All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [4]
And I began to weep, as she once had, like a desperately hungry child who would always remain hungry. Mute tears flowed down my face, onto my chin, my neck, my chest. I did nothing to stop them.
A moment later I went on. “If Grandma had a grave, I would go to the ends of the earth to visit it. But as you know, she doesn’t. Did you know she expected that? Did you know, Grandpa, that Grandma Nissel was the only one in the family, almost the only one in the whole community, who guessed it all? She knew she would never come home. She left this wretched town in her funeral dress. Yes, she wore her shroud under her black dress. She alone was ready. In the train, she alone was silent. Am I worthy of her silence, Grandpa?”
The child within me refuses to let go of his grandparents, as the man I am refuses to be separated from his father. My companion, my judge, or simply my guide, he never leaves me. It is to him I turn at times of doubt. I fear his verdict, I seek his approval. His encouragement is essential to me, and his reproaches hurt. How often have I changed course solely in order not to disappoint him?
I was hardly a model child. I complained easily. My concentration wandered. I spent too much time daydreaming with my friends instead of studying. I didn’t eat enough and my parents worried constantly about how thin I was, and how pale. Lavish sums were spent dragging me from doctor to doctor, city to city, to treat my migraines. (It was thanks to my illnesses that I discovered Satu-Mare and Budapest. Had my parents been richer, I would have been taken around the world.)
For the most part I was not too bad a pupil. My tutors liked me. I learned my lessons, did my homework. Perhaps they thought me spoiled. My illnesses kept me home for days on end, but for my teachers that was no excuse. The body may be ill, but that should not prevent the mind from pursuing its quest to come nearer to God.
The truth is, it was not illness that kept me in bed, at least not at first. I stayed in bed because I didn’t feel like leaving the familiar walls of my room, or the windows from which I could survey the life of the street and gaze upon our garden and especially my mother. Smile all you want, Dr. Freud, but I was attached to my mother, maybe too attached. When she left me to help out at the store, I would tremble under my blanket. When she was away, however briefly, I felt rejected, exiled, imperiled. I search my mind for my earliest memory, and I see a little boy sitting on his bed, calling for his mother. At the age of three, four, or five, I felt unhappy and harassed by my classmates at heder. I would count the minutes that separated me from my mother. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t spend all morning and afternoon with me. Had she been present, I would have learned the Hebrew alphabet and the Pentateuch—the first five books in the Scriptures—in no time flat and vanquished all the enemies of Israel. My dream was never to leave her. I would cling to her skirts even when she went to the ritual baths. I would sit on the stairs, hold my breath, and wait for her. “How come I can’t go in?” I would ask. “Because it’s forbidden,” she replied. “Why?” I persisted. “It says so in the Torah.” That stopped me. The Torah demanded silence and a kind of sacred respect. All prohibitions came from the Torah.
With time, however, study became a true adventure for me. My first teacher, the Batizer Rebbe, a sweet old man with a snow-white beard that devoured his face, pointed to the twenty-two holy letters of the Hebrew alphabet and said, “Here, children, are the beginning and the end of all things. Thousands upon thousands of works have been written and will be written with these letters. Look at them and study them with love, for they