In Polyxena's world, the outcome is less happy. God, the gods, the Devil, nature, the social system, the world, the primum mobile, refuses to acknowledge guilt or responsibility. My library repeats again and again the same question: Who makes Job endure so much pain and loss? Who is to blame for Winnie's sinking in Beckett's Happy Days? Who relentlessly destroys the life of Gervaise Macquart in Zola's L'assommoir? Who victimizes the protagonists of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance?
Throughout history, those confronted with the unbearable account of the horrors they have committed— torturers, murderers, merciless wielders of power, shamelessly obedient bureaucrats—seldom answer the question "why?" Their impassive faces reject any admission of guilt, reflect nothing but a refusal to move from the past of their deeds into the consequences. Yet the books on my shelves can help me imagine their future. According to Victor Hugo, hell takes on different shapes for its different inhabitants: for Cain it has the face of Abel, for Nero that of Agrippina.269 For Macbeth, hell bears the face of Banquo; for Medea, that of her children. Romain
Gary dreamt of a certain Nazi officer condemned to the constant presence of the ghost of a murdered Jewish clown.270
If time flows endlessly, as the mysterious connections between my books suggest, repeating its themes and discoveries throughout the centuries, then every misdeed, every treason, every evil act will eventually find its true consequences. After the story has stopped, just beyond the threshold of my library, Carthage will rise again from the strewn Roman salt. Don Juan will confront the anguish of Dona Elvira. Brutus will look again on Caesar's ghost, and every torturer will have to beg his victim's pardon in order to complete time's inevitable circle.
My library allows me this unrealizable hope. But for the victims, of course, no reasons, literary or other, can excuse or expiate the deeds of their torturers. Nick Caistor, in his introduction to the English edition of Nunca mas, the report on the "disappeared" during the Argentinian military dictatorship, reminds us that the stories that ultimately reach us are but the reports of the survivors. "One can only speculate," says Caistor, "as to what accounts of atrocity the thousands of dead took with them to their unmarked graves."271
It is difficult to understand how people continue to carry out the human gestures of everyday life when life itself has become inhuman; how, in the midst of starving and sickness, beatings and slaughter, men and women persist in civilized rituals of courtesy and kindness, inventing stratagems of survival for the sake of a speck of something loved, for one book rescued out of thousands, one reader out of tens of thousands, for a voice that will echo until the end of time the words of Job's servant: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." Throughout history, the victor's library stands as an emblem of power, repository of the official version, but the version that haunts us is the other, the version in the library of ashes. The victim's library, abandoned or destroyed, keeps on asking, "How were such acts possible?" My prayer book belongs to that questioning library.
After the European crusaders, following a forty-day siege, took the city of Jerusalem on 15 July, 1099, slaughtering the Muslim men, women and children and burning alive the entire Jewish community inside the locked synagogue, a handful of Arabs who had managed to escape arrived in Damascus, bringing with them the Koran of 'Uthman, one of the oldest existing copies of the holy book. They believed that their fate had been foretold in its pages (since God's word must necessarily hold all past, present and future events), and that, if only they had been able to read the text clearly, they would have known the outcome of their own narrative.272 History was, for these readers, nothing but "the unfolding of God's will for the world."273 As our libraries teach us, books can sometimes help us phrase our questions, but they do not necessarily enable us to decipher the answers. Through reported voices and imagined stories, books merely allow us to remember what we have never suffered and have never known. The suffering itself belongs only to the victims. Every reader is, in this sense, an outsider.
Emerging from hell, travelling against Lethe 's current towards recollection, Dante carries with him the sounds of the suffering souls, but also the knowledge
BELOW: Portrait of Jacob Edelstein.
OPPOSITE: A sketch of the library in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, by Alfred Bergel, dated 27 November 1943.
that those souls are being punished for their own avowed sins.274 The souls whose voices resound in our present are, unlike Dante's damned, blameless. They were tortured and killed for no other reason than their existence, and maybe not even that. Evil requires no reason. How can we contain, between the covers of a book, a useful representation of something that, in its very essence, refuses to be contained, whether in Mann's The Magic Mountain or in an ordinary prayer book? How can we, as readers, hope to hold in our hands the circle of the world and time, when the world will always exceed the margins of a page, and all we can witness is the moment defined by a paragraph or a verse, "choosing," as Blake said, "forms of worship from poetic tales"? And so we return to the question of whether a book, any book, can serve its impossible purpose.
Image not available
Perhaps. One day in June 1944, Jacob Edelstein, former elder of the Theresienstadt ghetto, who had been taken to Birkenau, was in his barracks, wrapped in his ritual shawl, saying the morning prayers he had learned long ago from a book no doubt similar to my
Image not available
Gebet-Ordnung. He had only just begun when SS Lieutenant Franz Hoessler entered the barracks to take Edelstein away. A fellow prisoner, Yossl Rosensaft, recalled the scene a year later:
Suddenly the door burst open and Hoessler strutted in, accompanied by three SS men. He called out Jacob's name. Jacob did not move. Hoessler screamed: "I am waiting for you, hurry up!" Jacob turned round very slowly, faced Hoessler and said: "Of my last moments on this earth, allotted to me by the Almighty, I am the master, not you." Whereupon he turned back to face the wall and finished his prayers. He then folded his prayer shawl unhurriedly, handed it to one of the inmates and said to Hoessler: "I am now ready."275
This page intentionally left blank
THE LIBRARY
AS OBLIVION
What has been lost cannot be destroyed or diminished.
Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance
If Night is the child of Chaos, then Lethe or Oblivion is its granddaughter, born of the terrible union between Night and Discord. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Virgil imagines Lethe as a river whose waters allow the souls on their way to the underworld to forget their former selves, so that they can be born again.276 Lethe allows us oblivion of our former experience and happiness, but also of our prejudices and sorrows.