Legends of Our Time Page 6

I cannot remember his name, nor how old he was: perhaps I never knew. I remember only his face and, above all, the eyes which dominated it. He had the face of a madman and the eyes of a saint, as though two persons were at war within him. When he spoke, his lips barely moved and his voice seemed to come from a long way off. It was the voice of a man who challenges mountains.

  The place where I met him was dark, as though some magician had plunged it into eternal night. It was peopled with phantoms. There were countless thousands of them. They had no past and no future. They were outside of time, beyond history. They were building a one-way Jacob’s Ladder, gigantic and invisible, which they were all waiting to climb, so that the heavens might be purified by fire. Man was leaving the earth, recalled by God. Everything was to start again. Creation had failed. The age-old vision had degenerated into a curse.

  But my visionary friend refused to believe all that. He claimed that we were in the Holy of Holies, in the presence of the Messiah. What he lacked in humor he made up in imagination.

  He was one of the Righteous; we called him “the Prophet.” Affectionately, meaning to tease and provoke him. I do not know who first called him by that name, nor why. Nor do I know whether it pleased or irritated him. All I know is that it suited him. The Prophet talked like a prophet. Making us relive our past, he gave us back our homes and our memories. And yet, as we listened in silence, with lumps in our throats, it was always of the future that he spoke. The truth was that we needed a future.

  There was something reassuring and comforting in his presence, tall, gaunt, and emaciated. We thought, if he, with his ravaged body, can endure so much, so can we. He worked like all the others, and, like all the others, he suffered cold and hunger and the brutality of the guards. I never heard him complain. His cheerfulness and vitality amazed us. What was the source of his strength and his faith? We had no idea.

  We had no idea, either, where he came from, or what he had done before the war. We were staggered by what he knew, the number of countries he had seen, the many languages he spoke.

  He could have been a Pole, a Belgian or an Austrian. He could have been a doctor or a philosopher, a rabbi or a poet, a beggar or a gardener. Every group felt that he belonged to them. When asked, he would evade the question with a smile. “My past wouldn’t interest you. What matters is my future.”

  Well, if he chose to be secretive, we forgave him. We loved him too well to hold it against him. His secrets and his weaknesses were no concern of ours. It was what he was doing now, frankly and openly, that concerned us and won our gratitude: his persistent endeavors to make our lives bearable. We loved him because he responded to every appeal for help, he set his face against evil, he clung to his humanity in a world where humanity was denied—and he took very little credit for it.

  He wanted no thanks. He would say:

  “All that I do is done in your name. I am only your representative.” Or, “It is you who have made me what I am; it is I who owe you a debt of gratitude.” We loved him because he wanted to restore our self-respect, to make us think better of ourselves when we thought of him, who was so different from us. And when, as sometimes happened, he was withdrawn and silent, we respected his reserve. His private thoughts were nobody’s business but his own.

  Until the day when, transformed, he announced his decision to reveal himself to a world that had ceased to expect his coming.

  It was a Saturday in autumn, a Saturday red with blood. We were clearing up rubble in a factory which had been bombed the night before. Foaming at the mouth with rage, the masters took it out on their slaves. Pointing to the rubble, the officer in charge of the working party warned us: “You’d better not start gloating too soon. Whoever wins this war, it won’t be you.” The guards, to prove it to us there and then, launched into a ferocious attack. They laid about them indiscriminately. There were three dead and nine injured in our party alone.

  Morale had never been so low. The struggle, it seemed to us, was futile. We would not be there to celebrate the defeat of Germany. Worn out, with heavy hearts, we felt that the end was near. We had touched rock bottom.

  But not the Prophet. Blows could not crush him. Maimed as he was, he walked with firm step, head held high and resolution in his eyes. Tirelessly he went from one to another of us, imploring us to stick it out, not to lose hope. In vain. We had not the strength to listen to him.

  At night, after the roll-call, he would make us sit on our bunks while he stood and preached endurance. “Brothers, fellow Jews, listen to me. I only ask that you should hear me out. We have no right to go under. If we are not there to bear witness on our own behalf, who will do it for us? Where, after the long night, should the first ray of light come from, if not from us? The day will come when everything will have to be told, and if we do not tell what we know, no one will.

  “Who, if not ourselves, will raise the hue and cry after the mad murderers? For the day is at hand, deliverance is in sight. You have my word for it, my promise. For God’s sake, my friends, don’t give up. Hold fast to me! I give you the future! Do not reject it! Hold fast, I say!”

  For the first time, his appeal fell on deaf ears. “What’s the meaning of this?” he thundered angrily. “Don’t you trust me? Have you ever known me to lie to you?”

  Somebody tried to calm him. “You must forgive us. We’re not to blame any more than you are. We can’t take any more.” Another added: “You offer us the future, but the Germans have already put an end to that.” A third said: “Oh! yes, Prophet, that’s the way it is. The Germans’ prophecy has beaten yours!”

  The Prophet lowered his head, and was silent. I could not help feeling sorry for him. Was he going to surrender, and fall into line with the rest? It seemed so. He was defeated. He would never try to rally us again. I thought: we have betrayed him.

  After what seemed an endless silence, he jerked himself upright. He was no longer the same man. He was convulsed, trembling with fury. Panting, his face contorted, he threw his feverish glance over his audience, who, looking vague, were only waiting for him to leave before relapsing into torpor.

  We longed for nothing better, in our apathy, than the void of oblivion. Our only hope was that we should soon be hurled over the precipice. No more thinking, no more planning, no more hopeless dreams. We wanted to be done with them, and the stifling and oppressive anguish they caused us. We longed to drown in the muddy waters of a river that would never reach the sea, to die while our bodies still lived.

  “You won’t even try to understand!” suddenly thundered the preacher. No response. We were incapable of understanding. We were impatient to see him gone. And besides, what was there to understand? I thought: this teller of tales has no more tales to tell.

  It seemed that I was right. He moved toward the door with an impatient gesture. But he never took his eyes off us, and stopped after every step, sure that, in spite of everything, we would call him back.

  Were we not his friends, his brothers? No. Dumbly, we watched him go, and no one called him back. But he came back: “You won’t even try to understand,” he repeated, but this time sounding hurt rather than angry. “Very well, then, I shall have to compel you. You leave me no choice.”

  There was no longer any trace of anger in his voice. It was once again the sad, beautifully modulated voice of the prophet of hope.

  With his hands clasped behind his back, he paced the floor, and revealed his private vision to us all:

  “When misfortune strikes some of the people of Israel, all the people are stricken at the same time. All the sufferings of our people are rungs on the ladder of history. The enemy who persecutes us doesn’t single out our merchants, our sages, our fools, or our poets. He who kills a Jew aims to kill all the Jews. Bankers and rabbis, vagabonds and dreamers, old men and children, we are sores on the body of Israel.

  “This is true also of the Messiah. You relegate him to the heavens, but he is here among us. You imagine that he is safe, sheltered from danger, but he has come here to
be with the victims. Yes, even he, he better than anyone, knows the sorrows that consume you; he feels the fist that smashes into your faces. The darkness that engulfs us engulfs him also. It is he, here and now, who urges you not to give way to despair. It is he who has need of you. Do not abandon him. Take pity on him. He is worthy of your pity. You must make sure that he is not the only one among his people to survive.”

  To strengthen his argument, he quoted from the sayings and legends of the Talmud:

  “It is written that when mankind has wholly given way to good or evil, the Messiah will appear. Well, mankind has given way to evil, and we know it. No one can claim to be free from guilt. We are living proof that man has betrayed his nature and his destiny. It is our duty to proclaim the end of his reign. Without our knowledge, it has already been proclaimed.

  “We are the harbingers of a new era. Very soon the shofar will sound, and the pall of darkness will be lifted. If you stand firm for a day, a week, a month, you will witness the coming of the dawn, and men will kneel to you and ask forgiveness. It is I who make you this promise, it is he who has decreed it.”

  Oh, yes, he spoke well. As always. His words came fast and fiery. But we remained deaf to their poetry. His message turned to dust and ashes before it could touch us.

  “I am not surprised that you do not believe me,” he concluded, half-sadly, half-teasingly. “But you heard me out. That will have to do for the present. Besides, I am now going to reveal a truth which even you will not deny. Do you know why you call me the Prophet? Because that is what I am.”

  That night, in my dreams, I heard him laughing and crying, though I could not guess the reason.

  Needless to say, we did not take what he said seriously. Yet we took him seriously. Whether he was playing a part no one could tell, but if so, he was determined to play it to the bitter end. While playing his chosen part, he somehow managed to involve us. Whether as spectators or participants, we could not escape watching him at work.

  In all he did, he gave of himself unstintingly, caring for the sick, willingly bearing the burdens of hard labor and torture, sharing his bread with anyone who asked for it. He lived only for others. He was admired by some and pitied by others. At his approach, people would stop talking. They would exchange winks, and whisper that the poor soul was going out of his mind.

  His friends, growing more and more uneasy, urged him to take a grip on himself, to stop squandering his energies. It was a sin, they said, to tempt providence so recklessly. He shrugged, and went back to work with redoubled zeal. Far from avoiding excess, he deliberately sought it.

  I asked him, “Why do you take such risks?”

  He replied, “I have nothing to lose.”

  “Have you no fear of death?”

  “Why should I fear it?”

  “But what are you trying to prove?”

  “That I am not a liar.”

  He seemed to bear a charmed life. It was fascinating. How long could his luck hold? People made bets on it, and it was always the doubters who lost. The Prophet was proving indestructible.

  On one occasion he came up against Hans the Killer, the most dreaded of all the Kapos in the camp. Hans claimed that a jar of jam had been stolen from him. He stormed into our hut and, with threats and insults, demanded that the culprit be denounced, or else we should all pay for it.

  The Prophet stepped forward: “It is I.”

  Taken by surprise, Hans stared in bewilderment.

  Unflinching, the Prophet reiterated: “I am the thief.”

  The Killer, collecting himself, roared: “And the jam? Where is it?”

  “I ate it,” calmly answered the Prophet.

  For a long time, the two men looked at each other in silence. Hans was frowning. A bad sign. I held my breath and shut my eyes, but only for an instant. I opened them again, to see a Hans transformed. The notorious killer was doubled up with laughter: “You’re lying! I made it up. The jam? In the cupboard! Come with me, I’ll show you.” And he made him a present of his life, and of a large hunk of bread.

  We no longer knew what to think.

  Soon after this, the winter selection took place. It was the Prophet’s last, and fatal, trial. The camp doctor pronounced him unfit for work. The whole camp was shocked at the news, and it was decided that something must be done to save him.

  An emergency committee was formed. There was only a week left to rescue him. A week in which to raise funds, make representations to influential people, bribe guards, work out a plan of action. There was solidarity on a scale unprecedented in the camp. More than a hundred people were involved. Never had so much been done by so many prisoners, and all to save a single Jew.

  Why him? Because everyone loved him. There was not one of us whom he had not helped at some time. Everyone owed him a debt of gratitude. Moreover, we felt obscurely that he symbolized our ability to rise above circumstances. It seemed to us that our own survival depended upon his. We still did not believe that he had the gift of prophecy, but we acted as though he were the arbiter of our destiny.

  He, for his part, made light of the matter. Did he know of our tremendous efforts to rescue him? Yes. And it amused him. He realized before we did, better than we did, that our efforts were doomed to failure. There was no appeal from the death sentence.

  Just a week after the selection, on a bright winter morning, the Prophet was ordered to stay in the hut. He was excused from work that day. We knew what that meant. So did he. His friends’ eyes were full of tears, but not his. Up to the last minute he was still playing his chosen part, still offering consolation and encouragement.

  He smiled as he took leave of us. “There is no need for tears. Take your choice: either I am myself or I am he. In either case, one thing is certain: he will not abandon you. So what is there to weep for?”

  He left us. We never saw him again. I still know nothing about him. Who was he? Where did he come from? I know only where he went.

  I often think of him, especially when I hear the Hasidic chant, Ani Maamin, which proclaims the faith of the Jew and the coming of the Messiah. As a child, I believed fervently. I still believe, but now chiefly in the hope that faith will restore the old fervor.

  In any event, the promise made by the Prophet on the night of his “revelation” was kept: we, all of us who were with him, survived.

  8.

  Testament of a Jew from Saragossa

  One day the great Rebbe Israel Baal Shem-Tov ordered his faithful coachman to harness the horses as fast as he could and drive him to the other side of the mountain.

  “Hurry, my good Alexei, I have an appointment.”

  They came to a stop in a dense forest. The holy man stepped down, went over to lean against an oak, meditated for a moment, then climbed back into the carriage.

  “Let’s go, Alexei,” he said, smiling. “We can go back now.”

  Though accustomed to not understanding the behavior of his master, the miracle-worker, the coachman still had the courage to be astonished.

  “But your appointment? Did you miss it? You, who always arrive on time, who never disappoint anyone? Did we come for nothing?”

  “Oh no, my good Alexei, we did not come so long a way for nothing. I have kept my appointment.”

  And as happened whenever he banished a bit of misery from the world, the Rebbe’s face radiated happiness.

  According to Hasidic tradition it is not given to man to measure the extension of his actions or the impact of his prayers, no more than it is given the traveler to foresee his precise destination: that is one of the secrets of the notion of Tikkun—restoration—which dominates Kabbalism.

  The wanderer who, to purify his love or to free himself from it, travels around the world and does not know that everywhere he is expected. Each of his encounters, each of his stops, without his knowing, is somewhere inscribed, and he is not free to choose the paths leading him there.

  Souls dead and forgotten return to earth to beg their share of grace, of etern
ity; they need the living to lift them out of nothingness. One gesture would suffice, one tear, a single spark. For each being participates in the renewed mystery of creation; each man possesses, at least once in his life, the absolute power of the Tzadik, the irrevocable privilege of the just to restore equilibrium, to repair the fault, to act upon the absent. Condemned to go beyond himself continually, man succeeds without being aware of it and does not understand until afterward.

  And now let me tell you a story.

  Traveling through Spain for the first time, I had the strange impression of being in a country I already knew. The sun and the sky, the tormented lustre in the eyes: landscapes and faces familiar, seen before.

  The strollers on the ramblas in Barcelona, the passersby and their children in the back streets of Toledo: how to distinguish which of them had Jewish blood, which descended from the Marranos? At any moment I expected Shmuel Hanagid to appear suddenly on some richly covered portico, or Ibn Ezra, Don Itzchak Abarbanel, Yehuda Halevi—those princes and poets of legend who created and sang the golden age of my people. They had long visited my reading and insinuated themselves into my dreams.

  The period of the Inquisition had exercised a particular appeal to my imagination. I found fascinating those enigmatic priests who, in the name of love and for the sacred glory of a young Jew from Galilee, had tortured and subjected to slow death those who preferred the Father to the Son. I envied their victims. For them, the choice was posed in such simple terms: God or the stake, abjuration or exile.

  Many chose exile, but I never condemned the Marranos, those unhappy converts who, secretly and in the face of danger, remained loyal to the faith of their ancestors. I admired them. For their weakness, for their defiance. To depart with the community would have been easier; to break all ties, more convenient. By deciding to stand their ground on two levels simultaneously, they lived on the razor’s edge, in the abnegation of each instant.

  I did not know it when I arrived in Spain, but someone was awaiting me there.