Legends of Our Time Read online

  It was at Saragossa.

  Like a good tourist, I was attentively exploring the cathedral when a man approached me and, in French, offered to serve as guide. Why? Why not? He liked foreigners. His price? None. He was not offering his services for money. Only for the pleasure of having his town admired. He spoke of Saragossa enthusiastically. And eloquently. He commented on everything: history, architecture, customs. Then, over a glass of wine, he transferred his amiability to my person: where did I come from, where was I going, was I married, and did I believe in God. I replied: I come from far, the road before me will be long. I eluded his other questions. He did not insist.

  “So, you travel a great deal,” he said politely.

  “Yes, a great deal.”

  “Too much, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What does it gain you?”

  “Memories, friends.”

  “That’s all? Why not look for those at home?”

  “For the pleasure of returning, no doubt, with a few words I didn’t know before in my luggage.”

  “Which?”

  “I can’t answer that. Not yet. I have no luggage yet.”

  We clinked glasses. I was hoping he would change the subject, but he returned to it.

  “You must know many languages, yes?”

  “Too many,” I said.

  I enumerated them for him: Yiddish, German, Hungarian, French, English, and Hebrew.

  “Hebrew?” he asked, pricking up his ears. “Hebreo? It exists?”

  “It does exist,” I said with a laugh.

  “Difficult language, eh?”

  “Not for Jews.”

  “Ah, I see, excuse me. You’re a Jew.”

  “They do exist,” I said with a laugh.

  Certain of having blundered, he looked for a way out. Embarrassed, he thought a minute before going on: “How is Hebrew written? Like Arabic?”

  “Like Arabic. From right to left.”

  An idea seemed to cross his mind, but he hesitated to share it with me. I encouraged him: “Any more questions? Don’t be shy.”

  He said: “May I ask a favor of you? A great favor?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Come—come with me.”

  This was unexpected.

  “With you?” I protested. “Where to? To do what?”

  “Come. It will take only a few minutes. It may be of importance to me. Please, I beg you, come.”

  There was such insistence in his voice that I could not say no. Besides, my curiosity had gotten the upper hand. I knew that Saragossa occupied an important place in Jewish history. It was there that the mystic Abraham Aboulafia was born and grew up, the man who had conceived the plan to convert to Judaism Pope Nicholas III himself. In this town, anything could happen.

  I followed my guide home. His apartment, on the third floor, consisted of only two tiny rooms, poorly furnished. A kerosene lamp lit up a portrait of the Virgin. A crucifix hung opposite. The Spaniard invited me to sit down.

  “Excuse me, I’ll only be a second.”

  He disappeared into the other room and returned again after a few minutes. He was holding a fragment of yellowed parchment, which he handed me.

  “Is this in Hebrew? Look at it.”

  I took the parchment and opened it. I was immediately overwhelmed by emotion, my eyes clouded. My fingers were touching a sacred relic, fragment of a testament written centuries before.

  “Yes,” I said, in a choked voice. “It is in Hebrew.”

  I could not keep my hand from trembling. The Spaniard noticed this.

  “Read it,” he ordered.

  With considerable effort I succeeded in deciphering the characters, blurred by the passage of some four hundred years: “I, Moses, son of Abraham, forced to break all ties with my people and my faith, leave these lines to the children of my children and to theirs, in order that on the day when Israel will be able to walk again, its head high under the sun, without fear and without remorse, they will know where their roots lie. Written at Saragossa, this ninth day of the month of Av, in the year of punishment and exile.”

  “Aloud,” cried the Spaniard, impatient. “Read it aloud.”

  I had to clear my throat: “Yes, it’s a document. A very old document. Let me buy it from you.”

  “No,” he said sharply.

  “I’ll give you a good price.”

  “Stop insisting, the answer is no.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “This object is not for sale, I tell you!”

  I did not understand his behavior.

  “Don’t be angry, I did not mean to enrage you. It’s just that for me this parchment has historical and religious value; for me it is more than a souvenir, it is more like a sign, a …”

  “For me, too!” he shouted.

  I still did not understand. Why had he hardened so suddenly?

  “For you too? In what way?”

  He explained briefly: it was the tradition in his family to transmit this object from father to son. It was looked upon as an amulet the disappearance of which would call down a curse.

  “I understand,” I whispered, “yes, I understand.”

  History had just closed the circle. It had taken four centuries for the message of Moses, son of Abraham, to reach its destination. I must have had an odd look on my face.

  “What’s going on?” the Spaniard wanted to know. “You say nothing, you conceal your thoughts from me, you offend me. Well, say something! Just because I won’t sell you the amulet you don’t have the right to be angry with me, do you?”

  Crimson with indignation, with anxiety perhaps, he suddenly looked evil, sinister. Two furrows wrinkled his forehead. Then it was he who was awaiting me here. I was the bearer of his Tikkun, his restoration, and he was not aware of it. I wondered how to disclose it to him. At last, finding no better way, I looked him straight in the eye and said: “Nothing is going on, nothing. I am not angry with you. Know only this: you are a Jew.”

  And I repeated the last words: “Yes, you are a Jew. Judeo. You.”

  He turned pale. He was at a loss for words. He was choking, had to hold himself not to seize me by the throat and throw me out. Judeo is an insult, the word evokes the devil. Offended, the Spaniard was going to teach me a lesson for having wounded his honor. Then his anger gave way to amazement. He looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time, as if I belonged to another century, to a tribe with an unknown language. He was waiting for me to tell him that it was not true, that I was joking, but I remained silent. Everything had been said. A long time ago. Whatever was to follow would only be commentary. With difficulty, my host finally regained control of himself and leaned over to me.

  “Speak,” he said.

  Slowly, stressing every syllable, every word, I began reading the document in Hebrew, then translating it for him. He winced at each of the sentences as though they were so many burns.

  “That’s all?” he asked when I had finished.

  “That’s all.”

  He squinted, opened his mouth as if gasping for air. For an instant I was afraid he would faint. But he composed himself, threw his head back to see, on the wall behind me, the frozen pain of the Virgin. Then he turned toward me again.

  “No,” he said resolutely. “That is not all. Continue.”

  “I have given you a complete translation of the parchment. I have not left out a single word.”

  “Go on, go on, I say. Don’t stop in the middle. Go on, I’m listening.”

  I obeyed him. I returned to the past and sketched a picture of Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, when Tomas de Torquemada, native of Valladolid, Grand Inquisitor of gracious Queen Isabella the Catholic, transformed the country into a gigantic stake in order to save the Jews by burning them, so that the word of Jesus Christ might be heard and known far and wide, loved and accepted. Amen.

  Soon the Spaniard had tears in his eyes. He had not known this chapter of his history. He had n
ot known the Jews had been so intimately linked with the greatness of his country before they were driven out. For him, Jews were part of mythology; he had not known “they do exist.”

  “Go on,” he pleaded, “please go on, don’t stop.”

  I had to go back to the sources: the kingdom of Judea, the prophets, the wars, the First Temple, the Babylonian Diaspora, the Second Temple, the sieges of Jerusalem and Masada, the armed resistance to the Roman occupation, the exile and then the long wait down through the ages, the wait for the Messiah, painfully present and painfully distant; I told him of Auschwitz as well as the renaissance of Israel. All that my memory contained I shared with him. And he listened to me without interrupting, except to say: “More, more.” Then I stopped. I had nothing more to add. As always when I talk too much, I felt ill at ease, suddenly an intruder. I got up.

  “I have to leave now, I’m late.”

  The car would be waiting for me in front of the cathedral. The Spaniard took me there, his head lowered, listening to his own footsteps. The square was deserted: no car in sight. I reassured my guide: there was no reason to worry, the car would not leave without me.

  We walked around the building once, twice, and my guide, as before, told me more about the Cathedral of Notre-Dame del Pilar. Then, heavy with fatigue, we found ourselves inside, seated on a bench, and, there, in that quiet half-darkness where nothing seemed to exist anymore, he begged me to read him one last time the testament that a Jew of Saragossa had written long ago, thinking of him.

  A few years later, passing through Jerusalem, I was on my way to the Knesset, where a particularly stormy debate was raging over Israel’s policy toward Germany. At the corner of King George Street, a passerby accosted me:

  “Wait a minute.”

  His rudeness displeased me; I did not know him. What was more, I had neither time nor the inclination to make his acquaintance.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I’m in a hurry.”

  He grabbed my arm.

  “Don’t go,” he said in a pressing tone. “Not yet. I must talk to you.”

  He spoke a halting Hebrew. A tourist, no doubt, or an immigrant recently arrived. A madman perhaps, a visionary or a beggar: the eternal city lacks for none. I tried to break away, but he would not let go.

  “I’ve a question to ask you.”

  “Go ahead, but quickly.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  Worried about arriving late, I hurriedly replied that he was surely making a mistake and confusing me with someone else.

  He pushed me back with a violent gesture.

  “You’re not ashamed?”

  “Not in the least. What do you want? My memory isn’t infallible. And judging from what I see neither is yours.”

  I was just about to leave when under his breath the man pronounced a single word: “Saragossa.”

  I stood rooted to the ground, incredulous, incapable of any thought, any movement. Him, here? Facing me, with me? I was revolving in a world where hallucination seemed the rule. I was witnessing, as if from outside, the meeting of two cities, two timeless eras and, to convince myself that I was not dreaming, I repeated the same word over and over again: “Saragossa, Saragossa.”

  “Come,” said the man. “I have something to show you.”

  That afternoon I thought no longer about the Knesset or the debate that was to weigh on the political conscience of the country for so long. I followed the Spaniard home. Here, too, he occupied a modest two-room apartment. But there was nothing on the walls.

  “Wait,” said my host.

  I sank into an armchair while he went into the other room. He reappeared immediately, holding a picture-frame containing a fragment of yellowed parchment.

  “Look,” the man said. “I have learned to read.”

  We spent the rest of the day together. We drank wine, we talked. He told me about his friends, his work, his first impressions of Israel. I told him about my travels, my discoveries. I said: “I am ashamed to have forgotten.”

  An indulgent smile lit his face.

  “Perhaps you too need an amulet like mine; it will keep you from forgetting.”

  “May I buy it from you.”

  “Impossible, since it’s you who gave it to me.”

  I got up to take leave. It was only when we were about to say good-bye that my host, shaking my hand, said with mild amusement: “By the way, I have not told you my name.”

  He waited several seconds to enjoy the suspense, while a warm and mischievous light animated his face:

  “My name is Moshe ben Abraham, Moses, son of Abraham.”

  9.

  Moshe the Madman

  Of all the faces that haunted my childhood, that of Moshe the Madman stands out most clearly in my memory. As if I were his only link to reality and he to mine.

  With the passing years, I shall have forgotten certain of my playmates and most of the companions I knew before and during the war. Not him. As if we were one another’s prisoners. Wherever I go, he precedes me. Sometimes I no longer know which of us pursues the other.

  Yet I know he has been dead for a very long time; in reality, his death coincided with that of my childhood. But he refuses to admit it. He seems to abuse the privileges of death and fire to deny the facts.

  The facts are irrefutable: twice condemned, as Jew and mental defective with no means of support, he was part of the first transport to leave the ghetto. First stop: the old synagogue. Moshe took advantage of it to lead the prayers. He laughed. It was the greatest day of his life: never could he have imagined that he would pray in this famous place, before a congregation of three thousand. Second stop: the railway station. Moshe was singing and dancing, perhaps to revive everybody else’s courage, perhaps simply because he had never taken a train before. Third and last stop: the platform of another forsaken little station no longer in use. Walking at the head of a silent procession, Moshe was still singing, louder and louder, until the end, as if to mock an enemy known only to himself.

  That enemy did not succeed in silencing his deep, disturbing voice. That voice wanders through the world, as dangerous to hear as not to hear. Often, during the night, it draws me out of my sleep. I experience once again the fear of a child afraid to sleep alone. I sense his presence there, in the room, in the corner near the mirror or in front of the window overlooking the river. Huddled up, I remain awake till morning; I wait for the early morning noises of the city to reach me before I dare to move.

  In the past I approached him without fear. He came often to our house. Father was his friend, his confidant. I had been warned: “Be kind to him, he’s mad.” I did not know the meaning of the word. He himself was to say to me: “Take a good look at me, I’m mad.” I looked but did not understand. To people he used to meet ten times in the same day, he would introduce himself the same way every time: “You don’t know me, I’m Moshe the Madman.” “We know, we know,” they would say as they pushed him out of their way. “No, not enough, you’ll never know it enough.”

  He fascinated me. People regarded him with pity, yet he dominated them. He was everywhere the center, the oracle; he moved in another universe, and it was only through him that we could become a part of it. We divined a power in him capable of crushing us.

  The disturbing fixity of his gaze gave him a sly mean look; yet with me he was kind, friendly. I would gladly interrupt my reading to go and listen to his heartbreaking songs. He told me strange stories, too, without endings. “Only the beginning interests me,” he used to say. “Who cares about the end, I know what it will be.” “And what about the beginning?” I asked. “I know that, too, except that I’m trying to change it.”

  To interrupt the study of Talmud was not really a sin if it meant spending an hour with him. He knew more about the Talmud than the sages of two thousand years ago and their disciples. He saw further than they, his silences contained a truth more hidden than theirs. Perhaps he perceived in it the first madman that God created and whom he him
self must have resembled. He derived from that great compendium not facts and affirmations but vision and inspiration. He was the first to make me understand that I could and must think of myself as a stranger; and that I must—and could—kill that stranger, or else be destroyed by him.

  Rather than reject his madness, Moshe evoked it. It served him as refuge, as homeland, and when on a rare occasion I visit an asylum, I experience in the presence of each patient, the same respectful fear that Moshe inspired in me long ago. The prophet winking at me: it is he. The persecuted one, who spurns me: him again. The young woman serenely rocking an invisible infant: it is Moshe she is trying to calm. All of them have his look.

  I am apt to pass him on the street as well. And to have him at my side in a restaurant or theater, to sit next to him in a plane. Sometimes I think the entire universe is inhabited by but a single person, that all faces are fused into one. Suddenly the young lady with whom I am strolling appears stupid; the words which I drink in ring hollow; friendships become burdensome. I want to run away, but Moshe guards all the exits. Armed with unknown power, he commands and I obey: it is my life against his. To escape him, I would have to destroy him. But how does one assassinate an angel gone mad?

  One day I thought I had found the solution: I imprisoned him in a novel. With a roof over his head, an address, a home, surrounded by people who showed him affection, I thought he would at last leave me in peace. It was not until later, the work finished, that I noticed the trick he had played on me: without my knowledge, like a thief, he had insinuated himself into the other characters (without respect to age, sex, or religion). In turn it was he who said, “I,” “you,” “he.” Two people were speaking to one another: he was both at once. They tormented one another: he was the cause and the expression of their suffering. Panic-stricken, I reread my earlier narratives: there too, he reigned as master. There too, he had preceded me. Even more serious: he had accorded himself the status of temporary resident, turning up and disappearing as he pleased. Hardly was he unmasked than he was already running off, more savage than ever, to new adventures to which he was dragging me by force.

  The idea occurs to me at times that I myself am nothing but an error, a misunderstanding: I believe I am living my own life, when in fact I am only transmitting his.