All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [140]
He suddenly seemed annoyed. Once again I felt my chance slipping away. I kicked myself for having offended him by trying to bribe him. But he decided to let it go. “I like doing favors,” he said. “So come with me to Pierre’s. I’ll phone you tomorrow morning and give you the go-ahead.” He spoke as if it were a military operation. Here we go again, a voice inside me whispered, but I silenced it. I wanted to show my gratitude, but before I could thank him adequately, he extended his injured hand (I never did figure out why he shook hands sometimes with the right and sometimes with the left), said goodbye, and limped away. When I realized he hadn’t said what time he would call the next morning, I ran after him. “You’ll see,” he muttered. I started to ask again, but I could see he was getting annoyed. So be it. I would wait all morning, all day if I had to.
Givon kept his word. If he was a liar, he was as anxious to be believed as an artist is to be admired. My notebook indicates that he phoned at precisely 11:38 a.m. “Be ready for an urgent communication,” he said. So he was still intent on playing the conspiracy game. “When?” I whispered. In an hour. Once again he kept his word. “I dropped in on Pierre this morning,” he said. “We had breakfast alone together.” In other words, the meeting had already taken place, without me. I tried hard to swallow my bitterness, but Givon explained, “I had to speak to him about you first. I couldn’t just show up with you in tow without warning, could I?” So the plan was still on. “Pierre told me he would be happy to meet you. I even translated some of your articles for him. He was touched by the one about his investiture.” So I would see him tomorrow? “Absolutely.” There was a long pause, and then: “I’ll call you tonight. Will you be in?” “What time?” I asked, but he had hung up.
I was supposed to write an article for Yedioth that evening, but it could wait. Givon’s call took precedence. A man on intimate terms with the masters of the Kremlin and Peking, who visited Mordechai Oren in prison and had been photographed in the midst of a throng of Soviet officers, was worth the sacrifice. I sat home and waited, annoyed when Leneman used the phone. I wished I could have kept the line open by telling him the truth, but Givon never would have forgiven me. So I invented a tale: A beautiful friend of mine, a girl I loved, had promised to meet me tomorrow. It would be a catastrophe if I missed her call. Leneman and his wife both smiled. They wanted to know who the girl was and where I had met her. They didn’t go so far as to ask if she was Jewish, but I felt myself blush. “Shyness becomes you,” Madame Leneman said. Meanwhile, I bit my nails in anticipation. To keep him off the phone I got Leneman to talk about his wartime experiences in the Soviet Union. He succeeded in distracting me from Givon and his mysterious exploits as we discussed the stages of his interminable march to the depths of Siberia and Stalin’s insane anti-Semitism. Leneman had been first to speak of the Jewish tragedy in the Soviet Union. Actually, I listened with some skepticism. Labor camps in the USSR? Courts doing the bidding of the NKVD? Summary executions? It was like listening to Victor Kravchenko in Yiddish. It all seemed impossible, unthinkable. Yet Leneman was an eyewitness. Originally from Warsaw, he was a war refugee in Moscow, where he became the correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He had known Solomon Mikhoels, the great theater director whose murder in Minsk in 1949 sounded the alarm. In Moscow Leneman had associated with Jewish novelists who were later shot on Stalin’s orders: Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister. Despite everything I already knew—the so-called Doctors’ Plot, the anti-Zionist and anti-cosmopolitan campaign that had swept through the Communist world—I still could not get used to the idea that so many intellectuals could have gone on worshiping and remained faithful all these years to a viscerally racist despot. And then there had been the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov