by Elie Wiesel
I expected my listeners to scrutinize my head to see if it had really returned to its normal size, but they did nothing of the sort. They continued to stare into their stone-cold tea. In the next few minutes nobody opened his mouth. We had no more desire to call up the past or to listen to our fellows tell their troubled life stories. We sat in restless silence around the table. Every one of us, I am sure, was asking himself to what he really owed his life. Gideon was the first to speak.
“We ought to take the Englishman something to eat,” he said.
Yes, I said to myself, Gideon is sad, too. He’s thinking of John Dawson. He must be; it’s inevitable.
“I don’t imagine he’s hungry,” I said aloud. “You can’t expect a man condemned to die to have an appetite.” And to myself I added: “Or a man condemned to kill, either.”
There must have been a strange tone in my voice, for the others raised their heads and I felt the puzzled quality of their penetrating stares.
“No,” I said stubbornly; “a man condemned to die can’t be hungry.”
They did not stir, but sat petrified as the seconds dragged interminably by.
“The condemned man’s traditional last meal is a joke,” I said loudly, “a joke in the worst possible taste, an insult to the corpse that he is about to be. What does a man care if he dies with an empty stomach?”
The expression of astonishment lingered in Gad’s eyes, but Ilana looked at me with compassion and Gideon with friendliness. Joab did not look at me at all. His eyes were lowered, but perhaps that was his way of looking out of them.
“He doesn’t know,” remarked Gideon.
“He doesn’t know what?” I asked, without any conscious reason for raising my voice. Perhaps I wanted to hear myself shout, to arouse my anger and see it reflected in the motionless shadows in the mirror and on the wall. Or perhaps out of sheer weakness. I felt powerless to change anything, least of all myself, in spite of the fact that I wanted to introduce a transformation into the room, to reorder the whole of creation. I would have made the Saint into a madman, have given John Dawson’s name to Gad and his fate to David. But I knew there was nothing I could do. To have such power I should have had to take the place of death, not just of the individual death of John Dawson, the English captain who had no more appetite than I.
“What doesn’t he know?” I repeated stridently.
“He doesn’t know he’s going to die,” said Gideon in a sorrowfully dreamy voice.
“His stomach knows,” I retorted. “A man about to die listens only to his stomach. He pays no attention to his heart or to his past, or to yours for that matter. He doesn’t even hear the voice of the storm. He listens to his stomach and his stomach tells him that he is going to die and that he isn’t hungry.”
I had talked too fast and too loud and I was left panting. I should have liked to run away, but my friends’ stares transfixed me. Death sealed off every exit, and everywhere there were eyes.
“I’m going down to the cellar,” said Gideon. “I’ll ask him if he wants something to eat.”
“Don’t ask him anything,” I said. “Simply tell him that tomorrow, when the sun rises above the blood-red horizon, he, John Dawson, will say good-by to life, good-by to his stomach. Tell him that he’s going to die.”
Gideon got up, with his eyes still on me, and started toward the kitchen and the entrance to the cellar. At the door he paused.
“I’ll tell him,” he said, with a quickly fading smile. Then he turned on his heels and I heard him going down the stairs.
I was grateful for his consent. He and not I would warn John Dawson of his approaching end. I could never have done it. It’s easier to kill a man than to break the news that he is going to die.
“Midnight,” said Joab.
Midnight, I reflected, the hour when the dead rise out of their graves and come to say their prayers in the synagogue, the hour when God Himself weeps over the destruction of the Temple, the hour when a man should be able to plumb the depths of his being and to discover the Temple in ruins. A God that weeps and dead men that pray.
“Poor boy!” murmured Ilana.
She did not look at me, but her tears scrutinized my face. Her tears rather than her eyes caressed me.
“Don’t say that, Ilana. Don’t call me ‘poor boy.’”
There were tears in her eyes, or rather there were tears in the place of her eyes, tears which with every passing second grew heavier and more opaque and threatened to overflow…I was afraid that suddenly the worst would happen: the dusky Ilana would no longer be there; she would have drowned in her tears. I wanted to touch her arm and say Don’t cry. Say what you like, but don’t cry.
But she wasn’t crying. It takes eyes to cry, and she had no eyes, only tears where her eyes should have been.
“Poor boy!” she repeated.
Then what I had foreseen came true. Ilana disappeared, and Catherine was there instead. I wondered why Catherine had come, but her apparition did not particularly surprise me. She liked the opposite sex, and particularly she liked little boys who were thinking of death. She liked to speak of love to little boys, and since men going to their death are little boys she liked to speak to them of love. For this reason her presence in the magical room—magical because it transcended the differences, the boundary lines between the victim and the executioner, between the present and the past—was not surprising.
I had met Catherine in Paris in 1945, when I had just come from Buchenwald, that other magical spot, where the living were transformed into dead and their future into darkness. I was weakened and half starved. One of the many rescue committees sent me to a camp where a hundred boys and girls were spending their summer vacation. The camp was in Normandy, where the early morning breeze rustled the same way it did in Palestine.
Because I knew no French I could not communicate with the other boys and girls. I ate and sunbathed with them, but I had no way of talking. Catherine was the only person who seemed to know any German and occasionally we exchanged a few words. Sometimes she came up to me at the dining-room table and asked me whether I had slept well, enjoyed my meal, or had a good time during the day.
She was twenty-six or -seven years old; small, frail, and almost transparent, with silky blonde, sunlit hair and blue, dreamy eyes which never cried. Her face was thin but saved from being bony by the delicacy of the features. She was the first woman I had seen from nearby. Before this—that is, before the war—I did not look at women. On my way to school or the synagogue I walked close to the walls, with my eyes cast down on the ground. I knew that women existed, and why, but I did not appreciate the fact that they had a body, breasts, legs, hands, and lips whose touch sets a man’s heart to beating. Catherine revealed this to me.
The camp was at the edge of a wood, and after supper I went walking there all by myself, talking to the murmuring breeze and watching the sky turn a deeper and deeper blue. I liked to be alone.
One evening Catherine asked if she might go with me, and I was too timid to say anything but yes. For half an hour, an hour, we walked in complete silence. At first I found the silence embarrassing, then to my surprise I began to enjoy it. The silence of two people is deeper than the silence of one. Involuntarily I began to talk.
“Look how the sky is opening up,” I said.
She threw back her head and looked above her. Just as I had said, the sky was opening up. Slowly at first, as if swept by an invisible wind, the stars drew away from the zenith, some moving to the right, others to the left, until the center of the sky was an empty space, dazzlingly blue and gradually acquiring depth and outline.
“Look hard,” I said. “There’s nothing there.”
From behind me Catherine looked up and said not a word.
“That’s enough,” I said; “let’s go on walking.”
As we walked on I told her the legend of the open sky. When I was a child the old master told me that there were nights when the sky opened up in order to make way for the p
rayers of unhappy children. On one such night a little boy whose father was dying said to God: “Father, I am too small to know how to pray. But I ask you to heal my sick father.” God did what the boy asked, but the boy himself was turned into a prayer and carried up into Heaven. From that day on, the master told me, God has from time to time shown Himself to us in the face of a child.
“That is why I like to look at the sky at this particular moment,” I told Catherine. “I hope to see the child. But you are a witness to the truth. There’s nothing there. The child is only a story.”
It was then for the first time during the evening that Catherine spoke.
“Poor boy!” she exclaimed. “Poor boy!”
She’s thinking of the boy in the story, I said to myself. And I loved her for her compassion.
After this Catherine often went walking with me. She questioned me about my childhood and my more recent past, but I did not always answer. One evening she asked me why I kept apart from the other boys and girls in the camp.
“Because they speak a language I can’t understand,” I told her.
“Some of the girls know German,” she said.
“But I have nothing to say to them.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said slowly, with a smile. “All you have to do is love them.”
I didn’t see what she was driving at and said so. Her smile widened and she began to speak to me of love. She spoke easily and well. Love is this and love is that; man is born to love; he is only alive when he is in the presence of a woman he loves or should love. I told her that I knew nothing of love, that I didn’t know it existed or had a right to exist.
“I’ll prove it to you,” she said.
The next evening, as she walked at my left side over the leaf-covered path, she took hold of my arm. At first I thought she needed my support, but actually it was because she wanted to make me feel the warmth of her body. Then she claimed to be tired and said it would be pleasant to sit down on the grass under a tree. Once we had sat down she began to stroke my face and hair. Then she kissed me several times; first her lips touched mine and then her tongue burned the inside of my mouth. For several nights running we returned to the same place, and she spoke to me of love and desire and the mysteries of the heart. She took my hand and guided it over her breasts and thighs, and I realized that women had breasts and thighs and hands that could set a man’s heart to beating and turn his blood to fire.
Then came the last evening. The month of vacation was over and I was to go back to Paris the next day. As soon as we had finished supper we went to sit for the last time under the tree. I felt sad and lonely, and Catherine held my hand in hers without speaking. The night was fair and calm. At intervals, like a warm breath, the wind played over our faces. It must have been one or two o’clock in the morning when Catherine broke the silence, turned her melancholy face toward me, and said:
“Now we’re going to make love.”
These words made me tremble. I was going to make love for the first time. Before her there had been no woman upon earth. I didn’t know what to say or do; I was afraid of saying the wrong thing or making some inappropriate gesture. Awkwardly I waited for her to take the initiative. With a suddenly serious look on her face she began to get undressed. She took off her blouse and in the starlight I saw her ivory-white breasts. Then she took off the rest of her clothes and was completely naked before me.
“Take off your shirt,” she ordered.
I was paralyzed; there was iron in my throat and lead in my veins; my arms and hands would not obey me. I could only look at her from head to foot and follow the rise and fall of her breasts. I was hypnotized by the call of her outstretched, naked body.
“Take off your shirt,” she repeated.
Then, as I did not move, she began to undress me. Deliberately she took off my shirt and shorts. Then she lay back on the grass and said:
“Take me.”
I got down on my knees. I stared at her for a long time and then I covered her body with kisses. Absently and without saying a word she stroked my hair.
“Catherine,” I said, “first there is something I must tell you.”
Her face took on a blank and anguished expression, and there was anguish in the rustle of the breeze among the trees.
“No, no!” she cried. “Don’t tell me anything. Take me, but don’t talk.”
Heedless of her objection I went on:
“First, Catherine, I must tell you…”
Her lips twisted with pain, and there was pain in the rustle of the breeze.
“No, no, no!” she implored. “Don’t tell me. Be quiet. Take me quickly, but don’t talk.”
“What I have to tell you is this,” I insisted: “You’ve won the game. I love you, Catherine…I love you.”
She burst into sobs and repeated over and over again:
“Poor boy! You poor boy!”
I picked up my shirt and shorts and ran away. Now I understood. She was referring not to the little boy in the sky but to me. She had spoken to me of love because she knew that I was the little boy who had been turned into a prayer and carried up into Heaven. She knew that I had died and come back to earth, dead. This was why she had spoken to me of love and wanted to make love with me. I saw it all quite clearly. She liked making love with little boys who were going to die; she enjoyed the company of those who were obsessed with death. No wonder that her presence this night in Palestine was not surprising.
“Poor boy!” said Ilana, in a very quiet voice, for the last time. And a deep sigh escaped from her breast, which made her tears free to flow, to flow on and on until the end of time.
SUDDENLY I became aware that the room was stuffy, so stuffy that I was almost stifled.
No wonder. The room was small, far too small to receive so many visitors at one time. Ever since midnight the visitors had been pouring in. Among them were people I had known, people I had hated, admired, forgotten. As I let my eyes wander about the room I realized that all of those who had contributed to my formation, to the formation of my permanent identity, were there. Some of them were familiar, but I could not pin a label upon them; they were names without faces or faces without names. And yet I knew that at some point my life had crossed theirs.
My father was there, of course, and my mother, and the beggar. And the grizzled master. The English soldiers of the convoy we had ambushed at Gedera were there also. And around them friends and brothers and comrades, some of them out of my childhood, others that I had seen live and suffer, hope and curse at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Alongside my father there was a boy who looked strangely like myself as I had been before the concentration camps, before the war, before everything. My father smiled at him, and the child picked up the smile and sent it to me over the multitude of heads which separated us.
Now I understood why the room was so stuffy. It was too small to hold so many people at a time. I forced a passage through the crowd until I came to the little boy and thanked him for the smile. I wanted to ask him what all these people were doing in the room, but on second thought I saw that this would be discourteous toward my father. Since he was present I should address my question to him.
“Father, why are all these people here?”
My mother stood beside him, looking very pale, and her lips tirelessly murmured: “Poor little boy, poor little boy!…”
“Father,” I repeated, “answer me. What are you all doing here?”
His large eyes, in which I had so often seen the sky open up, were looking at me, but he did not reply. I turned around and found myself face to face with the rabbi, whose beard was more grizzled than ever.
“Master,” I said, “what has brought all these people here tonight?”
Behind me I heard my mother whisper, “Poor little boy, my poor little boy.”
“Well, Master,” I repeated, “answer me, I implore you.”
But he did not answer either; indeed, he seemed not even to have heard my question, and hi
s silence made me afraid. As I had known him before, he was always present in my hour of need. Then his silence had been reassuring. Now I tried to look into his eyes, but they were two globes of fire, two suns that burned my face. I turned away and went from one visitor to another, seeking an answer to my question, but my presence struck them dumb. Finally I came to the beggar, who stood head and shoulders above them all. And he spoke to me, quite spontaneously.
“This is a night of many faces,” he said.
I was sad and tired.
“Yes,” I said wearily, “this is a night of many faces, and I should like to know the reason why. If you are the one I think you are, enlighten and comfort me. Tell me the meaning of these looks, this muteness, these presences. Tell me, I beseech you, for I can endure them no longer.”
He took my arm, gently pressed it, and said:
“Do you see that little boy over there?” and he pointed to the boy who looked like myself as I had been.
“Yes, I see him,” I replied.
“He will answer all your questions,” said the beggar. “Go talk to him.”
Now I was quite sure that he was not a beggar. Once more I elbowed my way through the crowd of ghosts and arrived, panting with exhaustion, at the young boy’s side.
“Tell me,” I said beseechingly, “what you are doing here? And all the others?”
He opened his eyes wide in astonishment.
“Don’t you know?” he asked.
I confessed that I did not know.
“Tomorrow a man is to die, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said, “at dawn tomorrow.”
“And you are to kill him, aren’t you?”
“Yes, that’s true; I have been charged with his execution.”
“And you don’t understand, do you?”