Free Elie Wiesel by The Forgotten

hopeless. After hours of talk that evening, you even managed to sum up a philosophical conclusion for both of us: “The important thing is to be aware of the present. The moment possesses its own power, its own eternity, just as love creates its own absolute. Hoping to conquer time is wanting to be someone else: you cannot live in the past and present at once. Whoever tries to runs the risk of locking himself into abstractions that separate a man from his own self. To slip out of the present can be dangerous—suddenly man finds himself in an ambiguous universe. In our world, strength resides in the act of creating and recreating one’s own truth and one’s own divinity.”
    Oh yes, Father. You tried to persuade me that even for you nothing was truly lost. To live in the moment is better than not to live at all.
    “It takes no more than a moment,” you told me that night, “to tell your fellowman that you love him; and in so doing you have already won a victory over destiny.”
    I remember: despite your weariness, despite your fear, you were in a kind of ecstasy. You were talking to persuade yourself as much as to reassure me; you were celebrating the present so as not to retreat from it.
    “The future?” you said to me. “The future is an illusion, old age a humiliation and death a defeat. Certainly, man canrebel. But his only true revolt is to shout ‘No’ in the present against the future. As long as he can move his lips he’ll be telling fate, ‘You challenge my right to live a full life—well, I’ll do it anyway; you challenge my happiness under the pretext that it is futureless, that because it’s severed from its roots it can never be perfect—well, I shall taste it anyway.’ ”
    Your eyes were shining, Father. You were breathing hard. I was, too.
    “I have the feeling,” you told me, “that fate is making fun of me. Because I cultivate memory, fate has decreed that I be deprived of it. Well, I say ‘No.’ When fate laughs at me, I’ll laugh at it. And I’ll be happy even if in my situation it’s absurd to do so.”
    At dawn you broke off our conversation. You were suddenly exhausted. So was I.
    “You’re young,” you said to me. “At your age you can be desperate and proud at the same time. It’s not so easy at my age. But I refuse to go under.”
    Me too, Father; me too.
    What to do?
    Elhanan was reading. Despite the late hour, he was waiting for Malkiel to return. A matter of habit. Even before the disease struck, he’d had a hard time falling asleep without chatting with his son, if only on the phone. Now it had become an irrepressible need.
    “Have a good day?”
    “Good enough,” Malkiel said.
    Stretched out on an old sofa beneath the yellow light of an old lamp, Elhanan was leafing through newspapers from the 1930s and ’40s. “Who died?”
    “An Indonesian general. A Belgian painter. A clothes designer,still young. A university president somewhere in Virginia.”
    “Page one?”
    “Twenty-eight.”
    Elhanan Rosenbaum took an interest in his son’s work, as if he knew something about it, which was by no means true. But he did know that the front page was better than the twenty-eighth. He knew that for his son’s career the position of a piece was important. “It’s unfair,” he sighed. “Only unimportant people are dying nowadays.” The disease had not weakened his sense of humor. “And Tamar?”
    “She sends a kiss.”
    “I’m very fond of her.”
    “And she of you.”
    “Why not—”
    “Because.”
    “Really, my son. You ought to—”
    “I know, I ought to marry her.”
    “What are you waiting for?”
    “A sign, maybe.”
    “What would you need?”
    Malkiel bowed his head. His father was right, wanting to see his son stand beneath the
huppah
before … before … “I understand. But it’s not so simple.” He took off his jacket, poured himself a glass of mineral water and sat down again on the hassock across from his father. Loretta brought