The Sonderberg Case (4 page)

Today he isn’t smiling.

He wants to know if I sleep well; no, I sleep badly. I always have. Do I exercise every morning? No. Never. I don’t have the time or the patience.

“Well, all of this is going to change,” he says. “I’m prescribing a diet for you. It’s in your best interest to follow it.”

I tell him that I don’t feel sick, but that if he insists, I could play the part of Molière’s “imaginary invalid.”

“That’s not funny,” he says.

Yedidyah and his uncle Méir were very close. As a child, he liked to play chess with him, get his advice, listen to his stories of fallen angels and laughing demons.

Méir and his brother had escaped the horrors of the great turmoil. Yedidyah’s grandfather, in his premonitory wisdom, had sent them to a distant relative in Brooklyn, supposedly as yeshiva students. He said, “Before facing Esau, his brother and enemy, Patriarch Jacob separated his relatives into two camps. So if one were to die, the other would survive. Just in case.” Clearly he was right. But did the two
brothers feel guilty for having “abandoned” or “betrayed” their parents in obeying them? If so, they never showed it.

Méir was madly in love with his wife. In fact, she called him “my big lunatic” in the morning and “my little lunatic” at night. Hence the nickname the family gave him: “Méir the little lunatic.” It was claimed that whenever he wanted to he could blind himself to reality in order to better discover invisible worlds: his blindness and his clairvoyance went hand in hand. But he wasn’t at all mad. Or blind. Little Yedidyah had a thousand and one proofs of this.

Admittedly, he had a fertile, passionate imagination: he saw some things more clearly and more farsightedly than anyone else. But is that madness? Couldn’t it be regarded instead as a power that Wise Men pride themselves on having? Occasionally he abolished time; past and future were equally important to him and he slid from one to the other with disconcerting ease. This was because he liked to catch people off guard.

One day, as Méir and Yedidyah were strolling down the street—sometimes he would pick up his nephew at school—he pointed to a hurried passerby.

“Take a good look, my child,” he said. “He has no idea where he’s going, but he’s running. Whereas I know where he’s going. One look at his face and I know everything about his life. Do you want me to tell you? His wife doesn’t love him; he keeps suspecting she’s unfaithful to him. He has two children who fight over every little thing. A neighbor who hates him. He’s plagued with insomnia. He’s had a great
tragedy in his life: his first child, a daughter, was born handicapped. Ever since, he’s been cursing himself day and night.”

“Can we help him?”

“Yes. You could.”

“How?”

“You could sing a song for him. Go on, run, catch up with him. You’ll change the star controlling his life.”

Yedidyah looked around for the passerby. Too late. He had disappeared. And Méir noted, “That’s the misfortune. We never do things in time.”

The words of a lunatic? No, those of a wise man.

Another day, Méir noticed an old woman in tears. “She’s lost her handbag. It contains all her papers. And all her remaining money: she’d just withdrawn it from the bank. But don’t worry. I’ll help her. She’ll get everything back. And she’ll laugh. And then cry. Out of happiness.”

“How will you do it?”

“We’ll do it together.”

And the amazing thing was, an hour later, Yedidyah saw the old lady again.

She was laughing.

Yedidyah finally asked the question bluntly: “Tell me, Méir. They say you became blind, but I know you’re not. They also say you’re mad. Is it true?”

“It is, my child. I’m mad, a blind lunatic, blinded by madness, blinded by the thick, dark light that envelops this world where we’re condemned to live. And this light affects my reason to the point of diverting it, perturbing it, directing
it against itself, against its source. Do you understand what I just said?”

“No, Méir. I don’t.”

“Very good. Bravo. You could have lied. To please me. You chose to tell the truth. Beware—one day, you, too, might be called a lunatic.”

With the years, he stopped being interested in newspapers. He didn’t even ask Drora or Yedidyah—when he came to visit—to read the papers to him. He used to say: “What’s the point? I know what’s in them. The situations and events are always the same; the names alone change. Therefore we might as well leaf through the phone book, right?”

He recounted how he had met Drora. In a museum in Paris. They were admiring the same Rembrandt painting: Abraham being stopped from sacrificing Isaac. She was oriental, simultaneously stern and dreamy. They left together and, without a word, sat down at the terrace of a café. She asked him to tell her a story. He invented more than one; but he spoke differently to Yedidyah.

“It was during the Occupation, a boy and a girl. Courageous. Their mission: to follow a traitor and track down where he lived. They saw him go home one night, a summer night. They went back to her house. They made love and were happy for a very long time: for a whole night. A small fragment of eternity. For others, eternity is what comes after death; for lovers, it’s what precedes it.”

“Who was it? Drora?”

He smiled but didn’t answer.

Yedidyah loved him.

And he loved being loved.

As for me, I love children. And of course, my twins are the children I love most in the world. Intelligent, respectful of others, they embody the joy of ever-renewed surprises. I need only look at them or listen to them and I thank God for having invented life and happiness and the family. Thanks to them, more than once, Alika and I grew close after a quarrel, big or small.

Leibele and Dovid’l: the same delicate face, the same dark eyes, the same penetrating and peaceful gaze, the same husky voice. And, give or take a few tiny differences, the same character and the same fondness for medieval music. They’ve always been very close even if each one had his own temperament. Leibele, being pragmatic, studied architecture, whereas Dovid’l chose philosophy of science. The former always sought the company of people, while the latter shied away from them, taking refuge inside his books.

Misfortune struck when they both fell in love with the same woman, a beautiful brunette full of talent, humor, and surprises. When she shared our meals, the dining room radiated with warmth and wit. What happened next? It was to be expected: each spared the other’s feelings; the two brothers broke up with her at the same time. Together they succeeded in overcoming feelings of guilt, but Dovid’l left
for Israel to complete his studies. He was wounded in a bomb attack. Leibele departed immediately to be at his bedside. A few weeks later, Dovid’l sent us a reassuring letter from the Tel Hashomer hospital:

Yedidyah was considering going to join the twins, whom he missed more than anything in the world, when Leibele
informed his parents that he was dropping out of university and enlisting in the Israeli army. He quickly became a member of a commando, filling his parents with a mixture of pride and fear.

Some time later, a Hebrew newspaper ran an article in his praise. The title: “Honor to Leibele! Bravo!” He was commanding an operation in Gaza; the aim was to capture a terrorist leader responsible for several attacks in Tel Aviv and bring him back alive. A spectacular success. With no loss of human life.

“You see?” Yedidyah said to Alika. “Theater isn’t the only thing to live for.”

“You’re right,” she answered. “The papers allude to the ‘theater of operations,’ but war isn’t theater. On that particular stage, the dead don’t get back up.”

Yedidyah made a gesture of discouragement. “Unfortunately, among those who declare war, there are surely some, here as elsewhere, for whom it’s a game staged by believers far away who claim to be acting in the name of their God.”

One of his son’s comments filled him with emotion and convinced him to make the trip to Israel: “Let it not be said,” Leibele had recently written, “that the descendant of the great Rabbi Petahia failed to join his people when they were in danger.”

And Yedidyah said to himself that, clearly, history was not a game.

And yet. He wondered how so much suffering could be
explained in this world, a world hidden under the mask of hatred, like a shroud, as a way of extinguishing the last sparks of sensibility and hope from it. How is one to act so this suffering would successfully transcend history by humanizing it?

Recalling the past, his grandfather had said to him one day, “You often hear people say, regarding some event, history will be the judge. Actually, history itself will be judged.”

“In other words,” Yedidyah noted, “Creation may be just one big, lengthy court proceeding?”

“Yes, you might say that.”

“And where does God fit in, Grandfather?” Yedidyah asked.

His grandfather didn’t answer.

Each time Yedidyah hears the word “trial,” inevitably Kafka’s trial is the one that comes to his mind: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.”

Lies, many lies, were told about the young German Werner Sonderberg. How had he managed to cope? As he faced the huge, all-powerful judicial apparatus, he had remained impassive, as if immunized in his isolation. Yedidyah described the young man, but he didn’t really understand him. Many events had filled his memory since then, from both the general situation and his private life,
but the trial had receded in his mind without fading away. Had his approach to things changed, his trajectory? Had the defendant’s behavior made him sense something that might have influenced his conception of justice, if not of good and evil? If he had changed, at what precise moment? And what part had Alika played in all of this? Had he grown closer to her, or drifted away from her?

There was one incident that could have turned into a disaster.

Alika was playing in Chekhov’s
The Three Sisters
.

“Do me a favor,” she said to Yedidyah. “Don’t come to see the play.”

Afraid he would be ashamed of her? He had gone nevertheless. Secretly. With a pang of anguish, he had waited in the dark for the curtain to rise and had slipped into the silent theater. He took a seat in the next-to-last row. Alika lives for the theater; her dream is to go onstage. Will she live up to the challenge? Will she thrill the audience, tense in its quest for beauty and truth, for the old to become new, alternating between the known and unknown? Will she act well? And if not, how could he tell her without wounding her and endangering their love? She acted well, in fact very well. But it was not the right part. Instead of playing the part of Masha, the unfortunate, unhappy wife, she had chosen the part of the youngest sister, Irina, who was nervous,
restless, and scatterbrained. Alika was not very good at incarnating a character that did not suit her.

Would she find out that he had disobeyed? The subject never came up.

Dr. Feldman and I see each other often. This morning he makes me open my mouth and examines my tongue.

“I don’t like it,” he says.

“I’m sorry, Doctor, but it’s the only one I have.”

He doesn’t appreciate my humor.

Actually, the good doctor doesn’t like anything about me. And even less my heart. He doesn’t like the way I’m breathing. He thinks I tire too quickly. He wants to know whether, by any chance, my parents had heart conditions. No, not as far as I know. Perhaps someone else in my family? No one.

“Still, you ought to be careful,” the doctor says insistently.

It is imperative, he says, that I treat my body as a friend. Otherwise, it might become my enemy. And then it would be a nuisance for my physician, and even more so for me.