Free Elie Wiesel by The Forgotten Page A

in a platter of fruit. She seemed sad. “Father,” Malkiel asked, “why have you never thought of marrying again?”
    Elhanan Rosenbaum stiffened. His brow wrinkled. “Why do you ask? Why now?”
    “Just a thought. Perhaps to get back at you. What about you? You could have found someone.”
    Elhanan propped himself on one elbow. Loretta came back in with two glasses of hot tea: she thought hot teacould cure anything. Elhanan waited for her to leave before he answered. “I no longer know, Malkiel. I’m sure I once had a good reason.”
    “Is it because you loved Mother too much?”
    “Too much? When you love someone it’s never too much.”
    “Do you still love her?”
    A pause. “Yes, I still love her.”
    He stretched again. A remote dream made him happy and sad. Malkiel, too, felt sad. He loved his father with total, all-encompassing love. No one had ever been so close to him. This was the man who raised him, who sang him lullabies, who took him to nursery school in the morning and brought him home in the afternoon, who stayed at his bedside when he had the flu, who took him in his arms when nightmares came. Of course there was Loretta, too, the marvelous black maid from Virginia, who was always there and in complete charge of the household; and Malkiel was attached to her. But it was not the same. He loved his father. Just looking at him, or making him a pot of tea when Loretta was on vacation, he was overwhelmed, sometimes to the point of tears. In grammar school and high school he had friends, pals. But his closest friend was always his father. Then why had he made him suffer? “Tell me about Mother,” Malkiel said. “Tell me something I’ve never heard.”
    “I thought I’d told you everything. Have you forgotten?”
    Forgotten. The word struck Malkiel. So it’s true, he thought. There are words that hurt more than sticks and stones. “No, I haven’t forgotten a thing.” He rose and touched his father’s shoulder. “And I promise I never will.”
    “I believe you,” said Elhanan. He closed his eyes.

    Once upon a time, my father was another man. Upright, proud and open to the sounds of life. Everything interested him; doubt fascinated him; evil repelled him. His patients swore by him. His students adored him. He knew how to bring an ancient text to life; he made it speak. It was as if Isaiah were to address each of us individually; as if all were present to watch Titus enter the holy of holies.
    I liked watching him at home. At his worktable, beneath his dusty lamp, which Loretta never dared to clean, he conversed with invisible companions. I used to hear him murmur, “But no, that’s impossible!” He would set one volume aside and pick up another, and I would hear him admit, “Okay, you’re right.” And at my childish astonishment, he would explain: “You see, Malkiel? When I speak to Abraham ibn Ezra, it seems perfectly normal, and when he answers me through his text, that seems normal, too.”
    His greatest pleasure: reconciling texts and authors. He managed to find common ground between the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel, between an interpretation by Maimonides and one by his implacable adversary the Raavid; then he radiated happiness. “To you, to life, to the survival of your teachings!” he would say, as if addressing them, a glass of wine held high. For him, this was a celebration.
    At school his colleagues found him a bit odd. “He ought to get married again,” they said. “His son needs a mother, and he needs a wife.” They were wrong. We needed each other, and that was all.
    A woman called Galia Braun, a native of Ramat Gan, was in love with him. Madly in love with him. She taught biblical geography and blushed every time she looked at me in class. She was quite beautiful and somewhat strict but never with me. She loved my father through me.
    It was my father who taught me to read and write. I remember a story he told me during our first lesson. “In my