All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [191]
“My friends told me about you,” she said. “They’ve been trying to introduce us for a long time. But I said no.”
I wasn’t sure what I found most striking about her: the delicacy of her features, the brilliance of her words, or the breadth of her knowledge of art, music, and the theater.
The following week I invited her to lunch at an Italian restaurant across the street from UN headquarters. I ordered an omelette but never touched it. I only listened.
She, too, had spent the war years in Europe. There were stories about her childhood in Vienna, her visits to her grandfather’s house in Lvov, and her family’s flight to Belgium, France, and Switzerland. For the moment, concealing my fear of falling in love on the spot, I simply listened and looked at her, timidly.
We saw each other again, exchanged confidences, and became friends. I advised her to read Robert Musil, Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese. She knew Thomas Mann better than I did. Likewise the theater: she had studied acting with one of the most famous drama coaches in New York. From time to time we went to concerts. There was David Oistrakh at Carnegie Hall, and a particularly lovely evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art listening to Rudolf Barshai and his Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Fluent in at least five languages, she was about to cofound an association of professional translators. We didn’t know it yet, but she was to become my wife.
Her name is Marion. Her little girl, Jennifer, was the best and most beautiful little girl in all the world.
For the moment I was leading a bachelor’s life in my tower overlooking the Hudson and Riverside Drive. It was a disciplined, nearly ascetic existence devoted to journalism and writing. I was up at six in the morning and worked on the current book until ten. Then came meetings, visits to the UN, press conferences, and the typing of my dispatches. Then back to my apartment, where I wrote while listening to chamber or choral music or at times Hasidic songs. Records were my one big luxury. Sometimes, when it wasn’t too cold, I would go for a walk on Riverside Drive, alone or with a colleague. (In those days it was not yet dangerous to walk the streets of Manhattan alone.)
My journalist’s job gave me a plausible excuse to decline unwanted social invitations and to leave dinners on the pretext of having to send cables. My own preference was to grab a sandwich (when I could afford it) at the kosher deli on the corner of 100th Street and Broadway.
I had been trying, since One Generation After, to discover a new language, to forge a style of narration consisting only of dialogue and disembodied, anonymous words. I knew I was taking a chance. Perhaps only the survivors, those who escaped, would understand, and perhaps their children.
In truth, my major concern has always been the survivors. It was for them that my first works were meant. Did I strive to speak for them, in their name? I strove to make them speak.
For they have lived in isolation for a long time, locked away, remaining aloof so as not to wound those close to them. Whenever there was talk of the war years, they would clench their teeth and change the subject. It was impossible to get them to let go, to touch wounds that would never heal. They had reasons to be suspicious, to think that no one was interested in what they had to say, and that in any case they would not be understood. With my books and articles I tried to convince them of the need to testify: “Do as I do,” I told them. “Tell your stories, even if you have to invent a language. Communicate your memories, your doubts, even if no one wants to hear them.” I shared with them my conviction that it is incumbent upon the survivors not only to remember every detail but to record it, even the silence. I urged them to celebrate the memory of silence, but to reject the silence of memory.
At first it was difficult, but eventually my efforts met with success. I began to receive manuscripts: