Legends of Our Time

  I told myself that I should open the gate, go across the yard, walk up to the porch, go into the kitchen. Who could tell? Perhaps someone was waiting for me near the stove, someone who would not ask me any questions but would invite me to sit down at the table, offer me a glass of milk and a piece of bread, and say: “You are exhausted, the bed is ready, go and rest, you have traveled a long way.”

  But I knew that the one who was sleeping in my bed would not forgive me for having come back. Perhaps he was not even asleep; perhaps he had been watching for my return for twenty years. Better to go away, leave the town, the country. What more had I to see here?

  Strange: I had come from very far away to take one more look at the house, the yard, the well near the cellar, the garden—and I could not manage to step through the gate. From far away the yard had never seemed so inaccessible to me. Stiffening, holding my breath, I forced my hand onto the iron door-handle, caressing it ever so gently before turning it. My shoulder pushed the gate, which gave a familiar little squeak as it opened up just wide enough for me to slip inside. Then, closing the gate again, I leaned on it with my full weight, my heart beating violently, my head bursting with delirium. The yard—our yard. Nothing had been moved out of place. The empty barrel at the entrance to the cellar, the empty bucket hanging above the well, the tree with its withered arms turned toward the garden: I could see them all through seven layers of darkness. The only thing that remained for me to do was to go into the kitchen, from there to the living room, and then into the bedroom.

  But I did not do it. It was the sharp, nervous bark of a dog that stopped me. I had expected everything but that. There had never been any dog in the house. We Jewish children had been taught to fear dogs; they were friends of the enemy, all demons, all anti-Semitic. Invaded by the absurd old terror, I bolted through the gate and onto the sidewalk: driven out a second time. By a dog, the true victor in this war. I took to flight, as I had long ago. I ran to the main street, to the main square; for lack of any other refuge, I collapsed on a bench and dropped my head onto my hands, blinded by pain, by rage, by shame—especially by shame. As I sat there, a new day began to dawn on the summit of the mountain.

  I had lived through my return to Sighet long before it actually took place. I had described it in my novel The Town Beyond the Wall. Retrospectively, the novel became a report. Except for the events of the night, nothing was missing. In the morning I picked up the thread of the book: I used it as a guide. Seen in daylight the town appeared to me exactly as I had dreamed it: bare, without any vigor, without any mystery.

  As in the novel, it was an autumn morning. The weather was fine. A yellow sun was advancing across the grayish-blue sky. Yellow, too, was the foliage; yellow the walls of the buildings; yellow the dead leaves; yellow, sad, discouraged were the men and women going to work, to market, to church, the children going to school.

  I looked into the eyes of the people I met—would I recognize anyone? A friend? An enemy? A neighbor? No, I had never seen any of them before. I did not know them, they did not know me. Some of them looked at me without seeing me, fleetingly; others saw me without looking at me, their thoughts elsewhere. No one approached me, no one turned his head. Not one gesture of astonishment or complicity. Nothing. They showed neither pleasure nor disappointment: my return was of no consequence to them. I had survived, that was my affair, not theirs. If I had spoken to them, they would have continued on their way; if I had started yelling “Disgrace!” or “Fraud!” they would not even have shrugged their shoulders. As if I did not exist. Or rather, as if I had never existed.

  I scrutinized the passersby with fascination. Former classmates? Former friends of my friends? Former customers of my father? To which of them had we entrusted our Sabbath candelabra, our winter clothes, our valuable papers? An old housewife was returning from market: wasn’t that Mrs. Stark, who had agreed to keep our sewing machine in her house? An energetic-looking official was coming out of the courthouse: wasn’t that the generous lawyer to whom we had “sold” some of our pieces of property? A man about my age was talking to his son, showing him some object in the window of the old pastry shop that had belonged to the Stein family: wasn’t that Pishta the Swaggerer, the very same one who used to go about dressed up as a demon on Christmas week, a whip in his hand, punishing any Jew he found for having killed his God? Ready to catch the slightest sign, the slightest blink of an eye, I mingled with the people in the street, in the stores, in the market. I brushed against them, I bumped into them: no one paid any attention.

  They should have inspired anger and bitterness in me, moved me to contempt. But I felt nothing of the sort. I was surprised to find myself sharing their indifference. Passing my house again, I saw the man who was living in it come out, a young engineer of Hungarian origin, with a lively glance, full of vigor: I said nothing to him. He would have replied: “I’m sorry.” No, not even that. He would have said nothing. He would not have remembered me. No more than the others would. More than anywhere else, it was at Sighet that I understood that the Jews had lost the war.

  And yet I was not angry with the people of Sighet. Neither for having driven out their neighbors of yesterday nor for having denied them. If I was angry at all, it was rather for having forgotten them.

  So quickly, so completely.

  Long ago, in this typical shtetl, Israel had been king. Although a minority in a town of twenty-five thousand, Sighet’s ten thousand Jews had set the tone in everything. As everywhere else in Central Europe, the Jews served as a measure, a barometer. The rich Jews were richer than the others, the poor Jews were poorer. In good and in bad, they lived in a constant state of excess.

  In the thirties, my father had turned down an American visa, saying: “Why look for America in America, when it is right here?”

  During the first years of the war certain rumors reached us concerning what was happening in Poland; among the Jews of Sighet these rumors roused very little anxiety—and even that was quickly forgotten. The rabbis said: “Nothing will happen to us, for God needs us.” The merchants said: “The country needs us.” The doctors said: “The town needs us.” They all considered themselves indispensable and irreplaceable.

  In 1943 it was possible to obtain “certificates” for Palestine: nobody wanted any. No, that is not true: one single Jew decided to go there. The others smiled: “Why leave? We are all right here, the people are friendly, they cannot do without us and they know it.”

  In Poland, in the Ukraine, in Germany, earth and sky had been burning for a long time, there were almost no Jews left there, but to us the world looked stable. The danger had not forced its way into our consciousness or disturbed our sleep. In the yeshivot, the young boys studied the Talmud; in the heder the children were learning the aleph-bet; in the stores people were buying, selling, competing for customers; on the Jews’ Street, during the idle hours, people were discussing politics, finance, marriage, strategy, Hasidism, and if anyone had dared to suggest that the day was coming when the town would get rid of the Jews as though they were a pack of lepers, they would have laughed in his face.

  Everyone had faith in the future. They were sure that life would go on that way eternally. A teacher explained to his pupils: “Do you know what the eternity of God is? It is we. By dancing on fire, by facing suffering and death, man creates the eternity of his creator—he offers it to him and justifies it.”

  Then came the German occupation. It happened at the beginning of 1944, a few days before Passover. Faces grew dark. Suddenly the Christian population dropped its mask—and declared its thirst for Jewish blood. But still the Jews assured one another: “It will pass, we must be patient and not despair.”

  The Festival of Freedom was celebrated while we waited for an event that nobody was able or willing to foresee.

  Eternity ended one month later.

  But not for Sighet. The town has twenty-five thousand inhabitants again. They lead a normal existence. With no Jewish doctors, no Jewish merchants,
no Jewish shoemakers. People get along without them, they are not missed. The gap was quickly filled. All the apartments are occupied, the schools are full, the stores have been taken over by the state. The Jewish community numbers less than fifty families, and most of them come from other places.

  There is even talk of progress. Several large buildings have gone up recently. An elementary school, a cooperative, a textile plant—the pride of the town. One more proof that people do not need Jews at all in order to march with the times, to conquer the future.

  If I had been a simple tourist, I would have had to admire the achievements of the new regime. But I was not. More than the night before, I felt myself a stranger, if not an intruder, in this sinister town which was stripped of all vigor, of any life of its own. I searched for the people out of my past, I searched for my past, and I did not find them. Why was everything so calm in front of the Talmud-Torah Synagogue and the Machzikei-Torah Synagogue and the Wizsnitzer shtibel? I looked for Kalman the Kabbalist, Moshe the Madman, Shmukler the Prince, Leizer the Fat: vanished without a trace as though carried off by one of the “anti-personnel” neutron bombs that destroy people and spare the stones they call their property.

  Incredulously, I visited all the places which had once filled my landscape: unchanged, anonymous. I stopped in front of my grandmother’s house; I stopped in front of the store once owned by my uncle, a learned Talmudist and a wretched merchant; I stopped in front of my teacher’s house. A thousand adventures, all with the same end.

  I walked from one synagogue to another; the biggest and oldest of them no longer existed: it had been destroyed by the retreating Germans, and a commemorative stone had been erected above its ruins. The others were empty, abandoned, cluttered with sacred books piled up helter-skelter and covered with dust. One single synagogue, too spacious for the fifty Jews who assemble there on Rosh Hashana, remained open.

  The Jews’ Street, once so lively and noisy, is now deserted. Its name has been changed. It is called the Street of the Deported. Who deported whom? A question devoid of interest or importance. No one asks it. The past is buried. People must live. And above all, they must forget. I met my old elementary-school teacher: my name meant nothing to him. I spoke to a neighbor who used to come to us every day of the week: she did not remember me. Some day some worthy citizen will glance at the name of the business street and say quite innocently: “The Street of Deported? I seem to recall that they were Jews.” He will not be sure. Even today he is not sure. The Jews deported from Sighet did not belong to Sighet. They belonged to some other place, some other planet. They were strangers. If the Jews were to come back, they would be driven away again.

  Had it not ever been thus? No doubt it had, but I had been too young at the time to understand it. The population had always thought that Jews did not become strangers, they were born that way. Only, these peaceful inhabitants go further than that. Today, for them, I am not even a stranger robbed of his childhood, not even a phantom in search of memories. Have they forgotten everything? No. Rather, they give the impression of having nothing to forget. There never were any Jews in Sighet, the former capital of the celebrated region of Maramures.

  Thus, the Jews have been driven not only out of the town but out of time as well.

  The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter. Why? Because. When you grow up, you’ll understand. I would imagine the dead conversing with God, or I would be among them, brushing against the walls, keeping my ears open; I wanted to listen, but there had always been someone to send me back to school or back home. Now I was free to enter. There was no longer anyone to tell me what was permitted and what was not. I had grown up.

  This was the only place in Sighet that reminded me of Sighet, the only thing that remained of Sighet. Outside, I was on foreign soil; here I was in the bosom of a great and powerful family ready to welcome me, to protect me.

  Perhaps it was simply because the dead who were here had been luckier than the others. They had not been deported. Remaining where they were, they had not had to undergo any humiliation. They had been let alone, left in peace. Perhaps that was why I had come to them: not so much to bid them farewell as to entrust them with the town, with the town’s Jewish past.

  I wandered from one grave to another. I had bought some candles. I lit them, placing one wherever I found a familiar name. The wind blew them out. I struggled against it, in vain.

  In the old days people had come here from far and near, especially between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, to lie down on the graves of the Tzadikim and implore them to intercede with the heavenly power to stop pursuing the people who had been too much chosen for too much suffering. Useless prayers, useless tears. The intercession had done no good. God had closed his ears and let it all happen.

  Finally, I stopped in front of a monument to the memory of a generation that had died elsewhere. A slanting block of stone, with a few words engraved on it. A tomb with no corpses. A gravestone with no graves instead of innumerable graves. I held a match to the last candle. To my great surprise, the wick caught at the first attempt and flamed upward. Was it a miracle? Would the flame rise to the seventh heaven and still higher to the tenth sphere, and still higher, to the celestial throne, and still higher than that?

  Suddenly I was aware of a presence—an old Jew was standing at my side. Without greeting me, without saying a word, he took a siddur from his pocket and began to recite the funeral chant: El mole rachamim shokhen bimromim. Where had this apparition come from? How had he found out I was there? I do not know. Perhaps he came to the cemetery day after day for the sole purpose of praying that all the Jews of Sighet, swallowed up by the night, might at last rest in peace. As he prayed I closed my eyes and shame came over me again.

  The last candle burned for a long time. Sometimes I tell myself that it is still burning.

  I met a second Jew in front of the Sephardic synagogue. The very sight of this extraordinary person, this bearded man dressed like a Hasid, took me back twenty years. I accosted him in Yiddish. Surprised, he shook my hand and looked at me lingeringly. Sholem aleichem, aleichem sholem: Peace be with you, my companion. A bond was established at once. Simple answers to harmless questions. No, he was not from Sighet. No, he had never known my father. What was he doing in this de-Judaized town? He was attending to the living. A rabbi? No. A shamash—a sexton? No. Was he teaching children the sacred language? No, not that either. Besides, there were no longer any children who would be willing to learn it. “I am the shochet,” he said—the ritual slaughterer. Incredible but true; in Sighet and the surrounding villages there were still Jews who ate kosher food. Not many. Ten here, ten there. At Borshe, a mountain town, there were not more than five. Three at Stremtere, another three at Dragmerest. It was for their sake that he had decided to stay, after sending his wife and children abroad; he would go to join them only when nobody here needed his services. For the moment he did not consider himself free. Going from village to village, from house to house, he did his work without complaint—on the contrary, he said he was happy, for he was more useful here than he could be anywhere else.

  I gazed at him in silence. I felt like giving him everything I possessed, but he had no need of anything. In the face of such generosity, a man feels poor; in the face of such humility, he feels humble. “I could not make up my mind to go,” he told me, smiling. “After all, I could not abandon an entire Jewish community that way, without a shochet.” He did not realize how much cruelty was contained in his words. Fifty families, a community. And to think that long ago this community had been a center of learning, a wellspring of life and wealth.

  If the legend of the Thirty-six Just Men is true, this slaughterer is one of them.

  Twenty-four hours after arriving in the town, I hastened to leave. One dawn, one dusk: that was enough. Already, remorse was coming over me: I had been wrong to come. Of the four wise men wh
o, the Talmud tells us, made their way into the fields of knowledge, only one emerged unscathed; and even he did not dare go in again.

  The car was waiting for me, the driver was impatient. “Are we leaving?” Yes, we were leaving. Was it fatigue that I found it so hard to lift my little suitcase, put it on the front seat, and then dump myself into the back? The slightest movement required a painful effort. A part of me wanted to remain. From here on it would be a one-way trip; every step would take me farther away from this place. “Are we leaving?” Yes, we were leaving. He let in the clutch, and the car started off. “Don’t go so fast,” I said in a low voice. Not so fast. I had seen everything, I wanted to see more. The little girl holding on to her mother’s arm. The couple stopping in front of a store window. The policeman on duty in front of the courthouse. The passersby who had not seen me arrive and now did not see me leaving.

  Here was the main street, the main square, the movie theater, the pastry shop, the girls’ high school. A last glance toward my own street: the belfry of the church, the new school building, and further on, at the intersection of two streets, my house.

  Sighet had long sunk below the horizon, and I still kept my head turned toward it, as though it were possible for me to carry it away in my gaze. And then I understood that I could not do so, and that in my heart I did not wish to do so. I had brought no part of it away with me, nothing but the feeling of emptiness. My journey to the source of all events had been merely a journey to nothingness.

  For it had never existed—this town that had once been mine.

  12.

  Appointment with Hate

  Seventeen years after I had left Germany—left it, as we say, forever—I went back.