We left the lobby hurriedly. The man stayed behind alone. For a long time after I was afraid to go back to that theater. I was afraid of finding him there, on the very spot where we had left him.
We went down the stairs, got our coats, and went out into the street where the wind whipped us angrily. The air was clear and pure, as it is on the peaks of snowy mountains.
We began to walk. It was cold. We were advancing slowly, as if to prove that we were strong and that the cold had no power over us.
Kathleen hadn’t taken my arm and I hadn’t taken hers. She didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at her. Either of us would have gone on walking at the same pace if the other had stopped suddenly to think, or to pray.
After walking silently along the Seine for an hour or two, we crossed the Pont du Châtelet, and then, when we reached the middle of the Pont Saint-Michel, I stopped to look at the river. Kathleen took two more steps and stopped too.
The Seine, reflecting the sky and the lampposts, now showed us its mysterious winter face, its quiet cloudiness, where any life is extinguished, where any light dies. I looked down and thought that someday I too would die.
Kathleen came closer and was about to say something. With a motion of my head, I stopped her.
“Don’t talk,” I told her after a while.
I was still thinking about death and didn’t want her to talk to me. It is only in silence, leaning over a river in winter, that one can really think about death.
One day I had asked my grandmother, “How should one keep from being cold in a grave in the winter?”
My grandmother was a simple, pious woman who saw God everywhere, even in evil, even in punishment, even in injustice. No event would ever find her short of prayers. Her skin was like white desert sand. On her head she wore an enormous black shawl which she never seemed able to part with.
“He who doesn’t forget God isn’t cold in his grave,” she said.
“What keeps him warm?” I insisted.
Her thin voice had become like a whisper: it was a secret. “God himself.” A kind smile lit up her face all the way to the shawl that covered half her forehead. She smiled like that every time I asked her a question with an obvious answer.
“Does that mean that God is in the grave, with the men and the women that are buried?”
“Yes,” my grandmother assured me. “It is he who keeps them warm.”
I remember that then a strange sadness came upon me. I felt pity for God. I thought: he is more unhappy than man, who dies only once, who is buried in only one grave.
“Grandma, tell me, does God die too?”
“No, God is immortal.”
Her answer came as a blow. I felt like crying. God was buried alive! I would have preferred to reverse the roles, to think that God is mortal and man not. To think that, when man acts as if he were dying, it is God who is covered with earth.
Kathleen touched my arm. I jumped.
“Don’t touch me,” I told her. I was thinking of my grandmother and you cannot truly remember a dead grandmother if you aren’t alone, if a girl with black hair—black like my grandmother’s shawl—touches your arm.
Suddenly it occurred to me that my grandmother’s smile had a meaning that the future was to reveal: she knew that my question did not concern her, that she would not know the cold of a grave. Her body had not been buried, but entrusted to the wind that had blown it in all directions. And it was her body—my grandmother’s white and black body—that whipped my face, as if to punish me for having forgotten. No, Grandmother! No! I haven’t forgotten. Every time I’m cold, I think of you, I think only of you.
“Come on,” Kathleen said. “Let’s go. I’m getting cold.”
We started walking again. The wind cut our faces, but we went on. We didn’t walk faster. Finally we stopped on boulevard Saint-Germain, opposite the Deux-Magots.
“Here we are,” she said.
“This is where you live?”
“Yes. Do you want to come up?”
I had to fight against myself not to say no. I wanted to stay with her too much, to talk to her, to touch her hair, to see her fall asleep. But I was afraid of being disappointed.
“Come,” Kathleen insisted.
She opened the heavy door and we walked up one flight to her apartment.
I was cold. And I was thinking of my grandmother whose face was white like the transparent desert sand, and whose shawl was as black as the dense night of cemeteries.
“WHO ARE YOU?”
I could hardly hear my own voice. Thousands of needles were injecting fire into my blood. I was thirsty. I felt hot. My throat was dry. My veins were about to burst. And yet the cold hadn’t left me. My body, shaken by convulsions, trembled like a tree in a storm, like leaves in the wind, like the wind in the sea, like the sea in the head of a madman, of a drunkard, of a dying man.
“Who are you?” I asked again, while my teeth chattered. I could feel there was someone in the room.
“The nurse,” said an unknown voice.
“Water,” I said. “I’m thirsty. I’m burning. Please give me some water.”
“You mustn’t drink,” the voice said. “You’ll feel bad. If you drink, you’ll throw up.”
Against my will, I began to cry silently.
“There, now,” the nurse said. “I’m going to moisten your face.”
She wiped my forehead and then my lips with a wet towel which caught fire as it touched my skin.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Six o’clock.”
“At night?”
“Yes.”
I thought: when Dr. Russel came to see me, it was well before noon. Six penicillin shots, I hadn’t even noticed.
“Are you in pain?” the nurse asked.
“I’m thirsty.”
“It’s the fever that’s making you thirsty.”
“Do I still have a high fever?”
“Yes.”
“How high?”
“High.”
“I want to know.”
“I’m not allowed to tell you. That’s the rule.”
The door opened. Someone came in. Whispers.
“Well, my friend? What have you got to say?”
Dr. Russel was trying to be casual.
“I’m thirsty, Doctor.”
“The enemy refuses to retreat,” he said. “It’s up to you to hold out.”
“He’ll win, Doctor. He doesn’t suffer from thirst.”
I thought: Grandmother would have understood. It was hot in the airless, waterless chambers. It was hot in the room where her livid body was crushed by other livid bodies. Like me, she must have opened her mouth to drink air, to drink water. But there was no water where she was, there was no air. She was only drinking death, as you drink water or air, mouth open, eyes closed, fingers clenched.
Suddenly I felt a strange need to speak out loud. To tell the story of Grandmother’s life and death, to describe her black shawl that used to frighten me until I was reassured by her kind, simple expression. Grandmother was my refuge. Every time my father scolded me, she would intervene: fathers are like that, she’d explain smilingly. They get angry over nothing.
One day my father slapped me. I had stolen some money from the store cash register in order to give it to a classmate. A sickly, poor little boy. They called him Haïm the orphan. I always felt ill at ease in his presence. I knew I was happier than he was and this made me feel guilty. Guilty that my parents were alive. That’s why I stole the money. But when my father asked me, trying to find out what I had done with it, I didn’t tell him. After all, I couldn’t tell my father that I felt guilty because he was alive! He slapped my face and I ran to Grandmother. I could tell her the whole truth. She didn’t scold me. Sitting in the middle of the room, she lifted me onto her lap and began to sob. Her tears fell on my head, which she was holding against her bosom, and I discovered to my surprise that a grandmother’s tears are so hot that they burn everything in th
eir path.
“She’s there,” the doctor said. “She’s outside. In the hallway. Do you want her to come in?”
With the strength that came from my fear, I screamed, “No! I don’t, I don’t.”
I thought he was talking about my grandmother. I didn’t want to see her. I knew she had died—of thirst, maybe—and I was afraid she wouldn’t be as I remembered her. I was afraid she wouldn’t have the black shawl on her head, nor those burning tears in her eyes, nor that clear, calm expression that could make you forget you were cold.
“You should see her,” the doctor said softly.
“No! Not now!”
My tears left scars on my cheeks, on my lips, on my chin. From time to time, they even managed to slip under the cast. Why was I crying? I had no idea. I think it was because of Grandmother. She used to cry very often. She would cry when she was happy and also when she was unhappy. When she was neither happy nor unhappy, she would cry because she could no longer feel the things that bring about happiness and unhappiness. I wanted to prove to her that I had inherited her tears, which, as it is written, open all doors.
“It’s up to you,” the doctor said. “Kathleen can come back tomorrow.”
Kathleen! What did she have to do with this? How did she meet Grandmother? Had she also died?
“Kathleen?” I said, letting my head fall back. “Where is she?”
“Outside,” the doctor said, somewhat surprised. “In the hallway.”
“Bring her in.”
The door opened and light footsteps came toward my bed. Again I made a desperate effort to open my eyes, but my eyelids felt sewn together.
“How are you, Kathleen?” I asked in a barely audible voice.
“Fine.”
“You see: I am Dmitri Karamazov’s most recent victim.”
Kathleen forced a little laugh.
“You were right. It’s a bad movie.”
“Better to die than to see it.”
Kathleen’s laugh sounded false.
“You’re exaggerating…”
Whispers. The doctor was speaking to her very softly.
“I have to leave you,” Kathleen said, sounding very sorry.
“Be careful crossing the street.”
She leaned over to kiss me. An old fear took hold of me.
“You mustn’t kiss me, Kathleen!”
She pulled back her head abruptly. For a moment there was silence in the room. Then I felt her hand on my forehead. I was going to tell her to take it away quickly and not to run the risk of catching fire, but she had already taken it away.
Kathleen tiptoed out of the room, followed by the doctor. The nurse stayed with me. I would really have liked to know what she looked like: old or young, beautiful or sullen, blond or brunette…But I still couldn’t move my eyelids. All my efforts to open them came to nothing. At one point I told myself that will-power wasn’t enough, that I had to use both my hands. But they were tied to the sides of the bed and the big needles were still there.
“I’m going to give you two shots,” the nurse announced in a voice from which I could guess nothing.
“Two? Why two?”
“First penicillin. And the second to help you fall asleep.”
“You don’t have a third one against thirst?” I had a hard time breathing. My lungs were going to burst: empty kettles forgotten on the fire.
“You’ll sleep. You won’t be thirsty.”
“I won’t dream that I’m thirsty?”
The nurse lifted the covers. “I’ll give you a shot against dreams.”
She’s nice, I thought. Her heart is made of gold. She suffers when I suffer. She’s quiet when I’m thirsty. She’s quiet when I sleep. She’s quiet when I dream. She is probably young, beautiful, beaming, attractive. She has a serious face, laughing eyes. She has a sensual mouth, made for kissing, not for talking. Just like Grandmother’s eyes, which she used not for looking, not for wondering, but simply for crying.
First shot. Nothing. I didn’t feel it. Second shot, this one in the arm. Still nothing. I had so much pain that I couldn’t even feel the injection.
The nurse fixed the covers, put the needles in a metal box, moved a chair, and turned a switch.
“I’m putting out the light,” she said. “You’ll go to sleep soon.”
All at once I got the idea that she too would want to kiss me before leaving. Just a little meaningless kiss on the forehead or on the cheek and maybe even on the eyelids. They do that in hospitals. A good nurse kisses her patients when she says good night. Not on the mouth. On the forehead, on the cheeks. It reassures them. A patient thinks he is less ill if a woman wants to kiss him. He doesn’t know that a nurse’s mouth isn’t made for speaking, or even for crying, but for keeping quiet and for kissing patients so they can fall asleep without fear, without fear of the dark.
Again, I was completely covered with perspiration.
“You mustn’t kiss me,” I whispered.
The nurse laughed in a friendly way.
“Of course not. It makes you thirsty.”
Then she left the room. And I waited to fall asleep.
“TELL ME a little about yourself,” Kathleen said.
We were sitting in her room, where it was pleasantly warm. We were listening to a Gregorian chant, which swelled inside us. The words and the music contained a peace that no storm could have disturbed.
On a small table, our two cups were still half full. The coffee had become cold. The semidarkness made me keep my eyes closed. The feeling of exhaustion that had been weighing me down at the beginning of the evening had completely disappeared. My nerves tense, I was conscious that time, as it passed through me, was carrying a part of me along with it.
“Tell me,” Kathleen said. “I want to know you.”
Her legs folded under her, she was sitting on my right on the beige couch. A dream was floating in the air, looking for a place on which to settle.
“I don’t feel like it,” I answered. “I don’t feel like talking about myself.”
To talk about myself, really talk about myself, I would have had to tell the story of my grandmother. I didn’t feel like expressing it in words: Grandmother could only be expressed in prayers.
After the war, when I arrived in Paris, I had often, very often, been urged to tell. I refused. I told myself that the dead didn’t need us to be heard. They are less bashful than I. Shame has no hold on them, while I was bashful and ashamed. That’s the way it is: shame tortures not the executioners but their victims. The greatest shame is to have been chosen by destiny. Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, his favorite toys.
Once I asked my teacher, Kalman the cabalist, the following question: For what purpose did God create man? I understand that man needs God. But what need of man has God?
My teacher closed his eyes and a thousand wounds, petrified arteries traveled by terror-stricken truths, drew a tangled labyrinth on his forehead. After a few minutes of contemplation, his lips formed a delicate, very distant smile.
“The Holy Books teach us,” he said, “that if man were conscious of his power, he would lose his faith or his reason. For man carries within him a role which transcends him. God needs him to be ONE. The Messiah, called to liberate man, can only be liberated by him. We know that not only man and the universe will be freed, but also the one who established their laws and their relations. It follows that man—who is nothing but a handful of earth—is capable of reuniting time and its source, and of giving back to God his own image.”
At the time I was too young to understand the meaning of my teacher’s words. The idea that God’s existence could be bound to mine had filled me with a miserable pride as well as a deep pity.
A few years later I saw just, pious men walking to their death, singing, “We are going to break, with our fire
, the chains of the Messiah in exile.” That’s when the symbolic implication of what my teacher had said struck me. Yes, God needs man. Condemned to eternal solitude, he made man only to use him as a toy, to amuse himself. That’s what philosophers and poets have refused to admit: in the beginning there was neither the Word nor Love, but laughter, the roaring, eternal laughter whose echoes are more deceitful than the mirages of the desert.
“I want to know you,” Kathleen said.
Her face had darkened. The dream, finding no place to settle, had dissolved. I thought: it could have entered her wide-open eyes. But dreams never enter from outside.
“You might end up hating me,” I told her.
She drew her legs under her still more. Her whole body contracted, became smaller, as if it had wanted to follow the dream and disappear altogether.
“I’ll take a chance,” she answered.
She’ll hate me, I thought. It is unavoidable. What happened will happen again. The same causes bring about the same effects, the same hatreds. Repetition is a decisive factor in the tragic aspect of our condition.
I don’t know the name of the first man who openly cried out his hatred to me, nor who he was. He represented all the nameless and faceless people who live in the universe of dead souls.
I was on a French ship sailing to South America. It was my first encounter with the sea. Most of the time I was on deck, studying the waves which, untiringly, dug graves only to fill them again. As a child I had searched for God because I imagined him great and powerful, immense and infinite. The sea gave me such an image. Now I understood Narcissus: he hadn’t fallen into the fountain. He had jumped into it. At one point my desire to be one with the sea became so strong that I nearly jumped overboard.
I had nothing to lose, nothing to regret. I wasn’t bound to the world of men. All I had cared for had been dispersed by smoke. The little house with its cracked walls, where children and old men came humming to pray or study in the melancholy light of candles, was nothing but ruins. My teacher, who had been the first to teach me that life is a mystery, that beyond words there is silence, my teacher, whose head was always hanging as if he didn’t dare face heaven—my teacher had long since been reduced to ashes. And my little sister, who made fun of me because I never played with her, because I was too serious, much too serious, my little sister no longer played.