Elie Wiesel (16 page)

Malkiel thought back to the women who had counted in his own life. His cousin Rita. One year younger than he, she fascinated him with her fiery temper, her mischievous,
sparkling wit, and the power of her sensuality. She wanted to be a liberated woman. She said it over and over. Free in act and commitment. “God’s equal; free as He.” So she defined herself. Proud and stubborn, Rita was.…

They saw each other often from the earliest years. They attended the same grade school and the same religious high school (where she provoked one scandal after another by trying to seduce her professors). Sometimes they had dinner together and took in a movie. Malkiel felt a sort of tenderness for her, mingled with dread: she intimidated him and encouraged him at the same time. He had never dreamed that there could be anything serious between them. But in time they went on trips to the Catskills together. Or swam in her parents’ pool. They were playmates, that was all. Cousins are meant to tease one another, to plot together, to make fun of the grown-up world, but they seek adventure on their own. One evening Rita suggested that they spend the weekend at Tanglewood. It was the beginning or middle of August; New York was crushed by a heat wave. Why not go off where it was cool and enjoy beautiful music at the same time? Rita drove a convertible and cursed the drivers who passed her. Her hair streaming in the wind, she steered with her left hand and drew Malkiel to her with her right. At first it was innocent: to show him a billboard, an old tree, a cloud formation. Malkiel sensed her warmth, but their closeness seemed of little consequence. Malkiel thought of nothing special, nothing new, and neither, no doubt, did Rita. They reached Lenox early in the afternoon and proceeded to the motel where they had reserved two rooms. Unfortunately, there was only one left, the clerk informed them, apologizing for the confusion. To make up for it, he would give them the room at half price. “Okay?” she said. “Okay,” he said. It was the beginning of a beautiful and stormy affair.

The concert beneath the stars was majestic. The magic of Schubert and Bernstein: total strangers, spellbound, exchanged greetings. “Beauty makes us all dreamers,” said a girl with shoulderlength black hair, a music student. “It makes me shiver,” Rita said. Yet the night was warm. Their summer clothes clung to their bodies. “Let’s go for a swim,” Rita said. “The pool at the motel looked inviting.” It was late, but Malkiel agreed. The swim did them good. So did dinner. The truth was, Malkiel would have lingered; he was strangely uneasy about being alone with his cousin. The room had one bed, a small sofa, two chairs and a table. Well, he’d sleep on the floor. But Rita had other ideas. “Are you crazy?” she asked. “The bed is plenty big enough for two.” He was stammering a timid “All right,” when she interrupted: “You know, we’re really not living in the fifteenth century. And we’re all grown up, aren’t we? And cousins, after all.” That settled it. Deep down he was even pleased at the way things had developed. Rita took a shower and emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel that barely covered her suntanned breasts. “It’s yours,” she said. He took the longest shower of his life and reappeared in blue pajamas. Stretched out on the bed, impassive, Rita was reading a newspaper. Malkiel tried to busy himself. He hung up his shirt and pants, inspected his socks, went back for a glass of water. “You’re making me nervous,” Rita said. “Come to bed.” He wondered what he was feeling. Desire, apprehension, curiosity—all that and more. Shyly, cautiously, he stretched out along the edge of the bed. “Do you want the paper?” she asked. “Thanks; I have my book.” She wanted to know what he was reading. His answer was muddled, unfocused. “Hard to say what it’s about,” he told her. For a long moment they read in silence. In the hall, young people were calling noisy hellos and good-byes and making dates for the next day. Tense, Malkiel tried to picture himself
among them, so that he would not picture the half-naked young woman beside him. And then, neither knowing how or why, their two bodies touched. And Malkiel soared to seventh heaven before plunging to seventh hell. In torture, in ecstasy, he wanted to sing and to weep; he had never felt so torn or so whole. “Was that the first time?” Rita asked. He was ashamed to admit the truth but admitted it anyway, not going so far as to tell her what he felt now: a mixture of guilt and remorse, a sense of defeat. His whole religious memory was suddenly judging him. Had he not violated one of the Ten Commandments? How would he answer at the Last Judgment? What would his uncle think? “Got the blues?” Rita teased him. “You poor virgin. Come here and let me cheer you up.…”

And Leila. The beautiful Muslim, fierce and exasperating. His fellow student at Columbia. She was a Tunisian, a diplomat’s daughter, extremely intelligent and dynamic. One of the activists at the forefront of the student protest, she stood up to her professors, whom she called every name. And to the administration, which she repeatedly sent to hell. Malkiel had come to interview her for the
Times.

It was the end of 1968, a turbulent, even volcanic period. The students were front-page news. Inflammatory speeches; financial demands, and sociopolitical, educational and philosophical ones. The professors could only hold their tongues and mind their manners, because their students, being younger, knew more than they. Down with the rich and culturally privileged! Down with the powers that be! Make way for idealistic youth, whose future is at stake, make way for the purity of their motives and the generosity of their aspirations! A wave of fervor and words swept through the campus. Down with everything old, and up with everything new; time to start again! Every speechmaker
saw himself as Danton, every agitator was Robespierre. Smash the idols, unmask the priests, demystify all those received ideas and beliefs: that was the goal. To accomplish it they invoked the individual’s fundamental right to immediate happiness and knowledge, to friendship without taboos, to the magic of LSD, and also and most of all to love without limits or inhibitions. Opposing them, in what they disdainfully called “the establishment,” adults saw things differently and denounced the promiscuity of mindless young people, their depravity and simplistic slogans. The students ridiculed their critics scornfully: “They’re all impotent. Their ideas aren’t even worth examining.”

To “cover” the rebellion, Malkiel interviewed its most prominent leaders, among them Leila, the movement’s Passionaria.

“So, Mr. Reporter, you’ve already sold out to money and power, at your age?” That was how she greeted him. Their first interview took place outside, in front of the library. At the top of the stairs a spokesman was reading out the latest resolutions adopted by the executive committee after a night of stormy debate. The crowd cheered for each paragraph as if the fate of the world depended on it.

“Could we talk seriously?” asked the reporter.

“You mean that the needs and demands of your own generation aren’t serious? Just what do you want anyway?”

“I need answers.”

“Then let’s have the questions. What do you want to know?”

“Why a beautiful girl like you raises hell.”

Leila glared at him. “What are you? A boy scout? J. Edgar Hoover? Do I owe you any explanations? Who are you to talk to me that way?”

Against the tirade Malkiel could only stammer, “Sorry,
sorry.” In an instant, the young reporter lost all his assurance and became what he was, the son of a refugee.

“Enough of all that,” Leila said. “Let’s talk. You can be useful to us. The capitalist press has exploited us long enough; now it’s our turn.” She plied him with propaganda, overwhelmed him with news “from an unimpeachable source,” “top secret” analyses, “confidential” rumors. Happily, a rewrite man restored perspective. Under Malkiel Rosenbaum’s byline, the article was a reasonably accurate account of the situation at Columbia. Next day Leila promptly insulted him. No jeer or insult was omitted. Too timid to defend himself, Malkiel let her wear herself out. Finally she asked him, “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”

“Yes. I still want to know why a beautiful girl like you goes around raising so much hell.”

She shot him another scornful glance and left. They saw each other several times after the protests had quieted down. She ran into him at one of the campus gates and asked, “Is a capitalist reporter rich enough to buy me a cup of coffee?”

“I think my newspaper can afford it,” he said. That same night they became lovers.

Malkiel often considered telling his father about her. But Elhanan would have taken it badly. He would have cried, “What? You, a Jew, with a Muslim woman? I’m sure she hates Israel.…”

And indeed she did. Leila, a future follower of the PLO, was already anti-Israel. Between her and Malkiel, argument followed endless and sometimes violent argument. Yes, yes, Israel has suffered, she would say; but does that give them the right to make Palestinians suffer?

Malkiel: You know very well it isn’t Israel making them
suffer! You can blame the Arab governments for their tragedy; why did they exhort them to flee their homes in 1948? And then let them live in refugee camps?

Leila: You Jews did all you could to uproot those people and drive them from their land, and now you blame the Arabs? If you hadn’t come along, there would have been no tragedy!

He: We didn’t come
along
, we came
back.
Easy enough for you to forget!

She: I’m not forgetting anything, but you forget that the Palestinians have been living on that land for centuries, and you abandoned it two thousand years ago!

Malkiel lost his temper:
Abandoned?
You dare to say we abandoned the land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? And shown to Moses? And conquered by Joshua? Aren’t you ashamed to falsify history? They expelled us from that land, but we never repudiated it, or forgot it, or abandoned it! Since King David there have always been Jews in Jerusalem, and Galilee, and Gaza.

She: Oh yes? And the big cities?

He: The big cities? Do you mean Haifa, Netanya and Tel Aviv? Do you want to tell me who built them? You, maybe? You were a smattering of people in the desert—do you dare deny that?

She: That’s the Afrikaner argument in South Africa.

He: I forbid you to compare us to those racists and their apartheid! Racism and Judaism are incompatible! We suffered too much from racism to use it against others.

She: There you go again with your suffering! As if you were the only people who ever knew hardship!

Their relationship lasted only a few months. Malkiel matured in the course of it. Of all the women he had known before Tamar, it was Leila who intrigued him most.

Shrewd, determined, politically committed, she sought extremes and rejected compromise and equivocation alike. “Do you think I love you?” she asked him during one of their quarrels. “You’re a dreamer, poor boy. I like you well enough to sleep with you, and you interest me enough to make me make you want to sleep with me.” Malkiel thought she was saying that to antagonize him, to affirm her power over him, to wound him; he was wrong. Leila loved him because he was a Jew. And after she left him she detested him for the same reason.

Did he feel guilty for living with a pro-Palestinian Muslim, an enemy of Israel? Sometimes after a sleepless night he dreamed up all sorts of scenarios. Suppose Leila was a spy. Suppose she’d seduced him solely to make him an Arab agent. Would he have been capable of following her that far? Of betraying his own people? Of mocking and desecrating everything his father believed?

Later he would wonder if his father’s illness was not a punishment for the love he himself had borne for an Arab woman.

D
r. Pasternak broke the news with extreme delicacy. He is a nice man, Dr. Pasternak. A bit awkward, rather prudent. When he talks to me he inspects his fingernails, which, between you and me, could use a little care. He is “my” doctor and he wants to spare me. What is he afraid of? Seeing me distraught, wiped out? I’m strong. I’ve always been. The proof is that Talia is dead and I am still alive. I am holding on.

“It’s something of a rare disease,” he said.

“Tell me all, my friend.”

“We don’t know much about it. What causes it? What might keep it from worsening? We’ll know someday. For now it’s incurable, as they say. But only for now.”

He went on. The brain is deteriorating and the memory eroding; researchers are optimistic. Encouraging. In Stockholm and Rehovot, New York and London, eminent specialists are working relentlessly. They will surely corner the enemy and render him harmless. Everywhere medicine is winning stunning victories.

“Keep fighting. In this kind of battle, it’s essential. You’re your own best ally. Keep telling yourself that memory possesses its own mysterious powers, which are even stronger than imagination.”

He went on at some length, Dr. Pasternak did. He wasn’t inspecting his fingernails now; he was studying me. I stopped listening. I only heard a word here and there. His whole speech could be summed up in a single fact: slowly, and then not so slowly, but at an unforeseeable pace, I was going to forget my whole existence, forget all that I had been.

“The main thing is not to give up,” the doctor repeated, walking me to the front door. “Miracles do happen.”

In the waiting room his receptionist, Susan, offered me a smile and a candy: “Don’t tell the doctor. Chocolate’s not good for you.”

I did not go straight home. I took a walk. Was it warm or cold that day? I have no idea. It was spring, but I couldn’t care less. What did I think about? I have no idea. My legs carried me along. My legs did the thinking for me.

Wandering along Broadway, I stopped at a bookstore window. Classics and popular works beckoned me to leaf through them. Not interested. Farther along, a clothing store. Not interested. Near the subway station a beggar accosted me: “I was rich once and I lost everything.” I looked at his open hand and his closed face. I took out my wallet and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “It is for you.” He seemed perplexed, frightened. “It’s too much,” he said. And then, hardly knowing what I did, I gave him all the money I had on me. “I was rich too,” I said, “and I’m going to lose everything.”