Présentation de l'éditeur
Reuven Tamiroff, a Holocaust survivor, has never been able to speak about his past to his son, a young man who yearns to understand his father’s silence. As campuses burn amidst the unrest of the Sixties and his own generation rebels, the son is drawn to his father’s circle of wartime friends in search of clues to the past. Finally discovering that his brooding father has been haunted for years by his role in the murder of a brutal SS officer just after the war, young Tamiroff learns that the Nazi is still alive. Haunting, poetic, and very contemporary,
The Fifth Son builds to an unforgettable climax as the son sets out to complete his father’s act of revenge.
Extrait
Was it dawn or dusk? The town of Reshastadt appears crouch and unreal under a steady slow drizzle. Was he already asleep? Or not yet awake? I did not exist for him. I was the bearer of a message, but he was not aware of either message or messenger.
Here is the station. In my confusion, I did not know whether I had just arrived or was preparing to leave again. Was I awake? I was floating in the unreal. Just like the day I followed Lisa on her trip. The same panic oppressed me. The same fist clutched my chest. But that day I loved Lisa—and today I did not love myself.
At one point, inexplicable, I thought I felt my father’s presence behind me. I jumped and turned around: “You shouldn’t have,” he told me as his hand pointed to the station and the streets and the town and the mountains that were already receding. “Forgive me,” I stammered. “Forgive me, Father, for having brought you back here, but I had no choice,”
My father shook his head unhappily. He was judging me. He was not really here, but his condemnation was real enough. How could I explain it? He hated explanations. He just kept saying: no, no, you shouldn’t have.
And so, like long ago, after the trip with Lisa, upon awakening I felt overwhelmed, weighed down with unspeakable remorse; my thoughts confused, my tongue pasty, I felt a stranger to myself. I began to pace the waiting room. Advertising posters: beautiful girls and their friends their lovers swim and laugh and drink and run and call and offer themselves for little or nothing, for a moment or a lifetime.
I tried to understand myself. I did not succeed. Once on the train, things would be better, that was a promise.
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“You shouldn’t have,” repeats my father. I could reply: “And you?” But I say nothing, I feel guilty. And yet I have done nothing. I feel guilty because I have done nothing.
If only I could get angry, express my rage, but I cannot. . . . And that saddens and annoys me and I resent this insensitive world and my father who understands without understanding that there is nothing to understand, for noise becomes torture and memory drives one mad and the future pushes us back to the edge of the precipice and death envelops us and rocks us and stifles us and, helpless, we can neither cry nor run.
Attention, all passengers. Leaving? Arriving? Goodbye, Reshastadt, the train is arriving, the train arrives, next stop Frankfurt then the airport then the plane then New York and the adventure starts all over again, ecstasy for lovers, prison for beggars, watch out all aboard your ticket
bitte, nicht hinauslehnen, bitte.
I beg your pardon, Mr. German ticket-taker conductor, I beg your pardon, father, descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you are right, I shouldn’t have. Why did I go to Germany and why did I seek out this dull and hateful little town? Why renew contact with a past drowned in blood? To conclude a project which from the start was doomed to fail? Had I really, truly imagined being able to dominate another man, to crush him, annihilate him?
I see my father looking at me disapprovingly. Yet it is his story that has led me here, on this train which seems to go backward rather than forward. The story of a leader who, again by chance, was called upon to play a role
