by Elie Wiesel
“No.”
“But it’s all quite simple,” he exclaimed. “We are here to be present at the execution. We want to see you carry it out. We want to see you turn into a murderer. That’s natural enough, isn’t it?”
“How is it natural? Of what concern is the killing of John Dawson to you?”
“You are the sum total of all that we have been,” said the youngster who looked like my former self. “In a way we are the ones to execute John Dawson. Because you can’t do it without us. Now, do you see?”
I was beginning to understand. An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.
“Well,” said the boy, “do you see?”
“Yes, I see,” I said.
“Poor boy, poor boy!” murmured my mother, whose lips were now as gray as the old master’s hair.
“HE’S HUNGRY,” said Gideon’s voice, unexpectedly.
I had not heard him come back up the stairs. Saints have a disconcertingly noiseless way. They walk, laugh, eat, and pray, all without making a sound.
“Impossible,” I protested.
He can’t be hungry, I was thinking. He’s going to die, and a man who’s going to die can’t be hungry.
“He said so himself,” Gideon insisted, with a shade of emotion in his voice.
Everyone was staring at me. Ilana had stopped crying, Joab was no longer examining his nails, and Gad looked weary. All the ghosts, too, seemed to be expecting something of me, a sign perhaps, or a cry.
“Does he know?” I asked Gideon.
“Yes, he knows.” And after a moment he added: “I told him.”
“How did he react?”
It was important for me to know the man’s reaction. Was the news a shock? Had he stayed calm, or protested his innocence?
“He smiled,” said Gideon. “He said that he already knew. His stomach had told him.”
“And he said he was hungry?”
Gideon hid his twitching hands behind his back.
“Yes, that’s what he said. He said he was hungry and he had a right to a good last meal.”
Gad laughed, but the tone of his laugh was hollow.
“Typically English,” he remarked. “The stiff upper lip.”
His remark hung over our heads in midair; no one opened up to receive it. My father shot me a hard glance, as if to say A man is going to die, and he’s hungry.
“Might as well admit it,” said Gad. “The English have iron digestions.”
No one paid any attention to this remark either. I felt a sudden stab of pain in my stomach. I had not eaten all day. Ilana got up and went into the kitchen.
“I’ll fix him something to eat,” she declared.
I heard her moving about, slicing a loaf of bread, opening the icebox, starting to make coffee. In a few minutes she came back with a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate in the other.
“This is all I can find,” she said. “A cheese sandwich and some black coffee. There’s no sugar…Not much of a meal, but it’s the best I can do.” And after several seconds of silence she asked: “Who’s going to take it down?”
The boy standing beside my father stared hard at me. His stare had a voice, which said:
“Go on. Take him something to eat. He’s hungry, you know.”
“No,” I responded. “Not I. I don’t want to see him. Above all, I don’t want to see him eat. I want to think of him, later on, as a man who never ate.”
I wanted to add that I had cramps in my stomach, but I realized that this was unimportant. Instead I said: “I don’t want to be alone with him. Not now.”
“We’ll go with you,” said the little boy. “It’s wrong to hold back food from a man who’s hungry. You know that.”
Yes, I knew. I had always given food to the hungry. You, beggar, you remember. Didn’t I offer you bread? But tonight is different. Tonight I can’t do it.
“That’s true,” said the little boy, picking up the train of my reflections. “Tonight is different, and you are different also, or at least you’re going to be. But that has nothing to do with the fact that a man’s hungry and must have something to eat.”
“But he’s going to die tomorrow,” I protested. “What’s it matter whether he dies with a full stomach or an empty one?”
“For the time being he’s alive,” the child said sententiously. My father nodded in acquiescence, and all the others followed his example. “He’s alive and hungry, and you refuse to give him anything to eat?”
All these heads, nodding like the tops of black trees, made me shudder. I wanted to close my eyes but I was ashamed. I couldn’t close my eyes in the presence of my father.
“Very well,” I said resignedly. “I accept. I’ll take him something to eat.” As if obeying the baton of an invisible conductor the nodding heads were still. “I’ll take him something to eat,” I repeated. “But first tell me something, little boy. Are the dead hungry too?”
He looked surprised.
“What—you don’t know?” he exclaimed. “Of course they are.”
“And should we give them something to eat?”
“How can you ask? Of course you should give them something to eat. Only it’s difficult…”
“Difficult…difficult…difficult…,” the ghosts echoed together.
The boy looked at me and smiled.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered. “You know that at midnight the dead leave their graves, don’t you?”
I told him that I knew; I had been told.
“Have you been told that they go from the graveyard to the synagogue?”
Yes, I had been told that also.
“Well, it’s true,” said the little boy. Then, after a silence which accentuated what was to follow, he went on in a voice so still that if it had not been inside myself I could never have heard it: “Yes, it’s true. They gather every night in the synagogue. But not for the purpose you imagine. They come not to pray but to eat—”
Everything in the room—walls, chairs, heads—began to whirl around me, dancing in a pre-established rhythm, without stirring the air or setting foot on the ground. I was the center of a multitude of circles. I wanted to close my eyes and stop up my ears, but my father was there, and my mother, and the master and the beggar and the boy. With all those who had formed me around me I had no right to stop up my ears and close my eyes.
“Give me those things,” I said to Ilana. “I’ll take them to him.”
The dancers stopped in their tracks, as if I were the conductor and my words his baton. I stepped toward Ilana, still standing at the kitchen door. Suddenly Gad rushed forward and reached her side before me.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
Almost brutally he snatched the cup and plate from Ilana’s hands and went precipitately down the stairs.
Joab looked at his watch. “It’s after two.”
“Is that all?” asked Ilana. “It’s a long night, the longest I’ve ever lived through.”
“Yes, it’s long,” Joab agreed.
Ilana bit her lips. “There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It’s like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: It’s raining today and it’s going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century. Now I say to myself: There’s night now and there will be night tomorrow, and the day, the week, the century after.”
She paused abruptly, took a handkerchief from the cuff of her blouse and wiped her perspiring forehead.
“I wonder why it’s so stuffy in here,” she said, “particularly this late at night.”
“It will be cooler early tomorrow,” promised Joab.
“I hope so,” said Ilana. “What time does the sun rise?”
“Around five o’clock.”
“And what time is it now?”
“Twenty past two,” said Joab, looking aga
in at his watch.
“Aren’t you hot, Elisha?” Ilana asked me.
“Yes, I am,” I answered.
Ilana went back to her place at the table. I walked over to the window and looked out. The city seemed faraway and unreal. Deep in sleep, it spawned anxious dreams, hopeful dreams, dreams which would proliferate other dreams on the morrow. And these dreams in their turn would engender new heroes, who would live through the night and prepare to die at dawn, to die and to give death.
“Yes, I’m hot, Ilana,” I said. “I’m stifling.”
I DON’T KNOW how long I stood, sweating, beside the open window, before a warm, vibrant, reassuring hand was laid on my shoulder. It was Ilana.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
“I’m thinking of the night,” I told her. “Always the same thing—”
“And of John Dawson?”
“Yes, of John Dawson.”
Somewhere in the city a light shone in a window and then went out. No doubt a man had looked at his watch or a mother had gone to find out whether her child was smiling in his sleep.
“You didn’t want to see him, though,” said Ilana.
“I don’t want to see him.”
One day, I was thinking, my son will say: “All of a sudden you look sad. What’s wrong?” “It’s because in my eyes there is a picture of an English captain called John Dawson, just as he appeared to me at the moment of his death…” Perhaps I ought to put a mask on his face; a mask is more easily killed and forgotten.
“Are you afraid?” asked Ilana.
“Yes.”
Being afraid, I ought to have told her, is nothing. Fear is only a color, a backdrop, a landscape. That isn’t the problem. The fear of either the victim or the executioner is unimportant. What matters is the fact that each of them is playing a role which has been imposed upon him. The two roles are the extremities of the estate of man. The tragic thing is the imposition.
“You, Elisha, you are afraid?”
I knew why she had asked. You, Elisha, who lived through Auschwitz and Buchenwald? You who any number of times saw God die? You are afraid?
“I am afraid, though, Ilana,” I repeated.
She knew quite well that fear was not in fact the real theme. Like death, it is only a backdrop, a bit of local color.
“What makes you afraid?”
Her warm, living hand was still on my shoulder; her breasts brushed me and I could feel her breath on my neck. Her blouse was wet with perspiration and her face distraught. She doesn’t understand, I thought to myself.
“I’m afraid he’ll make me laugh,” I said. “You see, Ilana, he’s quite capable of swelling up his head and letting it burst into a thousand shreds, just in order to make me laugh. That’s what makes me afraid.”
But still she did not understand. She took the handkerchief from her cuff and wiped my neck and temples. Then she kissed my forehead lightly and said:
“You torture yourself too much, Elisha. Hostages aren’t clowns. There’s nothing so funny about them.”
Poor Ilana! Her voice was as pure as truth, as sad as purity. But she did not understand. She was distracted by the externals and did not see what lay behind them.
“You may be right,” I said in resignation. “We make them laugh. They laugh when they’re dead.”
She stroked my face and neck and hair, and I could still feel the pressure of her breasts against my body. Then she began to talk, in a sad but clear voice, as if she were talking to a sick child.
“You torture yourself too much, my dear,” she said several times in succession. At least she no longer called me “poor boy,” and I was grateful. “You mustn’t do it. You’re young and intelligent, and you’ve suffered quite enough already. Soon it will all be over. The English will get out and we shall come back to the surface and lead a simple, normal life. You’ll get married and have children. You’ll tell them stories and make them laugh. You’ll be happy because they’re happy, and they will be happy, I promise you. How could they be otherwise with a father like you? You’ll have forgotten this night, this room, me, and everything else—”
As she said “everything else” she traced a sweeping semicircle with her hand. I was reminded of my mother. She talked in the same moving voice and used almost the same words in the same places. I was very fond of my mother. Every evening, until I was nine or ten years old, she put me to sleep with lullabies or stories. There is a goat beside your bed, she used to tell me, a goat of gold. Everywhere you go in life the goat will guide and protect you. Even when you are grown up and very rich, when you know everything a man can know and possess all that he should possess, the goat will still be near you.
“You talk as if you were my mother, Ilana,” I said.
My mother, too, had a harmonious voice, even more harmonious than Ilana’s. Like the voice of God it had power to dispel chaos and to impart a vision of the future which might have been mine, with the goat to guide me, the goat I had lost on the way to Buchenwald.
“You’re suffering,” said Ilana. “That’s what it means when a man speaks of his mother.”
“No, Ilana,” I said. “At this moment she’s the one to suffer.”
Ilana’s caresses became lighter, more remote. She was beginning to understand. A shadow fell across her face. For some time she was silent, then she joined me in looking at the hand night held out to us through the window.
“War is like night,” she said. “It covers everything.”
Yes, she was beginning to understand. I hardly felt the pressure of her fingers on my neck.
“We say that ours is a holy war,” she went on, “that we’re struggling against something and for something, against the English and for an independent Palestine. That’s what we say. But these are words; as such they serve only to give meaning to our actions. And our actions, seen in their true and primitive light, have the odor and color of blood. This is war, we say; we must kill. There are those, like you, who kill with their hands, and others—like me—who kill with their voices. Each to his own. And what else can we do? War has a code, and if you deny this you deny its whole purpose and hand the enemy victory on a silver platter. That we can’t afford. We need victory, victory in war, in order to survive, in order to remain afloat on the surface of time.”
She did not raise her voice. It seemed as if she were chanting a lullaby, telling a bedtime story. There was neither passion nor despair nor even concern in her intonation.
All things considered, she was quite right. We were at war; we had an ideal, a purpose—and also an enemy who stood between us and its attainment. The enemy must be eliminated. And how? By any and all means at our command. There were all sorts of means, but they were unimportant and soon forgotten. The purpose, the end, this was all that would last. Ilana was probably correct in saying that one day I should forget this night. But the dead never forget; they would remember. In their eyes I should be forever branded a killer. There are not a thousand ways of being a killer; either a man is one or he isn’t. He can’t say I’ll kill only ten or only twenty-six men; I’ll kill for only five minutes or a single day. He who has killed one man alone is a killer for life. He may choose another occupation, hide himself under another identity, but the executioner or at least the executioner’s mask will be always with him. There lies the problem: in the influence of the backdrop of the play upon the actor. War had made me an executioner, and an executioner I would remain even after the backdrop had changed, when I was acting in another play upon a different stage.
“I don’t want to be a killer,” I said, sliding rapidly over the word as I ejected it.
“Who does?” said Ilana.
She was still stroking my neck, but somehow I had the impression that it was not really my neck, my hair her fingers were caressing. The noblest woman in the world would hesitate to touch the skin of a killer, of a man who would have the label of killer his whole life long.
I cast a rapid glance behind me to see if the others
were still there. Gideon and Joab were dozing, with their heads pillowed on their arms, on the table. Gideon seemed, even in his sleep, to be praying. Gad was still in the cellar and I wondered why he had stayed there so long. As for the ghosts, they followed the conversation but, to my surprise, took no part in it. Ilana was silent.
“What are you thinking?” I murmured.
She did not reply and after a few minutes I posed the question again. Still there was no answer. We were both silent. And the crowd behind me, the crowd of petrified silences, whose shadows absorbed the light and turned it into something sad, funereal, hostile, was silent as well. The sum of these silences filled me with fear. Their silences were different from mine; they were hard, cold, immobile, lifeless, incapable of change.
As a child I had been afraid of the dead and of the graveyard, their shadowy kingdom. The silence with which they surrounded themselves provoked my terror. I knew that now, at my back, in serried ranks as if to protect themselves from the cold, they were sitting in judgment upon me. In their frozen world the dead have nothing to do but judge, and because they have no sense of past or future they judge without pity. They condemn not with words or gestures but with their very existence.
At my back they were sitting in judgment upon me; I felt their silences judging mine. I wanted to turn around but the mere idea filled me with fear. Soon Gad will come up from the cellar, I said to myself, and later it will be my turn to go down. Dawn will come, and this crowd will melt into the light of day. For the present I shall stay beside Ilana, at the window, with my back to them.
A minute later I changed my mind. My father and mother, the master and the beggar were all there. I could not insult them indefinitely by turning my back; I must look at them face to face. Cautiously I wheeled around. There were two sorts of light in the room: one white, around the sleeping Gideon and Joab, the other black, enveloping the ghosts.
I left Ilana lost in thought, perhaps in regret, at the window, and began to walk about the room, pausing every now and then before a familiar face, a familiar sorrow. I knew that these faces, these sorrows, were sitting in judgment upon me. They were dead and they were hungry. When the dead are hungry they judge the living without pity. They do not wait until an action has been achieved, a crime committed. They judge in advance.