Free The Sonderberg Case by Elie Wiesel Page B

According to her, our professor and protector shares her apprehensions about me.
    “He wonders,” she says one day, returning from a performance, “if you would still be able to write an objective review of a play in which I would be playing one of the leads.”
    “I have no idea.”
    “But do you think that could happen?”
    A shudder goes down my spine: I remember
The Three Sisters
. Alika with a group of students, in a small amateur theater. Does she know? I don’t let myself get flustered.
    “No doubt it could.”
    “And so? What would you do?”
    “You’re right, and so is the professor: it would be a problem for me. But maybe not for the reason you think. I would say to myself: if I like it, people will say it’s because of you. And if my review is critical, the people who don’t like me will snigger: look at that bastard, he’s humiliating his own wife.”
    “So? How would you get out of this dilemma?”
    “This is not about to happen tomorrow, as far as I know. We have time to think about it.”
    But, to tell the truth, I’d rather not think about it.
    ——
    When my grandfather read my articles, he said: “Long ago, in Judea, in the days when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem, a twenty-three-member court would sit and deliberate in cases requiring capital punishment. If the sentence was unanimous, it was immediately thrown out of court: it was inconceivable that, among the twenty-three judges, not one would side with the poor defendant, who was alone and helpless in facing them.”
    I told him that I wished I could have attended those trial deliberations and covered them for the newspaper at the time.
    “Remember the lesson, my son: when a man’s life is at stake, it is not theater.”
    It is day three of the proceedings. The experts at the courthouse are predicting the trial will be relatively short. Not many witnesses will be called to the stand. According to the prosecution, at the fateful moment, the defendant and his uncle were alone. No one saw Hans Dunkelman die. Going by what they call “circumstantial evidence,” provided by the local police, he fell from the heights of a plateau. But the question is, as we know: Was it an accident or a murder? The nephew’s ambiguous statement is disturbing and preys on everyone’s mind. How can someone be both guilty
and
not guilty? The young German remains silent while theother protagonists reveal themselves to be nonstop talkers. In a tribunal everyone wants to be heard. The only one who doesn’t seem to care is the main character, about whom there is so much curiosity that men and women have jammed the courtroom. From the very first hearings, I wondered: Will he even take the trouble to listen? He seems absent to the public and to himself.
    On the fourth day, I describe my impressions of Sonderberg to Paul.
    “He’s someone who is engaged in a struggle, and I don’t know against whom or what.”
    “Against fear?”
    “Perhaps.”
    “If he’s guilty, he could get the death penalty or, at minimum, life imprisonment. That’s a good enough reason to be afraid, isn’t it?”
    “Yes. But there’s something else; I sense it. Put it down to the kind of intuition that theater teaches you to cultivate. At a certain point, he looked at a woman in the jury. I caught his gaze. And his fleeting smile. As though he thought that if the twelve members of the jury had been women, his sentence would have been to make love to each of them.”
    “A swaggering smile?”
    “I don’t know. I think he was trying to destabilize her. But, for a second, he succeeded in destabilizing me.”
    Paul, lost in his thoughts, says nothing.
    ——
    To my amazement, the readers seem to like what I write. I see the hearings as a series of acts in the course of which the characters come onstage one after the other. Each session begins with the curtain going up; each adjournment is like an intermission. When the clerk tells the public to rise, it is like stage business;