by Elie Wiesel
One day, returning from an operation to intercept saboteurs in Galilee, he seemed devastated. “They killed two boys,” he told Yoav. “We got there too late, three minutes too late. Yes, those bastards paid for it. But the boys, teenagers from a nearby kibbutz, I saw their mutilated bodies.” He spoke in a barely audible voice, moving his hands nervously, obviously aching to do something useful, positive. “At times like this,” he added hoarsely, “we’re forever coming out with platitudes, like, Those two boys were heroes; they did not die in vain. And maybe in this case it’s true, because our anger will survive them. And yet only fanatics—in religion as well as in politics—can find a meaning in someone else’s death. That’s what distinguishes them from mystics, or most of us, whose only concern is with our own death.”
Standing at the window that looked out over their little garden, Yoav had listened to him intently, not knowing what to say.
“Come and sit by me,” his father said.
They were alone in the house.
“I loathe violence,” his father continued. “It’s been repugnant to me ever since I broke with the Communists, ever since I left Poland. But do I have a choice? If it were simply myself, my own life, maybe I could convince myself that in the end it would be better to fold my arms, bow my head, and take what’s coming to me. But I’m fighting for our people—our families, our friends, and those we don’t know—because maybe they won’t be granted either the time or the luxury of sitting back and waiting, doing nothing for victory, or peace, or universal redemption.”
He poured himself a glass of water, then another. Drops of sweat were rolling down his forehead, his cheeks, right into his shirt collar.
“It’s like this, my son: In Poland I believed in the revolution, and I could justify its violence. I told myself it was a necessary evil, an essential ingredient of victory. For a politically committed and motivated man it was a matter of principle, not sentiment. I repeated to myself the lessons the party had drummed into me: Since we have to use evil to destroy evil, it’s better to do it with fervor and determination. And because the evil that confronts us is infinite, we must hunt it down beyond national frontiers, wherever we find it. And we must do this here and now.”
That day Yoav’s father had felt the need to confide in him. Why that day? Because he had just seen two Jewish boys killed by Palestinian saboteurs? Or just because Yoav, who had come home early from school, was standing there before him?
“Have I ever told you how I became a member of the party? It was because of my grandmother. She was a simple, taciturn woman. I believed she was invulnerable, stronger than an oak tree in the forest. She worked endless hours in rich people’s homes to provide for her own needs (she would never accept help from her children) and those of friends poorer than herself. One evening when she came home she collapsed on her bed. The doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. At the time I didn’t know what that meant. She died soon after, never having uttered a word of complaint. Some weeks later, a friend from the capital asked me if I knew what my grandmother had died of. ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘tuberculosis.’ ‘Do you know what that means?’ ‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘It means she died of hunger and humiliation.’ ”
Later, when Yoav himself became an officer, he vowed that he would accept hunger if need be, but never humiliation.
As for his father, when he reached old age, he came full circle, retracing his own parents’ footsteps. He rediscovered the value, the beauty of their faith. He went so far as to visit the court of a Hasidic rebbe at Safed, who blessed him, praising his love for the Jewish people. “This love inside you,” said the rebbe, laying his hands on the former Communist’s shoulders, “will enable you to perform miracles. You will help our people overcome despair by celebrating joy and generosity, which have long been in exile, also awaiting their deliverance. And when this comes about, know that it is not you who have accomplished these miracles but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You are only his messenger.”
So what if it is my turn? thought George Kirsten. I shall die sooner or later in any case. And what have I to lose? Pamela? She helps me to live, but she too will disappear one day. No, what matters is that the document should reach its destination. Everything else is unimportant.
With his wife, Marie-Anne, George had never known the happiness he had craved. There was no end to her recriminations, her glances, her countenance conveying regret and bitterness. “I should never have married you. We got married too soon,” she would say. “Because of you, I’ve had no youth.” Or else she would complain about his job, not adequately remunerated in her opinion. One pretext was as good as another, and Marie-Anne had many others. But the truth was simpler: They were not made for one another. There are people for whom happiness is poison; their natural element is mistrust; they prefer dreams to hopes fulfilled, mindful only of the cruelty of the gods rather than of their grace. Marie-Anne was like that. There had been too many misunderstandings between them, too many sleepless nights filled with remorse. Husband and wife could no longer lift a finger or utter a word without irritating one another. They no longer even tried to remember the harmony that had once nourished their love. Their bodies were no longer in tune. They resented each other’s presence.
Fleeing the atmosphere of latent hostility and open resignation that reigned at home, their children lived their own lives far away. George recalled with bitterness that it was Paritus who had written, in a volume of meditations, “One of God’s tragic jokes is to make you live with a woman who is not meant for you.”
As an obscure public servant, George did not attract attention—monotonous work, modest salary. A social life with no surprises; a conjugal life with no pleasures.
He often asked himself how he could escape. But then his head would begin to ache until it almost blinded him. Had Pamela not been there with him at the office, and sometimes after work, he might well have taken his own life. The simplicity of this solution struck him forcefully one day: to end it all. Yes, to be done, once and for all, with this gray, dreary, depressing existence. Surely death gets rid of every problem; it puts an end to all adventures.
Yes, to end it all. Pamela would be unhappy but Marie-Anne, after a token tear of distress, would heave a sigh of relief: She would no longer feel watched, judged, indebted. She would no longer complain of living under constraint, in the shadow of real life. Would she be happier? Calmer? That, at least, would be something. Yes, if he died it would suit everybody, and him most of all. Farewell, everybody. He had lived long enough. Suffered enough. People would speak of him in the past tense: a few kind words, perhaps. Condolences. A fleeting effort to understand his weaknesses.
He was alone in his office. Outside, Washington was beginning to come to life, vibrant, frantic, bubbling with political intrigues, both grand and sordid, with ludicrous and unwholesome plots designed to win an hour of influence, a fragment of power. Good God, whatever had possessed him to come to this city, where everyone is afraid of everyone, where life is made up of jealousy, ambition, and hypocrisy? He would have liked to find someone to run away with, to do something else, who knows, maybe scientific research. The sciences had interested him in his youth, astrophysics in particular. Ah, to be able to explore space, to speculate about the limits of the galaxies. . . .
Daily papers and journals piled up before him, waiting to be classified. Sometimes he filed them away without even reading them.
Outside, the sun was shining. The cherry blossoms were out. Tourists were strolling through the city’s parks.
No doubt Marie-Anne had gone shopping. Nothing could stop her, neither rain nor snow. If she were the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, she would still go to the supermarket. And even if her husband gave her five servants, she would still make her solitary trips to the baker or the greengrocer. “Well, at least it keeps me in touch with my contemporaries,” she often said, accusingly. As if George were not her contemporary. As if, deep in his archives and immersed in the past, he had
lost all contact with the present.
If I die, thought George, will I bring her satisfaction at last? Will I be responsible for the happiness of at least one wife in this crazy world? What is dying? It is simply to conclude and say that the life you’ve lived has nothing to do with—with what? With happiness?
In one of Paritus’s books, George had discovered a dialogue between the old mystic and a philosopher whose name he could not remember. It was a dialogue about death.
“To die is to give up waiting,” Paritus says.
“But what about God? As he is above time, God waits for nothing. Does this mean that he too is dead?”
“You blaspheme, I pity you. I pity you because you are without hope. No, do not protest. I am not saying you are in despair; that is something else. To be in despair can be useful and fruitful; to live without hope is not.”
“You have not answered my question: Since God lives outside time, how can he wait?”
“God is,” replies Paritus. “God is both inside and outside time. That is to say, God lives in the passage of the one to the other. He is the incarnation of waiting. God is also the One whom we await.”
In a document dating from the Russian Revolution, Pamela had shown George another dialogue about waiting. This one between two prisoners of the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police.
“Yesterday when they brought you back, you were covered in blood. They’d been torturing you. How was it?”
“Hard, it was hard. Yet the torture itself is bearable; the worst is the anticipation.”
“But then how did you survive? How do you manage to live like this, knowing you will be tortured again and again?”
“You cannot understand,” came the reply. “A man who is fighting for the future of mankind is not waiting for torture, he’s waiting for— the Revolution.”
Strangely, these stories affect George now, although when he first read them they had left him indifferent.
A third story comes into his mind; he found it in a manuscript that was part of a valuable collection recently acquired by the National Library.
A winter night. In a noisy inn somewhere in the Carpathian mountains, an old rabbi, whose eyes are filled with gentleness, is chatting with a grinning Romanian officer. What can they possibly have to say to one another? They are discussing a prisoner. Iancu Stefan has got himself arrested, rather foolishly. Two drunkards had started a brawl. One of them pulled a kitchen knife; the other defended himself with his bare fists. The man with the knife got the upper hand. There he was, standing over his adversary—who was on his knees—ready to cut his throat. Incongruously dressed in peasant’s clothes, Iancu Stefan intervenes to prevent the murder. Furious, the other drinkers insult him. Appearing from heaven knows where, a policeman sternly asks him what he is thinking of, disturbing the peaceful inhabitants of this hamlet. One word leads to another, and Iancu Stefan finds himself at the police station. In his pouch they discover false papers and compromising pamphlets. He is accused of being a Communist, a Jew, a spy, and a traitor. An officer from the city takes over the investigation: Who are his accomplices, his contacts? The interrogation involves threats, blows. But Iancu Stefan knows how to take punishment. His body is covered with bloody scars, but he doesn’t utter a single cry.
Changing his tactics, the officer calls upon the village rabbi to use his spiritual authority and order the Jew to confess. The rabbi’s reply is sophisticated. “Captain, either your prisoner is a Communist, in which case he will not recognize my authority, or else he is innocent, in which case you should let him go.” The officer replies angrily, “He’s a Communist, I tell you. Just take a look at the garbage he’s been carting around.”
The old rabbi obeys. He reads the tracts written in Yiddish, then reads them again. He appears confused. “There’s no harm in this young man, Captain,” he finally says. “These texts speak of fraternity and justice. Such noble ideals are to be found in our sacred books and indeed in yours.” Then, understanding the ways of the Romanian administration, especially in the provinces, the rabbi uses a more convincing argument; he slips a few banknotes into the officer’s hand. The latter is still not sufficiently convinced, so the rabbi adds a few more. “Right. Take him away and tell him not to do it again,” mutters the officer in disgust.
The rabbi takes Iancu Stefan home with him, looks after him, and feeds him. One Sabbath evening the young Jewish revolutionary, whose real name is Shmuel Jacobovitch, says to him, “I’m not a believer. I observe neither the Sabbath nor the holy days. I don’t follow the commandments. I’m hostile to religion. And yet you have helped me.” The rabbi replies gently, “You are a Jew. Do I have the right not to come to the aid of my brother?”
“But I don’t believe in God,” cries Iancu Stefan.
“You don’t believe, you don’t believe. . . . But in spite of everything you are ready to suffer and perhaps to die for your own faith, your faith in History, as one of your pamphlets puts it, in the Revolution, in political action against our rulers. I believe in God and you believe in that which negates God. But if you had to choose between that officer with his power and myself, who have none, whom would you choose?”
Taken aback by the old rabbi’s intelligence and generosity, Iancu stares at him intently before replying. “So, you think we might have something in common? And that we might both choose hope and its difficulties over cowardly submission to our oppressors?”
The rabbi smiles sadly. “For me, it’s easy. The Torah continuously sustains me. It shows me my way, I am bound not to turn aside from it. But you, my brother, who shows you the way?” Iancu feels himself overcome with emotion. He suddenly feels very close to the old man. This surprises and disconcerts him. He ought not to feel close to a pious Jew who lives in the dark ages, who refuses to break the chains that shackle him and prohibit all progress to mankind. He ought to contradict him, ridicule him, urge on him the greatness of Marxist ideology and Leninist theory, and demonstrate to him their importance for all oppressed and humiliated peoples, including the Jews. But he is tongue-tied, and it is the old rabbi who breaks the silence. “You, my brother, are waiting for mankind to become better; I am waiting for the Lord to remember us. So why don’t we wait together, what do you say?” Moved to tears, the liberated prisoner nods, as if he could hear the Jewish child within him replying Amen.
As for me, I’m waiting for nothing, George tells himself. He has never rebelled against anything or anybody. He had let Marie-Anne dominate him. He was born resigned. Even his affair with Pamela was more abdication than revolt. The discovery of the document and his journey to Israel? Until now he had believed this would be the great event of his life. But now it no longer seemed to have much importance. Whether the former Nazi had repented or not was not George’s affair. The Nazi was not the only one to have made a travesty of justice, nor the worst. In any case, the Israeli researchers would do what was necessary.
Disillusioned, George had even lost his taste for discoveries. Life was going on without him, outside him.
He had not taken his life at other moments of despair: Suppose he did so now by offering himself as a volunteer? It would not be to save his traveling companions; he had no feeling for them whatsoever. So why would he do it? For whom?
For his children who lived so very, very far away?
George felt as if fists of steel were squeezing his throat. Bruce was hallucinating, seeing himself arraigned before a tribunal of dead women. Claudia was shivering, while Razziel addressed his last wishes to Kali. Alone at the window, Yoav remained lucid, tensed like a bow.
Into what nightmare had they plunged? Until now it was a psychodrama, soon it would become a nightmare.
Suddenly, a fierce and desperate cry made them start. It came from outside.
THE DIE is cast. No more doubts. No more memories prowling like criminals through their minds. The blank page, on which fate has scrawled its indecipherable writing, is turned. Soon the sacrificial slaughterer will appear; soon he will
lead his victim to the altar. And the family of mankind will contain one assassin more and one human being less.
The night was coming to an end when the Hunchback opened the door. He was sneering, as if to hide—or emphasize—the suffering that marked his face. He looked as if he were about to laugh and cry at the same time.
The danger was taking shape. Now they were sure of it; they were about to witness an execution, a murder. The Judge had spoken of a game, but the Hunchback had not returned to play games.
So stressed was Razziel that when he looked at Claudia he did not recognize her; she strangely resembled Kali. Bruce made a tentative gesture, as if to keep the young woman away from him; she frightened him. Yoav, ready to hurl himself at the Judge when the door opened, let his arms drop when he saw the Hunchback: It’s all over, he thought. George wrung his hands, shaking his head in disbelief. The tension increased several notches. A crazy thought flashed through Razziel’s mind: And what if Paritus were there, close to him but in disguise? Claudia thought about David. She thought about him with such intensity that she felt her heart ready to burst.
She did not feel the Hunchback’s stare. A fresh pain was rushing over him. He looked away hastily and began speaking, as if in a trance, standing on the threshold facing the five petrified hostages.
“The first time I saw her, it was the intensity of her yearning that struck me. And if I have finally found the strength within myself to resist and to rebel, it is on account of this woman, whose face and hair are the color of fire. I had noticed her yearning as soon as she came in. Who was it for? Not me. Me? I don’t exist, not even in my own eyes. It was as though she were looking at someone behind me.
“I have never seen such yearning; it transformed her face and her body. She was no longer a woman like those that fill my dreams. She was not sad, not even melancholy; she was something else. She seemed to live elsewhere, deeply immersed in her own world, away from all pettiness. And, yes, I saw her, I saw this woman with my own eyes, I swear it.
