The Fifth Son Read online

  Books by ELIE WIESEL

  Night

  Dawn

  The Accident

  The Town Beyond the Wall

  The Gates of the Forest

  The Jews of Silence

  Legends of Our Time

  A Beggar in Jerusalem

  One Generation After

  Souls on Fire

  The Oath

  Ani Maamin (cantata)

  Zalmen, or the Madness of God (play)

  Messengers of God

  A Jew Today

  Four Hasidic Masters

  The Trial of God (play)

  The Testament

  Five Biblical Portraits

  Somewhere a Master

  The Golem (illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  The Fifth Son

  Against Silence (edited by Irving Abrahamson)

  Twilight

  The Six Days of Destruction

  (with Albert Friedlander)

  A Journey into Faith

  (conversations with John Cardinal O’Connor)

  From the Kingdom of Memory

  Sages and Dreamers

  The Forgotten

  A Passover Haggadah (illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  All Rivers Run to the Sea

  And the Sea Is Never Full

  Translation copyright © 1985 by Elirion Associates, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SCHOCKEN and colophon are trademarks of Schocken Books Inc.

  Originally published in France as Le Cinquième Fils by Éditions Bernard Grasset. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, in 1985.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wiesel, Elie, 1928-

  [Cinquième fils. English]

  The fifth son / Elie Wiesel.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80639-0

  1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PQ2683.I32C613 1998

  843′.914—dc21 97-41133

  Random House Web Address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  For Elisha

  and all the other children of survivors

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  First Page

  About the Author

  Blessed is God who gave the Torah to His people Israel, blessed is He. The Torah speaks about four sons: one who is wise and one who is contrary; one who is simple and one who does not even know how to ask a question.

  THE PASSOVER HAGGADAH

  WAS IT DAWN or dusk? The town of Reshastadt appears crouched and unreal under a steady slow drizzle. Was he already asleep? Or not yet awake? I did not exist for him. I was the bearer of a message, but he was not aware of either message or messenger.

  Here is the station. In my confusion, I did not know whether I had just arrived or was preparing to leave again. Was I awake? I was floating in the unreal. Just like the day I followed Lisa on her trip. The same panic oppressed me. The same fist clutched my chest. But that day I loved Lisa—and today I did not love myself.

  At one point, inexplicably, I thought I felt my father’s presence behind me. I jumped and turned around: “You shouldn’t have,” he told me as his hand pointed to the station and the streets and the town and the mountains that were already receding. “Forgive me,” I stammered. “Forgive me, Father, for having brought you back here, but I had no choice.”

  My father shook his head unhappily. He was judging me. He was not really here, but his condemnation was real enough. How could I explain it? He hated explanations. He just kept saying: no, no, you shouldn’t have.

  And so, like long ago, after the trip with Lisa, upon awakening I felt overwhelmed, weighed down with unspeakable remorse; my thoughts confused, my tongue pasty, I felt a stranger to myself.

  I began to pace the waiting room. Advertising posters: beautiful girls and their friends their lovers swim and laugh and drink and run and call and offer themselves for little or nothing, for a moment or a lifetime.

  I tried to understand myself. I did not succeed. Once on the train, things would be better, that was a promise.

  “You shouldn’t have,” repeats my father. I could reply: “And you?” But I say nothing, I feel guilty. And yet I have done nothing. I feel guilty because I have done nothing.

  If only I could get angry, express my rage, but I cannot.… And that saddens and annoys me and I resent this insensitive world and my father who understands without understanding that there is nothing to understand, for noise becomes torture and memory drives one mad and the future pushes us back to the edge of the precipice and death envelops us and rocks us and stifles us and, helpless, we can neither cry nor run.

  Attention, all passengers. Leaving? Arriving? Good-bye, Reshastadt, the train is arriving, the train arrives, next stop Frankfurt then the airport then the plane then New York and the adventure starts all over again, ecstasy for lovers, prison for beggars, watch out all aboard your ticket bitte, nicht hinauslehnen, bitte.

  I beg your pardon, Mr. German ticket-taker conductor, I beg your pardon, father, descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you are right, I shouldn’t have. Why did I go to Germany and why did I seek out this dull and hateful little town? Why renew contact with a past drowned in blood? To conclude a project which from the start was doomed to fail? Had I really, truly imagined being able to dominate another man, to crush him, annihilate him?

  I see my father looking at me disapprovingly. Yet it is his story that has led me here, on this train which seems to go backward rather than forward. The story of a man who survived by chance and, by chance, rediscovered his wife and her demons. The story of a leader who, again by chance, was called upon to play a role he never really wanted.

  Poor father. He thought he was strong, stronger than the enemy. My turn to tell him: “You shouldn’t have.…” Were he here, I would rest my head on his shoulder. Were he here, I would break down and weep.

  I know: the things I say about my father disconcert you; what I am about to say will perhaps disconcert you further. Am I old-fashioned? I love my father. I love him down to his weaknesses. When we are apart, all I have to do is think of him and everything around me, everything inside me becomes transparent. Words burst into flames and roar until I shut my ears. My father’s voice reaches me from another world. I feel excluded, rejected.

  Of course, we have had our differences which at times turned into bitter arguments; then I would bite my lip so as not to cry out. That is natural, human: love is a series of scars. “No heart is as whole as a broken heart,” said the celebrated Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav. My father broke my heart more than once; even now, as I speak of it, I hurt.

  For he affects me, my father does. Nobody has ever affected me as deeply. There are times when I think of him, grave and unsmiling, and tears well up in my eyes. I feel both caught and liberated by a force that comes from far away. His every word, his every glance is for me a place, a moment of fusion. Every contact with him becomes reflection and encounter. Two exiles are joined in a single exhortation.

  Yet there is nothing extraordinary about his appearance. He is an average man, of average height, with an average income, living in an average house in a neighborhood for average residents. A refugee like so many others in a city whose ethnic pluralism is its true pride. Excep
t for the fact that he shows no interest in baseball and football, he follows the rules of the “American way of life.” Vitamins, ready-made clothes and The New York Times. Neither his way of speaking nor his manner of keeping silent attracts attention. He seeks anonymity. One must see him at close range to take notice. But then one cannot turn away. His eyes, his beautiful grave eyes, peer out from under heavy lids and bring you under their spell. If you are sensitive to the human face, you will not be able to free yourself of his; it suggests a distant darkness. But my father shuns observation. Eyes are cumbersome, he says, intrusive. Surely that is not the real reason. The real reason, in my opinion, has to do with the war. During that time, in Europe, one had to lose oneself in the crowd, melt into the night. To survive, one needed not to exist.

  One day, much later, somewhere in the Orient, a sage studied the lines of my hand and face, considered my destiny and shook his head, signifying great confusion: “Your case, my young traveler, leaves me perplexed: this is the first time it happens to me. I situate you within the flow of time and within the memory that restrains time. I see you kneeling before the gods of knowledge and the goddesses of passion. I see you standing before their priests. I recognize you among your friends, I discover you face-to-face with your enemies. But one being is missing from the landscape; I do not see your father.” A troubled light then appeared in his dark eyes. And he added, softly: “Help me, yes, help me rediscover your father.”

  For he has mastered the art of leaving, my father. You speak to him, he seems to listen to you, but suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, you sense his disappearance. In the subway, during rush hour, people jostle him but they do not see him. Whether out of excessive discretion or shyness, he is afraid to disturb, to exert a harmful influence, to provoke disasters, who knows, perhaps even earthquakes.

  He is a loner, my father. He feels at ease only among dead or invented characters who, locked into or liberated in thousands upon thousands of volumes, live in his imagination. Being a librarian, he chats with Homer and Saul, Jeremiah and Virgil. A passionate reader, he never goes anywhere without a book under his arm. At home as in the office, on the bus or in the park, he is forever “beginning” or “finishing” a study, a commentary by so-and-so on so-and-so or against so-and-so.

  We live in Brooklyn surrounded by Hasidim. For them, life is one continuous song. That is all right with me but their non-Jewish neighbors must not be too pleased with it all. Do these Hasidim ever sleep? Of course, you see, it is quite possible that they sing even in their sleep. Which would explain why their sad songs are so joyous and why their joyous songs are so sad. No, it would not explain anything, too bad.

  As for my father, he loves them. He reads their pamphlets, which he buys by the dozen. As soon as he comes home, he spreads them out on the table in the living room, or the one in the kitchen, and he begins to read them fast, very fast, as though he were dreading a catastrophe that would make them disappear. Have I mentioned the bleak light reflected in his eyes as he reads? He looks as if he is in pain, so intense is the joy he derives from reading.

  Before, I mean: before my mother’s departure, before her sickness, he would spend hours in the semidarkness of his library where books were piled helter-skelter, on makeshift bookshelves and on the floor. These days, he likes to settle down in the living room to read. Since the light bothers him, he unscrewed three bulbs from the tarnished chandelier. Strange, the semidarkness accompanies him and envelops him like a ritual shawl. When I see him like that, cut off from the world, so vulnerable in his isolation, I feel like sneaking up on him, hugging and comforting him; I feel like offering him my youth and my yearning for sunshine. Fortunately, my reticence always prevails and I withdraw.

  So as not to embarrass me, he pretends not to have seen anything. But I am not deceived. I know that he sees everything, that he is aware of everything, that nothing escapes him.

  What interests him? I don’t know. Sometimes he seems profoundly indifferent to life’s sounds. Did I say indifferent? Rather: inaccessible.… Absent.… No, I must correct myself once more: elsewhere …

  Elsewhere? I know the place. I think I know it. Or at least I can imagine it. It is a strange and real kingdom, a strangely real kingdom, one in which values are reversed, dreams are violent, laughter is delirious and silent. It is a kingdom in which one is forever dying, forever keeping silent, for the storm that blows there is a storm of ashes.

  My father lived there. So did my mother. How did they manage to survive? I do not know, neither do they. Absolute Evil was opposed by a Good that was only theoretical, therein lay the tragedy. “You won’t understand,” whispered my father. “Nobody will understand.” And my mother, in the very beginning, would agree: “As for me, it is God I do not understand.” To which my father answered: “And who tells you that God Himself understands?”

  I should so like him to open his memory to mine. I would give all I possess to be able to follow him on his obscure paths. Let him speak and I shall listen with my entire being and never mind if I ache for him, for us.… But he does not speak. He does not want to speak. Perhaps he cannot.…

  When he condescends to speak to me, it frequently is to discuss his favorite author, One-Eyed Paritus, whose Oblique Meditations influenced the religious and antireligious ideas of more than one medieval philosopher. As he quotes from him, he strokes his forehead and cheeks, he becomes thoughtful, kind, beautiful. All at once, I too came to love Paritus, for he was giving me back my father.

  As a child and adolescent I could not do without his presence, his sadness. Every evening, between school and bedtime, I followed him step-by-step, I tracked him in his memories, his walled-in visions. One day, he said, I would visit his native town, I would appear in Davarowsk between Kolomey and Kamenetz-Bokrotay, in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains, and I would admire the sky that witnessed his birth and the fences he surely climbed and the trees whose fruit he picked; I would inhale the smoke of the chimneys and the smell of the fields; I would gaze at the silvery reflection of the river, the shuttered windows of the asylums echoing endless laments. Oh yes, one day I would wake up in the ghost town of Davarowsk and I would call out: “Father, come and look, you are no longer the only one who haunts this cursed town with its cursed fate, I am with you, we won!”

  It would not be easy. For my father is cautious. He proceeds only on sure ground, always alone. Forbidden to knock at his door. He says only whatever he feels like saying, or else he says one thing to conceal another. Impossible to provoke him, to rush him. At the first sign of misplaced curiosity he erects his barriers.

  Of course, there were times when I was resentful. It hurt me to see, to know that he was alone in his struggle against invisible assailants. I was dying to fly to his rescue, to fight at his side. I would raise my voice, demand an explanation. All I did was increase his pain.

  I remember: being a student of philosophy, preoccupied with problems of suffering, my head bursting with Buddhism, Schopenhauer, the Ecclesiastes, I would turn my knowledge, my semblance of knowledge, against him. I remember: one winter evening, I was feeling particularly low, pining for Lisa. (I shall talk about her later); I took it out on him and reproached him his suffering:

  “Don’t you understand that to accept suffering is evil and dangerous? It is like choosing nothingness over being.… Fate over oneself.”

  He did not seem surprised, only sad. He pretended to finish the sentence he was reading, then raised his eyes and gazed at me: it was the gaze of a living man, a serious, dignified, austere consciousness; a gaze turned inward, a consciousness thoroughly cognizant of itself. Then the gaze went dark and the world went dark and I told myself: this is where the mystery begins.

  I also told myself: this is how he is. Nothing I can do about it. Out of reach. I shall have to wait some more. Respect his freedom. Like everyone, he is free to do as he pleases with his past. Free to be a prisoner or sovereign, resigned or rebellious, friend of the dead or ally of the living. F
ree to renounce his freedom. I had better accept that.

  Not that he shuns society, but he does distrust it. One never knows: outsiders may look where they should not. For instance, when I was a child I was taken to school by my mother, when I really wanted my father to take me there. The other children made fun of me: “What about your father, hmm? Ashamed to show himself?” “My father,” I would answer, “has no time for this; he is too busy. He has better things to do.”

  One day, my mother baked a chocolate cake; it must have been my fourth or fifth birthday. After dinner, she cut the cake and sighed: “We should have invited his little friends.” Whereupon my father totally withdrew into himself. He became scowling, hostile. I did not understand: I had done nothing wrong, neither had my mother. We left the table without a word and without touching the cake. Since then, nobody has ever celebrated my birthday. “Don’t be sad,” said my mother. “Your father does not like strangers: he likes only his own.” A satisfactory but incomplete explanation. There was another reason. A secret one. My father was afraid of children; they frightened him and brought back his old fear. And so did I.

  My dear son,

  Since I tell you everything, surely you know that I belong to an extinct race, an extinct species; I have invoked every name, exposed every face of the crepuscular beast and yet I have not shortened mankind’s wait.

  There was a time when I knew the goal but not the road; now it is the opposite. Perhaps not even that. There is more than one path open to us. Which one leads toward God, which one leads toward man? I am just a wanderer. Still I go on searching. Perhaps all I seek is to remain that wanderer.

  I have nothing left but words, outdated words, useless beneath their multiple disguises, scattered over the cemeteries of the exiled. I let myself be guided by them because I seek to comprehend the essence of things, the Being beyond beings.

  How long shall I remain a prisoner? Don’t leave me, my son.

  Your father