Listen to My Voice (25 page)

‘Yes,’ I replied, frankly and honestly.

On the basis of that reciprocal openness, we formed a friendship. At the outbreak of the war, she said, she
was
a twenty-two-year-old biology student, one year away from her degree. ‘My father was a man with very advanced ideas for those times. He was rather old when I was born, but healthy. He was a doctor, and he always encouraged my curiosity. To his great joy, I was fascinated by living things right from the start, beginning when I was a little girl. I loved to observe, question, experiment. While my schoolmates were losing themselves in boring fairytales, I was off on a solitary voyage among mitochondria and enzymes; their processes were the only magic that took my breath away. My idol was Madame Curie; I knew every passage of her biography by heart. I wanted to become someone like her and put my intellect at the service of humanity. I always had a passion for analysing and discussing things. As a student – inflamed by the atmosphere that prevailed in those days – I loved to expose the senselessness and folly of the world.

‘History, however, gave me a brutal push in a completely different direction. I saw my mother and my father on their way to death; we gazed into one another’s eyes for the last time before they disappeared into the building where the “showers” were. A few months later, I was supposed to die, too, in the reprisals for an escape attempt, but someone stepped forward and took my place, a man who opposed his serenity to my girlish terror.

‘I’m here because he went up in smoke. What else
could
I be but a witness, someone who has never stopped thinking about that step? All the questions are contained in those modest thirty centimetres: one step taken, another held back.’

We’d sit in the coolest corner of the library and talk for hours about death, about how the heart of Europe was turned to ashes in only six years.

‘Everyone says, where was God? Why didn’t he put an end to the slaughter with a flick of his finger? Why didn’t he send a rain of fire and brimstone down upon the evildoers?’ Miriam often repeated those questions, and her answer was, ‘But I say, Where was man? Where was the creature fashioned “a little below the angels”? Because men built the gas chambers; in order to optimise the time factor, specialist engineers calculated the exact angle at which the rail carts delivering bodies to the ovens should turn; nothing could interrupt the rhythms of disposal. They made their calculations while the wife was knitting in the living room and the kids were in their flannel pyjamas, asleep in their little beds, clutching teddy bears. It was men who went from house to house, rousting people out, dislodging them from the most hidden places. It was men who drenched their hands in blood, kicked newborn babies to death, slaughtered old people. Men who had the power to choose and had not chosen. Men who, instead of seeing other men as people, saw them only as objects.’

Another time, as she was dusting the library’s tiny book collection with the kind of tenderness one shows towards children, Miriam said, ‘You know what the biggest trap is? Everyone’s convinced the Holocaust is a phenomenon circumscribed by time. People are continually having ceremonies where they repeat in chorus, with proper firmness, “Never again! Never again will such a horror descend on the earth!” But when the buboes of the plague appear, what happens? Does the sick person get well and the epidemic abruptly stop? Or does it spread, becoming more and more virulent, producing the bacteria that will eventually carry the contagion everywhere?

‘Instead of “Never again”, we must have the courage to say, “Still and always!” Because still and always, under the appearance of normality, the miasma of those years pollutes our days, preparing us for a holocaust of cosmic dimensions. And society is the place to exercise technical perfection.

‘In Auschwitz, nothing was left to chance, there was no wastage and no lost time. The pure mechanism was all that existed. The central organisation took care of everything. At the end of this meticulous programming, the perfect man would finally be born, the only one capable of dominating the world and the only one worthy of living in it.

‘Things don’t change that much. Aren’t there people
now
, trying to convince us that our society can become as perfect as ant society? Are bees and ants really the models we ought to use? Do we have antennae or little feelers or prismatic eyes?

‘The flames of communism’s funeral pyre aren’t completely extinguished yet, nor are its wounds completely healed, when already we’re hearing about the prospect of a new paradise on earth: a world without disease or death, without deformities or imperfections.

‘The paradise of the apprentice wizards. “We’ve got everything under control,” they shout on the world’s televisions and in the world’s newspapers, when anybody who stops and thinks, if only for a moment, knows that we control nothing. Neither the possibility of being born nor the moment of death (unless you inflict it on yourself). Neither the water that comes down from the sky nor the quakes that split the earth.

‘These complexities escape the apprentice wizards, shut up inside their sanitised chambers as they are, and convinced that the universe consists of the microns of reality that dominate their thoughts. That’s why they can so merrily mix up the genetic patrimonies of different species in the name of progress (which is visible only to them and to the multinational companies that sign their patents) and why they can clone flowers and animals. And surely, in the obscure secrecy of some laboratory, they’re already cloning humans. After all, it would
be
so convenient to have a copy of yourself at your disposal – in case of breakdowns, you could use it for spare parts.

‘The wizards’ weapon is altruistic persuasion. They manipulate people’s good faith by convincing them that all this devastation is carried out exclusively for humanitarian motives. How will the world’s billions of poor eat without the new seeds invented by man for man? But I say what about the seeds invented by God? Aren’t they enough? Hasn’t an extraordinary complexity already been put at our service? And isn’t it, just maybe, our inability to see this complexity that drives us to seek new horizons that are actually horizons of death?

‘When man dreams about making a world without pain, without imperfections, in reality he’s already rolling out the barbed wire and dividing the world into the suitable and the unsuitable, a world in which the members of that second group are hardly different from ballast, something that will need to be cast off along the way.

‘Naturally, I believe what Madame Curie believed – man’s mission
is
to care for his neighbour in need – but when the care turns into a delirium of omnipotence, when it gets tangled up with the struggle for billion-dollar patents, then it turns into something very different from the proper aspirations of the human race. Instead of applauding the grand promises of science, we should have the courage to ask questions, even if they make us as
unpopular
as Jeremiah: Without disease, without fragility, without uncertainty, what does man turn into? And what becomes of his neighbour? Are we perfectible machines or troubled creatures in exile? Can our ultimate meaning be found in omnipotence, or in the acceptance of our precariousness? Out of precariousness, questions arise; a sense of mystery and wonder can grow from questions, but what can omnipotence and certainty generate?

‘Aren’t they trying to turn the human race into a multitude of omnivorous, perennially unsatisfied consumers? I buy, therefore I am. This is the horizon we’re all moving towards, as docile as lambs, except that our goal isn’t the sheepfold; it’s the abyss. And idolatry lies sleeping, always ready to awaken, in the heart of man.

‘Unimaginable catastrophes are waiting for us just around the corner. How is it possible to think we can touch the core of the atom, manipulate DNA, and still keep going forward? While everyone’s dancing with their headphones on and their eyes closed in artificial ecstasy, I see the flashes of the coming end, getting closer and closer every day.’

We watched a hoopoe walk past the window, shaking its crest.

‘Can’t anything be done?’ I asked.

Miriam turned toward me and stared at me for a long time in silence – what depths did the light of her eyes come from? – and then she said, ‘Of course. We must
repent
and open our hearts and minds to His word. Chase away the gods who’ve been carousing in our hearts for too long. Instead of the law of ego, we’d have to observe the law of the covenant.’

‘But isn’t the law a cage?’

‘Oh no,’ she said with a smile. ‘The law’s the only place where love can grow . . .’

A meow interrupted my memories. An extremely thin cat was at the chapel door, looking in. Her tail was as skinny as a pencil. I called her and she came in. She even let me scratch her under her chin, purring all the while with a look of ecstasy on her face.

Outside the sun had passed its highest point, and the air in the chapel was stifling hot. Before leaving, I gently touched the stone where your name’s engraved. Then I passed on to Mamma’s, with her two dates recording the brief span of her years.

For a while, the cat followed me as I walked to the cemetery entrance, but then she disappeared behind a stone. The only flowers that stood with dignity in their vases were made of plastic; all the others drooped heavily, exhausted by the great heat. Dozens of wasps were buzzing around a tap, colliding furiously with one another while hopefully waiting for a drop of water.

Before I left the cemetery, I turned around to
contemplate
its grounds (which also contained the Jewish and Turkish cemeteries) one last time. All of you – you, my mother, my father – were there while the unknown spaces of life were opening up before me; for better or worse, all of you taught me a great deal; and somehow, your mistakes had provided me with a treasure.

I went back home and returned to my cleaning.

I opened all the windows to let out the closed-in smell; the summer light streamed in forcefully, illuminating the darkest corners. I went into your room to get some clean sheets. The linen cupboard was in perfect order; for some reason, it had escaped the fury of your disease. The little sachets of lavender I saw you make up, most skilfully, so many times were still scattered here and there. When I reached for some sheets, the ones with the embroidered monogram, I saw a big yellow envelope lying on top of them. You’d written on it, in an unsteady hand,
For you
.

I’d never seen it before. How long had it been there? Since before you got really ill? Or maybe from before then, from the period of half-gestures, when for reasons unknown even to you your actions suddenly struck out down a different path? I opened the envelope and saw that it contained a large notebook with a flowery cover. At that moment, however, I didn’t feel ready to face whatever might be inside, and so I laid the notebook on
the
kitchen table and kept cleaning until well past noon.

That day, while working furiously, I came to two important decisions. The first concerned a dog: I would go to the pound the next day and pick out another one, because I couldn’t bear looking at that empty garden. The second decision concerned my future; in the autumn, I would enrol in the university and study forest science, because I’d finally realised what it was I wanted to do for the rest of my life: take care of trees.

After the hottest part of the day had passed, I started watering the garden. The rose bush was at the end of its flowering and seemed not to have suffered too much from my absence, while the hydrangeas looked pretty badly off. I watered them for a long time, now and then aiming the hose high so that I could watch the stream of water turn into a shower of golden droplets.

When I was done, I took out a deckchair, put it in the middle of the garden, and sat down with an orangeade in one hand and your notebook in the other.

Opicina, 16 November, 1992
was written at the top of the first page.

I recognised your handwriting, as tidy and regular as always.

You have been away for two months, and for two months I have heard nothing from you apart from a postcard telling me that you were still alive . . 
.