The Oath

Night
Dawn
The Accident
The Town Beyond the Wall
The Gates of the Forest
The Jews of Silence
Legends of Our Time
A Beggar in Jerusalem
One Generation After
Souls on Fire
The Oath
Ani Maamin (
cantata
)
Zalmen, or The Madness of God (
play
)
Messengers of God
A Jew Today
Four Hasidic Masters
The Trial of God (
play
)
The Testament
Five Biblical Portraits
Somewhere a Master
The Golem (
illustrated by Mark Podwal
)
The Fifth Son
Against Silence (
edited by Irving Abrahamson
)
Twilight
The Six Days of Destruction (
with Albert Friedlander
)
A Journey into Faith

(
conversations with John Cardinal O’Connor
)
From the Kingdom of Memory
Sages and Dreamers
The Forgotten
A Passover Haggadah (
illustrated by Mark Podwal
)
All Rivers Run to the Sea
And the Sea Is Never Full
Conversations with Elie Wiesel (
with Richard D. Heffner
)

Had the peoples and the nations

known how much harm they brought upon

themselves by destroying the

Temple of Jerusalem, they would

have wept more than the children

of Israel.

THE TALMUD

PART ONE
The Old Man and the Child

N
O
,
SAID THE OLD MAN
. I will not speak. What I have to say, I don’t care to say. Not to you, not to anybody. Not now, not tomorrow. There is no more tomorrow.

Once upon a time, long ago, there was a small town with a mysterious past, a black stain under a purple sky. Its name in Hungarian was Kolvillàg, Virgirsk in Russian and Klausberg in German. Nobody knows what the Romanians called it, or the Ruthenians, the Ukrainians and the Turks, all of whom, at one time or another, were its rulers
.

Don’t look for it on any map, in any history book; it isn’t there. Too unimportant to occupy even a modest place. A regrettable oversight, particularly since it seems irreparable. I should know. Painstaking, detailed research over many years has yielded few clues, few points of reference; not enough to endow it with any semblance of objective reality
.

Casual references to Kolvillàg are to be found in five places. Three of these are rather surprising
.

One of the letters the Austro-Hungarian colonel Turas von
Strauchnitz dispatched to his spouse is dated Kolvillàg, April 4, 1822. Unfortunately, the officer, though a keen observer and expansive by nature, did not take the trouble to explain what he had come to do or discover there: not a word about its citizenry, its homes or local customs
.

Klausberg is also mentioned in the correspondence maintained by the Scandinavian theologian Jan Saalbor with an obscure Romanian monk—Father Yanku—of Transylvania: “Could you, my venerable friend, do me a great service? It is a matter of some importance to me to know whether the castle of Virgirsk, better known as the Mute Mountaineers’ Monastery, was built in the tenth or the thirteenth century.” The monk’s reply, if reply there was, has not been recorded. And for the benefit of anyone interested, I should like to add that the monastery in question still stands. Its collection of icons is well worth the journey. On the other hand, nothing in its archives indicates even the slightest kinship with Kolvillàg, Klausberg, or even Virgirsk
.

That the hamlet attracted prominent travelers we know from Abraham ha-Katan who, in his
Diary (
Oppenheimer, ed., 1847
),
praises its hospitality: “I understand that one might wish to spend a Shabbat here. The merchants, though shrewd, are honest; the women, though charming, are devout; and the children are turbulent but respectful. In Klausberg the stranger will never feel unwelcome.”

Evidently a sage named Yekutiel ben Yaakov must have held court there in the sixteenth century, since his opinion is quoted in the collection of Responsa of the famous Rabbi Menashe, with regard to an abandoned woman—an
aguna—
who anxiously wished to remarry in order to discourage the local squire who pursued her with his infatuation
.

Finally, we come across Kolvillàg in the writings of the great
poet Shmuel ben Yoseph Halevi, whose litanies form part of certain liturgical services for the High Holy Days. This is what he tells us: “On the fifth day of the month Heshvan in the year 5206, a frenzied mob ransacked the holy community of Virgirsk. All the children of Israel, beginning with the three judges, were lined up in the marketplace, facing the church. There, under the eyes of an amused populace, they chose to die rather than renounce their faith. By nightfall three hundred and twenty corpses lay strewn across the marketplace stained with blood—and there was nobody to bury them.”

These are the scant bits of information I succeeded in uncovering about this ill-starred town. And so I shall know it only through the voice of its last survivor. His name is Azriel and he is mad
.

No, said the old man, I will not tell the story. Kolvillàg cannot be told. Let’s talk of other things. Men and their joys, children and their sorrows—let’s talk about them, shall we? And God. Let’s talk about God: so alone, so irreducible, judging without truly understanding. Let’s talk about everything, except …

I had met him one autumn afternoon. I remember, I shall always remember. The sun was setting, red and violent. I thought: This is the last time—and the thought made me sad. Then I said to myself: No, not so. It will rise again, as always, perhaps forever—and that thought too made me sad
.

Where do I come from? You are a curious young man. Do I ask where you are from? Oh well, today’s youth respects nothing
and nobody; and worse, even boasts about it. In my day old age conferred certain privileges. The closer man came to death, the more consideration he received. The oldest man was the most privileged; people would rise as he passed, solicit his advice and listen in silence. Thus he would feel alive and useful, a part of the community of man. Today things are different. You consider old men embarrassing, cumbersome, fit only for the old-age home or the graveyard. Any means of disposing of them is acceptable. They are a nuisance, those old people. You find their presence an unbearable burden. It is the Bible in reverse: you are prepared to sacrifice your parents. In my day, in my country, men were less cruel.

Oh yes, I am old—four times your age—but fortunately I have nobody in the whole world, which means that nobody wishes me dead …

Yes, I come from far away. From the other side of oceans. From the other side, period. Driven from my small town, somewhere between the Dniepr and the Carpathians, a town whose name will mean nothing to you.

A small town, like so many others, a small town unlike any other: a handful of ashes under a glowing red sky, its name is Kolvillàg and Kolvillàg does not exist, not any more. I am Kolvillàg and I am going mad. I feel it, maybe I already am. There is, deep inside me, a madman claiming to be me. Kolvillàg is what drove him mad.

Don’t ask me how it happened, I have no right to divulge that. I promised, I took an oath. With the others, like the others. Bound by oath as much as they. True, I was the youngest, but age is irrelevant. I was present at the conspiracy, I participated in it. And now it is too late: I shall not go back on my word. It ties me to a destiny that is not mine; it belongs to that part of me that yearns to remain faithful unto death, unto
madness, faithful to the madness which consists in declaring over and over: It is too late, too late.

Yes, one cannot push back night as one cannot contain the waves of a raging sea. The clock will tick off the hours even while the dwelling is engulfed by flames. Am I that dwelling? wonders the madman. Or the clock? You are the fire, answers the old man.

Anyway, what does it matter who I am. What I have seen, nobody will see, what I am keeping back, you will never hear; that is what matters. I am the last, do you understand? The last to have breathed the fiery, stifling air of Kolvillàg. The last to witness its ultimate convulsions before the beast withdrew, satiated but unappeased, monstrously immense yet weightless, almost graceful, like the morning breeze, like the flame that caresses the body before consuming it. The beast did not see me—do you understand?—that was my good fortune, my salvation. But I saw it. I saw it at work. Alternately savage and attentive, radiant and hideous, sovereign and cunning, it won with ease, reducing to shreds whoever saw it at close range, inside the bewitched and cursed circle. It turned the town into a desecrated, pillaged cemetery. Crushing all its inhabitants into a single one, it twisted and tortured him until in the end he had a hundred eyes and a thousand mouths, and all were spitting terror.