The Oath

  But Zemakh, not to be intimidated, persisted in his refusal. “To glorify the executioner is the basest of slaveries,” said he. “To make him into a god, the worst of perversions.”

  Then Lupu ordered his servants to whip him. Zemakh suffered and said nothing. They set fire to his beard; he suffered and said nothing. They placed hot coals into his hands, they pulled out his fingernails, his eyelids; he suffered and said nothing.

  To vary the torture, Lupu ordered a deep hole dug. Buried up to his neck, Zemakh drew the monster’s sneers: “You see? You are the smaller of us two.”

  But Zemakh, though reduced to the state of object, did not weaken. Drunk with rage and humiliation, the monster finally implored his victim: “Very well, don’t enumerate all my virtues, I shall be satisfied with three, with two! With one! Tell me that I am magnanimous, tell me that I am just! Tell me that people like me, find me handsome! Tell me and you shall have your life!”

  But Zemakh, who since the day of his birth had never said no, rejected the bargain. He was heard moaning: “Life is a gift, and not a piece of merchandise.”

  Lupu forbade that he be disinterred before the next day. Too late to save him. He was mourned a long time as one of those Just Men whose hidden qualities are revealed only at the hour when body and soul no longer obey the same call.

  The candle flickered, its flame wandering. Not enough air in the cellar. Better to put it out. Father closed the Book and sighed.

  “And now—what will happen now?” I asked him. “Who will write what is to follow? This night. This fear. This uncertainty. Who will record them?”

  “Not I.”

  “Who then?”

  “I don’t know. Who is right, Moshe or I? Who sees further? If I knew, I might find the courage to say: You, son. You continue my task and prove its validity. I don’t have the courage. Could all these chroniclers and witnesses, my predecessors, have labored and lived in vain? We shall know that when we know the continuation and end of this story.”

  He laughed a small ironical laugh I had never heard from him before.

  “But what good would it be, since we swore never to speak?”

  Rivka lit a match, and when I saw the smile on my father’s face, I understood how desperate he was. I always knew when he was fighting despair. What betrayed him was not his voice, not his eyes, not his hands, which at that moment were still, but his smile, which became strangely fine and peaceful.

  We remained seated on the sofa that Rivka had moved from upstairs. We were intruders in our own home, strangers in our own lives.

  Rivka was dozing near the door. Every few minutes she awakened with a start, and lighting a match, asked: “Has anybody heard anything yet?” And then she answered herself in a plaintive voice: “I can hear them.”

  I could hear nothing. And yet I was listening as I had never listened before. Sleep eluded me … well, I would sleep tomorrow. I would have time to sleep. After.

  On the lookout. Silence. Night.

  Father and his Book. Moshe and his vow. Rivka and her need for light, her need to see, to hear and ask the same question over and over.

  All is premonition.

  The past of Kolvillàg, the future of Kolvillàg. In a day, in an hour, there would be no more future, no more Kolvillàg.

  Certainty at last? No more tomorrows?

  On the threshold: the unknown. Imagination takes flight, alights not far from some inaccessible kingdom and leaves us behind, sacrificed, prisoners of night. Will it return? How are we to know? Will we be alive to summon it? How are we to know? Questions and doubts follow one another at the accelerated rhythm of our blood.

  Such is a town besieged by fear.

  Midnight: the hour of mystery, the mystery of time, of flight. Night within night, silence within silence. The Angel of Death chooses its prey and proclaims mourning.

  Midnight: the exodus from Egypt, Pharaoh’s defeat, conflagration in the Temple. Woman lamenting, man consoling her, both believing what they see and what they cannot see, what they say and do not say, and together they make their union into an invisible sanctuary.

  It is at midnight that the prophet opens himself to the voice; the survivor to his ghosts. The king abdicating, the messenger recalled. All is vanity, the reign is crumbling; destiny is named suspense. It is at midnight that eternity is lit by the present and desire limited by our senses.

  Midnight: the beginning of the beginning, the end of all ends. The day that was yesterday, the day that will be tomorrow: you are both link and conclusion. The rough sketch and the finished version: you are both judge and victim. You are conscience.

  Open your eyes, don’t say a word. Stay where you are, as you are, huddled in the dark. Don’t move, don’t run after images; you must make them yours without running, without calling.

  Tensed to the point of pain, you will defeat pain. Listen and accept, that is all, listen and accept. Open your eyes and ears, open yourself to the night inside you, the night that is you, that is all. That is midnight, nothing else for no one else: all images contained in one, all words contained in a sigh. All faces illuminated by the same ray of light, outlined in the same way, all faces—the same face.

  Midnight: in hiding, between two fires. Don’t say a word. Listen. The enemy is coming, he is here; he is the sound of midnight.

  Despite the fear, despite the unknown, do not deny yourself, do not be denial. This is the hour when man draws closer to man, when absence acquires the weight of presence—and presence that of absence. Try to be present.

  The enemy comes, he is here, he seeks his target, he seeks you. You are the target and you are no one’s enemy.

  Listen and wait. Listen and try to remember.

  Midnight: the hour of separation, the hour that is a summons. Listen and receive. Open yourself to receive, and if it be a weapon you receive, then be the bow that is arched but not released. Just men have no power, victims have no answer. The man who hopes and the woman clinging to his hope no longer believe in sharing. Midnight: the end of hope. So be it! What matters is to survive.

  Then came the attack.

  Flashing, throbbing like the eye of a hurricane—shaking the earth.

  Unleashed before dawn Friday, preceded by interminable howling of horses and humans turned wild by prolonged tension. It could be heard from one end of the world to the other. Swarming down the mountainside the avenging knights, defenders of the faith, happy and inexorable, galloped toward the Jewish quarter as though to surprise there a hostile army and annihilate it. Under their horses’ hoofs and in their wake the earth was torn apart with an awesome roar. A rhythmic race of men drawn by primitive and absolute hate. Breathing in the night only to exhale it thick and murderous, they launched into their attack sure of liberating the demoniacal powers held in check by civilization and its laws. Toppling ramparts, crushing every breathing thing, horsemen and beasts announced the explosion and end of the world.

  At the same moment, in the fields and valleys and hamlets, plunderers and graverobbers started on their own march. Armed with pitchforks, scythes, axes and hammers, they converged from all sides, forming a huge fan, circling the doomed quarter and cutting it from the outside world. To light their way, the ringleaders had prepared torches.

  How many were they? I couldn’t say. I was too young and too frightened to think of evaluating their number. Hundreds, thousands. Masses. Welded together. There was no seeing their end.

  A sustained, piercing attack. They came from everywhere, in successive, unruly, constantly renewed and reinforced waves, breaking over us, crushing us.

  Almost simultaneously, all of Shaike’s lookouts sounded the alarm. Too late. The enemy had already struck.

  Reeling under the impact of a series of deafening, violent blows, the quarter was disintegrating. No sooner were the first streets occupied than one could already see the caved-in hovels, the houses laid to waste. Ancient images of pogroms had reappeared: smashed doors, shattered windows, broken dishes. A crushed
cat, a trampled rooster. Mingled with the aggressors’ sneers were the sobs and death rattles of the tortured. Swords in the wind, whips in their fists, the howling and laughing invaders swept the barricades, sowing terror. Some killed and moved on, others took their time, amused themselves by whipping children in front of their parents, by violating the wife in front of the husband. Howling, laughing all the time.

  A terrifying inhuman sound rose from the depths of the earth; something akin to the rumble, the roar of a mob of monsters, survivors of the flood, come to avenge and erase an ancient shame, a divine sin.

  Moans of terror and pain, shouts of hate and triumph, screams of the wounded and sighs of the dying, the killers’ clamor and the victims’ whispers. Beings and objects, drained of real life, became one or clashed in the torrential, infernal din, whose volume increased and swelled, reaching from street to street, from hovel to hovel, from attic to attic, growing and multiplying every minute as though to submerge the whole world.

  Armed with clubs, sledgehammers, kitchen knives and seven shotguns, the Jewish self-defense groups waited, waited for the propitious moment to intervene. Surprised by the speed and magnitude of the attack, Shaike had decided against immediate reprisal.

  “You cannot fight lightning,” he had told his comrades. Impossible to defend every structure, every yard. Better to stay together, form a single unit. Attack the enemy from the rear. When? Any time. Where? Anywhere. Whenever possible.

  Wait, wait.

  The enemy, combat, death.

  “Don’t lose patience,” said Shaike. “For once our wait will have a meaning.”

  Stefan Braun and his wife, side by side in bed, heard the distant rumblings of the pogrom but pretended to be asleep. His father was lying in a puddle of blood and his son Toli, bleeding from a head wound, was wondering whether tradition allowed a grandson to say Kaddish for his grandfather.

  Behind the barricaded door, Davidov and his sons lay in ambush for the first aggressor. They knocked him down. The second one too, and the third, before they succumbed to numbers. When the horde left, the women rushed from the cellar and threw themselves on the men to revive them. The dazed father regained consciousness. At his feet, his two sons—slain.

  At the shelter, the crouching beggars had covered their ears. Some were thinking: This is our fault, it was wrong of us to be afraid. Others were saying: Let them come, we’ll have a good laugh; let them try to steal our misery. Avrom the Wise was smiling to Yiddel, who was smiling to himself. Kaizer the Mute, mute once more, was quietly crying. Leizer the Fat was hungry but dared not admit it. The gravedigger thought of the work lying ahead of him.

  Leah was no longer weeping. Before anyone else, before the lookouts, she had heard the enemy marching and had understood. A moment later, a shawl thrown over her cotton dress, she was running in the direction of the police station, colliding with the moving mass of the first horsemen. Did she see them come? Did she want to stop them? The time of a scream, of a warning—and Leah was nothing but a dismembered corpse: the triumphant enemy had won another victory.

  The Rebbe was still in his study. Standing near the bookcases, he fingered an ancient volume, thinking: Well, I have found it at last. And then: I have found it too late; may the Law be fulfilled without me.

  “Rivka,” my father said. “You have been a mother to Azriel. Give him your blessing.”

  The son, holding back his tears, allowed himself to be blessed.

  “Let us be ready,” said the official chronicler of the holy community of Kolvillàg. “Let us be ready,” he repeated without explanation.

  Berish the Beadle jumped from his bed, rushed toward the cupboard. He opened a drawer and seized a knife. “If they come,” he told his daughter. “Do you hear me, Hannah? If they come …”

  Adam the Gravedigger turned to his friends. “I shall need help. You will help me.”

  “Who will write the ending?” I asked my father.

  “The ending will not be written,” he answered.

  Seated in his armchair, the Rebbe took his head between his hands. “I, great-grandson of the great Maggid of Premishlan, I say and I declare that I do not understand, that I no longer understand.”

  The chronicler handed the Book to his son. “Will you remember?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You will know what to say, what not to say.”

  “No, Father.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  Was it an order, a vow? Together we clasped the thick bound notebook; never had we been so close.

  Rivka, on the verge of fainting, was softly moaning: “You are giving him the Book? Then this is the end?”

  “A simple precaution,” said Father to reassure her. “One never knows.”

  Wrong. He knew. My father knew that we would not see each other again. He knew that I was leaving for good, that he would not write in the Book any more. And I, did I know? Walls and words were about to separate us. I could do nothing but accompany him into the courtyard and obey. And look at him. At him and the others. From afar.

  The mob had reached the house across the street and occupied Anshel the Shoemaker’s place. The scribe lived directly behind us, alone. The sacred scrolls lay desecrated on the ground next to Reb Hersh, whose open eyes seemed halted at a certain word, and nobody would ever know which one.

  And at the inn, an unknown Jew, the neck of a bottle in his mouth, hanging by his feet. Next to him, Sender the Innkeeper and his young wife. Nailed to the wall.

  “Now, Hannah!” cried Berish the Beadle. “Now, daughter! Take the knife, take it, I promised your mother that …”

  Three noble invaders seized the knife and used it to cut his beard. While they had their fun with him, two peasants took charge of Hannah. Father and daughter exchanged a glance and had the good fortune to lose consciousness at the same moment.

  The Prefect, aware as never before, discovered a new anger within himself: an anger born of helplessness. At the first outbreak of the pogrom he rushed to headquarters. The guardroom—empty. The dormitories—empty. The office, the stables, the refectory hall, the sentry boxes—all empty. As foreseen, the constables were participating in the plunder, in the massacre, encouraged and led by Sergeant Pavel in person. Shoot them down, thought the Prefect, I feel like shooting them down. Later. It could wait, they would get theirs. First he had to take care of more urgent tasks. Which ones? He tried to think calmly: Where would he be of greatest use? He thought of his friend Davidov. Then he remembered Moshe, the least protected. Chances were he would become the pogrom’s first target. Was he still alive? the Prefect wondered as he went down to the cellar. A miracle, at last! Moshe! Alive! The seething, aroused horde had forgotten Moshe.

  “Thank God,” cried the Prefect. “I shall protect you.”

  “Too late,” said Moshe.

  “I’ll save you,” shouted the Prefect. “I’ll save you in spite of them and in spite of yourself! And if someone tries to stop me, let him watch out!”

  Moshe smiled at him, looked toward the skylight. “Too late,” he said. His resonant voice was back. “The beasts have been unleashed—too late to restrain them. They will devour their prey and clamor for more. You were right, my friend. You know wild beasts better than I. Human wolves are insatiable; only death can appease them. You were right, not I.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, Moshe, but this is not the moment!”

  “Yes it is. All we have is this moment. The night belongs to them. It is a night of punishment, of supreme ultimate stupidity; they kill themselves by killing, they dig their own graves by murdering us, they annihilate the world by destroying our homes. Poor mankind is dying of stupidity.”

  Meanwhile the bloody orgy continued unabated. A woman on the verge of being raped tore out her eyes with her two hands; she was not spared. Her three young children saw the outrage without understanding. Nearby, a bearded old man of majestic bearing was nailed to a cross with daggers. Elsewhere a gang of hoodlums was having spor
t with the Rebbe, who resisted their efforts to make him kiss an icon. They cut off his head.

  In less than one hour the Jewish quarter was laid bare. Corpses lay scattered on the ground, dying men called death. Gaping houses, more corpses intermingled. Stores, shops, apartments—the looters went berserk. Bolts of cloth and bags of flour, Shabbat jewels and caftans, chandeliers and china. They broke what they could not carry away. And the wine was flowing.

  That was the moment, while the bandits pranced around with their loot, that Shaike and his men chose to carry out their first mission.

  The location selected was the area near the still intact asylum. Just across the street, the invaders were ransacking the large grocery store belonging to the Poresh family. In their eagerness they had forgotten the asylum. Shaike and his friends immediately entrenched themselves there. The beggars watched in amazement as the young people prepared for combat.

  Shaike posted three men near the store, an ideal place to ambush the pillagers, who, their arms loaded, were quickly overpowered, disarmed and taken inside the asylum—the first hostages. The operation was repeated, with the same result. Soon there were sixteen, then twenty-six hostages. But then, during the following raid, something went awry. Two hoodlums escaped and alerted the rabble: “Help, help! The Jews are fighting, the Jews are killing us!” The human wave immediately deviated from its course and rolled toward the grocery and the adjacent buildings.

  Shaike did not waste a second. A few concise orders and a new plan went into effect. First he had the asylum evacuated, transferring the beggars to the Yeshiva, across the courtyard. Only the twenty-six hostages, their hands and legs bound, remained in the asylum, its doors bolted from the outside. Then the fighters gathered in the familiar school hall to prepare their next move.

  Meanwhile the mob in front of the asylum stayed at a distance. Only Pavel, a torch in his hand, stepped forward and barked his threats: “Hey, Jews. Come out! Hands above your heads! Otherwise you’ll burn alive!”