The Oath

by Elie Wiesel

  And when I did not answer, he continued harshly, accusingly: “Or did you just come to look at me? Or perhaps put me to the test?”

  Silently I shook my head in denial. I barely breathed. My body weighed heavily on me; it crushed me. I thought: I am lost. If the Rebbe does not sense the meaning of my plight, I shall never speak of it to anyone again.

  But he did. When he spoke again, his gaze was more penetrating, his tone more cutting. “The things one has no right to say, I have no right to hear. Why have you come to bother me? To prove to me my own impotence? To disturb me? You have succeeded. Now you may leave.”

  “Rebbe,” I said.

  He cut me short. “No! Not a word! You see me, I see you, that must be enough.”

  “One question, Rebbe,” I said very softly. “Just one. Listen to it. That’s all I ask of you. It is the sole reason for my coming here. And you already know it. What am I to do? Keep silent? Forever? Till the end? But till the end of what? The end of my life? Then say so. Command me. The burden will remain the same, but I shall carry it in a different way.”

  Rebbe Zusia of Kolomey stood up and began to stride back and forth across the room, oblivious of my person. Only after what seemed an interminable hour did he return to his armchair.

  “I know how to read but I dare not understand,” he said. “I know how to look but I am afraid to see. A man’s destiny is written in his eyes, and yours make me shudder. Here is what I propose. Stay with me a few days. I shall let you know. I want time to think before I pronounce myself. Be patient. Wait for my call, but keep away from my people. Don’t associate with them, don’t talk to them. Don’t kill the joy they believe to have found under my roof; for them it is necessary if not indispensable to preserve this joy. Will you obey me?”

  “Yes, Rebbe. Of course, Rebbe. I shall do as you say.”

  Thus I was able to spend Shabbat at his court. During services and meals the Hasidim sang and praised the Lord for having made the seventh day into the soul of creation. As for me, I remained on the sidelines so as not to disobey the Rebbe. I was too sad to mingle with the others, anyway; their rejoicing was not mine to share. I was slowly giving in to gloom, convinced that nobody noticed me. But I was wrong. During the third meal, the one that is marked by mystery, while the disciples surrounding the Rebbe hummed a nostalgic, throbbing melody, one of the Hasidim came over to my corner and asked why I was not participating. It was Gdalia, one of the Rebbe’s favorites because he dared to contradict him. Tall, emaciated, intense, he was called the “Somber One” or the “Loner,” though in fact he was neither. An erudite Talmudist also well-versed in Kabbala, he was treated as an equal by Rebbe Zusia in private and even in public. The Rebbe loved to tease him. “The best proof that I am not Rebbe,” he would say, “is that Gdalia is my Hasid.” To which Gdalia liked to answer, a gleam of irreverence in his eyes: “The difference between the Rebbe and myself is that I don’t feel compelled to prove myself.”

  “You have blasphemed,” Gdalia said to me. “Shabbat, the only Holy Day sanctified by God, deserves all your efforts to liberate the song within you. Sadness denies Shabbat, which signifies joy.”

  “Not for me,” I answered.

  “Are you excluding yourself from the community?”

  “Only from this one.”

  “There is no such thing. Whoever situates himself outside one community, repudiates them all.”

  “Wrong. At least I hope so.”

  “Who are you? What are you doing here? Are you wanted by some enemy?”

  “I have no right to answer you.”

  “Maybe I can help you.”

  “I have no right to answer you,” I repeated, blushing.

  We had to interrupt our conversation. The third meal was coming to an end, Shabbat was withdrawing. After the ceremony of Havdala, marking the division in time between the sacred and the ordinary, between light and darkness, between Israel and its foes, the Rebbe retired to his rooms. Young Talmudists gathered to start the week with study, while at the other end of the hall, old men sat around in a semicircle reminiscing: one had seen the great Arieh-Leib dancing at an orphan’s wedding; another remembered the cry of pain and anger uttered by Gershon the Cantor one festive night that was to be the eve of his death. “I shall tell him,” he had roared before collapsing in the midst of a delirious crowd. They had danced around him for a long time; they had danced with such fervor that they had failed to notice the lifeless body on the ground. “I shall tell him, I shall tell him.” Him, who? Nobody will ever know.

  I went out into the courtyard to get a breath of air. My heart was heavy. I was angry with the whole world. With the Rebbe who belied his legend; he did not listen. With his disciples who rejoiced even though Kolvillàg had ceased to exist. Where was I to turn? I was angry even with the dead; they would have done better not to exclude me. I was of no use to them. I was too young, I lacked experience. A more worldly, more mature survivor would have known how to behave. I felt stupid, useless, at sea. Someone was calling me: “The Rebbe wants you.”

  It was Gdalia. He had been walking next to me for some time. I hadn’t noticed. “The Rebbe is waiting for you,” he said in a neutral voice. “He will listen to you now.”

  From the depths of his armchair, the Tzaddik of Kolomey looked at me with troubled and disapproving eyes. During Shabbat he had appeared much younger. Now his back was stooped, his features drawn. From time to time his hands, resting on a thick volume, trembled. The flame of a kerosene lamp drew shifting shadows on the ceiling and wall.

  I remained standing, afraid and at a loss. This man before me, would he be my judge or my defender?

  “You went against my orders,” the Rebbe scolded me. “You are sowing black thoughts in my community.”

  “I have said nothing,” I protested, “absolutely nothing, I swear it!”

  “Never mind. It is possible to spread fear without opening one’s mouth. It is possible to deprive man of his right to consolation without saying one single word. You did it, I watched you.”

  “But …”

  “But what? You want to tell me that you suffer? Is that why you came? To tell me that? To unload too heavy a burden? If so, if your shoulders are flinching under the weight, then your presence here is undesirable. There is no room under this roof for anyone who cannot control his sorrow and prevent it from affecting his fellow-man.”

  “That is not the point, Rebbe,” I protested with difficulty.

  “No? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Suffering does not frighten me. I don’t try to set it aside.”

  “But then … what is this about?” he muttered as he moved his heavy, bushy head closer toward me.

  He was asking for an answer I could not provide. Never had I felt so helpless. How was I to speak of what defies language? How was I to express what must remain unspoken?

  “Rebbe,” I said softly, “it is about a trap bolted on all sides. And it is dark inside.”

  “And you want to come out, is that it? To go where? And do what?”

  How could I explain it to him? I could not. Impossible. It had been a mistake to come, to hope. I felt weariness creep over me, invading my mind. I made one last try. “Rebbe,” I said in a whisper, “others have sealed my lips. You alone can open them. Tell me whether I should speak or keep my peace.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said with a sigh. I was about to go on, when he stopped me with a wave of the hand. “I don’t understand. I didn’t know it before but I know it now. I know that I have no right to understand. I also know that you will cause me pain.”

  “Possibly, Rebbe. Much pain.”

  I saw his eyes, I saw the flame in his eyes and I thought: Yes, I shall cause him pain.

  “The story that is mine, I have been forbidden to tell. And so, what am I expected to do? I should like to be able to speak without betraying myself, without lying. I should like to be able to live without self-reproach. I should like to remain silent without turning my ve
ry silence into a lie or a betrayal.”

  With his head lowered, he was listening, holding his breath. I paused. A flame ravaged his eyes and I wondered what they were seeing. Suddenly he sighed and narrowed his mouth as though pondering a decision. His body tensed.

  “Say nothing more,” he roared, shaking. “Not another word! You are bound to secrecy and I forbid you to violate it! I shall not be your accomplice! Nor shall I be misled! Not another word, or you shall be damned in heaven and on earth!”

  Standing before him, I felt my knees buckle under me. There was no way out: the will of the dead cannot be defeated. Along the walls, the shadows seemed to be rocking, stretching and chasing one another; they were making me dizzy. The blood was pounding in my temples, my vision was blurring. Where Rebbe Zusia of Kolomey had been standing, there now stood the Tzaddik of Kolvillàg, the madman of Kolvillàg, my friend Moshe. And in his eyes there was the fire of Kolvillàg, the end of Kolvillàg.

  “I can’t,” I said, not knowing what it was I couldn’t.

  His fist came down on the table; the lamp flickered. Choking with indignation, he stood up, his finger pointing to the door. “You are insolent! Get out!”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t understand his anger. “I can’t, Rebbe,” I repeated breathlessly. I could find no words to justify my presence.

  He sat down, shattered. Then he invited me to sit down facing him. I felt my thoughts take leave of me; they went to join me at the other end of the table, which found itself transported to another room, in another house, set in a charred world of ashes.

  “So be it,” said Rebbe Zusia. “I shall listen to you. In my own way, not yours. Without words. I shall listen to what they conceal. You will look straight into my eyes and you will tell me everything. Without moving your lips, without thinking about the words you will use. You will relive everything before me, and the old man and you will become one. Go on, begin.”

  And so, with my mouth open, hands folded in front of me, like his, I began to rethink, to relive the events I was carrying deep inside me since my escape from Kolvillàg. I rediscovered the town only to see it reduced to ashes once more. The last holidays, the last meeting of the Community Council, the last night. I experienced again the ceremony of the Herem—excommunication—the wait, the fear. Slowly I retraced my steps as Rebbe Zusia followed with bated breath, grief-stricken. Only his eyes—dark shadows dancing in them—seemed alive. He listened in silence, listened to the silence welling up inside me with every image as though to stifle it; ultimate total silence suffused with twilight, the deadly kind that rises from wilderness at dusk. And then came the black and luminous hour that marked the last convulsions of the last night, the wedding by fire and the end of Kolvillàg.

  “I don’t understand,” whispered Rebbe Zusia. “I still don’t understand. You hurt me and yet it brought you no relief.”

  He rested his head between his hands and remained thus for a long time. A bluish light filtered down from the sky and glided over the windowpane. The shadows withdrew into the corners, behind my back, as though to watch me.

  “You will leave here this very day,” the Rebbe said without changing position. “You will be Na-venadnik, in perpetual exile, a stranger among strangers. May you be the silence between words, the dead forgotten by the living. Reveal yourself to no one, attach yourself to no person. Since you carry a secret world inside you, watch over its inhabitants. You have been entrusted with a key; keep it. It belongs only to you, it belongs not even to you.”

  His head moved but not his hands. I could see his eyes: more somber than before. And I, in turn, listened. I listened as I had never listened before. I could hear the sound of my blood flowing in my veins and that of night retreating before the approaching dawn.

  “I send you on the road to the unknown so that you may lose yourself before finding yourself again,” Rebbe Zusia continued. “You will live under new skies, in a changing landscape. One gives, one gives oneself in order to forget; it is in order to forget that one speaks. Try not to speak, my poor friend …”

  Exhausted, he paused, repeating “my poor friend” over and over, shaking his head to express his sorrow and his sympathy too.

  “Yes, I shall impose on you the restlessness of the wanderer. You will walk, you will not spend two nights under the same roof. How far? How long? You will know when the time comes. In the end, the ways of heaven and man coincide. Not only in the hour of death. It all depends on your attitude toward death and toward each hour. Some men do nothing but die throughout their journey; others succeed in snatching a few days, a few weeks of life. The goal of the Na-venadnik is to keep the book open.”

  He stood up, and so did I. He escorted me to the door and put his arm around my shoulders in a tight embrace. “Remember that God is everywhere and that He is everywhere the same. Not you. In truth, there are thousands and thousands of Azriels inside you. It is your task to find them and to bring them together; when they shall have become one, you shall be free.”

  “Free to speak, Rebbe?”

  “Free not to speak.” And after a pause: “Freedom, what is it exactly? You do everything you did before, only you do it freely.”

  I had expected a blessing, but was disappointed. He gave me leave without even shaking my hand. He seemed solemn and determined, but the fire in his eyes was gone. It was almost daylight and the town was no longer burning.

  The nomad life did me good. Rebbe Zusia had been right. Not being tied to any place or person modifies your relationship with others and with yourself. You are the former prisoner who constantly turns around to look at the prison, and in that way, knows he is free. Master of your body and your imagination, you answer to no one. With no landscape of your own, all landscapes are yours. In your search for time, you conquer space. You are at home everywhere and your house has no doors, open as it is to the four winds and the stars. With your every move, you shift the center of the universe.

  Roaming from town to town, from country to country, the Na-venadnik gives of himself and becomes the richer for it; the more he gives, the more he extends his powers. By helping strangers live, he himself lives more fully, more intensely. He speaks with his eyes, listens with his lips. For him every word is a call and every call is an adventure; his purpose is to discover not the world but the soul of that world. His feet, at the touch of the earth, reveal to him its incandescent riches. They warn him to flee a particular hamlet or, on the contrary, to set down his walking stick and bundle and take the time to breathe. Indeed, the Na-venadnik needs but sniff the air in the marketplace and look over the first person to cross his path, in order to guess whether the locality is friendly or hostile, poor or prosperous. That is one of the privileges of the Na-venadnik. Because he constantly moves from place to place, he knows these towns and hamlets better than their own inhabitants.

  And yes, all these hamlets seen from the outside resemble one another. Sadna d’araa had hu, states the Talmud: all cities come out of the same workshop. The same cottages everywhere—some of them sad, others friendly and streaming with light. The same peasants and woodcutters, framed by the same trees: huge ones reaching into the clouds, frail ones burrowing in the grass. Fields of wheat, rye, corn. The sap rises. Everything blooms. Meadows, fords, haystacks. In the distance, a mountain covered with pine trees. Villages and hamlets, large and small, animated by the same pulsation. Every village has its own church and pointed steeple—pass by quickly and avert your gaze lest you get into trouble for visual blasphemy. Every little town prides itself on its fair, where the same sellers shout themselves hoarse to overcome the same suspicious surliness of the same buyers. Offers fly back and forth; people yell, quarrel, make up, kiss and curse in Russian, Ruthenian, Hungarian, Romanian—and Yiddish. The language of the fair is universal. One horse is traded for another, a bolt of cloth for a calf, cheese for candles. The boys woo the young peasant girls, who in turn provoke them, laughing and rolling their hips. Their benevolent parents do not interfere. Sometimes t
hey even set the example. Here and there couples lie down in the grass. Others, to save time, cling to each other standing up behind the barn. Frequently tempers run high: a lovers’ quarrel, an offended father, a jealous husband. Too daring a young man, too reticent a girl, and lo and behold, participants and spectators brandish their daggers, and the blood flows. An hour later they all meet again in the tavern, where Itzik or Sender or Yoske becomes their referee. Or scapegoat. One downs a few glasses, one beats up a Jew—and everybody feels better.

  Every village has its taverns, and in every tavern you will find, in front of the wine cask, an Itzik or a Sender or a Yoske for whom pain has become a matter of habit, of livelihood. These innkeepers resemble one another the way the Jewish communities dispersed between the Dniepr and the Carpathian Mountains resemble one another.

  Cut off from the outside world, these timeless Jewish kingdoms are private worlds, with their own princes and minstrels, fools and beggars, poets and workers, celebrations and mournings. They do not communicate with one another, or rarely, yet all observe the same ritual and all fashion for themselves the same tomorrow. On Friday nights, before the arrival of Shabbat, they all intone the same melody to invite the angels, carriers of the same peace. In my daydreams it sometimes was not I but the village—always the same one—that was roaming the roads in search of help and redemption, and I was but a link.

  With the years, I became a hyphen between countless communities. News was gathered from my lips. Intrigues at the Hasidic courts, clashes with the Mitnagdim. Being well-informed myself, I informed others. The schemes of the clergy and the politicians, the rates for so-called official protection: I was up-to-date. I knew who was trying to intercede with whom on which family’s behalf—and at what price. I was newsmonger as well as messenger.

  Of course, I occasionally would travel through large cities. Thus I visited Lemberg, pushed as far as Prague, spent a night in Kiev. I even lived an unforgettable Shabbat in Vienna, where a rich merchant, a friend of the governor, offered me hospitality. He resided in a building crammed with rooms and stairways, enough to make one lose one’s way. It was teeming with servants who all looked alike. To reach the top floor, one had to take a train that traveled upward. I refused to board it, as I found even ordinary trains not too reassuring. Why do people insist on making themselves the slaves of machines? I wondered. In their eagerness to arrive quickly, they forget where they are going. But the vertical train, in my opinion, was infinitely more dangerous. How could one be sure that it would actually halt at the ceiling? And what if suddenly it felt like continuing, higher and higher, to the very stars? Can you imagine me suddenly appearing before the celestial tribunal in a train? I fled that capital as quickly as I could, running faster than the train, thus deeply distressing my host. Poor benefactor, he was seeking a tutor for his children, and had hoped to impress me. I thought: He’ll manage. Surely he will ferret out a tutor who likes machines; as for me, I prefer the stars.