Authors: Elie Wiesel
Zupanev guessed what he was thinking. “You’ve undoubtedly crossed my path a thousand times but you never stopped to look at me. That surprises you? That’s how I am—I don’t attract attention. I’m a human chameleon, or
something close to it. I blend into the landscape; there’s nothing about me that catches the eye. Everything about me is so ordinary that people look at me without seeing me. But I see them. After all, a watchman’s duty is to watch.”
How old was he? Sixty? More? Less? He was ageless. As a child he must already have had that round expressionless face, those pale expressionless eyes. He was right: with his rounded shoulders, balding head and heavy walk, he was unlikely to arouse any interest. His features were so monotonous that one skipped immediately from forehead to eyes, from eyes to nose, from nose to lips without a single wrinkle or line to catch one’s eye. Anonymity.
“Come, my boy,” said Zupanev. “I’ll speak for the two of us. I’ll tell you stories you don’t know and should know.”
They went down to the ground floor. Zupanev opened a door, asked him to enter, offered him a glass of soda water, which Grisha drank in small sips while looking over the room. A cot, a table, two chairs, a trunk, a bookcase with some volumes whose titles the young boy’s eyes scanned. A shock: one was
I Saw My Father in a Dream
, his father’s work.
“What is it, my boy, what’s the matter?”
He saw Grisha’s eyes fixed on the bookcase.
“Ah, I see! The book of poems. You’re surprised. But why? Don’t I have the right to like poetry? It’s in Yiddish, so what? I understand Yiddish.”
He took the book and opened it at random to a poem called “Sparks.” He began to read in a hesitant voice; soon Grisha was on the verge of tears. So many questions flashed through his head: Who are you, Zupanev? This book, how did you get it? How long have you been a watchman here? Did you know my father?
Zupanev seemed to understand. “Some day I’ll tell you
more. You’ll come back. I’ll tell you everything; you should know it all.” He lowered his bald head abruptly as if to press it forcibly into his chest. To hide his pain? Grisha felt overcome by an inexplicable uneasiness.
Zupanev kept his word. There was no end to his stories. A spellbound Grisha listened to him without missing a single word or intonation; had his father himself been speaking to him, he could not have listened with greater intensity.
Who was Zupanev? Why had he not seen him before? What did he do with his free time? Whom did he see? Who kept him informed and whom did he inform?
In time Grisha understood that his friend never bared himself. He spoke of others to avoid speaking of himself.
“David Gabrielovich Bilamer—does the name mean anything to you?” murmured Zupanev. “A writer, a great writer. A Jew, a Communist, and a friend of the big shots. Listen: one evening he is summoned to the Kremlin; he gets there early. He’s received politely, taken to an anteroom, told to wait. He’s so terrified that he develops an urgent need to go to the toilet, but unfortunately the door is locked, and no one is there to open it. What has to happen, happens: he wets his pants. Just then the door opens, an officer asks him to follow him. Bilamer tries to explain his problem, but the officer tells him:
He
is waiting for you. There they are in
his
presence: Stalin, in person. What a nightmare. Bilamer thinks: They’ll shoot me. He feels a huge icy hand on his back. And suddenly, he hears the familiar voice: ‘Comrade, I wanted to tell you personally how much I liked your article on myths in literature.’ Soon Bilamer finds himself back in the corridor, then outside where the wind takes his breath away.”
A sickly smile, or rather, an unwholesome grimace on his face, Zupanev pauses a moment before reaching his punchline: during the anti-cosmopolitan purges, Bilamer
was arrested and charged with crime against decency and offense against the Head of the Party. And he was of course shot.
How does Zupanev know all that? Grisha wondered. The watchman knew a lot more. A whole procession of men, well known and obscure, ordinary and odd, peopled his stories. Grisha could guess what was coming just by keeping an eye on his companion’s right hand: if it stroked a glass of tea, some contemptible people were about to be described; if it fiddled with a cigarette, the character would be admirable.
“Do you know the story of Makarov?” Zupanev asked one evening, taking out his tobacco from an inside pocket. “I guess you’re too young. Ah, Makarov! Massive as a bull, gentle as a lamb, he really believed in the acceleration of history. That’s what the Revolution is, isn’t it? For centuries and centuries nothing moves; then, all of a sudden, mountains collapse and everything happens at once. Instead of wasting his time learning a trade or looking for a woman, Makarov joins the Party and suddenly—there he is, raised to the position of an official—excuse me, a high official; he’d skipped several ranks without knowing it. Congratulations, Makarov. Especially since he’s doing a good job. And the glory doesn’t go to his head. He retains his modest life style, goes on seeing his old friends, drinking with them, and even goes so far as to protect them with his authority. Then, one fine morning comes his downfall, as abrupt and unforeseen as his rise. One night he’s yanked out of bed; he struggles, he protests; he’s told: ‘Later—you’ll tell all that later.’ Before the investigator he voices his anger and threatens to complain high up. The investigator laughs in his face. ‘But you
are
as high as you can get now, you idiot!’ And he comes straight to the point: ‘We know your loyalty to the Party. There’s a mission awaiting you, a mission only you can carry out.’
He gives him some details; tells him it’s all about—Antonov. ‘Antonov absolutely must be broken. He’s your childhood friend, I know, and that’s why there’s no one better qualified to unmask him.’ ‘But what’s the charge?’ ‘He belongs to the Zinoviev gang.’ ‘Impossible! I know Antonov as well as I know myself. I’ll vouch for him. You’ll never make me believe that my friend Alexeyevich Antonov has betrayed the working class. Why, he’s given his life to it. You’ll never make me say he’s an enemy of the Party, after he’s shed his blood for the triumph of the cause.’ Makarov screams—he’s taken back to his cell. The interrogation is repeated ten times, a hundred times. The usual methods are used—in vain. Specialists are called in—in vain. Then the investigator appeals to ideology, patriotism, dialectic, individual conscience confronting the collective conscience, means and ends, self-sacrifice and the Communist ideal. Throughout his discourse, the investigator keeps playing with a sharp black pencil on his desk. Makarov can’t tear his eyes away from it—and that’s what saves him. He answers, ‘My life and my soul belong to the Party, but I would disgust myself if I destroyed my best friend; I would be unworthy of the Party.’ ‘In short, you refuse to carry out a Party order?’ ‘Not at all. The Party demands we tell the truth; I’m telling the truth.’ ‘But what if the Party says one thing and you another, who’s right?’ ‘The Party.’ ‘Listen: the Party has tried Antonov, the Party declares him guilty. And you, you proclaim he’s innocent!’ ‘Impossible! The Party can’t condemn my friend Antonov because the Party can’t lie.’ The investigator gets angry. Makarov, no intellectual, couldn’t care less about logic. And—this case is unique in the annals—the affair does not end in tragedy. Ten years in the clink instead of the bullet in the back of the neck, which the ‘gentleman of the fourth cellar’ had been ordered to administer. Why the reversal? Well, neither Makarov
nor Antonov ever signed anything at all. Their dossiers were lying around for so long that the gods finally changed both tools and victims.”
Grisha’s astonishment grew. Where did Zupanev get all these stories? Had he known the heroes he was talking about?
“One fine day,” Zupanev went on, “Makarov and Antonov meet in the prison courtyard. They fall into each other’s arms. ‘How did you manage to hold out?’ Makarov asks. ‘It’s simple. They were trying to persuade me that I ought to confess for the good of mankind. To which I answered, “How can I hope to work for the good of mankind if to do so I must become a traitor?” It wasn’t easy. The interrogations went on and on, but you see? I’m here. And how did
you
manage to hold out?’ ‘Oh that was even simpler: I kept staring and staring at the investigator’s pencil, telling myself, I’m not a pencil, a human being is not a pencil.…’ ”
Oh yes, that watchman knew a lot of things. About prisons and torture sessions, judges and clowns—as if he had forced open mysterious doors to bring back secrets no one dared name. But why was he revealing all this to his young friend? How did he get access to the forbidden memories of an entire people reduced to silence? What was it that those expressionless eyes of his saw when he sneered in the middle of a phrase or gesture? Zupanev sneered frequently, he kept on sneering, uttering sounds that seemed to want to turn into laughter. He would shake his head, moisten his lips, move his hands to sketch strange shapes, and then expel a forced guffaw: “
Ha ha ha
, you see what I mean?” Grisha did not always see, but he listened.
Sometimes he felt his mind reeling. “The prison world is a sort of hereafter,” Zupanev would say. “In it, nothing can be understood, nothing seems true. Often the condemned
are joined by their judges. Prosecutors and prisoners, torturers and tortured, false and true witnesses, they are all there, pell-mell, reduced to subhumans.…”
Grisha and Zupanev met often. For Grisha, the watchman’s lodging had become a refuge which neither his mother nor Dr. Mozliak could invade.
Who are you, watchman? What prison do you hail from? How many languages do you speak? And why do you talk to me? Why are you teaching me Yiddish? And why are you so anxious for me to hear your stories?
“Did I tell you the story of Hersh Talner, you know, the historian? He kept working on his history in his cell; and as he was not allowed to write, he used to repeat, sometimes aloud, sometimes in a whisper, what he would have put on paper. One night a miracle takes place: someone slips him a pencil stub and a sheet of white paper. Try to imagine that, my boy, just try to imagine it: he’s finally going to compose his
J’Accuse
and set it down for eternity. He has so many things to say, too many for a single sheet. How can he sum up on its two sides the nightmares and agonies of a whole generation? Holding his head in his hands, he reflects; this is worse than torture. His memory is overloaded; too many facts, too many images. How can he convey them without mutilating them? Conscious of his mission, he weighs the haunted faces and broken bodies, the confessions and denials, the testimony of the dead and the appeals of the dying; he questions them, consults them, judges them: which should he rescue from oblivion? Dawn breaks; he has not yet written a single sentence. Then, gripped by panic, he bursts into sobs; will the historian fail in his task? He weeps so hard the warden enters his cell and confiscates pencil and paper. Unfulfilled the mission, the unique opportunity lost. Later the historian is led once again before the examining magistrate. In the raw light of the court, someone sees him and suppresses a
cry: Hersh Talner’s red hair had turned completely white. Can you understand that, my boy? A single sheet of blank paper had turned him into an old man.”
The watchman’s eyes were moist; so were Grisha’s. And my father? the boy wondered. Did he too get old? Did the watchman know? Zupanev seemed to know everything.
“Listen, my boy,” Zupanev said to him in his monotone, bringing him back into his own era, his own world, where men pray and lose hope for the same reasons. “Try to understand what I’m telling you. Each generation shapes its own truth. Who will tell our truth whose witnesses have been murdered?” He paused and began grimacing again: “I know who. The crazy historians, the paralyzed acrobats. And do you know who else? I’ll tell you: the mute orators. Yes, my boy, the mute poets will cry forth our truth. Are you ready?”
And the adolescent could only nod: Of course I’m ready. I want to get old fast.
Berlin 1928. I was almost nineteen and life was beautiful. The world was crumbling around me, but I didn’t mind. On the contrary: I felt alive—living, as the expression goes, intensely.
I had begun writing poems and more poems. They were not worth much, and I no longer like them; I prefer those I wrote later, here in prison. But what was important was to keep myself busy, to express myself, to say what I thought about people, what I felt for them—not for everyone, of course, not for the industrial tycoons with their pompous, sinister manners, but for their pitiful slaves, the wretches like myself—and there were a lot of us.
Life was funny. Though housewives no longer went marketing with suitcases stuffed with banknotes, and shopkeepers no longer went home pushing wheelbarrows filled with money, the poor were still poor and hungry.
I gave, I kept giving as much as I had, sometimes less, mostly more. The money I had brought from Liyanov still represented a veritable fortune. Compared with my new friends I was a Rothschild. Compared with Rothschild, to be sure, I was … But why should I have compared myself with Rothschild? That was the fashion at the time. People used to say, “Oh, if only I were
like
this one, or
like
that one.” It made me laugh. One day I quoted Rebbe
Zusia, the famous Hasidic master, who told his friends and disciples, “When I appear before the celestial tribunal, the Prosecuting Angel will not ask me, ‘Zusia, why weren’t you Moses?’ Or, ‘Why weren’t you Abraham?’ Or, ‘Why weren’t you Jeremiah the Prophet?’ No, he will ask, ‘Now, Zusia, why weren’t you Zusia?’ ”
To which my new friends responded by laughing at me. “So now you’re quoting rabbis? Here? What’s the matter with you, poor Zusia?”
They all belonged to that phantasmagoric milieu in Berlin where intellectual and artistic clowns, political and antipolitical militants flitted from one pastime to another, from one profession, lover, mistress or confessor to another.
We would meet at Chez Blum, at the New Parnassus or at one of the other clubs and carry on noisily, going into artificial flights of ecstasy, getting into fights but being reconciled the same day. We discussed the Versailles Treaty, Rosa Luxemburg, Nietzsche’s madness and Plato’s homosexual tendencies. Politics, modern literature and philosophy, theories of art or Communism, Fascism, pacifism—we never stopped talking. We were drunk on words, invariably the same ones: progress, change, realism, the proletariat, the sacred cause, the cause that recalled into question all other causes.