by Elie Wiesel
“Lisa has met him?” asks Bontchek, surprised.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“One day she asked to meet my parents: ‘But why, Lisa?’ ‘Why not?’ I tried to change the subject, to stall: with her all such tricks were doomed to failure. Obstinately, stubbornly, she insisted. And so I told her the truth: she could not meet my parents because my mother was in a clinic and because my father, since her departure, tolerated no female presence at home. ‘You won’t ask him to meet me? Fine, I’ll go without an invitation.’ ‘Don’t do it, Lisa.… Let me smooth the way.’ That evening I mentioned her to my father. His attitude surprised me: ‘You care about this girl?’ ‘I … I don’t know.’ ‘And if I see her, you’ll know? In that case, let her come. Let her come tomorrow.’ Besides, he added, it had been a long time since he had had the opportunity to have an interesting conversation with a young woman of my generation. Fine.
“Lisa and I arrived together the following day. Father greeted us smiling. The table was set: tea, pastries, fruit. ‘Your name is Lisa,’ he said to her, shaking her hand. He repeated: ‘Lisa, Lisa.’ And she answered that yes in fact that was her name. With the help of her sharp sense of humor, she overcame the malaise that hovered over the living room. She reminisced about her childhood—about the first time she realized that her name and she were one, the origins of her first name, her father’s family roots. She teased me about my shyness with the other girls in class. ‘Do you know that your son almost got a terribly bad mark in logic because he was so intimidated by the professor he could not utter a coherent sentence? You see, the professor of logic is Annette Bergman, and she drives all the boys crazy.…’ Lisa stayed three hours. She was already at the door when my father, squeezing her hand with great warmth, said to her: ‘So your name is Lisa.’ He had closed the circle by saying the same thing, and he had said nothing else.
“That’s all very well,” says Bontchek. “Still your father likes Lisa whereas he shuns and excludes me. What could I have done to deserve this?”
“You’re on the wrong track, believe me. My father tends to keep his distance from people. He is reserved. But that does not mean that he is against you or anyone else.”
Bontchek is not to be convinced. He is obsessed by the coldness he senses in my father.
“Is it because I used to chase girls? Because I was always ready for a fight, always eager to make a deal? Is he reproaching me—still—for my dissolute past? My escapades?”
“You’re being silly. And unfair. Try to understand: my father likes solitude and silence; in fact that is why he chose to become a librarian.”
One day, in the library, I had seen him with a young-looking woman whose bearing and sensuality I have never forgotten: just thinking about her does something to me. Her dark hair fell freely over her shoulders; her sensuous lips spelled invitation and desire. There she stood in front of my father’s desk, asking his opinion on Charles Ketter’s posthumous poems; he advised: “Read the early ones, reread the last.” She leaned over to look at the work he was studying: “Paritus? Who is he?” “A one-eyed man who meditated in exile.” Oddly this provoked her: “Will you have dinner with me? I’m hungry.” I was shocked by my father’s icy response: “We are in a sanctuary, madam, not on a cruise ship.” She dissolved into tears and so did I. I was ten. I never saw her again. And now as I think of it, I realize that I miss her, have been missing her for a long time: no doubt I am more sociable than my father.
“You don’t understand, you no longer understand my father,” I tell Bontchek again. “Even I find myself excluded by his silence. Evidently he prefers his ghosts to the living. He may even consider himself a ghost. Have you seen him walk along the street? He floats, he glides, he threads his way among the passersby without ever brushing against them. Does he love death? I don’t think so. But he loves the dead. He’ll love me when I’m dead. You, too, Bontchek, he’ll love you when you’re dead.”
Since Bontchek says nothing, I continue:
“Perhaps you think I’m too hard on him. I probably am. And yet I do love him. My love for him is total. But not blinding. He hides behind his eyelids, he shuts me out of his past. Let’s face it, Bontchek, without your help, I would have learned nothing about what he endured in the Davarowsk ghetto. He doesn’t answer my questions. Does he even hear them? I want to know, I tell him. The beginning of a story, the vestiges of a memory, I want to know what you knew about life, the world, the mystery of life, I want to know what you experienced in the company of human beasts who claimed history and God as their own; I want to understand, I want to understand you. Nothing doing: he stares at me, his gaze becomes darker and darker and he becomes more and more agitated; he sets his jaw, swallows his saliva and says nothing. He neither wishes nor is able to confide in me.
“Oh, I know: you’ll tell me that all sons have problems with their fathers. The generation gap and other such nonsense. But it’s not the same. The things my father could tell me, no man will reveal to his son. Yet all I want is his trust.
“I remember: one Friday evening we were alone and I became angry. I lost my temper. I became disrespectful. Why? It was fashionable to be ashamed of one’s parents at that time, toward the end of the sixties. The country was upside down, embroiled in a massive upheaval. A blinding wrath had descended upon my generation. We didn’t speak, we shouted. We loved violently, we loved violence.
“We had just finished the Shabbat meal and my father wanted to know whether I was staying home. In fact, I had no plans to go out. But I felt the need to lie:
“ ‘No, I’m expected somewhere.’
“ ‘Who would expect you on a Friday night? You know I like to have you here.’
“I don’t know why but I exploded:
“ ‘You want me to be here? But why? To honor me with your silence? Do you think it’s fun to see you gloomy all the time?’
“I don’t know what got into me but I couldn’t control myself.
“ ‘You claim to be a good Jew, you observe the laws of Shabbat, you claim to be my father, but isn’t it a father’s duty to pass on his knowledge, his experience to his son? Am I not your son, your only son? What kind of father are you if you persist in living sealed off behind a wall?’
“And to hurt him even more, I shot out this impudent remark:
“ ‘No wonder we’re alone tonight and every night. My mother, my poor mother, clearly it is you who made her sick!’
“My father opened his eyes wide and closed them immediately; he was breathing hard. Was it the reflection of the candles on the table? His face suddenly looked yellow and red, crossed with deep shadows. My heart heavy and my mind in turmoil, I left him to go nowhere. I had offended him. Wounded him. Ask his forgiveness? Dazed with grief and remorse I wandered through Brooklyn feeling excommunicated. The songs wafting out of the lighted homes, the joy they expressed, seemed to repudiate me, to condemn me to shame and contempt. I recalled the Biblical law: a son who insults his father deserves the supreme punishment. Why had I done it? To avenge my mother? To conform to the spirit of the times? How could I make up for what I had done? Had I turned on my heels and gone home, had I thrown myself into my father’s arms to cry with him or for him, I could have fixed everything. But something stopped me from doing that. I think I wanted to feel guilty, I wanted to go to the end of my guilt, and every moment compounded my error and increased my uneasiness. Why? In order to suffer, of course. I made him suffer so as to suffer more myself.”
I said it before: like my contemporaries I was going through a crisis. One that had nothing to do with my personal life. My generation was undergoing profound crises; we had become painfully conscious of society’s ills on an international scale. Student uprisings in Paris and other capitals of Europe were analyzed and reanalyzed on every campus. Something like a nausea of epidemic proportions was driving thousands of young people to repudiate gods and idols living or dead. Yes, nausea is the word that best describes the feeling tha
t drove my comrades, those I knew and the others, of that period. Ideas and ideals, slogans and principles, old and rigid theories and systems: everything that was linked to the past, we rejected scornfully. Suddenly parents were afraid of their children, teachers of their students. In the movies, it was the criminal not the cop who won our sympathy. In philosophy, the least important subject was … philosophy. In literature, negation of style was in style. Morality, humanism were funny words. It was enough to pronounce the word ‘soul’ to send your listeners into paroxysms of laughter. Sometimes Lisa and I would visit friends: there was drinking, undressing, lovemaking while reciting the Bhagavadgita, a mingling of obscenity and prayer, generosity and cruelty, and all this in the name of protest and so-called revolutionary change. It was pure chaos. The young wished to appear older, the old to remain young; the girls dressed as boys, the boys paraded as savages. “If this continues,” I said to Lisa, “the Messiah will refuse to come.” She made a gesture of disdain: “The Messiah? Who is that? Do you think that I should make his acquaintance?” To her way of thinking he had to be a madman, therefore, someone she wanted to meet.
Lisa was active in the radical Left and tried hard to involve me. I was treated to huge rallies, fiery rhetoric, demonstrations involving socially oppressed people, the deprived, the wretched, the ethnic and sexual minorities. The battle was in Vietnam but the front line cut across the campus. The present was being disfigured, but we were challenging the past, unmasking political machinations, denouncing authority. The university no longer taught literature or sociology but revolution or counterrevolution and even countercounterrevolution of the Right or the Left or in between. The students no longer knew how to construct a sentence, formulate a thought, and were proud of it. If a professor happened to voice his displeasure, he was boycotted, perhaps even told to go back to his scholarly works, his archaic ideas. Next time, he had better make sure to be born into another society, another era.
It would be foolish to deny the influence Lisa had on me. She was Rosa Luxemburg, the Pasionaria, my own Joan of Arc; she was leading the masses on to the barricades. Watching her in action I loved her even more. I vaguely felt that this movement of revolt she had made her own brought me closer to my father’s memories, to the victims’ dead memories. It wasn’t clear to me how. I wasn’t able to think it through, but I didn’t care. I thought: So what, I’ll think about it some other time. Indeed, other priorities had emerged: the march on Washington, the demonstration in front of the White House. And Lisa, my number one priority. I loved Lisa and Lisa loved political strife: the typical modern couple. Was my father pleased? If so, he didn’t show it. But neither did he say he wasn’t. While campuses were burning and institutions were tottering, my father sank deeper and deeper into his meditation on Paritus. Mankind was racing to destruction, the nuclear cloud was stretching to the horizon, but he went on analyzing sentences that only seven times seven people, himself included, would ever read.
It was Lisa, too, who introduced me to acid. At first I resisted. I gave in only when she found a way to link the drug to … my father. Nothing complicated about that: she linked everything to my parents!
“You go on a ‘trip’ and you are free, liberated,” she said. “Free of your father, of your father as of everything else. Isn’t that what you’re trying to accomplish?”
“Maybe, I’m not so sure. I am less concerned with freeing myself of my father than with freeing him. He is the one you should convince to take LSD.”
Never mind, she would have to find a better argument. As always when faced with a complicated problem she sat down on the floor, crossed her legs and thought out loud:
“No thanks. Even if he says yes, all he will remember in the end is that my name is Lisa. It’s you I want. Come with me. You won’t regret it, I promise. Are you afraid?”
“Frankly, yes. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. And you’d like me to take LSD just like that? Don’t waste your time.…”
“You don’t understand,” she pleaded. “You suck on a lump of sugar and you succeed in transcending yourself; you become other, you attain the celestial heights of the beyond. In one hour you become the equal of Buddha, of Moses. And you, you’ll go higher than they ever went. Come on, what do you have to lose? Your earthly ties? Your security? Come with me and you will dominate the unknown, you will come out of yourself, you will be yourself, come.…”
Suddenly I had an idea: in the course of the trip I might be able to get closer to my father; I might see his invisible universe, I might live his fear of death, I might live his death. What he had withheld from me in words I would find in images, I would see with my soul.… I agreed.
“On one condition,” I said. “I’ll do it once. After that, no more. Will you promise not to insist?”
She promised.
“I’m not worried,” she said, laughing. “You’ll like it. You’ll ask for more.”
“We’ll see.”
The trip was set for the following week, in her tiny new studio in the Village. In the meantime I did some research. Three books a day on the subject: usage, effects and dangers. My father was surprised to see me, night after night, bring home from the library books on hallucinogens.
“Are you doing work on the subject?”
“Yes. For my psychology professor.”
“I see.”
And after a slight hesitation:
“You won’t let yourself be tempted.…”
“Don’t worry, Father.”
The dreaded and anticipated evening finally arrived. Lisa, gentle and solemn, gave me her instructions on how to prepare myself: Relax, let yourself go. Fly. Jump.
First, I conjured up my friend Bontchek. I recalled his stories of the ghetto. And abruptly, drawn by an irresistible force, I am far away, a very small boy at my father’s side. Miserable. Confronting a starving, terrified mob. And, inexplicably, I am two people at once: I look at a trembling child and I am that child. I snuggle against my grandfather but at the same time I seek refuge in the crook of my father’s arm. I feel like crying and not crying, howling and being quiet, running away and remaining still, I want to be and to cease to be, I see myself double and not at all, very tiny and terribly old and I ache, I ache, I feel my heart bursting with fear and happiness, yes happiness at being able to feel such pain, I feel my body becoming one with the body of creation and my mind becoming one with that of the creator, I feel every parcel of the earth, every fiber of my body, every cell of my being and they all oppress me they are so heavy, they are so light, and they all pull me skyward while pushing me downward, is that why my tears start to flow? Is that why I am speaking to them, calling them, drawing them close to penetrate me as a flame penetrates darkness? I hurt, the pain is overwhelming, and yet I don’t care because I know that it is from and for my father, that it is because of him that, all of a sudden, I feel the need to hide, to huddle over there in the corner of my room, in the bend of the planet, that it is because of him also that I am shrinking more and more until I am small, smaller, reviving the child in me, even dying in his stead in the void, in the black and scorching nothingness.…
“You scared me,” said Lisa. “You shouted, you wept. You begged Death to desist. And Life to illuminate the world. You said things, things that are not like you: you were not you.”
Exhausted, breathless, I was coming back slowly, painfully, to my alternately numb and outrageously stimulated senses. My father, I thought. But my father had remained silent. Even in my hallucinated vision I had been unable to make him speak. I had spoken for him, but he had said nothing.
Suddenly I thought of Bontchek. Soon after their reunion my father began exhibiting surprising signs of nervousness with regard to his former comrade. Surprising because for him that is rare. Even when he is tormented or anxious, he will not let it show; even when he is angry, his eyes are not. Why was he so rude to Bontchek?
I remember the scene clearly: we are in the living room and Bontchek who is visiting our home
for the first time is enjoying his slivovitz sip by sip. As I watch him I think to myself: strange character; a mixture of martyr and hedonist. A black, really black face as though covered with soot, flattened nose, powerful neck, square chest, he looks like a boxing coach or a fugitive from the Foreign Legion. But as soon as he opens his mouth, he communicates tenderness.
Clandestine journeys and struggles, the establishment of networks, adventures in the underground, the aftermath of World War II, Palestine, Israel and its wars: he tries to summarize the years in a few hours.
He seems to be trying to please or to justify himself. My father listens to him, amiably, attentively; he’s clearly glad to see him again. The complicity between them is obvious. As always when I am in the presence of two beings whose relationship is genuine I am moved. I tell myself: “These two friends have known the unspeakable; one day they will begin to testify and will continue to the end of time.” In my imagination I see the Messiah whom Simha has brought; I see Him approaching on tiptoe so as not to disturb us.
Suddenly I become aware of a change: my father is surreptitiously glancing at the clock on the wall opposite the window. He is becoming impatient: this is the last Thursday of the month, Simha will soon be arriving for their regular session. It is past seven; it is getting late. How is my father going to extricate himself from this rather delicate reunion? In fact, why would he not invite his former comrade to stay? Bontchek knows Simha, who will be glad to see him again. I am about to make that suggestion, but my father reads my mind and throws me a disapproving glance. Fine, I’ll be quiet. The minutes grow longer, the seconds stretch under the weight of boredom. Bontchek, somewhat drunk, somewhat incoherent, is in the process of attacking two German tanks on a road near Bokrotay, my paternal grandfather’s village. It is eight o’clock, the problem becomes serious, dramatic, a source of tension.