Hostage (21 page)

Handcuffed, they were led to a military truck that was standing by. Zelig tried to reassure his friend.

“Don’t worry. These soldiers aren’t qualified to handle our case. As soon as we’re introduced to a high-ranking officer, the misunderstanding will be cleared up. I’m confident.”

They spent endless hours in a jail cell. Zelig tried to convince Pavel that what was happening to them was normal, understandable. After all, they were in a military zone. In a few days, everything would be cleared up. The party would send someone to ease their path. Pavel remained doubtful. How could they prove their innocence to the Soviets?

“I trust the party,” said Zelig.

Finally they were escorted, separately, to appear before a military security officer. They were asked the same questions: Why had they entered the USSR illegally? What was their objective? Who were their contacts? The two said they were members of the underground Communist party; they had decided to come to Soviet Russia quite simply to help the party triumph over its enemies.

Then the officer brought them in together.

“Did the Soviet government invite you to come to this country?”

“No. But the party’s secret service …”

“We have no proof of this.”

“But our superiors, in our town …”

“We don’t know them. And you, do you know anyone here?”

No, no one, they said.

“Consider yourselves under arrest. If you were real Communists,
you would have known that discipline prevails over everything else. It’s our party, responsible for our national security, that decides which of its members are to come and help us, how and when. If you are Communists, why didn’t you wait until you were summoned?”

Zelig turned to Pavel and asked, “Didn’t you once tell me you had a relative in the USSR?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“A cousin … an uncle …”

The officer sniggered. “What makes you think I would just happen to know this cousin or uncle or whomever?”

“I’m not sure you would know him, comrade officer,” said Zelig, “but …”

“Watch your language! Until your identity as a party member has been verified, I forbid you to call me comrade!”

Zelig and Pavel were escorted back to their cell. The next day, they were transported north. Each night they stayed in another prison. They were hungry, exhausted, thirsty, scared, nostalgic, full of regret. Zelig clung to his ideals; Pavel was less sure.

Zelig: “Don’t judge the party on the basis of what’s happening to us. We’re the victims of bureaucracy. Some papers must have gone astray. Don’t forget that they see us as Hungarian or Romanian, in other words, as enemies of the Soviet Union.”

Pavel: “But you’re forgetting the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. We’re supposed to be allies.”

Zelig: “The party knows what it’s doing.”

Pavel: “Still, don’t you wonder about the alliance between Nazis and Communists?”

Zelig: “The party has its reasons!”

Pavel: “You talk about the party the way my father used to talk about God.”

Zelig: “I don’t believe in God, but I believe that the Communist ideal is sacred. I hope the same goes for you.”

Pavel didn’t answer.

June 22, 1941.

Hitler’s armies launch an all-out offensive against the Soviet Union. After a series of defeats, the Red Army needs men and equipment. Some prisoners are freed, and some of the deported are brought back from Siberia. Zelig is to enter the infantry, whereas Pavel, found to be medically unfit, is appointed to the Department of Transportation.

Desperate, Zelig urges Pavel to try again to convince the authorities of his family tie in the USSR.

“They won’t believe us,” says Pavel.

“It’s still worth a try. What have we got to lose?”

Zelig introduced himself to a lieutenant. “Excuse me, but I think that if you’re willing to listen to me, you’ll see that I have something important to tell you.”

“I’m listening,” says the officer. “Be brief.”

“My comrade Pavel’s cousin works in the Kremlin,” he said, standing at attention.

“Speak. I’m listening.”

“He works with one of Stalin’s close collaborators.”

“And what’s this cousin’s name?”

“Meirovitch. He works with Lazar Kaganovich.”

The officer gave a start.

“Bring in your friend!”

A few minutes later, Pavel introduced himself.

“I want to hear it from you,” the officer said, staring at Pavel. “Is it true—you have a friend in the Kremlin?”

Trying to control his trembling, Pavel said yes, it’s true.

The officer rose nervously. “Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?”

Zelig, standing at the door, coughed gently, trying to intervene.

“We tried,” says Zelig.

The lieutenant ignored him. “Pavel, do you realize what you’re saying? Do you know that Lazar Kaganovich is among the most loyal confidants of Comrade Stalin?”

“I didn’t make anything up.”

Forty-eight hours later, Pavel was on his way to Moscow.

Shaltiel tries to remember how and when Pavel broke with his Communist past, reimmersed himself in his ancestral faith, retook his Jewish name Pinhas.

Did Pavel’s break date from his memorable impromptu visit to the Moscow synagogue on the day of Rosh Hashanah? The visit had shaken him, that’s for sure. But it hadn’t caused a definitive rupture. Something else had been necessary for his life to change.

Shaltiel was present when Pavel confided in his father. He had come from Jerusalem to take part in the family celebration. It was on a Saturday afternoon, of course, at home.

Pavel and his father were meeting for the first time since the
war. After the requisite small talk, there was a silence. Pinhas spoke up: “I’m thinking about Davarowsk and Moscow—they seemed so far from each other. Much farther than Moscow from Jerusalem.”

“Explain what you mean,” said Haskel.

“I mean, to paraphrase the great Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, that from wherever he sets off, the Jew always returns to Jerusalem.” Then Pinhas started describing what he called one of the saddest episodes in his life.

“When disillusion had taken me under its wing, I talked to Leon Meirovitch about Davarowsk. He cried. He cried for the living and the dead, for his family that he would never see again. He, the staunch, die-hard Communist, entrenched in his ideology, who swore only by Marx and Lenin, Stalin and Kaganovich, cried his heart out. I quietly stood in a corner of his office. I felt indiscreet, ill at ease. ‘I’ve betrayed them,’ he whispered. ‘I betrayed my poor parents and their relatives. I made them suffer when I deserted their home and tradition. I substituted my faith for theirs. I believed in a future that refuted theirs, now I realize I was on the wrong track, a track that doesn’t lead to the liberation of nations but to their enslavement. It doesn’t lead to the land where our people would find sovereignty, serenity and the happiness promised by the prophets of pure socialism. It leads to the camps where freezing temperatures kill the body and despair demeans the spirit. Revolutions are too bloody. Give a banner to a people and they will make it red, drenching it in their own blood and those of their martyrs, the blood of their enemies, real and imagined, as well as their victims. I have lived and fought under a delusion, for a delusion. And now it’s too late to start over.’ ”

A short time later, when he arrived in Jerusalem, clandestinely helped by his cousin to escape the Soviet Union, in spite of his age, Haskel’s eldest son went to sit on the benches of a yeshiva. This was so Pinhas could delve more deeply into Pavel’s remorse.

Shaltiel recalls that Paritus had given him a brief lecture on mystical madness. Is it a powerful and implacable rebellion against linear or discursive thought? What does it seek, except to push tradition and heritage to the bottom of the abyss? Is it the rejection of what seems stable, well-founded, precise, necessary and inevitable? Finally, it is the victory of words, Paritus had said, words that find meaning in the heart.

And God is always there. He questions when He is questioned. His very silence questions. How should He be answered? Does the mystic stop being a mystic, or simply stop being, when He says no to him?

Me, I tell children about the old age that awaits them. I remind old people of their receding past.

Is it my destiny? It’s my passion, I admit it. Even when I don’t speak, my silence is still haunted by speech.

God himself needed to express Himself in order to undertake His oeuvre, which, afterward, would become that of men.

Facing the recesses of time and the traps of memory, entangled in pain, hope or speech, he sometimes falters, floats, trembles.
Memory will always be something other than an aggregate of words, well or badly strung together. When man feels the need to throw himself into the fray, his speech changes into action.

For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship. Celebrate speech instead of scorning it; elevate it to the level of prayer so that up there, the Judge of men will give men an appetite for serenity.

Life is a tale. When I was a child, this is what everyone told me; as an adult I repeated it. Sometimes it starts well and ends badly; at other times, it presages misfortune but brings jubilation.

But who is the storyteller? Who uses words in order to fill the imagination of the one who is listening to him?

It is of speech that I wish to talk, of speech that tosses the waves and moves with the mountain wind. Speech does not deny silence and does not replace it; it amplifies silence, just as silence, in turn, deepens speech.

Speech offers a sanctuary to silence, and silence protects it like a sanctuary.

Making a man reconcile life and conscience, truth and love, is a much more complex and brutal task than awakening the body to reality and the soul to fervor. Only rarely does one build on cleared, bare ground. But watch out—a building erected through speech on rotten soil is in danger of collapse at any time along with its content.

Speech gently caresses the hands of the sleeping child and slaps the face of the criminal. Speech demands a voice in order to live, in order to become a noose or a caress. Sometimes it
scales the peaks at full speed; at other times it inches forward slowly, staggering, crawling. It is speech that helps the sick part with the living; and then again, it is also speech that makes death retreat.

During a brief respite, before dawn, Luigi, looking tired, takes advantage of the Arab’s absence to remove Shaltiel’s handcuffs and lets him rub his hands to get his blood circulating again.

“Since you say you’re a storyteller,” he said, “tell me a story. It will keep me awake.”

“You’re an odd one,” he says. “Here I am suffering because of you, getting ready to die at your hands, and you’re interested in hearing a story?”

“If it’s a good story, with a bit of luck, you’ll live an extra day,” says Luigi.

“I don’t believe you,” Shaltiel says.

“Just talk,” says Luigi. “What do you have to lose?”

“Okay,” says Shaltiel. “A story will divert me too.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a blind king who was desperate for light in order to admire the stars. He turned to his most illustrious advisers—physicians, philosophers, artists—and promised ten thousand gold coins to the person who would help him escape the darkness, if only for an instant.

“One of them handed him a miracle-making flask inherited from his great-grandfather; another brought him a mirror that reflected hidden and invisible things; a third prayed for him, in vain. The king could see nothing.

“He was giving up hope when an old beggar introduced himself and said in a very low voice, ‘Your Majesty, for a very
long time I was like you, blind to the world that surrounded me. The beautiful blossoming trees, the rays of the sun, the merchants at the fair, the courtiers clustering around the wealthy—I didn’t see these things. Then, in my peregrinations throughout the kingdom, I met a young woman of such radiant beauty that her gaze lit mine. Would you like me to introduce her to you? She is far away, but I know where to find her.’

“ ‘Of course I’d like to meet her,’ said the king. ‘Go get her quickly.’

“He ordered that the beggar be provided with the speediest horse-drawn coach. The old man returned a month later, empty-handed and sad.

“ ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I arrived too late. The beautiful young woman died in a mountain accident. The entire village where she lived is in tears.’

“Downcast, the king began to cry as well.

“ ‘Is this the first time you’re shedding tears?’ asked the old beggar.

“ ‘Yes,’ said the king. ‘The very first time.’

“ ‘So you’ve never
seen
your starving subjects, their sick children, the unfortunate languishing in jail?’

“ ‘No, never,’ said the king.

“ ‘Well, Your Majesty, now you know what human suffering is. You’re not blind; it’s that you have a heart of stone. You became indifferent to pain, poverty and the misfortune of your subjects. You forgot that each one of them—each of us—is a universe that deserves your attention and compassion. Look up into my eyes and tell yourself that my gaze contains the light that shone in the eyes of the beautiful young woman who has passed away.’