And the Sea Is Never Full (50 page)

As it happened, I might well have been at his side in both capitals. He had invited me to accompany him. A seat had been reserved for me in his Concorde, and a room in the hotels. I refused. I don’t regret it. On the contrary, I believe I made the right decision. Had I been present in Berlin, I would have left the hall in the middle of his speech.

Still, even though I’ve distanced myself from him and his universe, I feel sad. This was not how I had imagined his exit from my life.

•   •   •

On January 8, 1996, I am in the South to lecture at a small college. The phone rings in my room at 6 o’clock in the morning. “I have sad news for you,” Elisha says. “Your friend Mitterrand is dead.” Elisha had been awakened by journalists calling from Paris.

I feel the silence slowly descending on me, leaving a familiar feeling. A whole chapter of my life is ended. The place Mitterrand occupied in my book of friendship covers many pages. There were journeys, discoveries, reunions, luminous moments, glowing images, picturesque episodes. I knew my friend in his glory, I knew him in sickness. How did he enter into death? I imagine him in his small, monastic room alone with his physician, alone with his past. Did he choose the asceticism of solitude before sinking into it for all eternity? Did he finally become reconciled with God at the moment of leaving His creation? The religion he rejected had, in fact, always interested him. The sacred fascinated him both as challenge and as shelter. And what if, in his own way, he had been a lover of God as he followed his fervent desire to conquer history?

I don’t respond to most of the requests for interviews. Why add to the verbal deluge sweeping over France? To Christine Pouget, of Agence France-Presse, I point out that Jewish tradition recommends saying nothing but good things about the dead. For
Paris Match
I write an article along those lines: I speak only of the good period. I recall the early days of our friendship, when he thrilled those he loved and made them dream. I have no intention of speaking about René Bousquet, nor of Vichy. No, I will not talk about the last year of his life. Doesn’t the Talmud say that death erases all sins?

But then—what happens to memory?

The media report the emotion that has taken hold of France. It is sincere and profound. That is normal: The man left his mark on his era; everyone agrees on that. Some extol his European spirit, others his political genius; still others vow never to forget his passion for freedom.

There are moving scenes of people: the silent crowds. The tears, the roses—the French recognized themselves in Mitterrand’s very ambiguities. The funeral at Jarnac. The sorrow on people’s faces. The solemn mass at Notre Dame. And thus the end rejoins the beginning.

Lucid to the last, sovereign in everything, but a victim of his body, he freely chose his hour to free himself. In summoning death
he, in a way, conquered it. The last word of his book was written by him.

What was on his mind as he took leave of the living shadows before rejoining those that had come before? The great game he had played? Had it been a game?

I glance through my notebooks. How often did we speak of what is awaiting us afterward? Paradise, hell, the Last Judgment, the Apocalypse—he wanted to know. Could human life be nothing but the flutter of an eyelid? But then, what remains of what one has received and what one has given?

Three Suicides

B
ENNO
W
ERZBERGER
in Israel, Tadeusz Borowski in Poland, Paul Celan and Piotr Rawicz in Paris, Bruno Bettelheim in the United States, Primo Levi in Italy—the writers who were part of the shrinking community of Holocaust survivors endured severe hardship. Despairing of the written word’s power, some chose silence. The silence of death.

Was it because as guardians of memory they felt misunderstood, unloved, exiles in the present, guilty of having failed in their task? Were they afraid of having spoken too much—or not enough? In light of the tragedies that continue to tear apart society, did they admit defeat?

I knew three of them well. Their final acts continue to haunt me.

Primo Levi, speaking of “experts” on the Holocaust, said: “They are the thieves of Time; they infiltrate themselves through keyholes and cracks and cart off our memories without leaving a trace.”

Why did Primo, my friend Primo, fling himself from the top of a staircase, he whose works finally succeeded in shaking public indifference, even outside Italy?

From our first meeting in Milan, during the seventies, we had formed bonds. In a way we were meeting
again
, having already “met.”
Over there
, in Buna. I had spent some time in his barracks. I had seen him without seeing him. He had crossed my path without noticing me. Even
over there
, social differences existed.

Now, transcending frontiers, we moved forward side-by-side as we clung to our links to those who had abandoned us. Was it he or I who said: “Maybe I’m dead and don’t know it.” Like him I was convinced that our experiences isolated us, that people living today or tomorrow could never understand their nature.

When we turned our gaze inward we saw the same universe. The selections, the
kommandos
, the “roll calls” in the icy wind, the hanging of the young boy, a member of the underground—yes, he remembered it all as I did. Sometimes he would question me about a sentence of mine he had read somewhere; I told him I was a bad interpreter of my writings. I did better commenting on his.

Why death, Primo? To tell us what truth about whose life?

Did he want to reach to the very end of his thoughts, his memories? Truly enter death? I don’t remember why, but I called him shortly before his death. A premonition? His voice sounded thick, heavy. “Things are not good,” he said slowly, “not good at all.” “What’s not good, Primo?” “Oh, the world, the world’s no good.” And he doesn’t know what he is doing in a world that’s going so badly. “Are you having problems, Primo?” No, he has no problems. In Italy and elsewhere he is read, admired, honored, but it’s going badly. We speak of mutual friends, of his plans, of his son, Renzo. I suggest he come to New York, spend some time with me. He doesn’t say no, he doesn’t say yes; he doesn’t answer, as though he were already elsewhere, behind other walls. To cheer him up I describe to him the success of his works on American campuses. No reaction. “Are you there, Primo? Do you hear me?” Yes, he hears me—but he’s no longer there.

An American novelist publishes an article that shocks quite a few of us. He says that Primo’s friends should have urged him to get treatment, and that a good therapist could have cured him. This is a typical banalization: Here we have existential evil, the lifelong incandescent wound of a soul, reduced to a nervous breakdown common among writers whose inspiration becomes blocked, or among men of a certain age.

Is there another explanation? If there is, it has something to do with a Holocaust writer’s attitude toward memory and its workings, writing and its pitfalls, language and its limits. Like Kafka’s unfortunate messenger, he realizes that his message has been neither received nor transmitted. Or worse, it has been, and nothing has changed. It has produced no effect on society or on human nature. Everything goes on as though the messenger had forgotten the dead whose message he had carried, as though he had misplaced their last testament.

Yes, we had our disagreements. In my own way I’m a believer; he declared himself an atheist. I persist in wanting to work from within our tradition; he kept his distance. I did not share his leftist tendencies,
just as he distanced himself from my attachment to Israel. And then, I thought him too severe with survivors: There our disagreement was total; he ascribed too much guilt to them. His theory of a “gray zone” in which every inmate was guilty—some more, some less, directly or indirectly, simply for having survived—well, all this seems to me simplistic and unfair. By speaking of the “relativity” of their innocence, he was attenuating the guilt of the killers. Only the criminals are guilty, I told him; to compare the victims in any way with the torturers was to dilute or even deny the killers’ responsibility for their actions.

Primos theory reminds me of the advice Karl Jaspers is said to have given Hannah Arendt to mistrust the “false innocence of the victims.” What false innocence is he talking about? That of the children, the sick, the old? Surely, they were not guilty, nor were the rabbis, the priests, the dying, emaciated men and women. To say that every one of them could have become a killer is to indict the whole world. It is to compare the privileged
kapos
with the moribund
Muselmänner
, “Muslims,” as they were called. It is to punish the innocents who have been punished enough.

In my opinion, Primo felt guilty in terms of the present rather than the past: All Holocaust writers are subject to the same feeling of remorse and impotence. Perhaps they think that if things are going so badly it is their fault, because since they have not been able to find the right language to communicate, they have failed to impact the destiny of their contemporaries.

From the first to the last day, I felt his despair. “It’s worse today than yesterday, worse than ever,” he kept repeating. What did he mean by that? That talking of yesterday was worse than having lived through it, than still living through it? That nothing makes a survivor despair more than knowing that he is useless, that the past will not serve as lesson? Was that why he returned to the land of the dead, because the living would not listen?

He killed himself because he could not go on.

At times I find myself whispering to him: You shouldn’t have, Primo. Not that, not that. Death is never a solution, you know that….

And yet, deep down, I understand him.

The first review of Jerzy Kosinski’s
Painted Bird
was written by me for the
New York Times
. Poor Jerzy, who entertained so well and lived so
badly—misunderstood in his lifetime, will he be better understood after his suicide?

When he first called me, I was still a bachelor, living on Riverside Drive. He was young, nervous, impatient, eager to dazzle and disconcert. I ask him two questions: “Is your book based on fact?” And then: “Are you Jewish?” “I’d like to know,” I say, “since your character is presented as a Gypsy. And the word ‘Jew’ is hardly mentioned.” He answers yes to the first question and no to the second. I am amazed: “What? You’ve lived through all these atrocities and you’re not even a Jew?” Thinking that this makes him even more deserving, I add a few compliments to my positive review, which nets me a number of insulting letters from Polish Jews. According to them, I was wrong to be so kind to a Jew who is ashamed of his Jewishness. They knew him in Poland. His book is nothing but a collection of mad rantings. I refuse to believe them. I call him: “I must see you again.” “Aha!” is his answer. “So they’ve contacted you.” Who? “My enemies.” Who are his enemies? Why does he have any? In any case we need to meet. I invite him for lunch. Again, I ask him the question: “Are you Jewish?” He again answers that he is not. “Then why do these people say that…” They are his enemies. This discussion goes on for weeks if not months. When the novel appears in France, my friend Piotr Rawicz writes about it in
Le Monde
. I ask him: “Is Jerzy Jewish?” “Of course he is,” Piotr replies. “Did he tell you so?” No, he didn’t; on the contrary, he denies it. But then how does Piotr know? “I know,” says Piotr. “Why does he conceal his Jewish origins?” I wonder. “Ask him.” Piotr asks him; he maintains his position. Piotr wants to know whether he’s circumcised. Jerzy refuses to answer. It is only when Piotr, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, threatens to call a few friends to help him undress him, that he acknowledges that he is a Jew.

When his second novel appears, I review it for the
Forverts
. I say that the novel is good but that I find the author peculiar; I explain his bizarre behavior as an attempt to elaborate a philosophy of ambiguity. Jerzy is angry. He sends a letter to the newspaper and threatens to start legal proceedings if I don’t retract. He denies ever denying his Jewishness. His letter is published, followed by my response: I have Piotr’s letter and other evidence. If he insists, I am ready to publish them. I add that I had expected more gratitude from him. I’m greeted by silence, no lawsuit. A few months later Jerzy telephones and says he wants to see me. At once. I demand an apology before seeing him. He apologizes. I pick up our dialogue where we had left off. “Why did
you lie about your Jewishness? The war is over, Jerzy. Jews no longer need to hide.” He says he doesn’t know what happened to him; that he was absentminded, distracted. And anyway it was better that way. For Poland and the Poles, it was better. A Jewish tragedy written by a Jewish writer would have left them cold, whereas if a non-Jew was being persecuted and a non-Jew was telling of his sufferings, that was something else. Arthur Gelb of the
Times
believes that his bizarre behavior was motivated by fear—fear of the anti-Semites, fear of persecution.