Against the Pollution of the I Read online

  I didn’t understand then who he was, but certainly I saw him. And this image began to work inside me until the moment it lit up like a torch. I didn’t know who he was because he didn’t say.

  He had a story which he came back to often: it belonged, he belonged, to the Christian Scientist sect. He had even been to America once to meet his fellow Christian Scientists. This adventure, quite out of the ordinary for a welder from the Jura, intrigued but did not enlighten me. It gave another layer of mystery to his character. That was all. Jeremy, without stories, mattered.

  Is it necessary to apologize for using so many images which are linked to simple acts: to eating, to breathing? If I were tempted to do so, Jeremy would prohibit me. He knew too well that one does not live on ideas.

  He was truly a manual man. He knew that at Buchenwald we would not live on the ideas which we had of Buchenwald. He said this; he even said that many of us would die from them. Alas, he was not mistaken.

  I knew there were men who died because people had killed them. For them there was nothing left to do but pray. But I also knew many who died very quickly, like flies, because they thought they were in hell. It was of such matters that Jeremy spoke.

  It was necessary for there to be a man as simple, as clear, who had gone to the depths of reality, in order to see the fire and beyond the fire. More than hope was needed.

  It was necessary to see.

  The good man Jeremy saw. There was a spectacle before his eyes, but it was not the one we saw. It was not our Buchenwald, that of the victims. It was not a prison, that is to say, a place of hunger, blows, death, protest, where other men, the evil ones, had committed the crime of putting us. For him, there were not us, the innocents, and the other, the big anonymous Other with the tormenting voice and the whip — “the Brute.”

  How did I know? You have the right to ask: after all, Jeremy said almost nothing about such things. Well, without a doubt, there exist in certain beings, as there existed in him, a rightness and wholeness so perfect that their way of seeing communicates itself, is given to you, for at least an instant. And the silence then is truer, more exact, than any words.

  When Jeremy came to us across Block 57, in the midst of his little halo of space, it was clarity which he gave to us. It was an overflowing of vision, a new vision. And that is why we all made way for him.

  Above all, do not imagine that Jeremy consoled us. At the point we had reached, any consolation would have been mere romance, a taunting nursery story. We were not in the land of Cockaigne, and if we had been crazy enough to think so for one second, waking up afterward would have been bitter indeed. Jeremy spoke hard. But he did so gently.

  There was no trace of glibness about him. He had a mellow voice, precise and deliberate gestures, but this was the habit of his craft, a natural tranquility. He was a good fellow, I’m telling you, not a prophet.

  Jeremy was so little a prophet, he created so little uproar, that I don’t know how many, among the dozen men who survived those days of Winter 1944 in Barrack 57, remember him today. I would so much like not to be the only one.

  One didn’t notice anything special about Jeremy, no sign. He carried the banner of no faith, except from time to time that of Christian Science. But at this time, for me, and for the other Frenchmen around me, this word had only a bizarre resonance.

  One went to Jeremy as toward a spring. One didn’t ask oneself why. One didn’t think about it. In this ocean of rage and suffering there was this island: a man who didn’t shout, who asked no one for help, who was sufficient unto himself.

  A man who did not dream: that was more important than anything. The rest of us were dreamers: we dreamed of women, of children, of houses, often of the very miseries of other times which we had the weakness to call “liberty.” We weren’t at Buchenwald. We didn’t want anything to do with Buchenwald. And each time we came back it was there just the same, and it hurt.

  Jeremy was not disappointed. Why would he have dreamed? When we saw him coming with his immense serenity, we felt like shouting, “Close your eyes! What one sees here burns!” But the shout remained in our throats because from all evidence, his eyes were solidly fixed on all our miseries and did not blink. Even more, he did not seem like someone who takes a great burden upon himself, the air of a hero. He was not afraid, and that just as naturally as we were afraid.

  “For one who knows how to see, things are just as they always are,” he said. At first I did not understand. I even felt something quite close to indignation. What? Buchenwald like ordinary life? Impossible! All of these crazed, hideous men, the howling menace of death, these enemies everywhere, among the SS, among the prisoners themselves, this wedge of hill pushed up against the sky, thick with smoke, with its seven circles, and over there across the forest, the electric fences, all of this was just as usual! I remember that I could not accept this. It had to be worse — or if not — then more beautiful. Until finally Jeremy enabled me to see.

  It was not a revelation, a flashing discovery of the truth. I don’t think there was even an exchange of words. But one day it became obvious, palpable to me in the flesh, that Jeremy, the welder, had lent me his eyes.

  With those eyes, I saw that Buchenwald was not unique, not even privileged to be one of the places of greatest human suffering. I also saw that our camp was not in Germany, as we thought, in the heart of the Thuringe, dominating the plain of Iena, in this precise place and in no other. Jeremy taught me, with his eyes, that Buchenwald was in each one of us, baked and rebaked, tended incessantly, nurtured in a horrible way. And that consequently we could vanquish it, if we desired to with enough force.

  “As always,” Jeremy explained to himself sometimes. He had always seen people living in fear and in the most invincible of all fears: that which has no object. He had seen them all desire secretly and above all else one thing: to do harm to themselves. It was always, it was here, the same spectacle. Simply, the conditions had finally been completely fulfilled. The war, Nazism, the political and national follies had created a masterpiece, a perfect sickness and misery: a concentration camp.

  For us, of course, this was the first time. Jeremy had no use for our surprise. He said that it was not honest and that it did us harm.

  He said that in ordinary life, with good eyes, we would have seen the same horrors. We had managed to be happy before. Well! The Nazis had given us a terrible microscope: the camp. This was not a reason to stop living.

  Jeremy was an example: he found joy in the midst of Block 57. He found it during moments of the day where we found only fear. And he found it in such great abundance that when he was present we felt it rise in us. Inexplicable sensation, incredible even, there where we were: joy was going to fill us.

  Imagine this gift which Jeremy gave us! We did not understand, but we thanked him, time and again.

  What joy? Here are explanations, but they are feeble: the joy of being alive in this moment, in the next, each time we became aware of it. The joy of feeling the lives of others, of some others at least, against us, in the dark of night. What do I know? Isn’t that enough for you?

  It was much more than enough for us. It was a pardon, a reprieve, there, all of a sudden, just a few feet from hell. I knew this state through Jeremy. Others knew it also, I am sure.

  The joy of discovering that joy exists, that it is in us, just exactly as life is, without conditions and which no condition, even the worst, can kill.

  All of this, you will say, came from Jeremy because he was lucid. I didn’t say that he was lucid — this quality belongs to intelligence and, in the world of intelligence, Jeremy was not at home. I said that he saw. I have spoken of him as a living prayer.

  Subtle people will pretend that the faith of Jeremy was without nuances. Who cares! For him, and for us through him, the world was saved in each second. This benediction had no end. And, when it ceased, it was that we had ceased wanting it, that we — and not it — had ceased being joyful.

  These are not great w
ords. And if nonetheless you have that impression, then it is I that am clumsy. Jeremy was an ordinary man. Ordinary and supernatural, that’s it.

  One could very well live next to him for weeks and not see him, and speak only of “an old guy not like the others.” He was not a spectacle in the manner of heroes or street hawkers.

  What was supernatural in him, from all evidence, didn’t belong to him; it was meant to be shared. The spectacle, if it existed, was for us to find and to find within ourselves. I have the clearest memory of finding it. I perceived, one day like the others, a little place where I did not shiver, where I had no shame, where the death-dealers were only phantoms, where life no longer depended on the presence of the camp or on its absence. I owed it to Jeremy.

  I have carried this man in my memories as one carries an image with one because it has been blessed.

  And now, how has he disappeared? I hardly know. Without a sound, in any case, just as he came.

  One day, someone told me that he had died. This must have been several weeks after our arrival in the camp.

  Men went like this there. One almost never knew how. They disappeared in too great numbers all at once: no one had either the time or the inclination to look into the details, the “how” of their death. We let them melt into the mass. There was a solid ground of death in which we all participated more or less, we who were alive. The death of others was so much our own affair that we didn’t have the courage to look it in the face.

  I do not remember the “how” of Jeremy’s departure. I remember only that he came to see me, several days earlier, and told me that it was the last time. Not at all in the way one announced an unhappy event, not so solemnly. Simply — this was the last time, and since it was thus he had come to tell me.

  I don’t think this caused me pain. It must not have been painful. Indeed it was not, because it was real and known.

  He had been of service. He had the right to leave this world which he had completely lived.

  I am well aware that people will say to me, “What do you see of the supernatural in your welder? He gave you an example of serenity, at a time when serenity was very difficult to attain. That’s good, but that’s all. This peace of Jeremy was the result of courage and a strong constitution.”

  Well, no! We will not have done with Jeremy for that price.

  What I call the supernatural in him was the break with habits which he had completely realized. Those habits of judgment which make us call any adversity “unhappiness” or “evil,” those of greed which make us hate, desire vengeance, or simply complain — a minor but incontestable form of hatred — those of our dizzying egocentricity which make us think that we are innocent each time we suffer. He had escaped from the network of compulsive reflexes, and it was this necessary movement which neither good health — or even perfect health, if such exists — can explain.

  He had touched the very depth of himself and liberated the supernatural or, if this word bothers you, the essential, that which does not depend on any circumstance, which can exist in all places and in any time, in pain as in pleasure. He had encountered the very source of life. If I have used the word “supernatural,” it is because the act of Jeremy sums up to me the religious act itself: the discovery that God is there, in each person, to the same degree, completely in each moment, and that a return can be made toward Him.

  This was the good news which Jeremy told, in his turn, and in his very humble manner.

  We would all gain a lot by putting memory in quarantine.

  The petty memory, at least, the stingy, encumbering memory which makes us believe in this unreality, this myth: the past.

  It is this which suddenly brings back — without a shadow of reason — a person, or the shred of an event which then installs itself in us. The image throws itself on the screen of consciousness; it swells, soon there is nothing else but it. The mind’s circulation stops. The present disperses. The moments which follow no longer have the force to carry us. They no longer have any flavor. In short, this memory secretes melancholy, regret, all manner of inner complication.

  Fortunately, there is the other memory. For me, it is the one to which Jeremy belongs.

  This man haunts me, I confess. But he does not haunt me in the manner of the memory. Simply, he has entered into my flesh, he nourishes me, he works to make me live. I spend very little time thinking about him: one could say it is he who thinks of me.

  To speak to you of him, I have had to allude to Buchenwald. But do not be misled: Jeremy was never “at Buchenwald.” I encountered him there in flesh and blood. He wore a registration number. Others beside myself knew him. But he was not there in the particular, exclusive, individual manner in which we hear the phrase “to have been at Buchenwald.”

  This adventure of the camp was for him only an adventure: it did not concern him in a fundamental way.

  There are people whom I remember only in letting the “little memory” function in me. These people, if I encounter them there, remain there. Jeremy, when he speaks to me, does not do so from out of my past, but from the depths of my present, there, right in the center. I cannot move him.

  They are all this way, the people who have taught us something. Because this something, this knowledge, this increase of presence in life, they give to us only because they clearly know that they are not the owners. Imagine Jeremy happy as it happens to others to be happy: for personal reasons, due to a history different from that of others, precious and subtle. Do you think that he would still be in my life?

  He would have rejoined those picturesque characters, passing figures. But Jeremy was not happy: he was joyous. The good which he enjoyed was not his. Or rather, it was — but by participation. It was just as much ours.

  This is the mystery and power of those beings who serve something other than their own provisional personalities: one cannot escape them.

  — Translated by Noelle Oxenhandler

  CHAPTER 6

  POETRY IN BUCHENWALD

  “HEY, LUSSEYRAN! Wait up! Listen!”

  The hand of Saint-Jean, thin as a knife-blade, so eager that the bones vibrated like nerves, grabbed my arm. His voice became lower, graver, both angry and tender. He recited,

  I know all sorts of people

  Who are not equal to their lives

  Their hearts are poorly smothered fires

  Their hearts

  Open and close like their doors.

  The hand on my arm relaxed, let go, and began gesturing in the air to an invisible witness.

  “It’s Apollinaire,” said Saint Jean. “Apollinaire. He knew! I tell you, he knew!”

  Already my wonderful friend had taken a step away from me. He stood up, lifted his arms. He seemed to have grown taller and to have learned something so essential and so urgent that he had to let me know about it immediately. Yes! It was as though he came bearing news — good news which was going to brighten our wretched lives. I listened to him intently.

  I know all sorts of people

  Who are not equal to their lives

  Their hearts are poorly smothered fires

  Their hearts

  Open and close like their doors.

  He recited the verse again, but with a stronger, more confident voice. This time it wasn’t necessary for him to convince me of anything. It had become obvious for me as well.

  Now he leaned against my shoulder, as if to make me turn about inside myself and examine the horizon with the new eyes he had just given me.

  “Apollinaire wasn’t thinking about us,” he said. “He was thinking about a prostitute, Marizibill. And yet, Lusseyran — !”

  There was no need for him to say more. I let him know I had understood. Or rather — I saw. I saw around us the ring of sharp rocks that closed off the road and these men, this multitude of men who were almost faceless and whose eyes open and shut without ever really opening. I saw the lines of prisoners who trudged toward the central square to report for work. I saw the cold, the hunger, the
fear, all these things that we were not equal to — that were greater than us, too great for us. I knew that the first man I would bump into would not speak my language and would have none of my thoughts. And that for him I, in turn, would be an utter stranger.

  As for Saint-Jean, this man who ordinarily asked so many questions, who was so determined to see, to know, to arrive at a simple certainty, a final truth which could sustain him — he gave no further explanations, he sought no further.

  I asked, “How did you find these verses?”

  “They were there,” he said. “I have known them a long time. But it was just then, when I saw the big Russian, a Tartar, and those fifty other Russians who slowly made a circle around him and drew closer in silence and then, finally, threw themselves upon him with cries of hatred and scratched him, trampled him, killed him while nobody did anything or said anything and maybe didn’t even see anything. . . .Then, Lusseyran, I understood.”

  I know all sorts of people

  Who are not equal to their lives. . . .

  At this my friend made a great gesture with his arm as if to leave unspoken an unbearable thought. This thought had occurred to me in the same instant, and I, too, had found it unbearable. There was this powerlessness of men, our powerlessness, in the face of the events of men’s lives, our lives! This was as frightening as the threat of perishing by fire. But Apollinaire had spoken this powerlessness. He had known how to say it in such a way that it no longer had the same face. It wasn’t any softer, but it was clearer. It began to be reclaimed a little bit, just enough to leave a little room in which to live.

  I had loved Saint-Jean for several weeks because he was courageous, ardent, agitated, and especially because he had an unbelievable passion which I had never before encountered to such a degree in anyone — a passion for honesty. He didn’t ask himself whether or not it was prudent to be honest in a concentration camp. An honest man is honest in all circumstances. One keeps one’s word, one tries to understand, even if it’s painful. Inner harmony, moral clarity, these are not things to be sold, even at the price of material security — especially not for that.