The Oath (3 page)

As for the storyteller, he intrigued and fascinated me. Who was he? A saint? A madman? A Just Man disguised as vagabond? He lived alone in a wretched little garret. His neighbors avoided him, the janitor trembled as he spoke of him. After he disappeared, none of his personal belongings could be found. I would have given much to lay my hands on his Book; but he had taken it with him, of course
.

Through constant pursuit of the character, I succeeded in uncovering his tracks. Thus I learned that he was regularly received in some of the most elegant salons as well as in the Marxist student house. He patronized the North African Jewish restaurant and the Home for Aged Anarchists. He, whom nobody succeeded in knowing, knew many people. He was equally at ease quoting from the Talmud or Mao Tse-tung; he mastered seven ancient tongues and a dozen living ones. Haughty with the powerful, humble with the deprived. To professional philosophers he taught philosophy; to tycoons, the stock market. Young people loved him: he listened, teased, appeased. He made them understand what was happening to them; it was always more serious or simpler than they had imagined. They came to him, each with his problem, his small personal tragedy. He arbitrated their quarrels, ideological and other, and
imposed sentence. The boys told him of their emotions, the girls discussed politics: a world upside down. Even when he scoffed at them, he was forgiven. Too old to envy success, too alien to this generation to judge it. His words were deeds; he had no ulterior motives
.

I approached, questioned many who had spoken with him. Unfortunately, they were of no help. Yes, all remembered him, but not in the same way; their portraits did not coincide. Some spoke of his round, puffy face while others described it as angular and expressive. They recalled his massive head, out of proportion to the rest of the body. And his eyes? Light and gentle, according to some; somber and penetrating, according to others. I would ask: What about his hands? For I myself still see them, see them drawing patterns in the air, accentuating this sentence, denigrating that thought. But they looked puzzled. What was so extraordinary about his hands? And what about his voice? I asked. Do you remember his voice? On that point, they all agreed: his had been a deep, resonant, often raucous voice
.

I discovered the small synagogue, deep inside the Jewish quarter, where he had taught Talmud in Yiddish to an audience made up of Polish and Hungarian immigrants. A first thought, crazy, absurd, made my heart jump. What if they all came from over there, from Kolvillàg? No, impossible. They were born elsewhere. Slobodke, Wizhnitz, Satmàr. Still, just in case, I did ask: Kolvillàg, does that name mean anything to you? Shaking their heads, they answered no. Kolvillàg? Don’t know, don’t know. Your teacher Azriel came from Kolvillàg, I would say. They opened their eyes wide. What, his name was Azriel? They had known him by another name: Katriel. Some smiled as they recalled him, others cried. But, in all honesty, they may have cried because of me. Or over me
.

The most striking fact about Azriel was furnished me by a youngish man with a delicate, moving face: “We had just finished the Tractate on Shabbat. As is the custom, the reader recited the
Kaddish d’rabbanan;
and our Master’s inflection was so singular, so heartbreaking that none among us answered amen, and yet we felt that all of creation was answering amen.”

“I remember,” says the old man:

Sitting on a stool next to the door, a woman dressed in black cries and cries in silence. On the table a candle consumes itself.

“Why a candle in midday?” I asked my mother.

“It’s for Grandfather.”

“Where is he? Where is Grandfather?”

“He is dead.”

“What does that mean, dead?”

“That means that he is gone, that he will not come back. Ever. You will not hear him sing again. He will not bless you again.”

“Why did he leave?”

“Because God has called him.”

“And when God calls, one must come immediately?”

“Yes, immediately.”

“And what if one doesn’t feel like it?”

“One goes anyway. One has no choice. One does not die at will. We are in God’s hand.”

“Why does God want man to die?”

“You will grow up and you will know.”

On her lap she held a book of Psalms she was reading absent-mindedly. Her thoughts were elsewhere, with Grandfather, somewhere in the kingdom where the dead gather around God, saying: You have called us, here we are. I wondered whether her thoughts would come back and when. Tomorrow, no doubt. That was the word my mother often used to reassure me. Tomorrow I would no longer hurt. Tomorrow I would play in the yard. Tomorrow I would welcome the Messiah.

“Why this black cloth over the mirror?” I asked my mother.

“It’s a sign of mourning. When we are sad we don’t care about our image in the mirror.”

My mother. I had never seen her so beautiful nor so sad. I looked at her and felt like crying. It wasn’t her sadness but her beauty that made the tears rise into my throat.

“I still don’t understand the candle,” I said obstinately.

“And yet it’s simple: it burns awhile and then goes out. What happens to the flame? It rises to heaven. Like the soul. You will grow up and you will understand that fire is a symbol both for the living and for the dead.”

“What’s a symbol?”

“You are too young. One day you’ll understand.”

“Not before?”

“Not before.”

“When? Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is far away.”

“All right, let me explain to you. A symbol is a word you use in place of another.”

“Why would I do that?”

Mother didn’t answer and I didn’t insist. That night Grandfather appeared to me in my sleep. Surprised that I could see him, I asked him to explain. After swearing me to secrecy, he said: “Your mother thinks I’m dead; she’s wrong. Your father too is wrong. And you will be my proof. As long as you live I shall be alive.”

“But … What if God calls me?”

“Tell yourself that God’s call is not necessarily the call of death. It all depends on you.”

His voice, I can hear it still. It is that of my first dreams. My
mother died soon afterward and I too had to light a candle, then another and another. I can see them still. Their flame rises and goes on rising. And here it is, immense and greedy, no longer symbolizing the soul of a person but that of a town, a region, a vanished kingdom, and like it, ephemeral and invisible except to the dead.

My mother is sick. Her heart, she says. Nerves, says the doctor. This is where it hurts, she says, pointing to her heart. Nerves, says the doctor, shrugging his shoulders. No matter who is right, my father feels guilty. So do I
.

One day I questioned my father: “Did you read? The trials of the war criminals are turning into a farce. The killers listen to the witnesses’ testimony and roar with laughter as though they were at the circus. How can they?”

Pale, his eyes half closed, he answered me in a barely audible voice: “They can, they can.”

Another time: “I don’t understand. God’s role in the camps—explain it to me.”

“You couldn’t understand.”

The gap between us was wide; it seemed unbridgeable
.

“Both executioner and victim,” my father went on, his voice unsteady, “have reason to doubt God.”

And then the question that was burning my lips and that I never dared ask before: “You. And Mother. Both of you. How did you do it—how did you survive?”

Sometimes I would watch my father from my corner and feel anxiety creep over me. What did he look like
over there?
What does he do when he is not doing anything? Whom does he see when he is staring into space? The more I observed him, the less I understood the nature of his ailment
.

“You think I am suffering,” Moshe had said. Moshe, my mad, my saintly friend lying helpless in his blood. “You believe that I am succumbing to pain. You are wrong. I observe myself, I see myself suffering. The part of me that is watching is not suffering, or else is suffering in a different way. And it is not complaining.”

“But doesn’t this place affect you at all? Aren’t you sad, angry? Wouldn’t you like to go out, meet friends, stroll through the streets, be with your wife?”

“You’re too young to understand,” he had said, grimacing. “My body is in prison, I admit that. Naturally. But my innermost self is free. More than ever. Would you rather it were the opposite?”

He had stopped abruptly, crumpling over even more, turning his head to the right and to the left as though to discover an invisible intruder: “There is something I haven’t told you, something you should know. I am cold. I didn’t tell you that I was cold. I mean really cold. Totally. All of me. Not only my body. But me. I mean my innermost self. We are cold.

“A man in prison learns to say we. For there, you see, you are alone; for there you really freeze. If in the street you notice a passer-by shivering with cold, a stranger in need of warmth, know that he has spent time in prison.”

They were all cold in Kolvillàg. In the cellars and outside. In the jails and in the houses. All the Moshes of the town, and not only of the town, were shivering with cold; all needed warmth so much they wished for fire, fire everywhere, in the prisons and
in the forests, fire on earth and fire in the sky, ruling and avenging all of creation from one end to the other. Sometimes I think that Kolvillàg burned simply because Moshe, my foolish, my saintly friend, was shivering with cold.

“Let’s walk, get warm.”

Lead him away from here, the old man reflects. Bring him back, make him understand. Don’t leave him alone, not yet. Don’t let him sink into silence. Grab hold of him, pull him along. Speak, make him speak. He resists, answers reluctantly. His life in general outlines. Lonely childhood, the usual studies. A feeling of emptiness, waste. Go ahead, answer: Why this? Why that? He reacts badly to all this questioning, but at least he reacts; that’s better than nothing. Terse, breathless answers. Why this taste for solitude. And this curiosity about politics, religion, science. And why the one-year stay at a kibbutz did not produce the expected results. And why he feels uprooted. Go on, continue. Have you no real problems? An unhappy love affair perhaps? They walk side by side, cross streets drowned in neon lights, empty squares, come back to the waterfront only to leave it again immediately. Go on, continue.

The old man is tireless, insatiable. To save a man, one must think like him, feel what he feels, see what he sees and what he refuses to see. To save him, one must want to die like him. One must be he. Except that he will never be like me; he has never known Moshe the Madman, he has never inhaled the conflagration’s smoke.

“Speak, for God’s sake. You read books, don’t you? You go to movies, you have friends, you flirt, don’t you? I want to know everything, everything, I tell you! When you see a pretty girl, doesn’t your body respond whether you like it or not? When she smiles at you, don’t your cheeks flush?

“
My
cheeks were flushed at the touch of a woman I considered pretty and immodest. I was ten years old, not quite. We
were spending our summer vacation in the mountains, near Kolvillàg. Each family had its own cottage but for meals we all gathered in a large rectangular dining hall. Our neighbors at the table were my schoolmate Bernard and his mother. She was constantly laughing in a provocatively infectious way. An invitation to pleasure, happiness, sin, that was her laughter. Jealous, the other women prattled on and on about her. She was doing things, Bernard’s mother, things; I had no idea what kind of things. Terrible, no doubt, for in my presence they were referred to cryptically. I was curious and kept my ears perked up. In vain. Nothing.

“After days and days of watchfulness I was no further ahead. My nights were sleepless: what was it that made this beautiful and joyous woman a sinner? She frequently disappeared after lunch followed by an old bachelor who sang well. They would come back an hour or so later, breathless, red-cheeked. And our dear busybodies, seeing them thus, would wink at one another knowingly. And so I learned that there existed a link between the color of cheeks and sin. I learned more than that the day my table companion had the outlandish idea to interrogate me about her son. I answered politely, respectfully, but there was so much light, so much blue in her blue eyes that I had to veil mine; I lost my composure, became confused. Thereupon, in order to encourage or reward me, she smiled at me and started to caress my cheeks, which at her fingers’ touch, caught fire. It was infinitely pleasant and infinitely painful; I became dizzy. And like her partner, I too was breathless. And like Bernard’s mother, I too knew sin.

“And you? Have you never loved anyone? Are you immune to desire? What are you, saint or idiot?”

He plagues him with questions, tries to elicit confidences. In vain. The young man is too shy, too puritanical perhaps. Well,
no matter, Azriel muses. Since you refuse to speak about it, I will. My love stories always have sad endings, but all stories end sadly, don’t they? Mine, I can barely remember; they took place so long ago. Prague, Berlin, Vienna. The mad, exuberant years between the two wars. Student, laborer, vagabond. A Wandering Jew, learning languages and trades, carting his nightmares from country to country, from setting to setting, finding no respite anywhere.

The old man remembers the only woman who mattered in his exile. Rachel: confidante, accomplice, ally. She had the knack of amusing him. He fell in love with her because she made him laugh. And from that moment on, she rather made him feel like crying. One day she kissed him on the mouth. He confessed his innocence in matters of women. “A man who waits so long must have his reasons,” she said. “I would like to know them.” — “Impossible, you can’t.” — She gave him a long look and kissed him again. “No?” she said. — “No. It is better to leave it at that. You keep your secrets and I will keep mine.” She never spoke of it again.