From the Kingdom of Memory (19 page)

What would you do?

I would call him.

How? With tears? With words? Will you use me?

I don’t know.

You have never called him?

I have. Often. Everything in me calls for him. But he doesn’t answer. It’s your fault. You stand between us.
Because of you he can’t hear. Because of you he can’t come near me.

Starting again?

Yes, starting again. The dead need cemeteries. At times, I imagine six million victims in search of graves, and I feel close to insanity.

Continue
.

I begin to yell, and yet I say nothing. I shout but no sound is heard. Does that silence offend you?

My dear friend. Of all the words, your silence pleases me most. For there is a silence of the living and a silence of the dead. And I …

And you? You what?

I am not scared of you.

Why do you say that?

I think you’re the one to be scared.

You talk nonsense. Fear is a tool in my hands; I can direct it against anyone I wish. I rarely fail
.

You’ll fail now.

Your certainty borders on arrogance, old man
.

I lived too long. So much so that if they try to send me back from heaven I’ll say no.

Tired?

And how.

You wish to die?

I am too deeply rooted in my tradition to want to die. But I shall leave life without fear or regret.

You surprise me, old man, but I like you. A man your age who stands up to me like this, well, that’s something.… Usually people kneel before me … and implore me to give them another year, another day. You should see them
.…

You pitiless being.… First you humble them, then you despise them … you remind me of the enemy who, eternities ago, threw Jews in the mud and then insulted them for being dirty.

The enemy?

Your ally.

Because I deprive the living of their ability to live? Admit at least that I don’t lack fairness. All fall before me. The good and the wicked. The killers who killed your parents, I will kill them, too. Can you imagine the world without me? God himself would lose his way
.…

You are not God’s messenger, but people’s. Doesn’t the Talmud call you “The messenger of people”?

The Talmud, the Talmud … it also claims that when God said
“Tov meod”—
Very good—he referred to me. Leave me alone with the Talmud
.

Can you kill the Talmud?

No, but I have taken the lives of many Talmudic scholars
.

Yet their word is more powerful than yours.

So what? In the end I win
.

Always? Weren’t you allowed to come near King David only when he recited Psalms?

A slight delay. Unimportant
.

Obviously, you fail to understand. As long as we sing, you are powerless against us. Maybe that’s why so many Jews, young and old, went to their death singing.

Are you proud of that?

Yes, I am. I am proud of all Jews who perished. Those who fought and those who prayed, I am their kinsman. Facing the executioner, facing you, they appeared human, sad but human, weakened but sovereign, starving but dignified.

You haven’t seen them
.

I have seen some.

Some wept like cowards
.

Cowards? You said cowards? Because they wept? Are cowards the only ones to weep? Some people weep for noble reasons. You who remember humankind, have you seen that many orphaned parents, tortured children? Have you witnessed that many massacres?

Yes, I have
.

You are lying.

You may say anything about me but that I am a liar. I never lie. I always tell the truth to those for
whom I come. Yes, I have seen many massacres. That’s my fate: nobody dies without my being present. My gaze kills. My breath creates mass graves. That’s how it is, there is nothing I can do about it. I see them all and they all look alike. Alive, people intrigue me; dead, they bore me. All are equal before God? Before me too. Maybe I am God
.

You are not.

How can you be that certain? God and I have many things in common. If He is the beginning, I am the end
.

God participates, you don’t.

But who writes the last word? I do
.

No, you don’t. All the catastrophes, the murders, the fires, they are all man’s work, not yours.

But aren’t men my emissaries? my accomplices? They do what I tell them to do—and undo
.

It’s nice of you to take responsibility for all the injustices and agonies in the world. But I refuse to place all the blame on you. For then the killers will not feel guilty. And the assassins will see themselves as victims. And the pogroms, the manhunts, the mountains of human ashes will be reduced to grandiloquent abstractions and solemn stupidities. Since our destiny is at stake, I refuse to judge you. But God will. As for us, human beings, we shall judge our fellow men and women in human terms alone.

You amuse me, old man. You talk, you talk and
with every word you come closer to me. And yet, you go on talking
.

I’ll be dead soon you’re thinking? Well, beware: the dead may one day rise to slay you.

Who are you?

I don’t know
.

Who am I?

I don’t know
.

Who knows?

The others. They know
.

The others? Who are they?

The grownups
.

What is a grownup?

Someone who gives orders, that’s a grownup. Someone scary who can kill us
.

You mean the guards?

Yes. The guards
.

They know who we are?

They know everything. They have prepared everything. That’s what they are here for. To prepare everything. How many barracks, how many tents, how many bread rations. They must take care of us, see? After all, they won’t throw us out like sick cats into
the garbage. A grownup is someone responsible, see what I mean?

No, I don’t see.

What don’t you see?

How can they take care of us when they keep on saying that we are disgusting?

So what?

So what? I’ll tell you so what! If we are disgusting, they can throw us in the garbage.

If so, they’ll need a huge garbage can, right? Do you know how many we are?

I don’t.

Can’t you count?

I can count.

Then start counting
.

I … I can’t.

You forgot?

I learned to count to ten. Maybe seventeen.

Ah, my poor fellow. Life doesn’t stop at seventeen
.

What comes after seventeen?

Thirty. A hundred. A thousand
.

Are we a hundred children here?

More than a hundred
.

A thousand?

A thousand times a thousand
.

How many is that?

Many. We need a can as large as the whole planet, as deep as the ocean. Can you imagine the world as a gigantic garbage can?

The world?

Yes, the world. Created by God
.

I can’t believe it.

What can’t you believe?

I can’t believe that God Almighty would have worked so hard, first for six days, then for six thousand years, just to produce a cheap garbage can.

If you were He, what would you have produced?

A palace. A royal palace not only for kings, but for everybody. A palace that would transform all visitors into princes. And you?

If I were God?

If you were God, what would you do?

Things, simple things. First of all, I would order all cobblers to make shoes for all the children here. My feet hurt, see? And God should do something about my feet. And yours. And those of all the children. Look at us, we walk like invalids
.

True. Like invalids. Barefoot invalids. My feet ache.

I am exhausted
.

Not as much as me.

If I were God I would bring a huge forest and put it here, on the road before us. Then the transport
would have to stop. And we could rest. I am sleepy, aren’t you?

Sleepier than you.

If I were God I would see to it that all things would be sleepy. Trees. And stones. And trains. And guards
.

That’s all? I still prefer my royal palace. Except it isn’t simple, I know that. If all people become princes, what about our guards? I don’t want them to become princes. But … I think I have an idea. They will stay outside the palace gates. We’ll call them only when we are cold: to light the fire in the stove.

But isn’t it what they are doing now?

Now?

Yes, now. Look: the fire over there … The flames are as high as the heavens. They illuminate the world
.…

No. Not the world; only the palace. I am so happy. God has granted my wish. My dream will be fulfilled. We are going to live in the most glorious palace in the world. And since God is so nice to us, we shall sing for Him, okay?

My body is aching. I can’t sing
.

We must. We’ll dance, too. For Him. We want Him to be proud of us. And of all His creatures. Don’t you agree that God is proud of us? I am proud of Him.

…

Do you hear me?

I am listening
.

May I ask you a favor?

Maybe
.

Teach me how to pray.

I can’t. I am too cold
.

Teach me … I don’t want to freeze to death.

Don’t worry. We are approaching the palace
.

What Really Makes Us Free?

I
S THERE
a nobler aspiration than the desire to be free? It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself. To violate that freedom, to flout that sovereignty, is to deny man the right to live his life, to take responsibility for himself with dignity.

Man, who was created in God’s image, wants to be free as God is free: free to choose between good and evil, love and vengeance, life and death. All the great religions proclaim this. The first law after the Ten Commandments had to do with slavery: it prohibited not only owning slaves but also
entering into
slavery voluntarily. One who gave up his freedom was punished. To put it another way: Every man was free, but no man was free to give up his freedom.

To strip man of his freedom is not to believe in man. The dictator does not believe in man. Man’s freedom frightens him. Imprisoned as much by his ambition as by his terror, the dictator defines his own freedom in relation to the lack of freedom of others. He feels free only because, and when, other people—his subjects, his victims—are not free. The happiness of others prevents him from being happy himself. Every free man is his adversary, every independent thought renders him impotent.

Caligula felt sure of his own intelligence only when faced with his counselors’ stupidity; Stalin derived morbid pleasure from the humiliations he inflicted on his ministers; Hitler liked to insult his generals. Every dictator sees others as potential prisoners or victims—and every dictator ends by being his own prisoner and his own victim. For anyone who claims the right to deprive others of their right to freedom and happiness deprives himself of both. By putting his adversaries in prison, his entire country becomes one vast jail. And the jailer is no more free than his prisoners.

In fact, it is often the prisoner who is truly free. In a police state, the hunted man represents the ideal of freedom; the condemned man honors it. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, in Occupied France, the only free people were those in prison. These men and women rejected the comfort of submission and chose to resist the forces of oppression. Once imprisoned, tormented,
tortured, they no longer had anything to fear. They knew they were lost.

When the great French Jewish humorist Tristan Bernard was arrested by the Germans after months in hiding, his fellow prisoners were surprised by his smiling face. “How can you smile?” they asked. “Until now, I have lived in fear,” he said. “From now on, I shall live in hope.”

It is because his victims cling to hope that the dictator persecutes them. It is because they believe in freedom as much as in life itself that he is determined to deprive them of both.

Heroes and martyrs became the pride of their people by fighting with a weapon in their hand or a prayer in their soul. In a thousand different ways, each proclaimed that freedom alone gives meaning to the life of an individual or a people.

For a people—that is, for a social, ethnic, or religious group—the problem and its solution are both simple. When a people loses its freedom, it has a right, a duty, to employ every possible means to win it back. But resistance can be expressed in nonviolent ways too.

The Jews who lived in the ghettos under the Nazi occupation showed their independence by leading an organized clandestine life. The teacher who taught the starving children was a free man. The nurse who secretly cared for the wounded, the ill, and the dying was a free woman. The rabbi who prayed, the disciple who studied, the father who gave his bread to his children,
the children who risked their lives by leaving the ghetto at night in order to bring back to their parents a piece of bread or a few potatoes, the man who consoled his orphaned friend, the orphan who wept with a stranger for a stranger—these were human beings filled with an unquenchable thirst for freedom and dignity. The young people who dreamed of armed insurrection, the lovers who, a moment before they were separated, talked about their bright future together, the insane who wrote poems, the chroniclers who wrote down the day’s events by the light of their flickering candles—all were free in the noblest sense of the word, though their prison walls seemed impassable and their executioners invincible.