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her on the cheek? I choose to do nothing and say nothing. May my respectful and wounded silence be an offering.
    Let me explain.
    My last hours in Jerusalem, in the Old City. I spend a sleepless night thinking things through.
    I had promised my grandfather that I wouldn’t forget the past, the past that haunted him. How was I to reconcile Auschwitz and Jerusalem? Would the former merely be the antithesis, the anti-event of the latter? If Auschwitz is forever the question, is Jerusalem forever the answer? On the one hand the darkness of the abyss, on the other the dazzling light of daybreak? At Birkenau and Treblinka, theburning bush was consumed, but here the flame continues to warm the hearts of messianic dreamers.
    What is the meaning of all this?
    Let me explain.
    I catch myself having a sudden desire to pray. I pray for Alika: may she find serenity. For my two children: may they find fulfillment in a world rid of all cruelty, cynicism, and pain, and all forms of fanaticism. For my uncle Méir: may his madness continue to bring beauty and not intellectual decline. For my grandfather: may he still live a long time, may he find the strength to recount what can only be expressed by song or silence.
    Let me explain.
    The beggars, whose palms and mouths were constantly open, even when there wasn’t a single tourist in sight. Not one answered my questions, but they all made me offerings that have greater weight than the best of replies. I collect their stories with a deep sense of gratitude.
    The story of the two drops of water in the ocean that look for each other in vain and meet only when solitude and nostalgia turn them into tears—I got this story from one of them. I regard it as a treasure that it is incumbent upon me to safeguard.
    I say to him: it could be that God set me on man’s earth for the express purpose of this meeting here tonight, in the shadow of the shades that roam before the Wall, and to listen to you.
    Suddenly, facing the remains of the ancient Temple,where countless pilgrims have come to express their thirst for truth and redemption, I realize that, for the first time in a long time, far from Alika, I haven’t lived or even approached experience in theatrical terms.
    Perhaps because here neither fate nor history appears as a spectacle that can be interrupted or canceled at will.
    Like my grandfather, when I returned to New York I was no longer the same.

AND JOURNALISM? AND THE TRIAL? Werner and Anna. The young German would like to see me. What does he want to talk to me about? Does he want to compare notes, the notes of the actor with the notes of the spectator?
    So I was a journalist. I began my career as a drama critic. Yet it had never occurred to me; it had never been one of my ambitions. Actually, I owe being cast in this part to our bearded professor with the mischievous expression.
    During my third year of study, he gave me to understand—and hardly with kid gloves—that he couldn’t see me leading a useful or honorable life on the stage.
    “You like the theater, that’s for sure,” he said to me one day. “It means a lot to you, that’s obvious, and I like that. But I can’t see you on the boards.”
    And after a pause for dramatic effect: “I see you in the audience.”
    Some of my classmates started to laugh while I felt crushed. Alika lost her temper. “You morons, you find thisfunny? Professor, how can you enjoy humiliating a student in public?”
    He hastened to correct himself. “Pay no attention to the wiseguys, my son. You’re superior to them. In fact, you’re the best in the class. But …”
    “But what?” Alika asked insistently. “Go on. Don’t stop in the middle of a nasty remark.”
    He didn’t answer her, but invited me to come and see him after class in his office.
    I expected criticism, or worse: a condescending lesson to make me understand, for once and for all, that I was a hopeless actor. And I wasn’t completely mistaken.
    We were standing in front