As he walks along the Brooklyn street, hands stuffed in the pockets of his raincoat, Gamaliel is trying to shake off his memories, let them go haunt someone else under some other sky. His gloomy thoughts turn to the events that are threatening the world at the end of the century. In the name of the fatherland, supposedly civilized countries send to death young people who would rather be dancing the frenzied dance of desire. Under the noble pretext of advancing science, man becomes a slave to machines. There is a risk that those who claim to be honoring their people’s past in fact may do it discredit. They talk themselves into saying nothing. The gods of hate hide behind slogans of brotherhood; they fool everybody, including themselves.
In his melancholy mood, Gamaliel wishes he could be in the company of his four friends: Bolek with his secret, Diego with his stories of the Spanish Civil War, Yasha with his cat, Gad with his adventures. All so different and yet so close to one another. He would like to be listening to their voices, proving himself worthy of their confidence but never judging them, adding his exile’s testimony to theirs. He might never see them again. He has no idea why that thought comes to his mind, but he knows it is not the first time; it’s as if he expects each of their meetings to end in disaster. Usually, he dismisses the notion with a smile: you and your crazy forebodings. But today he doesn’t smile it away. He feels as if his friends are slipping out of his sight, out of his life. As if they pitied him. Is he ill? Those who are ill feel sorry for those they love. Is this true for refugees as well?
Adam and Eve: the first to be uprooted, the first exiles, the first stateless ones, driven out of the first family home, where life was beautiful even when it wasn’t. Like them, their descendants today wander the earth, fleeing the serpent with its deadly poison. Others decide their fate. They are no longer free to act, to believe, to choose their places, nor even to renounce freedom. As in ancient Greece, where they were called apolis, they are considered harmful, or dangerous, and so they are kept aside from humanity.
“All of us are like Adam,” said a Sage in antiquity. Not I, Gamaliel says to himself. I’m not Adam; Eve is my mother, not my wife. And I want to protect the children, my own and all the others, from the world of my madness. Where are they growing up, in what accursed land beset by what enemies? Why so much hatred? And what about himself, Gamaliel, the exile? He has done no harm, has taken nothing from others. Hasn’t seduced their women or led their children astray. Hasn’t taken their place in the sun. And yet. Why is he so unloved? Why do people he has never met shun this solitary intruder who carries his past like a load on his shoulders? It’s strange: The word refugee has lost its biblical meaning. The Bible provides for cities of refuge, where those who kill someone by accident can take shelter from avengers. Of course, the refugees are not entirely free of guilt, so, Scripture specifies, they must remain in these cities of asylum until their sin is expiated by the death of the High Priest. And that is why, adds the Talmud, the refugees are so often visited by the mother of the High Priest, who brings them clothing and sweets and fruits in the hope that if their lives are pleasant enough, they will not pray for her son’s death. In our time, it’s the innocent who need refuge.
Gamaliel shakes his head: What is the point of collecting all this information from so many sacred and secular texts, when their authors all end up in the potter’s field of history? Yes, it’s true I learned about King David’s turbulent life of love and war, and his son and successor Solomon’s pearls of wisdom, but also the treason of his other sons, Absalom and Adonijah. But what use is that to me today? I know that the first translation of the Bible was ordered by Ptolemy, who had seventy scholars locked in cells, each in solitary confinement, and that Diogenes lived like a dog, so he was nicknamed “the cynic.” That the Talmud is compared to an ocean deep beyond measure. That Maimonides wrote some of his works in Arabic, and Spinoza wrote in Latin. That Erasmus dedicated his Praise of Folly to Thomas More, who coined the word utopia, the place that never was. That Hölderlin went mad and closed himself off from the world thirty-six years before he died. That Goethe hated the Bible, which he considered a trash heap of “Egypto-Babylonian sodomy.” I made a study of the laws governing the right of asylum in antiquity, and asceticism in the Middle Ages. So? Just where did all that get me? There are so many who know more than I do, who understand the world better than I do. I would be truly learned, a great scholar, if only I could retain everything I’ve learned from those I have known. But then would I still be me? And isn’t all that only words? Words grow old, too; they change their meaning and their usage. They get sick just as we do; they die of their wounds and then they are relegated to the dust of dictionaries.
And where am I in all this?
GAMALIEL GLANCES ABSENTLY AT HIS WATCH. IT’S still early. Go to Manhattan and drop in unannounced on one of his friends? No, not enough time for that. He goes to a diner that is a hangout for students from a nearby campus. Some of them are standing around, talking sports and politics. He takes the only seat left at a small round table. A bored waiter comes by to take his order: a bottle of mineral water. “That’s it? How about some coffee to wake you up?” All right, coffee. He picks up snatches of conversation around the table: “Politicians, none of them are any good,” a man who needs a shave is saying; “they’re all crooks. . . . Have you heard the latest? I tell you, if it were up to me . . .” The man sitting next to him, an angry young anarchist, by his looks, interrupts: “You’d do what? Don’t try to tell me you’d have the courage to go out and waste them. So you’d better shut up, right?” Echoes of the sixties, with their student rebellions. If he were in a better mood, Gamaliel would join in the conversation, and take notes that might come in handy someday. . . . It’s important to listen, to collect such information. A writer is a recording machine, so he tells himself at times. He picks up the sounds of the world, arranges them in order, labels them with symbols only he can understand. So, who is that young anarchist? Does he know the man he’s just insulted? Suppose it’s his own father? For a moment, Gamaliel imagines the two men in some other setting, at home perhaps, still quarreling; and he sees a woman, the young man’s mother, who is begging them to stop. But then the two men turn on her. “It’s all your fault,” shouts her unshaven husband. “You spoiled him.” “That’s true, I did spoil him,” the woman says. “I wanted to make a prince of him. You, too—I spoiled you also. I saw you as a king. I loved you once, you know.” “I swear you’re crazy. Kings and princes! In storybooks, they’re handsome and happy, but not in real life. In real life, there’re just poor ordinary guys like me, or garbage like that good-for-nothing son of yours. Or fools like you . . .” Gamaliel closes his eyes. I’ll have to remember that. I can use it in chapter two, when the man realizes he is fed up and decides to get even with the whole world. . . .
NOT ONE TREE GRACES THE STREET EASTERN Europeans call Forest Avenue, in ironic recognition of the fruitlessness of human endeavor: No trees line the ways of our lives. As he walks down the street, Gamaliel is trying to get his mind off the book he is writing. Its purported author, the famous Georges Lebrun, has already announced it in more than one television interview. “Well, Monsieur Lebrun, when may we expect your next novel?” an attractive journalist asked him recently, with only a momentary pretense of interest. “Oh, you know,” the author replied, giving that lazy shrug that was part of his image, “when a writer is so engaged with the work he is creating, the process is so complex, so enigmatic, that to say how long it will take . . .” Gamaliel stifles a snicker: The impostor has learned his lines well. If, after all the novels to which Georges Lebrun has signed his name over the years, without having written a single readable page, he still has no idea when he will deliver his next manuscript, it is for the excellent reason that his ghostwriter, Gamaliel, doesn’t know, either. “At least tell us what it’s about. . . .” “Oh no,” the author protests, sounding frightened now. “One must never talk of the baby before it is born. . . .” Yes, Georges Lebrun is playing his
role perfectly. And how about me? Gamaliel wonders. What is my role here?
Once, the celebrated author had seen his ghost at a big party given by a major publishing house. Lebrun was surrounded by admiring women who knew his photo better than his books. He tried to avoid Gamaliel, but Bolek, Gamaliel’s fellow refugee, who knew them both, mischievously brought the two together. “You’ve read his latest novel, haven’t you?” he asked Gamaliel, deadpan. And Gamaliel replied as he was shaking Lebrun’s hand, “Of course I have—and how about you?” Lebrun, red-faced, muttered a threat, which Gamaliel pretended not to hear.
Gamaliel was a reluctant ghost at the beginning, in Paris. He hated those “authors” who bought title to his work. Even the first one? No, not Georges Lebrun. His name was Bernard Murat. A charming man, a professor, with a head of undisciplined hair, enormous horn-rimmed glasses, awkward in movement. He appealed to Gamaliel: “I’ve begun a book on a medieval heretic—a well-born Spanish monk—but I’m in poor health and I don’t have the strength to finish it. Help me out and I’ll make it worth your while.” How did he know Gamaliel could be of use to him? It was guesswork. They had met one evening at Bolek’s place. Gamaliel’s friend Bolek was a Polish Jew, who, on the infrequent occasions when he’d had too much to drink, would imagine he was a character in a Dostoyevsky novel. A dozen or so guests were sipping lukewarm tea, smoking up the room, and telling dirty jokes. Everyone was laughing, except Gamaliel. As he was leaving, the professor asked if he might walk a few blocks with him. As they were walking, the professor offered in a tremulous voice to hire Gamaliel as his ghostwriter. “I don’t know you,” he said. “I don’t know who you are; our friend Bolek has told me nothing about you. Still, I’m certain you’re a writer.” “But I haven’t published anything!” Gamaliel exclaimed. “One can be a writer without publishing,” said the professor. “And I haven’t written anything yet!” “One can be a writer without writing,” the professor replied, imperturbable. Gamaliel stole a glance at the professor, and could not help teasing him: “And can you be a teacher without teaching?” The professor gave him a serious answer: “A writer can write without having readers, but to teach, you must have students around you. And unless I finish my book, I’m likely to lose my classes.” And so Gamaliel accepted the bargain. He felt sorry for the professor, who really believed that his reputation and career depended on the publication of his work. And his honor, too. In a word, his life. “But I’m not a historian,” Gamaliel protested, and immediately regretted his words. It little mattered whether he was a historian; Bernard Murat was, and that was all that counted.
Thanks to Murat, Gamaliel would read and reread the essential works on intellectual and spiritual life in the Middle Ages. He began with Europe, and then he focused his attention on Rome and Barcelona. Crescas and Pico della Mirandola, Averroes and Ibn Ezra. Maimonides, and, of course, Paritus the One-Eyed, that scholar whose imagination knew no bounds. How could one hear the voices of heaven, what was the true faith, and how could one recognize it? In those days, it was all too easy to fall into heresy. It was enough if you merely hesitated, or stood out in the crowd of the faithful, or refused to give the usual answers. Or if you said no: no to absolute power, no to the pitiless authority of the Church, and no, a hundred times no, to its dogmas. No to anything that denied freedom, even if you had to die for it, or with it. So it was that Giordano Bruno appeared as a hero in Bernard Murat’s book. Was Giordano at fault when he declared that without Creation there could be no Creator? Before they tore out his tongue, Giordano had a bitterly honest debate with his inquisitor, who for a moment almost gave in to pity, before he got hold of himself. Fertile imagination? Gamaliel went so far as to give his Giordano a companion in misfortune, a brother in his faith, a partner in his bold quest for the truth that is human, as opposed to the truth that claims to be divine. Gamaliel named this man Manuel de Toledo, and gave him the story of his life. One fine day, Manuel said good-bye to the three sons and a daughter he would never see again: He was arrested by monks at the command of the Grand Inquisitor. He would never leave the stifling, filthy cell, where the guard was Christ: a nod to Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov, of course. Despite his torturers, Manuel’s mind stayed clear and he kept his dignity as a free man. And meanwhile, Gamaliel’s wallet was fattening. But then in a moment of candor, the professor handed him back the manuscript, saying, “Fiction is a lethal trap for a historian like me. I’m better off doing without it.”
Gamaliel’s second contract was signed under more down-to-earth circumstances. It was Bolek again—Bolek knew everything about everybody—who said to him one day, “You’re broke, and don’t try to deny it. I can see it just looking at you. Well, I’m broke also, so that makes two of us. But I have an idea for you.” He burst out laughing. “You remember the story of the loyal wife who goes in tears to the rabbi because, she says, her husband doesn’t know how to play cards? ‘So what’s the problem?’ the rabbi asks, and she says, ‘The problem is, he doesn’t know how to play, but he keeps on playing.’ ” Gamaliel laughed, then said, “I don’t see the connection.” Now Bolek was serious: “I know a playboy who’s got it in his head that he wants to be a famous writer.” “So? Does he have a problem?” asked Gamaliel. “He doesn’t have a publisher?” “No, it’s not that he needs a publisher. What he needs is talent.”
Gamaliel was still single, as was his friend, and they were both penniless. Bolek was right: Why not try to earn a little money? Gamaliel was introduced to Georges Lebrun the next day at a Left Bank café popular with young artists and intellectuals; the two men took an immediate dislike to each other. Svelte and well built, Lebrun looked like a model or a ballroom dancer. He was vain and he smelled of money.
“It’s very simple,” Lebrun said, gulping his scotch. “I need recognition and you need money. Number one: I’m the author. Number two: If I don’t like a particular page or a particular character, either you change it to suit me or you get rid of it. And then, and never forget this: silence from now on. If you breathe a word of this to anyone, you’ll be back on the street before you know it. Understand?”
Gamaliel started to get up and leave without bothering to answer, but Bolek stopped him, then whispered in his ear, “Pay no attention; he’s always like that.”
“How does he dare talk to me as if I were his servant?”
“He’s trying to impress you.”
“I’ll never write for someone who’s such an imbecile, and a bad-mannered one besides.”
“He’ll pay you well, and that’s all that matters. Just do your writing and you’ll never have to see him again. Give me the manuscript and I’ll deliver it. So for a few months at least, we won’t have to worry about paying the rent.”
Bolek was always the practical one. You had to admire that in him. And he was right. But now he put forward a different argument: “Suppose by accident you were to write a good book. You don’t know anyone in Paris, so you wouldn’t be able to find a publisher. Then either no one reads your masterpiece, in which case it doesn’t exist, or else it’s published, not under your name, but it exists.”
“Suppose it’s not good enough as literature?”
“In that case, you should be glad your name’s not on it. That said, I know you well enough to be sure you can’t help putting some good work into it. Would it be right to deprive readers of that?”
With nothing to lose but his self-respect, Gamaliel wrote a draft, taking his time about it, and handed it to Bolek. In Gamaliel’s opinion, his manuscript lacked everything that a good novel requires. It was kitsch. A tearjerker. You want cheap emotions, here they are. What was worse, he had made errors in syntax and spelling that made him blush. After all, his first teacher, Ilonka’s friend or customer in Budapest, was no magician: He would have needed more time to help Gamaliel master French. Don’t worry, Bolek reassured him; he knew a teacher at the lycée who was proud of his grammar. He would ask the teacher to correct the manuscript in return for a share of the money. Six mo
nths later, Lebrun was being hailed by le tout Paris as the most promising writer of the postwar years. Women adored him; their husbands despised him but did not dare show it. Gamaliel was amused by this hubbub in society, one that would surely echo in literary circles. He waited patiently for Lebrun, once he had calmed down, to seek him out and demand another masterpiece.
He did not have long to wait.
THUS, WRITING BECAME A JOB FOR GAMALIEL: A way to live better and to pay for comfortable lodgings. As a trade, it was fairly interesting, and it paid pretty well. No sooner had he finished an assignment than he would forget it: The sorry collections of clichés that he ground out as a writer for hire were of no further interest to him. He would return to his one true passion, the Book of Secrets, which made him forget all his frustrations. In it he would put everything he could draw from his memory and from his soul. In the characters he created, was he not unconsciously putting himself in the story? The Jewish painter Chaim Soutine used to say, according to a close friend of his, that for some paintings he did not have to call on memory, and yet those paintings portrayed nothing but his memories. Gamaliel sometimes wondered if the same was true of words. Words could be a writer’s best friend, but they could also be formidable opponents. He suffered like a sick man when the words would not submit, would not let themselves be tamed. But when his imagination was on fire and the words allowed themselves to flow, he would bless his happiness and all Creation. At times, his words would take root in a reddening sky; at others, they would sink into a cemetery haunted by malevolent shadows, as in the brain of a madman. Why did Gogol, back from Jerusalem, weep when he had finished Dead Souls? Piotr Rawicz tasted ashes as he was writing “The End” on the last page of his novel Blood from the Sky. Does a writer love the words he writes, or does he reject them when they part company? Gamaliel believes, most of the time, that a word has a shadow that accompanies and stretches out from it; and the pain he suffers is inflicted by that shadow. But if he separates the word from its shadow, he will expose it in all its nakedness, and that is dangerous: Once on display, it will attract too many ears, too many knowing looks.