Legends of Our Time (10 page)

The disturbing fixity of his gaze gave him a sly mean look; yet with me he was kind, friendly. I would gladly interrupt my reading to go and listen to his heartbreaking songs. He told me strange stories, too, without endings. “Only the beginning interests me,” he used to say. “Who cares about the end, I know what it will be.” “And what about the beginning?” I asked. “I know that, too, except that I’m trying to change it.”

To interrupt the study of Talmud was not really a sin if it meant spending an hour with him. He knew more about the Talmud than the sages of two thousand years ago and their disciples. He saw further than they, his silences contained a truth more hidden than theirs. Perhaps he perceived in it the first madman that God created and whom he himself must have resembled. He derived from that great compendium not facts and affirmations but vision and inspiration. He was the first to make me understand that I could and must think of myself as a stranger; and that I must—and could—kill that stranger, or else be destroyed by him.

Rather than reject his madness, Moshe evoked it. It served him as refuge, as homeland, and when on a rare occasion I visit an asylum, I experience in the presence of each patient, the same respectful fear that Moshe inspired in me long ago. The prophet winking at me: it is he. The persecuted one, who spurns me: him again. The young woman serenely rocking an invisible infant: it is Moshe she is trying to calm. All of them have his look.

I am apt to pass him on the street as well. And to have him at my side in a restaurant or theater, to sit next to him in a plane. Sometimes I think the entire universe is inhabited by but a single person, that all faces are fused into one. Suddenly the young lady with whom I am strolling appears stupid; the words which I drink in ring hollow;
friendships become burdensome. I want to run away, but Moshe guards all the exits. Armed with unknown power, he commands and I obey: it is my life against his. To escape him, I would have to destroy him. But how does one assassinate an angel gone mad?

One day I thought I had found the solution: I imprisoned him in a novel. With a roof over his head, an address, a home, surrounded by people who showed him affection, I thought he would at last leave me in peace. It was not until later, the work finished, that I noticed the trick he had played on me: without my knowledge, like a thief, he had insinuated himself into the other characters (without respect to age, sex, or religion). In turn it was he who said, “I,” “you,” “he.” Two people were speaking to one another: he was both at once. They tormented one another: he was the cause and the expression of their suffering. Panic-stricken, I reread my earlier narratives: there too, he reigned as master. There too, he had preceded me. Even more serious: he had accorded himself the status of temporary resident, turning up and disappearing as he pleased. Hardly was he unmasked than he was already running off, more savage than ever, to new adventures to which he was dragging me by force.

The idea occurs to me at times that I myself am nothing but an error, a misunderstanding: I believe I am living my own life, when in fact I am only transmitting his.

One morning a stranger telephoned. He was speaking Yiddish and his drawling, melodious accent betrayed his Hungarian origin. I was struck by his voice, which seemed familiar.

“To whom am I speaking?” I inquired politely.

If ashamed of his own name, he did not take the trouble to make up another. Instead, he had the skill of losing himself in generalities.

“My name? Why do you ask? You don’t know me. Besides, it’s of no importance. What is in a name? A convention, a decoy. Tell me, what is more deceptive than a name? Even God has none, you know.”

“He can permit himself that liberty,” I said, half-amused, half-irritated. “No one is likely to confuse him with anyone else.”

“You don’t know a thing about it. Besides, who told you that that could not apply just as well to me? After all, I was created in his image, was I not?”

I had heard this voice before, harsh, disturbed, disturbing: but where? when? under what circumstances? Could it belong to a forgotten friend? a friend returned to life? an old neighbor with an account to settle with me?

“Do I know you?”

“You amaze me: does anyone ever really know anyone?”

I lost patience.

“We’re wasting time, sir. What exactly do you want?”

“I told you: to meet you.”

“For what purpose?”

“Oh, none in particular. I’d like to see you, talk to you, understand you.”

“You amaze me,” I replied. “Does anyone ever really understand anyone?”

“You refuse? You don’t have the right.”

He deigned to explain himself: he was what one might call an admirer. He claimed to have read certain of my works. He wanted to discuss a certain aspect which concerned him personally.

I hardly enjoy playing the sage in direct communication with heaven. I do not live in the castle, the prince does not confide in me.

“Then you refuse?” my reader insisted. “You don’t want to meet me, simply because my name means nothing to you?”

I had heard that voice before, that accent.

“Give me an hour. I absolutely must see you. It’s about your town. I think I recognize it.”

I had not been mistaken. He came from a small town in my region. He remembered my native town, which he used to visit several times a year. He also remembered Moshe the Madman, who on two occasions had been engaged as the official cantor for the High Holy Days in the only synagogue in his village. I jumped: Moshe the Madman? Well then, that changed everything.

“Really?” I shouted, excitedly. “You knew him? You heard him sing? When? How was he, what mood was he in? Did you speak to him? What did he say to you? When was the last time you saw him?”

“You’re asking too many questions. We can’t talk over the telephone. It’s about him I wanted to question you. But your time is precious. Too bad. I’m sorry.”

“Wait! I didn’t say that!”

“I thought that …”

“Forget what I told you.”

Now I was the one insisting that we meet. When? As soon as possible. Right now? He was not free. This afternoon? Too busy. This evening? Already taken. He was playing hard to get: he could not see me before next week. I pleaded, he let himself be convinced: just to please me, he would free himself the next day. After his work, at seven. I invited him to my place. Too far: he lived in Brooklyn. For want of a better place, we agreed to meet at the public library on Forty-second Street. At the main entrance. All right? All right. To make doubly sure, I offered to describe myself. Unnecessary, he said.

He hung up, laughing, and his laugh, even more than his voice, seemed familiar.

And so I learned that in this stone-faced city someone else had kept alive the memory of that cantor who used to play the supreme fool, then the fallen fool, in order to provoke the heavens and to entertain the children.

Who could he be? An old man retracing his steps one
last time before condemning himself for good? His son, in search of the past, of old wounds? An orphan who wanted to understand? Tomorrow I would know. For the moment, the waiting was enough. I already felt less alone: my memory was no longer going to be a prison enclosing other prisons each more narrow and more suffocating than the last. The doors were going to open from the outside. At last I would have some corroboration that Moshe the Madman had really and truly existed, that he had not just forced his way into my imagination.

I needed very much this tangible evidence, this testimony. For as a result of responding to his call, of hearing his breath, I had come to doubt his existence: I believed it a reflection if not an extension of my own. He had accompanied me so often and so far that I was ending up by confusing our destinies, our thrusts; I sang like him, I prayed like him, like him I tried to probe the silences of others, to oppose them with my own. I was he.

It was thus with a feeling approaching gratitude that I thought of my unknown friend from Brooklyn: thanks to him, I would become myself again. Provided that nothing happened to him, that he did not die first, that he did not lose his memory.…

Later, on my way home from work, a certain uneasiness suddenly comes over me: what if the Hungarian Jew from Brooklyn is not a stranger? I have to stop in the middle of the street and rest against the wall of a skyscraper. I review our conversation, which seems stranger now than it did that morning: why had he refused to give his name? to come to my house? Why had he waited until the last moment to mention the cantor’s name? And what had made him laugh? I am conscious of an obscure danger. If he is not a stranger, who is he? What does he want of me?

I shake myself and start walking again. It is getting late, I am exhausted. I follow the river. Not a soul in sight. Yet, I keep stopping at every corner to look back:
am I being followed? I hold my breath: nothing. Just nerves. A car comes, its headlights blind me, I jump back. It has passed. Who is driving it? Don’t think about anything. At last, my building. The porter opens the door for me and looks quizzically at me. He thinks I am drunk, I’m with someone. I go up to the twenty-fourth floor. My room. I am afraid to turn on the light. Groping, I move toward the bed, I undress in the dark. I feel I am being watched. To sleep. To hide myself in sleep. A thousand hands reach toward me and summon me: I am afraid, but I let them carry me away, I want to give myself up to that voice, to understand why it sounded so familiar; I am afraid, but I want to understand why I am afraid … and so round and round until I fall asleep.

An hour before the rendezvous, I stationed myself at the entrance to the library. The department stores were pouring their shoppers out into the street, where wave after wave of them flooded the sidewalks. Pedestrians and drivers were engaged in their daily battle. There was no end to the congestion. The heat gave the passersby a dull look of resignation. Men and women, young and old, walked hand in hand. Some out of habit, others so as not to get lost. The crowd was getting larger by the minute.

Standing motionless, to one side, I scrutinized those sweating faces: would I recognize the one I was waiting for?

At precisely seven, a man came up and stared right at me. He had not recognized me. But I did recognize him. Those smoldering eyes, those puffy lips, that stooped back. The rest hardly mattered. His appearance did not count. In the past, he had been dressed only in rags. Now he appeared elegant in his light gray suit, with matching tie. In the past, he used to play the beggar; now he was playing the rich man.

“Moshe,” I murmured in a choked voice.

He held out his hand.

“Hello. Glad to meet you. How are you?”

His voice was grave, melodious. His gesture hesitant. And his expression disturbing, supplicating and mocking at the same time.

I could not believe my eyes. My head was bursting. He was holding my hand in his and I did not have the strength to withdraw it. I thought: “You’ve got to think, and fast.” But I did not dare to think: who knew where my thoughts would lead me? If Moshe the Madman is alive, then all those who disappeared, lost in the mist, are alive, too; something has happened in the kingdom of night which we know nothing about, something quite different from what we think.

He let go my hand and stared at me curiously, as if to test me.

“You called me Moshe: why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Inadvertently, out of habit. It’s a name I like, it contains the history of our people.”

It was he, my friend, the mad cantor, who was staring at me, no doubt about it. I had seen him go to his death and that was still the best proof he was alive: all those who entered, by night, the crucible of death, emerged from it by day more healthy and more pure than the others who had not followed them.

Suddenly I understood why he had haunted me since the liberation: I saw him everywhere because he was everywhere, in every eye, in every mirror. The dead had come back to earth, all like him; he was the first link in this dynasty of madmen, he was destiny turned into man.

He no longer had his pot-belly or his thick beard. He no longer wore his prayer-shawl, his
talit katan
, under his patched-up jacket. But it was the same Moshe who used to shout in the street, in front of the synagogue, at the hour of prayer: “I am burning, children, I am burning like fire! Look, children, look and see that it is in everyone’s power to burn without being consumed!” People
thought he was drunk. He liked to drink. During the holidays he would go to various Hasidic groups, and interrupting their gatherings, would jump up on the table and in a single draught empty every bottle handed him. He was the king of clowns, the prophetic fool, free to do anything. The more he drank, the more his utterances gained in clairvoyance. “Yes, I’m burning, children!” he would cry. “Look at me and understand that it is with fire that one kindles fire, it is also with fire that one puts out the flame: but woe to the man who puts it out, woe to him who draws back from it. Look, children, look and see how I hurl myself down head first!”

“Let’s go and have something,” my companion suggested.

We found a kosher restaurant on Forty-sixth Street. The waiter placed a bottle of Slivovitz on the table. We clinked glasses. I said: “Moshe used to drink alone. I should have kept him company, but I was too young. Is it too late now? I wonder.”

I filled the glasses a second time. A third. I emptied mine in one draught; he was nursing his, taking small sips. I thought: “He has changed, after all. In the past, he would have been impatient, he would have wanted to rush things. Is it possible that he has reached the end of his road?”

“I read what you wrote about Moshe the Madman,” he said, grimacing slightly. “You seem to know him better than I.”

“Better? Perhaps differently.”

“No, better. The proof: you speak of him, he animates your writings. That’s why I was determined to meet you. What do you know about him? his background? his ambitions? his secret plans? Are you sure he was the way you describe him? that he didn’t use his madness to achieve an end known only to himself? And then, are you sure he was killed at Auschwitz?”