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By Root 2257 0

he and Zauber assured me would change my life for good. I made statements, signed documents and depositions. A month, a year went by. I returned to my hotel. Zauber returned to Israel, Bea to Montreal. From time to time I asked the lawyer how things were going. He was a patient man, and he advised me to follow his example. Eighteen months after the accident he accompanied me to court. This was not yet the trial, but a simple procedural matter. Two years after the accident, there was Still nothing. One day Hillel called me, and we had coffee together. He asked me about the trial. Wall Street, it seemed, had not been kind to him, and he was short of cash. But not to worry, he would work it out. He would wait. That day I instructed my lawyer to settle the matter within the week. He tried to talk me out of it. That was just what the insurance company was hoping for, he said. If they knew we needed cash, they would offer us peanuts. I replied that I didn’t care and that if he stalled I would replace him. The next day he informed me of the result of his negotiations: He would receive 30 percent of my payment and from the rest Hillel would be paid back.

That’s how I failed to become a millionaire.

But I did come away from the adventure with some memories. And with a novel that began this way:

“The accident happened one evening in July in the heart of New York, as Kathleen and I were crossing the street on our way to see The Brothers Karamazov.”

My novel The Accident was only partly inspired by reality. To begin with, the fictional Kathleen is not the Kathleen with whom I had broken up or, more accurately, who had broken up with me the year before. Second, although the story correctly describes my condition and feelings in the weeks after the accident (I recall that when I came to, I laughed at the irony of having survived the death camps only to be run over in the streets of New York), in the novel the “accident” is a suicide attempt.

Another episode, however, was drawn directly from reality: my encounter with Sarah. I met her on a bus between the Hôtel de Ville and the Place de la République in Paris. I felt her watching me as I read a Yiddish book. Blond and petite, her mouth framed by lines of disillusionment, she seemed lost in her own existence. She invited herself home with me. “Tell me a story,” I said, and she replied, “My name is Sarah.” My mother’s name, I thought to myself. To her I said: “That’s not a story.” “Yes it is,” she said. I sat down at my desk, but she remained standing, leaning against the door as if to prevent an intruder from entering or to stop me from leaving. I sank into an uneasy silence. Was she waiting for questions I never asked? Suddenly her eyes filled with tears and she cried, “Don’t you understand? My name is Sarah and I was born in Vilna.” I opened my mouth to say that that wasn’t a story either, but she now seemed beside herself. In a loud voice she began to tell me of her experiences in a concentration camp, of the torture the Germans inflicted on her, of the solidarity among the other inmates. She was twelve years old at the time. I shouldn’t have listened, should have plugged my ears, thought of something else, made love to her—anything to make her stop talking.

For The Accident, perhaps in order to transcend the theme of the accident-suicide. I chose as epigraph a quotation from Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: “I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient legend: Man’s heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves on the banks of this ditch to drink the blood and thereby come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.”

For the camp survivor life is a battle not only for the dead but also against them. Locked in the grip of the dead, he fears that by freeing himself, he is abandoning them. Hence the near-impossibility of loving, or of believing in humanity.

I was released from the hospital in a wheelchair and returned to my hotel room. There were frequent visits from David and daily ones from Aviva. For