by Elie Wiesel
Like his son, Haskel looks out the window to see if three stars are shining in the firmament, signifying that the holy day has ended. Day and night battle for the last rays of the sun. The young Shaltiel, with his naïve and poetic imagination, is convinced that the presence and departure of the Sabbath depend on his father, on the songs he sings in a strong or halfhearted voice, that his father’s power is immense.
As soon as the evening prayer is finished, father and son hurry home to light the candles that separate the sacred from the profane and Israel from other nations. And they wish each other “Good week, good week.” Let it be good for each of them. But, Shaltiel thinks, how could it really be good as they will not be together? From morning to night, his father will knock at the doors of hardhearted strangers, and he, Shaltiel, will be isolated at school from the boys luckier than he, listening to the tutor or imagining an invisible chessboard.
Later on, he will find the word describing his state of mind: exile. That is what he is all week, torn away from his parents, an unpopular exile who arouses uneasiness everywhere, and who drags his anguish along with him. A vague anguish, elusive, pernicious, imperceptible but all-consuming. Stifling. Worse: demeaning.
In school, at first, people made fun of young Shaltiel. They teased him and tried to provoke him. They had no compunctions about hurting him.
Months went by, but he remained solitary, powerless. More than the others, he suffered from the cold in the winter and the heat in the summer. Some classmates occasionally wore new clothes for the holidays. Not he. Often a scapegoat, he didn’t take part in games, and didn’t laugh with the others when one of them acted stupidly or insolently. He was unconnected.
Then, one day, he made a friend.
He must have been entering his eleventh or twelfth year. That day, Reb Haskel had fallen ill. Shaltiel (or Shalti, as his relatives called him) wanted to stay by his bedside, but Haskel wouldn’t hear of it.
“A boy’s place is in school,” he ruled.
With a heavy heart, Shaltiel could only obey. In school, he could think only of his father. For the first time in his life, he didn’t listen to what was being said around the long, rectangular table.
It was winter. The streets of Brooklyn were covered with icy patches buried under snow. As though grieving, the city breathed in slow motion. The skyscrapers were wrapped in mist, in a hush.
That day, the students were studying the Treatise on Punishments in the Talmud and, in the Bible, the chapter where the young Joseph, hated by his jealous brothers, is cast into a pit filled with snakes and scorpions. In tears, he implores his enemy brothers to get him out. Impervious to his pain and fear, they sit down to calm their hunger. The tutor waxed indignant: “How is this possible? Isn’t it a disgrace? Joseph is suffering and crying, and his brothers think only of their stomachs? And after that, what do they do? They sell him into slavery! He, son of Jacob, grandson of Isaac and great-grandson of Abraham! It is hardly surprising that in the Talmud our Sages, blessed be their memory, declare that day as one of the darkest in the history of our people! They sold him for a bit of money and shoes!”
At that point Shaltiel could not hold back his tears. The tutor noticed him for the first time, really, and congratulated him: “You’re crying for the unfortunate Joseph, that’s good. This shows you have a good heart—not like all those idlers sitting here.”
And so the other students glared at Shaltiel, as though it were his fault that Joseph’s brothers had behaved contemptibly. He felt their annoyance. He himself was surprised by the words he blurted out: “No, I’m not crying for Joseph. I’m crying for my father. He’s unwell, and there’s no one at home to take care of him.”
The students stared at him, some with astonishment, others with compassion.
“What’s wrong with your father?” asked the tutor, fondling his beard.
“I don’t know,” Shaltiel replied. “He’s sick. So sick that he stayed home.”
A silence fell over the children as if to punish them.
“Go home,” said the tutor, in a tone that was now charitable. “Your father needs you more than we do. Tell him it’s my decision, not yours. You’ll come back tomorrow.”
Shaltiel went home. Haskel didn’t hide his joy. As Malka was at work, he asked his son to make him tea. Then he fell asleep.
The next day, at school, Shaltiel was given a seat at the table. When it was his turn to read the text, Shaltiel had good diction and knowledge that no one suspected. The tutor and the schoolboys were all taken aback.
“Where did you learn to read the text and the commentaries of Rashi and the Tosafists?” the tutor asked.
“Right here,” Shaltiel answered.
“No one at home helped you?”
“No one. When my father isn’t ill, he’s away all week.”
“How did you do it?”
“Well, I have a good memory. It comes in handy when you play chess too.”
The tutor looked at him for a long time before smiling.
“It takes a lot to astonish me. But you did. And I’m grateful to you.”
Nathanael, the top student in the class, drew close to Shaltiel. And so the friendship was born.
This was such a long time ago.
Did I live, did I survive, for this? Shaltiel wondered. To lose my freedom, my right to happiness? I know the power of the irrational on the course of events, but why does it so often turn out to be harmful? From one minute to the next, everything changes. You breathe in another way. You hope for something different. One minute of respite is a blessing. Memories become a great help.
His world had shrunk to the size of a basement.
When I was freed, I found out that at home, when the sun went down, my family didn’t know what to make of my disappearance. Usually I liked to watch the spectacle of the sunset with children and old people, and invent stories for them. “Enter here,” I said to them, “enter into my story, the one we may be living through and that I bring to life,” incantatory words like stifled cries responding to men’s heartbeats, to the wounds of the earth. As they listened, the children became sadder, the old men did not; they simply hoped for the sun’s return.
Why my unexpected absence? I will recall the facts. All this took place three years after the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, one year before the Israeli Entebbe rescue operation, and well before the abductions and suicide murders that are so common nowadays. In those days, when someone disappeared in the United States, one didn’t assume the worst. But my family was worried. Where could I possibly be? With whom? My wife, Blanca, and our two nieces, Koli and Ahuva, who lived more often with us than at Malka’s sister’s house, first thought it was due to my absentmindedness. They presumed I had gotten lost, because I always have had problems with schedules and geography. Whenever we set off to see friends or went to the supermarket, they poked gentle fun at me: If I said “Right,” then it had to be to the left. Whenever we made an appointment to meet at the theater, I always made the appointment early, for fear of arriving late. Koli thought I was merely late. Ahuva, a redhead, replied: “No, he probably got lost.” Koli said, “Or went to the wrong city.” “No,” said Blanca, “you know Shalti: He makes two appointments at the same time, in two different places.”
The dinner ready, the table set, they were waiting only for me. Finally, Blanca decided to call Grandfather first. Did he know where I could be at so late an hour without giving a sign of life? Then she called the local library, then close friends.
Everyone said the same thing: “We haven’t seen him since.” As time went by, all three stood at the window looking down on the street, increasingly filled with anxiety. “He’s never done anything like this before,” Blanca said. “Something must have happened to him.” Koli suggested calling the police. Ahuva said they should call local hospitals. They decided it was best to call the local police precinct.
Blanca: My husband is very late in coming home. We’re very worried.
The policeman: His name?
Blanca: Shaltiel Feigenberg.
The policeman: His profession?
Blanca: Storyteller. He gives talks in the community.
The policeman: Did you say storekeeper or storyteller?
Blanca: Storyteller.
The policeman: Is that a profession?
Blanca: He says it’s more like a calling.
The policeman: Maybe he fell asleep in his office?
Blanca: He has no office. He works at home.
The policeman: A girlfriend?
Blanca: What? I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine it …
The policeman: Okay, okay. Sometimes that’s the simple explanation. I guess not in this case. I will do a little research. If you have no news in the next few hours, call us back.
The two girls wanted to know why Blanca had lost her temper on the phone. “I’m like your uncle. I don’t like rude people who, because they have a bit of power, think they can get away with anything,” she answered.
Blanca and Koli went to police headquarters, where their anxiety was taken more seriously. (Ahuva stayed home to answer the phone, just in case.) The scene was chaotic, but they found their way to the missing persons department. A polite officer, in his early forties, with a mustache, greeted them professionally.
“First, the good news. Your husband isn’t on any of our victim lists. He hasn’t been attacked, fallen off a bus or suffered a heart attack in the middle of the street. Could he have gone for a walk by the sea? Or gone to relax in a swimming pool?”
“My husband doesn’t swim.”
“And I assume you’ve contacted all your relatives, friends and relations?”
“Yes.”
“Could he be working on a project that requires a meeting, an unforeseen trip?”
“No. Let me explain. His projects are in his head. He’s knight of the imaginary, a magician of the word. He sometimes goes out for a bit of air or, as he says, to talk to the birds so he can better interpret their chirping, but it’s never for long. If he’s going to be late, he always warns me.”
“And today?”
“He might have gone to the library this morning. He came home for lunch. Then he went out again.”
“For what reason?”
“Sometimes he works better when he walks.”
Koli added, “And also when he talks to children.”
“What children?” asked the officer.
“Any children. When he sees a sad child in the street, he wants to hear his story, to learn from him and to drive away the child’s sadness.”
“And then? Does he try to see him again?”
“No. Never. My husband has only one obsession: fantasy. He has seen and lived through too many of the world’s sorrows and bereavements, you understand; he believes it’s his mission to side with those who suffer, to tell their stories. The deprived, disoriented children.”
“Where does he find these children?”
“Anywhere. In poor neighborhoods. In schools. In parks. But once he knows their stories he never tries to see them again.”
“Kind of odd,” the policeman says.
“He does the same thing with old people.”
“A peculiar kind of guy.”
The officer finished what he was writing and looked up.
“What can I say except don’t worry too much? It often happens that men or women of a certain age feel a sudden need to break away from their social, family or professional environment, for a day and sometimes longer. This doesn’t mean anything. They almost always return home. I advise you to wait it out. As for us, we’ll do some research. I give you my word: We’ll bring your husband back to you, safe and sound.”
Blanca and Koli returned home. Ahuva met them with the news that there had been no telephone call.
Blanca had already called her in-laws, Haskel and Malka. She called them again. Shaltiel hadn’t showed up. Sometimes he would drop in on them unexpectedly, just to kiss them or to tell them that everything was okay in his little family. Blanca tried to hide her fear that something alarming had happened. In vain. Pessimistic by nature, her in-laws couldn’t help dreading the worst. “Won’t it ever end?” Malka said. She didn’t make it clear what she meant by “it.” No need to. Both she and Haskel were survivors.
They seldom mentioned their experiences “over there,” in the cursed universe where Death and Evil substituted for man’s Creator and Judge. When Haskel was questioned, he answered that, in order to give an answer, a new language would have to be invented. Malka felt the same way. If you wanted a piece of information or comment on that subject, you would have to force the words out of Haskel. Shaltiel agonized over this. How was he to prevent his father and stepmother from taking almost all their past silently with them to the grave?
In the past few years, Haskel had been teaching in a Hebrew seminary and Malka had obtained a part-time job in a Jewish nursery school. They never complained: “Jews like us have no right to,” they said. In contrast to what they had been subjected to, they blessed their luck and considered themselves relatively fortunate. They were happy to work, happy to have started a family, happy to be alive, or rather to have survived.
Haskel had been deported from Transylvania to Auschwitz and Malka from Lithuania to Ravensbrück. They met in a camp for displaced persons in Germany at the end of the war. They fell in love and married. An American military rabbi officiated at the wedding ceremony, in the presence of Shaltiel, Arele and some strangers. Their honeymoon lasted one day. It was the rabbi who helped them immigrate to America.
Coming back to the present: “If Shaltiel is neither in prison nor in the hospital,” said Malka, “it’s a bad sign. I wonder if our enemies aren’t involved.”
She saw enemies everywhere.
“Which ones?” asked Blanca.
“I have no idea. Probably the same ones as in the past. They’ll never give up.”
Haskel kept silent on the other end of the phone, but Blanca, clinging to a tenuous and vague hope, took the liberty of contradicting her mother-in-law.
“This isn’t Hitler’s Europe. In those days, you couldn’t ask the police to protect you from the enemy because the police were the enemy. Today, here, you can. The police are going to help us.”
“I prefer to put my trust in God,” said Malka.
A few minutes later, Blanca received a call from the abductors, plunging her into sadness and uncertainty.
The hours drag on, heavy with anxiety. Shaltiel, in his delirium, becomes more and more pessimistic. He says to himself that whereas in the first basement he used to pass the time by playing chess in his head, here, in the second one, he feels even dirtier and more diminished, virtually repudiated by life, and his only meager comfort is talking to the shadows. It is before them that he wonders about the meaning of this adventure. To them, he talks about his secrets.
Of course Shaltiel is ignorant of the developments that his disappearance has led to. As soon as Blanca, dry-eyed and determined, had relayed the abductors’ message to the police, the police commissioner, John Ryan, a rock-solid Irishman, made her sit down in his office. He then called Saul, his deputy in charge of antiterrorist activities in the metropolitan area, who joined them.
Saul, a Brooklyn native, had been recruited from the FBI. In his forties, athletic-looking and elegant, he had a piercing gaze behind his horn-rimmed glasses. He was an intelligent man, with a sober, calm dynamism. He avoided the media, so few people knew of him.
Three hours earlier, Blanca told them, about 10:30 p.m., the telephone rang in her apartment. A voice whispered, “Don’t wait up for your husband. He’s in our hands. We’ll put him on trial for his crimes against the Palestinian people. We demand that three of our soldiers be freed. One is in America; the other two are in Israel. If our demand is rejected, your husband will be executed. We must have an answer tomorrow.”
Her hands on her lap, Blanca fell silent with a blank stare.
“He gave no specific time?” Ryan asked.
“No.”
“No name?” asked Saul.
“No name.”
“Not even the names of the prisoners?”
“No names at all.”
She remembered one detail. “The caller had a European accent.”
“Was it German perhaps?” Saul asked. He had hunted down Nazis in the past.
“No. A singsong accent. French or Italian.”
“Are you sure?” asked the commissioner.
“Yes,” said Blanca.
Without being asked, Blanca handed Ryan some photos of Shaltiel. The two officials thanked her and questioned her about her husband—his work, his passions (children and the elderly), his habits (Jewish ritual, reading, walks), his friends and acquaintances. Was he involved in politics? No. Did he sometimes take part in pro-Israeli demonstrations? Never. It wouldn’t be like him. Does he drink? Does he ever use, hmm, undesirable substances? Was he ever away for such a long period of time before? Did she suspect he had a girlfriend?
Blanca, inured to any potential offense by now, answered all these questions as best she could.
“We’ll do everything we can to bring your husband back,” said Ryan. “But for the time being, you should keep all this to yourself; it’s in his best interest, and yours, and ours too. If it gets out, the media will pick up the story. And inevitably things will get more complicated.”
She nodded and left.
The photos of Shaltiel were sent immediately to the police and FBI labs.
“What do you make of this business?” the commissioner asked Saul.
“I don’t like the looks of it,” Saul said.