The Testament Read Online Free PDF Page A

the way I love him. The way you love him yourself. You do love him, don’t you?”
    Raissa’s gaze became remote and Grisha was seized by fear.
    “What’s the matter, Mommy?”
    “Nothing.”
    “I want to know.”
    “You’re too little. Too little to understand.”
    The tremor in her voice made Grisha fall silent. He felt threatened. His room was no longer his room, his toys were no longer his toys. He was being separated from his mother as he had been separated from his father; the world was filled with thieves, stealers of souls, who kill poets and destroy their books. And in that kind of world, orphans are doomed to solitude.

THE TESTAMENT OF PALTIEL KOSSOVER I
    With your permission, Citizen Magistrate, I should like, before I begin—and I shall begin with the end, which I know to be near—to express my gratitude to you.
    You were kind enough to allow me to continue to exercise my profession here. You even suggested a subject: “Your life.”
    Thus, thanks to your kindness, I enjoy a privilege that, in our tradition, is accorded only to the
Just
. They are forewarned of their end so as to enable them to live their death, and, above all, put their affairs in order. And their thoughts. And their memories.
    A
Just
, me? Of course I’m joking. But I find that religious notion strangely appropriate here: have not our relations, Citizen Magistrate, developed, from the beginning, under the sign of religion? You have been urging me to
repent
, to
confess
, to
purge myself
, to
expiate
, to
atone
, to seek
pardon
, to be worthy of
salvation
: these acts are all essentially religious. Priest or inquisitor, you serve the Party whose attributes are divine: great and magnanimous, omnipotent and merciful, infallible, omniscient.…
    If time allows, Citizen Magistrate, I shall return to this another day. But first my confession.
    You have interrogated me a thousand times on the crimes of which I stand accused; and a thousand times I have answered you that none of it made any sense.
    To show you my appreciation, I have today the honor of informing you that I have changed my mind: I plead guilty. Not on all points—not on those that implicate other persons. Only on those that for me—and hence for you too—have symbolic value.
    I plead guilty to having felt something akin to hatred for the glorious Russian nation into which I was born and for which I have fought.
    I plead guilty to having nurtured—a little late, too late—an exaggerated, boundless love for an obstinate people, my own, whom you and your people have endlessly denigrated and oppressed.
    Yes, today, I break my links with your world, a world protected and represented by this prison; I espouse the Jewish cause, I espouse it entirely and totally; yes, I declare my solidarity with the Jewish people everywhere, always. Yes, I am a Jewish nationalist in the historical, cultural and ethical sense; I am first and foremost a Jew, and regret not having been able to declare this earlier and elsewhere.
    And now the facts.
    You will laugh: I should like to express myself in verse. But that would take a lifetime.…
    Name, given name, patronymic: must I write them down? You know very well who I am. It is true that, under the pressure of your interrogations, one reaches the point of forgetting one’s own identity. And you, do you learn any more from that? Forgive the impudence of a maker of words, Citizen Magistrate. His history binds you to him forever, for one day you will be old and alone with your reflections, as I am now. And you will ask yourself who you are. And you will answer: I am the one who was seen by a Jewish poet before he died, I am the one whose image Paltiel Gershonovich Kossover carried with him to his death.
    Yes: Paltiel Gershonovich Kossover, that is my name. Poet by avocation, Jew by birth, and—forgive me—Communist, or former Communist, by conviction. I know: you are wincing. You deny me the right to refer to my various titles of service. I am an