The Oath

  Now do you understand what makes me so anxious? I am afraid to lose my mind by expressing the ineffable, by naming the unnameable. I am afraid to say that which ought to remain unsaid, that which cannot be said. I am afraid to die mad. Like my friend, long ago, over there. Like him I know that whoever sees his innermost self must perish; whoever discovers his madness goes mad. Mad with fear, mad with cold. Perhaps I already am just that. The proof? Moshe, my mad, my dead friend. I see him everywhere. Don’t tell me that’s normal. I know he stayed behind, dead among the dead, and yet wherever I go I find him; sometimes he is there even before me. As though he were expecting me.

  It’s the same for Kolvillàg, I admit. I know that little town has disappeared, dispersed with the smoke, swallowed by the flames, carried off by the enemy—yet I go on seeing it and even living in it. Destroyed by fire, Kolvillàg has become a town of fire. Except for this, it has hardly changed. I dwell there and warm myself in its blazing houses.

  Madness, this vision of Kolvillàg, I admit. Madness, this tale and the tale of this tale. Sheer madness, of course. Madness if I dreamed it, madness if I survived the dream. Do you want me to tell you? Moshe is not dead, I am. And all the rest is commentary.

  So go ahead, Moshe. Speak to us. Speak to us of man’s distress, of the scandal of existence. Tell us why life is worth living. Explain to us why—height of injustice—misfortune must also be ugly. Tell us why, having chosen knowledge over immortality, man is subjected to the punishment of exile. Go ahead, Moshe. You speak, since you have sworn me to silence. Tell me why the old man in me must live while boys are drawn to their death, lured by beckoning rivers.

  One day you said to me: If man speaks to God through man, that’s good; if he speaks to man through God, it is not. And so I ask you, Moshe: whom are you addressing through me? Is it to express yourself that you have made me mute? Is it to take revenge? But you have already taken revenge. I am no longer who I was. Older than my body, I have forgotten what I am supposed to do down here. I listen to the sounds of a new day breaking and of night retreating. I strain my ears to hear the song of the weeping mother and her desperate son who is sinking into the slow, contagious insanity of violence and disintegration. That’s all, nothing more. News items do not concern me. Sundry riots, scientific discoveries, changes of regimes here and there no longer affect me. I have seen too many.

  War will never be eliminated, nor evil, nor crime. No matter what he does, man cannot win. There is nobody left to speak to but the children, the wounded children. But I feel sorry for them, so I spare them. Why sadden them? Why burden them with this weight you bequeathed to me? What is the good of dragging them into the cursed universe you have entrusted to my care? Better for them not to listen to me, to avoid me completely. I bring bad luck. Had this boy met someone else instead of me, he would be saved. Yes, I carry bad luck inside me as I would a cancer. Step aside when I pass, run. Whoever approaches me risks freezing at my touch. For I am cold, I am cold in my veins, in my guts. The way you were cold in your cell. There I was your freedom; here I am your prison. Is that why you were laughing? How you laughed! And so did I! More, more, you ordered me, louder, louder! And laughing, I left you. Laughing, I made my escape.

  I remember. I gaze at the Book and I remember. Daybreak. My eyes follow the Angel of Death as he labors to level the strangely hushed town. My lips begin to whisper on their own: I don’t understand, I don’t understand, no, I shall never understand.

  Strangely, all this horror was not without a certain beauty, a certain hallucinatory grandeur whose meaning escaped me, if meaning there was, for it turned to ashes before my eyes. There was no afterwards; I had expected as much. The dying town was taking along its secret, its survival and everything that linked it to the outside world; that too I had expected. And then I was gripped by the peculiar sensation of being present at a misunderstanding, a farce, both monstrous and inhuman. God refused to play His role and so did man. Listening intently, I thought I heard a cry for help so powerful it almost took my breath away. I felt the urge to laugh but did not dare. I clung to the tree and closed my eyes. It was then that I saw a boy who opened his. He smiled at me, gently, politely. “Don’t cry, sir. Don’t be sad, and above all, give up your illusions. Haven’t you learned anything?”

  “Who are you, boy? Where did you come from?” I asked him.

  “No, no, you mustn’t ask me that. Haven’t you been told?”

  “Who are you?” I asked again, furious because I suddenly understood that this most crucial of all questions would haunt me to the end. “Who are you and who am I? What do we have in common? What divides us and what sets us one against the other? Tell me if it is your story that lives inside me, or my own. Tell me if I must obey and whom.”

  “You are shouting,” the boy said reproachfully. “At your age you still don’t know that a man losing his temper is not a pretty sight? You should smile and make believe.”

  “And Kolvillàg?” I asked.

  “Kolvillàg?” said the boy, surprised. “What is it? Never heard of it.”

  He looked at me, annoyed. I had displeased him, I had been wrong to mention that town with its mysterious and sealed past. The boy was right. He was wise, wiser than his elder. Standing before him, on those heights overlooking the conflagration, I felt small, intimidated, lost. He had a sense of humor, that boy. He had understood that the destiny of this particular town had farcical overtones.

  And you know why, Moshe. Better than I. Go ahead, speak. I beg of you, Moshe, speak. It’s our only chance. This young man must not be allowed to die because of one madman’s silence, because of one madman! He mustn’t be allowed to die mad. Go ahead, Moshe, open the sanctuary, open the Pinkas. Speak, Moshe, speak.

  “Nerves,” said the doctor, “that’s what it is.”

  “The heart,” insisted my mother. “Memory, conscience, the past, fate—God. I am helpless against God.”

  She had just spent another bad night. You could tell from her distraught features, her livid complexion.

  “He comes, looks at me and goes away. I run after him, but the distance between us does not diminish. And so I shout, I scream. He stops and so do I. He waits until I am calm again, and tells me: You mustn’t follow me, it is forbidden; they will not let you in. I begin to shout again, to scream, but he has already disappeared. He is angry with me, I know that he is angry with me. I shouted too late.”

  “Nerves,” said the doctor.

  “Do something,” my father pleaded. “Is there nothing you can do? Nothing, really nothing? There must be something you can do. Please?”

  “I shouldn’t have,” said my mother, looking at me from far away.

  Poor child, the old man thinks. He must be helped. Moshe, you alone can pull him out of this. He thinks he can do it by abdicating. I am old and know that isn’t so. Man’s nature is to fight even though at every moment he is given confirmation that he will not prevail. It is man’s nature to think of himself as immortal. Is that good, is that bad? Both, no doubt. It cannot be helped. “The dying man who recites his last prayer is paying respect not to death but to God,” said Meir of Podoli in one of his chronicles. “Therein lies his strength and his greatness.”

  And then, while leafing through the Book, while conversing with his mad friend, the old man understands that the young man is unwittingly helping him by putting him to the test. He is forcing him to reinvent a meaning to his quest. On the very threshold of death, the old man is still fit for battle.

  He had lost sight of that. It had all become a burden, a matter of habit. He had lived too fast; he was exhausted, his sensibility blunted. With Kolvillàg as a landmark, the present seemed pallid, puerile. He had felt no want, no pain for a long time. He was neither happy nor unhappy. Nothing surprised him, nothing offended him. Nothing moved him, nothing tempted him. Having lived inside the Book so long, he ceased to be touched by the outside world, and floundered into boredom and death.

  Thank you, my boy. Thank you for
disturbing me, shaking me. Thank you for crossing my path. I desperately needed you. Thank you for forcing my hand; you did it in time. Oh yes, I was living inside the closed world of memories. I liked my exile. I knew things by their names. I had lost my innocence, my need for worship that had been racking me for years. Worse, I no longer felt pain. A stranger to myself, a stranger to my own story, I was a poor participant in that of others. No more remorse, no more regrets, no more nostalgia. Nothing but indifference. A matter of age, no doubt. “May God save you not from suffering but from indifference to suffering,” my friend Moshe had wished me. A wish that almost didn’t come true. That is why I shall speak to you in spite of everything. Out of gratitude. I shall break my oath not only to save you but also to save myself. I may be old and weary but I am not yet dead; I want to live my own death after having lived that of Kolvillàg. And though I am older than the old men I watched being murdered, I am still capable of recalling their childhood and mine. I am still capable of borrowing their voice.

  PART TWO

  The Child and the Madman

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, promising to be mild, almost warm. Clear sky, invigorating breeze. In the distance, long rows of pine trees bowing to the sun. Nearby, stone buildings and wooden cabins casting off their shadows. The familiar sights and sounds of a provincial town awakening: pails drawn from the well, animals being led to the drinking trough. First gestures, first meals, first decisions. The daily miracle was renewed; earth once again was beginning to live. Oh yes, it was going to be a peaceful day, bearing offerings, the kind that reconcile man with his fate and even with that of his fellow-man.

  I was returning from the mikvah, where I had performed my ritual ablutions, and on my way to the House of Study to participate in the first morning service. I was sixteen years old and planned to change the world through prayer.

  I was hungry and thanked God for my hunger. I was tense and feverish, and I blessed God for that fever and that tension. I rediscovered my body, as I did every morning, and resented its coming between me and myself. I decided to treat my body with even greater severity; I would nourish it less, drive it harder. I customarily fasted on Mondays and Thursdays. I would now push my resistance even further. From Sunday to Friday. Following the example set by the great ascetics Moshe had taught me to revere. I wanted to resemble them, I wanted to resemble him. Impossible to elevate and enrich the soul except at the expense of the body.

  Moshe was already at the Beit-Hamidrash. Wrapped in his tallith, his phylacteries on his forehead and left arm, he was staring into space with an intensity close to pain. He had not seen me come in. I withdrew into a corner and put on my phylacteries, picked up a volume of Mussar and read a few passages on things to do and not to do, on impulses to unleash or to restrain, on goals to attain or transcend, and also on agony, chastisement and the future of the illusory world men persist in wanting to conquer, embellish and possess as though they could take it along to the grave. After a while eight more worshipers filed in and we could begin the service.

  At the end of the last litany a voice was heard: “Is nobody saying Kaddish?”

  “Nobody.”

  That particular day none of the faithful worshipers had a dead parent to commemorate.

  “Wait,” said Moshe. And he began reciting the prayer for the dead. His voice was harsher, more deliberate than usual.

  Now I know that I should have recognized it as an omen.

  Back home, I found Rivka the maid busy in the kitchen, a rueful look on her face. Father was in his room, already at work; I caught a glimpse of him bent over the table, his Book before him.

  “I have a premonition,” Rivka said while pouring me hot coffee.

  Rivka was forever having premonitions. When things went well, she expected the worst; when there was trouble, she radiated optimism.

  “A premonition?” I said, smiling. “Another?”

  “Yes.”

  “A bad one, I expect?”

  “Very bad.”

  “Then why worry about it?”

  In vain. I did not succeed in cheering her up. Never mind, in another hour her mood will change, I thought. It wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last. Our maid was flighty, extremely unstable in matters of premonitions.

  “You’re making fun of me,” she complained as she wiped the table. “You’re wrong. I know I’m only an ignorant woman. I know my head is empty. But my heart is full …”

  I smiled. She was telling the truth. She was kindhearted, compassionate, warm. She had taken care of me and the house since my mother’s death. I loved her. Very much.

  “I know men of whom one could say the opposite, Rivka—full heads and empty hearts. I prefer you to them.”

  “You only say that.”

  “Because it is true.”

  “Then why do you make fun of what my heart predicts?”

  She seemed vexed. I apologized and rose to go. “Will you be in a better mood when I get home?”

  She shook her head, refusing to answer. Fate took it upon itself to answer in her stead.

  God needs man to manifest Himself, that we know. Whether to affirm His power or His mercy, He does so through man. He uses an intermediary to express Himself and an emissary to punish. We are all messengers.

  The one He designated as the instrument to chastise my little town was called Yancsi—a troublesome youth who loved wine and the outdoors, animals and girls. And whatever he loved he felt compelled to hurt. When he was five he plunged a knife into his mother’s arm; she was late preparing his food. When he was ten he roamed the streets at night assaulting solitary strollers. He loved to frighten, he loved to hurt.

  He was not an enemy of our people, no more than of any other. He was a far greater foe of the birds, who, I remain convinced, were aware of it. They avoided him. No sooner did he appear than the sky became empty. But Yancsi pursued them, caught them, tortured them and threw their mutilated bodies into the brackish, poisoned pond.

  And so when he disappeared and there was talk of murder, my first thought was: It’s an act of reprisal, vengeance. The birds had surely condemned him to death. Now they had carried out the sentence. Which would explain the disappearance of his corpse—the executioners had carried it away.

  Unfortunately, the authorities leaned toward a less judicious explanation. For the first time in her life Rivka the maid had accurately foreseen the terrors to come. For the first time in her life her premonitions were about to take shape.

  It’s an old, old fable. And a foolish one at that, though it has proved its worth. So black and blinding was its baseness, that wherever it was invoked, bloodshed followed. In its aftermath, love of God turned into hate of man. A hate that fell into the same pattern everywhere, nurtured by a variety of instincts, superstitions and interests, constantly adapting itself to the requirements of the times and the environment. Nothing has changed since the first “ritual murder.” Again and again the same corpse served as pretext; over and over the same child has been assassinated to provoke the same abominations.

  This time there was a difference. Usually these slanderous rumors began to circulate around Easter time. And this was October. We had just finished celebrating the last of the High Holy Days, that of the Law, Simhat Torah. And then, too—there was no corpse here.

  There was only the disappearance of a hoodlum, the fourteen-year-old son of a stableman. After going for an outing with the horses two weeks earlier, Yancsi had not returned home. When it was reported that the horses had been seen in a neighboring village, a cursing Dogor went to bring them back.

  At first people thought of it as an escapade. What schoolboy, particularly a dunce, does not dream of running away? Surely he would show up, meekly anticipating the thrashing that Dogor, his colossus of a father, a gruff and bloodthirsty man, would not fail to give him. But Yancsi had not reappeared.

  When another three or four days had elapsed without his being able to punish his son, the stableman took issue with his wife, who ob
viously was responsible, for without her this cursed bastard would not have come into this world, therefore would not have run away, therefore would not have caused this trouble. As the blows rained on her, bloodying her face and back, the woman began to scream so loud that for once her neighbors decided to go and have a look.

  “That son of a whore,” the enraged man was shouting as he trampled on his legitimate victim, who was shrieking like a madwoman. “That son of a whore has taken off! And I have to stay with his whore of a mother!”

  “Leave her alone, Dogor,” the neighbors tried to reason with him. “It’s not the woman’s fault … She had nothing to do with it …”

  “Oh yes, she did, oh yes. It’s all her fault. Like mother, like son. Vicious dogs, both of them! She, too, thinks of nothing but running away. I’ll kill her first. The slut, the tart. I’ll kill her!”

  “Leave her alone, Dogor.”

  But Dogor, obstinately bent on his task, continued to strike his victim, aiming for her head, her belly, her hips, as though determined to kill her.

  “Dogor, Dogor, good Dogor, that’s enough,” the neighbors pleaded. “Think of this—dead or crippled, she’ll be of no use to you!”

  “Let her croak! Good riddance!”

  Foaming with rage, the stableman relentlessly battered her inert body. It took four peasants to subdue him.

  Dogor was still struggling and swearing. “Slut, whore, tart! She and her bad seed, I should have killed them long ago!”

  “May God forgive you, Dogor,” said one of the neighbors. “You speak without knowing. To kill is a sin, a crime the law does not look upon lightly. You want to go to jail? To the gallows?”

  “You are unjust,” his spouse echoed. “You have married a woman worthy of you. No, you are the one not worthy of her. Poor woman. She is devoted to you, she works harder than you. While you are busy running from tavern to tavern, she slaves away. Poor woman. While you are rolling under the table, she takes care of your home. You should thank God for having chosen her for you.”