All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [115]
She let me read the letters the Greek writer had sent her in the twenties. They were love letters of stirring beauty. Though their liaison lasted just a few years, it seems their passion never died.
From that day, I plunged into Kazantzakis’s work and read it all, in one vast gulp. The great writer carried me into an enchanted universe in which man pursues with equal stubbornness his battle with himself and with God.
I spent a week listening to Rachel and then we parted. But our relations had changed. She became too touchy, too demanding. In her frequent letters she complained that I didn’t write often enough.
Years later I was on the French Riviera, covering the Cannes Film Festival. I decided to visit Kazantzakis. I obtained his address in Antibes and soon was knocking on his door. He answered in person and asked me what I wanted. When I said, “Nothing,” he closed the door in my face. A moment later he opened it again and said, “Come in.” He led me to a sofa, sat down next to me, stared at me intently, and asked, “Who are you?” I told him I was a journalist. “What do you want to know?” “Nothing,” I replied. “I just wanted to meet you.” He leaned toward me until our foreheads almost touched, and then he said, very softly, “You know her, huh?”
They had not seen each other in twenty-five years.
There was talk in Israel about the upcoming negotiations with the Konrad Adenauer government, and Dov asked me whether I would be ready to go to Germany. I wasn’t, but I said yes anyway.
After visiting Bonn, I spent a day in Dachau alone. I was troubled and depressed, for the Jewishness of the victims was barely mentioned. In Hitler’s day Jewish life had been in danger. Now it was Jewish memory that was at risk.
It was around that time that an unexpected source of income opened up for me: simultaneous translation. Molière was right: Sometimes you have talents you don’t know you have. I was completely unaware of the craft that would now supply me with desperately needed funds.
The telephone had rung. A man with a pleasant voice and a slight drawl—“My name is Teddy Pilley and I am in need of your services”—asked me whether I would be interested in a position as an interpreter at the upcoming conference of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. “Let me add that it’s well paid,” said the voice. “Two hundred dollars a day.” I thought I was hearing things. Two hundred dollars a day! At the time I was making fifty dollars a month. I’d be a millionaire. Teddy Pilley listened to my silence and then said, “But of course that doesn’t include the per diem.” I was speechless. What was a per diem? When I still hadn’t said anything, Pilley went on, “Come to the Congress offices tomorrow morning at eleven. You know the address? On the Champs-Élysées. We’ll talk. Are you interested?”
Was I interested! My only problem was I wasn’t sure I could do it. I had never done any “simultaneous” interpreting, didn’t even know what it was. I had never been to an international conference either. Why had they picked me? Well, I had nothing to lose. But the next morning I panicked. There were six candidates, and they apparently meant to test us one at a time. Well, I don’t like tests, and I said so to the pleasant man who greeted us as we arrived. “Don’t look at it that way,” he said. “Think of it as a game. We’re going to have some fun, that’s all.” I wanted to protest, but he quickly led me to a room where two booths had been set up, and a moment later I found myself sitting in front of a microphone wearing huge earphones. “I’m going to read something in French,” Pilley told me, “and you translate into Yiddish. A word of advice: Don’t think about the words too much. Let yourself be carried by the rhythm of my voice. It’s easy, you’ll see.” He began to read a political article from a morning paper.