The Sonderberg Case (3 page)

Itzhak and Orli had four children, two girls and two boys.

On a holiday evening, when the whole family was assembled around the table, I heard my mother whisper to my father, “Look, in spite of it all, we’ve defeated Hitler. Our happiness is his hell.”

And then again, I saw tears well up in my grandfather’s eyes, he who was so good at hiding his feelings. He seemed absent, very far away, lost in the past, no doubt.

He had told us that Rabbi Petahia was born in the Carpathian Mountains, near the village where the great Rabbi
Israel Baal Shem Tov used to take solitary walks dreaming of the mysteries of Creation. Unusual powers were attributed to him: by subtly combining the letters in some mystical prayers and in the names of the angels by the side of the Creator, it was said he could change the fate of individuals.

One day, when he was still in his youth, Rabbi Petahia was approached by a woman in tears. She had been wandering on the road for two days and two nights looking for help. Her husband was sick; he was going to die. She would be left with their six little children. They were hungry. No one in the world was prepared to help her. “Have pity on us,” the woman lamented. “Save my children. You, Rabbi, who arrange so many things, arrange for my husband to stay alive.” And Rabbi Petahia, moved to tears, could not ignore her request. But he had been warned about the heavens: man is not allowed to change the laws of nature, laws created and willed by God. Rabbi Petahia did not listen to the heavenly voice. “I’m prepared to accept my punishment, provided the sick man is not summoned to the world of truth and can remain with his family. I’m aware that the miracle will be done at my expense, and I say: Amen, so be it.” And he said to the woman, “Go home, your husband has his children by his side; they are joyfully awaiting you.” Of course he was deprived of his powers. For a month. And to mankind’s misfortune, he made the decision that from then on he would never again rebel against God’s will.

Several months later, he got married.

AS FOR ME
, I waited a long time before getting married. Out of fear of life, of not being able to support a family? Yet I hoped to have a close relationship with a beautiful and intelligent woman. And Alika possessed these attributes, or virtues. But, for reasons that escaped me, I wasn’t ready.

It was she who insisted that I put an end to my bachelorhood. After three years of living together, she decreed that it was time for her to become, as she put it, “an honest woman.”

We met at the university, where we were both studying drama. No other area attracted me. The sciences? Inconceivable. Mathematics had always been a terrifying mystery for me. Theology? My relations with God left a lot to be desired. But why not geography, economics, anthropology, architecture, or psychology? Why theater? Was it because it occupies a minor, virtually nonexistent, position in the Jewish tradition? Yet the tradition offered thousands of examples of eloquence. Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos: these prophets’ words were fiery and impassioned. Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi
Ishmael, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai: masters of language. Rashi and his commentaries, Maimonides and his philosophy, Nahmanides and his disputations with the convert Pablo Christiani. The Gaon Elijah of Vilnius: “The goal of redemption is the Redemption of the Truth.” Interpreters, visionaries, precursors. All erudite men in search of meaning. Still, for them, the world was not a stage, nor was life a performance. Was their universe too serious? Lacking in humor and fantasy? Incapable of arousing laughter and nurturing the imagination?

Perhaps I simply wanted to take my grandfather’s advice. I often used to recall the conversation we had had. Was life a string of roles? A series of rough drafts? A kaleidoscope? As for my professor at the university, he believed in theater. He made us read, read, and read—in this he was like my grandfather—whatever came into his head. Aristotle’s rules on drama, Nietzsche’s
Birth of Tragedy
, Euripides, Ionesco, the Bible, and the Vedas. Psychology and theological treatises, Strindberg, Anski, Goethe, Pirandello, Shaw, Beckett: I devoured them and they devoured me. We had to study the methods of Stanislavski, Vakhtangov, Jouvet, and the Actors Studio. He admired Meyerhold not for his theories but for his ultimate fate: shot in 1940 on personal orders from Stalin. Attentive to every word, watching every movement of the arms and lips. I never stopped wondering: How can the enactment of representation be changed into living truth? How does the actor manage to make a thousand spectators believe, for two hours,
that he is another person? He recites borrowed words and appropriates them as though they originated in his own brain and heart, and they move me as if they were just being formulated in my presence. This miracle of metamorphosis inherent to art, I was living it intensely enough to devote my dreams to it, my ambitions, my escapes, my needs—in short: my youthful years.

One day, the professor surprised us by citing Augustine: “God is close to those who flee from him, and flees from those who seek him.” And he added the following comment: “In a way this is true of the actor, too. I am close and far at the same time. My body can be touched, but I remain mentally inaccessible: the spectator sees me, but he can’t enter my thoughts. The body is present and so is the soul, in a different way. To perform is a bit like making the invisible visible, but only for an instant. That’s the grandeur and trap for the actor. If I want to be too detached, I will be bad; if I overidentify with the character, I will be bad, too. On the stage, self-effacement is sometimes necessary in order to acquire another self. But more often, the two selves quarrel, make peace, share their daily bread; and that becomes a work of art.” To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre: in a play you must lie to be true.

From the first day, Alika and I formed not a couple but a duo. It was our professor—a short, bearded man with a
quavering, mischievous voice, a face furrowed in perpetual astonishment and, perhaps, a skeptic’s self-mockery—who had wished it. Without knowing our names yet, just our faces, he had pointed to the two of us: “You and you, you’re going to read page twelve of the play.” For a while afterward, I jokingly called her “you” and she called me “you.”

Oh, the good-hearted professor with the bushy beard and inquisitive gaze. His every word counted. His influence weighed on my every step, and on my decisions, too.

I remember our first sessions. Fervor, a feverish desire to learn, intense excitement: simple words became rich and sacred; innocuous gestures took on a meaning that sublimated them. Every day brought a revelation about human nature, its ugliness, and made us discover the whims of fate and of men.

“Theater is not a profession,” said our professor with a solemn and grave air. “Remember: it’s a vocation, a mission. An
initiation
. Better yet: a form of asceticism. When you’re playing Othello, or you, Phaedra, you’re not operetta heroes but princes, gods; you expect the spectators to bow before you in order to receive from your lips, if not from your hands, not the punishment of the earth but a fiery offering.”

With his calm and firm voice, he emphasized that we should each take account of our own morphology and determine how to extract from it the essence of words and the magic of gestures. But above all he was a spiritual guide; what he tried to fashion was our souls. He taught us
how to read in depth, how to assimilate a text and savor it before making it into sheer song, the song transmitted to us by generations of guides and students.

In one of our first classes, with a facetious look on his face, he kept us standing and silent for an hour in order to teach us how to emphasize presence in absence and movement in motionlessness.

“Fear,” he remarked. “How can fear be incarnated? By trembling? No. By laughing and dancing a certain way. I’d almost be tempted to say by experiencing a great joy. A hidden but all-consuming fear, repressed but enveloping: that’s what you show the audience. Everything within you is afraid: your thought processes are afraid of being too slow or too quick, too visible or not visible enough; your soul is afraid of wanting to be too free or not really a prisoner. At that moment, onstage, you are fear itself.”

On another occasion: “Onstage, you must know how to laugh and cry as if for the first time. Think about Nietzsche’s madness celebrating the virtue of laughter. And of Dante, who pities the damned in the ninth circle because they can’t weep. And above all, think of Virgil, who says fortunate is the person who can understand the secret causes of things. From all three, the actor has much to learn.”

And on another occasion: “In his rigor as much as in his vulnerability, the actor develops in his temporary role a role that defies and overwhelms him before it liberates him. Admittedly, he knows his part from the start, just as he
knows his partner’s lines, nothing is improvised, and yet his words and movements must not
seem
spontaneous but
be
spontaneous.”

Fascinated, the students were riveted to everything he said.

He continued in his deep voice tinged with ironic melancholy: “You won’t be surprised to hear me say that for human beings life is often a game: whether princes or beggars, rich or poor, erudite or ignorant, they all have one thing in common: they more or less feign sincerity. And among them, of course, I like the actor best. He will be alone when the day comes that he will have to leave the stage. In politics as in business, nothing is more distressing than the sight of an old man refusing to give up the privileges of his position. For the actor, it isn’t the same: even when he is old, he will have a part to play, the part of the old man. But whether young or not, the art of leaving the stage, when the time comes, is the hardest one to acquire; arriving is simple, leaving is not. You’ll learn that here.”

Alika whispers to me in an aside: “You got that, right? If one of us decides to break up, he will have to do so with artful delicacy.”

Born in California, an only daughter, Alika came from a well-to-do, liberal family, secular if not atheist. She had her first real Sabbath meal in our house at my mother’s invitation. And she only began to fast on Yom Kippur to please
me. We saw a great deal of each other for weeks on end, in our courses and for occasional rehearsals in her studio apartment in Greenwich Village, or in mine, which wasn’t very far from hers. It was a comfortable camaraderie, with ordinary meetings between friends, a relationship with no physical contact. In fact, she had warned me quite frankly: “I’ve known men before you, both older and younger, so please don’t fall in love; it could ruin our relationship.” I promised her. It was easy, particularly since I was recovering from an unhappy love affair and I wasn’t ready to embark on a new romance.

Today, I think about it with amusement: our professor thought it useful and necessary to teach us how to make people laugh and how to make them dream—making them dream was more complicated because it was more subtle. How to look on in silence and make this silence be part of the spectacle. How to embrace one another and even how to kiss. Our first kiss was directed; it had no spontaneity. I don’t recall whether I enjoyed it. But I acquired a taste for it. Later on.

And, one evening, it happened.

It happened thanks to Alika’s cousin, Sharon. She was working on a film in Hollywood and had come to New York for a few days. The three of us dined together in the Village, in a small restaurant popular with students. We had a long discussion about the latest best-selling novel adapted to the
screen. Alika was against it on principle, Sharon for. I was against it, too, but I supported her cousin’s point of view. I liked her spirit and enthusiasm. At the end of the stormy meal, the young woman said she was tired and wanted to return to her hotel.

As it was on my way, I offered to walk her back. Alika objected. We had course work to do for the next day—on the subject, as I recall, of the blind man in drama and the modern transposition of his nightmares. Script in hand, we worked on our parts. Suddenly she stopped and stared at me for a long time. Was she jealous? In any case, her agitation added to her charm. But to this day I have no idea whether she suddenly found me attractive or was afraid of my leaving her.

The rest, as they say, was an event staged in heaven.

The Talmud says that having completed the job of creation, God, suddenly unemployed, set to work arranging marriages. Sometimes, though not always, it’s love at first sight. At other times, the process can last years. Yedidyah wonders about the heavenly marriage broker’s method: What are his criteria in making his choices? And what about divorces—who is responsible for divorces?

And what about the crimes of men?

Did Hans, Werner’s uncle, believe in God? Did Werner? At the trial he was asked many questions, but not that one. It’s a shame.

——

My annual medical exam. Dr. Feldman doesn’t utter a word from beginning to end. He lets the body express itself in its own way. Its language is more familiar to him. He receives its signals with his hands. If he smiles, that’s good. If he remains impassive, it’s because something is troubling him.