“
I’ll do my best.
”
“
And then
…”
“
Yes?
”
“
There is one point which is essential.
”
“
What is it?
”
“
It’s at the core of my blurring memories; thanks to it, the memories are still mine.
”
“
What are you talking about?
”
“
You’ll know at the right time.
”
“
When? Where? Over there?
”
“
Yes. Over there. Or when you come back. But to know it, you must first go there.
”
“
You can’t tell me now?
”
“
I must not, Malkiel.
”
“
And if I come home empty-handed?
”
“
You will not come home empty-handed.
”
Why had Elhanan Rosenbaum insisted that his son, Malkiel, visit his hometown? To dig up what secret? To meet what phantom? To do what ritual penance?
It was only to oblige his already sick father that Malkiel had agreed to leave him for a few weeks. He could not refuse him this favor, perhaps the last he could do for him.
“You must go,” Elhanan repeated, more and more obsessed. “Believe me, you must.”
“Are you hoping I’ll find you there, as a child or a young man? Think again, Father. You’re not over there but here. Entirely.”
Entirely? Not really. Day by day Elhanan Rosenbaum deteriorated. Each morning new regions of his past seemed to have been detached from him, to have vanished. “What are you waiting for, Malkiel? For the last spark to die? For the last door to close?”
Malkiel had no choice.
He had made another journey, several years earlier, far from the excitement of New York, far from his father, who was flourishing as a teacher and psychotherapist.
In Asia, the earth—or rather history—was trembling. Gigantic mass graves had been discovered in Cambodia. The phrase “boat people” had entered the language. “I want to go over there,” Malkiel told his boss. “I
have
to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But I
have
to.”
The sage, chin resting on one hand, studied him for a moment. “Because of Tamar? To put some distance between you?”
“No.”
“Because of your father?”
“Not that either.”
“We have Henry over there. He’s doing a good job. He doesn’t need help, as far as I know.”
“He’s willing to have me come over,” Malkiel said.
The sage sounded annoyed. “You spoke to him before speaking to me?”
“We’re friends.”
There followed a lecture on journalistic protocol and ethics, which ended in a handshake. “If I understand correctly, you already have your visa?”
Malkiel nodded.
He rushed to tell Tamar; to telephone his father. That very night he left for Bangkok. Henry was waiting for him at the airport. “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing here?”
“Just looking,” Malkiel answered. Of course Henry knew why Malkiel was there.
“I didn’t book you into a hotel. You’ll stay with me.”
“What I’d like to do—”
“I know. You’d like to leave for the border right away. Let me take care of things. Tomorrow morning we’ll go up together. First you’re going to take a shower. And change. I have tropical clothes for you.”
Good old Henry. The perfect friend. A great reporter, with a Pulitzer Prize, at home everywhere. And ready for anything.
Next morning they entered the camp at Aranyaprathet, not far from the Cambodian border. Thousands of eyes followed their every move. Eyes burning from sunlight, exhaustion, suffering. Malkiel would never forget those eyes, or the devastating smiles of starving children.
“I look at them and I want the whole world to look at them,” Henry said.
“I look at them,” Malkiel said, “and they look back at me. And I think of other children in other places, after the war in Europe.”
They trudged through the camp’s streets and alleys.
“Your pieces are the best you’ve ever written,” Malkiel said. “Nobody can read them without a sharp pang of guilt.”
Day after day, Henry’s dispatches appeared on the front
page of
The New York Times
, describing men and women whom the Khmer Rouge, in their murderous insanity, had deprived of all hope and joy. One piece ended, “How can this outrage be happening? Can a whole people die?”
“How did this madman Pol Pot persuade so many people to kill so many others?” Malkiel asked.
“You know the pattern,” Henry said. “Pol Pot calls himself a revolutionary. You can justify anything in the name of revolution. He was hoping to bring history back to zero.”
“To begin again? Like God?”
“Great killers want to be gods.”
“And they just let him do it?”
“Apparently, yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand? And your father doesn’t understand either?”
Malkiel gulped. “Yes. My father understands.”
A sun at once leaden and coppery beat down like a curse on the tents and barracks. Women passed out in the heat; nurses brought water.
“Come along,” Henry said. He led Malkiel into a special barracks apart from the others, where two hundred young men lived. They seemed to be infantrymen and noncoms. They were disciplined, doing calisthenics, training rigorously—for what purpose? They refused to talk to strangers.
“Take a good look at them,” Henry said. “They’re Khmer Rouge.”
These killers were fourteen or fifteen. The word was that they’d tortured their own parents and executed their own brothers and sisters, always in the name of their revolutionary ideal. Hangings, drownings, shootings: Malkiel searched for traces of violence in their impassive faces.
In nearby tents, Cambodians talked about their agonies.
Henry translated. Terror, flight through the forest, life and death in the swamps. Could anyone imagine a whole country transformed into a hermetically sealed ghetto? I can now, Henry said. Could anyone even conceive of a regime, in 1980, for which remaining human is a crime punishable by death? I can now, Malkiel thought.
In his mind he saw his father and talked with him: “You see? The Jews aren’t the only ones to suffer.”
“I never said they were.”
“But to hear them you’d think only their suffering mattered.”
“You weren’t listening closely, Malkiel. When a Jew talks about suffering, he’s talking about other people’s suffering, too.”
“In that case they don’t talk about it enough.”
“Possibly. They are timid; they refuse self-pity. Try to understand them. If they talk too much, people resent it. If they don’t, people resent them for
that.
”
When I come back to New York we’ll continue this discussion, Malkiel promised himself.
He would spend several weeks in Aranyaprathet. Khao I Dang: one hundred ten thousand people jammed into a compound that might house a quarter of that number. Sa Keo: thirty thousand refugees … Malkiel wanted to know everything, to take it all in. He spent his evenings with French, Israeli and American volunteers; he visited the infirmaries, the schools, the kitchens. Henry spared him none of this education: he too remembered. In 1938 his father fled Hitler’s Germany. Fifty thousand visas could have saved all the Jews in Germany.
Malkiel interrupted his investigations and turned volunteer, working for a rescue committee. He helped some refugees fill out emigration forms, others to find vanished
relatives. He played with children, taught them a few words of English; he slept little and hardly ate. Henry warned him: “You want to help them, of course you do. But you’d help them a lot more with a good piece on all this.”
“Logically you’re right,” Malkiel said, “but I checked my logic at the door.”
Was he thinking of his grandfather, the benefactor whom he resembled so? Elhanan spoke of it one day: “You know, my father—whose name you bear—did much for the Jewish people.”
A Thai doctor, young still and refined, watched discreetly over Malkiel’s health. One night he collapsed, fell to the ground; she was there to have him carried to the infirmary. “Overwork and exhaustion,” she said. Malkiel was given an injection and woke up forty-eight hours later.
“Well, my friend,” Henry said, “I have a telex from the sage, may God grant him long life. He demands that you take the first flight out. They’re waiting for your copy.” He winked. “Not to mention Tamar; she’s impatient, too.”
The Thai doctor also urged him to leave. “If you stay with us you’ll work yourself into the ground; will the refugees be any better off? Go home and tell them what you saw here; find the right words, and we’ll all be grateful.”
Gaunt and weak, Malkiel left Bangkok. On the flight to New York he wrote the first article.
“You did well to go there,” Elhanan told his son. “Do you want to know why? Because no one bothered to help us when
we
needed it.”
That night he read his piece to Tamar, who said nothing for a long moment, and then thanked him in her own way.
A
child swept away by a tempest. A young waif jolted by tragic, inexorable events. A disoriented youth, lost and bewildered, singled out by fate.
When hostilities began in 1939, Elhanan was thirteen years old. An only son, he divided his time between his yeshiva studies and his father’s office at a lumber company. At home, his mother, still young and elegant, represented Western culture: she kept up with the artistic life of the capital, while her husband read only religious works. It was a close and happy family. The two servants followed instructions: they were never to turn away a beggar without offering him shelter and a meal, and they were to show him warmth and understanding. “Even if he doesn’t deserve it?” asked Piroshka, the cook.
“I don’t know of any human being who doesn’t deserve a crust of bread and some change,” was the blunt reply of Elhanan’s father, Malkiel. “We never know. The nameless beggar may be the prophet Elijah himself, a vagabond Lamed-vovnik, one of the Just, a rabbi in exile.”
Elhanan once broke into the conversation. “And if the beggar in question is someone we know?”
His father smiled proudly. “A good question, my son. But
remember that in every beggar there is an element of the unknown.”
It was a turbulent and tormented year. Czechoslovakia was torn apart. Poland was attacked, bombarded, dismembered. Then came Romania’s turn. Soon the small town of Biserica Alba reverted to its Hungarian name, Feherfalu. Overnight they would have to change the names of streets, schools, shops, cinemas. At school the students were forced to learn songs to the greater glory of Horthy Miklós. And yesterday’s idol, King Karol II? Banished and repudiated.
The situation was almost stable for the Jews. Previously threatened by the Romanian anti-Semites of the Iron Guard, they were now threatened by Hungarian anti-Semites of the Nyilas movement. So? You can learn to live with anything, especially the worst.
After the fall of Poland, Jewish refugees appeared in the little town. Not surprising: the town was perfectly situated for people who wanted to cross the border illegally. A crossroads of four or five countries, it absorbed foreigners because everybody here spoke all their languages. Austrians, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles—Elhanan’s father took care of them all with a devotion that preachers everywhere mentioned in their sermons. “Look at Malkiel Rosenbaum. He is the embodiment of the rare virtue
Ahavat Israel
, which signifies Jewish solidarity and compassion.” He found lodgings for them, documents, work; he helped them flee to other towns and other havens. Many refugees headed for Romania, Turkey, Palestine came through Biserica Alba, now Feherfalu.
In memory: 1941, Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles. Malkiel brought home a guest for the evening meal. Elhanan was struck by the stranger’s pallor and gauntness. A
threadbare raincoat shrouded his hunched shoulders. Through thick lenses his myopic eyes gazed at the middle distance, as if to capture an evil omen. The night was pleasant, yet he had his collar turned up and he shivered. Elhanan’s father asked him about the situation in Poland. “Bad, sir, very bad,” replied the visitor, and his lips tightened. But how? Tell us more. The visitor refused to go into detail. “We haven’t enough time,” he said. “If I start I’ll never stop. But I must say good-bye soon, as you know; my train leaves at eleven.” His Yiddish was Germanic, his tone fearful. After the meal and the customary chants, he said, “You’ve been a great help to me. How can I thank you? Yes, I know how. I will give you a piece of advice; follow it. Do not linger in this country; the enemy will rise up here, too; don’t wait; take your family and go; as soon as possible and as far as possible. Take pity on your son and his mother; take pity on yourself.” He shook Malkiel’s hand, wished Elhanan and his mother a courteous good night, and walked out into the sleeping town.
For a long moment the three Rosenbaums were speechless. Father took hold of himself. “It is fear speaking through his mouth. He has surely been through a terrible time, and he sees the enemy everywhere.”
Mother was not so sure. “I don’t know.… And if it was the truth? If he was right when he said we should go?”
Father raised his voice, a sure sign that he was upset. “Go? Go where?” Sitting in the
succa
, they thought it over. A gentle breeze whispered along the roof. In the neighboring
succa
people were singing, celebrating the holiday with exuberance. “And you, Elhanan, what do you think?” asked Father.
“He frightened me.”
“Me too,” said Malkiel.
Elhanan cried out: “Look! The stranger forgot his briefcase!”
To lighten the mood Malkiel said, “Maybe he’s an absent-minded professor. Go on, son. Run to the station and give it back to him.”
Elhanan snatched up the briefcase, which he found rather heavy, and rushed to the station. Their guest was seated on a bench in the waiting room. “Sir, sir, look, you forgot this!”
Expressionless, the stranger raised his head, took the briefcase, set it down beside him and murmured a vague thank you.
Obviously, thought Elhanan, he has other things on his mind. The boy said good night and turned to go home, when the stranger called him back: “Sit down.” Elhanan sat. “Can you guess what’s in this briefcase?” No, Elhanan had no idea. “Look, then.” The stranger opened the case, and Elhanan almost fainted: it was full of gold coins. “That is my whole fortune,” said the stranger tonelessly. “That is all I have left.”