The Oath (31 page)

“Thank you for the compliment, Moshe, but this is not the moment!”

“Yes it is. All we have is this moment. The night belongs to them. It is a night of punishment, of supreme ultimate stupidity; they kill themselves by killing, they dig their own graves by murdering us, they annihilate the world by destroying our homes. Poor mankind is dying of stupidity.”

Meanwhile the bloody orgy continued unabated. A woman on the verge of being raped tore out her eyes with her two
hands; she was not spared. Her three young children saw the outrage without understanding. Nearby, a bearded old man of majestic bearing was nailed to a cross with daggers. Elsewhere a gang of hoodlums was having sport with the Rebbe, who resisted their efforts to make him kiss an icon. They cut off his head.

In less than one hour the Jewish quarter was laid bare. Corpses lay scattered on the ground, dying men called death. Gaping houses, more corpses intermingled. Stores, shops, apartments—the looters went berserk. Bolts of cloth and bags of flour, Shabbat jewels and caftans, chandeliers and china. They broke what they could not carry away. And the wine was flowing.

That was the moment, while the bandits pranced around with their loot, that Shaike and his men chose to carry out their first mission.

The location selected was the area near the still intact asylum. Just across the street, the invaders were ransacking the large grocery store belonging to the Poresh family. In their eagerness they had forgotten the asylum. Shaike and his friends immediately entrenched themselves there. The beggars watched in amazement as the young people prepared for combat.

Shaike posted three men near the store, an ideal place to ambush the pillagers, who, their arms loaded, were quickly overpowered, disarmed and taken inside the asylum—the first hostages. The operation was repeated, with the same result. Soon there were sixteen, then twenty-six hostages. But then, during the following raid, something went awry. Two hoodlums escaped and alerted the rabble: “Help, help! The Jews are fighting, the Jews are killing us!” The human wave immediately deviated from its course and rolled toward the grocery and the adjacent buildings.

Shaike did not waste a second. A few concise orders and a new plan went into effect. First he had the asylum evacuated, transferring the beggars to the Yeshiva, across the courtyard. Only the twenty-six hostages, their hands and legs bound, remained in the asylum, its doors bolted from the outside. Then the fighters gathered in the familiar school hall to prepare their next move.

Meanwhile the mob in front of the asylum stayed at a distance. Only Pavel, a torch in his hand, stepped forward and barked his threats: “Hey, Jews. Come out! Hands above your heads! Otherwise you’ll burn alive!”

“Yes, yes! Alive!” echoed the crowd. “Let them burn alive!”

Thereupon one could hear the hostages protesting: “Don’t do that! Not that!”

“They’ll come out, you’ll see, my pet,” said Pavel to his beloved whip. “All Jews are cowards, they’ll come out.”

“Yes, yes!” shouted the mob.

“Alive, you’ll burn alive,” insisted Pavel, drawing a circle in the air with his torch.

“Well done,” shouted the crowd, aroused by the prospect of the new and yet so ancient spectacle.

“Not yet!” yelled the hostages. “Don’t do that to Christians! We are Christians like you! Your comrades, your brothers in Christ! Not Jews! There are no Jews here, not a single one!”

The mob was not to be discouraged, not to be deprived of the promised entertainment. Protests flew from all sides:

“They’re lying.”

“They take us for fools!”

“Or choirboys!”

“Alive, burn them alive!”

“No, no,” shouted the hostages in a panic. “We are Christians! Like you!”

Together and individually they swore, swore on the heads of their mothers, living or deceased; of their spouses, beloved or loathed.

“Lies and profanations,” Pavel declared. “This is a Jewish building. A shelter. An asylum. What would Christians be doing in an asylum? Don’t tell me you thought you’d find some treasures there!”

The enthralled crowd was roaring with laughter. “Bravo, Pavel! What intelligence, Pavel! You shut them up! You’ll be promoted, Pavel! You’ll wind up captain! Bravo, Pavel!”

The people’s hero: Pavel. Too bad he wasn’t wearing his uniform. Next time, he promised his whip.

“Well?” he shouted. “You haven’t answered yet! What were you looking for in the asylum?”

“Hostages. We are hostages.”

“Shrewd, those Jews,” said Pavel. “Never at a loss for answers.”

“The truth, it’s the truth! We swear it!”

“Hostages,” inquired Pavel. “Whose hostages?”

“The Jews’—damn it!”

“But you said there were no more Jews in there. No good, find something else!”

There was a silence on the hostages’ side. A moment went by before they renewed their pleas: “Our voices! Don’t you recognize our voices?”

Pavel consulted his confederates; nobody knew them.

Then the hostages yelled their names: “Yonel, Yonel from Batiza … Simora, Simora Frescu … Laczani Pal[unclear] … Ivan, Ivannn …”

Now the hostages really were panicky. They shouted and shouted:

“I live next to the woods …”

“The first house …”

“At the edge of the brook, that’s where I … the edge … brook …”

“The yellow cabin … The cornfield …”

“Petrica, my wife! Help, my turtledove!”

The frenzied mob refused to believe, refused to listen. Its need to kill, to debase man, to offer him as fodder to the beast of night, was not yet assuaged. Drunk with power, with cruelty, it demanded more blood, more triumphs, more victims.

Now that most of the Jews were either dead, dying or entrenched in shelters whose discovery would require hours of searching, the mob did not hesitate to set upon their own.

“They are Jews, Jews!”

“Let’s get done with it!”

“Why are we wasting time!”

“One last warning,” Pavel promised his whip. “And then …”

“Idiots!” yelled the hostages.

“For the last time,” said Pavel, brandishing the torch. “Come out or you’ll burn alive!”

“Imbeciles! Assassins! We can’t come out!”

Finally a peasant recognized two of the voices. “Yonel and Ivan …”

“We don’t believe a word of it …”

“Yes! We drink together … Christians, like you and me …”

Angered by the kill-joys, the townspeople called them drunkards, traitors. Jews. The discussions degenerated into disputes, quarrels. Ancestral grudges and hates between clans, tribes and families rose to the surface. It came to blows. In the heat of the fight somebody grabbed the torch Pavel was holding absent-mindedly and hurled it onto the roof of the asylum, which burst
into flames at once. Somebody else took revenge on the grocery store.

Suddenly a red blaze, spinning from the entrails of the earth and night, soared skyward, irresistibly sweeping space. Cases of matches, barrels of oil and kerosene and alcohol fed the furnace. The fire progressed with lightning speed. And the fighting continued as before, the rivals tussling while the stifling circle closed in around them. Down the next street the knell was ringing. Seven separate fires were spreading an unbearable heat. Sovereign, invincible, the fire invested the area, swallowed building after building, street after street, racing to light the sun and the horizon.

By its immensity, the fire assumed a divine role—gigantic, unpredictable, its very sight maddening. The town was toppling into illusion. Merchants and clerks, laborers and employers, girls and boys, all intermingled, young and old, killers and killed, murderers and victims, at once blinded and illuminated, fleeing in every direction, carried by the carrousel in flames. Expelled from time and nature, they seemed to float between sky and earth, between two burning walls. Some were roaring with laughter, others were embracing, still others abused one another, screaming in horror and also laughing in horror. A gentle-eyed woman tossed her infant into the flames, while another, filled with compassion, sang a lullaby. Shifra the Mourner ran to the cemetery to join her beloved husband in the grave. There she met Adam the Gravedigger, who asked for her help. “All my friends are dead, who will bury them? And who will bury us? God perhaps? Will God be our gravedigger?” The stableman Dogor grabbed his wife and swept her into a frenzied, savage dance. The priest and the Bishop, under the icons’ watchful eyes, in total disagreement on everything else, decided this was the time to debate orthodoxy and heresy. “It’s
your fault,” shouted the lawyer. “Dirty Jew,” retorted his wife.

“Go now,” said the official chronicler of the holy community of Kolvillàg. “Go, my son, the moment has come.” He did not explain, but I understood: it was now or never. The moment had come to leave, break out of the circle, slip outside; it was now or never. The moment had come to choose life. He gave me a strong push, and I had to obey. Clutching the thick notebook to my body, I left my father, I left Rivka, who had been a mother to me, I backed away from them so as to see them as long as possible. I went on seeing them, and now as I speak to you, I see them still.

Meanwhile, caught up in the frenzy, the killers were killing each other, senselessly, with swords, hatchets and clubs. Brothers and sisters striking one another, friends and accomplices strangling one another. Few resisted, none protested. An extraordinarily vigorous dancer leapt high into the air, met the sword and fell to earth, decapitated. A young girl combed her tresses; a stranger pierced her chest.

While backing away I experienced a double sensation, both odious and sublime. Flee, yes. Flee this setting fit only for cruel and grotesque gods. Jump off this merry-go-round before I find myself caught in the dizzying whirlwind; force myself, yes, force myself and save the Book.

Ultimately it saved me.

But nobody saved the Jews of Kolvillàg, or their assassins. When death reigns, no one is spared. When the avenging gods are human wolves, there can be no hope for man.

I backed away, my wide-open eyes recording the last images of this town and this night. Moshe, in front of the prison, shaking his head as though acquiescing: Too late, too late. The Prefect crying: “But I want to save you, I want to! In spite of yourself!” Nearby, the carnage continues and so does the farce.
And suddenly, in the center of the turmoil, I think I see Yancsi, that thug of a Yancsi whom fate has chosen as instrument. The sergeant catches him and squeezes him in his arms: “You are my whip, come let me hug you, my pet.” Moshe’s mask crumbles and at last he bursts out laughing. Shifra the Mourner has ceased to cry and so has Kaizer the Mute. And all have ceased to live. Adam the Gravedigger recites the
Kaddish
for the dead, the living—and himself. Bewildered, dazed, mad with fear, horses and dogs chase one another in a race toward death, drowning out the sobs, the sneers and the lamentations. The earth splits in a thousand places and the houses tumble down. A reddish glow seen in a shattered mirror. I back away, clasping the Book to my heart; the farther back I am the more I remember, and the more I know what it contains.

Ringed by the flames, the entire town was burning. The hovels and the shops, the parchments and the dead schoolboys. “Is it over, Grandfather?” Toli asked. “I hope so,” said the lawyer’s father. “And Grandfather, who will say
Kaddish?
”
“Yitgadal veyitkadash shme raba,”
recited Adam the Gravedigger, digging his own grave. “I should have sent her to her Uncle Peretz,” said Davidov, carrying his lifeless daughter on his shoulders, not knowing where to go or why. “You shall live in spite of yourself,” insisted the Prefect. “You must be joking. It is all over,” said Moshe. “All I want to do is cry, but I have forgotten how.”

The town, in consuming itself, was telling a timeless story for the last time, and there was nobody to listen. Yiddel no longer smiles and Avrom no longer thinks. Whom are we fighting now? Shaike was asked. But he was already dead. The Book, said my father. The
Herem
, said Moshe. It’s my fault, but I was hungry, said Leizer the Fat. Memory, insisted my father, everything is in memory. Silence, Moshe corrected him, everything is in silence.
I was stepping back and back, but the distance remained unchanged. The prey of death, the price of life: Kolvillàg was burning and I watched it burn. The House of Study, the trees and the walls—whipped by fire and wind. The cobblestones—shattered. The Jewish quarter, the churches and the schools, the store and the warehouses: yellow and red, orange and purple flames escaped from them, only to return at once. The shelter and the orphanage, the tavern and the synagogue joined by a bridge of fire. The cemetery was burning, the police station was burning, the cribs were burning, the library was burning. On that night man’s work yielded to the power and judgment of the fire. And suddenly I understood with every fiber of my being why I was shuddering at this vision of horror: I had just glimpsed the future.

The Rebbe and his murderers, the sanctuary and its desecrators, the beggars and their stories, I trembled as I left them—left them, backing away. I saw them from afar, then I saw them no more. Only the fire still lived in what was once a town, mine. Charred dwellings. Charred corpses. Charred dreams and prayers and songs. Every story has an end, just as every end has a story. And yet, and yet. In the case of this city reduced to ashes, the two stories merge into one and remain a secret—such had been the will of my mad friend named Moshe, last prophet and first messiah of a mankind that is no more.

“Day is breaking, you must leave,” said the old man
.

I had to shake myself. I was returning from far away. The noises of the city were so many wounds. Walk, die, survive. The sky turning white. The vague pain I could not situate or name. The feeling of bereavement. I closed my eyes. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow is named Azriel
.

“Do you regret?” I asked him. “Do you regret having spoken?”

“No. And you?”

I smiled. “Why would I regret it?”

“Because now, having received this story, you no longer have the right to die.”