All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [129]
A sage approached me outside my hotel in Bombay. “For five rupees I’ll tell your future.” I told him I would give him ten if he could tell my past. Taken aback, he asked me to write down my date of birth and any other date on a piece of paper. He snatched it from my hand, turned his back, and remained still for a moment. What was he calculating? When he turned to face me, he looked terrified. “I see bodies,” he said. “Many bodies.” Now it was my turn to be taken aback. How could he have known what April 11, 1945, meant to me? And yet.
I spent a Shabbat with a Jewish family in Bombay. I went to synagogue. My hosts proudly told me of their success. The Sassoons and the Kadouris were super-rich families, veritable dynasties. But it had never occurred to anyone to discriminate against them because of their origins or their ties to Judaism. There were so many ethnic groups, languages, cultures, and traditions in this vast country that Jews did not attract special attention. In one of the synagogues I met a Jewish American student who wanted to convert to Buddhism. I asked him why, and his answer saddened me: “Judaism is egocentric while Buddhism is universalist.” Had he ever really studied his people’s tradition? Probably not, but …
I spent an unforgettable evening in an ashram learning to listen to the stars, and to listen to Him who listens in silence. I learned to receive offerings of smiles. I plumbed and absorbed the teachings of old sages. At night it was hard to tell whether I was dreaming. In the morning it was hard to tell whether the light came from above or from higher still.
This sort of pilgrimage was not yet as fashionable as it became later. In one place I was the only foreigner among one hundred young monks contemplating the meaning of suffering. When our eyes met, they would greet me with the graceful Hindu gesture of raised hands, smiling and nodding as I smiled back. I attended their prayers. Their chanting of om still echoes in my ears. One old master invited me to join him in his walks, yet I left the ashram without ever having heard his voice.
I was drawn to India and to the spiritual force and intellectual possibilities it represented. But in the end I had to tear myself away. Its concepts of existence and of God were too different, too distant from mine. A Jew considers pain an insult to man. I have no right to turn my back on the suffering of others. Jews must “choose life,” in the here and now, and the living. In fact, the same word—hayyim—means both “life” and “the living.” I have no right to postpone my salvation for an eventual reincarnation.
I returned from India even more Jewish than before.
GRANDMA NISSEL, her black scarf knotted under her chin, chats with Tsipouka. Grandmother is somber, my little sister serene and pensive.
They are sitting quietly on a bench covered with dead leaves. I tell myself it must be autumn. It is always autumn in the cemetery.
I approach the bench on tiptoe, with gliding but annoyingly noisy steps. I try to listen. But all I hear is the rustling of leaves. I tell myself the leaves are speaking for the dead, and that when they fail to rustle it means the dead don’t feel like talking.
The dead invade my sleep even more often these days, plowing it up as if to reap images of themselves, images undistorted by time.
I awake early in the morning, exhausted. In a panic, I strive to grasp a word, a call from that world from which I so reluctantly escaped.
I close my eyes.
She is pale, my grandmother.
And so is my little sister.
In my dream I walk with them to the point beyond which the living may not advance. I turn back.
And begin again.
A free ticket from El Al enabled me to visit Montreal. Bea seemed happy enough; she was now working at the Israeli consulate. Here, unlike in occupied Germany,