Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

The staff fell silent in the end like the stone on which the one and the other had lain prostrate, the funeral slabs under which the one and the other would have to lie. The star announces the wedding celebration, the holiday of rest and of prayers for the biblical mother and her biblical Father. The wedding ceremony before sunset, bloodied before setting, before the dark that spread over the sunset and beyond sunset, when they finally met — Celan and Fondane and the white crutches of their books — and they were able to speak for the first time at length about themselves and about us, the ones who have climbed with them, toward them, near them and their bloodied shadows.

Chat, barren hum, idle words! There could not be conversation after their setting and ours, beyond the mountains and sunset …

There could only be idle speech, babble, stammering, with Gross and Klein, with “I” Do-you-hear-me, and “thou” Do-you-hear-me, the inebriation of the Earth not made for us, tongue and language are no longer ours, the flowers and their fruit were never for us, the ones with the forbidden name, wavering shadows, foreign, borrowed, crutches that speak without our understanding their matter or their silence and that light our steps and those of strangers without our seeing, under the distant, painful star, “I” here and “thou” here. We come from the Vale of Tears where they tolerate us, sometimes, for a while, to draw behind us our souls emptied of soul for a new funereal ascension, another hallucination from which we will be hurled into the tumult of the shades.

No, nothing. Or maybe whatever burned down like that candle on that day, the seventh, not the last; not on the last day, no, because here I am, here on this road which they say is beautiful; here I am by the turk’s cap lily and the corn-salad, and a hundred yards over, over there where I could go, the larch gives way to the stone-pine. I see it, I see it and don’t see it, and my stick which talked to the stones, my stick is silent now, and the stones you say can speak, and over my eyes there is that moveable veil, there are veils, moveable veils, you lift one, and there hangs another, and the star there — yes, it is up there now, above the mountains — if it wants to enter it will have to wed and soon it won’t be itself, but half veil and half star, and I know, I know, cousin, I know I’ve met you here, and we talked a lot, a lot, and those folds there, you know they are not for men, and not for us who went off and met here, under the star, we the Jews who came like Lenz through the mountains, you Gross and me Klein, you, the windbag, and me the windbag, with our sticks, with our unpronounceable names, with our shadows, our own and not our own, you here and me here—

In the murmur and babble of the dialogue and of the memory in which the flame of love from back then still flickers and with which nothing can compare, the staff has grown still, intimidated by the undertone with which Buber tries to halt the two interlocutors, as if back then, long ago, when each of the wanderers had been instructed under the flickering of the Friday night candle.

Buber would try again to turn them from their pilgrimage so that he might join them, but they would no longer heed him.

“The spirit in its human manifestation is man’s response to his Thou … the response toward that Thou that appears out of the mystery and that addresses us from the mystery. Spirit means word,” Buber whispers to the two who have long known that spirit is word. “The Spirit resides not in I but between I and Thou,” he repeats to the poets who have known this for a long time and who have learned it again with every step of their meeting, because “then when we follow the road and meet with a person who comes toward us following his own way, we know only our own road, not his, which he only reveals to us through meeting. The other party, his side happens to us through meeting,” Buber had whispered long ago, back then , under the flickering of the guttering candle and whispers to the wayfarers again, now, in the undertone of meeting and conversation in the mountains.

Something and more than something was setting, was declining, was guttering out: then, thereafter, this minute. The two poets do not hear the shadow of back then; only the staff hears and absorbs the high, clear peace and quiet, more eloquent than words.

The interlocutors are now witnesses too, witnesses to the dying out of a world of which only the meeting in posterity reminds them. They keep silent, and silence is kept by the staff, and the mountains of stone and the woods … “a pause, an empty space, a blank — you see all the syllables stand around, waiting.”

This is the silence that culminates in all the silences prior to addressing, to meeting and conversation. “Only the keeping silent before the Thou, the silence of all languages, the taciturn expectation in the unformed, undifferentiated, pre-linguistic word liberates that Thou that stands in reserve, there where the spirit does not manifest itself but is.” They keep silent but they are beside each other in the undying that is only granted to the dead that resurrect in speech and meeting. The staff stands between them absorbing the silence and the shades of the land of hereafter and afterwards, absorbing the spirit of between : mutuality, the space of relationship, of the appeals in which the two have animated destiny.

As a child Buber spent his summer vacations in Bucovina, in a village near Sadagura, near Cern u ti and not far from Her ta, gazing at the Hasidim, who were no more than diminished surrogates of their forebears in whom, once flickered — back then, like a candle ready to gutter out, like sunset lowering its nocturnal mantle over the pilgrim’s wanderings — the word : the word of Rabbi Eleazar, “the word created for the sake of the perfect man.”

For the sake of … “for the sake of the imperfect man” the poets of the word would irritatedly reply — the one from Cern u ti the other from Her ta—“for the sake of the imperfect man, but in his perfection.” That is how the poets would reply if they heard the whispers of the declining shadow.

“Any living being is a meeting,” the melamed , the children’s teacher, would murmur, unheard, “And so is posterity. One only resurrects through meeting,” the wanderers would repeat with a single, unheard voice like fraternal shadows.

The day burned down to its end, the love they could neither give nor receive from those flung under the selfsame slabs, now after sundown, after ash, after their uniting like brothers, recalls and reclaims those unloved. Now on the eve of departure from here when the sun and not only the sun is nearly set, Celan and Fondane have united in brotherly love with the forever unloved, on the final road toward themselves, up there in the eternal and non-eternal depths:

“me here, me, who could tell you all this could have and don’t and didn’t tell you; me with a turk’s cap lily on my left, me with corn-salad, me with my burned candle, me with the day, me with the days, me here and me there, me, maybe accompanied — now by the love of those I didn’t love, me on the way to myself, up here.”