The Fifth Son

by Elie Wiesel

  “Wrong, I’m not impossible, merely improbable.”

  Surely unpredictable.

  She takes everything and gives back more. Lisa equals constant motion. Endless agitation. Pure energy. The need to lose her way, to lose herself. And the celebration of the senses, the madness of desire. She is capable of anything, Lisa is. “Come, let’s go for a walk,” she’ll say at the precise moment when I feel like sleeping or reading. “Let’s go to the concert,” when I’m having an attack of migraine. “Let’s go visit your father,” when I’m angry at him and afraid to let it show. “But he is asleep, Lisa.” “I’ll tell him he is dreaming.” He is not asleep. We talk, or rather: Lisa talks, talks: she knows how to charm him, make him laugh; no one has a more beneficial effect on my father; she makes him feel good, that’s clear. I believe I love Lisa because my father also loves her. As though following a script, he always says good-bye to her with the same words: “So then, your name is Lisa.”

  To Lisa, I speak of the war, to Lisa, I speak of all the things that hurt. The war, for her, is my father; and my father, for her, is me.

  “People don’t understand us, they refuse to understand,” says Theresa. “They refuse to take into account our tragedy; they don’t stop analyzing that of the others: the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Czechs, the French, the Belgians, the Norwegians, the Freemasons, the priests, the Gypsies and, of course, the Jews, most of all, the Jews, persecuted by us, assassinated by us, by me!”

  “You are right, Theresa. People are wrong not to feel as sorry—or even more sorry—for the poor Germans who persecuted and massacred the Jews, the priests, the Freemasons …”

  She doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand my irony; she rattles on:

  “All Germans are swine, war criminals, that’s all I hear! As soon as the word ‘massacre’ is pronounced, the German nation comes to mind! As soon as one says ‘cruelty’ people think of the Germans, of me.…”

  “You’re right, Theresa. It is wrong not to cry over the poor killers, wrong not to pity the poor assassins who exterminated the ghettos, wrong not to be sympathetic to the misfortune of the torturers who reigned over the death camps. It is you who are right, Theresa: the tragedy of the killer is probably greater than that of his victims. The Germans should retaliate against all those who lack consideration for them.”

  “You are laughing at me,” says Theresa, offended.

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “You misunderstood me,” she says. “I don’t speak of the criminals but of their children. I refer to the young Germans who have done nothing and are hated, judged, despised: their burden is unjust, you must admit!”

  There, she was right. I do feel sorry for young Germans because they are tainted, unjustly marked: if they are content it is because they are insensitive; if they are not, it is because they are honest. In other words, in order to be honest they must feel guilty. Isn’t that too much to ask of them?

  At the university, I avoided the German students. It was as if their language were contaminated, it stood between us like a barbed-wire fence.

  “Theresa,” I say suddenly, “I am a Jew.”

  The effect is dramatic. She withdraws into a corner near the window, her face convulsed. She looks at me differently: it is enough to announce to somebody that you are a Jew and he—or she—will look at you differently. Once more she addresses me with the familiar “Du.”

  “You are a Jew, a Jew. You are Jewish, Jewish.”

  The situation becomes comical. Theresa, moved by who knows what kind of impulse, a desire to make up for past grievances perhaps, leaves her seat and comes to sit next to me. She takes both my hands in her own and squeezes them violently while whispering incoherent sentences. I catch two words: Liebchen and Angst. What is the connection? Is she studying philosophy? She may be trying to reassure me that her Liebchen of the moment need endure no Angst. Except that Angst is something of which I have plenty: there is a knot in my stomach while I travel on German soil. I am going to confront a man I have met only through his victims’ eyes. Theresa senses my discomfort, she offers me her help, her compassion, her passion. I feel her pulse quickening. I’d like to withdraw my hands but I don’t, it is as though I am detached from her, I leave her to her adventures, I think of something else, I swear to myself never to forget, never to forgive.…

  “Why do you refuse to understand our tragedy?” says Theresa, who is beginning to look tired.

  I swear to myself to try to understand all tragedies, hers included; even if, of course, it has nothing to do with that of the Jews.

  Thank God, she’s asleep. The single bulb’s bluish light bounces off her throat and slides down her chest. What or whom is she dreaming of? I dream of Lisa. In my delirium I see her at the mercy of the Angel. I am angry with my father and Simha: their failure has a meaning and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps simply this: that the killer is stronger than his victims. The Angel, all alone, has assassinated thousands and thousands of Jews, but all the Jews of the world are powerless against him. Could the killers be immortal? I see myself, in the living room, showing the photograph to my father and Simha. The distraught face of one, the incredulity of the other. The weeks of rest in the mountains, at the seashore, wiped away, vanished. I was in such a rush to make the plane, I even forgot my raincoat. What else did I forget? The night flight, the day in Frankfurt: I am yearning for sleep. To sleep. For good. Like in the sealed cars, long ago. That would be stupid. Theresa would discover my corpse. Her cry of horror. Paritus, my friend, is it you who said: “Every cry is a cry for help?” Paritus, you’re an old fool.

  I am cold. A vague sensation of imminent defeat; the sudden feeling of being the bearer of bad luck. A desire to join my mother in her clinic. Through the mist I observe the ghosts moving about slowly; some are veiled, others can be seen only from the back. Are they talking? I hear nothing. Yet I know what they are saying. An old man wanders back and forth as if seeking someone: an enemy, a brother? Inexplicably he begins to laugh. A woman numb with cold seems ready to explode with anger. The train is rocking me but not enough to make me fall asleep.

  Theresa moves restlessly; she is nervous because I am nervous. In her dreams she tries perhaps to understand me. She sleeps and I watch her sleep. And I think of Lisa: I like to watch her sleep. The better to possess her? The better to give myself to her. And deep inside me there is a small frightened Jewish boy who looks at her with me, through me, a small boy killed by a highborn German officer.

  Sleep, Theresa. Surely I am not angry with you. The only being who really inspires animosity, a fierce hatred, in me is the Angel. The others don’t count. He alone obsesses me. I want to hate him, I hate him for having killed and for having escaped death. Everything inside me demands that my hate grow from day to day, from memory to memory, from page to page. It is because I cannot hate anyone that I am determined to hate him. It is because I am against violence that I wish for his defeat, his agony. Even though I cannot hurt anyone, I want to imagine, I want to see him dead, to complete my father’s work, to finally taste revenge. Afterward, I shall stand before my father and tell him: “I have seen the man responsible for Ariel’s death, I have seen the assassin of the Jews of Davarowsk.” And he will say: “All right, so you’ve seen him; what have you done with him?” That is the question. What am I going to do, my God, what am I going to do?

  Did I doze off? Suddenly, it’s dawn; the sun’s rays filter into the compartment. The train speeds along, growling and groaning, like a sick animal fleeing through the night.

  Theresa opens one eye, seems surprised to discover me next to her, then remembers. She stretches smiling.

  “We’re arriving soon.”

  She stands up, straightens her skirt, her blouse, her hair; I look away.

  “Half an hour,” she says.

  She takes her handbag, goes to the lavatory and comes back combed, made up, buttoned, her face under control. Who is she? Theresa, a common name. Theresa who? What kind of
life does she lead? The next minutes are both long and fleeting and, in any case, unnerving. Whatever I say will ring false. Polite banalities. And what if I grabbed her, just like that, without preamble? Not my style. And then she’d say: really, you Jews.… And also: Lisa would be upset with me. And my father. What’s more, I don’t feel like it. A word of advice from our dear Paritus comes to mind: “To journey through life, man must choose between nausea and a smile.”

  “I hope that your visit to Germany will be successful and pleasant,” says Theresa.

  Successful and pleasant? Precisely the words she should not have used. The Angel used them before sending the Jews of Davarowsk to be “relocated.” If he wished them a successful journey, it meant that he had marked them for annihilation; if he predicted for them a pleasant journey, it meant that he was sending them to a hard labor camp.

  “You are the first Jew I have met,” says Theresa. “You’re not as I imagined them. You encourage and reject with the same gesture. You’d like to inspire affection but you’re too scared. You run away from the present and reach simultaneously into the future and into the past so that in the end you are nowhere.”

  I pretend not to smile, to understand, to consent, I pretend that I am evolving outside the present, beyond time; I pretend to be engaged in living.

  At last, the train slows down. Here are the sidings, the platforms of Graustadt’s central station. Theresa moves toward the door; a moment’s hesitation: should she kiss me? Take me as lover, confidant, yoga instructor? She settles for a shrug of the shoulders and a good-bye of the most ordinary kind.

  I step off the train. I have two or three hours to waste waiting for the connection. The outrageously modern station is a gigantic supermarket where travelers can buy anything: a woman for the morning, insurance with a suicide clause or a lifetime ticket on the German Railroad System.

  Between nausea and a smile, what does one choose?

  DID I LEAVE the station? Did I hallucinate? I have the feeling of making another “trip,” this time without Lisa, to the other side. I am and I am not myself. Aimlessly I roam through Graustadt and yet I know that I am expected here. In a narrow alley, near a large square bordered by a park, I notice two women—a mother who vaguely resembles mine and a daughter who reminds me of Lisa—they are standing in front of a dilapidated building, they are crying.

  “Please don’t,” I tell them. “You mustn’t cry. It’s dangerous. Tears attract attention. Do you want to be arrested? Do you want to die?”

  They pretend not to hear or not to understand what I am telling them; but it could also be that I did not say this but something else or even nothing at all.

  “Come in,” says the mother. “You did well to come,” she adds blowing her nose.

  “I knew that you would come,” says the daughter. “You were his friend.”

  “Your father had many friends,” corrects her mother. “Look at them, here they come. How nice of them.”

  Indeed, men and women are converging on them, all of a certain age, well dressed but colorless. They greet the two women and disappear inside the building.

  “Please come in,” says the mother. “Follow us. We shall begin.”

  I observe her winking at her daughter who winks back. Oh well, that’s their problem. I push open the door and enter what looks like a packed funeral parlor. Someone pushes me toward a chair, I sit down: I need it badly, my legs are hurting.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says a man who resembles Lenin but pretends to be a priest, “on behalf of our dear Ludwig Semmel’s family, I thank you for having come in such great numbers. Ludwig was our brother, our irreplaceable benefactor. Our loss is great and our pain is immense.”

  “He speaks well,” whispers an old lady, nudging her ailing husband. “I hope he’ll be available when your turn comes.”

  “Exemplary father, faithful husband, devoted friend, Ludwig deserved the admiration we felt for him,” continues the priest Lenin. “He was a saint, nay, more than a saint: an angel.”

  He expresses himself in flowery, mawkish language. The audience is ecstatic, mesmerized; some people make a move as if to applaud but think better of it.

  “Never, do you hear me, never shall we forget him,” the priest is spouting, “never shall we forget Ludwig Semmel, the man who …”

  Overwhelmed by emotion, he withdraws from the podium and returns to his seat in the first row. The two women break out their handkerchiefs, followed by the rest of the audience, with the exception of those who do not own one and who make do with the backs of their hands.

  The next speaker is a bald man who stutters:

  “I miss Lud-d-wig and you-you …”

  Here and there I hear noises of irritation; when one is a stutterer one does not make speeches. But the speaker has his own reasons that no one can contest: the deceased and he were business associates. Therefore the survivor must proclaim the truth: contrary to local gossip, L-Lud-dwig had been an honest man. Ev-ven if-if one crossed the p-planet, one could never find a more honest associate.…

  Others echo him. Philanthropist, patron of the arts, protector of widows, Ludwig Semmel shall have his statue. Ludwig Semmel, Ludwig Semmel: who is he? Have I met him? I am searching my memory when I become aware of the fact that all eyes are fixed on me.

  “Your turn,” says the widow.

  “Speak,” says the daughter.

  I should answer that they are mad, that I have never had the honor of meeting their father and husband, that I am a Jew from Brooklyn who has never spoken in public for the excellent reason that nobody ever asked me to, but they are all staring at me so insistently that I hesitate to refuse. As in a dream I see myself rising to my feet and walking toward the pulpit, I see and hear myself deliver an incoherent speech in which I compare Cicero and Paritus, Schiller and John Donne whose eulogy I finally deliver: the daughter seems delighted; her softly shining eyes gaze at me intently. As for the mother, she waits until I finish to take her turn at the pulpit:

  “The last speaker is the only man my deceased husband considered a true friend. The others are liars, cheats. Holtz, do you think I have forgotten the matter of the fake jewels? And you Fleischmann, do you think my husband didn’t know that you tried to seduce our daughter?”

  The widow was in top form. She elicits the response you can imagine. Timidly at first, and then more noisily, people begin to protest and show their displeasure. As for the widow, she is not to be intimidated: it is the greatest settling of accounts I have ever witnessed. Three women faint, two men run away. Aloof, uninvolved, I watch the scene: I await my awakening to understand.

  “Who are you?” the widow is demanding to know.

  “Yes, where are you from?” the daughter asks.

  “My name is Ariel.”

  “You are a liar,” they shout hysterically.

  “My name is Ariel. Ariel, Ariel!”

  “Lies! You’re lying, he’s lying! He is making fun of us! He has come with the sole purpose of making fun of us, of ridiculing our plight, of imposing guilt on our people!”

  “My name is Ariel and I am a Jew, I come from Brooklyn and Davarowsk, from Wizhnitz and Lodz, from Debrecen and from Bendzin …”

  The women who have fainted come to, the fugitive men reappear to join the mob; if I escaped death it is because, despite what you may think, miracles did not cease with Moses and Joshua.

  THE Angel and I were alone; one always is with Death. Enshrined behind his immaculate desk, he was eyeing me in an arrogant, polite and curiously detached way. Armed, I could have gunned him down. At one particular moment, just before the end, in the instant of recognition, I was standing so close to him I could have strangled him. I was free, I had the luxury of weighing all the options, of eliminating all extraneous motives. I had the leisure to consider the act before acting. And to correct a page of History, if not History itself.

  Free? A hasty word, used incorrectly. The act that commits a person sums him up in his entirety, for it comm
its everybody. Paritus was not wrong in his attack on Homer: the weight of the past is heavier than that of the future. Death negates the future tense but not the years, the hours that have elapsed. My ancestors are present for me within my endeavor; my decision binds them, for through me they are able to act. On that level, individual freedom, albeit unlimited, seems inconceivable.

  And therefore I don’t know whether my inaction should elicit regret or the opposite of regret from me. Cowardice or courage? The fact remains that, at the last moment, the so-called moment of truth, I sidestepped the decision. The act contemplated by my father has met with failure once again. I know that I should apologize, beg to be pardoned; I feel guilty. Guilty for having confronted the enemy without defeating him.

  And yet it was easy.…

  With the help of details gleaned from my father, I quickly find my bearings in this small provincial town. My father is with me as I follow the Birnbaum Allee until I reach the Kaiser Friedrich Platz. He is still at my side as I discover the changes that have taken place in Reshastadt. No more rubble, no more ruins. Suspicion, mistrust and superficial politeness have given way to enjoyment, courtesy and consumption. In one generation, the vanquished have succeeded in erasing the visible traces of their defeat.

  A few bank notes, a few lies and a few compliments and the trick is played. As an “American journalist on assignment,” I’m given the best room in the Hotel Italien, access to the local daily’s archives and the cooperation of the public relations office of the Elektronische Laboratorien TSI whose chief executive is Herr Wolfgang Berger.

  His secretary is pretty, provocative, efficient. As in fiction, she admires her boss. As in the movies, she protects him. Her smile is cool, her demeanor firm.

  “The Herr Direktor is on the telephone, he will receive you momentarily. May I bring you something to drink?”

  She is hospitable, helpful: she will do all she can to see that her boss will make the best possible impression on me. I wonder how far she would go to ensure favorable press coverage. I wonder how far she would go to conquer me?