“You’ve come a long way, have come all the way here …”
“I have. I’ve come, like you.”
“I know.”
“You know. You know and see: The earth folded up here, folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there is water, and the water is green and the green is white, and the white comes from even farther up, from the glaciers, and one could say, but one shouldn’t, that this is the language that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you and not for me — because, I ask you, for whom is it meant, the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me — a language, well, without I and without You nothing but He, nothing but It, you understand, and She, nothing but that.”
“I understand, I do. After all, I’ve come a long way, like you.”
“I know.”
“You know and you want to ask: And even so you’ve come all the way, come here even so — why and what for?”
“Why, and what for … Because I had to speak, maybe, to myself or to you, speak with my mouth and tongue, not just with my stick. Because to whom does it speak, my stick. It talks to the stones and the stones — to whom do they speak?”
“To whom should they talk, cousin? They do not talk, they speak, and who speaks does not talk to anyone, cousin, he speaks because nobody hears him, nobody and Nobody, and then he says, himself, not his mouth or his tongue, he, and only he, says: Do you hear me?”
In the “undeserved” hour of survival, the phantomatic Celan meets his cousin from the East, he too having escaped somehow to the West and been sent back from there to the Eastern land of death. Celan is targeted, struck, penetrated, “stricken” to his depths and forever, although he had not been reached physically like his predecessor Fondane. Sh’ma Yisrael, Here, O Israel!” repeats the echo Klein or perhaps the echo Gross. Their voices no longer distinguish one from the other, nor have they any reason to separate, although one of them was “struck” and the other, who hadn’t the opportunity, was stricken too.
These two search for each other, cry one unto the other in the wasteland, the solitude beyond death and the mountains. They call each other reciprocally: it is I, I the one it seems you hear, or that you seem to hear. They have so much to tell each other, the Jew Klein and the Jew Gross! “Do you hear me, do you hear me” becomes a repeated and empty echo; the palaverer’s nickname, “Do you hear me” is the code or the nickname for one and the other in the empty space of the absolute silence belonging to the time after. “Do you hear me” babbles senselessly and endlessly, here and now after the end, after sunset when Klein and Gross, and Celan and Fondane, and their cousins and their cousins’ cousins are dead and the “peace and quiet” of the “purification” has settled at last in the mountains where there no longer exist I and Thou. Peace and quiet has descended, finally, desecrated and forever. The sun has gone down and peace and quiet — serenity — with it. I and Thou no longer exist, and eternity seems eternal, a crafty, malicious, voracious eternity.
They stand, Klein and Gross. The beautiful path does not belong to them, and they don’t belong to it. They are from the Valley of Death, in the dark of beyond and of afterwards, where only the white crutches — like the bones burned at O
wieçim* in the East and washed in the West, in the morbid Seine — illuminate the road that is not a road on which they have climbed, one toward the other, one beside the other. Everything has set, like the sun and not only the sun and its light — not only the sun.
“On the stone I lay prostrate,” Fondane recounts at the beginning of the end. Or maybe it was Celan among the captives aligned at the place where they quarry funeral slabs. Or maybe Gross and Klein recount in turn and simultaneously, as happens among those like them, among condemned cousins that slept and slept not, dreamed and dreamed not, as happens also to our interlocutors, Antschel and Wechsler (the real Jewish names of Celan and Fondane), in the darkness of hereafter and afterwards.
*Auschwitz.
They lay prostrate, yes, together on the funeral stones, the one and the other, among the unloved, and the one and the other had a sense of their being different. They were many and who should love the like that’s unlike? The One. Only the Single, the Supreme, the Invisible, the Great Anonymous whose unpronounceable name is forbidden by the holy laws, as is His invisible image forbidden, hidden in the sunset that has swallowed the mountains, and not only the mountains, our unpronounceable name, like His name, and our images made after His image and so forbidden.
It is not easy to love yourself in the mirror of the many. Mirroring multiplied, dilated, twisted, contorted: disfiguring. Brotherhood was becoming a hindrance with access to too much — too full — too superlative and too little and with the breakdown of everything. They knew this: Celan and Fondane as well as Gross and Klein. The semblables, converted into a mass, into an implacable anonymization (like death itself), no longer permit the potential I and the potential Thou — both pre-existent outside and inside ourselves — equally annulled in the collective identity, and condemned without likeness and without escape. We cannot love ourselves too much in this deformed mirror of pluralities, not when it’s a matter of being converted into a mass prior to nothingness.
The mothers do not disappear, however, not even in the fog of massification; they enchain us beyond their life and death and ours and give us birth again every instant in the corner where the candle sustains the memory and the chance of meeting and of love, until the last flicker. Mother’s face did not disappear for Pesach, nor for Benjamin, the one who could not let go of his sister’s and mother’s hands, even to save himself. Beyond the sacred and profane is precisely the face of that innate Thou that accompanies us and which, when it is absent, keeps watch beyond life.
The murmur of Jewish mothers among the flames of the candlesticks: the candles protected by trembling hands cannot be forgotten, however, nor the salt mine silence of the room, nor can the father of the Jewish mother be forgotten; even today Grandfather Abraham, the unforgotten, burns the sacred candle in all the houses where the coming Day is celebrated, the seventh, after which follows the first again, if it weren’t to be the last. The poets — both the one and the other, the prodigal sons serving the word that is still searching for the same eternal Thou in the lyric charade of silence — have both remained forever near the biblical mother lighting candles and protecting the flame with her hands and the murmur of verses, the love that cannot be repeated.
“Do you hear me, he says — I know, cousin, I know … do you hear me, he says, I’m here. I am here, I’ve come. I’ve come with my stick, me and no other, me and not him, me with my hour, my undeserved hour, he who has been hit, who has not been hit, me with my memory, with my lack of memory, me, me, me …”
“He says, he says … Do you hear me, he says … And Do-youhear-me, of course, Do-you-hear-me does not say anything, does not answer, because Do-you-hear-me is one with the glaciers, is three in one, and not for men … the green-and-white there, with the turk’s cap lily, with the corn-salad … But I cousin, I who stand here on this road, here where I do not belong, today, now that it has set, the sun and its light, I, here with the shadow, my own and not my own, I–I who can tell you: