Free And the Sea Is Never Full by Elie Wiesel Page A

Len is silent. Then he gives me the news: My sister Bea is ill, gravely ill; they have just operated; she has cancer. Len is sobbing. Frozen, I cannot speak for a long moment. Never have I heard my heart beat so loudly. I fall into a chair and ask: “What can be done?” The physician in Len is pulling himself together: “Nothing unfortunately, nothing.” I ask him whether Bea knows. No, she doesn’t. Besides, she is still in recovery.
    I return to my class. My students look at me, perplexed. They can sense my distress. I tell them: “Let’s go on, shall we?” But they lookat me and remain silent. I don’t know how, but I make them speak. “Where were we?” I don’t know and they, evidently, don’t either. Fortunately, the moment to conclude comes soon.
    Back home, Marion places Elisha in my arms to console me.
    I begin a series of shuttles between New York and Montreal. Bea knows she had a tumor but believes it to have been benign and thinks it was successfully removed. That is what she says to me.
    But then why this shadow in her gaze?
    And then comes another blow. My sister Hilda loses her husband, Nathan, a gentle, infinitely kind man.
    Hilda tells me: They were on the road. Nathan was driving; suddenly he stopped and asked for a piece of candy—he who had not eaten sweets since childhood. The next moment he was dead.
    Born in Tarnów, Poland, he had emigrated to France between the wars. A fervent Zionist, he dreamed of living in Israel. He will be buried there.
    Bea calls me from Montreal; she does not feel up to attending the funeral. She asks me to understand; she is afraid. Of course I understand: Cancer is frightening, and so are cemeteries, even to someone as brave as my sister. “Explain to Hilda that …” No need to explain. Hilda understands. I accompany her to Israel; I am at her side at the cemetery. The entire Israeli family is there.
    By chance, at the cemetery entrance I meet Moishele Kraus, the former cantor of Sighet. At my request he sings the prayer for the dead at the open grave. A distant relative gives a brief eulogy. It is my first time attending a burial in Israel. I didn’t know that here men are buried only in their
talit
, without a coffin. It is also the first time that I hear the Kaddish recited here, so different from the one said by the orphan every day of the first year of mourning. It seems heavier, harsher. It is frightening. I am glad Bea did not come.
    In the United States, the presidential campaign is in full swing, noisy as ever. And this time around, mean.
    Robert Bernstein, head of Random House, is intent on my meeting one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination, the senator from South Dakota, George McGovern. Marion and I are invited to dinner in a quiet restaurant.
    The senator makes a good impression. He appears to be a man of integrity, obsessed not with power but with the use he might put it to. He speaks softly without moving a muscle in his face.
    I ask him: “Why do you want so much to be president? The campaign is harrowing; it depletes you. After all, you are an influential and respected senator. Wouldn’t it be wiser to strengthen that position, which is unanimously respected?”
    McGovern responds: “Nixon must be defeated. He is evil incarnate. And I am the only one who can beat him.”
    How naive of McGovern. He did not realize that he was the only one who could not defeat Nixon.
    Moreover, the sitting president is doing rather well. The Watergate scandal is still to come. Foreign policy dominates the news. Sure planes are bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, but isn’t it Nixon who, together with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, makes historic visits to China and Moscow? Not only will Nixon take the elections, he will win by a large margin.
    The night the results are announced, I see young students weep.
    It was in 1973 that
Le serment de Kolvillag (The Oath)
was published in Paris. It is a bleak novel, devoid of hope. With the