Elie Wiesel (34 page)

“Everybody says that,” Lidia put in. “You can always find honorable reasons for inflicting pain.”

Malkiel chose not to reply. “I am going to tell you about the worst day of your life. You are terrified. You have hidden in the cellar with an aunt. Do you remember?”

The old woman straightened her head. A deeper layer of shadow veiled her eyes. She placed her right hand on her breast and seemed to be measuring her own heartbeat, perhaps trying to quiet it.

“The Red Army is attacking, and the Germans and Hungarians have fallen back to new positions in a few buildings. Not for long. Resistance is useless and they know it. The battle lasts from dawn till midafternoon. From your shelter you can hear the sounds of war: tanks, shells, soldiers drunk on violence, bearers of death.… Suddenly you catch your breath. Somebody’s broken down your door. An armed man is in the house. You can’t see him, but you can hear him. He searches the house, opens the closets, inspects the rooms, knocks on the walls, opens the cellar door, stumbles on your aunt, who cries out in horror, flings her aside and runs down the cellar stairs pointing his rifle; and sees you. He’s tall and slim and agile, and he’s full of cold anger. He orders you up the stairs. You obey. He shoves you into a room and shuts the door. He turns to you and glares at you with hatred, and then he talks to you in a language you don’t understand. Yiddish. Do you remember, madam?”

The old woman was panting, and stared at him now as if he were the man who had raped her. She pressed her hands to her temples. Was she trying to suppress some image rising irresistibly from the depths of memory? “No, sir, I do not remember.”

Malkiel did not believe her, and harshly told her so.

“Stop it,” Lidia said. “Can’t you see she’s suffering? Why do you make her suffer?”

“I did nothing to her,” Malkiel said stubbornly. “Someone else made her suffer, not me. I’m part of her present, not her past.”

“But you’re making her suffer in the present,” Lidia said.

“No. She’s remembering pain from long ago. It’s not the same.”

“I don’t remember,” the old woman said tonelessly.

“The man barks an order: you don’t understand. He explains in gestures. You still don’t understand. Then with his rifle in his left hand he strips you with his right hand: tears off your blouse, your skirt; you’re half naked. He drops his trousers.” Malkiel was talking fast, without realizing it, much faster than usual.

Lidia cried, “That’s enough! What kind of man are you?”

Malkiel could not stop. He would press this interrogation to the end and beyond. “You’re lying on the floor in the dirt and the man is on top of you, crushing you, suffocating you, his breath makes you sick, he glares into your eyes, you fight him just as you fight the hysteria that might free you, and then you stop fighting, and suddenly …”

The old woman was absolutely motionless now. Reliving the shame, she seemed vanquished by shame.

“Suddenly a man appears. He’s out of breath. He sees you before he recognizes your attacker. And you see him. You don’t speak to him, but he understands you. You don’t plead with him, but he comes to the rescue, or at least tries
to. He calls out to your tormentor, in Yiddish also, and talks sense to him; but the other is deaf. He begs him not to be bestial; he raises his voice and cries out that what he is doing is cruel, immoral, inhuman; he shouts at the top of his lungs, but it does no good. And then he weeps, this new man. He sobs. Your eyes meet. You remember, madam?”

And in a hard, insistent tone: “That man, that unexpected knight who wanted to save you—do you remember him, Madame Calinescu?”

The old lady came out of her silence as an invalid comes out of illness: weakened but lucid. She seemed to have aged ten years in ten minutes. She opened her mouth, she started to speak, and suddenly it was Malkiel who panicked. He thought he knew, he did know what the old lady was going to tell him. She was going to reveal the hideous and abject face of her knight. “Ha! You see him as a noble creature, rushing to the rescue of a poor helpless woman. You are quite naive, sir. In war all men are beasts. All they want is to hurt people, to humble them, to possess them. Let me tell you what your knight did, that savior of yours whose heart was so pure: he waited for his friend to finish and then took his place. And you thought … You make me laugh, sir.” That was what the old lady was going to tell him. To take revenge because he had troubled her peace? To see that truth prevailed? But then what sense was there in this quest? Where was hope? Was redemption still possible? A secret voice, the same inner voice, whispered to him, Go now, tear yourself away from this place, open the door and go and never come back! And as before, he paid no attention. Besides, his panic was baseless. The old lady would act out no such scenario. The knight’s glory would remain bright and reassuring.

But the old lady’s anger was nevertheless violent. “By
what right do you reopen my wounds?” she asked slowly and distinctly. “Who authorized you to rifle my memory? Why do you force me to see myself again soiled, bruised, dishonored in my flesh as in my soul? What have I ever done to you? Haven’t I suffered enough? I prayed God to let me forget, and God heard me; I finally buried my memories. And wiped out the traces of that day that was blacker than night. I finally forgot the ugly leers, the hands, the sounds that tied me to that man. Why must you undo what God has done? By what right do you come to transform His divine compassion into human malediction?”

She did not raise her voice; she contained her anger, but her fury brought back her somber gaze. Stricken by remorse, Malkiel said nothing. She’s right, he thought. How can I tell her she’s wrong?

“I forgive you,” the old lady went on. “A man’s character always shows in his face, and I know that you are not cruel. You wanted to show regret, and pity? That is no concern of mine. Since you were in my house, I listened to you. Since you looked at me, I spoke to you. And now please leave me. I need rest.”

Malkiel bowed in thanks. He signaled to Lidia that it was time to leave. And yet he knew that he must ask one last question: “The man who tried to help you—do you think of him from time to time?”

“Thanks to him I believe from time to time that not all men are evil. I believe that he was honest and a man of charity. But in my need to forget it all, I finally forgot him, too.”

She rose to show her visitors out. As she shook hands with Malkiel she said, “That man of courage and humanity, I see him at times, as if behind a smoke screen. An illuminated shadow, so to speak. But I saw many shadows that day, and in the days that followed.”

Malkiel held her hand in his own. “I hope you won’t be too angry with me, Madame Calinescu. Thanks to you I’ve learned something useful and perhaps essential: forgetting is also part of the mystery. You need to forget, and I understand. I must resist forgetting, so try to understand me, too.”

For the first time she attempted a smile. Malkiel was affected by that more than by her words: “I could lie, but I don’t want to. The truth is that I don’t understand you. Aren’t you too young to learn someone else’s past in addition to your own? A little while ago I wondered if the man was perhaps you. But of course that’s impossible. You were not even born then.”

“It was my father,” Malkiel said gently.

The old woman swayed, shuddered. Fearing she would collapse, Malkiel put his arms around her and went on just as gently: “My father was the man who tried to save You, not the other one.”

Relief softened Elena Calinescu’s face. Little by little she grew calm. She gazed at him for some time before murmuring, “Then will you allow an old woman to thank you? And to kiss you?” She kissed his forehead. “Thank you for coming.” She kissed him again. “And thank your father.”

Malkiel embraced her and then, on the verge of tears, left without a word. Lidia followed him. They went downstairs without speaking. In the street Lidia turned to him. “Will you allow an interpreter, not so young anymore, to kiss you, too?” She kissed him on the mouth. And Malkiel saw his father again, who had never known love here in the city of his birth; no woman here had ever sealed his lips with hers.

It was time to go back.

T
amar. He would see Tamar again. He would love her; love her with his whole heart. Weeping, laughing like a child, she would take him back, he was sure. Or at least he hoped so. Was she angry? That was all in the past. Their quarrel? Ancient history. The incident? She held it against him, but given his past and even more his father’s past, could he have done otherwise? Tamar was unjust. With her chin in the air, she’d glared at him. “You’re lying. You’re lying, and you want me to lie, too!” Good thing it happened at his place and not at the newspaper. The foreign editor and the sage himself would have settled the matter for them: all real news must be published.

Israel was at the heart of it. And an article that might do Israel harm, might tarnish its image and harm its interests. Malkiel said, I love Israel. Tamar said, I love truth. They spent a sleepless night debating, shouting familiar arguments and old recriminations back and forth. Malkiel tried to bring her to the “right way of thinking,” as they say; it was no use. Proud, arrogant, sure of her knowledge and her right to pronounce judgment, she proved stubborn, determined, unyielding: she punctuated everything she said with, “Freedom of information comes first.” Malkiel
replied, “And if your sacred freedom of information causes real harm? Harm to our people? Will you swear by it just the same?” Tangled in their maze of pride and loyalty, they forgot how to listen. So the couple broke up. Hurt, each saw in the other an obstacle.

Tamar had interviewed a young Palestinian from Bethlehem who was on a lecture tour in the United States. He was a professor of political science at Bir Zeit, and he accused Israel’s government, police and army of suppressing and torturing the Arabs of the West Bank. Even before she turned it in to the foreign desk she showed her piece to Malkiel, who blushed as he read it. “Come have a cup of coffee,” he said.

“Right now? It’s five o’clock—we’ll miss the first edition.” He insisted. “Please, Tamar. Come on.”

“Is it that urgent?”

“Yes.”

They went up to the cafeteria and took a small table in the corner. “What’s so urgent? Something about your father?”

“No.”

Tamar was short with him. “Come on. There’s not much time. If you have something to say, say it.”

“That article. Have you shown it to anyone?”

“No. I was going to give it to the sage once you’d gone over it.”

“You’d better not,” Malkiel said.

“What? But it’s explosive! It’ll be quoted all over television tomorrow.”

“That’s just it,” Malkiel said. “That’s why you’d better not.” Malkiel too had to go back to work. “Let me make a suggestion,” he said. “Wait one day. Nobody’s going to beat you to it. This guy is too eager to see the story in our paper.

We’ll talk about it tonight. If I don’t persuade you, run it tomorrow.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then rose suddenly and walked toward the door. “See you later,” she said hastily.

At seven o’clock, as usual, Malkiel went to visit his father. In his heart he had hoped to find Tamar there; she often arrived first; but she was surely in no mood to please him that evening. Loretta was all smiles.

“Everything all right today?” he asked.

“Just fine,” she said, “except he wouldn’t take his nap.”

Malkiel told his father, “You should rest in the afternoon. It’s good for you.”

“I can’t sleep. I don’t want to,” Elhanan said. “I’m afraid of not waking up. Or of not knowing I’ve awakened.”

To make him talk, Malkiel asked all kinds of questions, to which Elhanan replied distractedly. “Your mind’s somewhere else,” Malkiel said.

His father paused before answering. “Our sages teach us that two angels attach themselves to a man at birth and never leave him. One walks before and helps him climb mountains, the other follows in the shadows and pushes him toward his fall. I have a feeling that the second one is now stronger. I feel sorry for the first.”

“Don’t underestimate him,” Malkiel said. “He’s there to protect you; and God protects him.”

Elhanan thought that over, and his voice was full of anguish. “And who protects God?”

Malkiel was in a hurry to go home. Tamar was already there. Curled up on a sofa with a stubborn look on her face, she was sipping a whiskey-soda. “All right, let’s get right to it, Mr. Censor.” It was beginning badly. When Tamar wanted to be bitchy, she was unbeatable.

“You’ll allow me to sit down?”

“Yes.”

“On the sofa?”

“No. Take a chair. That one, so you face me. Okay. I’m listening. Start explaining. What right do you have to censor me, violating all my principles?” When Tamar uttered the word “principles,” nobody could stand up to her. They were sacred, those principles. Inviolable.

Malkiel tried his luck anyway. “You met with this Palestinian, right?”

“Of course I did. His facts were solid and specific.”

“Were they also true?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Did you verify them?”

“You read the piece—didn’t I report official Israeli reactions?”

“When you publish both versions—and don’t give much space to the Israelis—you leave room for doubt.”

“What’s wrong with shaking up the simpleminded reader?”

The argument degenerated. They both fell back on clichés and emotions.

“It’s a question of truth,” Tamar said. “Do you want me to suppress it?”

“You dare contradict the truth of Israel by any other truth?”

“If what this Palestinian says is true, then Israel is contradicting its own truth—its ethical calling, its prophetic mission!”

“Who are you and who am I to set ourselves up as judges of an ancient people, and furthermore our own?”

“Who are you and who am I not to help an ancient people, and furthermore our own, refrain from serious error? Their salvation may depend on it, and ours certainly does!”

“You call yourself Israel’s savior?”

“Your irony is misplaced. I’m neither a prophet nor a moralist. I’m a journalist. I intend to do my job as honestly as I can. And you’re only a sad little preacher trying to stop me with childish and sentimental arguments.”