The Oath by Elie Wiesel

me to the end. “Who are you and who am I? What do we have in common? What divides us and what sets us one against the other? Tell me if it is your story that lives inside me, or my own. Tell me if I must obey and whom.”
    “You are shouting,” the boy said reproachfully. “At your age you still don’t know that a man losing his temper is not a pretty sight? You should smile and make believe.”
    “And Kolvillàg?” I asked.
    “Kolvillàg?” said the boy, surprised. “What is it? Never heard of it.”
    He looked at me, annoyed. I had displeased him, I had been wrong to mention that town with its mysterious and sealed past. The boy was right. He was wise, wiser than his elder. Standing before him, on those heights overlooking the conflagration, I felt small, intimidated, lost. He had a sense of humor, that boy. He had understood that the destiny of this particular town had farcical overtones.
    And you know why, Moshe. Better than I. Go ahead, speak. I beg of you, Moshe, speak. It’s our only chance. This young man must not be allowed to die because of one madman’s silence, because of one madman! He mustn’t be allowed to die mad. Go ahead, Moshe, open the sanctuary, open the
Pinkas
. Speak, Moshe, speak.
     
    “Nerves,” said the doctor, “that’s what it is.”
    “The heart,” insisted my mother. “Memory, conscience, the past, fate—God. I am helpless against God.”
    She had just spent another bad night. You could tell from her distraught features, her livid complexion
.
    “He comes, looks at me and goes away. I run after him, but the distance between us does not diminish. And so I shout, I scream. He stops and so do I. He waits until I am calm again, and tells me: You mustn’t follow me, it is forbidden; they will not let you in. I begin to shout again, to scream, but he has already disappeared. He is angry with me, I know that he is angry with me. I shouted too late.”
    “Nerves,” said the doctor
.
    “Do something,” my father pleaded. “Is there nothing you can do? Nothing, really nothing? There must be something you can do. Please?”
    “I shouldn’t have,” said my mother, looking at me from far away
.
     
    Poor child, the old man thinks. He must be helped. Moshe, you alone can pull him out of this. He thinks he can do it by abdicating. I am old and know that isn’t so. Man’s nature is to fight even though at every moment he is given confirmation that he will not prevail. It is man’s nature to think of himself as immortal. Is that good, is that bad? Both, no doubt. It cannot be helped. “The dying man who recites his last prayer is paying respect not to death but to God,” said Meir of Podoli in one of his chronicles. “Therein lies his strength and his greatness.”
    And then, while leafing through the Book, while conversing with his mad friend, the old man understands that the young man is unwittingly helping him by putting him to the test. He is forcing him to reinvent a meaning to his quest. On the very threshold of death, the old man is still fit for battle.
    He had lost sight of that. It had all become a burden, a matter of habit. He had lived too fast; he was exhausted, his sensibility blunted. With Kolvillàg as a landmark, the present seemed pallid, puerile. He had felt no want, no pain for a long time. He was neither happy nor unhappy. Nothing surprised him, nothing offended him. Nothing moved him, nothing tempted him. Having lived inside the Book so long, he ceased to be touched by the outside world, and floundered into boredom and death.
    Thank you, my boy. Thank you for disturbing me, shaking me. Thank you for crossing my path. I desperately needed you. Thank you for forcing my hand; you did it in time. Oh yes, I was living inside the closed world of memories. I liked my exile. I knew things by their names. I had lost my innocence, myneed for worship that had been racking me for years. Worse, I no longer felt pain. A stranger to myself, a stranger to my own story,