The Forgotten Read online

  “Men are wrong to think that the blind cannot see. The truth is that they see, but differently. I would even say that they see something other.” They were at the window. A dim light played on the old man’s face. “Closer,” he said. “Let my hands touch your head. Your eyes. I see with my hands. In your face I find your father again. And his father. One must know how to read a face. Only a blind man truly knows.”

  Malkiel felt his emotions swell. He had always been fond of old men and blind men. “Who are you, Ephraim?”

  “You heard me. I am the caretaker.”

  “And what do you take care of?”

  “What people throw away, what history rejects, what memory denies. The smile of a starving child, the tears of its dying mother, the silent prayers of the condemned man and the cries of his friend: I gather them up and preserve them. In this city, I am memory.”

  A madman, Malkiel thought. Another one. Unless it’s me. Here, a gravedigger without a corpse; there, a blind caretaker. And where am I in all this?

  With Hershel’s help the blind man returned to the table. The gravedigger lit an oil lamp. Malkiel saw the caretaker more clearly: an angular, hollowed face, haloed by a sparse beard. Nervous hands. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Since the war,” Hershel answered, “which is like saying forever. I saved him. Not heaven, but the gravedigger, a man who lives by the earth. You want to know why I saved him? Because he was blind. You want to know how he went blind? He never stopped weeping from the time the war began, in 1939. You could say he was watering every desert in the world. I know all about people who weep. But I never saw anyone cry the way this one did. He was a foreigner—from Poland—so they put him in an asylum. That’s where I saw him the first time. I invited him to come live in my hut. He sobbed his thanks. I did all I could to make him stop. His tears were stronger than my arguments. They flowed, and flowed. He got on my nerves sometimes, and I would ask him, ‘Where do you find the strength to do all that crying?’ He always answered the same way: ‘Even when the celestial gates are locked, the gate of tears remains open.’ His sight was dimming, of course, but that didn’t bother him. It disappeared altogether the day the Germans arrived.”

  Ephraim raised his dead eyes to the visitor. “I wanted to remember, don’t you understand? I knew I’d witness more bloody events. I knew my memory would not be able to hold them all. So to recall all that I saw and heard in Poland, I had to cease seeing.”

  The gravedigger interrupted. “I don’t always know what he’s talking about, it’s too complicated for me, but I understand his tears. Every drop tells me a story. We’ve been living here together since the war. I pass along what happens in town and in the outside world, and he weeps about the old days, in his country, far away.” The alcohol was inspiring him. He snickered. “You want to know why he agreed to stay here with me instead of leaving with the community?”

  Malkiel waited without replying. He was a captive of these two men. He could hardly take his eyes off the blind caretaker’s nervous hands; he wanted to cover them with his own, but dared not.

  “You listen, young man called Malkiel son of Elhanan. Ephraim knew that every man, woman and child of our blessed community was going to be massacred and they’d have no decent burial, they wouldn’t be buried in consecrated Jewish soil. He knew it better than they, better than I. So, Malkiel son of Elhanan, when I promised him I’d take personal care of him and pick out a grave among our most illustrious citizens, he finally agreed not to follow the others. The last time I ply my trade, it will be for him.”

  The blind man turned up his palms. Malkiel finally summoned the courage to place his own upon them. Two men, all that was left of a large community. How could they have …

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the blind man said. “You’re going to ask me a question, and I know what it is. You’re going to ask me how I escaped the murderers, am I not right?”

  Malkiel nodded, yes, the blind man was right. This blind man was a mind reader.

  “I have powers, yes. I’m blind, but I see a long way. I’m old, but my brain is not worn out.”

  “But how did you—”

  “You’re in a hurry? I have all the time in the world. How did I escape the killers? I know the Cabala. An old master taught me the art of making myself invisible by pronouncing the names of certain angels. Am I not right, gravedigger? Didn’t I make myself invisible?”

  “That’s right,” said the gravedigger.

  “It was so simple. I pronounced one word, one name, and the killers didn’t see me.”

  Malkiel’s hands still lay upon the blind-man’s. He did not want to withdraw them for fear of breaking the spell: for fear of interrupting the hallucination, for that is what Malkiel believed it was. He mistrusted all these stories of the occult. In India, too, the wise men claimed they could become invisible. In the end they died. Death alone is invisible. Man’s end was the same everywhere.

  “Since you could save yourself,” Malkiel said, “why didn’t you try to save some of the other Jews?”

  “A good question, Malkiel son of Elhanan. And also pertinent. But we cannot teach such mysteries in one day. That takes time. Still, I tried. Didn’t I try, gravedigger?”

  “That’s true. He tried.”

  “I did all I could to save …”

  “To save whom?”

  The blind man fell silent. Was he groping for a name? a face? a date? Finally he said, “He was called Malkiel … Malkiel son of Elhanan.”

  “What? My grandfather?”

  “Yes, your grandfather. I tried to save him. To make him invisible in his turn. On the last night, before he was to join the SS officer, his executioner, I talked and talked to him. It was no use. ‘Since all are to die, I will be the first,’ he told me. I recall his last words; they were about your father. ‘Tell him the date of my death so he can recite Kaddish.’ ” The blind man squeezed Malkiel’s hand tightly. “Is that why you came? For the date?”

  “I don’t know,” Malkiel said. “It may be, but I don’t think so. My father knows the date. He commemorates it every year.”

  “Then tell me the truth: what brings you to this unfortunate little town?”

  “My father.”

  “So I was right! Was I not right, gravedigger?”

  “One hundred percent.” The gravedigger laughed his abrasive laugh.

  “Elhanan,” the old man said. “Where is he?”

  “He lives in New York.”

  “Is that far?” asked the gravedigger. “How big is it? Bigger than this town? What are the cemeteries like? Rich? Deluxe?”

  The blind man and his visitor paid no attention to the drunkard’s interruptions. The old man had flung his head back as if to read the low, dark ceiling. “Your father,” he said pensively. “Your father is a wise man. I see him from here.”

  If he only knew, Malkiel thought, taking away his hands. If only he knew how sick my father is.

  “Your father sent you here, and you don’t know why. But I know. It was to see me. To receive my teaching. He too would like to become invisible.”

  This man’s mind is wandering, Malkiel decided. Can he really see my father? Who knows? In this strange place all things are possible.

  “And another thing,” the blind man said. “He wants to become part of my memory.”

  He wants, he wants, Malkiel thought. Does my father still want anything?

  Irritated that no one was talking to him, the gravedigger cried, “And me? I don’t count? I have no memory? I can’t see the invisible?” He put a bony arm on Malkiel’s shoulders. “Remember what you seem to want to forget. I was the one who buried Malkiel son of Elhanan. And you, the other Malkiel son of Elhanan, you ought to respect me and honor me for it.”

  Had his father sent him to this town to listen to the two strange Jews? Could he have guessed that the gravedigger and the blind man were still here, as if forgotten by history?

  “And if I were to tell you,”
the gravedigger went on, “that your father hopes you’ll have yourself buried here? I’m the world’s finest gravedigger, take my word for it.”

  “Let him be,” said the blind man in a louder voice. “He is young and has much living to do. His father sent him here not to enter into death but to emerge from it. I can help him. You cannot.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know; let that be enough for you. Your job is to make people disappear; mine is to keep them among us.”

  Why did Malkiel now see himself with Tamar after one of their visits to Elhanan? They talked endlessly. Did hope help us to survive, or not? Too many families clung to it all through the war, thus falling into the enemy’s trap. But would they have survived without hope? Hope is sometimes unworthy of us, Tamar said, but despair is even worse if it kills the will to act, to confront events, to protest evil, to shout, No! We are not blind, we will not submit! If the absurd exists, we’ll respond. With reason or with more absurdity—but we’ll respond.

  The blind man leaned toward Malkiel as if to inspect him; their heads touched. The old man’s breath entered Malkiel’s nostrils. “You are young,” the blind man said. “At your age a man is desperate and proud; at mine, pride vanishes. And yet it seems to me that I could teach you pride. And hope, too.”

  “You speak without knowledge.”

  “I know that. I am memory.” He said “I am memory” as others might say “I am music” or “I am luck” or “I am death.” “Listen, my young friend. Don’t linger here. Get out. I implore you. What you seek, you can find in me. Look upon me and go. Feel the chill of my hand and go home. Your place is not with us. It is among the living.”

  “But my father—”

  The blind man grew angry. “I have powers, I could force you, but I prefer not to. You’ve seen me, you’ve visited the grave of Malkiel son of Elhanan, and that’s enough. I am your savior, your guide. The rest is none of your concern.”

  To avoid hurting the old man, Malkiel would have promised anything, but he could not lie to him. He would certainly leave. But not yet.

  A memory was waiting for him. And calling to him.

  “I’m afraid, son. If you knew how much.”

  “I’m trying to understand, Father.”

  “I’m afraid of failure. Of not passing along enough. At night I wake up sweating. There are so many things still inside me that I want to save. For you. For your children. Will I have time? At dawn I can’t calm my heart. This morning I wondered, Suppose God has forgotten His creation, and the Messiah His mission? Suppose the sun forgot to rise and the rooster to crow? Suppose my soul forgot it was a soul? Words are already playing tricks on me; they’re all colorless, and bloodless; my mind is already ashamed of its limits, its opacity. What’s to become of me, my son?”

  “Such questions prove your faculties are still there.”

  “But someday I’ll forget those questions, too.”

  “Someday … someday …”

  “Tomorrow? Next week? I must hurry. The story I don’t tell will be lost forever. The idea I don’t pass along to you will never spring forth again. The event you don’t hear about will be forever erased from history. Everything is already muddled in my head. Have I told you how I met your mother?”

  “In a camp for displaced persons.”

  “Did I tell you that we became friends because—”

  “Because you spoke Hebrew.”

  “I spoke it well. Better than now. My accent was perfect. I recited Bialik’s poem called … I can’t remember what it was called. It’s about a student who neglects everything but his studies.”

  “Hamatmid.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Hamatmid. The assiduous student.”

  “Ah yes, that’s it.… I forgot.…! forget so many things. Soon I will forget where I come from and where I am going. Now and then my blood freezes at the thought that one day—who knows?—I will forget you, too.”

  Thus did Elhanan helplessly witness his own destruction. Forgetfulness was for him the death not only of knowledge but also of imagination, hence of expectation. Mentally torn, struggling vainly to control his actions, to transform time into consciousness, he submitted himself to constant examinations: What was the name of the man who … What happened on the day when … His reason, still clear, watched over a shrinking, progressively impoverished memory. In his brain a huge black sponge scrambled words and images. Time no longer flowed, but toppled over the edge of a yawning precipice. Overcome by a sense of inevitability, Elhanan decided that the end was approaching. He was losing sight of his landmarks. Forgetfulness was a worse scourge than madness: the sick man is not somewhere else; he is nowhere. He is not another, he is no one. Certainly Elhanan hung on; certainly he fought. With pills and potions he resisted, reading all he could on the subject. But, like Moses in the legend, he forgot at night what he had learned in the morning. “We can’t do anything about it,” the specialists repeated. “Forgive us; but medical science has its limits like everything else.” Elhanan had to accept it: he was slipping down a slope, and at the bottom he would encounter nothingness.

  Tamar came often to visit, between two assignments, alone or with Malkiel. Elhanan greeted her tenderly. Because she reminded him of Talia? Sometimes he talked to her as if she were his wife. She would not play the game: “I’m Tamar. But tell me about Talia.” Other times: “Tell us about the war.” Or: “And when you were a little boy. Tell us about when you were a little boy.” Elhanan let himself go more easily when Tamar was there. When Malkiel decided that his father’s accounts should be taped, Tamar approved. “It’s good for him to talk. Words stimulate him. And it makes him feel useful.” When the old man’s brain dimmed, they worked together to brighten it. They gave Elhanan all their free time and lived according to his rhythms. But Elhanan was tiring more quickly. His memories were blurring faster. He repeated himself, or interrupted himself in mid-sentence, unable to finish. It was a kind of twilight, and Malkiel and Tamar felt it in their very being. It devastated them to see this man, once so proud of his lucidity and so attached to his past, lose both. Also, Elhanan was decaying physically. More and more he seemed extinguished. His voice no longer carried, his hands pointed aimlessly. But Malkiel and Tamar refused to resign themselves; they went on asking him questions. It was strange, but he seemed better on the Sabbath; he seemed more serene. He managed to express himself with his old eloquence.

  “Remember what our sages teach us,” he said to Malkiel after dinner one Friday evening. “It is given to man to know where he comes from, where he is going and before whom he will have to give an accounting. I still know where I am going, but I know less and less where I come from. My consolation? You, at least, you will know where I come from.”

  And later the same night: “You should go … go on a pilgrimage.”

  Malkiel was about to protest, when Tamar tugged at his sleeve. “Let him finish.”

  “Yes, my son. You must go to the town where I was born. You’d understand me better. You’d remember more. You may meet people who knew me. The woman …”

  “What woman?”

  “You know, the woman who …”

  In the small hours Tamar turned to Malkiel. “Will you go, then?”

  “I can’t. He’s so sick.”

  “I’ll stay. I’ll watch over him. Do what he asks.”

  “I’m afraid,” Malkiel said.

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m afraid.”

  “Sometimes I think your whole life is ruled by fear. Fear of loving, fear of not being worthy of love, fear of having children …”

  He bowed his head. Tamar knew him well. “Still, I do love you,” he said. “Fear doesn’t keep me from loving you. And you?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “What do you want?”

  “From you? More sharing.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That would be enough.”

 
; “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  Beloved Tamar. You, the beginning. You, the awakening. You, who will make sense of my father’s disease. “Do you think a cure is possible in spite of everything?”

  She did not answer immediately. She was lying down, and in the half-light of dawn she seemed asleep. In the end my father’s agony will wear her out, Malkiel thought. A woman’s role? To understand, to trust, to wait, to have faith and to share it. Then why have you fled into sleep, Tamar? Don’t go away, don’t leave me while I’m staring at you—as if you were a stranger—to give you shape and voice, so that your face, tense under my gaze, will become present again, human again, again filled with grace. “Tamar. Are you asleep?”

  “No, I’m not sleeping.” And after a moment, “Yes, I believe that even at the last agony, man is worthy of triumphing over death.”

  “We’re not talking about death, but of oblivion.”

  “Oblivion is a way of dying.”

  “And you still believe?”

  They clasped hands, as if to reaffirm their pact.

  “I still believe. Do you want to know why?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Because I love your father’s stories. We won’t forget them. Isn’t that the beginning of a victory?”

  Blessed Tamar.

  Hershel the gravedigger came up to him at the gate of the cemetery. “You’re leaving?”

  “Maybe.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Why too bad?”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing you stay. I could dig a grave near your grandfather’s. Can you picture it? Two graves, side by side, marked with the same name: Malkiel son of Elhanan.”

  Malkiel made no answer.

  “You’re not thirsty?” asked the gravedigger. “My throat is on fire.” And when Malkiel made no answer, he went on slyly, “I’ll sell you another story for a drink.” Still Malkiel said nothing. The gravedigger insisted. “The story’s a good one. You’ll like it. I promise.”