The Oath Read online

  “Yes. Death too.”

  And lowering his voice, the old man continues: “But you will never see Kolvillàg. So you have nothing to fear. You have been spared the worst.” And in an even lower voice, almost a whisper: “I am not telling you not to despair of man, I only ask you not to offer death one more victim, one more victory. It does not deserve it, believe me. The most beautiful of deaths is hardly that; there is no beautiful death. Nor is there a just death. Every death is absurd. Useless. And ugly. Is that your wish? To add to the ugliness of the world? I am telling you to resist. Whether life has a meaning or not, what matters is not to make a gift of it to death. All you will get in return is a corpse. And corpses stink—I know something about that. Stay, I tell you. Stay on the threshold. Like myself. And like myself you will avenge Kolvillàg …

  “Kolvillàg: you don’t know what it is. A melodious, enticing name, don’t you think? You wouldn’t think of a slaughterhouse. And yet, and yet. But I must stop. Don’t worry, my dead friends: I shall not repudiate you, I shall not allow a stranger to desecrate your sanctuary. I shall be careful. The event shall remain whole. I shall tell neither cause nor effect. I shall not reveal the enormity of the secret, I shall only indicate its existence. I shall show only the spark. One glimmer will be enough. If afterwards you still want to die, my young friend, you will at least know why.

  “What I saw in Kolvillàg, not only during its last night, was the eruption of total violence, the rule of madness in the absolute sense, as though the absolute had become unhinged. As though the Creator, in a fit of joyous and destructive rage, had granted full freedom to His creatures, from the greatest to the most insignificant; and these creatures, crazed by their burden of divinity, driven to madness and nothingness, suddenly resembled one another in their passionate hatred and vengefulness.

  “Caught in the turmoil, adolescents and parents, beggars and rich men, wise men and fools uttered the same unheeded cry. Slayers and victims foundered in the same well, condemned to the same anonymity. Good and evil fought over the same role, the same privileges. At one point, had I dared, I should have cried out: ‘Woe to us, God is not God! Woe to man, the Master of the Universe has gone mad!’ But I dared not. And then, there was my promise, my pledge. I tightened my lips, bit them till they bled; I did not shout. Sheltered by the woods, high above the valley, I watched the conflagration spreading, approaching by huge leaps. I didn’t run, I didn’t panic; I didn’t even move. I thought: What for? And also: Let him come, the avenger, I am expecting him, I’ll relinquish this tree, this forest of trees to him, I shall give them to him as an offering, I shall gladly yield to him both the mountain and the valley. And the rest with it.”

  Suddenly the old man shivers. “And you, aren’t you cold?”

  “No.”

  A foolish question, but the old man is always cold. Old age? Lack of sleep? Even in summer he wears two shirts.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Thirsty?”

  “No.”

  Speak, the old man thinks. The best way. Make him speak. Speak to him. As long as we keep speaking, he is in my power. One does not commit suicide in the middle of a sentence. One does not commit suicide while speaking or listening. Nor in the middle of a meal. Make him eat, drink, get drunk. But nothing interests him. And yet, and yet. He should be roused, shaken. Go on speaking? How long? On whose behalf, on behalf of what? On behalf of the dead. What business is it of mine? And yet, and yet. One must act, do something, anything, invoke a certainty, any certainty. To hell with principles, vows. The true contest must take place on the level of the individual. It is here, in the present, that the Temple is reclaimed or demolished. It is not by legitimizing suffering—and what is death if not the paroxysm of suffering—that one can disarm it. The mystery of the universe resides not in the universe but in man; perfection can be attained only by the individual.

  So you hope to defeat evil? Fine. Begin by helping your fellow-man. Triumph over death? Excellent. Begin by saving your brother. Make him understand that escape into death is more senseless than escape into life. A man who does not fear death is a fool who wants to die. Fear is a healthy thing, it implies a rejection of death. Proof: Kolvillàg was crumbling under fear. No connection? Wrong. If you are tired of living, young man, it is because in Kolvillàg death was victorious. The abyss inside you was opened there. In your own way, you are a ghost. A survivor. Except that you have no story to relate. You wish to take your life in order to give yourself a story. You’d like that of Kolvillàg, eh? And then you’ll live, eh? No blackmail, please.

  I cannot give you that which is not mine. I don’t have the right. Don’t push me, I won’t relent. Others have tried with no success. A word of advice: chain your gaze, rein in your thoughts; they must not venture too far, beyond the accepted bounds. You risk stumbling over a people engulfed in silence and protected by it, and you would lose your mind.

  There followed feverish days, filled with excitement. My involvement with Kolvillàg became deeper, more intense, turned into obsession. I ate little, slept poorly. How can I explain its hold on me? I couldn’t explain it to myself. Could I have seen in Azriel a personification of the prophet Elijah, the one the disinherited, the downtrodden dream about? Or of my grandfather, who died over there in the tempest? I couldn’t say. Did he help me to escape? Accept myself? Fulfill myself? Possibly. It hardly matters. Psychoanalysis is not my strong point. Azriel knocked down the walls I had erected around myself. Something important and genuine happened to me while I discovered the city that lived inside him. By allowing me to enter his life, he gave meaning to mine. I lived on two levels, dwelt in two places, claimed more than one role as my own.

  In one night he had me adopted by his entire community. So much so that I could find my way in his town. The streets, the gardens, the public buildings. Every chimney, every lamppost. The asylum with its dried-out wooden roof, where wanderers found shelter and food. Across the street, the big general store. The police station, the church. The House of Study with its crumbling walls, the old synagogue with its impressive entrance. The Jewish school where on Saturday afternoons Shaike and his exalted friends prepared the revolution, the victory of the oppressed in a world where poverty would be a virtue envied and bought by the rich. The rabbi who, it was said, slapped impertinent merchants but later had himself secretly whipped by an anonymous servant. The priest with his sanctimonious airs of pious martyrdom. The notables, the president. Moshe the Madman and his overly ambitious plans. Kaizer the Mute, who cried himself into drunkenness. The beggars, amateur actors all, who on Purim eve succeeded in eliciting applause; as long as the festivities lasted, they were the unchallenged masters of the town. Leizer the Fat, Yiddel the Cripple, One-Eyed Simha, Avrom the Wise, Adam the Gravedigger; I watched them live, I was present at their discussions. I laughed at their intrigues, shared in their sorrows. The alliances, jealousies, complicities, daily adventures and secular traditions which together create the climate and the pulse of a town, well, Azriel had communicated them to me as a gift.

  As for the storyteller, he intrigued and fascinated me. Who was he? A saint? A madman? A Just Man disguised as vagabond? He lived alone in a wretched little garret. His neighbors avoided him, the janitor trembled as he spoke of him. After he disappeared, none of his personal belongings could be found. I would have given much to lay my hands on his Book; but he had taken it with him, of course.

  Through constant pursuit of the character, I succeeded in uncovering his tracks. Thus I learned that he was regularly received in some of the most elegant salons as well as in the Marxist student house. He patronized the North African Jewish restaurant and the Home for Aged Anarchists. He, whom nobody succeeded in knowing, knew many people. He was equally at ease quoting from the Talmud or Mao Tse-tung; he mastered seven ancient tongues and a dozen living ones. Haughty with the powerful, humble with the deprived. To professional philosophers he taught philosophy; to tycoons, the stock market. You
ng people loved him: he listened, teased, appeased. He made them understand what was happening to them; it was always more serious or simpler than they had imagined. They came to him, each with his problem, his small personal tragedy. He arbitrated their quarrels, ideological and other, and imposed sentence. The boys told him of their emotions, the girls discussed politics: a world upside down. Even when he scoffed at them, he was forgiven. Too old to envy success, too alien to this generation to judge it. His words were deeds; he had no ulterior motives.

  I approached, questioned many who had spoken with him. Unfortunately, they were of no help. Yes, all remembered him, but not in the same way; their portraits did not coincide. Some spoke of his round, puffy face while others described it as angular and expressive. They recalled his massive head, out of proportion to the rest of the body. And his eyes? Light and gentle, according to some; somber and penetrating, according to others. I would ask: What about his hands? For I myself still see them, see them drawing patterns in the air, accentuating this sentence, denigrating that thought. But they looked puzzled. What was so extraordinary about his hands? And what about his voice? I asked. Do you remember his voice? On that point, they all agreed: his had been a deep, resonant, often raucous voice.

  I discovered the small synagogue, deep inside the Jewish quarter, where he had taught Talmud in Yiddish to an audience made up of Polish and Hungarian immigrants. A first thought, crazy, absurd, made my heart jump. What if they all came from over there, from Kolvillàg? No, impossible. They were born elsewhere. Slobodke, Wizhnitz, Satmàr. Still, just in case, I did ask: Kolvillàg, does that name mean anything to you? Shaking their heads, they answered no. Kolvillàg? Don’t know, don’t know. Your teacher Azriel came from Kolvillàg, I would say. They opened their eyes wide. What, his name was Azriel? They had known him by another name: Katriel. Some smiled as they recalled him, others cried. But, in all honesty, they may have cried because of me. Or over me.

  The most striking fact about Azriel was furnished me by a youngish man with a delicate, moving face: “We had just finished the Tractate on Shabbat. As is the custom, the reader recited the Kaddish d’rabbanan; and our Master’s inflection was so singular, so heartbreaking that none among us answered amen, and yet we felt that all of creation was answering amen.”

  “I remember,” says the old man:

  Sitting on a stool next to the door, a woman dressed in black cries and cries in silence. On the table a candle consumes itself.

  “Why a candle in midday?” I asked my mother.

  “It’s for Grandfather.”

  “Where is he? Where is Grandfather?”

  “He is dead.”

  “What does that mean, dead?”

  “That means that he is gone, that he will not come back. Ever. You will not hear him sing again. He will not bless you again.”

  “Why did he leave?”

  “Because God has called him.”

  “And when God calls, one must come immediately?”

  “Yes, immediately.”

  “And what if one doesn’t feel like it?”

  “One goes anyway. One has no choice. One does not die at will. We are in God’s hand.”

  “Why does God want man to die?”

  “You will grow up and you will know.”

  On her lap she held a book of Psalms she was reading absent-mindedly. Her thoughts were elsewhere, with Grandfather, somewhere in the kingdom where the dead gather around God, saying: You have called us, here we are. I wondered whether her thoughts would come back and when. Tomorrow, no doubt. That was the word my mother often used to reassure me. Tomorrow I would no longer hurt. Tomorrow I would play in the yard. Tomorrow I would welcome the Messiah.

  “Why this black cloth over the mirror?” I asked my mother.

  “It’s a sign of mourning. When we are sad we don’t care about our image in the mirror.”

  My mother. I had never seen her so beautiful nor so sad. I looked at her and felt like crying. It wasn’t her sadness but her beauty that made the tears rise into my throat.

  “I still don’t understand the candle,” I said obstinately.

  “And yet it’s simple: it burns awhile and then goes out. What happens to the flame? It rises to heaven. Like the soul. You will grow up and you will understand that fire is a symbol both for the living and for the dead.”

  “What’s a symbol?”

  “You are too young. One day you’ll understand.”

  “Not before?”

  “Not before.”

  “When? Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is far away.”

  “All right, let me explain to you. A symbol is a word you use in place of another.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Mother didn’t answer and I didn’t insist. That night Grandfather appeared to me in my sleep. Surprised that I could see him, I asked him to explain. After swearing me to secrecy, he said: “Your mother thinks I’m dead; she’s wrong. Your father too is wrong. And you will be my proof. As long as you live I shall be alive.”

  “But … What if God calls me?”

  “Tell yourself that God’s call is not necessarily the call of death. It all depends on you.”

  His voice, I can hear it still. It is that of my first dreams. My mother died soon afterward and I too had to light a candle, then another and another. I can see them still. Their flame rises and goes on rising. And here it is, immense and greedy, no longer symbolizing the soul of a person but that of a town, a region, a vanished kingdom, and like it, ephemeral and invisible except to the dead.

  My mother is sick. Her heart, she says. Nerves, says the doctor. This is where it hurts, she says, pointing to her heart. Nerves, says the doctor, shrugging his shoulders. No matter who is right, my father feels guilty. So do I.

  One day I questioned my father: “Did you read? The trials of the war criminals are turning into a farce. The killers listen to the witnesses’ testimony and roar with laughter as though they were at the circus. How can they?”

  Pale, his eyes half closed, he answered me in a barely audible voice: “They can, they can.”

  Another time: “I don’t understand. God’s role in the camps—explain it to me.”

  “You couldn’t understand.”

  The gap between us was wide; it seemed unbridgeable.

  “Both executioner and victim,” my father went on, his voice unsteady, “have reason to doubt God.”

  And then the question that was burning my lips and that I never dared ask before: “You. And Mother. Both of you. How did you do it—how did you survive?”

  Sometimes I would watch my father from my corner and feel anxiety creep over me. What did he look like over there? What does he do when he is not doing anything? Whom does he see when he is staring into space? The more I observed him, the less I understood the nature of his ailment.

  “You think I am suffering,” Moshe had said. Moshe, my mad, my saintly friend lying helpless in his blood. “You believe that I am succumbing to pain. You are wrong. I observe myself, I see myself suffering. The part of me that is watching is not suffering, or else is suffering in a different way. And it is not complaining.”

  “But doesn’t this place affect you at all? Aren’t you sad, angry? Wouldn’t you like to go out, meet friends, stroll through the streets, be with your wife?”

  “You’re too young to understand,” he had said, grimacing. “My body is in prison, I admit that. Naturally. But my innermost self is free. More than ever. Would you rather it were the opposite?”

  He had stopped abruptly, crumpling over even more, turning his head to the right and to the left as though to discover an invisible intruder: “There is something I haven’t told you, something you should know. I am cold. I didn’t tell you that I was cold. I mean really cold. Totally. All of me. Not only my body. But me. I mean my innermost self. We are cold.

  “A man in prison learns to say we. For there, you see, you are alone; for there y
ou really freeze. If in the street you notice a passer-by shivering with cold, a stranger in need of warmth, know that he has spent time in prison.”

  They were all cold in Kolvillàg. In the cellars and outside. In the jails and in the houses. All the Moshes of the town, and not only of the town, were shivering with cold; all needed warmth so much they wished for fire, fire everywhere, in the prisons and in the forests, fire on earth and fire in the sky, ruling and avenging all of creation from one end to the other. Sometimes I think that Kolvillàg burned simply because Moshe, my foolish, my saintly friend, was shivering with cold.

  “Let’s walk, get warm.”

  Lead him away from here, the old man reflects. Bring him back, make him understand. Don’t leave him alone, not yet. Don’t let him sink into silence. Grab hold of him, pull him along. Speak, make him speak. He resists, answers reluctantly. His life in general outlines. Lonely childhood, the usual studies. A feeling of emptiness, waste. Go ahead, answer: Why this? Why that? He reacts badly to all this questioning, but at least he reacts; that’s better than nothing. Terse, breathless answers. Why this taste for solitude. And this curiosity about politics, religion, science. And why the one-year stay at a kibbutz did not produce the expected results. And why he feels uprooted. Go on, continue. Have you no real problems? An unhappy love affair perhaps? They walk side by side, cross streets drowned in neon lights, empty squares, come back to the waterfront only to leave it again immediately. Go on, continue.

  The old man is tireless, insatiable. To save a man, one must think like him, feel what he feels, see what he sees and what he refuses to see. To save him, one must want to die like him. One must be he. Except that he will never be like me; he has never known Moshe the Madman, he has never inhaled the conflagration’s smoke.

  “Speak, for God’s sake. You read books, don’t you? You go to movies, you have friends, you flirt, don’t you? I want to know everything, everything, I tell you! When you see a pretty girl, doesn’t your body respond whether you like it or not? When she smiles at you, don’t your cheeks flush?