by Elie Wiesel
“Details are rarely insignificant.”
“You won’t hold it against me if I sometimes tell you unpleasant things, sad things?’
“I won’t hold it against you, Father.”
“You won’t be disappointed, later, when I express myself badly?”
“You’ve never disappointed me.”
“But I have so many things to tell you, so many things!”
“I know.”
“I worry and worry: will I have time to tell you everything?”
“Let’s hope so.”
“That’s just it, my son. I feel hope deserting me, flowing out of me.”
“You’ll fight to hang on to it.”
“Will you help me?”
“Naturally, I’ll help you. Always.”
“There’s not much time.”
“No, Father, there’s not much time. You talk. I’ll listen.”
“All right. I’ll tell you. The beginning, and what follows, everything, I’ll tell you everything if God lets me. Are you listening? Try to remember what I tell you, because soon I won’t be able to tell you anything.”
Elhanan had to recall the village of his childhood for his own child. Malkiel must bear it within him as his father bore it, a landmark and a source of wonder.
Picturesque and colorful, it blended cultures and ethnic groups, diverse traditions and customs. Russians, Turks, Mongols, Germans, Hungarians and Romanians had left their imprint upon it. A modern Babel; its citizens spoke many languages. You might have said that men and women had thronged to this enchanted spot from all corners of history to build their temples, all too visible and not very reassuring.
You would find peddlers and merchants, acrobats and bandits, witches and healers. Just men who aspired to reach heaven, and primitive villagers coupling in the courtyard in broad daylight. Men who lived only for others and evildoers who lived only off others. Hard-hearted police informers and troubadours with smiling faces. Wise old men dreaming of God and upstarts who took themselves for gods.
“My grandfather lived far, far away,” Elhanan told his son. “If you can, go and see the little hamlet where he had a farm just beyond a river, really a stream.… In summer I used to visit him.”
With his mother Elhanan went there either by train, some twenty minutes’ ride, or in a carriage, two hours or more. Elhanan preferred the carriage. When the coachman was in a good mood he let the boy hold the reins; and then, enjoying a new freedom and authority, the boy felt in tune with life.
The road wound its way through a forest. Elhanan gazed at the trees, which looked immense, all black with twisted roots, cracked and tangled branches: in them he saw the pleas of distorted and accursed creatures doomed to repentance. He closed his eyes, but still he saw them.
“I believed my grandfather stronger than a lion,” said Elhanan to his son, “and wiser than a Wise Man. He spoke to me, and I listened; I spoke to him, and he listened. I listened even when he was meditating in silence; I meditated with him. It was he who taught me to love fields and valleys.”
Elhanan did love the countryside. The shepherds’ flutes calling their flocks at day’s end, the stray lambs’ tinkling bells, the wind rustling the leaves just before a storm. Every blade of grass possessed by its own song, said Rabbi Nahman. Elhanan loved hearing the song of the earth mingle with the song of the sky.
Elhanan’s mother spoke often of her own mother, his grandfather’s first wife. And the child loved her though he had never seen her. He was sure that she had been beautiful and sweet as his mother. On the other hand, he was wary of the morose woman his grandfather had taken for his second wife. He found her sullen and bitter; he resented her without knowing why.
Twice a year Grandfather came to town—without his wife—to spend the holidays with Rabbi Sender of Wohlnie, who lived opposite Elhanan. Grandfather admired this master naively and sincerely, and attributed to him virtues and powers that raised him to the ranks of the Just. Among his followers was a man who had damned his wife in an angry moment, crying out, “May fire take her!” Shortly afterward his wife died in a fire. Was it just bad luck? The rabbi reprimanded him: “You talk too much.” After that the Hasid never uttered another word. A few years later, the rabbi told him, “Silence, too, has its limits.” Whereupon the penitent immediately recovered the power of speech. But from then on, words tumbled together in his mouth; he became incoherent, and people thought he had lost his mind. The penitent asked, “Am I mad, Rabbi?” And the rabbi answered him, “There are madmen of silence and madmen of speech; it is often difficult to choose between them.” So the Hasid divided his life in two: he spoke in the morning and was silent in the evening.
Elhanan must have been five or six when his grandfather brought him before Rabbi Sender. “Bless him, Rabbi.” The rabbi, with a majestic face, eyes sparkling with kindness and intelligence, took the boy on his knee and smiled down on him. “What blessing would you like from an old man like me?”
Elhanan answered, “May all the old men I meet be like you.”
The rabbi laughed heartily. “I can guess what your grandfather wants. He wants me to promise him that you will grow up to be a good Jew who fears God and loves his Torah. But you’re more original than he is, my boy. May you always be so.” That exchange filled his grandfather with pride.
There was a Tempter in the village, a real one who wreaked havoc. He seduced young women and pushed them toward sin and suicide. Elhanan thought he had seen him once, near the well in the courtyard. He had heard him laugh, most often at night. A voluptuous, seductive laugh, a laugh that gave him goose pimples. His grandfather asked, “Are you afraid, Elhanan?” The boy confessed that yes, he was afraid, most of all on Saturday night, when the demons emerged from their prisons to come and perturb the living. His grandfather said, “Rabbi Sender will help you.” Rabbi Sender did not make fun of the boy: “We should never mock someone who is in fear, especially a child. Here is what I suggest: Saturday night you and I will go together to listen to the Tempter. Would you like that?” Elhanan accepted. At midnight the rabbi and the little boy drew near the well. Rabbi Sender recited a brief prayer and said, “Tempter, if you go on frightening Elhanan, you will never free yourself from the punishment I have in store for you.” A moment later, Elhanan heard whimpering rise from the depths of the well. “If you so wish,” the rabbi said to Elhanan, “we have the power to chain him up for centuries to come. Do you want me to do that?” Elhanan had never felt so important. “I’d like to ask my grandfather’s advice,” he answered. And his grandfather counseled clemency. Elhanan adored him. Between the old man and the little boy there was a touching and comforting bond that no one could break. When Grandfather came to the house, they were inseparable. They slept in the same bed and talked on and off for hours.
One Rosh Hashanah night, his grandfather taught Elhanan a solemn and deeply moving song. Elhanan loved his voice: it summoned up secret universes. A holy flame flickered about his person: joy, warmth, light pervaded the whole house. In the early hours of the morning, his grandfather died, still singing. But for Elhanan his song was stronger than death. He was convinced that his grandfather would never stop singing.
“I loved my father,” said Elhanan to Malkiel. “I admired him and I would have given my life for him. But I yearned to be like my mother because she was like my grandfather. My mother is present to me as you are present to me. If she could see me as I see you, if my grandfather could hear me as I hear you, everything would be so different.… Yes, Malkiel, so different.”
Elhanan was speaking to his son, but he was alone. Or rather he felt at once alone and not alone. The room was lit and not lit. He trembled, seeing himself with his mother again in the snowy village. All these phantoms so near him, all these hysterical demons tangled together like conspirators, filled him with fear. Help me to cast out fear, Mother, and do not leave me. You’re still there, I can feel it, my heart beats louder—why am I afraid? Ah, it’s nothing. I’m just cold.
And because I’m talking to you, my son, and you are not here.
Do you hear me?
As a child Elhanan wondered where spoken words went, and glimmers of light and shared silences. Who gathered up the unheard prayers of the faithful? To whom did a dying man’s regrets belong after his death?
Elhanan asked himself a good many questions. They bore on the mystery of life and of darkness. Why live, if it was only to cease to live? Why build, if it was only to wake up among the ruins? His father tried to explain to him that certain things remained inexplicable. His teachers took great pains to make him understand that sometimes it was better not to try to understand.
How sweet life was in those days! Stable, regular, incorporated into God’s memory, it allowed the poor to go on their way singing, the prisoners to sleep, and the children to venture without fear on uncharted paths.
The Jews led a Jewish life, the Christians a Christian life, and the others—the emancipated—displayed equal scorn for both.
Naturally, an occasional crisis aroused distrust and rancor between the communities. When that happened Elhanan and all the Jewish children stayed home and worked alone or with their parents until calm was restored.
A memory: the fascists had seized power in Bucharest. Gangs of the anti-Semitic Iron Guard were planning a raid on synagogues and Jewish homes. Neutral, the police kept their distance. Protective measures were necessary, but which ones? A meeting was held in the house of Malkiel, father of Elhanan. All the elders were there. Solemn, grave, they talked and talked; and Elhanan’s father advised and advised. Only Elhanan did nothing. He watched and he listened. He did not understand: why were they so worried? It was as if they expected the end of the world. At one point, his father had raised his head: “If all these rumors are true, it may be the end of the world.”
In any event, the pogrom did not take place, thanks to Berl Brezinsky. You don’t know Berl? That’s odd; in the village everybody knew Berl. In short, Berl, who was rich and remarkably strong, went to find the head thug and said to him, “Listen, you, you have a choice. Either you hold back these bastards, and I give you ten thousand lei, or you refuse, and I beat you to a pulp.”
Elhanan remembered Berl, as he remembered all the prominent men of the community, and also the less prominent. He felt close to Shammai, who told him, “It’s hopeless, it’s laughable,” without ever explaining what drove him to despair. And to Yohanan, who confided to him, “I feel guilty and I don’t know why; maybe you know?” And to one fool who spoke in a singsong: “People, people, are they annoying! Into the garbage with their fine words and their rantings and their pompous orations! The time for words is ended, and all that matters is the following fact: the world as it is does not deserve to survive.” And to a beggar who told him of his grief one Sabbath afternoon in the synagogue, drowned in shadow: “I’m ugly, I realize that; it’s poverty that makes me ugly. Tell me, you who are kind enough to listen, what becomes of my smile when I stop smiling?” And to a poet who said anything to anybody: “Ah, how I miss her, the woman I haven’t met yet, the woman I’ll never meet.”
Dreaming of his childhood, Elhanan became a child again and rediscovered a naive language, sometimes prophetic and sometimes nostalgic.
There was an even more bizarre character. Something about him frightened people. Despite the warmth of the House of Study, the beit ha-midrash, where Elhanan had seen him the evening before, he sat bundled up near the hearth and seemed to be freezing; his lips moved, but he made no sound. Flushed and feverish, with a sickly gaze, he looked without seeing. Elhanan asked him, “Are you in pain, sir? Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
The stranger did not answer.
“Would you like us to call a doctor?” Elhanan could not seem to catch his eye; the man seemed to be moving through an unreal world, bewitched, beyond reach. “Who are you, sir? Where do you come from? From what hell have you escaped?”
Nothing.
“Who is tormenting you? Who wishes you harm?”
Still nothing.
At first he had gone unnoticed in the town. They were used to these wanderers, messengers bearing secrets, who appeared and vanished without a word of explanation. They gave them lodging in the vestibule of the beit ha-midrash. To feed them, the shammes sent them to well-off families, who gave them one meal a day. Some spent a night in the village, others seven years; the village accepted them all and respected their liberty.
Elhanan loved to talk with them, to draw them out; through them a distant, turbulent, altered world offered itself to him; thanks to them he roamed the earth from end to end without ever leaving his little village.
But this vagabond was not like the others. He seemed more a returning ghost. His beard and brows tufted, his arms scarred by burns, he might have survived a blazing fire.
At the evening meal Elhanan spoke of him to his father, who advised him to let the stranger be: “He may need silence and solitude; don’t impose your curiosity on him.”
Elhanan saw the man again the next day: seated on the same bench, in the same hunched position, with the same stare.
The boy watched him during the morning service; the stranger took no part whatever. He never even stood up for the Kedushah. After the service, Elhanan approached him again and offered to help.
“Stop nagging me, boy. You belong in school, not with me. You’re too young to waste your time and too good to clutter up my fantasies. Scram. It’s in your own interest to steer clear. If I start talking you are lost.”
“I’m not afraid, sir.”
“And you brag about it? Learn to be afraid. Like me. Like everybody.”
“I’ll learn.” And in a burst of audacity, “Teach me.”
The stranger grimaced suddenly. His gaze flared at Elhanan with painful force. “No, son. Find someone else.”
“Please,” Elhanan said. “Every visitor teaches me something. Don’t be the first to send me away empty-handed.”
The stranger appraised him at length and then broke into a smile. Elhanan thought, When I’m grown up I’ll smile like him.
“So be it,” the stranger said. “You won’t go away empty-handed. You’ll remember this meeting. You’ll remember that once on the path of life you came across an old Jew, as old as the world itself, as stubborn as the world’s memory. I’m not asking you to promise not to forget; he’s the one who makes that promise.”
The stranger smiled at him again, and Elhanan thought, No, I won’t go away empty-handed; when I’m grown up I’ll be generous like him.
Elhanan wanted to go on talking, but the stranger withdrew into himself, as if the boy were not there.
Elhanan wanted to cry, as if he guessed that the stranger would not be able to keep his promise.
Their first meeting. At the Times. At the end of the seventies. Tamar was a political reporter, and a star. Malkiel was a rewrite man. She brought in some copy and handed it to the editor, who scanned it quickly and dropped it on Malkiel’s desk. “Cut it down a little, but not too much; be careful. Tamar doesn’t like people tampering with her copy.” It was a piece about some local political campaign. Charges and countercharges. Malkiel knew his stuff. Melt down the fat. Cut the cosmetics and coloratura. The classic rule of good journalism: honor the verb, sacrifice the adjective. And then the rhythm: be careful about pace and rhythm. An easy job, all technique, quickly accomplished. The piece ran on page one. His boss, nicknamed “the sage,” was obviously pleased.
Not Tamar. She was famous, and she knew it; her successes, if not her pride, gave her the right to be temperamental. She stormed in next morning, furious, and planted herself in front of her surgeon: “You butchered my piece, you destroyed it, you turned it into a simplistic, id-i-o-tic caricature! Any reader with brains must have laughed at it!” She forced the words out between clenched teeth. “Who are you to massacre my story? Who told you to flatten my style? To make a fool of me in front of the whole world?”
Standing there, she intimidated Malkiel,
who wished he could crawl into a hole in the ground. If his esteemed colleague could have fired him on the spot she would have, and with pleasure. More, if she had had the power to cut off his fingers or even his head …
It was the sage, defender of the oppressed, who saved Malkiel from eternal damnation. He took her by the shoulders. “Calm down, Tamar,” he said. “Do you want to drive him to despair? Just between us, he had nothing to do with it. In fact, he fought to keep it exactly as it was—and it was, by the way, one of the best pieces you ever wrote. I never saw him fight for any piece the way he did for this one.”
The tigress calmed down immediately. “Is that bargain-basement flattery true?”
The sage, visibly sincere, flashed his special-occasion smile: “I swear it on the most beautiful head in the room. Yours.”
She turned back to Malkiel, a bit confused and repentant. “You poor boy! I’m a monster. Why did you let me go on like that? You should have insulted me, put me in my place, told me to go to hell.… Don’t be id-i-o-tic. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. By the way, what’s your name?”
So they became pals. Accomplices. Everybody at the rewrite desk knew it: only Malkiel was authorized to edit Tamar. No trespassing. They were an elite team, blessed from on high. Inseparable. Tamar’s style, Malkiel’s editing, a real lesson for beginners. So much so that the sage, always ingenious, suggested they cover a story together. They took the shuttle to Washington, stayed at the Madison Hotel, and went to work. Tamar knew everybody in the Senate and the House. She had a contact in the White House. They called her by her first name, they teased her, they invited her to lunch, dinner, the “reception of the year.” “Sorry.” She shrugged. “I’m not alone.” Malkiel blushed. Was he a burden to her, heavy baggage? “Are we doing the story together, or not?” Tamar asked. “Are we going to win the Pulitzer together or not?” Malkiel could only agree: “Of course, of course.” She laughed ironically: “You are stupid. Look at these people—they’re dying of jealousy. I love that.”