“Will you listen to me? Gyula, will you?” I implored.
He jumped up as if I had just forced him to reopen his eyes. There was a little sardonic laugh.
“No, I won’t,” he said.
“But I’d like you to know.”
“To know what?” he asked harshly.
“Everything.”
“I don’t need your stories in order to know.”
Good old Gyula! I thought. What happened to the young woman on the beach? Did you insult her? Did you tell her, “You are a little bitch, a dirty little bitch?” Did she understand that these were words of love?
“Gyula,” I asked him, “what happened to the unknown woman?”
“What unknown woman?”
“The one on the beach. The one who smiled at you?”
He was overcome by a loud laugh that must have been hiding a wave of tenderness surging up in him from the distant past.
“Oh, that one?” he said in a voice that tried to sound vulgar. “She was a little bitch, a dirty little bitch!”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Did you tell her that?”
“Of course I told her!” He realized I was smiling. “You monster,” he shouted at me in disgust. “Let me work. Otherwise I’ll beat you up!”
The day before I was supposed to leave the hospital, Gyula came in surrounded by an aura of arrogance. He stood like a victorious general at the foot of my bed, between the river and me, and announced the good news: the portrait was finished.
“And now, you can die,” he said.
Gyula placed it on a chair. He hesitated for a second. Then, turning his back to me, he stepped aside. My heart was beating violently. I was there, facing me. My whole past was there, facing me. It was a painting in which black, interspersed with a few red spots, dominated. The sky was a thick black. The sun, a dark gray. My eyes were a beating red, like Soutine’s. They belonged to a man who had seen God commit the most unforgivable crime: to kill without a reason.
“You see,” Gyula said. “You don’t know how to speak; you are yourself only when you are silent.”
He quivered slightly, unable to hide his emotion.
“Don’t talk,” he added. “That’s all I’m asking you.”
And to hide, he went to the window and looked at the playful waves of the East River moving elegantly toward their date with infinity.
He had guessed. It was enough to look at the painting to realize. The accident had been an accident only in the most limited sense of the word. The cab, I had seen it coming. It had only been a flash, but I had seen it, I could have avoided it.
A silent dialogue now took place between Gyula and me.
“You see? Maybe God is dead, but man is alive. The proof: he is capable of friendship.”
“But what about the others? The others, Gyula? Those who died? What about them? Besides me, they have no friends.”
“You must forget them. You must chase them from your memory. With a whip if necessary.”
“Chase them, Gyula? With a whip, you said? To chase my father with a whip? And Grandmother? Grandmother too, chase her with a whip?”
“Yes, yes, and yes. The dead have no place down here. They must leave us in peace. If they refuse, use a whip.”
“And this painting, Gyula? They are there. In the eyes of the portrait. Why did you put them there if you ask me to chase them away?”
“I put them there to assign them a place. So you would know where to hit.”
“I can’t, Gyula. I can’t.”
Gyula turned and all of a sudden I saw that he had grown older. His hair had become white, his face thinner, more hollow.
“Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead,” he said looking right through me. “It is man’s duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.”
Yes, he had grown older. It was now an old man talking to me and handing over to me the ageless knowledge that explains why the earth is still revolving and why man is still looking forward to tomorrow. Without catching his breath, he went on as if he had saved these words for me for a long time.
“If your suffering splashes others, those around you, those for whom you represent a reason to live, then you must kill it, choke it. If the dead are its source, kill them again, as often as you must to cut out their tongues.”
A boundless sadness came over me. I had the impression I was losing my friend: he was judging me.
“What if it cannot be done?” I asked him, feeling very dejected. “What should one do? Lie? I prefer lucidity.”
He shook his head slowly.
“Lucidity is fate’s victory, not man’s. It is an act of freedom that carries within itself the negation of freedom. Man must keep moving, searching, weighing, holding out his hand, offering himself, inventing himself.”
All of a sudden I had the impression that it was my teacher, Kalman the cabalist, who was talking to me. His voice had the same kind, understanding accent. But Kalman was my teacher, not my friend.
“You should know this,” Gyula went on without changing his tone of voice, without even blinking an eye, “you should know that the dead, because they are no longer free, are no longer able to suffer. Only the living can. Kathleen is alive. I am alive. You must think of us. Not of them.”
He stopped to fill his pipe, or perhaps he had nothing else to add. Everything had been said. The pros and the cons. I would choose the living or the dead. Day or night. Him or Kalman.
I looked at the portrait and hidden in its eyes I saw Grandmother with her black shawl. On her emaciated face she wore an expression of peaceful suffering. She was telling me: Fear nothing. I’ll be wherever you are. Never again shall I leave you alone on a station platform. Or alone on a street corner of a foreign town. I’ll take you with me. In the train that goes to heaven. And you won’t see the earth anymore. I’ll hide it from you. With my black shawl.
“You’re leaving the hospital tomorrow?” Gyula asked in a voice that sounded normal again.
“Yes, tomorrow.”
“Kathleen will take care of you?”
“Yes.”
“She loves you.”
“I know.”
Silence.
“You’ll be able to walk?”
“With crutches,” I answered. “They took off the cast. But I can’t put any weight on my leg. I have to walk with crutches.”
“You can lean on Kathleen. She’ll be happy if you lean on her. Receiving is a superior form of generosity. Make her happy. A little happiness justifies the effort of a whole life.”
Kathleen will be happy, I decided. I’ll learn to lie well and she’ll be happy. It’s absurd: lies can give birth to true happiness. Happiness will, as long as it lasts, seem real. The living like lies, the way they like to acquire friendships. The dead don’t like them. Grandmother would not accept being told less than the truth. Next time, I promise you Grandmother, I’ll be careful. I won’t miss the train again.
I must have been staring at the portrait too intensely because all of a sudden Gyula started gritting his teeth. With an angry, enraged motion, he took a match and put it against the canvas.
“No!” I exclaimed in despair. “Don’t do that! Gyula, don’t do it! Don’t burn Grandmother a second time! Stop, Gyula, stop!”
Gyula, unmoved, didn’t react. His face closed and withdrawn, he was holding the canvas with his fingertips, turning it in all directions, and waiting for it to be reduced to ashes. I wanted to throw myself on him, but I was too weak to get out of the bed. I couldn’t hold back my tears. I cried a long time after Gyula had closed the door behind him.
He had forgotten to take along the ashes.
Also by Elie Wiesel
NIGHT
DAWN
THE TOWN BEYOND THE WALL
THE GATES OF THE FOREST
THE JEWS OF SILENCE
LEGENDS OF OUR TIME
A BEGGAR IN JERUSALEM
ONE GENERATION
AFTER
SOULS ON FIRE
THE OATH
ANI MAAMIN (cantata)
ZALMEN, OR THE MADNESS OF GOD (play)
MESSENGERS OF GOD
A JEW TODAY
FOUR HASIDIC MASTERS
THE TRIAL OF GOD (play)
THE TESTAMENT
FIVE BIBLICAL PORTRAITS
SOMEWHERE A MASTER
THE GOLEM (illustrated by Mark Podwal)
THE FIFTH SON
AGAINST SILENCE (edited by Irving Abrahamson)
THE OSLO ADDRESS
TWILIGHT
THE SIX DAYS OF DESTRUCTION (with Albert Friedlander)
A JOURNEY INTO FAITH (conversations with John Cardinal O’Connor)
A SONG FOR HOPE (cantata)
FROM THE KINGDOM OF MEMORY
SAGES AND DREAMERS
THE FORGOTTEN
A PASSOVER HAGGADAH (illustrated by Mark Podwal)
ALL RIVERS RUN TO THE SEA
MEMOIR IN TWO VOICES (with François Mitterand)
KING SOLOMON AND HIS MAGIC RING (illustrated by Mark Podwal)
AND THE SEA IS NEVER FULL
THE JUDGES
CONVERSATIONS WITH ELIE WIESEL (with Richard D. Heffner)
WISE MEN AND THEIR TALES
THE TIME OF THE UPROOTED
Hill and Wang
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1962, 2006 by Elie Wiesel
Translation copyright renewed © 1990 by Elie Wiesel
Preface copyright © 2006 by Elie Wiesel
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Originally published in 1961 by Éditions du Seuil, France, as Le Jour
English translation originally published in 1962 in the United States by Hill and Wang as The Accident
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wiesel, Elie, 1928–
[Jour. English]
Day / Elie Wiesel; translated from the French by Anne Borchardt.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-2117-0
I. Borchardt, Anne. II. Title.
PQ2683.I32J6813 2006
843'.914—dc22
2006041058
www.fsgbooks.com
*Le Jour (Day) was titled The Accident when it was first published in English.
Elie Wiesel, Day
(Series: # )
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