Elie Wiesel Read Online Free PDF Page B

You belong in school, not with me. You’re too young to waste your time and too good to clutter up my fantasies. Scram. It’s in your own interest to steer clear. If I start talking you are lost.”
    “I’m not afraid, sir.”
    “And you brag about it? Learn to be afraid. Like me. Like everybody.”
    “I’ll learn.” And in a burst of audacity, “Teach me.”
    The stranger grimaced suddenly. His gaze flared at Elhanan with painful force. “No, son. Find someone else.”
    “Please,” Elhanan said. “Every visitor teaches me something. Don’t be the first to send me away empty-handed.”
    The stranger appraised him at length and then broke into a smile. Elhanan thought, When I’m grown up I’ll smile like him.
    “So be it,” the stranger said. “You won’t go away empty-handed. You’ll remember this meeting. You’ll remember that once on the path of life you came across an old Jew, as old as the world itself, as stubborn as the world’s memory. I’m not asking you to promise not to forget; he’s the one who makes that promise.”
    The stranger smiled at him again, and Elhanan thought, No, I won’t go away empty-handed; when I’m grown up I’ll be generous like him.
    Elhanan wanted to go on talking, but the stranger withdrew into himself, as if the boy were not there.
    Elhanan wanted to cry, as if he guessed that the stranger would not be able to keep his promise.

T heir first meeting. At the
Times.
At the end of the seventies. Tamar was a political reporter, and a star. Malkiel was a rewrite man. She brought in some copy and handed it to the editor, who scanned it quickly and dropped it on Malkiel’s desk. “Cut it down a little, but not too much; be careful. Tamar doesn’t like people tampering with her copy.” It was a piece about some local political campaign. Charges and countercharges. Malkiel knew his stuff. Melt down the fat. Cut the cosmetics and coloratura. The classic rule of good journalism: honor the verb, sacrifice the adjective. And then the rhythm: be careful about pace and rhythm. An easy job, all technique, quickly accomplished. The piece ran on page one. His boss, nicknamed “the sage,” was obviously pleased.
    Not Tamar. She was famous, and she knew it; her successes, if not her pride, gave her the right to be temperamental. She stormed in next morning, furious, and planted herself in front of her surgeon: “You butchered my piece, you destroyed it, you turned it into a simplistic, id-i-o-tic caricature! Any reader with brains must have laughed at it!” She forced the words out between clenched teeth. “Who are you to massacre my story? Who told you to flatten my style? To make a fool of me in front of the whole world?”
    Standing there, she intimidated Malkiel, who wished he could crawl into a hole in the ground. If his esteemed colleague could have fired him on the spot she would have, and with pleasure. More, if she had had the power to cut off his fingers or even his head …
    It was the sage, defender of the oppressed, who saved Malkiel from eternal damnation. He took her by the shoulders. “Calm down, Tamar,” he said. “Do you want to drive him to despair? Just between us, he had nothing to do with it. In fact, he fought to keep it exactly as it was—and it was, by the way, one of the best pieces you ever wrote. I never saw him fight for any piece the way he did for this one.”
    The tigress calmed down immediately. “Is that bargain-basement flattery true?”
    The sage, visibly sincere, flashed his special-occasion smile: “I swear it on the most beautiful head in the room. Yours.”
    She turned back to Malkiel, a bit confused and repentant. “You poor boy! I’m a monster. Why did you let me go on like that? You should have insulted me, put me in my place, told me to go to hell.… Don’t be id-i-o-tic. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. By the way, what’s your name?”
    So they became pals. Accomplices. Everybody at the rewrite desk knew it: