Day Read online

  For Paul Braunstein

  I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient saying: Man’s heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.

  —NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS, Zorba the Greek

  Contents

  Preface

  Begin Reading

  Preface

  DAY* IS MY SECOND NOVEL and third book. In a concrete sense, it is the sequel to Dawn. Do the two stories bring the same character to life? You might say that each can be found in the other.

  This novel deals with a number of obvious themes, but its true subject remains unspoken: Having survived the cruelest of wars, how does one go on in a hostile or indifferent world?

  Stripped of everything resembling a normal existence, having lost everything except his memory, my hero suffers from an inability to count on the future, to become attached to another person, thus to hope.

  One evening, crossing Times Square in Manhattan, he is hit by a taxi. In his hospital bed he spends weeks battling the pain from his multiple injuries.

  Battling death? Life too.

  Wavering between these two callings, each as brutal as the other, he lives through old fears and memories again.

  He struggles to understand why fate has spared him and not so many others. Was it to know happiness? His happiness will never be complete. To know love? He will never be sure of being worthy of love. A part of him is still back there, on the other side, where the dead deny the living the right to leave them behind.

  His recovery will be a road into exile, a journey in which the touch of the woman he loves will matter less than the image of his grandmother buried under a mountain of ashes.

  After night comes day, inviting the dead to seek an open heart in which to find rest, an emissary who may become an ally, a friend.

  This is the novel’s theme. Set within the background of what is so poorly called the Holocaust, the novel does not deal directly with the event. As I have said elsewhere, I feel unable to tell the story of this event, much less imagine it. A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel—or else it is not about Auschwitz.

  That said, certain episodes here are true—that is, taken from life. The accident actually happened to me. I didn’t see the taxi coming. The possibility of a suicidal impulse was invented for the sake of the story.

  In fact, the question has haunted me for a long time: Does life have meaning after Auschwitz? In a universe cursed because it is guilty, is hope still possible? For a young survivor whose knowledge of life and death surpasses that of his elders, wouldn’t suicide be as great a temptation as love or faith?

  MANY YEARS AGO, long after publishing this short narrative, I read somewhere (I think it was in a book by Michael Elkins) about the tragedy of children and adolescents who had emerged from hiding in forests and underground shelters at the time of the Liberation, who soon fell ill from exhaustion or malnutrition.

  Transported to various hospitals, they baffled doctors with their refusal to be fed, choosing instead to let themselves slip into death.

  This was their simple and heartrending way of launching their own accusation at a so-called civilized society that had allowed people to stand by idly and betray the very humanity of mankind by remaining indifferent.

  The suicides of these children, like the murders of their parents, will never be forgiven.

  —ELIE WIESEL

  THE ACCIDENT occurred on an evening in July, right in the heart of New York, as Kathleen and I were crossing the street to go to see the movie The Brothers Karamazov.

  The heat was heavy, suffocating: it penetrated your bones, your veins, your lungs. It was difficult to speak, even to breathe. Everything was covered with an enormous, wet sheet of air. The heat stuck to your skin, like a curse.

  People walked clumsily, looking haggard, their mouths dry like the mouths of old men watching the decay of their existence; old men hoping to take leave of their own beings so as not to go mad. Their bodies filled them with disgust.

  I was tired. I had just finished my work: a five-hundred-word cable. Five hundred words to say nothing. To cover up another empty day. It was one of those quiet and monotonous Sundays that leave no mark on time. Washington: nothing. United Nations: nothing. New York: nothing. Even Hollywood said: nothing. The movie stars had deserted the news.

  It wasn’t easy to use five hundred words to say that there was nothing to say. After two hours of hard work, I was exhausted.

  “What shall we do now?” Kathleen asked.

  “Whatever you like,” I answered.

  We were on the corner of Forty-fifth Street, right in front of the Sheraton-Astor. I felt stunned, heavy, a thick fog in my head. The slightest gesture was like trying to lift a planet. There was lead in my arms, in my legs.

  To my right I could see the human whirlwind on Times Square. People go there as they go to the sea: neither to fight boredom nor the anguish of a room filled with blighted dreams, but to feel less alone, or more alone.

  The world turned in slow motion under the weight of the heat. The picture seemed unreal. Beneath the colorful neon carnival, people went back and forth, laughing, singing, shouting, insulting one another, all of this with an exasperating slowness.

  Three sailors had come out of the hotel. When they saw Kathleen they stopped short and, in unison, gave a long admiring whistle.

  “Let’s go,” Kathleen said, pulling me by the arm. She was obviously annoyed.

  “What do you have against them?” I asked. “They think you’re beautiful.”

  “I don’t like them to whistle like that.”

  I said, in a professorial tone, “It’s their way of looking at a woman: they see her with their mouths and not with their eyes. Sailors keep their eyes for the sea: when they are on land, they leave their eyes behind as tokens of love.”

  The three admirers had already been gone for quite some time.

  “And you?” Kathleen asked. “How do you look at me?”

  She liked to relate everything to us. We were always the center of her universe. For her, other mortals lived only to be used as comparisons.

  “I? I don’t look at you,” I answered, slightly annoyed. There was a silence. I was biting my tongue. “But I love you. You know that.”

  “You love me, but you don’t look at me?” she asked gloomily. “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “You don’t understand,” I went right on. “One doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. You can love God, but you can’t look at Him.”

  She seemed satisfied with this comparison. I would have to practice lying.

  “Whom do you look at when you love God?” she asked after a moment of silence.

  “Yourself. If man could contemplate the face of God, he would stop loving him. God needs love; he does not need understanding.”

  “And you?”

  For Kathleen, even God was not so much a subject for discussion as a way to bring the conversation back to us.

  “I too,” I lied. “I too, I need your love.”

  We were still in the same spot. Why hadn’t we moved? I don’t know. Perhaps we were waiting for the accident.

  I’ll have to learn to lie, I kept thinking. Even for the short time I have left. To lie well. Without blushing. Until then I had been lying much too badly. I was awkward, my face would betray me and I would start blushing.

  “What are we waiting for?” Kathleen was getting impatient.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I was lying without knowing it: we were waiting for the accident.

  “You still aren’t hungry?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “But you haven’t eaten anything all day,” she sa
id reproachfully.

  “No.”

  Kathleen sighed.

  “How long do you think you can hold out? You’re slowly killing yourself…”

  There was a small restaurant nearby. We went in. All right, I told myself. I’ll also have to learn to eat. And to love. You can learn anything.

  Ten or twelve people, sitting on high red stools, were eating silently at the counter. Kathleen now found herself in the crossfire of their stares. She was beautiful. Her face, especially around the lips, showed the first signs of a fear that was waiting for a chance to turn into live suffering. I would have liked to tell her once more that I loved her.

  We ordered two hamburgers and two glasses of grapefruit juice.

  “Eat,” Kathleen said, and she looked up at me pleadingly.

  I cut off a piece and lifted it to my mouth. The smell of blood turned my stomach. I felt like throwing up. Once I had seen a man eating with great appetite a slice of meat without bread. Starving, I watched him for a long time. As if hypnotized, I followed the motion of his fingers and jaws. I was hoping that if he saw me there, in front of him, he would throw me a piece. He didn’t look up. The next day he was hanged by those who shared his barracks: he had been eating human flesh. To defend himself he had screamed, “I didn’t do any harm: he was already dead…” When I saw his body swinging in the latrine, I wondered, “What if he had seen me?”

  “Eat,” Kathleen said.

  I swallowed some juice.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said with an effort.

  A few hours later the doctors told Kathleen, “He’s lucky. He’ll suffer less because his stomach is empty. He won’t vomit so much.”

  “Let’s go,” I told Kathleen as I turned to leave.

  I could feel it: another minute there and I’d faint.

  I paid for the hamburgers and we left. Times Square hadn’t changed. False lights, artificial shadows. The same anonymous crowd twisting and untwisting. In the bars and in the stores, the same rock-’n’-roll tunes hitting away at your temples with thousands of invisible little hammers. The neon signs still announced that to drink this or that was good for your health, for happiness, for the peace of the world, of the soul, and of I don’t know what else.

  “Where would you like to go?” Kathleen inquired.

  She pretended not to have noticed how pale I was. Who knows, I thought. She too perhaps will learn how to lie.

  “Far,” I answered. “Very far.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she declared.

  The sadness and bitterness of her voice filled me with pity. Kathleen has changed, I told myself. She, who believed in defiance, in fighting, in hatred, had now chosen to submit. She, who refused to follow any call that didn’t come from herself, now recognized defeat. I knew that our suffering changes us. But I didn’t know that it could also destroy others.

  “Of course,” I said. “I won’t go without you.”

  I was thinking: to go far away, where the roads leading to simplicity are known not merely to a select group, but to all; where love, laughter, songs, and prayers carry with them neither anger nor shame; where I can think about myself without anguish, without contempt; where the wine, Kathleen, is pure and not mixed with the spit of corpses; where the dead live in cemeteries and not in the hearts and memories of men.

  “Well?” Kathleen asked, pursuing her idea. “Where shall we go? We can’t stand here all night.”

  “Let’s go to the movies,” I said.

  It was still the best place. We wouldn’t be alone. We would think about something else. We would be somewhere else.

  Kathleen agreed. She would have preferred to go back to my place or to hers, but she understood my objection: it would be too hot, while the movie would be air-conditioned. I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t so hard to lie.

  “What shall we see?”

  Kathleen looked around her, at the theaters that surround Times Square. Then she exclaimed excitedly, “The Brothers Karamazov! Let’s see The Brothers Karamazov.”

  It was playing on the other side of the square. We would have to cross two avenues. An ocean of cars and noises separated us from the movie.

  “I’d rather see some other picture,” I said. “I like Dostoyevski too much.”

  Kathleen insisted: it was a good, great, extraordinary movie. Yul Brynner as Dmitri. It was a picture one had to see.

  “I’d rather see an ordinary mystery,” I said. “Something without philosophy, without metaphysics. It’s too hot for intellectual exercises. Look, Murder in Rio is playing on this side. Let’s go to that. I’d love to know how they commit murders in Brazil.”

  Kathleen was stubborn. Once again, she wanted to test our love. If Dostoyevski won, I loved her; otherwise I didn’t. I glanced at her. Still the fear around her lips, the fear that was going to become suffering. Kathleen was beautiful when she suffered; her eyes were deeper, her voice warmer, fuller; her dark beauty was simpler and more human. Her suffering had a quality of saintliness. It was her way of offering herself. I couldn’t see Kathleen suffer without telling her I loved her, as if love was the negation of evil. I had to stop her suffering.

  “You really care that much?” I asked her. “You’re really that anxious to see the good brothers Karamazov mistreated?”

  Apparently she was. It was Yul Brynner or our love.

  “In that case, let’s go.”

  A triumphant smile, which lasted only a second, lit up her face. Her fingers gripped my arm as if to say: now I believe in what is happening to us.

  We took three or four steps, to the edge of the sidewalk. We had to wait a little. Wait for the red light to become green, for the flow of cars to stop, for the policeman who was directing traffic to raise his hand, for the cab driver, unaware of the role he was going to play in a moment, to reach the appointed spot. We had to wait for the director’s cue.

  I turned around. The clock in the TWA window said 10:25.

  “Come on,” Kathleen decided, pulling me by the arm. “It’s green.”

  We started to cross the street. Kathleen was walking faster than I. She was on my right, a few inches ahead of me at most. The brothers Karamazov weren’t very far away anymore, but I didn’t see them that night.

  What did I hear first? The grotesque screeching of brakes or the shrill scream of a woman? I no longer remember.

  WHEN I CAME TO, for a fraction of a second, I was lying on my back in the middle of the street. In a tarnished mirror a multitude of heads were bending over me. There were heads everywhere. Right, left, above, and even underneath. All of them alike. The same wide-open eyes reflecting fright and curiosity. The same lips whispering the same incomprehensible words.

  An elderly man seemed to be saying something to me. I think it was not to move. He had close-cropped hair and a mustache. Kathleen no longer had the beautiful black hair that she was so proud of. Disfigured, her face had lost its youth. Her eyes, as if in the presence of death, had grown larger, and, incredibly enough, she had grown a mustache.

  A dream, I told myself. Just a dream that I’ll forget when I wake up. Otherwise, why should I be here, on the pavement? Why would these people be around me as if I were going to die? And why would Kathleen suddenly have a mustache?

  Noises, coming from all directions, bounced against a curtain of fog they weren’t able to penetrate. I couldn’t make out anything that was being said. I would have liked to tell them not to talk, because I couldn’t hear them. I was dreaming, while they were not. But I was unable to utter the slightest sound. The dream had made me deaf and mute.

  A poem by Dylan Thomas—always the same one—kept coming back to me, about not going gently into the night, but to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

  Scream? Deaf-mutes don’t scream. They go gently into the night, lightly, timidly. They don’t scream against the dying of the light. They can’t: their mouths are full of blood.

  It’s useless to scream when your mouth is filled with bloo
d: people see the blood but cannot hear you scream. That’s why I was silent. And also because I was dreaming of a summer night when my body was frozen. The heat was sickening, the faces bent over me streaming with sweat—sweat falling in rhythmical drops—and yet I was dreaming that I was so cold I was dying. How can one cry out against a dream? How can one scream against the dying of the light, against life that grows cold, against blood flowing out?

  IT WAS ONLY LATER, much later, when I was already out of danger, that Kathleen told me about the circumstances surrounding the accident.

  A speeding cab approaching from the left had caught me, dragging me several yards. Kathleen had suddenly heard the screeching of brakes and a woman’s shrill scream.

  She barely had time to turn around before a crowd was already surrounding me. She didn’t know at first that I was the man lying at the spectators’ feet.

  Then, having a strong feeling that it was I, she pushed her way through and saw me: crushed with pain, curled up, my head between my knees.

  And the people were talking, talking endlessly…

  “He’s dead,” one of them said.

  “No, he’s not. Look, he’s moving.”

  Preceded by the sound of sirens, the ambulance arrived within twenty minutes. During that time I showed few signs of life. I didn’t cry, I didn’t moan, I didn’t say anything.

  In the ambulance I came to several times for a few seconds. During these brief moments I gave Kathleen astonishingly precise instructions about things I wanted her to do for me: inform the paper; call one of my friends and ask him to replace me temporarily; cancel various appointments; pay the rent, the phone bill, the laundry. Having handed her the last of these immediate problems, I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again for five days.

  Kathleen also told me this: the first hospital to which the ambulance took me refused to let me in. There wasn’t any room. All the beds were taken. At least that’s what they said. But Kathleen thought it was just a pretext. The doctors, after one glance at me, had decided there was no hope. It was better to be rid of a dying man as fast as possible.