And the Sea Is Never Full (51 page)

The quarrel was over. Jerzy recovered his roots, his identity. And my affection. Others were more severe than I. A long article in the
Village Voice
called him an impostor. A recent biography tries to destroy the myths surrounding him. He went through the war with his parents and thus couldn’t possibly have experienced the atrocities described in
The Painted Bird
, and thus couldn’t possibly have written his books himself.

The news of his suicide—which was like that of Bruno Bettelheim—shattered me. So this hedonist was unhappy, even unhappier than his own eccentric or tragic characters.

Piotr Rawicz, my comrade, my companion. Why did he withdraw from the world of the living? I can see him now: hunched over, his gaze hopeless, ironic but lucid, so terribly lucid.
Le Sang du Ciel (Blood of the Sky)
will remain one of the masterpieces of the period. In my article about it in the
New Leader
, I wrote:

I remember our long strolls in Paris, his pessimism so lucid and merry that it would have taken little for me to go mad with optimism.
His monologues—I remember his murmured monologues in which philosophic reflection (the Bhagavad Gita and Lao Tzu, Spinoza and Wittgenstein) refused to yield to humor, and conversely. For him, everything had to do with metaphysics, even derision. He liked to evoke Germany as he had known it long ago and as he was then rediscovering it. Its fragmented capital attracted him; he saw it as a huge phantasmagorical farce—Berlin and its noncommitted, detached intellectuals; Berlin and its hard-to-bear snobs; Berlin and its false or real aristocrats turned into true or false cynics; its dangerous but ridiculous spies; Berlin and its friendly, voluptuous, and oh-so-easy women.

During our dinners in a small restaurant in the Latin Quarter, he brought to life the ghetto of Lvov replete with scholars and romantic beggars. Other times he would speak of his experiences in the Leitmeritz camp. What had saved him from death? He attributed his luck in large part to his knowledge of German and Ukrainian. He was taken for a Christian. Nevertheless, he remained more often than not in the company of Jewish prisoners. “And what about fear, Piotr?” I asked him. “How did you experience fear over there?” “Oh, it made me laugh,” he answered. And without waiting for my reaction he explained: “The whole thing was just a farce, a farce on a cosmic scale.” I reminded him of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav’s story in which a prince who has lost his way hears laughter at night, an otherworldly laughter. Piotr nodded: he knew Rebbe Nahman…. He knew many things, my friend Piotr.

I sometimes took him along to religious services. We spent a Yom Kippur together in a small, improvised synagogue near the Place de la République. The next day he described to me the High Holidays in Lvov. He tried to make it humorous but didn’t succeed. Yom Kippur was the only day on which he was incapable of laughter.

Why did he kill himself, he who still had so much to give to life? A rifle bullet through his mouth put an end to a singular destiny.

When I recall Piotr, a knot forms in my chest. Writer, ethnologist, anthropologist, essayist, and poet, he deserved glory and surely happiness (to the extent that these go together) as much as others, more than others. Why did he turn his back on life when he had contributed to raising it to a higher level by making it funnier? Was it the illness and then the death of Anna, his wife and best friend? Was he afraid of solitude? The specter of decline?

Piotr. Often penniless but elegant nevertheless, always generous. Terribly busy but always available. Desperate but pleasure-loving. Our dinners were unforgettable. Endless, too. He loved to talk, and he talked with the clarity of a scientist; a heavy Russian accent, pedantic French, smiles that were alternately melancholy and sarcastic. He pitied the social climbers, celebrated the humble, the beginners, the unknowns. He had written a novel, but what about his childhood memories from Lvov, had he written them down somewhere? And where would one have to look for them? Had he entrusted them to someone?

He drank a lot, smoked a lot, laughed and loved a lot. Why was he no longer writing? Oh yes, he protested vigorously, he was writing; he was writing, but only in his head. (Felipe Alfao, the Spanish author of
Locos
, told me the same thing.) “Come,” he said to me once, “I’ll show you.” He led me to his tiny room, where one couldn’t take a step without knocking over messy piles of books and reviews. He showed me manuscripts, let me read a few pages of mystical poems. Yet he called himself an agnostic. Can one be both mystic and infidel, both prophet and heretic? “‘Why,’” he said, “is a word that God gave man by mistake. God is God, can anyone say that God does not believe in Himself? Or that He does not believe in anyone else?”

Why did he choose suicide? What message did he leave us when he opened his lips to welcome death?

Understanding

W
ITH THE YEARS
the inevitable happens: My extraliterary and academic activities become too demanding and take up too much of my time. How am I to maintain my normal schedule and devote four hours a day to writing, which, after all, remains my priority? I snatch every moment of freedom and impose on myself more and more rigorous discipline. The author of Ecclesiastes does not believe in books, but I cling to them. The day I stop writing, what shall I be? I still have so many stories to tell, so many subjects to explore, so many characters to invent or reveal. I am still tormented by the same anguish: Notwithstanding all the books I have written, I have not yet begun. But then I write them in order to understand as much as to make myself understood.

In the Haggadah, the admirable account that on Passover night relates the Exodus from Egypt and urges the children to ask questions of their elders, we read:

In a new translation of the Passover Haggadah (illustrated by Mark Podwal) I recall the traditional commentaries on this passage. Then one evening I ask myself: Why does the text mention only four sons? I imagine a fifth, the one who has not returned. I open the doors
of memory to him by making him into a character in my novel
The Fifth Son
.

It tells the story of a failed existence, of a vengeance gone awry, human and divine truth mutilated. It narrates the tragic destiny of the Tamiroff family. Reuven, the father, a survivor of the Davarowsk ghetto, struggles with the ghost of the “Angel,” the SS killer who tortured and exterminated Jews as if to prove that evil would triumph. The mother, who has sunk into a kind of benevolent madness, is elsewhere, a prisoner of oblivion. And Ariel, their only living son, tries to understand them, and above all to understand the reasons that led them to give him life.

They live in Brooklyn, among the Hasidim. Reuven is a librarian: “He chats with Homer and Saul, Jeremiah and Virgil,” but his favorite writer is Paritus the One-eyed, whose
Oblique Meditations
had a great impact on medieval philosophy. They are surrounded by a circle of illuminati. Bontchek, who remembers everything; Simha-the-Dark, who calls himself a merchant of shadows. They all come from Davarowsk and gather regularly to evoke their common past. And what about the son in all this? He slowly discovers and absorbs this past: the life before, in the ghetto, with its illusions and nights of waiting; the scenes of horror in which the Angel pulled on the mask of a bloodthirsty god, ally and servant of death.

I forbid myself to imagine what happened inside the gas chambers; my gaze follows the living people who enter them to die of suffocation only as far as the entrance, yet I force myself to see the massacres of Jews in Babi-Yar, Ponar, Romboli, and Kolomyya. Why? Where is the difference? I have no idea. But it is important for me to be there, if only in my imagination, to be there among those who say the Kaddish for the dead and for themselves. I often study the photographs taken by the Germans that show the processions of men and women moving toward the mass grave. What are they thinking? What is the child saying to his grandfather, whose face looks composed? Firsthand accounts and documents are practically unanimous regarding the passivity of the doomed. An SS officer, member of the
Einsatzgruppen
, confesses somewhere that it drove him crazy. He could not understand these people who let themselves be shot, by himself and his soldiers, without putting up the slightest resistance. A Jew lying down on the edge of the trench asked the Germans: “Is this how I should lie down?” Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish policeman in the ghetto of Otwock, not far from Warsaw, describes in his testimony
that some men and women could have fled but chose to wait calmly—yes, he says “calmly”—the “liberating” bullets. I shall never forget the episode of a group of runaway Jews accidentally discovered hiding in a field by a Polish policeman. He begins to kill them one after another but is forced to stop when he runs out of bullets. He sends a boy to fetch more ammunition. And there he is, unarmed, facing Jews who could assault him and render him harmless. Instead they wait for the boy to return. And the massacre is resumed.

How are we to understand resignation on such a scale? It is possible that these unfortunate Jews, abandoned by everyone but Death, were tired of hiding, running, hoping, tired of living in this disgusting world where human beings murder innocent Jewish children without feeling the slightest remorse.

How many Jews were massacred in this way by the SS with the logistical support of the Wehrmacht? A million? More? The
Einsatzgruppen
had contests as to who could kill the largest number of Jews per week. Their statistical reports have been recovered.

In
A Beggar in Jerusalem
, I describe the disappearance of a community. It contains a “dialogue” between an SS officer and the last Talmudist, whom he fails to kill: “You think you’ll be able to testify? But no one will believe you; you think you know the truth? But it’s the truth of a madman.”

In
The Fifth Son
, I return to this theme. And Ariel listens to the confrontation between the Angel and Reuven Tamiroff, the sadism of the torturers, the suffering of the victims, their despair, the death, in the ghetto, of the first Ariel, the brother whose name he has inherited. And what about the soul in all this? And God? Memory is everything.

As in my other novels I try once again to examine more closely the relationship between father and son. But here the drama of the son is twice as great, for it is linked to a dead brother. If the first Ariel had not been murdered, the Tamiroffs’ second son might have been born, but he would surely have had a different name. And what about justice in all this? And vengeance?

Ariel ultimately will try to write a new page in his father’s book. He will go to Germany to confront the Angel—who is now Richard Lander, an important industrialist, respected and influential in the world of finance and politics—and to punish him. But he will not kill him.

The story includes many letters written by Reuven to his son. But when he says, “Do you know that I am looking at you, that I
would like so much to hear you,” whom is he speaking to, the dead or the living son?

I think back to Job’s children, those he was given as a reward after the test God and Satan had made him endure. What did they think of the problems their parents had endured? And of their innocent brothers and sisters who had been sacrificed because, on high, there had been some doubt of Job’s piety? Did they try to find out who their elder siblings had been? It was with them that Job and his wife would have lived happily if Satan and God had not made their wager.

At the end of the account Ariel writes: