I catch myself listing admirable priests of the present time, Fathers Alexander, Vladimir, Georgiy, Viktor (Mamontov). I can think of perhaps another 10 or so. Anyway, who says there have to be a lot of righteous people? Perhaps 36 are enough to save the world.
Daniel was a righteous man. In human terms he suffered defeat. After his death his congregation dispersed and now, just as before, there is no Church of St. James. In a sense, Jesus, too, suffered defeat. First he was not understood or accepted by his own people, then he was accepted by many other peoples but still not understood. If anyone wants to argue that he was understood, where is that new human being, that new history, those new relations between people?
None of my questions have been answered. I have had finally to abandon the cozy clichés I found useful in my life. Daniel just sat in that chair, radiant, and the questions went away. In particular, the Jewish Question went away, that unbridgeable gulf between Judaism and Christianity which Daniel managed to bridge with his own personality. While he was alive, within his life, everything was one. By the effort he made in living his life, that bleeding wound was healed. Not for long, only while he lived.
All these years I have been thinking a great deal about these matters, and coming to a better understanding of things which were closed to me before. Judgment is not always required. You don’t need to have an opinion on every issue. The urge to pronounce judgment is misguided. Christianity inherited from Judaism a fraught relationship between man and God, of which the most vivid image is Jacob’s wrestling all night with the angel. The God inherited from Judaism challenges man to fight. God toys with man like an indulgent father obliging his young son to test his strength, training his soul and, of course, smiling into his metaphysical beard.
Only I cannot understand where those 500 people fit in, the young and old who were shot in the night in Czarna Puszcza while 18-year old Daniel was hiding in the forest. And a few million others.
Whenever I am in Israel, I look around amazed, scandalized, joyful, indignant, admiring. My nose constantly tingles at that inimitable sweet-and-sour Jewish sensitivity to life. It is difficult to live there. The stew is too thick, the air too solid, passions too heated. There is too much pathos and shouting. It is, however, also impossible to turn your back on. This small provincial state, a Jewish village, a homemade state which remains to this day a microcosm of the world.
What does the Lord want? Obedience? Cooperation? Mutual destruction of the peoples? I have completely repudiated value judgments. I’m not up to them. In my heart I feel I lived an important lesson with Daniel, but when I try to define it, I recognize that what you believe doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you personally behave.
Pretty profound, eh? But Daniel has placed that right in my heart.
Lyalya, you have been a great help to me all this time. I do not know how I would have emerged from this undertaking without you. I would probably have resurfaced somehow, but the book would have been different. It is foolish to thank you, just as it is foolish to thank someone for their love.
By the time you finish these major books, they have torn out half your soul and leave you staggering about. At the same time, amazing things happen and characters who are partly fictitious do deeds it is impossible to imagine. The community of Daniel Rufeisen has dispersed. The community of Daniel Stein, the hero of my book, half-remembered, half-imagined, has also dispersed. The Church of Elijah by the Spring is in ruins; the community house is boarded up but will soon be back in use because it is a very fine house and its garden is beautiful. The old people’s home has closed its doors. The pastor is gone and the sheep have strayed. The Church of St. James, the Jerusalem community of Jewish Christians, exists no more. And yet the light shines.
Lyalya, I am sending you the last episodes. I am mortally weary of all the letters and documents, reference books, and encyclopedias. You should see the mountains of them piled high in my study. The rest is text.
L.
19. December 1995, Jerusalem-Haifa
The engine didn’t start the first time he turned the ignition key, or the second. Daniel took the key out and closed his eyes. He prayed that he should get back home while also thinking that tomorrow he really must go and see Ahmed the garage mechanic in the Lower Town. Somewhere deep in his consciousness the thought stirred that the car was eighteen years old and it was time to lay it to rest. He turned the key one more time and the engine started. Most likely it would not break down on the journey now. The main thing was not to let it stall. It was after eight in the evening on the seventeenth of December.
Neuhaus was going to die in a few days’ time, perhaps even tonight. How magnanimous and wonderful it was of him to take his farewell of his friends like that. Daniel, too, had been honored. This morning the professor’s son had phoned to say his father was very ill and wanted to say good-bye.
Daniel had got in the car and driven to Jerusalem. The son, in a crocheted skullcap and a black jacket shiny with age, took him to his father’s study. “I need to warn you that some years ago my father was fitted with a pacemaker. They hesitated for a long time because his heart was worn out and it was very risky, but Father told them to do it anyway. That was nine years ago. Now the pacemaker has failed. He has constant fibrillation. During the night we phoned for an ambulance and Father asked how much time he had left. The doctors said very little, so he refused to go to intensive care. He has heart pains now. When they lessen a little he asks for someone to go in.”
Daniel waited forty minutes in the study until the professor’s wife, Gerda, called him through. She was a tiny woman, a doll who had been acknowledged the prettiest girl in Vienna in the late 1920s, before people knew that a woman can be beautiful only if she is over 1 meter 80 centimeters tall.
“Five minutes,” she whispered, and Daniel nodded.
The old man was sitting on a chaise longue, his back supported by large white pillows, but his hair and he himself were even whiter.
“It is good you have come,” the old man said, nodding. “Gerda told me you had been on television, but she couldn’t remember what the broadcast was about.”
“It was about the war. They were asking me about working as an interpreter for the Germans,” Daniel said.
“Ah yes, I wanted to ask you: did you not have to go with them to the bathhouse?”
“I did just once. There was a lot of steam and they noticed nothing. It contracted so much from fear, they didn’t see, but I was expecting to be exposed,” Daniel admitted.
“Yes. I wanted to say good-bye to you. You see, I am leaving.” A smile spread over his clever face with its big nose, and he closed his eyes. “I am going to see my Teacher, your God.”
The professor’s son was already standing at the door. Gerda, who had turned away to the window, was intently examining a large acacia. She saw Daniel downstairs, thanked him, and shook his hand.
It was said that when Neuhaus met his wife, a golden halo gleamed above her head and he knew she was destined for him. It was said that one time their children, a son and daughter, caught meningitis and almost died. Neuhaus negotiated with God to let them live. They survived, but had no children of their own. All their lives they worked with other people’s, the son as headmaster of a school for retarded children, and the daughter teaching deaf and dumb children to speak. It was said that when Neuhaus had his heart operation, one of his rich friends vowed that if the patient survived, he would give away all his wealth to the poor, and Neuhaus bankrupted him. It was said that during one of his lectures, Neuhaus took off his skullcap, waved it over his head, and put it down on the table. “This is cloth! You see, it is cloth. It bears no relation to the problems of faith. If you have come to my lecture to learn faith, you have come to the wrong door. I can teach you to think. Not all of you, though!”