The Judges Read online

  “I’ve just taken delivery of it,” he said gravely.

  “Whereabouts?”

  “On my lips and in my heart.”

  Be careful, a voice within warned her; he’s talking like someone onstage. Just listen to him, listen to yourself: You sound like characters in a play. But she silenced the voice. That’s enough. I’ve spent my whole life being careful. Was that why all her relationships had been short-lived? Why her marriage had failed? She had checked her impulses, never completely let go, as if some uncontrollable force were always holding her back. But now that was all over. Understood?

  The waiter brought them their coffee.

  “I work at a theater,” said Claudia. “What do you do?”

  “I keep quiet.”

  “That’s not a profession.”

  “You didn’t ask me my profession, you asked what I do.”

  Taken aback, Claudia had an impulse to kiss him.

  “But when you’re not keeping quiet, what do you do?”

  “A whole heap of things,” he replied evasively.

  “A heap, how many’s that? Ten? Twenty-six?”

  “I write.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I write.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Haven’t I told you already? A whole heap of things.”

  “Novels?”

  “Yes. Novels.”

  “Poems?”

  “Poems, too.”

  “May I read them?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In my head.”

  She burst out laughing. “You’re funny!”

  “Sometimes what I write is funny.”

  “And other times?”

  “Sad.”

  “Sad, you?”

  “Yes. No. Sometimes what I write is sad.”

  “Even when you’re happy?”

  “Even when I’m happy.”

  “I’d like to read what you write. Now.”

  He did not reply.

  They left the restaurant, went back to his hotel, and, once the door had closed behind them, gently, very gently, without the slightest haste, embraced.

  And for each the other’s body became a refuge.

  The next day David took a plane back to Tel Aviv.

  A BRUPTLY, at about four o’clock in the morning, the lights went out.

  At first, they thought it was a power failure that would be quickly repaired, but it continued and the darkness finally became oppressive. Bruce took out a box of matches and Claudia her lighter, an army lighter David had given her. They lit up at the same time. The room seemed to shrink. Yoav was standing at the window, looking out. The snow, shimmering with a milky glow, was still falling with a constant rhythm, ready to absorb the dirt of roads, of trees, and even people.

  “The bastard,” said Bruce, “he’s pushing us to the wall.” He thumped on the table. Nothing. George knocked on the door.

  “Louder!” shouted Claudia.

  Still nothing. The tension between the hostages was becoming palpable, and their nerves were beginning to fray. By now they were convinced that real danger lay in wait for them. The Judge represented an occult and malevolent power; he had them in his clutches, like toys. Was he going to permit a murder—or even commit one—in obedience to the voices of his Masters?

  Squabbles broke out among them in the darkness, futile, almost incongruous, but tainted with infectious and absurd hostility. Well, here we are, Claudia said to herself, right in the middle of Sartre’s No Exit. We hardly know one another, but very soon we’re going to be bound by fear and hatred.

  She was right. Each of them resented the others’ presence as an unbearable intrusion. “Give me room to breathe!” “Will you stop stepping on my toes!” One reproached himself for having taken that ill-starred flight, the other for having accepted shelter in this accursed house. The third blamed the rest of the group for the whole situation and resented them for not having the courage or magnanimity to volunteer for death. They all had particular reasons for claiming favorable treatment, mercy for themselves. All save Yoav. He asked for nothing and clung to nothing.

  The Judge’s prolonged absence only increased the tension. What was he going to think up next? What was the import of his obscure speeches? What satanic cult held him in thrall?

  Bruce was the first to lose what was left of his cool. Swinging his abominable red scarf around his head as if it were a weapon, he began to yell obscenities and wild threats. “I’m going to kill them, I tell you, I’m going to kill these monsters. Rip out their eyes, their ears, and their guts! I’ll teach them to attack innocent people. That goddamned judge should be strung up, for real, and the Hunchback flogged till he begs for mercy!” No one dared to shut him up; in moments like this it was better to let rage spill out in great waves. He would end up exhausting himself. But he was beyond exhaustion. “That bastard of a judge, that son of a bitch, he’ll pay for this. And that travesty of humanity, that mincing hunchback, he’s got it coming.” Razziel, too, was panic-stricken and began singing a song he had learned from the Rebbe of Kamenets: “You are my Lord and I am thankful to you.” At the Rebbe’s house, the Hasidim used to sing it loud and clear. Here, Razziel only hummed it softly.

  But where had the Hunchback disappeared?

  From time to time they all went “ssh,” thinking they could hear the sound of voices coming from the corridor or from upstairs. Or were they mistaken? Their own silence hung in the silence that surrounded them.

  The lights came on just as the Hunchback appeared in the doorway. He had a message from the Judge. “Tonight you will all be the judges. Whichever one of you is condemned, the survivors will all be responsible for that death. The person who is to carry out the sentence has already been appointed.” He paused for breath, then: “That’s all the Judge has instructed me to announce to you on his behalf. I wish I could tell you more, but that’s all I know.” And he left the room.

  Through the window the snow could be seen, increasingly dense and turbulent, still falling inexorably, as if there were nothing amiss, as if five people were not in danger. In the village, people were eating, sleeping, and making love, while here five trapped human beings were desperately straining their ears to hear the approaching footfalls of death.

  “Bastard, son of a bitch,” yelled Bruce, like a gangster double-crossed. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him with my bare hands! I’ll tear him limb from limb and feed him to the wolves—no, to the jackals; wolves are too good for him.”

  “He’s trying to set us against one another,” said Razziel. “He mustn’t succeed. We mustn’t play his game.”

  But like it or not, they had to get involved.

  Except, perhaps, for Yoav.

  One hour before dawn, something happened that provoked a brief argument among the prisoners. The Hunchback came in to announce that the Judge wished to see Razziel outside. Outside in the cold? No: in his office. “What for?” Claudia asked. “Why does he want to see him? Why him rather than someone else?” Yoav suggested that he refuse in the name of solidarity: Together they would have a better chance of escaping. George asked the Hunchback’s advice, who replied, “The Judge knows how to make himself obeyed.” Razziel wondered what Paritus would have advised him to do. Doubtless not to shun the moment that may bring one closer to the truth. Isn’t it incumbent on man to try to learn everything about his destiny at the very moment when he teeters on the brink of the void?

  “You must come with me,” said the Hunchback.

  Razziel followed him into the corridor and from there into a little office, dimly lit but pleasantly heated. The walls were hung with portraits and old maps. Books were stacked in a corner; the Judge, on his knees, was rummaging through a pile of them.

  “Sit anywhere you like,” he said, without looking up.

  Razziel sat on one of the two chairs. On a low table was a teapot, little cakes, dried fruit.
<
br />   “Help yourself.”

  “I’m not hungry,” replied Razziel.

  The Judge seemed preoccupied as he leafed through a volume looking for some reference or forgotten statute. When he stood up, he took his place facing Razziel.

  “So, you are well versed in mysticism.”

  Razziel remained silent.

  “These matters interest me too.”

  Was he hoping Razziel would react? If so, it was a vain hope.

  “What is it you seek in them? The mystery of the beginning or of the end?” The Judge’s voice had changed. No longer threatening, it expressed true curiosity. “Is it a taste for the absolute that attracts you? For me it is initiation into death.”

  “Death is by definition absolute,” Razziel said finally.

  “Not at all. It’s far too intermingled with life, which is anything but absolute. For me, the absolute lies in evil: pure evil, powerful, more powerful than goodness, and just as infinite as God. It is from evil that salvation will come.”

  Razziel shivered. Suddenly he understood the meaning of what was happening to him. In order to meet Paritus he first had to confront his adversary. Conversely, it was in order to discover this adversary that his meeting with Paritus had been ordained. Now he must be strong, he told himself, strong and lucid. He must be capable of saying the most obscure things in even tones, devoid of all emotion. There are certain words and silences that are worth more than all our emotions. Emotion only helps man to appease his conscience, to exonerate himself, to persuade himself that he is not as corrupt as all that, not as guilty as all that, since he suffers from the same wants as everyone else.

  “Do you believe in Redemption?” asked Razziel in a hoarse voice.

  “Which one?”

  “There is only one,” said Razziel. “The Redemption is the same in the present and in all eternity.”

  “And you, do you believe in it?”

  “Yes. Every time a human being stops suffering and causes others to overcome suffering, he is experiencing the effect of Redemption. Saving the life of a child, rescuing a prisoner from torture, is to take part in the ultimate process that is Redemption.”

  The Judge shook his head. “If that is your great mystical quest, I find it pitiful, and you too. It is suited only to weak and sanctimonious souls, to pusillanimous ambitions. It rejects the violence of hatred or, at least, of anger; it lacks strength; and therefore it lacks humanity. Am I wrong?”

  “Yes!” cried Razziel. “Rejecting violence and hatred demands more strength and more courage than yielding to them! Killing is easy; any fool or degenerate can do it. But giving meaning to life is a complex challenge of a quite different order.”

  “You accord too much value to life. Absolute good is meaningless, for it refers you back to God and his judgment. And that brings us back to our first question. For me, life is a curse. And there is evil in curses. In granting life, God simply reveals his own weakness. Do I shock you, sir, you, the specialist in esoteric matters? Have you not yet found in your texts the priceless evidence that proves the world can be saved by evil? Countless great minds have striven to arrive at this, by preaching goodness; they have all failed. That is why my Master has led me along the opposite road: We strive to save the world through evil. If you wish to know who was my Master I will tell you: He was an arsonist, a murderer.”

  The Judge fell silent. Razziel closed his eyes and again had a vision of Paritus. Ancient texts, inscribed on blazing parchments, came into his mind, the exploits of false messiahs and their disastrous consequences: Sabbatai Zevi in Turkey, Jacob Frank in Poland. They too believed they could change the course of History by violating its laws. And then there were the tragic lives of those pious dreamers, intoxicated with the absolute, who tried to force the Lord’s hand by deepening their love for him and his creatures: Rabbi Abraham Abulafia and Rabbi Yoseph di la Reina. True mystery is not linked to messianic time but to the longing of man.

  One day Paritus had asked him if he knew how to dance. No, he did not. “No?” Paritus was astonished. “You must learn. When you dance you lift yourself into the air. Only to fall back again? So what? When he comes back to earth, man is no longer the same.” Once again, Paritus was right. Man’s strength resides in his capacity and desire to elevate himself, so as to attain the good. To travel step by step toward the heights. And that is all he can do. To reach heaven and remain there is beyond his powers: Even Moses had to return to earth. Is it the same for evil?

  Bizarrely, beyond the furious storm that buffeted the walls as if to blow them away, the distant world seemed at peace, in full equilibrium. Time was becoming a thing one studied and questioned in order to calm it.

  “Evil,” said the Judge, “is what I know, as it knows me. It is all I know.”

  Razziel was preparing for a heartbreaking story: cruel parents, friendships betrayed, unhappy love. Maybe the Judge had grown up in prison, or on the streets. But no. He listened to a barely coherent account of a golden childhood; a youth full of promise, affectionate parents, inspired teachers. Then one day the teenager made the acquaintance of a strange guru with disconcerting ways and mesmerizing powers of denigration. He could read other people’s thoughts and even control them. After this encounter, his life became a labyrinth, a laboratory where evil made all transmutations possible. Isn’t evil, like suffering, the very essence of progress? the guru would ask. Isn’t it necessary both for the functioning of justice and for the labors of theologians? There is no perfection except in evil, he often repeated. To do good is easy; it is the first rule they teach children. To do evil is not. Only a courageous spirit, burning with energy, is capable of rebelling against a thousand years of laws, social contracts, and religious dogmas.

  Distancing himself little by little from his parents and their friends, the Judge began to follow the teaching of his guru. One day he saw a young handicapped boy fall on the pavement and went to help him up. The boy slipped and fell again. This time, as if happy to repair a foolish blunder, the Judge burst out laughing and turned away. On another occasion, he passed an old man in the street and knocked him over. Some years later, noticing a woman about to throw herself under a subway train, he held her back. By way of recompense she slapped his face. This experience marked a turning point in his life: He realized that seeing other people suffer made him happy. He adopted the custom of spending long hours in hospitals and prisons. The angels of evil had become his companions.

  Suddenly the Judge stood up, lowered his head, took several steps across the room, and began speaking in a hoarse, bitter voice.

  “To do evil and to serve evil is to recognize its timeless value. Have you ever seen the swollen face of a dead child, or the horrified expression of a young girl betrayed, or the torn bloody body of a violated mother? No? Then you will never know the attraction evil can hold for a man, to the point of making him an avenger, thirsty for justice. Such a man has only one desire, one ambition: to become a god of death by taking on its powers. Truth no longer lies in life but in death. It is in death that justice is accomplished. Killing the guilty man, eliminating the criminal: These things are no longer enough for him. He wants something more, something different. It is other people’s innocence that he longs to strike down, because that of his own nearest and dearest has been soiled, disfigured, destroyed. He knows, yes, this man knows, that good has less power than evil and fewer possibilities. He does not know why God decided it thus, but let his will be done. And so he allies himself with evil, to sing its praise and become its messenger among those men who evidently need it in order to function.” He lowered his voice. “You understand me, don’t you? The mystic in you does understand me?”

  “I understand that evil has its own priests as good has its prophets. But I cannot accept that any man could wish to embody evil.”

  “Then you understand nothing!” exclaimed the Judge, suddenly radiant.

  “What you say is immoral and inhuman,” replied Razziel.

  “What is
inhuman, deriving pleasure from someone else’s pain?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that is where you’re mistaken. For man, who cannot escape his condition, everything is human.”

  Razziel protested no further. Perhaps the Judge was right on that point. Man can both understand and cease to understand, love and despise, grasp existence at the moment that either imprisons or liberates him, experience the abyss even while his eyes are fixed on the heavens—and still be a man: that is, weak enough to be constantly changing his opinions.

  “I may often be wrong,” said Razziel, “but not about the fact that evil is the rejection and the negation of good and thus the rejection of life and of that which elevates man and allows him to transcend himself.”

  “And death? What do you make of death? Can one not transcend oneself in death?”

  “No. Neither in mine nor in that of another. Death only means one thing: the end. The end of the world I carry within me. Beyond it, nothing in that world exists.”

  “But there is something else,” said the Judge.

  “Something else,” echoed Razziel. “But that something else is beyond me and no longer depends on me. Or on you.”

  The Judge thought for a moment. “Do you know Cervantes had a very high opinion of Don Quixote? He said of him that what assured his success was dying a wise man, having lived as a madman. But it is also true that he strove to live above good and evil. How about you?”

  At a sign of the Judge’s, the door opened and Razziel rejoined his companions, wondering whether in fact the Judge had avenged the death of his wife and daughter.

  Yoav listened to Razziel’s report with half an ear; the existential conflict that arose between good and evil no longer concerned him. Yoav was thinking of his father. What would he have done in my place, he wondered, being a man for whom action was a kind of secular religion? In his youth in eastern Poland he had belonged to the clandestine Communist Party. Robust, with an ascetic face and an intense gaze, he was the very model of the romantic revolutionary who believes in the mystique of self-sacrifice in order to change the world. Inside him there was anger barely held in check, a rage just waiting for a pretext in order to explode. Later, in Israel, he became an officer in the commandos, but he rarely talked about his military activities.