One Generation After by Elie Wiesel Page A

customers. I suggested they invite my friends to share the fun; but they didn’t go for the idea. You’ll manage by yourself, like a big girl, they said. We drank. We did other things. They were pleased and told me so. They left. I kept one bottle. I didn’t touch it, I swear, that is, not really. I don’t enjoy drinking, not alone, not like that. My head spins when I drink alone. It’s spinning now. Feel it: it’s spinning, can you tell?”
    She began turning her head with such frenzy that I became dizzy. I said: “Yes, indeed, it is spinning.”
    “You see? I know what I’m saying. I may seem incoherent, but I know what I want to say. If you don’t understand, it’s because you’re Jewish: you’re a good listener, but you don’t understand.”
    Her hand moved to her mouth as if to apologize for her blunder. “Did I offend you? No? Good. Still, I do apologize. You must forgive me. You do understand, I know that. I take it all back: you’re a Jew, therefore you understand. It’s I who don’t understand you. See, when I saw you, sitting on your bench, sitting on the night—yes, don’t look at me like that, on the night: I say, one can sit on it and lie down on it, one can even dwell in it—when I noticed you there, I immediately knew that you were someone who understands, someone I cannot understand. You like hearing me say that, don’t you? You’re young and the young love to be told that. Well, I’m going to make you happy and solemnly declare: I do not understand you. There now, are you glad? Besides, it makes me glad too. I would so like never to understand. It rarely happens. Most of the time I understand only too well and too fast. What do you expect? That’s what I’mpaid for. Men, I know them, I can see through their schemes and pretenses. Immediately. I think to myself: ‘Go ahead, old boy, do your little act, I know before you and better than you what you’re after.’ Ha, they think they possess me when they take my body and fill me with their disgust; in fact, I’m infallible; I see through them and I spit on them.”
    Barbara was telling me her life, and I thought of mine, and of all human existence, which one single gesture, one single event can distort, uplift or debase forever. One word said or said poorly, or not said at all, a train missed, a hand taken or rejected, and life is no longer what it might have been. Freedom? A farce. The future is but the product of the past, which remains beyond our reach; we may no longer touch it, for it becomes a divinity created by us and against us. What is done is done, we cannot retrace our steps, we cannot choose ourselves again. Thus a yes or a no, every yes and every no, commits man beyond the present. That is the misunderstanding, the fundamental injustice of human condition: we accept and refuse situations which will emerge only later, when it is already too late.
    Barbara kept quiet a long time. I should have said something.
    She misinterpreted my silence: “You’re not exactly talkative. Did you at least listen?”
    “Jews are good listeners,” I reminded her.
    “I also like to listen.”
    “I have nothing to say.”
    “Nothing? No reaction? No comment? I have just told you the idiotic story I call my life, and you have nothing to say?”
    “Nothing.”
    “All right. As you wish. But I have a favor to ask of you.”
    “What sort of favor?”
    “Forget what I told you. Immediately. I too want to forget. Promise?”
    “Of course. I promise.”
    She tried to kiss me; I gently pushed her away. “It’s frightfully hot,” I said.
    She took her handkerchief and wiped my face. “Why don’t you talk to me? Are you afraid I won’t understand? Is that it? But that is precisely what I wish! Tell me anything, so long as I don’t understand! Just once in this rotten life I would like not to understand!”
    A dense sadness was oppressing me. Barbara brought her face close to mine and I did not pull back. Her lips were on my cheek. I