Malkiel Rosenbaum agrees begrudgingly to revisit the events of his father’s wartime experiences in Romania fighting the Nazis and, as a result, discovers another side to the stories, and a truth his own generation is in danger of forgetting.
Release date:
September 14, 2011
Publisher:
Schocken
Print pages:
320
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My name is Malkiel. Malkiel Rosenbaum to be exact. I feel that I must set it down. Superstition? To ward off bad luck? Perhaps I merely want to prove to myself that I have not yet forgotten my own name. Could that happen to me, too? One morning I could pick up my pen and it would not obey me; it would refuse to follow my orders for the simple reason that I would no longer be capable of issuing them. Malkiel Rosenbaum would still exist, but he would no longer be master of his own identity. I am forty years old. Malkiel Rosenbaum is forty years old. That, too, I must set down; it is important. I was born in 1948 in Jerusalem. I am as old as the State of Israel. Easy to remember. I am as old, and as young, as Israel. Forty. Plus three thousand. What does it matter? Only memory matters. Mine sometimes overflows. Because it harbors my father’s memories, too, since his mind had become a sieve. No, not a sieve: an autumn leaf, dried, torn. No, a phantom which I see only at midnight. I know: one cannot see a memory. But I can. I see it as a shadow of a shadow which constantly withdraws and turns inward. I hardly glimpse it, and it vanishes in the abyss. Then I hear it cry out, I hear it whimper softly. It is gone, but I see it as I see myself. It calls: Malkiel, Malkiel. I answer: Don’t worry, I won’t leave you. One day it will call no more. The shock was so violent that he lost his balance and almost fell to the damp soil; the name on the tombstone, tilted as if under the weight of its weariness, was his own. Malkiel ben Elhanan Rosenbaum.
A wild notion crossed his mind: could he already be dead? He could not remember living through his death. So what? That means nothing. Who’s to say that the dead carry their memories into the other world? Despite himself he leaned forward and deciphered the date: the month of Iyar 5704. May 1944. I’m a fool: I was not yet born. How can you die before you’re born? But then, why am I here? Could I have forgotten? No, forgetting is not your problem, not yet, but your father’s right? I’m here to remember what my father has forgotten. But do I live only to remember? Suppose life were only your ancestor’s imagination, or a dream of the dead?
Leaning on the tombstone of this grandfather who bore his name, he was suffused by an obscure and almost animal anguish, a black tide, menacing, portending disaster. Beyond the trees he saw the reddish-gray roofs of the town hall and the school. Beyond the tombs he saw the blood of the dying day and heard the moan of the yawning twilight. Living, he thought with dread. They call this living.
It’s the same with love. They say, If I stop loving I’ll die. And then one day they stop. And they’re still alive. They call that loving. They call that choosing life. God has ordained that. As He ordains faith. So He always wins: the opposite of God is still God. To flee God is also to draw near Him. You cannot escape him. Am I right, Grandfather Malkiel—you cannot escape him?
Answer me. Help me. Come to our rescue. Your son needs you, and so do I. My father no longer understands anyone and no one understands him. As if he’d gone mad. But he hasn’t. They say a madman, like an animal doomed to sacrifice, uses an intelligence different from ours, or at least a primitive form of ours. But my father’s intelligence has been crippled. He’s sick, Grandfather, and I’m fighting to help him.
His disease has a name, but he refuses to hear it. He will not let it be spoken in his presence. You’d say he was afraid of it. As if he were dragging a procession of soulless, faceless phantoms behind him. Strange, the apprehension. Is it because in his house, in the small town of his childhood, they avoided naming certain illnesses, certain disasters, for fear of being noticed by them? And now does he think he can fend off disease by not naming it? Whatever his reason, I must respect it to the end.
He pressed harder on the cold stone, as if he wanted to embed himself into it, or at least leave a visible and lasting imprint.
From a distance a hoarse voice hailed him: “Hey, stranger! Where’d you disappear to?” It was Hershel, the caretaker-gravedigger, a clumsy giant with a head carved of granite and a face of blackened bark. He seemed out of breath. “I lost sight of you, stranger. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m not so young anymore. My legs, oh my legs! If I were married I’d say they couldn’t chase my wife anymore. They don’t carry me around the way they used to. It’s not their fault, Here we say the years too can make us grow old. Ah, if I were your age . . .”
“I’m not so young either,” Malkiel said.
“Cut it out. You’re making fun of me. I could be your great grandfather.”
Well, thought Malkiel, my great-grandfather’s grave is here, too; I must try to find it.
“But I’m talking, talking, and you have to leave. We’re locking up. And be careful. A Jewish cemetery is a dangerous place even if it’s abandoned.”
“Dangerous for whom? For the dead?” Malkiel was a bit annoyed.
“For everybody. Except me. The gravedigger never has anything to fear. But other people . . . they don’t realize. A cemetery is a special place, and an old one even more so. Look around you, how calm it is. And if I told you that was only appearances, a trick? You bet. The dead are like you and me: jokers slip in the heroes, and between them they drive us crazy. They play all kinds of games. They will grab your coat and rip it, and grab your eyes and rip them, too. You’re a happy man, stranger. You don’t know about all that.”
The gravedigger sat heavily on a low tombstone, across from Malkiel. Mopping his brow with a huge patched handkerchief he’d pulled from an inside pocket, he went on. “Listen, stranger. A visitor from a nearby village showed up one day, a long time ago, before the war, and asked me to show him a relative’s tomb. I showed it to him. All of a sudden he turned to me and said, ‘Who’s that open grave for?’ Now, I’m the gravedigger, and I couldn’t remember digging a grave, for the simple reason that no one had died that week. And maybe you know that tradition forbids us to dig a gave before the person had died, for fear of tempting the Angel of Death. So who dug that open grave? The dead themselves? So I said to this visitor, Listen, friend, if I were you I’d get out of here now and go far, far away, as far as you can. He refused. I don’t believe in these superstitions, he said, disgusted. Well, you can guess the end. He left and went to the inn and a beam fell on him. They buried him the same day. In the grave waiting for him.”
The gravedigger gestured as he spoke. He was enjoying himself. I’ll give him a good tip, Malkiel decided; he’s earned it. Any man who spends his life among the dead deserves a good tip. Do the dead enjoy his stories?
“All right, then, let’s go,” said Hershel the gravedigger. “In these parts night falls fast, because of the mountains.”
Malkiel followed him out of the cemetery. At the gate a bucket of water stood ready for them. He washed his hands according to custom and gave Hershel two packs of American cigarettes. The gravedigger bowed low. “They’re worth four bottles of tzuika,” he said, patting his belly. “Listen, someday I’ll tell you about the Great Reunion. I owe you that much. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” Malkiel said.
Hands in his pockets, his throat dry, Malkiel walked along the river. Night was about to invade the town.
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