The Sonderberg Case Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘theater of operations,’ but war isn’t theater. On that particular stage, the dead don’t get back up.”
    Yedidyah made a gesture of discouragement. “Unfortunately, among those who declare war, there are surely some, here as elsewhere, for whom it’s a game staged by believers far away who claim to be acting in the name of their God.”
    One of his son’s comments filled him with emotion and convinced him to make the trip to Israel: “Let it not be said,” Leibele had recently written, “that the descendant of the great Rabbi Petahia failed to join his people when they were in danger.”
    And Yedidyah said to himself that, clearly, history was not a game.
    And yet. He wondered how so much suffering could beexplained in this world, a world hidden under the mask of hatred, like a shroud, as a way of extinguishing the last sparks of sensibility and hope from it. How is one to act so this suffering would successfully transcend history by humanizing it?
    Recalling the past, his grandfather had said to him one day, “You often hear people say, regarding some event, history will be the judge. Actually, history itself will be judged.”
    “In other words,” Yedidyah noted, “Creation may be just one big, lengthy court proceeding?”
    “Yes, you might say that.”
    “And where does God fit in, Grandfather?” Yedidyah asked.
    His grandfather didn’t answer.
    Each time Yedidyah hears the word “trial,” inevitably Kafka’s trial is the one that comes to his mind: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.”
    Lies, many lies, were told about the young German Werner Sonderberg. How had he managed to cope? As he faced the huge, all-powerful judicial apparatus, he had remained impassive, as if immunized in his isolation. Yedidyah described the young man, but he didn’t really understand him. Many events had filled his memory since then, from both the general situation and his private life,but the trial had receded in his mind without fading away. Had his approach to things changed, his trajectory? Had the defendant’s behavior made him sense something that might have influenced his conception of justice, if not of good and evil? If he had changed, at what precise moment? And what part had Alika played in all of this? Had he grown closer to her, or drifted away from her?
    There was one incident that could have turned into a disaster.
    Alika was playing in Chekhov’s
The Three Sisters
.
    “Do me a favor,” she said to Yedidyah. “Don’t come to see the play.”
    Afraid he would be ashamed of her? He had gone nevertheless. Secretly. With a pang of anguish, he had waited in the dark for the curtain to rise and had slipped into the silent theater. He took a seat in the next-to-last row. Alika lives for the theater; her dream is to go onstage. Will she live up to the challenge? Will she thrill the audience, tense in its quest for beauty and truth, for the old to become new, alternating between the known and unknown? Will she act well? And if not, how could he tell her without wounding her and endangering their love? She acted well, in fact very well. But it was not the right part. Instead of playing the part of Masha, the unfortunate, unhappy wife, she had chosen the part of the youngest sister, Irina, who was nervous,restless, and scatterbrained. Alika was not very good at incarnating a character that did not suit her.
    Would she find out that he had disobeyed? The subject never came up.
    Dr. Feldman and I see each other often. This morning he makes me open my mouth and examines my tongue.
    “I don’t like it,” he says.
    “I’m sorry, Doctor, but it’s the only one I have.”
    He doesn’t appreciate my humor.
    Actually, the good doctor doesn’t like anything about me. And even less my heart. He doesn’t like the way I’m breathing. He thinks I tire too quickly. He wants to know whether, by any chance, my parents had heart conditions. No, not as far as I know. Perhaps someone else in my