Hostage

by Elie Wiesel

  Rising at dawn, I walked alone around the small streets of the royal old city of Kraków, surrounded by ghosts coming down from the mountains, so close and so threatening. In the evening, with Blanca and our friends, I found the musician and his violin at the same place, shortly before he began “playing.”

  I asked him why his violin was silent.

  “You really don’t understand a thing,” he replied in his calm, low voice. “My violin isn’t silent. People just refuse to listen to it, so it resists them. But it expresses itself better than I do, better than all of us, and differently, it speaks. It speaks for all those who made use of it to express the meaning of their shattered lives. Composers, violinists, singers and dancers, all those who were moved, overwhelmed by love or hope, or sadness, changed by the curse of God and human misery, all those whose death throes live on in this instrument—this violin conveys their cries, their lamentations. But people are morally, mentally, humanly incapable of hearing it. I alone …”

  He cut himself off.

  “You alone what?”

  “I was going to say, excuse me for being conceited, that I alone on this cursed earth am worthy of hearing it. But that’s not true. I met someone else who was—an odd fellow, a wanderer, roaming in and out of other people’s lives, he attended a solo concert I gave in France before a Hasidic audience. Why had so many people come out to hear a violinist whose violin produced no audible sound? Some out of curiosity. Some sought a very new or very old message, coming from the origins of history that plunge into the memory of God. Others saw it as an original work of poetry. One old man mentioned a Hasidic school that glorified silence. Another described a rabbinical marriage where he heard a whole orchestra made up of stringless violins. Oh, yes, the Hasidim are true romantics. In a large gathering, introducing twenty-odd great violinists (the orchestra accepts only good musicians), all with stringless violins, is a bold thing to do! And the audience, meditative and moved, listened to them. And every person heard them. I’m just a soloist, and I’m not sure that my listeners in France heard me. But what of it! I can hear my violin. And so did the other man.

  “Tell me more about the other man.”

  “Yes, the odd fellow who looked like a happy beggar or an unhappy prince. He had just returned from India, Jerusalem and other places, from another era. He claimed he could understand things that elude understanding, see the invisible and triumph over the power of Death by removing its bare face. Our first encounter was stormy. I criticized him for hating the dead, whereas my violin tries to appease them. He replied that apparently I was too ignorant to understand the meaning of his approach: It was not the dead but Death that he wished to subdue. That’s why he liked my violin and its music. He even offered to compose an oriental tune for my violin inspired by an ancient text taken from the Dead Sea Scrolls. I said in my view, my violin’s sorrowful complaint was more closely connected to Christian Europe than to the Hebraic tradition. ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘I’ll find appropriate words in the New Testament or in Martin Luther. And if you dislike those, I also know some Bohemian tales.’ This fellow, whom I met by chance in France, is a walking, living library—a kind of human miracle.”

  My heart began racing, as before a surprise. “How much time did you spend together?”

  “Exactly a week.”

  Like me.

  “Did he give you the song he promised?”

  “He did. One without lyrics.”

  “And what was its message?”

  “There was none. It’s a song that tells all mankind: You don’t deserve my words or my voice. In fact, you don’t deserve our dreams or our lessons. Besides, you’ve never understood anything about our destiny.”

  I asked him to play the song on his stringless violin. He did. And I don’t know why, but I began to sob tearlessly.

  “It’s the song of the murdered Hasidim, sung to thank their ancestor, the Master of the Good Name, the Besht, for having inspired, guided and enriched them.”

  “So the fellow was a Hasid?”

  “He was Hasid and anti-Hasid, a rationalist and a mystic, infinitely proud and deeply humble: He alone knows when the hour of Redemption will toll. But he won’t tell anyone. Like my violin, he is silent.”

  I hesitatingly asked him the name of this mysterious person, fearful I’d be disappointed. I was not.

  “He has several identities.”

  “But under which identity did he introduce himself to you?”

  “G’dalya.”

  I knew it. I had guessed it from the beginning.

  “He said he also went under the names Menahem, Yaakov and even One-Eyed Paritus. Yet he wasn’t one-eyed. He saw people and things clearly. Why did he pretend to have only one eye? I don’t know. But he understood the thirst of the gods and men’s desire to make sparks fly, and also the language of birds and clouds.”

  I said I’d be very grateful if he could help me find this man.

  “No problem,” he said. “He comes here every evening to listen to my violin. He’s among the crowd.”

  “How will I recognize him?” I didn’t want to reveal that I had already met him once, at sea.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll recognize you thanks to my instrument.”

  That evening, the musician played a Hasidic tune, which made me realize that, in the face of memory, joys and sorrows merge.

  • • •

  In his prison, in his turmoil, Shaltiel tells himself that he could use the musician right now, and especially this G’dalya who hides behind the figure of One-Eyed Paritus.

  Suddenly he is panicked: He no longer remembers where he hid the envelope that G’dalya had given him.

  Will he die without having spoken to him again?

  Will he also die without an heir?

  Like children, I was fond of old people. Their memories were my dreams. When you look at them, you never know if they’re about to weep or sing. In my jail, I wondered if I would ever become an old man.

  Old people walk slowly as though they are afraid of stumbling. Each step is a triumph. Every thought is a surprise. Every meeting is a new support, a whiff of hope.

  There’s nothing surprising about the fact that at a certain point in my career, I decided to devote myself to them. I wanted to acknowledge them, follow them, nourish them in my own way. I wanted to establish and share a bond with them, reassure them while collecting illuminated or dusty scraps of their stories. Thanks to my efforts, they will not be dispersed and scattered into the wind of oblivion. Perhaps one day in the near or distant future, there will be someone, still relatively young but bearing age-old memories, who will do for me what I tried to do for them.

  The two abductors were separated most of the time. Ahmed was on duty during the day and Luigi at night. In the darkness, Shaltiel didn’t always realize this. When he feared he would go mad, he thought of One-Eyed Paritus and his mystical madness. Shaltiel liked the Italian more than the Arab. Both were his enemies, his oppressors, his inquisitors, possibly even his executioners, but with one he could talk, while the other only heaped insults and threats on him. Before each conversation with the Italian, he would free Shaltiel’s hands and offer him a glass of water.

  Every cross-examination started with an exchange that was both simple and useless. But on this day it took an unexpected turn.

  Shaltiel: How long are you going to keep me here?

  Luigi: This isn’t up to us. It’s up to Israel and Washington.

  Shaltiel: And if it were up to you, would you let me go?

  Luigi shrugged.

  Shaltiel: You’re so different from your comrade. He loathes me. You don’t.

  Luigi: He’s the one who has suffered in the flesh and whose heart was bruised. He was born in a Palestinian refugee camp. His father and grandfather are stateless and live on alms. They’re humiliated constantly, from day to day, from month to month, from generation to generation. His elder brother was killed by an Israeli commando. His sister lost her fiancé; she
hasn’t stopped sobbing since. Have I said enough?

  Shaltiel decided not to argue. But they started to discuss politics. Luigi said he was on the side of the Palestinians, in other words, of the Arabs, and therefore a staunch adversary of the Jewish state.

  “I can understand,” he said, “that the Jewish people, after centuries of suffering, needed a state, but why do the Palestinians have to pay the price?”

  Chased from where they lived, asked Shaltiel, where could the desperate Jews go at the end of the Second World War?

  “They could have gone home.”

  “Home? Poland? Hungary? Romania? Lithuania? Those who did return home were greeted with hostility and, in some places, with pogroms. You’re Italian. Don’t tell me you’re a Holocaust denier. Are you aware of our history? We were almost annihilated in Europe. So many of the survivors in camps for displaced persons encountered closed doors in America and the Holy Land, and had only one alternative: to fulfill their ancestral dream and restore Jewish sovereignty in the Promised Land.”

  “You didn’t answer my question: Even if the Jewish people deserved a homeland, why did it have to be Palestine?”

  “Because no other people in the world have been as haunted as mine for thousands of years by the nostalgia of returning to the land of their ancestors.”

  “Nostalgia is a feeling that leaves me cold,” Luigi said. “What I’m interested in is justice. I’m fighting so that justice is rendered to the oppressed Palestinians. You Jews have forgotten that your hope is founded on their despair.”

  This is still surreal, Shaltiel thought. Here I am in a basement, at the mercy of two killers. They want me to help them make their cause more attractive to the American Jewish community. They want me to share their condemnation of Israel. Since when have I become so important that my opinion has any effect on public opinion? And here I am defending Israel before the citizen of a country that had been allied with the country that had planned to exterminate my people. Am I dreaming?

  I reminded Luigi of a few historical truths: There had never been a Palestinian state since the origins of Islam. It was only in 1947 that, for the first time, the concept of a legal and independent Arab state in Palestine appeared on a resolution adopted by the United Nations. This resolution, known as partition—between a Jewish state and an Arab state (not a Palestinian state)—had been accepted by Israel. The Arabs rejected it and chose violence instead. Had they accepted the partition plan, today Lydda and Jaffa would be part of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside a smaller, if not weaker, Jewish state. And Ahmed could have grown up and led a peaceful, productive existence instead of devoting his days and nights to murder.

  “All of this is past history,” said Luigi in a flat voice. “Why go back in time? That was four generations ago. You can’t blame the young people of today for the mistakes their grandparents made in 1947–48.”

  “Is it the fault of the Jews?” asked Shaltiel.

  “And what about the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories? What do you say about that? Whose fault is that? And doesn’t it remind you of anything?”

  “You’re Italian and cultured; you should be ashamed of yourself. How can you compare the sometimes harsh and severe attitude of Israeli soldiers on the West Bank with the atrocities of the Blackshirts and the SS in occupied Europe? The German occupation, do you know what it was like? What was involved? Torture by the Gestapo, roundups, the executions of hostages, absolute terror, the imprisonment of innocent people, ghettos, deportations to Auschwitz …”

  “Stop talking,” said Luigi, walking away.

  They resumed their discussion the next day around the subject of terror.

  “Do you know who I am?” asked Luigi. “I’m a revolutionary who repudiates people who refuse to understand my wounds. Molded by memory as well as by the rejection of memory, I live in history, aspiring to take part in its convulsions of love and hatred, in its lunacies. It is history that I condemn and history that judges me. I was trained by anarchists in Latin America, the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany. I’m a true internationalist. What unites us all is a faith in violence as the only way of influencing events.”

  Shaltiel remained silent.

  “You have no comments to make about this? This doesn’t shock you?”

  “No. The world you live in is not mine. What do you know about mine or about me? All you know is that I’m at your mercy, and that when you hit me, it hurts.”

  “I never hit you.”

  “Your accomplice did, in your name too.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “In the world I live in, it’s the same.”

  “Your world has failed. We’re building ours on its ruins. I know our methods disgust you, but they work because of the fear we arouse. Fear is more tangible than promises. In the Middle Ages, people thought they could fight evil with evil. We want to fight fire with fire by increasing the scale and scope of the fire.”

  Shaltiel hesitated. Should he risk offending Luigi further? Quietly he said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but part of your argument is reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany—Goebbels, Streicher, Eichmann, Mussolini. They all claimed they were waging a war against wars, bringing death to others in order to rescue their own people from death.”

  “So, as far as you’re concerned, I’m a fascist, a Nazi! A monster, in other words!”

  “I don’t know you. But apart from their extreme nationalism, your logic is no less destructive than theirs.”

  The Italian managed to control his anger. “I’m not a Nazi or a racist. I don’t advocate military conquest or domination; gratuitous cruelty repels me; death makes me ashamed. I’m only in favor of revolution.”

  “In other words, in favor of force.”

  “No, only in favor of violence.”

  “What kind of violence are you talking about that isn’t cruel?”

  “Stop!” said the Italian. “I’m not cruel. My Arab comrade is. Even more so than you could imagine. He fights for his own people; my struggle transcends that issue. If this event ends in your death, he will be the one responsible, not me.”

  Shaltiel drew a deep breath, though he felt a pain in his chest. Now it was clear: The last living examples of mankind that he would see in his lifetime would be his executioners.

  And he’d die without an heir.

  He sought Blanca in his hallucinations. He never ceased looking for her. Her hair verging on black, her refined face, her turned-up nose, her lips full of life, she was by his side even in his stifling hideaway. He heard her deep, low-pitched voice. He imagined her to be the ideal woman. It was best not to remember her faults. Her intransigence, her prying, her obstinacy: No one’s perfect. Didn’t Maimonides say that human beings should not aspire to perfection as God alone is the incarnation of perfection?

  How could he explain their estrangement? Are love and staying power incompatible? Do human beings tire even of happiness? In the life of a couple, it can happen that one fine morning you wake up and the attraction is gone and you have nothing to say to each other anymore. There is no clash, no misunderstanding. It’s just that the sacred flame is no longer sacred. There has been no betrayal, no extramarital relationship. We shut ourselves into words that we offer to the whole world, or rather to the small world that surrounds us and stifles us. The wife is as beautiful as ever and the husband no less devoted, and yet things have changed without any breakup having taken place. The Talmud is wise on the subject: “When a couple loves one another, they sleep well, even on the edge of a razor; as soon as love is gone, the largest bed seems too narrow.” In the past, the sparks flew all the time.

  It was odd for a man who loved children so much, who lived for them and for old people, that they had no children. Was it too late to think about it? Blanca wanted to have children, but Shaltiel did not. He quoted a passage in the Talmud for her, to the effect that at the time of the destruction of the Temple the Sages
refused to marry because, they said, when God shows He intends to destroy the universe, it is forbidden to thwart His will by giving life.

  He remembers their first meeting. He is twenty years old. A bohemian-artist type, nervous, extremely tense, fearful, always on the defensive. She is beautiful.

  In their class at City College in New York, there are two hundred students listening to the lecture by the brilliant professor of moral philosophy Robert Goldmann, a campus celebrity. Shaltiel is in his third year, Blanca in her first. He is distracted as he listens to the lecture, while she, next to him, her head bent sideways, is taking notes like everyone else. He studies her profile, attracted by her way of concentrating and ignoring his presence. He does not conceal his attraction. She is the center of his thoughts. This has never happened to him before.

  That day’s Nietzsche lecture is about his years of dementia and silence. Was he a deep metaphysician or a flamboyant poet? The professor admires him for his style and his poetic originality. According to him, when Nietzsche first writes a verse or a thought, he has no idea where it will lead him. His knowledge is tragic, hardly gay. Zarathustra lets himself be carried along by the luminous force that, from the outset, eludes his darkened consciousness. Which proves that Nietzsche himself didn’t want to be followed in his madness and even less in his suicide.

  Is there such a thing as poetic, literary philosophy, philosophical literature? Didn’t Bergson receive the Nobel Prize in Literature? Plato’s dialogues lack style, élan, hence grace and beauty, but what does that prove?

  Shaltiel doubts that the young student, with her dark hair, tilted head and bright eyes, feels his presence. But it is she who, without raising her head, addresses him first with a forced smile before he has said a word to her.

  “I haven’t seen you write anything down. You must have an exceptional memory.”

  Shaltiel is startled and says nothing.

  “But,” she goes on, her head still bent over her notebook.