it's about. It's about something much more serious.
I am writing to you because I love you very much. And also in order to prepare myself and prepare you for our inevitable reunion. Will it be a bolted door or an opening?
You know whom I owe a lot to? To a dead patron. And on another level, to an old, erudite tramp—unless he was a young fallen god who thought he was an elderly invalid. One autumn evening, he offered to teach me the truth.
I was still living with my uncle. I was strolling in Brooklyn, among its bearded Hasidim with their suspicious, feverish eyes, expecting to be stopped by a fanatic who would urge me to repent, when a sickly-looking stranger asked me to help him walk; he was having trouble with his crutches. An image came to mind: What if he was the Messiah, who, according to the Talmud, waits to be called from among the wounded and the ailing in front of the gates to Rome? How could I refuse to help him? In a weak voice, he asked me: “Would you like me to teach you the truth?”
After taking a few steps, I replied: “Of course. I've been trying to track it down for ages.”
“Well, believe it or not, I've found it.”
“Bravo,” I said, feigning admiration. “Explain it to me.”
“Truth is a mask that hides under other masks.”
“You're disappointing me,” I answered.
“The truth is there is no truth.”
A young Hasid came up to us and asked us if we'd already recited our evening prayers.
My companion of the day became angry. “You're disturbing us,” he said. “Don't you see that we're praying?”
Looking vexed, the intruder murmured: “You'll end up in hell, you'll burn in its flames, and then you'll remember me.”
The beggar didn't condescend to answer; he just sniggered.
“And what about God in all this?” I asked him.
He stopped and stared at me with pity. “You poor fool,” he said with a sneer. “Haven't you understood yet that—”
“Don't say another word,” I begged him.
Suddenly, I was overcome with panic. I felt my interlocutor was going to make me plunge into blasphemy.
“… don't you understand that God isn't God, for man is no longer human? That in an insane world, dominated by violence and hatred, in the service of Evil and Death, God Himself is like you and me? He too needs to be liberated, needs to be helped so He won't lose hope?”
“But then—” I cried out.
“Then what?”
“Then what's the point of our quest for God? What should we do about our craving for God, our faith in an all-powerful and merciful God?”
The beggar looked at me, nodding in commiseration.
“One day, poor fellow, you'll understand.”
Yes, one day, I say to myself, one day I'll be at the end of my wits, and I'll understand.
What will I understand? That there are times when madness is preferable to what seems rational? That one can settle into it with no fear of disappointments and betrayals?
And could this day have already come?
I don't mention my dybbuk to Thérèse, who is supposed to cure me, but I tell her about Rina, with whom I shared a hurried encounter—correction: to whom I got close, I think, for the duration of a smile. An enthusiast of everything occult, this strange woman despised life, and life certainly repaid her in kind. Had she ever been in love? Impossible to know. Though thirty or forty, she dressed like an old grandmother. As I talk about her, I don't know why, I think of my first and last true love. Could you be too young for me? Your maturity belies your age. I love you for your smile, even if it's the smile of a frightened child. Frightened of growing up? Yes, frightened of growing up in a world that, in spite of protesting grandiloquently, doesn't like children, but uses them instead as targets for its disappointment, its lack of self-confidence, and for its revenge.
“Tell me about Rina,” the doctor insists.
“I think of her without joy.”
“Why?”
“She was a fortune-teller, or rather, a misfortune-teller.”
“Yet mysticism doesn't leave you indifferent.”
Indifferent? Nothing leaves me indifferent. I tell her about my attraction to Buddhism. In India, in some ashrams, not listed in guidebooks, they teach wisdom and serenity, in others, madness. Yes, you go there to become mad. There you can see a woman walking around naked and laughing, another singing, a third moaning, but in fact it is always the same woman.
Unbearable images for a simple visitor: an adolescent grown old in a minute, an old man sucked up into the heavens. That is the veil that envelops the existence and world of men.
“An illusion then?”
“A beautiful illusion that hides a reality that isn't an illusion.”
This brings back the memory of my meeting with Rina. “Who are you?” a woman inquired one day, in a gentle, slow voice, a woman who believed in love's inability to change life.
It was after my first trip to the Holy Land. We were in a bus going down Fifth Avenue. A gloomy autumn day. Depressing. I had walked for hours to dispel my low spirits. I said to myself that my life was somewhere else, on the other side. I saw myself again as a child. My parents had no suspicions: the thieves had left a little boy in my place who looked just like me. And who, totally delirious, contemplated the world and didn't find it pleasant.
I got off at a stop near Central Park. I sat down on a bench. A second later, a young woman with short, brown, curly hair, wrapped in a black coat, sat down next to me. I realized it was the woman who had questioned me on the bus. Had she followed me? She looked at me in a strange way, as though I wasn't there, as though I wasn't me; she was at the same time terribly present and terribly distant, neither seeing nor feeling the snow falling on her tousled hair. And I wondered: Could she be the heavy-breasted thief? No, she is better dressed. She remained silent. Because she still thought I was distant? Yet I needed to hear her voice. Understand me, Doctor: I looked at her; her eyes became bluer than the blue of the firmament, and their pupils darker than the wrath of jealous gods. Suddenly she stood up. With a gesture, she invited me to do the same. We walked down the street to a coffee shop, where it was warm.
“You didn't answer my question: Who are you?” she asked.
“I'm someone who is looking for a child.”
“What about me? Who am I?” she asked me.
“How would I know?”
“My name is Rina.”
“What do you do?”
“People who know me think I'm a witch.”
“Oh, I see. So you're fond of demons.”
“No. Not demons. Only their master,” she said.
“I see.”
“Satan.”
“In our sources, he's called Ashmedai.”
“You're Jewish.”
“Yes. Jewish,” I said.
“So you know that Ashmedai has a wife.”
“Her name is Lilith.”
“I know. It's me.”
I
was rendered speechless, thinking: She's boasting! In the texts, Lilith is very beautiful. Rina seemed to read my mind. “You don't believe me,” she said.
“You're right, I don't.”
“You might have to pay dearly for that.”
“Pay dearly? How?” I asked.
“My husband's punishment.”
“For example?”
“We can make you incapable of loving.”
She had just entered my life, a minute ago she hadn't existed, but not knowing why, I told her I hated her, had hated her since I was born, and perhaps long before.
“You're mad,” she answered. “Stark raving mad, mad as a hatter.” She hesitated, then went on: “And perhaps mad enough to love.”
She stopped again, as if to invite me to understand on my own that in the cold, cynical world where we live, you have to be mad to love.
A cold, colorless, neutral voice. Ready to become impassioned? A face of stone, but of living, human stone; yes, she had dark, baleful eyes, an astonishingly steady gaze, and a smile verging on laughter. For a moment I felt like touching her face, yes, touching it to punish myself by making each one of her features a little less human. She held out her hand to me, and I was afraid of grasping it.
“So, would you be mad enough to love me, me the wife of the other king of the universe?”
So as not to fall into her trap, I let my thoughts wander back to my parents: Where are we? Where am I? In the jungle of Paris or of Manhattan? In the valley of the gods, where the gardens are in bloom and springtime is eternal?
Answer me, for the love of God and the hatred of beings like Lilith and Ashmedai. Say something, Father. Answer me, Mother. If only to shatter the silence howling in my blazing head, in my heart gone mad.
When the dead don't want to speak, no one in the world can force them to. Confined, locked up, as in a hostile enemy fortress.
And, like them, I remained silent just to listen to a song they alone could pick up and decipher: the song of the stones complaining of being stones.
As a result, I felt a renewed strength come over me. Nothing frightened me. I leaned toward her to gaze at her and assess her endowments. Was there a better way of reacting? Finally, something in her face moved. A word tried to come out of her throat and stopped short. Then another word. And more words. I could see them; I saw them swarming about restlessly like flies.
“I know you have questions; I'm listening to you,” she said. “They interest me as much as you.”
“I would rather listen to yours,” I replied.
She didn't answer right away. “Might you be afraid of suffering, of dying perhaps?”
“Not anymore.”
“I'll proceed. Let's imagine that I fall in love with you. What would you say?”
“I would say you're crazy.”
“And if I was,” she said, “would that change anything? Would you be in love with me, say, if you knew everything I know and everything I know how to do? Would you love me insanely?”
“You're crazy, I tell you.” And I added that in my studies I learned a great many things about the world of demons. Their powers, their likings, their perversities. But no source mentions their insanity. I'll have to fill that void.
“You know nothing about us,” she hissed between her teeth. “You don't know who we are and what our desires are. You reject my love not because I am who I am, but because you are who you are: a man doomed never to love. Too bad for you and for me. If you had wanted to, you could have rescued me by loving me. Yes indeed, dear Mr. Purity, do you know that I live in the mud, the mud of the world? And with the curse upon me, the curse of his creatures?”
I started to ramble, yes, I was rambling, but I couldn't do anything else. Tell her about my life, lived foolishly, mutilated, claimed by evil gods? The extent of my illness, the reasons for my real or imaginary guilt?
“I curse you!” Lilith cried out. “May you remain without love all your life!”
Did she know I was mad, therefore crippled? Had she forgotten this? Could she have gone mad too? What was she seeking in me: the pure and innocent love I was reserving, in my subconscious, for the woman of my dreams whom I don't want to talk about yet? But does pure love exist? For years, each time I meet a stranger, I wonder about this. Until when will I have to wonder about it? In fact, all those who know me, or think they know me from my words and silences, wonder about the same thing: about solitude erected as a screen, a wall, and also as a mirror.
Is madness contagious? All those who come close to me are stricken by this curse—why?
Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, perhaps a lot. Not all are affected, and those who are aren't really cursed. And what of it? If they're free to choose reason and happiness, I'm free to want neither one. My obsession: one minute before sinking into madness entirely, to shout the truth to men's faces, even if it makes them go mad.
Like the dybbuk, I take refuge in my madness as in a warm bed on a winter night.
Yes, that's it. It's a dybbuk pursuing me, haunting me. Taking my place. Usurping my identity and giving me his fate. No more doubt: it's a dybbuk disguised as Doriel. So, I am really another? And would the other be me? This explains my constant distress, the changes, the sudden metamorphoses, with no rites of passage, the despondency bordering on mindlessness, the vagueness of heart that characterizes my illness. In other words: Could I be living another person's life, the life of a stranger, in fact? And who is the other person's dybbuk?
“What's a dybbuk?” asks Thérèse, truly interested.
“Badly formulated question, Doctor. You should say, who?”
“I'm sorry, but I don't understand.”
“You should say: Who is a dybbuk?”
“Very well. Who?”
I tell her about S. Anski's play, a great play, in which two Tal-mudic students are bound by an oath: if, one day, one of them has a boy and the other a girl, their children will marry. But one becomes rich and the other remains poor. You can imagine the rest. Leah didn't marry Hanan. He dies of grief. And his soul steals its way into his betrothed's soul.
“But then your dybbuk should be a woman.”
“Not always, Doctor. A dybbuk can be a stranger, an identity thief, who says ‘me’ through my mouth, in my place. A wandering, exiled soul, lost in the immense emptiness that makes up the universe of men and the memory of God. For reasons known and unknown, the dybbuk hides from the sight of angels and demons. He feels safe only in the soul of another being. I am his hiding place. His life becomes mine; it is made of excess, anguish, and ill-defined remorse. I fear that my dybbuk may be mad, and I struggle to understand the germ of his madness. Is it, in his case, the rejection of a religion that he considers not demanding enough or, on the contrary, worth no greater demands? Is it just thought rebelling against itself? The dybbuk's thought never stays still; it runs until it is out of breath, and I run after it, to hold it back. The dybbuk's heart knows neither love nor hatred but is jealous of those who feel either. Perhaps he repudiates tradition in the name of all traditions, rejecting a heritage accepted unthinkingly, so as to feel freer.”
The therapist stops nodding and manifests an incredulous air. “But which of you two is ill? Who am I supposed to take care of?” she asks.
“Me. Him. More specifically: me who is him.”
I explain it to her in a few hasty words: when he invades a person, the dybbuk is omnipresent, cunning, but not always diabolical, because he is suffering. However, he too is motivated by a need that is within the province of the sacred. Doesn't his soul, though damned, aspire to the tranquility promised by transcendence? Nimble, unpredictable, determined and unscrupulous, he pulls me along like a prisoner burdened with chains; his salvation depends on mine, but at the same time mine is conditioned by his.
“And what about me?” asks the therapist without looking at me. “Where do I fit in?”
The dybbuk bursts out laughing, and so do I.
In every form of madness there smolders the
desire to escape so as to find oneself again and renew oneself, to experience rebirth through death, howling in order to keep quiet.
I have so many things to keep silent about, so many things to talk about, but where are the words? The words are hiding, they elude me, they hate me; therein lies my madness, Doctor. It's the words. The words I need in order to cling to life, to find my fervor again and pray—yes: in order to live. Where are they? Why have they vanished? Out of fear of being isolated? There are sounds and words that can't bear being alone; each one summons the next and becomes linked to it, and no force can separate them without reducing them to powerlessness. Is that the secret of poetry and music?
And of madness?
I made too much use of words, their suppleness and their density, as a way of captivating the first passerby encountered in the street or at the fair, and I am overcome by a desire to repudiate them. Then, especially in the morning, I feel an irresistible need to just sink my teeth into life, and to hell with the fear of others and the shame of living among them. After all, the point is to like what one possesses and what one is, in order to better get rid of them. The devil take future pleasures in heaven; the earth is here so we can savor its fruits, and the body to demand an impossible happiness. A vain hope? Cries directed at a deaf world? And if I'm taken for a madman, too bad. Remember Zarathustra, Doctor, expressing himself through the mouth of that other great madman, who committed suicide after a long silence: “It is night. Now, up higher, rises the voice of gushing fountains; and my soul too becomes a gushing fountain.” Do you think his silence drowned him in his own delusions?
I shut my eyes. Somewhere, in my village in Poland. A small cloud, a dark smile, the snow that keeps falling on the face as if to erase the lost orphan's smile. Don't ask me what the connection is, not you of all people, Doctor, especially not you. It's you who is constantly annoying me with your habit of reminding me that association of ideas is essential to therapy. It's you who requests, demands, and commands me, in the name of all the saints of holy therapy, to let my thoughts wander, run wild, plucking an image here, extracting a sigh there. Bah, Doctor, I for one don't believe in that catastrophe-theory stuff according to which the truth about the world and man is hiding out of fear or shame—
