“What is it you want, Father?”
Elhanan opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again to gasp for breath. He wanted to speak, to ask for something.
“Yes, Father?” Malkiel stared intently at him. If only he could understand.
“I don’t know.… I don’t know.…” Huddled in his armchair near the window, he seemed harassed—but by whom? by what?
“What is it you don’t know?” Malkiel was sinking into a depression as deep as his father’s. Had the sickness crossed
a new threshold? “You’re upset, Father. Take it easy. You’ll feel better soon.”
Elhanan obeyed his son. Eyes shut, he folded his arms and seemed to drift slowly into a soothing lethargy. Relieved, Malkiel suddenly wanted to kiss his forehead as if he were a child, Malkiel’s child, fallen asleep in the middle of a bedtime story. He noticed a single tear running down his father’s cheek. Was he weeping in his sleep? But Elhanan was not asleep. “I want … I want an apple,” he asked timidly.
Malkiel hurried to the kitchen. Seeing him, Loretta was worried; what had happened? “An apple. Quick. My father wants an apple.”
Eyes still shut, Elhanan held out his hand. Malkiel put the apple in it. Elhanan caressed the fruit sensuously. “It’s terrible,” he said with a faint smile.
“What’s terrible, Father?”
“I wanted an apple. But I couldn’t think what to call it. Can you understand that? I envisioned the apple, I knew it was a fruit, I remembered its smell and its taste, I could have drawn a picture of it, but … its name escaped me.”
Was that how the disease progressed? He would have to ask Dr. Pasternak. Tomorrow. He wouldn’t be a bit surprised. He knew what was bound to happen, if not when: little by little the sick man would lose his vocabulary. Each day the sponge would grow thicker, greedier, more absorbent.
Malkiel was careful not to show his own distress. But Elhanan felt it and made few demands, so as not to increase it. Feigning sleepiness, he asked for nothing. If he was thirsty he would go to the kitchen himself. There, alone with Loretta, he would point to the teapot.
To ease the tension, Malkiel adopted an air of false gaiety.
“I have a riddle for you, Father. Which is better, to hold a fruit in your hand or to be able to name it?”
A moment of truce, of reprieve. After the “crisis”—so each episode was called—Elhanan seemed to improve. In a lighter mood, he once again became the professor: “Adam’s superiority lay in his ability to name the animals that God showed him. Not being able to name things was for the Romans the ultimate malediction:
Nomina perdimus rerum
, they complained. A deaf man does not hear the words, but he knows them. A mute does not say them, but he understands them. But what is an apple to a blind orchard keeper?”
“So here you are again on my turf! Who you talking to? The dead?” The gravedigger’s guttural, hollow voice. Though Hershel laughed, his coarse features were frightening. “Leave the dead alone, Mr. Stranger. They have a right to peace and quiet, don’t they? Come have a drink with me instead. They’ll thank you for it, believe me.”
“It’s too early to go back to town,” Malkiel said.
“Too early, too late. Meaningless words. If you have any sense you’ll come along and trust me. I’ll tell you more stories, about other meetings.” His whole immense body jiggled when he laughed. His arms flapped and his chest swelled. He hopped and skipped like a carnival bear.
“All right,” Malkiel said, “let’s go.”
In the street, people turned for a second look at this odd couple. The gravedigger was as slovenly as Malkiel was neat. Malkiel wondered if he was being followed. Hard to tell: there were too many people in the streets. After half an hour’s walk they stopped before a seemingly empty lot surrounded by a crumbling wall. “It’s the old cemetery,” said the gravedigger. “They haven’t used it for a hundred years
or more.” He pushed at a squeaky gate. A bare courtyard; way in the back, a little shack. “Here we are. This is where I live.”
Inside, in the gloom, a man was sitting with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. Surprised, Malkiel drew back.
“Fear nothing,” Hershel said. “He’s not dead. Sit down there.” He pointed to a grimy chair. Malkiel overcame his reluctance and sat down. Across from him, the other man was breathing loudly. His hands clasped on the table now, he seemed to be staring off into space. Malkiel waited, calming himself.
“I lied,” said the gravedigger, pouring himself a glass of brandy. “I’m not the only Jew in town. Ephraim here wants to talk to you. Just let him finish his prayer. Which prayer? Don’t ask. You never heard of it. He invents his own prayers. Every night he has a new one. You want to listen? Be my guest.”
“
Adoshem sfatai tiftach
,” the man intoned. “Others have sealed my lips; it is for You to open them. For You to tell me if I should weep or sing; if I do one or the other of my own will, I’m damned; I know it. Can that be Your wish? I can’t believe it; I’m too old to doubt You. I refuse to believe that man was created to choose between two maledictions. Show me the way. Tell me the answer I’m afraid to decide all alone. I’m too old to allow myself the slightest mistake. That, too, I know.
“
Upi yaghid tehilateha:
I may never again sing Your praises. Silence would be easier. First of all, I’m in the habit. Since I lost my sight I have felt that my words too were blind. Can it be that You have forced me to take this road, to witness so much horror, for the sole purpose of blinding me? I am accustomed to the night, but not to the silence of the night.
It is driving me mad. What is it that You wish? To deprive me of my sanity?
“I have traveled about the world, passed through towns and villages, met old men greedy for the future and children thirsting for dreams.… Will I ever see my loved ones again? Will they make me share their judgment of me? And of all of us? And of You?
“Decide for me, I beseech You. Let me see what my eyes can no longer see. Give me the power to speak without lying, or to be silent without turning my silence into a lie. Teach me how to interpret Your will, and how not to oppose it to the will of free men wrenched from life: that is the will I respect most deeply. Is it because Your will and theirs are not the same that You treat me as You treated the Seer of Lublin? At his wish, You deprived him of sight. But at whose wish did You deprive me of mine? Do You need it? So be it; take it. Bestow it on whomever You wish. But do not touch my memory. Does it hinder You? Does it weigh upon You? Too bad for me. But I cling to my memory as I cling to my life, I cling to it because it is my life. It is I, Ephraim son of Sarah, Your servant, who ask this of You. And he is weary and worn, Your servant: You know it, don’t You?”
The seated man fell silent, but his words echoed throughout the room. “Who are you?” he asked suddenly.
“My name is Malkiel.”
“Malkiel what?”
“Malkiel Rosenbaum.”
“And what was your father called?”
“Elhanan Rosenbaum.”
“Then you are Malkiel son of Elhanan?”
Malkiel cleared his throat; he felt as if he were appearing before a judge. In the end he only said, “Yes.”
The seated man clapped twice. To summon someone? A ghost? “Malkiel son of Elhanan, you say? I knew him. He was a martyr. By what right do you usurp his name?”
“He was my grandfather.”
Furious, the gravedigger knocked over his glass. “No fooling!” he shouted. “Ah, no! Not that!”
The unknown man stood up. “Come to the window,” he ordered Malkiel. “I want to see you.”
How can this blind man see me? Malkiel wondered, even as he obeyed. Ephraim walked with his hands straight out in front of him. Malkiel was feeling something new and was not sure what it was. He saw himself again as a child, on the eve of Yom Kippur. Hands outstretched, his father blessed him.
“Men are wrong to think that the blind cannot see. The truth is that they see, but differently. I would even say that they see something other.” They were at the window. A dim light played on the old man’s face. “Closer,” he said. “Let my hands touch your head. Your eyes. I see with my hands. In your face I find your father again. And his father. One must know how to read a face. Only a blind man truly knows.”
Malkiel felt his emotions swell. He had always been fond of old men and blind men. “Who are you, Ephraim?”
“You heard me. I am the caretaker.”
“And what do you take care of?”
“What people throw away, what history rejects, what memory denies. The smile of a starving child, the tears of its dying mother, the silent prayers of the condemned man and the cries of his friend: I gather them up and preserve them. In this city, I am memory.”
A madman, Malkiel thought. Another one. Unless it’s me. Here, a gravedigger without a corpse; there, a blind caretaker. And where am I in all this?
With Hershel’s help the blind man returned to the table. The gravedigger lit an oil lamp. Malkiel saw the caretaker more clearly: an angular, hollowed face, haloed by a sparse beard. Nervous hands. “How long have you lived here?”
“Since the war,” Hershel answered, “which is like saying forever. I saved him. Not heaven, but the gravedigger, a man who lives by the earth. You want to know why I saved him? Because he was blind. You want to know how he went blind? He never stopped weeping from the time the war began, in 1939. You could say he was watering every desert in the world. I know all about people who weep. But I never saw anyone cry the way this one did. He was a foreigner—from Poland—so they put him in an asylum. That’s where I saw him the first time. I invited him to come live in my hut. He sobbed his thanks. I did all I could to make him stop. His tears were stronger than my arguments. They flowed, and flowed. He got on my nerves sometimes, and I would ask him, ‘Where do you find the strength to do all that crying?’ He always answered the same way: ‘Even when the celestial gates are locked, the gate of tears remains open.’ His sight was dimming, of course, but that didn’t bother him. It disappeared altogether the day the Germans arrived.”
Ephraim raised his dead eyes to the visitor. “I wanted to remember, don’t you understand? I knew I’d witness more bloody events. I knew my memory would not be able to hold them all. So to recall all that I saw and heard in Poland, I had to cease seeing.”
The gravedigger interrupted. “I don’t always know what he’s talking about, it’s too complicated for me, but I understand his tears. Every drop tells me a story. We’ve been living here together since the war. I pass along what happens in town and in the outside world, and he weeps about the old days, in his country, far away.” The alcohol was inspiring
him. He snickered. “You want to know why he agreed to stay here with me instead of leaving with the community?”
Malkiel waited without replying. He was a captive of these two men. He could hardly take his eyes off the blind caretaker’s nervous hands; he wanted to cover them with his own, but dared not.
“You listen, young man called Malkiel son of Elhanan. Ephraim knew that every man, woman and child of our blessed community was going to be massacred and they’d have no decent burial, they wouldn’t be buried in consecrated Jewish soil. He knew it better than they, better than I. So, Malkiel son of Elhanan, when I promised him I’d take personal care of him and pick out a grave among our most illustrious citizens, he finally agreed not to follow the others. The last time I ply my trade, it will be for him.”
The blind man turned up his palms. Malkiel finally summoned the courage to place his own upon them. Two men, all that was left of a large community. How could they have …
“I know what you’re thinking,” the blind man said. “You’re going to ask me a question, and I know what it is. You’re going to ask me how I escaped the murderers, am I not right?”
Malkiel nodded, yes, the blind man was right. This blind man was a mind reader.
“I have powers, yes. I’m blind, but I see a long way. I’m old, but my brain is not worn out.”
“But how did you—”
“You’re in a hurry? I have all the time in the world. How did I escape the killers? I know the Cabala. An old master taught me the art of making myself invisible by pronouncing the names of certain angels. Am I not right, gravedigger? Didn’t I make myself invisible?”
“That’s right,” said the gravedigger.
“It was so simple. I pronounced one word, one name, and the killers didn’t see me.”
Malkiel’s hands still lay upon the blind-man’s. He did not want to withdraw them for fear of breaking the spell: for fear of interrupting the hallucination, for that is what Malkiel believed it was. He mistrusted all these stories of the occult. In India, too, the wise men claimed they could become invisible. In the end they died. Death alone is invisible. Man’s end was the same everywhere.
“Since you could save yourself,” Malkiel said, “why didn’t you try to save some of the other Jews?”
“A good question, Malkiel son of Elhanan. And also pertinent. But we cannot teach such mysteries in one day. That takes time. Still, I tried. Didn’t I try, gravedigger?”
“That’s true. He tried.”
“I did all I could to save …”
“To save whom?”
The blind man fell silent. Was he groping for a name? a face? a date? Finally he said, “He was called Malkiel … Malkiel son of Elhanan.”
“What? My grandfather?”
“Yes, your grandfather. I tried to save him. To make him invisible in his turn. On the last night, before he was to join the SS officer, his executioner, I talked and talked to him. It was no use. ‘Since all are to die, I will be the first,’ he told me. I recall his last words; they were about your father. ‘Tell him the date of my death so he can recite Kaddish.’ ” The blind man squeezed Malkiel’s hand tightly. “Is that why you came? For the date?”
“I don’t know,” Malkiel said. “It may be, but I don’t think so. My father knows the date. He commemorates it every year.”
“Then tell me the truth: what brings you to this unfortunate little town?”
“My father.”
“So I was right! Was I not right, gravedigger?”
“One hundred percent.” The gravedigger laughed his abrasive laugh.
“Elhanan,” the old man said. “Where is he?”