The Time of the Uprooted Read Online Free PDF Page B

doctor. Is it the way I’m dressed? This old gray suit I’m wearing is my favorite. It dates back to the time of Colette—my first wife, also my last. It’s missing a button and looks as if I’d slept in it. On holidays, like today, I’ll change my shirt, but that’s all. Do I look like a Gypsy, or some homeless man? I prefer to play the part of the absentminded professor.
    “I’m sorry to say this,” says the guard, imperturbable, someone whose authority is second only to God’s, “but I must see proper identification. Those are the rules. You must understand why we”—who is “we”?—“must insist on those rules in times like these.”
    Now the stranger comes to my rescue: “I know this man. I’ll vouch for him. He’s practically one of us.”
    I gasp. Is this my guardian angel? Had our paths crossed in Hungary, in an Austrian hostel, in a shelter for refugees in France? Had he, too, been stateless? Had he, too, envied those fortunate enough to have the right papers, to be citizens of a nation that would protect them, while they sought to realize their dreams? Was there some sort of association across frontiers for onetime refugees, as there was for onetime soldiers?
    “What is the patient’s name?” the guard asks, still sullen.
    “I told you. She’s Hungarian.” I stop to catch my breath and search my memory. “Lili. Lili Rosenkrantz.” That was the name Bolek had mentioned when he gave me the message that had brought me to the hospital.
    “I don’t see that name on the list.”
    “I know her,” says my savior.
    “But I don’t see her name. . . .”
    “Don’t worry about it; I’ll see to it. You have your hands full.”
    “Oh yes,” says the guard. “It’s not as if I don’t have anything to do.” He glares at me. Would he never cease suspecting me? “This patient, is she a relative?”
    How could I answer that? Once again, the stranger comes to my rescue: “Yes, she’s his aunt.”
    Now the guard hands me a slip of paper. “Building four, ward three.”
    I go along a hall that leads to the courtyard, then to a garden. It’s nice out. A peaceful morning: Spring is arriving with a smile. Doctors come and go. Two male nurses are escorting a restless, babbling patient. His features are drawn; he looks undone, as if he has been howling in silence for so long, he can no longer hear the sounds and murmurs of the world.
    I look around for my benefactor. He’s vanished. But he was there at the right time, as if he had lived only to appear at my side when I needed an ally. A helping hand from fate? The cynics are wrong; David Hume and Nikos Kazantzakis are right: Everything that happens in our human universe is mysteriously linked to everything else.
    WHY IS THE PAST SUDDENLY WITH ME? AND WHY is my heart beating so? Gamaliel, sitting on a bench in the calm of the garden, is wondering while he waits for his appointment.
    . . . A FRIGHTENED LITTLE JEWISH BOY IS CLINGING to the skirt of his distraught mother. It’s dark in the bedroom where they are hidden. “Mama,” whispers the small boy, who is mad about stories, “tell me a story. Tell me anything, even one I know. What matters is hearing your voice, not the story. I want to hear your voice.”
    “Not now,” says his mother.
    “But when? Tomorrow? But when is tomorrow? Are you sure tomorrow comes after now?”
    His mother is weeping softly, very quietly, without tears, so as not to be heard by a suspicious neighbor or a passerby in the night. “Be a good boy, my love. Tomorrow will come; the night won’t last forever.”
    The boy is trying to hold back his sobs. “But you . . . you won’t be here tomorrow.”
    “I’ll come back, I promise you.”
    “When? I want to know when you’re coming back.”
    “Soon, my love, very soon, but now you must behave.” He’s willing to behave, but not to be parted from his mother. She strokes his hair, his eyebrows, his lips. “One day, you’ll understand, my precious. The