Legends of Our Time (15 page)

To my house, of course—home at last. Light the candles, set the table for the feast of reunion. The wandering son has returned. Will you find the way in the dark? Nothing simpler, my legs will take me there. My legs have a better memory than my eyes anyway; they never had to look upon those clouds of smoke, those clouds in which an entire people, bound together, rose up.

I stepped forward slowly, cautiously. The firehouse, where was the firehouse? It should be at the corner of the main street. Swallowed up. And the booth on the corner, at the entrance to the Jews’ Street? Old Semel used to sell his fruit there, summer and winter; now there was no booth, no fruit, no Semel. Further on, the church. That was still there, thank God. And the house, my house? I tried to calm myself, but I was afraid—of seeing it again, of not seeing it again. Don’t run, don’t run, neither forward nor back: what is the point of running anymore? But my legs refused to obey. They ran, they flew. And I flew—above the roofs, above the memories. Houses, trees, chimneys, clouds, windows, all flew with me toward a vanished town, toward a stolen house. As my legs were seized with flight, my throat was seized with an irresistible desire to shout, to tear the night apart, to make the earth tremble once and for all, to make the heavens fall. But I no longer had any control over my body. I shouted, but no sound came out. The town went on sleeping, with no fear of the silence.

I ran, as a convict runs toward freedom, as a madman runs toward his madness; I ran even while I knew that no one and nothing was waiting for me over there, at the end of the run, over there in the building at the intersection of the two streets, facing the police station. If my house had survived the flames of madness, if it was still standing, a curse be upon it: strangers were living in it.

Here it was.

All at once, I had only one desire, to stretch out on the sidewalk, to rest, to catch my breath, no longer to run, no longer to think, no longer to play the phantom among men, no longer to play the man among men. The play was over. Curtain. The player was tired; the spectator was exhausted; go home to bed, we are closing, save your strength, tomorrow will be another day. But I remained on my feet, stretched tight like a bow with arrows
pointed at myself. I looked and listened as I had never looked and listened in my life. The imperceptible noises, the wavering shadows, the secret vibrations—I captured them, I interrogated them, I imprisoned them, I made them mine.

The street, the house: there they were, mine again. More than before, better than ever. Total, irrevocable possession: more than when I had lived there. My walls, my neighbors, my garden, my trees, my witnesses, my murderers, my playmates, my classmates. For a long moment I wandered around the building with its drawn curtains. I asked myself whether I should not simply knock on the window and wake up the residents: “Let me in, I’ll go away tomorrow.” I knew that I would not do it, and I felt humiliated and defeated.

Like a blind man, I let my fingers wander over the fence that surrounded the garden, over the walls of the house, over the windows; I was waiting for them to return to me the things that had strayed, the images that had dissolved. I felt vulnerable and invincible at the same time: I could do everything, I could do nothing. I could evoke the past, I could not bring it to life again. Nothing had changed. The house was the same, the street was the same, the world was the same, God was the same. Only the Jews had disappeared.

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.