All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [13]
Then there was the violin. My instructor was an officer of the gendarmerie. I would go to his quarters twice a week, a bottle of tzuika in hand. He drank, I played. When the bottle was empty I would stop.
In high school I continued to learn, only to forget. My parents enrolled me as a special student in Jewish high schools, first in Debrecen and later in Nagyvárad. My mother’s dream was for her son to become a doktor rabiener, a rabbi with a doctorate. Private tutors in Latin, algebra, and physics drilled me for a month before I set out to meet the big-city professors. My sister Bea went with me. I can see her now, wearing her beret, leaving me at the gate, smiling and confident, as if to say, I’m here, you’ll be all right. It was an image that came back to me years later in a Montreal hospital, where Bea, ravaged by cancer, knew she was dying, and I knew she knew. I held her hand and smiled as if to say, I’m here, you’ll be all right.
Hilda and Bea attended the girls’ high school in Sighet. One of their problems was to avoid being forced to write on Shabbat. Generally my father worked that out through a method tried and true: he bribed the principal. My little sister Tsipouka was too young to go to school, so she learned alone at home. I loved to watch her bending over a book, serious and intent—with her golden hair she was as beautiful as an angel. I would hold my breath so as not to disturb her. What I felt for her I will never feel for anyone else.
I remember the night she was born. My father sent me to fetch Dr. Fisch, who stayed alone with my mother while Maria and Grandma Nissel came and went, lugging tubs of boiling water. At one point my grandmother told me to knock on the Borsher Rebbe’s window. “But he’s sleeping, Grandma,” I protested. “Then wake him up,” she said. “Ask him to intercede for your mother in heaven.” Naturally, I obeyed. The Rebbe wasn’t sleeping. His lighted window was open, and he seemed to be waiting for me. “Come in,” he said, and then, “Let’s go downstairs to the Beit Hamidrash.” So we went to the House of Study and Prayer. There he opened the Holy Ark, stood before the sacred scrolls, and invited me to recite a psalm with him. “It is impossible that a child like you and an old man like me would not be heard in heaven.” Verse upon verse, we recited the appropriate psalm. “Another,” said the Rebbe, frowning. I obeyed. After the third psalm he fell silent and I went home. Through the closed door I could hear my grandmother begging my mother: “Don’t hold back! Cry! Shout! You have to shout when it hurts, and I know it hurts.”
I went back to the Rebbe. “It’s not working,” I told him. “My mother won’t shout.”
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s open the prayer book.” He found something that spoke to my mother’s condition and recited a verse which I repeated after him. Suddenly we heard a piercing cry from across the street. The Rebbe leaned over to kiss the book. “You see?” he said. “Our people have just been enriched by a new child. May God bless it.”
My little sister was a blessing. But … No, no buts. Not yet. Everything in its time. My little sister did have a few years of happiness, as did I.
A few years later it was my mother’s turn to rush to the Borsher Rebbe. I had come down with a terrible case of appendicitis, and the doctor felt that I urgently needed surgery. He advised us to leave that very day for Satu-Mare and the Jewish hospital there. “But it’s Shabbat!” my parents cried. The doctor shrugged. “You have no choice.” Desperate, my mother ran across the street to consult the Rebbe, who told her, of course, that the law permitted violation of the Seventh Day when a life was at stake.
Of my hospital stay I remember mainly the ether I had to inhale