Yes, the line between good and evil, between the appropriate and the false, has been blurred, he thought. The boundaries have ceased to be clear. There is a long way from yes to no, and the end is not in sight.
He did not speak of the Ten Commandments, because he no longer considered them as all-embracing and all-applying, as the sum total of all that is under the stars, of what is allowed and what is forbidden, what one ought or ought not to do. He discovered the power and the curse of imagination. An inner voice told him that he could trust it. A terrible, sinful thought struck him: was there still a God, and if there was, was he not perhaps powerless?
As they sat in the twilight of the first of those ten days she spent at his house, Rabbi Schapiro said: “I would like to be in your place.”
“You wouldn’t,” she replied.
“We were living in a pagan world,” the rabbi whispered, but so that at least he could hear himself. “They had their personal god, their golden calf, their degenerate idea. They wanted to have and proclaim their hoarfrost giants as in their ancient times, and they found one. Their giant of evil.”
They both knew who he meant. He avoided uttering the name of the man he regarded as the personification of evil, the evil from which the devil arose; as the sum total and quintessence of all time, looking both back and forward, whose spirit continued to move through light and shade, noise and silence, enveloping them like a dark, invisible but perceptible cloud. Who would in future remember his date of birth in the quiet little Austrian town, feel sorry for his mother and his unknown father, and bless the accident that he had no children?
He saw evil producing the germs of further evil, as when a fire flares up and its sparks light new fires on all sides; a huge conflagration engulfing the whole world. He saw the face of the man with a small moustache, as he had appeared on countless pictures and postage stamps, in school books and newspapers, on posters at every street corner, in the windows of zealous champions of his ideas, a man with a shock of dark hair, with burning eyes almost screaming from their sockets. For a long while the rabbi kept his eyes closed, his eyelids marked by fine blue and blood-red veins, the lids purple from lack of sleep, from anxiety and fatigue, from the burden of evil.
He felt that evil had settled in him and on him, like sweat and dirt from an exhausting journey to a destination he had not yet reached and perhaps never would. The journey of Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, in that coal-tender to Pecs in Hungary was only one part.
He didn’t have to disprove to himself that life was an obscure journey from birth to death, one on which only a handful of the chosen started out, travelled, and departed with dignity. Not many could keep their dignity while journeying. And so he looked at the girl from the army brothel, now in his house, as though through a window onto something he hadn’t seen before or perhaps even known existed.
Where were those good people, those strong people, those who knew what evil was when it was still in the bud? What questions will their children and their children’s children ask them some day? What will they ask those who did not know? The rabbi put this question to the void.
“Where were those who saw what was happening and closed their eyes to it? Who did not even open them when they woke up? What were they doing?”
No answer came back to him from the void, because the void does not even produce an echo. The rabbi thought of the unforgettable parables and elucidation of the Old Testament he had once admired so much, of the innumerable writings, the records of oral tradition, the wisdom of the wisest rabbis, the proverbs of Solomon, the songs of the Biblical poets, the clarity, clear-sightedness and power of truth uttered, come what may, regardless of those in power, by the prophets. That which transcended time and place with deceptive general validity, a boundless and universal validity.
In his mind’s eye he saw a goshawk flying over a field, diving down, from an enormous height that gave it a view far and wide, onto a small fieldmouse which had no idea of what threatened it until it was too late, until it was in the claws of the bird of prey. He could hear the rush of the bird’s wings and the squeak of the little mouse.
“Will all those with a conscience now have a hole in their soul?” the rabbi asked in a whisper. “Is modesty still a virtue or is it the false sister of excuse for those I know and do not know, and also for myself, if it relates to what cannot be explained, to what I do not attempt to explain?”
Skinny didn’t reply. She was digesting an ample midday meal after an even more ample dinner the previous evening.
“You witnessed the ugliness of the world,” the rabbi whispered. Perhaps he didn’t even want her to hear.
Had the brutality of children who didn’t yet know the miracle of life become the brutality of adults because they never grew up? Had it been due to their character, to circumstances, schooling, youth organizations, the army and the many other institutions which had sprung up all over Europe?
Are those who were sure of themselves confused, or are those who were confused sure of themselves?
Is it a punishment for the fact that too many people allowed just a handful to make the decisions?
Is it possible by the waving of a hand to turn human beings into refuse and the world into a refuse heap?
He could still hear those who proclaimed the New Order; the breaking up of what belonged together, as if it were possible to improve the daylight or the brilliance of night, the brightness of the stars, the song of birds, the colour of a lilac bush, of a lucerne flower amid the clover, the crimson of a wild poppy or the slenderness of a stalk of wheat.
The purity of conscience.
The sweet breath of hope.
The innocence of a two-year-old. The transparency of a tear.
There was no end to it. His soul was like a bottomless pit without echoes, a soundless cry, a deafening silence.
“Why did they do it?” he whispered. “How could they have done it?”
What pleasure was there in killing people whom the killer didn’t even know?
What could he invoke, which face of God? The God of infinity? The God of wisdom? The God of vengeance? The God of thunderbolts? Or the God of mercy? The God of goodness? The God of the 30 paths of wisdom? The God of the 50 gates of light? The God with the fiery sword? The God of the Covenant?
He had begun to doubt the God of speech. He could invoke only the God of silence. But wherever he looked, more was concealed than apparent. Perhaps these Gods existed only in his imagination? But were they not written about in the sacred books? Where was the God of justice? The God of right? God the saviour? He who was everlasting, unutterable, glorious, infinite, indulgent, good, incomprehensible?
The rabbi remembered how, as a young man, he had been excited by the three worlds, the higher, middle and lower world, and their relation to the human body which also contained three worlds — head, breast, and the body from the waist down.
It seemed to him improper to reflect on this in connection with Skinny. The body from the waist down and, with the girl before him, also from the waist up. Shell, transient substance and core. Blood corpuscles? Head, nerves, breast, blood, stomach and lymph, spirit, emotions and instinct, the life of the cells? He was not thinking of the second phase of creation, of procreation. She had told him about Dr Krueger’s experiments, of how he had sterilized her. About Dr S chimmelpfennig’s injections. About the psychological interrogations conducted by Oberführer Dr Blatter-Spirit. He could visualize the soldiers telling her about their families, their girlfriends, mothers and sisters, about their children. The officers, NCOs and men for whom going to war was like going to work. Their daily bread.