by Elie Wiesel
“So, explain it to me … before performing your ‘duty,’ ” says Shaltiel, trying, unsuccessfully, to smile. “If I understand you correctly, you’ll accomplish this duty even if you’re loath to do so? Or am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not. You call me a torturer, an executioner, a murderer, and God knows what else, whereas I say I’m a revolutionary.”
“And this allows you to torture and kill human beings?”
“Didn’t you study the history of nations and mankind? The end justifies the means.”
“All means?”
“Yes. All means.”
“Are you sure that history demands this? What gives you the right to speak in its name?”
“Being a revolutionary means making a claim to this right, and obtaining it by having an effect and influencing history.”
“In other words, by submitting history to your own will, by making it your slave, though you say you want to free it. You say you’re obeying it, whereas, in the name of your theories, you’re trying to eliminate it and substitute your own. But, admit it, your theories are not very pretty, for they lead to the ugliness of extreme violence that is the negation of life.”
Shaltiel summons all of his intellectual and physical powers in order to engage in this impossible debate, as if to proclaim that the torture wracking his body is an abstraction. Is there an example of an SS officer discussing his role of killer with his victim? Can murderers and executioners define themselves and make distinctions among themselves, under the pretext that they are acting in the name of different principles and obeying rules that have nothing in common, other than the shedding of blood of innocent people? Can one wonder about the place of innocence in the revolutionary venture? And what if the latter draws its strength from the very fact that it condemns the innocence of its victims more than their supposed guilt? And what if, ultimately, what is called revolution was merely a reflection of evil in the whole gamut of theories invented by men who use their power to dehumanize history?
“What am I to you?” Shaltiel asks. “A prisoner? A hostage? Just one more victim? A Jew? A human being?”
“All of these, perhaps.”
“How will my suffering and the suffering of my family advance your struggle?”
“Thanks to you, little storyteller, our enemies will take us more seriously.”
“But you claim to be fighting for society’s victims. Well, what about me? Aren’t I a victim too? More real, more palpable, more concrete than the others, who are far away and whom you’ve only seen on television screens or magazine covers?”
“There you’re mistaken. I’ve traveled to refugee camps in Asia, starving populations in Africa. People who are exploited everywhere in the West. I’m fighting for them as well.”
“But why choose terror, when there are other more honorable ways of coming to their aid? Did you give this any thought?”
“Yes, I did. But all those aid agencies, all those philanthropic organizations, are founded and manipulated by corporations that are responsible for the poverty and shameful conditions of the suffering victims. Not the revolution.”
“But it brings about its own injustices. Am I not a living example—I mean, a still living example? Isn’t communism a revolution that betrayed its own ideals? Didn’t your Mussolini use the same arguments as you to impose his fascist dictatorship? Didn’t Hitler shout that his mission was to help all of humanity?”
The lightbulb on the ceiling goes out. The basement is plunged into a kind of semidarkness. The Italian remains motionless and silent for a long time. Is he thinking about what he just heard or of what he will feel when this event reaches its epilogue? He seems less confident and gloomier when, for the first time, he answers in a more solemn voice.
“Your questions, or most of them, are not new to me. I’ve already weighed them in my mind, even though it was in other circumstances. What I’ll say to you is what I said to myself, many years ago. There’s no risk in admitting it to you: You’ll take what you have the right to call my confession into the hereafter. And, who knows, there you might meet someone who will tell you what to do in a world that disowns us, a world that self-destructs by spreading death all over, that suffers by causing suffering, that chooses to ignore the meaning of its own cruelty and its consequences. These questions haunted me for a long time. My father was a despicable person. You should have suspected as much. Corrupt, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler, yes, fascist, Nazi. Seduced by the power and harshness of that ideology, he gave in to all its monstrous temptations. To put it plainly: He arranged to be assigned to very special SS units. I’m sure you know what I’m referring to, what kinds of people. I was born ten years later and was too young to understand his commitments and fully gauge how heinous they were. Why did he burden me with a past that I abhor and a fate that condemns me? He disgusted me. And being his son, living in his house, sharing his meals, just being alive, made me disgusted with myself too. I am living on the ruins of so many cultures destroyed by so many crimes; so many so-called noble and lofty passions producing so much rot. How could all of ‘that’ have happened? I wondered day and night. How could everything that was supposed to glorify truth have been swallowed up in a hideous, cruel and monstrous lie?”
Shaltiel is listening intently, resisting the slightest impulse to foolishly take pity on his torturer and possible executioner. He knows he needs to resist the Stockholm syndrome. He knows that in human relationships there are boundaries and that the Italian has crossed them all. Now, the Italian leaves the room.
Suddenly, Shaltiel conjures up Blanca again—her radiant and eager face when he tells her stories, her voice when she replies. One day, they went for a walk along the banks of a river. They both offered the river words as gifts. He said, “Return.” She said, “Dream.” Then he said, “Happiness.” And she, “Always.”
“Somewhere another river meets this one and they flow into the ocean, which is never filled. Then they sing their joy with such energy and tenderness that, up there, on his heavenly throne, God smiles down on them, and His smile throws light on us while the two rivers warm us.”
Under the same impetus, they both threw two more words into the river current: “Thank you.” And Haskel, who had just joined them, added, “Thank you, God; thank you, rivers; thank you, children; yes, thank you, world; thank you, Creation. Thank you to everything in and around us that makes us love life.”
Luigi returns.
“I used to curse everything that surrounded me,” he says. “Whether a deep philosophical thought, a medieval chant, the call of love or the beauty of a child—I met everything with a rejection as thoughtful as it was instinctive. I liked to think of myself as inquisitor and irascible judge. It wasn’t justice that I was defending, but a truth that I thought was indispensable for my own survival. Before I could lucidly confront all the things that predated my appearance, I yelled: No, no, I don’t want memories.”
Shaltiel wonders if he should remind his torturer that he belongs to a people whose children had arguments for cursing the world that were so much more valid—that they didn’t use. But the Italian is speaking again.
“I started reading in depth all the books that try to relate the unspeakable. Books by historians, by survivors. But then I read books by the ‘enforcers,’ in other words, the murderers. They attracted me. That’s how I had the idea of joining people who, out of a strange need for purity, were contemplating destroying the world in order to save it. What once was, they believed, must no longer be. Hence, their willingness to fight. Though of the same age as the generation of 1968, I didn’t join their movement. I understood their motives and had sympathy for their political-poetical dreams, but that was all. They didn’t go far enough.”
Once again, Shaltiel feels a drop of pity—Luigi is a victim of his father’s crimes. But he doesn’t deserve Shaltiel’s empathy. He can’t help but listen, though: After all, the truth of the opposite camp is also a truth.
Luigi goes on with his
story in a voice that is tense but calm. He keeps his eyes lowered: What was he looking for on the grimy floor covered with refuse?
“Then I plunged into the works of Nechayev and Bakunin. I was attracted by the anarchist, nihilist, extremist path, obsessed by the void, the downfall and the nothingness that follow the shattering of passions and dreams. I joined the outlawed Japanese, Italian and German revolutionary groups. The Red Brigades. I met the devoted followers of Mao, Trotsky and Stalin who had aged so badly, unhinged by their denial of limits. The killers who kill while laughing. The clandestine carriers of grenades and bombs intended for any haphazardly chosen victim. Exterminating angels. Yes, my unfortunate Jewish storyteller, I have blood on my hands. But unlike my father, the blood I shed was not Jewish. However, that could happen. You have to know, you have to tell it to the good Lord of the Jews, up there, if you believe in Him: Tell Him I belong to a Palestinian terrorist cell. Can you imagine why? The terrorists think my goal is to help them drive the Jews out of their country and contribute to the creation of an Arab Palestine. They’re mistaken. Their pompous and fiery discourse leaves me cold, as do all forms of nationalism and patriotism. Including that of the Jews. Weren’t my father and his comrades patriots? Didn’t they love the imperial, global visions of their demented leader? And what about the Germans who vowed loyalty to their Führer even after his downfall? No, I feel close to the Palestinian cause because it pushes rational terrorism across uncharted frontiers. I remembered Munich in 1972, the Olympic games and the murder of the Israeli athletes by masked Palestinian terrorists. I had the kind of presentiment that never misleads. It comes from the training I received in Palestinian bases in Lebanon, Iraq and other places. The day is not far off when suicide terrorism will be global.”
The Italian is now talking in a slow monotone, as though he were reciting a text he had learned by heart. And Shaltiel listens to him with keen attention, as though he senses that his own salvation depends on it. Perhaps he also dreads Ahmed’s return, for then this exchange would immediately be interrupted. And then …
“Not since the eleventh century, when Sheikh Hassan ibn Sabbah sent his emissaries to the four corners of Islam armed with daggers to kill their enemies and kill themselves, has the world known these kinds of revolutionary deeds. I saw how today’s young soldiers—adolescents among them—were trained and for what. They were trained to die in order to kill. I’m talking about tomorrow’s suicide killers of course. They’ll go far, very far. The Sheikh targeted specific adversaries; future suicide terrorists will attack innocent people—strangers, women and children. If Death could die, they would be its reincarnation. That’s what will be new. You’ve probably read Dostoyevsky? He tells of a time in Czarist Russia when the conspirators planned the assassination of the Grand Duke for weeks. Everything was ready for a Sunday when he would be going to church. The man was already as good as dead. Except that in the last minute he decided to take his children with him, and this ruined everything—the assassins would not kill children.”
Shaltiel asks: “What about you? Could you kill children in the name of your theories?”
“Me, maybe not. Ahmed, yes.”
“And this doesn’t appall you?”
“He’s a true revolutionary. He’s fighting for a sacred cause.”
“And you? What cause are you fighting for?”
“Me, I’m fighting against all causes.”
“But by helping Ahmed kill—kill children even—aren’t you his accomplice?”
“Yes, I am. But only an accomplice. Legally it’s the same thing, but I don’t give a damn about laws. I don’t see it as the same thing. I demand the right to give my rebellion a meaning that transcends it. My father used to attend the executions of innocent people; I might attend one today. Taking it out on the innocent is a way of denouncing the people responsible for poverty in the world, but not just that; it’s also a way of exposing the weakness, fragility and uselessness of innocence. You, my unfortunate storyteller, as a Jew, you should be able to understand that.”
For the first time, Shaltiel can’t control his anger. Until then, in spite of all the feelings he had had—anxiety, anguish, panic, disgust, incomprehension, the sense of unreality, absurdity and despair—wrath seemed to have been overlooked; or rather, wrath had spared him. But now it cannot be denied.
“How dare you! You use Jewish suffering just to add to it! Apparently you haven’t understood a thing! You criticize the miscarriages of history and heap even more ignominy on it! You call yourself an anarchist, a nihilist? You’re nothing but a pathetic power-greedy adventurer! You attribute your so-called revolutionary motives to the tragedy of my people, whereas you’re prepared to contribute to this tragedy through me because I’m a Jew! It’s not sufficient for you that your father was guilty, that he fueled the hatred that made him important, powerful and tyrannical; you also want to resemble him! Get a grip on yourself; get rid of your mental aberrations! Snap out of your wild, falsely intellectual imaginings! You’re repelled by the generation of 1968, intellectual mentors make you laugh: What are you doing in this world with its tormented, wounded memory, a world that is desperately trying to recover and comfort itself by inventing new hopes and giving itself a little bit of joy, serenity and happiness? Go away, get the hell out, and for the love of God, stop using my people in your ideological arguments—their slow death as they walked to the fires and common graves under your father’s scrutiny, if not under his orders. There are limits even to blasphemy!”
Luigi is unmoved.
“Did you look through my wallet? It’s there on the floor. Inside, you’ll find the photo of a man in a summer shirt. Look at it! Look at his arm! You’ll see the number tattooed on it. Do you know what that means?”
Luigi bends down, picks up the wallet and takes out the photo. He examines it.
“Yes,” he says, “I know.”
“It’s my father,” Shaltiel says.
• • •
One year, to the day, after having left Blanca, Shaltiel was reunited with her. She looked proud and pretty, and still tilted her head. During his entire absence, they hadn’t been in touch.
Shaltiel looked back on that day with a feeling of gratitude but also of embarrassment and—why not admit it?—shame. Even for a couple in love, there are bitter pills to swallow in the course of their lifetime.
They arranged to meet under the same tree, and on the same park bench, where they had sat the last time they met. They looked at each other with the same feeling of helplessness, without kissing. As radiant as before and even more attractive, her lips slightly fuller, her eyebrows thicker, Blanca initiated the conversation in a neutral and direct tone of voice.
“You’ll tell me about your trip later and I’ll tell you about my studies, my work with Professor Goldmann. But, for now, I just want you to know I’ve remained faithful. What about you? Did you?”
“I didn’t betray you,” he answered. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“You didn’t understand my question. I asked if you’ve been faithful.”
“Do you want to know if I thought about you all the time? All I can tell you is that I met a lot of people, asked a lot of questions, heard a lot of stories, and you were always present in my mind.” He paused. “One other thing: I missed you.”
She thought at length before answering, still without smiling.
“That’s enough for me. And now let’s speak about our love.”
He sighed. “I loved you; I love you.”
They kissed and then were silent for a long time, as in the past, before expressing the feelings close to their hearts. Shaltiel felt the onset of desire; she too. Nothing seemed to have changed. The park was still leafy and green; the passersby still had their worries; the sky, its color. And two youths were about to receive from each other the joy of the human truth that lights up the eternal passions of mankind.
“Listen, Shalti, I have a question that’s tormenting me,” Blanca said, loweri
ng her head, and then raising it and looking at him straight in the eyes. “Did you ever wonder how we managed to love each other for so long without making love?”
Shaltiel felt a pang of anguish. “Yes, of course, I often wondered. Because, as you know, I wanted to, terribly. But I felt you didn’t want to, or rather that you weren’t ready.”
She saw herself again as a little girl, facing her parents and their usual reproaches that were not always unfair.
“You were right. I wasn’t ready.”
Shaltiel felt a nascent anxiety though he couldn’t fathom its origin or consequences. A doubt went through his mind: Perhaps she isn’t a virgin. How could he ask her without humiliating her? Didn’t she have the right to have known someone before meeting him?
She seemed to decipher his look of sadness.
“Yes, you guessed it. But it isn’t what you think …”
Composing herself, she took a deep breath and held back her sighs before confiding in him.
She must have been thirteen years old. Going home one night after dining at a friend’s house, she was brutally attacked by a stranger. He had hit her over and over again to silence her screams as he raped her. She was ashamed of going home.
Shaltiel felt anger well up in him, not against his girlfriend, but against an environment where such crimes could occur. If he saw this man in the street, would he be able to contain his rage?
“I was afraid and I was ashamed,” Blanca continued. “I was afraid of what you might say or do. That’s why, before, I couldn’t …”
Shaltiel took her in his arms and whispered in her ear.
“I love you for who you are: innocence itself, wounded, violated but unchanging. We’ll make love often, and you’ll forget the rest. Yes, I know, a woman who was once raped remains raped for life. But, in my eyes, in my soul, our love will restore your purity.”
He clasped her very tightly to his chest. “I love you even more than before.”
“And I’ll have your children,” said Blanca. “And you’ll be proud of them.”