Yes, she understood.
“Ask if she can recall the day of the liberation.”
Lidia translated. The old woman stiffened. She raised her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t remember it.” Was there defiance in this voice, weakened by the years?
“Ask her if she’d consider trying.”
Lidia translated. The old woman, still stiff and proud, answered that she was old, she had lived too many years, too many seasons, too many tragedies. No, she did not recall that day. Besides, it was all so long ago.
“Insist, Lidia. It’s important.” Again Lidia translated.
“To whom?” asked the old woman.
“To me,” Malkiel said.
“I don’t know you. And anyway at my age the things that may be important to you aren’t important to me.”
Lidia translated, turning from one to the other.
“Tell her not to be afraid, Lidia.”
“I’m not afraid,” the old woman said.
“Then why refuse to help me?”
“I don’t know you. So I fail to see how I can help you.”
“By remembering the day of—”
“I’ve forgotten so many things, so many things,” said the old woman. She dragged a chair closer and sat down. From then on Malkiel saw her only in profile. “So many things,” she repeated wearily. “Luckily I’ve managed to forget them. God in His mercy has helped me erase them from my memory. You’re still young, sir. You can’t understand the virtues of forgetfulness. How could we go on if we remembered everything?”
Lidia translated in a neutral, professional voice.
“I’m not asking you to remember everything,” Malkiel said. “Let’s limit it to one day. The day of the liberation.”
“It was wartime, sir. So many things happen in wartime.”
“What sort of things?”
“Evil things, things that hurt us. Terrible things. Is there anything in war that isn’t terrible?”
“Please tell me more precisely what you mean.”
The old woman could not. She was very sorry. She was too tired and too old to pierce the mists that enveloped her memory. She was sorry, but he must understand that.…
“Forgive me, madam, but do you remember your husband?” Here we go, Malkiel thought, tense.
“What a question! Of course I remember my husband,” the old woman said. “How could I forget him? He’s right here in the next room. In bed with a bad cold.”
Then she had remarried? Lidia had not mentioned that. Unless he had misunderstood her. He had fixed on the one fact that she was still alive. “Children?”
“Three. All married. Two live far away. We have seven grandchildren. Maria lives here with her husband and their daughter.”
Three children, Malkiel thought. “How old is your eldest child?”
“It’s a daughter, Silvia.”
“How old is she?”
“Why do you want to know that? What do you care about my children’s ages?”
“I promise to explain, madam.”
“Well, let’s see. I married my husband when I was … when I was twenty-five, maybe a little younger. Silvia? Thirty-eight, if I’m not mistaken.”
Malkiel did some quick arithmetic and sighed with relief. No, Itzik the Long had no descendants in Romania. Yet how many times had it happened to how many others? “And your first husband, madam? Do you remember him?”
She stiffened again. Painful memories froze her bony face. Her silence became opaque. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair.
“He was an important man, wasn’t he? A Nyilas officer. Zoltan—remember his name? Remember his uniform? His weapons? His whip? Have you really forgotten him? He detested Jews and hunted them down. Did you know that? He stalked them and beat them and tortured them. Isn’t that true, madam—your husband killed Jews?”
In cutting, staccato tones Malkiel struck blow after blow. To hurt her? To rouse her from her torpor, to stir her up. But she, head high and gaze hard, sat mute.
Malkiel said, “Lidia, tell her I am not here to accuse her of anything, and even less to torture her, but …”
“But?” Lidia echoed.
“To understand. And that’s the truth. I came to see her so I could understand my father better.”
“What? In slashing at this poor woman you think you can help your father?”
“No, Lidia, it’s not that. It’s too late for my father.”
“Is he dead?”
“No, he’s still alive. Yes, my father is alive. But … never mind. I’ll explain it some other time. Just believe me for now: Madame Calinescu’s answers are extremely important to me.”
The old woman seemed to have sensed the meaning of this exchange. She brought her hands forward and set them on her knees, and bit her lips before speaking again. “Tell him he’s right. My first husband was a bad man. He liked to do evil, and he hurt me often.”
“You? Why?”
“I used to beg him to break with his Nyilas friends. I wanted him to change. I wanted to live with a husband and not a hangman.”
They had been married six or seven months before the liberation. He was the son of a friend of her father’s. It was an arranged marriage, of course. She was young, very young, barely out of her adolescence. She dreamed of a Prince Charming. Her father said, “I’ve found your Prince Charming. He’s a Nyilas, but that will pass.” The man was called Zoltan. The girls liked him in his glittering uniform. “How could I doubt his character, his nobility of spirit? I was naive and stupid.” He was a handsome fellow, sensual, vain, and he treated people with contempt. Yes, he beat his victims. Yes, he hated them, Jews most of all. Yes, he went to the ghetto to “clean it out,” as he said. When he came back he radiated triumph. And she, his wife? While he was gone she stayed home with her many servants. Locked in her room, the shutters closed, she wept. “What are you crying about?” he asked. “You need everybody to be your victim,” she answered. Then he whipped her. And she stopped weeping.
“Yes. How could I have forgotten my first husband?” the old woman said.
Actually, she could have escaped, gone home to her parents and told them, “Zoltan is a monster. I don’t love him and he doesn’t love me.” Or, “We love each other at night, when we’re alone in bed. But we’re never really alone. His victims are always there; I can hear them groaning.” Or again, “Yes, we still love each other sometimes, we love each other with a twisted love, a cursed love.” Yes, she should have, she should have.
Malkiel could not help sympathizing. How can anyone go through life in a constant state of remorse? Why hadn’t she left her jailer husband? Or fought back against the growing horror? She should have understood that such a refusal could have saved her—a refusal that ran with and not against life’s grain, which transforms a handful of dust into a human being. Now it is too late.
Malkiel understood why she would want to forget. The days of the ghetto, and the humiliation of a people. Days of tenderness, too. Days when she loved her monster of a husband, when she sulked without him, when she embraced him and sought to mingle his breath with her own. She wanted to erase those images—what could be more natural? Had Malkiel any right to impose them upon her? An inner voice said, “Stop. Leave this poor woman alone. She’s suffered enough, she has a right to rest, even if she can find it only in forgetting.” But he knew he had to go on with his quest. Why? Pure instinct; he knew he had to.
“Your first husband, madam. Do you remember his death?”
Yes, she remembered. They came to inform her one afternoon in spring. She was in her garden. An officer stood before her, solemn and somber. Erect and respectful. “Be strong, madam,” he said. “In the name of the minister of war and the commander in chief of the army, I must bring you sad news.” She heard only the first words, “Be strong,” and she guessed the rest. Wild thoughts tumbled in her mind. “He will never hurt anyone again.” “I will never be humiliated again.” “I am a widow. I am not yet twenty
and already I am a widow.” And then? Then she must have fainted. Who killed her husband? She hardly knew now. Yes, she knew. Partisans. Jewish partisans. They lived in the forests and the mountains. Young people, who had escaped from the local ghetto, and other ghettos. “I saw his corpse. It was unrecognizable. I remember it. I said to myself, ‘It is the dead who killed him. It is his own victims who punished him.’ I remember because my parents were there. They told me that during the funeral services I kept saying one word over and over: ‘Punishment, punishment.’ The Russians moved in a few days or a few weeks later.”
Lidia interrupted. “She’s telling the truth. I got confirmation. She wasn’t touched after the liberation. They said her conduct had been irreproachable.”
Malkiel tried to imagine her young. She must have been beautiful. Fine features. Innocence itself. He tried to imagine her as victim. Victim of Itzik the Long. Screaming. Begging for pity.
It was still raining outside. A bird flew suddenly into his field of vision and seemed to be carrying shreds of cloud on its wings.
“As a young widow,” Lidia went on, “she spent several weeks in a clinic not far from here. For mental disorders.”
Of course, Malkiel thought.
“Of course,” Lidia said. “Her husband’s death. The shame of having been a Nyilas torturer’s wife. The wild turmoil at the liberation.”
Malkiel stepped closer to the old woman. He needed to look directly into her face. He gazed into her eyes. He saw nothing. There was no expression in her eyes. “Lidia, ask her if she sees me. If she doesn’t see me, ask her what she does see.”
The old woman did not answer the question. Lidia repeated it. Still she did not answer. She’s tired, Malkiel decided.
“I’m tired,” the old woman said. “These memories are a great weight.”
Malkiel was not happy as an investigator. An inquisitor? All evidence points to this woman having also been a victim. Why add to her suffering by forcing her to relive the past? The same voice told him that this was enough. And again he did not heed it.
“Try to forgive me, madam,” he said, leaning forward. “It will be painful, but I have no choice. My motives are honorable.”
“Everybody says that,” Lidia put in. “You can always find honorable reasons for inflicting pain.”
Malkiel chose not to reply. “I am going to tell you about the worst day of your life. You are terrified. You have hidden in the cellar with an aunt. Do you remember?”
The old woman straightened her head. A deeper layer of shadow veiled her eyes. She placed her right hand on her breast and seemed to be measuring her own heartbeat, perhaps trying to quiet it.
“The Red Army is attacking, and the Germans and Hungarians have fallen back to new positions in a few buildings. Not for long. Resistance is useless and they know it. The battle lasts from dawn till midafternoon. From your shelter you can hear the sounds of war: tanks, shells, soldiers drunk on violence, bearers of death.… Suddenly you catch your breath. Somebody’s broken down your door. An armed man is in the house. You can’t see him, but you can hear him. He searches the house, opens the closets, inspects the rooms, knocks on the walls, opens the cellar door, stumbles on your aunt, who cries out in horror, flings her aside and runs down the cellar stairs pointing his rifle; and sees you. He’s tall and slim and agile, and he’s full of cold anger. He orders you up the stairs. You obey. He shoves you into a room and shuts the door. He turns to you and glares at you with hatred, and then he talks to you in a language you don’t understand. Yiddish. Do you remember, madam?”
The old woman was panting, and stared at him now as if he were the man who had raped her. She pressed her hands to her temples. Was she trying to suppress some image rising irresistibly from the depths of memory? “No, sir, I do not remember.”
Malkiel did not believe her, and harshly told her so.
“Stop it,” Lidia said. “Can’t you see she’s suffering? Why do you make her suffer?”
“I did nothing to her,” Malkiel said stubbornly. “Someone else made her suffer, not me. I’m part of her present, not her past.”
“But you’re making her suffer in the present,” Lidia said.
“No. She’s remembering pain from long ago. It’s not the same.”
“I don’t remember,” the old woman said tonelessly.
“The man barks an order: you don’t understand. He explains in gestures. You still don’t understand. Then with his rifle in his left hand he strips you with his right hand: tears off your blouse, your skirt; you’re half naked. He drops his trousers.” Malkiel was talking fast, without realizing it, much faster than usual.
Lidia cried, “That’s enough! What kind of man are you?”
Malkiel could not stop. He would press this interrogation to the end and beyond. “You’re lying on the floor in the dirt and the man is on top of you, crushing you, suffocating you, his breath makes you sick, he glares into your eyes, you fight him just as you fight the hysteria that might free you, and then you stop fighting, and suddenly …”
The old woman was absolutely motionless now. Reliving the shame, she seemed vanquished by shame.
“Suddenly a man appears. He’s out of breath. He sees you before he recognizes your attacker. And you see him. You don’t speak to him, but he understands you. You don’t plead with him, but he comes to the rescue, or at least tries to. He calls out to your tormentor, in Yiddish also, and talks sense to him; but the other is deaf. He begs him not to be bestial; he raises his voice and cries out that what he is doing is cruel, immoral, inhuman; he shouts at the top of his lungs, but it does no good. And then he weeps, this new man. He sobs. Your eyes meet. You remember, madam?”
And in a hard, insistent tone: “That man, that unexpected knight who wanted to save you—do you remember him, Madame Calinescu?”
The old lady came out of her silence as an invalid comes out of illness: weakened but lucid. She seemed to have aged ten years in ten minutes. She opened her mouth, she started to speak, and suddenly it was Malkiel who panicked. He thought he knew, he did know what the old lady was going to tell him. She was going to reveal the hideous and abject face of her knight. “Ha! You see him as a noble creature, rushing to the rescue of a poor helpless woman. You are quite naive, sir. In war all men are beasts. All they want is to hurt people, to humble them, to possess them. Let me tell you what your knight did, that savior of yours whose heart was so pure: he waited for his friend to finish and then took his place. And you thought … You make me laugh, sir.” That was what the old lady was going to tell him. To take revenge because he had troubled her peace? To see that truth prevailed? But then what sense was there in this quest? Where was hope? Was redemption still possible? A secret voice, the same inner voice, whispered to him, Go now, tear yourself away from this place, open the door and go and never come back! And as before, he paid no attention. Besides, his panic was baseless. The old lady would act out no such scenario. The knight’s glory would remain bright and reassuring.
But the old lady’s anger was nevertheless violent. “By what right do you reopen my wounds?” she asked slowly and distinctly. “Who authorized you to rifle my memory? Why do you force me to see myself again soiled, bruised, dishonored in my flesh as in my soul? What have I ever done to you? Haven’t I suffered enough? I prayed God to let me forget, and God heard me; I finally buried my memories. And wiped out the traces of that day that was blacker than night. I finally forgot the ugly leers, the hands, the sounds that tied me to that man. Why must you undo what God has done? By what right do you come to transform His divine compassion into human malediction?”
She did not raise her voice; she contained her anger, but her fury brought back her somber gaze. Stricken by remorse, Malkiel said nothing. She’s right, he thought. How can I tell her she’s wrong?
“I forgive you,” the old lady went on. “A man’s character always shows in his face, and I know that you are not cruel. You wanted to show regret, and pity? That is no concern of m
ine. Since you were in my house, I listened to you. Since you looked at me, I spoke to you. And now please leave me. I need rest.”
Malkiel bowed in thanks. He signaled to Lidia that it was time to leave. And yet he knew that he must ask one last question: “The man who tried to help you—do you think of him from time to time?”
“Thanks to him I believe from time to time that not all men are evil. I believe that he was honest and a man of charity. But in my need to forget it all, I finally forgot him, too.”
She rose to show her visitors out. As she shook hands with Malkiel she said, “That man of courage and humanity, I see him at times, as if behind a smoke screen. An illuminated shadow, so to speak. But I saw many shadows that day, and in the days that followed.”
Malkiel held her hand in his own. “I hope you won’t be too angry with me, Madame Calinescu. Thanks to you I’ve learned something useful and perhaps essential: forgetting is also part of the mystery. You need to forget, and I understand. I must resist forgetting, so try to understand me, too.”
For the first time she attempted a smile. Malkiel was affected by that more than by her words: “I could lie, but I don’t want to. The truth is that I don’t understand you. Aren’t you too young to learn someone else’s past in addition to your own? A little while ago I wondered if the man was perhaps you. But of course that’s impossible. You were not even born then.”
“It was my father,” Malkiel said gently.
The old woman swayed, shuddered. Fearing she would collapse, Malkiel put his arms around her and went on just as gently: “My father was the man who tried to save You, not the other one.”
Relief softened Elena Calinescu’s face. Little by little she grew calm. She gazed at him for some time before murmuring, “Then will you allow an old woman to thank you? And to kiss you?” She kissed his forehead. “Thank you for coming.” She kissed him again. “And thank your father.”
Malkiel embraced her and then, on the verge of tears, left without a word. Lidia followed him. They went downstairs without speaking. In the street Lidia turned to him. “Will you allow an interpreter, not so young anymore, to kiss you, too?” She kissed him on the mouth. And Malkiel saw his father again, who had never known love here in the city of his birth; no woman here had ever sealed his lips with hers.