Free The Time of the Uprooted by Elie Wiesel Page B

by the refugee, the exiled, the hungry, the person who’s been uprooted and is living clandestinely, the fear of showing one’s afraid . . .
    “My poor wife,” the old man is saying. “How she suffered, flat on her back, thin as a rail, handcuffed to the iron cot, waiting for the first wave to hit, the first shock to shoot through her body and rip her brain apart . . .”
    Gamaliel is no longer listening to the old man’s soliloquy; he’s thinking about the patient he’s going to see. Can it be that she is someone he knows? A neighbor from back then, in Budapest? Companion of a one-night stand somewhere along the fields of flowers or dusty roads of this planet? A small shy voice somewhere inside him whispers, Suppose it’s Ilonka? If it is, will she remember him? After all, it’s been what seems like centuries since their ways parted. She stayed home, in her apartment, working at her trade of nightclub singer, living her life, whereas he . . . He has so many questions for her. About his mother. Who turned her in? What was she wearing? What did she carry in her pathetic little suitcase when she climbed into the cattle car? And about his father. Who tortured him in the interrogation cell at the notorious counterespionage headquarters on Andràssy Utca? Did his comrades help? What were their names? How did he maintain his Jewishness far from his own people? When and how did he die? So many things Gamaliel doesn’t know but wants to find out. He can’t even list them all. What questions should he ask Ilonka, if indeed it is she waiting there, to rouse her will to remember the distant and painful past? He knows only that the elusive, nebulous answers he seeks lie somewhere in a memory not his own, and that he cannot die in peace until he knows. Fortunately, Ilonka knows. For it is she he came to see. But is it she? Not necessarily. After all, that the patient speaks Hungarian means nothing; many Hungarians live in America.
    “What’s on your mind?”
    The old man’s intrusive question is exasperating. Gamaliel feels like telling him it’s none of his business. He shouldn’t pester a stranger like this. Let him go pick on someone else. But the old man is pitiful. Why hurt his feelings? Maybe he should just throw the question back at him.
    “As for me,” the old man says, as if he’d read Gamaliel’s mind, “what concerns me is language—that is, language in relation to electroshock treatment.”And he launches into a learned monologue on the connections between philology and semiotics as they relate to anthropology and psychiatry. “Yes indeed, you can tell if a person is in a state of advance or decline according to the words he uses to define those conditions. It’s all in the language. . . . Didn’t Leibniz say that language is the finest monument a people can build? Every word has its double, as does man: This double accompanies man, or denies him; it is always the aggressor. It distorts the reality that the word transmits. But where is truth? To flush it out, to corner it—there’s a goal for the seeker. And then, if he digs deeply enough into the word, he will find a truth set forth by our most remote, least-known ancestors. . . .”
    The old man pauses to pose the next question. “But if that word is telling a lie, is man up to the task of discovering the truth on which the word once was based? But then again, what is a lie? The opposite of the truth? But then what is truth? The Sophists, those masters of rhetoric, did not even ask the question. What interested them was the art of convincing. Now, there is conquest in conviction, and electroshock is the dreadful conqueror who convinces. But how about the conquered? Who speaks for them, for those who learned only to howl? What would we know of Plato and Confucius if their ability to express themselves had died with them? Similarly with Moses: What if the word of God had not burst forth from his lips but had sunk into the sands?”
    Well, well . . .