The Testament Read online

  Not that I am ashamed of having believed in the Revolution. It did give hope to the hungry, persecuted masses. But seeing what it has become, I no longer believe in it. The great upheavals of history, its dramatic accelerations … all things considered, I prefer mystics to politicians.

  I am going to die within a month, a year, and I should like to go on living. With you and for you. To have you meet the characters who are sharing my wait in this cell of mine.

  I must tell you that in my Testament I did plead guilty. Yes, guilty. But not to what I take to be the meaning of the charge. On the contrary: guilty of not having lived as my father did. That, my son, is the irony: I lived a Communist and I die a Jew.

  The tempest has swept over us and people are no longer what they were. I have grown up, matured. I walked through the forest and lost my way. It’s too late to go back. Life is like that—going back is impossible.

  YOUR FATHER

  Outside, the dusk falls abruptly over the hills around Jerusalem. Nothing remains of the coppery sun but a handful of sparks firing the window panes. This is the hour when Grisha likes to stand near the window, to gaze at the city reaching out for night. Not now: he’s too absorbed in reading and rereading his father’s Testament. As he turns the pages he hears the hoarse, staccato voice, unlike anyone else’s, of Viktor Zupanev—the man who could not laugh—who passes on to him the story of the story of the Jewish poet slain far away.

  Suddenly he tenses as he tries in vain to visualize Zupanev. Faces parade in his head—delicate or vulgar, calm or nervous, surly or happy faces—but not one of them bears the features of the old watchman of Krasnograd. He does hear his voice: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Grisha? Wasn’t I your guide, your protector? Would you have gone to Jerusalem if I hadn’t sent you? Why have you forgotten me?” Tomorrow, Grisha says to himself. Tomorrow I’ll know. She is arriving tomorrow. My first question will be: “Have you seen Zupanev? Describe him to me.” And only then will he question her about his father: “Did you love him, Mother? Did you really love him?” Tomorrow …

  For the moment Grisha plunges back into his reading.

  “… I awoke with a start, panting. The running, the strangled cries—all that was in my dream. The little girl about to fall from the tower, and the same little girl about to drown: a nightmare! As a child I used to recite the morning prayer: I thank you, O living God, for giving me back my life. Why did I suddenly hear this as an echo? I listened to the beating of my heart as though it were ticking away outside myself. Instinctively, I stopped breathing, became all ears. Silence … a black, evil silence rising … I never knew silence could move. Was I still dreaming? A glance at the window—it was still night, I was home in my bed. To the right, the cradle. Grisha was sleeping a peaceful sleep; I heard his steady, confident breathing. Raissa was moving restlessly. What demons were besetting her? Perhaps I should wake her, tell her: They’re coming, Raissa. They’re at Kozlowski’s, do you hear me? Good old one-armed Kozlowski, such a nuisance, with his foolish, useless smiles. Did he smile as he welcomed them? No, that’s not where they were. At Dr. Mozliak’s, perhaps? That mysterious character I sometimes see on the staircase—he gives me the creeps. Was it his turn?

  “All this lasted no more than a second—a second since my awakening—and a fist of steel was already pounding my temples. They’re very close! Take care of the little one, Raissa. He mustn’t forget me, promise he won’t forget me. I start shaking her gently, but I’m petrified. There’s a knock on the door. No use clinging to foamy waves. Listen, Paltiel. The knocks are discreet, polite, persistent. One, two, three, four. Pause. One, two, three, four. Raissa nudges me with her elbow. The knocking begins again. I panic: Should I wake the little one? Talk to him, embrace him one last time? I take a deep breath—no sentimentality, Paltiel! A pain in my left arm, near the chest. Funny if I had a heart attack now! One, two, three, four. They’re getting impatient. A mad notion flashes through my mind. What if I don’t get up? If I don’t open the door? If I feign sickness, or death? What if it’s only an extension of my dream? A little blond girl is going to throw herself from the top of the tower, and that same little blond girl is going to drown; she cries out, I cry out, but the people are sleeping, nobody hears, nobody sees; people don’t want to wake up.…

  “No, it’s all over. It’s my turn. Raissa squeezes my arm. I tell her softly, This is it, Raissa. I’d like to see her expression, but it’s still dark. Never mind: I look at her without seeing her, I touch her. She shakes her head; her hair falls over my shoulder; I feel warm. It’s all over, I whisper. Will you watch over our son? She says nothing, but—oddly—I hear, I receive her answer. And I realize that my fear has left me. Not a trace of panic any more. I don’t have to save the little girl with the golden hair, she’s already dead. The anguish oppressing me for months lifts. I feel strangely relieved.

  “And liberated.”

  The plane from Vienna is due tomorrow, in the late morning. In his room in Jerusalem, Grisha has one night to get ready. His mind is made up. He will go to meet his mother at Lod and bring her home with him. She’ll sleep in the room, he’ll sleep on a cot in the foyer for a week or two. Just time enough for her to read her husband’s Testament. Then she’ll go to stay at the Ministry’s Reception Center. Perhaps then, she too will feel relieved.

  A year has passed since Grisha left Krasnograd. He remembers his mother’s pale, distraught face: “Are you leaving because of me?” When Grisha did not respond at once, she lowered her voice and asked again, “Because of me? Tell me.” In shame, she covered her mouth with her hand: she knew well enough that her son could not speak his answer. But Grisha had learned to make himself understood by moving his lips, his hands, his shoulders, or simply with his eyes. “No, not only because of you,” he answered. Reassured, she said, “Because of the doctor?” “I’m going because of my father.”

  That was only partly true. His mother surely had something to do with it. By tomorrow you’ll have read the final sentence in the story of the arrest, Grisha muses, and I’ll look at you as I never have before. And you will live the death of my father.

  And Raissa, what will she say? “Grisha, my son, don’t judge me; I beg of you, don’t judge your mother. Try to understand.” That’s what she’ll say, as she had each time she tried to justify herself, and failed. “Make an effort, Grisha. Try to imagine the past years, the terror, the loneliness. Especially the loneliness …”

  Enveloped by night, Jerusalem holds its breath.

  I have never laughed in my life, said old Viktor Zupanev, as if explaining something. Can you understand that? Even when I was kidding around, even when I was playing, my heart wasn’t in it: I wasn’t laughing. You don’t seem impressed. And yet … Have you met many people incapable of laughter? Tell me. So what? you’ll say. One can do without laughter. One can do all sorts of crazy things: one can love, eat, dream, chase skirts, jump on a high wire, set the clouds afire and tear down trees, thumb one’s nose at the world, one can even be happy—and still not laugh. True. But as for myself, Grisha, I wanted to laugh, to have one really good laugh, to roar with laughter, laugh until I croak. But I never could. I’d look at myself in the mirror and sink into one of those depressions.… That’s why you won’t find a single mirror in my place. And then a poet different from the others, a crazy Jew, burst into my life and changed it by telling me about his own. And then …

  In writing his Testament, Paltiel Kossover had sought precision first of all. Every word contains a hidden meaning; every sentence sums up a wide range of experiences. Could he have imagined that his writings would survive him? That his words would be read and reread, studied and restudied by his son? Like all prisoners, all condemned people, this singer of Jewish suffering, this poet of dead hopes knew what could be expected: in the dark solitary cells of the Secret Police people wrote only for the interrogators, the torturers, the judges. Awaiting death, they wrote only for death. Did Paltiel Kossover, in spite of everything, believ
e in the impossible? He hinted at this somewhere. Page … which page? Grisha leafs through the manuscript. There on page 43, at the bottom:

  “… You ask me why I’m writing. And for whom. At one time these questions were easy to answer. In fact, at the time I was touring the collective farms and communes, I was asked these two questions after each of my lectures. The Soviet people wanted to understand, and the Jewish poet tried to supply them with explanations. I am writing in order to vanquish evil and to glorify that victory; I am writing to justify the thirty or forty centuries of history I bear within me. Grandiloquent? Pretentious? So what? My words reflected what I felt. As for the second question—for whom was I writing?—I answered: I’m writing for you, for you who are alive today, my contemporaries, my allies, my companions, my brothers. I should like to take your arm, watch you smile as you listen to my story, which is also yours.…

  “Today I no longer know. I am writing, but I do not know for whom: for the dead, those who abandoned me en route and who are waiting for me? I am writing because I have no choice. As in that story of olden days: King David used to love to sing, and as long as he sang, the Angel of Death could not approach him; composing his Psalms, he was immortal. Like me. As long as I write, as long as I put ink on paper, death will be powerless against me: you will keep me here, between these hideous walls. And when I shall have told my last story, completed my last reminiscence, your emissaries will come to fetch me, to lead me to the dungeons. I know that, I live without illusion. So it is because of you, if not for you, that I shall go on writing. And since I have the right to tell everything—that is the only right I have—let me add this: these words, which you think you will be the only ones to read, are intended for others beside yourselves. You can destroy my notebooks; no doubt you’ll burn them, but a voice within me tells me that the words of a condemned man have their own life, their own mystery. Does the word ‘mystery’ make you sneer? Well, I’m beginning to believe in it. The words you strangle, the words you murder, produce a kind of primary, impenetrable silence. And you will never succeed in killing a silence such as this.…”

  Grisha turns the pages. Would his mother be able to read the handwriting? What a pity I’m mute, he tells himself. I should have liked to give my voice to my father, to be the narrator of his broken life and his hidden death. Poor Father! Your son, your heir, can articulate only unintelligible sounds; your only son is mute.

  While reading, he moves his lips, as though talking to himself in a low voice. From time to time he raises his eyes, passes his hand through his tousled hair; his thoughts wander off into the distance, beyond the years and the frontiers: a sad child, harassing his mother, an unhappy child humiliated by a stranger, a bewildered orphan, a rebellious, frenzied adolescent who attached himself to a mad old man, to that night watchman who was so anonymous as to be faceless. A mother he loves and no longer loves: “Try to understand,” she tells him. Grisha rubs his eyes as if to chase away a painful memory; he rubs his eyes each time he thinks of his mother. Yet there was a time he refused to leave her for a single hour, even to sleep; he loved her and only her. There was a time they were alone in the world. Alone, Grisha thinks, and his heart twinges.

  He gets up and walks over to the open window. The fresh air does him good. Night is a living presence in Jerusalem; it roams the streets, accompanies passersby, hides in the doorways. In Jerusalem night is a messenger.

  Tomorrow, Grisha thinks, the plane arrives tomorrow morning. Friday, the eve of Yom Kippur.

  Who will go with him to the airport? Someone must, to do the speaking. His friend, the writer in whose house he lives, who knows everyone. For years, he has been fighting for the Russian Jews. Many owe him their freedom. It was he who informed Grisha, “Your mother has just arrived in Vienna, she’ll be coming here in three days.” Grisha felt dizzy. His friend put his arm around him protectively. “You love her, don’t you? You never thought you’d see her again, did you? You’re excited, I understand, so am I. The family—what’s left of Paltiel Kossover’s family—reunited in Israel, well, that does something to me.…” Poor fellow, Grisha tells himself, he thinks he knows and understands everything.

  What about Katya? Of course she would go with him. She’d know when to step aside. But she might say something better left unsaid. No, I’ll go alone, Grisha decides. Police and customs, my mother can handle all that, she’s not the timid sort. A former Red Army officer knows how to take care of herself.

  Tomorrow. Moment of truth, day of judgment, eve of Yom Kippur. A strange coincidence. Grisha breathes deeply, strains to catch the thousand and one noises rising from the street and neighboring buildings. The radio brays out the news of the day: commentaries, commentaries on commentaries. Israelis love to comment. Everybody has an opinion on every subject: the Russians, the Chinese, the Left, the Right, abortion, psychoanalysis, men, women, and those in between. And the coming elections. And the Day of Atonement: should one fast or go to the beach? Politicians’ speeches, religious exhortations. God wills, God exhorts: how many spokesmen He has, all so sure of themselves! Thanksgiving for the year gone by, prayers for the year to come. No war—above all, no war.

  It’s ten at night, perhaps later, but the street still brims with activity. A rabbi and his disciples, in winter kaftans despite the hot weather, are on their way to the Wall to beseech God to give them the strength and wisdom to better beseech Him tomorrow evening. A worker makes his way homeward breathlessly. A tourist asks someone to decipher an inscription on a yeshiva: “This building will not be sold or rented until the coming of the Messiah.” How Paltiel would have appreciated that quiet affirmation!

  Children call to one another. Their parents, new immigrants from Odessa, exchange complaints and advice: “You want a tax-free car? All you have to do …”

  Katya lives across the street, in the gray, three-story house, on the ground floor. Should I pay her a visit? Quite a girl, Katya. If there were room in his life for such things, he would try to marry her.

  Excitable, amusing, warm, Katya is a mute in her own way when it comes to her husband, fallen in Sinai or in the Golan Heights. She never speaks of him. A war widow, she refuses to be a dead man’s prisoner. Not like me, Grisha reflects. I live with the memory of my father, I incorporate him into my own memory; I live in his shadow. It is to him that I dedicate all my free hours, all my passions, all my energy and willpower. I am the shadow of a shadow; we disappear at dawn.

  No, he will not go to Katya’s. Not tonight. He knows how it will end and he does not want to be distracted, not tonight.

  Since his arrival in Jerusalem in 1972, since settling down in the apartment loaned to him by his father’s admirer, Grisha has led a solitary life except for his relationship with Katya. He spends his days copying, recopying and studying his father’s poems and Testament. In the evenings he visits Katya.

  When he first went to her, he hesitated whether to ring the doorbell or knock on the window. He chose the window. She came to let him in, showing no surprise. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  Grisha found her attractive. A little on the plump side, but attractive. How explain to her that he was mute?

  “All right, come in,” said the young woman, after looking him over attentively.

  “I’m letting you in because you knocked at the window,” she added. “I don’t like the door, people ring to bring bad news.”

  Grisha inspected the room as though interested in its cleanliness. Beneath the mirror were some framed photographs of an officer in various poses: saluting the Minister of Defense, surrounded by comrades, on the beach, holding hands with a young woman, a little on the plump side but attractive.

  “My name’s Katya, what’s yours?”

  Grisha did not answer. He looked at her. More than once, seeing her silhouette through the window, he had been attracted and troubled by her. He feared her rejection as much as her pity.

  “You’re not saying anything? Why not? Have you lost your tongue, maybe?”<
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  Grisha nodded—yes, in fact he had. She backed away.

  “Forgive me.”

  Grisha shook his head again—no need to ask forgiveness.

  “How did it happen? When? The war?

  No, not the war.

  “Then what? Have you been mute since birth?”

  No, not since birth.

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  He made a gesture as though to say “You can’t understand.” In any case he was not going to tell her his life story. Or tell her about his father’s work. Or talk to her about his mother. And surely he was not going to confide in her the secret adventure of an old watchman of ghosts called Viktor Zupanev. Even if he were not mute he would have remained silent.

  At first he stayed to one side, without touching her. He had the feeling they were not alone; you don’t make love, Grisha, in the presence of the dead.

  Then he had yielded. He had succumbed to the urgency of his desire. Forgetting his mother and father, forgetting the fallen officer, he let himself be carried away by his body. He wanted to love this young woman, open himself up to her one day.…

  No, not tonight.

  I’ll go see her tomorrow morning. I’ll ask her to take me to the airport. Better her than anyone else. On the way back, there’ll be two widows in the car. Is there some link between them? I know why Katya will be there; but my mother? Why was she coming? What forced her to leave Krasnograd? How did she manage to free herself from Dr. Mozliak? Grisha muses about his mother, her lover and their hostile city. Still, the city did have hospitable hideaways known to him alone.… Then his thoughts brought him back to Jerusalem, a city of distinct contours, wrapped in its legends and its kings, a city of changing colors, of voices near and far. And above it all, gray and white clouds contending for the sky. And my father? Grisha shivers. My dead father who wants to talk to me. And what about me? Me? Me—nothing.