by Elie Wiesel
The train tears itself away from Berlin. Leaning on the window, not daring to turn around, I look into the night. Finally, overcome by fatigue, I sit down. A man in the corner smiles at me: it is the mysterious prince I had seen that morning near the Zirkus.
Weary and drained, I close my eyes and at once open them again to return his smile. Suddenly I want to cry—to cry for Inge and her dark future, for Hauptmann and his buried illusions, for Traub and his comrades, for Berlin and its Jews. I want to weep but my traveling companion is smiling at me. And this is how I leave the Third Reich, holding back my tears and smiling against my will, like an idiot. Was it weakness, cowardice, desertion? I plead guilty, Citizen Magistrate. I plead guilty of having fled prison and death in Berlin.
Who are you, Zupanev, my friend? Where do you come from? What planet dropped you into my life? What have you done, whom did you see before taking charge of this district at night? What kind of man are you, watchman friend? What secrets, whose secrets are you protecting? On whose orders? These unpublished poems by Paltiel Kossover—how did you get them? Who gave them to you? You say someone entrusted them to you for me. How did that stranger know we were going to meet? You say so many things, Zupanev, and I wonder why? And will I ever know what you’re keeping from me?
More and more intrigued by the watchman, Grisha asked himself the same questions again and again. Zupanev must have known his father—in prison, maybe? Unable to put his questions into words, he implored him with his eyes, hoping the watchman would understand. Did Zupanev understand? His answers concealed as much as they revealed to his young visitor.
They met weekends or evenings. Sitting on his cot or on a stool, his notebooks on his knees, the watchman became the teacher: he taught Grisha things the boy had not learned at school. He explained the events of the day: the zigzags of Russian policy with respect to Jewish citizens, what was happening in Israel, the problems of emigration. He imparted to Grisha rudimentary Yiddish and some episodes of Jewish history. In sum, he was preparing him for the great departure.
“Me they won’t let out,” he said. “You they will. Some of the writers’ children have already left; your turn will come. Then you must be ready.”
Ready for what? Grisha wondered. But Zupanev changed the subject: no use insisting with him.
One day he surprised his young protegé. “I have a present for you. Some of your father’s unpublished poems. He wrote them in prison.”
Burning, incandescent verses. Grisha imagined his father, crouched in his cell, setting fire to a darkened world with simple everyday words; let loose upon a maddened age, they delayed redemption; the world does not deserve redemption.
“The sum of a lifetime,” said Zupanev. “Agonies, friendships, separations: words. Everything begins and ends with words.”
Soon, Grisha mused, soon I’ll know my dead father better than my mother ever did.
“You see?” said Zupanev. “Everything is possible.”
He repeated, “Yes, my boy. Everything is possible and always will be.” And he winked.
UNPUBLISHED POEMS (Written in Prison)
By PALTIEL KOSSOVER
He is not in his movements,
he is not in his words,
nor is he in his anger,
or his confession,
or even in his time.
But then,
then
where is he?
Night,
before the assault.
A pale rumor swelling
and roaring.
A rumor before the cry,
it flows and kills
and dies.
God,
before the prayer.
A harsh throbbing silence
that strikes.
Memory:
Temples and barbed wire,
corpses and walls
of Jericho and Warsaw;
ghettos for the enlightened,
prisons and darkness,
rocks and whips,
gunfire and convulsions;
dead children,
children of the dead.
Keeper of eternity,
how do you succeed
in not drowning
in the madness
of those who give you life?
Gravedigger,
give back to earth
the mud and the clay
of heaven.
Cover your face,
gravedigger,
and shame God
who has veiled
his own.
Abandon the dead,
gravedigger,
as they have abandoned you;
the living are calling you
because they are afraid
of you.
Life is a poem
that is too long
or not long enough,
too simple
or not simple enough,
life is too long
or not long enough.
Life is a poem
that is too sad
or not sad enough,
too clear
or not clear enough.
Life is too long
and not long enough.
Life is a poem?
Too short
and unfinished.
Translated from Yiddish
THE TESTAMENT OF PALTIEL KOSSOVER VII
Paris, city of light? Why not? Getting off the train at the Gare de l’Est one rainy day, unshaven, exhausted, covered with soot, I had no idea where to go. I knew no one, no distant cousin in leather goods, no uncle in the Rue des Rosiers. I had only one address, which I knew by heart—that of Paul Hamburger.
Traub had given it to me. “Get in touch with him. You never know, you might be able to be useful to each other.”
Easier said than done. I could hardly present myself at his home, just like that, fallen from the sky, suitcase in hand, empty stomach and all. I had eaten nothing since Berlin. Too tense, too nervous. And also, my traveling companion had intimidated me to the point where even if I had been hungry, I wouldn’t have let him see it.
We were alone in the compartment. He sat near the door, I had the window seat. Knowing nothing about him—not even whether he was Jewish—I kept looking out at the landscape, the sky, the telegraph poles, the houses and thatched cottages so as not to have to start a conversation. I was being cautious. We were still on German soil; what if the fellow were a spy? He didn’t look the part, to be sure, but informers and policemen never do. No, it was better to hide behind my thoughts and my homesickness. I was still pleading with Inge; I kept finding new arguments, and never had I been so eloquent, so persuasive.…
Suddenly, I turned around, bewildered: my companion had spoken to me—in Yiddish. “In this cursed land, one has the impression of witnessing the end of the world, don’t you agree?”
I answered in the same language, but with a certain anxiety. “You shouldn’t speak of such things, not out loud.”
Disdaining my advice, he went on, “Fear is one of the Biblical curses. Fear of speaking and listening, of awakening and sleeping: oh, yes—we are witnessing the apocalypse.”
His Yiddish was from Lithuania, pure, melodious, in contrast to his raucous voice. “At the same time I tell myself that since the world was world, there has always been one man who looks around and declares the end is at hand—and he is always right.”
His recklessness intrigued and disturbed me. I turned and studied him more closely. In Berlin I had taken him for the prince of a royal tribe of Israel, so majestic was his bearing. As I said, he was dressed austerely and elegantly, with waistcoat and gold chain. He had a free and easy manner, an aquiline nose, and a faraway, preoccupied look. In Barassy and Berlin, in Liyanov and Bucharest, I had seen all types of Jews, believers and nonbelievers, rich and poor, affectionate and vain—but this one resembled none of them. Radiating a mysterious power that transcended his own person and mine, he was in a category all his own.
&
nbsp; “Who are you?” I asked.
“Forgive me. I have not introduced myself; I am a professor, my name is David Aboulesia.”
His looks and demeanor were neither those of a professor nor those of a Spaniard. A man named David Aboulesia would express himself in Castilian or in Ladino, but surely not in Yiddish. I suspected him once again of having disguised himself for some unavowed purpose.
“What do you teach?”
“The history of Jewish poetry. Or, if you prefer, the poetry of Jewish history.”
And he started talking to me of Biblical, prophetic, midrashic poetry; medieval litanies; songs commemorating the martyrs of the Crusader period and the pogroms; of Yehuda Halevy and Shmuel Hanagid, Eliezer Hakalir and Mordechai Yoseph ha-Kohen of Avignon. He had such mastery of his subject that I became oblivious to the constant comings and goings in the corridor of suspicious characters in dark raincoats and uniforms. We were approaching the frontier.
“The work of the poet and of the historian are identical,” said my companion. “Both illuminate the summit and proceed by the process of elimination, retaining only one word in ten, one event in a hundred. The difference between poetry and history? Let’s say that poetry is history’s invisible dimension.”
He carried on so long about all this that he was beginning to annoy me. We were crossing a barbarian land where Jewish history and poetry were continuously threatened, yet here he was, erect and dignified as a statue, playing with words, juggling ideas—and in Yiddish, to boot. After all, there’s a limit.
“David Aboulesia is a Spanish name—where did you learn Yiddish?”
The explanation was simple: his maternal grandparents were Russian Jews. And on his father’s side?
“Sephardim from Tangiers.”
Where did he live? Where did he teach?
“All over. I’ve been traveling for some years now. I move through towns and villages, I go from country to country.”
What was he looking for?
“Someone,” he said. “I am looking for someone.”
“The Messiah?” I asked, by way of a joke.
My tone displeased him. He stiffened.
“Why not? Why not him? He’s of this world, young man. The Talmudic sages place him at the gates of Rome, but in fact he lives among us, everywhere. According to the Zohar, he is waiting to be called. He is waiting to be recognized in order to be crowned. Remember, young man, the Messiah looks like anyone at all except a Messiah. His name, which preceded Creation, also preceded him. The story of the Messiah is the story of a quest, of a name in search of a being, or of the being itself.”
His digressions irritated me. Who did he think he was? An initiate? A madman, I thought. We’re still in Hitler’s Reich and all he has in his head are messianic theories. He must be mad. But I had no chance to let him see my irritation. The train stopped, we had reached the frontier, and other preoccupations gripped me. What if my name was on a blacklist? And if they arrested me? The agony was interminable: police and customs officers were turning my passport over, searching my suitcase. Aboulesia watched them with a calm, almost haughty look. Because he had a British passport? I detected no trace of alarm in him. The Germans saluted us politely and left. But the strain did not relent for me until the train started again and crossed the border. I sighed with relief. I looked at my companion in a new way: Now let’s begin. But he beat me to it.
“I saw you yesterday, young man,” he said. “I caught a glimpse of you, near the Zirkus in Berlin. I was waiting for you to follow me.”
He really is mad, I thought.
“But—I have followed you, haven’t I?”
“So you have,” he answered. “That places me under an obligation. Make a wish, no matter what.”
There he goes again. He was no longer playing at being the Messiah; now he was impersonating Elijah the Prophet. One more, so what! They were not hard to find, those prophets and messiahs, they were a dime a dozen. I quite liked them; and they liked me too. There had been many, ever since I was a child. Maimonides is right: a world without madmen could never exist. But those of my childhood were all poor, lost, stray devils, searching for a morsel of bread or an attentive ear—not like this Sephardic professor who had gone to look for the Messiah in Germany.
“I’m waiting—your wish?”
“Very well. Answer one question: What were you doing in Germany?”
He left his corner and sat down opposite me, near the window.
“Our sages believed the Messiah would come the day mankind was either entirely guilty or entirely innocent. I went to Germany—on a mission. To assess the country’s guilt.”
“So?” I said, playing the game. “What did you find?”
“The world isn’t altogether guilty yet, but don’t worry, young man, it soon will be,” he said with surprising detachment. “But—”
“But what?”
“Now it’s my turn. I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“I noticed some phylacteries in your suitcase. Now, you’re not wearing a hat, you didn’t say your prayers this morning. What kind of Jew are you?”
Ah, the phylacteries.
“I am not a practicing Jew.”
“But then I don’t understand.…”
Soon I was telling him about Liyanov, my father, my promises. Aboulesia took an interest in my past. He spoke to me of his own. He had studied in a famous yeshiva in Lithuania, had taught in Galicia, in Greece, in Syria, in the Old City of Jerusalem. He had masters and disciples everywhere.… As I listened to him, I recalled an incident from the time I was studying under Rebbe Mendel-the-Taciturn.
His pupils were young, devout, fervent, engaged in penetrating Scripture’s secret splendor, a splendor linking mortals to their immortality. Each of our words resounded in the Celestial Palace where God and those near to Him fathom the story of our sufferings; each of our silences suggested another silence, more sublime, more holy.
I remember one evening, before midnight, Nahum, the youngest son of the mikvah attendant, asked a question: “We have reached the threshold of knowledge, Rebbe, but what use is it?” Nahum was trembling like a leaf about to drop from its branch. It was a dead-end situation, and he knew it. Means or end, knowledge inspires the same degree of fear.
Rebbe Mendel-the-Taciturn hid his head between his hands and raised it only after a long moment. “You want to know the use of knowledge?” he said. “Well, listen, all of you listen: it helps us understand Creation, that is, to grasp it, to work on it and even on its Author; it helps to bring us close to the beginning and the end simultaneously; it helps to bring about a liberation of the being inside beings, of the eternal in time.…” The Master seemed in a trance. He kept saying that knowledge is a key, the most precious of all keys, and also the most dangerous, because it opens two identical doors: one to Truth, the other to the abyss. Nahum cried out, “And what if I refuse the key?” “Too late,” answered our Master. “We have crossed the threshold; from now on, doubt is no longer permitted.” A silence heavy with apprehension fell over us. No one dared break it. It lasted until the morning prayer—no, it drove away prayer. We passed that day without prayer, without food, without rest. Shortly afterward, Nahum lost his faith, his brother lost his life, and I myself felt the ground shaking under my feet.
David Aboulesia was speaking and I remembered Rebbe Mendel-the-Taciturn, whose eyes flashed with rage whenever a text refused to reveal its meaning. I remembered Ephraim and his politico-religious games. Inge and Traub. Hauptmann and Bernfeld. And now David Aboulesia.… They all were trying to hasten events, to prepare man for the Messiah or the Messiah for man. The goal was the same—impossible to attain. Impossible? Not for Inge. In a guilty Germany she represented salvation. Aboulesia was speaking, and I was imploring Inge to drop everything and come join me in Paris.
“… Since he refuses to appear in our midst,” said my companion with complete seriousness, “I shall continue to pursue him where
ver he may be in heaven or on earth.”