Elie Wiesel (24 page)

In Palestine, Elhanan felt transported to a country at once familiar and mysterious. He seemed to recognize every stone, every tree, and every crossroad; but at the same time he felt a need to stop after every step he took, and cry out, “Is this only a dream?”

Hebrew inscriptions and street names—Yehuda Halevi and Don Itzhak Abrabanel—Jewish police speaking Hebrew, the Star of David gloriously displayed, the underground striking fear into the hearts of the British army: “Look, Talia! Read this! Listen to that!” Overcome by emotion, he passed from one wonder to another, in all the ecstasy of a teenager after his first date.

For the country, for the whole Jewish people, this was the finest hour. Each incident took on the dimension of an epic. After two thousand years of exile, a sovereign Jewish state was about to be reborn from the ashes. Everything would change: political structure and state of mind, foreign relations and self-esteem.

The first Sabbath with Talia’s parents. Zalmen was a civil servant, Reuma an editor. After the kiddush, Zalmen and Reuma embraced the young couple. “Let’s dance!” Zalmen shouted. Reuma needed no urging. Talia and Elhanan held back. “Come on, you too,” Zalmen said. “Happiness is here to be shared!”

Elhanan and his in-laws got along beautifully. Mutual respect, affection, generosity, no misunderstandings and no afterthoughts. When people talked about “mixed marriages”
between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in the Mea Shearim neighborhood, they mentioned both couples.

Before looking for work, Elhanan and Talia went to the seashore for a few days. In a cabana on the beach they loved each other. Elhanan would always remember immense, violent waves.

Not far from them, two men walked slowly along the beach. Leaning on a cane and limping badly, an old man seemed to search for something in the sand. All these dramas that one observed. Some of the women were quietly beautiful but without sparkle; others seemed to light up the sea and the sun itself. The handsomest faces were those that did not reveal what they had lived through.

On their return, the days fell into a normal rhythm: attacks on the army and the police, curfew, repressions, demonstrations against regulations. Sensational news: the three resistance organizations concluded an agreement to cooperate. In one night ten bombs exploded at various nerve centers. The Lehi blew up military aircraft, the Irgun blew up a barracks, the Palmach and the Haganah brought in a few hundred refugees near Netanya. Unprecedented convulsions racked the country. Endless debates and discussions. When you’re fighting for independence, where do your rights end? How do you respond to death sentences imposed by military courts? To a whipping by the police the Irgun replied by publicly whipping a British soldier. The British authorities threatened to execute “terrorists.” These same terrorists took officers hostage: an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

Eretz Israel had not seethed like this since Bar Kochba’s revolt.

(Any victory is temporary, a victory over time more so than others. Yet now Elhanan could not restrain himself. For him, every moment of clarity was a triumph that he earnestly tried to sustain. At those times he would speak until exhausted, not knowing if it would be granted him to finish the story he had begun.

So he often had the feeling that the memory he was summoning was the last. Like the scribe copying Holy Scripture, he wanted to bless God for each word that he succeeded in bringing to life.)

F
ool that I am, I never realized that Talia was leading a double life. I never guessed. She covered her tracks perfectly, she who never lied about anything. She claimed she was working for the secret service of an organization for underground immigration. In the evening she sometimes left me, saying in the most natural tone, “I’m on duty tonight. Don’t wait up for me; I’ll see you in the morning. If I sleep late, wake me. You know I love to have breakfast with you.” Only later, lifetimes later, when I came back from Amman, did her parents tell me the whole story. They knew it all along.

At the time, I was working in the Czech consulate. I knew the vice consul. He’d studied at the yeshiva in Feherfalu, and my parents had suggested that he “eat a meal” every Wednesday. “I spoke to the consul about you,” he told me one day. “We need someone like you, with Hebrew, Yiddish, German and the Slavic languages.” They hired me as a translator. A decent salary and a reasonable work load. Talia couldn’t get over it: “How did you manage to do so well so soon? Do you realize—you’ve barely arrived and you’re already set!” What impressed her most was my consular ID. “If I understand this, you’re almost a diplomat, aren’t you? Do you have diplomatic immunity?” Talia laughed, and I too. I saw her happy, and I laughed.

I should have been more careful.

I remember one morning she was reading the paper and she turned pale. Overcome, she almost passed out. “What is it, Talia? Are you sick?” There was another question on the tip of my tongue, but I preferred not to ask it: Could you be pregnant? I brought her a glass of cold water. She took a sip, then another, as she stared at the front-page photo: five men, still young, chained together and surrounded by British police. “That’s Saul,” she said.

“Which one?”

She pointed: in his twenties, bushy-browed, an ironic smile. I asked, “Do you know him?”

She knew him. “A friend from school days.” In fact, he was a comrade in arms. And the others? They, too, but she didn’t know them: compartmentalizing was a rule of the underground. Arrested by British police during an attack on a military base, the five were to be tried by a military court. And then? The scaffold. “It has to stop,” she said. I agreed. But I was against terrorism. Talia and I discussed this often. “And you don’t oppose the British oppression that produces terrorism?” Yes, I did. “Then you’re against everybody?” Yes. I was against everybody; they were all too violent for me.

Even so, she was noticeably preoccupied with armed resisters. Most of her reading was news reports and articles about them. Irgun, Lehi, Palmach, Haganah: she knew them all as if they were her domain. She knew their tactics and the names of their leaders. The Haganah? Moderate, prudent. The Palmach: an elite paramilitary unit. The Irgun: more extremist than the Palmach. The Lehi: more extremist than the Irgun.

In 1946 and ’47, everybody talked about those four movements. Not a day went by without one of them sabotaging
a bridge or a strategic building. Daring and ingenious, they penetrated the heart of civil and military administration. They extorted money from banks, cut telephone lines, stole vehicles and munitions, took hostages, and then issued communiqués: invisible, they were as ubiquitous as their too visible oppressors.

When I came home from the office one Sabbath morning I found Talia in tears. Rigid with pain, she was reading accounts of the trial of two underground fighters. Armed when captured, they refused to plead guilty. More, they denied the legitimacy of the proceedings. To every question from the judge they responded, “We’re Jews, and this land is our land.” The rest of the time, they sang. The prosecutor made speeches, the witnesses bore witness, the judge grew furious; but the accused sang. Finally the court tried them in absentia. To inform them of the death sentence, the judge and his entourage went to their cells. The two resisters received the verdict singing. One of them, Shimon, said, “You can keep us from living, but you cannot keep us from singing.” Wrenched, Talia’s father remarked, “Those words will live in the legend of Israel.” Reuma wiped her tears and said, “May Israel’s guardian keep them safe.” Talia corrected her: “They’re keeping Israel’s guardian safe.” I never intervened. Of course I admired the young Jewish heroes and grieved over their lot; but in my heart of hearts I thought, What a waste; haven’t we lost enough blood? My in-laws, surprised at my silence, exchanged glances, as if wondering whether I understood. No, I did not understand.

I was a fool.

One Friday night we were waiting for Talia, who was late, something that had never happened before. We were always together for the first Sabbath meal. I liked to hear my father-in-law recite, in his heavy Russian accent, praise of
his wife, that “woman of valor,” and I liked my mother-in-law’s Yemenite
zemirot
, and I liked the mood at table. Sometimes I could close my eyes and see myself once more in my father’s house; I would tell him about Sabbath in Jerusalem.

Talia late? Where could she be? At the office? On a Sabbath eve? “Something must have come up,” said my father-in-law. “Maybe a boat came in unexpectedly.” He proposed that we sit down to dinner. My mother-in-law shook her head no. “Let’s wait,” she said.

“You’re right. Sabbath isn’t Sabbath without our daughter.”

Talia came home after midnight. She was unrecognizable. Her hair was tangled, her eyes swollen, her skirt and blouse stained with oil and blood. “I need a hot bath,” was all she said. She went upstairs, spent twenty minutes in the bathtub and came downstairs glowing, as if nothing had happened. Anguish fled from my mother-in-law’s face; it was replaced by pride.

Next morning we heard on the radio that the Irgun had attacked a military convoy. Two soldiers dead, three wounded. The terrorists had sustained no casualties.

Everybody knows the rest. The world press told pretty much the whole story. The British command ordered a curfew. Gigantic raids, mass arrests.

“Was it worth it?” I asked Talia at dinner, later.

“Of course it was worth it.”

“Look around: the whole country’s suffering for one skirmish.”

“Look around: that skirmish did permanent damage to the prestige of the British Empire.”

“Are you sure? On one side, a pinprick. On the other, draconian punishments.”

“A few more pinpricks like that, and the British army won’t have enough medicine to treat themselves.”

“Well, listen to you defending terrorists!”

“They’re not terrorists. They’re freedom fighters, they’re the resistance!”

“If you admire them that much, what would you say if I decided to join them?”

Talia became serious. She seemed to be considering my question, which was only intended as a joke, and then she answered, “If you join an underground movement, I hope it’s because you admire it and not just because I do.”

The truth is, I wasn’t ready. I recognized the resistance’s courage and generosity, but from a distance. They chose danger, and that was their business. I’d been through enough danger in my youth. I broke with violence in 1945. Forever? Why not forever?

Was it perhaps because we felt that fate was about to separate us and that we had to live out our whole future in a few months, a few deeds? We loved each other with a perfect and all-consuming love that haloed our daily existence with a fragile mist of eternity.

Sometimes Talia said, half seriously, “All this has me worried. What’s happening to us is too beautiful, too pure. The gods are jealous. Let’s do something to appease their envy.”

“What do you suggest?”

“A quarrel.”

“About what?”

“Anything.”

“All right,” I said. “You first.”

We argued for a moment and then burst out laughing.

I felt the threat everywhere. To wait for Talia when she worked late tested my nerves. One morning as I watched her drink her coffee, completely preoccupied, I felt my heart palpitating, as if it would burst. Usually the coffee mustache made me laugh. Not now. Now I suffered. Talia
raised her head: “Are you in pain?” No, I was not in pain. It was something else, but what it was I could not say.

On November 29, 1947, an exuberant and profound joy surged through the country. Towns and villages, kibbutzim north and south, all applauded the United Nations vote in a delirious whirl. The world had finally acknowledged the validity of Jewish demands. Praised be Thou, Lord, Who granted us this victory. Everyone burst into song, into dance, into a celebration of history’s meaning and a triumph over destiny. A groundswell stirred the Jewish people’s memory. Never again, the wandering; never again, the exile; never again, the fear. In a burst of happiness, Talia kissed her parents and took my arm. “Let’s go make love,” she whispered. “Now?” I was startled. “With the whole world looking at Lake Success, you want to go to bed?” “Yes. Later, when our children ask us what we were doing when the United Nations voted for Israel’s independence, we can tell them, or at least think: we were making love.” And truly the people of Israel everywhere made love, not physically but through the joining of all their memories of the past and their hopes for the future. Every one of them felt at home in history, at last; every one of them meditated upon fate and said Amen.

In Palestine as in ancient Judea, some attitudes quickly changed. After the United Nations vote I shared the general belief that war was inevitable and not to serve would be dishonorable.

Next day I told Talia I’d decided to join an underground group. “Which one?” she asked. I had no idea. For my purposes, one was as good as the next. I was not involved in politics; I trusted my instincts. Also luck, which decreed
that on this day the Lehi’s pamphlets would impress me by their lyrical tone and mystical content. A colleague at the consulate hinted that he had contacts with the movement. “Can you put in a good word with someone?” He could. A week later, December 10th or was it the 12th, I found myself in a cellar, before three men hidden by a curtain. They put me through a grueling interrogation. They insisted on hearing all about my past, my activities and opinions, my social relations. I wasn’t offended. They were doing their job, after all; how could they be sure I wasn’t an informer? “We’ll be in touch,” said a shadow. “When?” The same voice replied, “First lesson: don’t ask questions.”