by Elie Wiesel
“Yes, he's mad, Doriel,” that's what people mutter, adding, “Poor guy,” or “Nice guy,” it all depends, for they claim the right to pass judgment, to censure a person who refuses to be like them, a person attached to his life as though it were a sleepy planet or a planet in turmoil, who might ruin them by unmasking them.
What do they know of the dybbuk who thumbs his nose at me, these men and women who have never felt the throes of hunger and fear? Since when does a full stomach fancy himself a spiritual adviser, or the client of the best tailor set himself up as an expert in social ethics?
All these people chatter morning and night, while working and resting; they'll say anything about anything, without wondering whether their words reflect a desire to enrich the world with a new truth or an ancient promise. I'm sure that the parents of my students go so far as to reproach me for the ignorance of their offspring … The teachers accuse me of competing with them. And hypochondriacs of stealing their physicians. I remain impassive. I find more interest, life, and independence in words than in those who utter them. Sometimes, always unexpectedly, a word vanishes; it's impossible to recapture it, for it has already become a face. And this face, stunningly beautiful and fascinatingly ugly, at once young and decrepit, coarse and majestic, enjoys attracting and repelling me, and I say to myself, laughing and crying: it is the face of a god struck by the madness of demons, and the madman is me.
I have a question for you, Doctor: Does a madman think he is the only person who is mad or that all men are mad? Am I mad so I can be alone or because I already am? Sometimes in a fit of a certain indefinable something, I ask myself: Since there's such a connection between solitude and madness, how can one know whether human beings, in their opaqueness and pettiness, didn't succeed in driving mad all of Creation, saturated and disgusted with their stupidity?
Sometimes the madman wants to fling the plain truth into their faces. Remind them of the puerile fantasies of power that they boast of avoiding in order to better grab them. The madman is less cunning but more experienced than they; his memories reach back farther. But what is the point of attracting their attention? They won't even get angry; they'll guffaw and slap their knees: “Oh, he's funny, our poor Doriel, he's rambling, it probably helps him; it entertains him.” Well, no; it doesn't entertain him. Sometimes, he just assumes the role of the solitary dreamer who sees the light coming from another age. And suddenly, the light changes into a fire; it's the fire, the fire that a demented woman sees in the train bringing her and her starving children, and their silent grandparents, to the kingdom where all life plunges into death; she sees gigantic flames nipping the sky, and set ablaze, it opens like a tomb where the sparks of souls said to be immortal are snuffed out. Then the mad dreamer begins to sob uncontrollably and says to himself that if he sheds enough tears, who knows, perhaps the tears will extinguish the fire; and God himself in a burst of remorse or gratitude will thank him.
Oh, dreamer, where is the fire that set the night ablaze? You know, Doctor, you know what's happened to it, that feverish and terrifying night that the madman carries deep down and that crushes me relentlessly with the weight of its tormented ghosts?
I'm talking to you, Doctor, even when I know you don't understand me and never will. I am talking to you the way I used to talk to a woman whom I thought was close; she left me like an illusion, and in her flight, she filched more than my earthly clothes. She didn't just steal the joys and hopes that are offered to us during our life span. She dispossessed me of my dreams and desires for an absolute.
You listen to me; that's your function, your duty. In order to mollify me, you pretend to be opening up to my voice. You say: “I keep silent for your own good; so you'll allow your thoughts to range freely in the plowed, known, and unknown landscape of your memory. So as to cure you of your phobias and manias.” You're thinking of the guilt complex every son feels with regard to his father, and every person with regard to his elder or his heir, and that's why you wish to make me speak freely about myself, without censuring me, is that it? But submitting oneself to your method is not self-evident. Of course, I sometimes feel guilty, though not responsible, for a lot of blunders, errors, and other wrongdoings, guilty for living a life that isn't normal, and never was, but how would you know this unless I opened up? And what if I die in the middle of my confessions, in the middle of a sentence that was going to reveal a spine-chilling truth? Who will know how to complete the sentence for us?
Admittedly, I told you about Maya. Maya is the past. Which doesn't prevent me from describing her, much more than the sensuality of her lips or the melodious tone of her Yiddish, the beauty of her blue eyes, so intense, so true, hardly softened by the dark shadows under them, and her smile, yes, her smile too. It's very simple: Maya is my bygone youth. I loved being with her. In order to better isolate myself? Of course not. Love implies rejecting isolation. When one loves, one loves everyone. When I think of the woman I love, I love even those walls that separate me from the world and myself. But you're going to interrupt me; I know it, I feel it. No? I'm wrong? Good. In that case, perhaps I should start by telling you how I became mad, when the dybbuk took possession of me. But I repeat, Doctor, answer me, you who have learned to know everything. How can you tell if someone's a lunatic? Where does it start? How can he be recognized? From his abrupt ruptures or their internal logic? From his need for chastity or for debauchery? What must he do or say for us to know that he is undermined by an affliction that can't be defined? If I start to laugh, and make you laugh by telling you tragic stories in an amusing way, stories that should make you weep, would you take me for a madman? And what if I told heartrending tales in order to entertain you, and cause you to burst out laughing; it would be the same, wouldn't it?
Listen, Doctor. We've been seeing each other for months and seem to be complying with the requirements of a ritual that is still partially obscure. Do I know you any better? No. Do you know me any better? No. So what could be the aim of our meetings, except to make us admit that they are irrevocably doomed to failure? If only I could at least fall in love with you while talking to you or opposing my will to yours. You would replace Rina, Maya, Ayala—yes, there was also Ayala. After all, why not? A gesture from you would suffice. But your professionalism would prevent your making this gesture, or am I deluding myself? No, surely not. Your masters, whom you claim to follow, are keeping an eye on us; you'd never dare displease them. This applies to mine too, though for other reasons, ethical rather than professional.
Where are mine?
Sometimes, I think of what happened to my sister, Dina, and my little brother, Jacob, but I don't see them anymore. Why are they suddenly hidden from my view, Doctor? Could this be another sign of my illness: not seeing the invisible anymore? Swallowed up into a dense, frantic, and confused crowd, they've lost their identity. Are they looking for me the way I am looking for them? Are they looking for our parents? Among the old men, walking unsteadily, which one is my father? Among the motionless women, which one held me to her breast? Help me, Doctor: Whose son am I? What have I done, what error have I committed that I can no longer remember my roots? Could that be my illness: choosing oblivion in order to justify my life? Could memory be the tool my dybbuk is using? Could that be why your Freud distrusted it? Yet you've often explained to me that mental suffering can come not from forgetting everything but from desperately trying to remember everything.
I don't forget my parents, Doctor. I've never forgotten them, believe me. Every time I think of them, I feel like crying, but I hold back my tears. I think of them so my tears will flow, but they don't flow. And if they choke me, too bad. Let my tears decide. I am ready to let them carry me to nearby rivers and faraway peaks. Would my life then become a tear?
What of it? Let it make the ocean overflow.
Maya, you wanted me to tell you a story? Listen:
In the Orient, where I went in search of solitude and serenity, I made friends with an ascetic fugitive forced to wander, a pe
nitent like me. At night, under a sky with a thousand stars both near and far, we listened to the rustle of the trees bending in the wind, herald of a life-giving rainfall.
My friend, still young, younger than me, told me about his past, which he himself described as criminal, and I thought of mine, unable to say whether it was completely innocent.
“Listen to me, brother,” he said. “Listen to me closely, from beginning to end. Try not to interrupt me, not even to ask for more facts, or clarification. Listen to me and then tell me which of us has more to blame himself for. Wait, I said from beginning to end. Was I wrong? And what if I suddenly wanted to start with the end or with what leads up to the beginning? And also, brother, did I give you the impression that I wanted to tell you just one anecdote, just one thought, just one episode? And what if I had several up my sleeve, even a thousand, why not? Which ones should I present to you first? Wait, I haven't finished questioning you while questioning myself; I said ‘a thousand episodes,’ hence a thousand anecdotes, a thousand glimmers, a thousand moments. And what if it was always the same destiny intent on being told, but in a constantly changing rhythm and according to a structure forever renewed?”
I remember thinking as I listened: I could appropriate his words and say the same thing, in the same tone of voice. I too am haunted by questioning, I too have “a thousand stories” teeming in my brain; all they want is to come out and live again in the sunlight with the reward of being shared or to dissipate in the mist of anticipated suffering. I could have … but I wouldn't do it. If one day I started speaking, my lips would describe my father's melancholic face and my mother's noble smile on the day I left them—or rather, on the day they left me. I saw them, but as a result I felt incapable of uttering the slightest word to describe them. Could that be the reason why I felt so ill at ease and guilty? Was it too late to try? I should have confided in my ascetic friend, but I didn't have the strength. I was drained.
Over there, in the Orient, both miserable, each in his own way, wandering far from our roots and our homes, melancholic but not in despair, close to each other, we derived from our association a feeling of plenitude that only friendship can provide.
“In the beginning,” said my friend in a tone tinged with nostalgia, “there was happiness …”
It occurred to me that I could say the same: in the beginning, there was probably happiness. I didn't always remember it. When I wasn't myself, I couldn't find its trace either in my body or my memories. Yet, in every fiber of my being, even if I couldn't really apprehend it, I knew it must have existed at a specific time and place. When I was with my relatives, all my relatives, before the breakup of our family circle. And later, when my parents were reunited. But afterward? Yes, that's man's tragedy: there is always an afterward.
“I remember,” said my friend. “A forty-year-old man, his still-radiant wife, an unusually well-behaved little boy. They are sitting at the table, lit by a faint yellow light. Somewhere far away, in another city, or in another neighborhood of the same city perhaps, war is raging. With cannons and knives. Brothers and neighbors, driven by a need for vengeance or conquest, define their ties through blood and violence. Death is what unites them. Then, after a brief meditation, the father sighs and bows his head as if to pray. ‘We're poor, but let's not complain of anything anymore. For we're happier than the wealthy. We have bread before us, and cool water. And no hatred in our hearts. That's sufficient. The rest doesn't count. The rest will come in time.’ And after a silence, he goes on: ‘May God forgive me. I expressed myself badly. I said the rest doesn't count. It counts, it must count, since, not so far away, among people like us, human beings are killing or being killed. For them, the rest won't come anymore. And yet, aren't our happiness and our serenity whole? Shouldn't we feel diminished, guilty, or at least concerned?’
“So then,” my ascetic friend added, “deep down, I said to myself: My father isn't guilty but mad; and if he isn't mad, I am.”
“Very well,” I remarked. “Your father was mad. But who was guilty?”
“Me,” said my friend.
“Guilty? You? Of what? You were the little boy, weren't you?”
“Yes, I was. And I was innocent, even more so than my father. But I became guilty later, when I chose the wrong path. I rebelled against poverty and misery. The idea was romantic, the means less so. Some friends and I robbed a banker. We didn't know that he had a heart condition. He died a few days later.”
“But why did you do that? Did you love money?” I asked.
“No, on the contrary: I hated it. In order to hate it, I first had to have some.”
Should I have told him about Samek and his gift? What would he have thought of me?
I tried to answer him with a smile, and being a believing Buddhist, he would have understood, but I changed my mind. The deepest and most powerful cry, a Hasidic rabbi used to say, is the one we keep locked up in our breast.
Like remorse. And desire.
3
From where you are, close to everything eternal, you know my past. In fact, you may even know my future. How can I explain to you why I undertook this therapy? What is its true aim? To know more about you and me? Will she bring me closer to you or, on the contrary, raise a permanent wall between us? Is it my illness that prompts you to answer me, or my hypothetical recovery?
Whatever happens, since I owe you everything, I'll tell you everything.
Yes, everything.
EXCERPTS FROM DR. THéRèSE GOLDSCHMIDT'S NOTES
Doriel Waldman was recommended to me by a non-Jewish colleague, Dr. John Gallagher, who thought that, given my origins, my professional training, and my experience in so-called Jewish therapy, his case would interest me. Actually, my first impulse was to refuse. I don't like categorizing medical science using ethnic or religious criteria. There is no such thing as specifically Jewish therapy. A competent Protestant or agnostic therapist is perfectly capable of treating a Muslim patient, just as a Jewish specialist should be able to handle a Catholic schizophrenic or a depressive atheist. Freud and Jung, at variance on many things, are both concerned with human beings and their illnesses, whatever their roots and affinities. But my eminent colleague insisted: “Receive him and you'll see. I trust your judgment. Do you remember our three patients five years ago? They helped give us a deeper insight into some of man's dark and dangerous drives.”
“Do you mean that this patient is like them?”
“No, he's different.”
“And you think I'll be able to help him?”
“See him and decide.”
Fine, let's not be too rigid.
Gallagher deserved my trust. The three unusual cases we had treated jointly had taught me a lot. Did Gallagher know they presented fascinating though disturbing similarities to the experiences that had haunted the sleep and infrequent joys of my parents? They had lived through the time of horrors. So I agreed to see his protégé while thinking, I don't know why; still, it's strange he didn't keep him.
An appointment was made with my new patient for a month and three days later. A Thursday afternoon. I unintentionally kept him waiting; I had to calm down a young movie actress in the throes of a severe nervous breakdown. I couldn't possibly send her away given the state she was in. Delayed by a quarter of an hour, I took a short time to glance at the file Dr. Gallagher sent. Biographical facts: about sixty, single, in-depth Jewish studies, numerous activities but no fixed employment, active in several associations devoted to aiding the disadvantaged, research trips to Israel, Africa, and Asia. Insomniac, loner. Complains of frequent anxiety attacks and various ills that prevent him from working. Or from being happy. And far worse: they disrupt his very existence. In short, he's unwell.
Sitting at my desk, I hold out my hand and invite him to sit down. Doriel Waldman barely hides his annoyance. As usual, I'm polite, courteous, even kind, but not overly so. I ask him what seems to irritate him. His first words, uttered with a sneer: “I hate waiting.”
First impression: he's angry; the whole world wishes him ill, including me, since I didn't receive him immediately. Bah, I didn't waste my time at the university: I also learned how not to respond to provocations; that's part of the profession. I say to him: “It seems you need my services.”
He replies with a shrug: “Who told you that? Dr. Gallagher? He refuses to treat me.”
“He thinks, no doubt mistakenly, that I'm better qualified than he is.”
“Perhaps, but that's not the real reason.”
“Oh yes? What's the real reason then?”
“He's an anti-Semite; that's why he refused. He doesn't want to help the Jew that I am.”
I can't refrain from laughing. “Dr. Gallagher happens to be a close friend. He was my favorite teacher. In some ways I owe my career to him. He's a decent, honorable person. Anything racist and ugly is repellent to him.”
