Hostage

  He knows, Haskel said to himself. The anguish he felt was almost overwhelming.

  “You’re going to get well, Leibele. I promise in the name of my dear ones. We’re going to study together, pray together, tell the world about the dangers of forgetting … together.”

  “Yes, yes, my friend … Haskel. My mother …”

  He was drawing nearer to her, that was certain. Soon he would be with her, just as Haskel would one day be with his mother. A tear trickled down his cheek.

  Suddenly, Leibele tried to lift himself up. As his eyes met Haskel’s, his speech became stronger.

  “If your prayer is answered, the first thing I’ll do is pray with you. I’ll wear tefillin and so will you.”

  He fell back on the drenched pillow. He was drifting away.

  Natasha looked at him tenderly. Months later, after she and Ilya had to return to the Soviet Union, Ilya asked her to marry him. The last time Haskel saw Ilya, he asked his Russian savior to get him a pair of tefillin.

  Shaltiel has discovered that his worst enemy is not his memory overflowing with events and faces, or his exacerbated sensitivity, but his body, his whole body, strained and enfeebled. The Arab torturer is weakening Shaltiel’s resistance and undermining his spirit by punishing his body. Deprived of food and sleep, his eyelids are as heavy as lead. His tongue sticks to his palate. His lips are gashed. His head and lungs are bursting. He has shooting pains in his shoulders, hands and fingers. Breathing is an ordeal.

  Is it daylight outside or dusk? He’d very much like to know, though it really doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know anything, except that hell exists.

  “Confess, you louse!” the Arab commands. “You’re Jewish, you’re a spy, you belong to a criminal group. Confess that you support your Jewish brothers in Palestine, that you love them, the murderers of my people. We know it.”

  He has lowered his voice, as if people on the street outside might hear him. There is daylight now. The hostage strains to hear noise from the outside—any noise from a cityscape that is no longer.

  Shaltiel nods his head, his nose covered in blood. Yes, he says, he loves the people of Israel, but, no, he’s never been a threat to the Palestinians. From where does he get his courage? Is it because he’s innocent? He doesn’t know. He only knows, between two fainting fits, that the Arab is torturing him and that torturers are never right. Worse than the physical suffering is the powerlessness in the face of humiliation. Still, it’s his body that’s subjecting him to humiliation. The penetrating stench of the urine and the vomit. He is like a child again, unable to control himself. His head is throbbing and his heart aches as he is trapped in a world that repudiates him. With a bleeding mouth, he blurts it all out again. Yes, yes he’s Jewish! Yes, he tries to write and tell stories! Yes, he’s been to the Holy Land—but only to visit cousins in Jerusalem, and to pray; yes, to pray at the Wall, and cry, and dream. That’s all.

  But the torturer is not satisfied: “That’s not enough!” He splits open the arch of Shaltiel’s eyebrows with his fist.

  His eyesight seems to have changed. He doesn’t see the shadows, yet he feels their ominous presence. He guesses about everything, but understands nothing.

  When it’s the Italian’s turn, things are more tolerable; he knows the two men are playing good cop, bad cop. Still, the European seems to be interested in his parents, his wife, his occupations.

  One day, he says to him, “Since you say you’re a storyteller, tell me a story.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “My mouth is too dry.”

  The Italian gives him a drink. But Shaltiel still can’t. He can’t concentrate.

  Finally, in a rasping voice, between two sighs, Shaltiel tells his abductor the story of the wise bird.

  One day, God decided to send a special messenger to earth to put his creatures back on the straight and narrow path. He sent a bird, a tiny, very beautiful and fragile bird. The bird dared to plead that he was too small, too weak and too ignorant for the assignment. He was bound to lose his way, bound to be insulted and beaten. God reassured him: “Don’t worry, my little messenger. I’ll be at your side all the time, everywhere. You won’t have to talk; you have the gift of song, so you’ll sing for them. When they speak to you, it’s me that they’ll hear.”

  The confident bird now left the heavens and flew down to the earth. He arrived at the house of sleeping merchants, where his singing woke them up. They chased him away. “They’re so exhausted buying and selling things they’ll never own that their eyes shut involuntarily,” God said to the bird. “Don’t resent them. They’re not guilty of sleeping but of not understanding.”

  The bird, as he flew, noticed an army getting ready for combat. “How could I possibly sing?” he asks God. “They want to kill and die; they love murder.” God told him to sing nonetheless. The bird obeyed. Only one soldier heard him, and that man threw a stone at him. God, as though hurt, uttered a small cry and the soldier collapsed.

  Later, as the messenger bird was resting in a fruit tree, he saw a little boy and his old grandfather looking at him, and he heard them praise his grace and beauty. He wanted to thank them, but God told him to remain silent. “It’s for them that I made you fly down. I’d like to teach you something useful and true: Your silence should be a song, a song so solemn and timeless that it will silence forever hatred and bloodthirstiness in the hearts of mortals.”

  “He’s not here,” said Shaltiel’s captor. “Your little bird doesn’t live here. Haven’t you understood yet? Here your silence, like everything else, like everything in life, will just be one long howl.”

  He was right, of course.

  And yet, without knowing why, Shaltiel thought of his older brother, whose silences touched his.

  Davarowsk-the-great-Podolsk: the small town in Galicia where an ordinary Jewish family lived, amid others, honoring the religious customs and attending to its daily worries. They observed the Sabbath and the High Holy Days and visited friends. There was very little talk about politics at the dinner table. There were no daughters but three brothers: Pinhas or Pavel, Berele and Shaltiel.

  It was the father, Reb Haskel, a peddler of ancient and modern books, who saw to the running of the household. Bread, milk and a few seasonal fruits were usually served; rarely warm dishes. For the Sabbath meals, a proper effort was made to honor the day’s holiness.

  As Reb Haskel’s salary was very low, he supplemented it by tutoring the children of the wealthy on the sacred texts. In addition, in the evening, in his spare time, as an amateur scribe, he corrected the parchments of the phylacteries under the supervision of a professional.

  Berele, the youngest boy, died at age five. Shaltiel remembers his death, but only vaguely. He remembers his funeral more vividly. Rain fell on the open tomb, and Shaltiel was tormented with the thought that his little brother was going to be drenched and all alone. People cried as his father recited the Kaddish.

  The bereaved family knew periods of poverty. At night, they often rose from the dinner table with half-empty stomachs. But the father was determined that his children would not give way to melancholy. A funny story, a kind word from him sufficed to chase away sadness. When he had to leave home, even for a day, he invariably told his children to respect their mother and remember that one day they would no longer be here to guide them, but they must remain together, always.

  The eldest son, Pinhas, had a strenuous job in a sawmill. There, at sixteen, he discovered the Communist ideal and experiment. Arele, Haskel’s nephew, found his path to God at fourteen and turned to mysticism at eighteen. As for Shaltiel, he was fascinated by chess and devoted all his free time to the game; he also cultivated all the passions that would haunt him: the desire to understand others, a faith in history—not blind history but history with a human face—anger when confronted with the unexpected, an awareness of time passing. Even in his jail, he tried to slow its course in order to escape from pain and anguish by playing di
fficult games.

  “In a certain way, our three destinies remained strangely linked,” Shaltiel would later say. “It was because Pavel was a Communist that Arele became interested in religion and me, in the spellbinding world of chess.”

  A man’s life, really, is not made up of years but of moments, all of which are fertile and unique. This is what I was taught by an old man who begged for words and stories, and I never tire of repeating his lesson. Some of life’s moments mark a break in consciousness; others give rise to streams of scintillating, philosophical ideas or astonishing works of art; still others, to important meetings or profound personal upheavals.

  When exactly did Pinhas, my dear older brother, get the revelatory summons from Moscow? That’s something that no one at home knew except for me. Perhaps he told me because he was fond of me. I was still a little boy when he left home. In order to protect himself and probably so we wouldn’t have problems with the police, he didn’t tell us about his membership in the clandestine Jewish Communist Party for a long time. He was frequently absent at night, but he told my father he was only meeting with friends. Did my father suspect the truth? He did know how to read our thoughts without ever passing judgment on them. So long as his sons gathered at the table for the Sabbath meal, and so long as they went to synagogue with him on the Sabbath and on the High Holy Days, he didn’t mind. However, as Pinhas spoke very little about his nocturnal occupations, our curiosity kept growing. Until the day he confided his great secret to Arele: He was in love. Not with a brunette or a blonde, but with a revolutionary movement that promised to give humanity a sunny, fulfilling future.

  An older comrade at the sawmill, Zelig, who was financially even worse off than he, a courageous young man whose irony was as remarkable as his physical strength, was responsible for his conversion. He had gone about it slowly and methodically. First, through incisive little remarks, Zelig undermined his candidate’s religious faith, demonstrating to him that the heavens were as empty as they were deceptive. Marx replaced Moses. Stalin outclassed the Messiah.

  At first, Pinhas resisted.

  “You don’t believe in God, that’s your business,” he said to Zelig. “Not mine. I believe in Him just like my father, though it’s true that in his observance, he is more scrupulous than I; I sometimes forget to bless my bread or fruit before eating it, and sometimes I also pray hastily without trying to understand the meaning of the words. But I believe God exists.”

  “But do you exist for Him?” Zelig asked. “That is the question.”

  “My answer is yes, I do, and so do you. Think what you will; we exist for God. He didn’t create the world in order to get rid of it!”

  “And what makes you think He created our world and the human beings who populate it? Don’t you understand that it’s not God who created us but we who invented God! Science is here to prove it.”

  Unfortunately, Pinhas did not have the intellectual background to refute his comrade’s dialectical materialism. True, he could have turned to our father. He was erudite; he could have helped and suggested the appropriate books for him to read. But Pinhas thought his father might see it as challenging his faith and that it would make him sad. He preferred to keep silent.

  Actually, he was wrong. Our father would have known what to answer. He would have told him the story of the great author of Hatam Sofer whose young son asked him a question concerning the faith. The father took a week to answer him. “Can it be,” the son asked, “that you needed so much time to find the answer to my question?”

  “No,” his father replied. “I could have given you the answer right away. But I wanted you to understand this: People can easily live solely with questions; and also you should know that some questions remain forever unanswered.”

  But Pavel needed answers and he pursued them. Sometimes at the sawmill the two young Jews would have discussions—about the origin of the universe, manhood, the enigma of free will in the divine design, the tragic sentiment of life and, more tragic, of death. How could these things be explained? Zelig had an answer for everything. Always pressing ahead, he drove his friend into a corner: “If your God knows everything, then you’re not free; and if you have no freedom, then you’re not responsible for anything; but then why fear divine punishment?”

  Pinhas’s inexperience made his friend, who was so very knowledgeable, ill at ease. So he suggested a deal: They would no longer talk about philosophy or religion, but would devote themselves to analyzing political and social problems. Eventually, they came to communism, its importance to Jews first, and then to all peoples.

  “Communism is the ultimate remedy for anguish, injustice, evil, hatred, anti-Semitism and war,” said Zelig.

  “Prove it,” said Pinhas.

  “Gladly. In the world we live in, you and I, everything is going badly. The rich exploit the defenseless and the downtrodden. Why? Because communism doesn’t rule here yet.”

  “But where does it rule then?”

  “In the Soviet Union, the true home of all stateless persons,” Zelig replied.

  “How did you come to all these ideas?”

  “Through books, of course. And from Communists, of course. One day you’ll understand: Communism is a conception of the world; it encompasses all our aspirations and offers us all possibilities.”

  Night after night, Zelig and Pinhas discussed historical materialism, the imperative of the dialectic and the meaning of history. Zelig described the Communist paradise as defined in the Soviet constitution. And he based his arguments on clandestine Yiddish brochures that confirmed his statements. In fact, these brochures also alluded to a kind of independent Jewish state called Birobidzhan where everyone would be Jewish and Yiddish would be spoken by everyone, from its leaders to its ordinary citizens, and used in official publications and newspapers. In other words, no more anti-Semitism. No more threats. No more danger. Happiness would be shared by all; pure joy would reign at all levels, everywhere. No one would feel useless or inferior. No one would say: I’m better than you. No one would have the power or the right to humiliate or exploit anyone, in the name of anything.

  “Imagine a world,” Zelig said, “where all men are equal, where racial hatred and religious fanaticism are replaced by a great human solidarity. Your father wouldn’t work as hard nor would you. The Jews wouldn’t be persecuted and the poor wouldn’t die of hunger.”

  “You’re describing the Messianic era,” said Pinhas.

  “Yes. But it will be created by men, not gods.”

  One night, Pinhas adopted a solemn expression and asked, “What do you expect of me?”

  There was a silence, and then Zelig answered, “Become a Communist. Like me. With me.”

  For Pinhas, this moment was a turning point.

  His first appearance before the Peretz Markish cell, named after the great poet living in Moscow, was memorable and dramatic. It felt like a complete upheaval in his life. The cell consisted of seven members, five men and two women. Pavel was the youngest. The secretary, Gregory, a dry and taciturn bald man who took himself very seriously, dominated the evening, with short, solemn sermons directed at the new revolutionary.

  “We’re pleased to welcome you into our movement. We’re accepting you because your supporter is a comrade whom we trust. We hope you won’t disappoint us. Be sure to observe all the security rules scrupulously. We’re operating in a hostile atmosphere. We’re spied on by informers. The police are always seeking us out, aware of the danger we represent for the people they protect. All your ties to us must remain secret. Not one word to anyone, not even to the people closest to you.”

  After a pause, he looked at Pavel with a searching and stern gaze and added, “From now on, your family is us. We have complete priority over all the people who are not party members. Forget your individual conscience and your personal passions: You’ve now written them off once and for all. The party is the equivalent of God for your father: the beginning and end of all things. Betray the party and you’ll
be damned.”

  They all nodded their heads. The young convert had been warned. Evil exists, and it is betrayal.

  Though a good Communist, faithful to the ideals of Marx and Stalin, Pinhas remained a good Jew, in part because he was a good son. He didn’t want to upset our father, so he went to great lengths not to change his way of life.

  As I said, I don’t know why, but he chose me as his confidant. And it’s he who first taught me chess, when I was still little; I played with my father only later. One day, while we were playing, he told me the story of a young boy, an occasional magician, who devoted his life to a noble conspiracy: making history move forward and rescuing human beings from despair. Afterward, he referred to him often though making it clear that he was an imaginary character. His faith in the future became his gateway to a romantic circle of initiates all linked to a gigantic worldwide fraternity. He constantly came within a hairs-breadth of danger; ran the risk of being identified, imprisoned and beaten; felt the excitement of distributing forbidden tracts under the doors of Jewish homes and outwitting the police. And then came the harrowing but also thrilling preparation of the use of violence.

  Whom was he speaking of, if not himself and his dreams?

  Yet he led an open and ordered life as before. He was never absent from his place of work. He never criticized his employers. He celebrated the Sabbath and the holidays with us.

  Only once did he have to deal with a snag. His cell had decided to meet on a Sabbath evening. How could he justify not being present at the Friday evening meal? He invented a friend’s illness. Father wanted to know how serious his friend’s condition was, and Pinhas, a bad liar, gave an answer that was too vague to be convincing. Nevertheless, my older brother’s seat stayed empty for the Sabbath meal.

  That night the offices of the police were set on fire. A young Jew was arrested; dangerous pamphlets were found in his home. He confessed under torture that he was a Communist. He mentioned Pinhas’s cell, and the secretary was immediately apprehended and cross-examined. The others were obliged to hide, in the mountains, or elsewhere. Pinhas decided to spend a few days with a distant cousin. Father wanted to know why. Pinhas tried to dodge the question. Father demanded the truth and Pinhas confessed: He was involved in the conspiracy. “So you’re mixed up in the fire?” asked my father, alarmed.