I am surrounded by a diaspora of returns, Niala mused. One always seeks one’s own center. One comes back to it sometimes, then sets off again. Toward what? Toward far-off places? Toward unknown peripheries? Not at all! Toward new centers that one imagines set down far away. Toward the hope of new centers. And so one sets off once more. Which means, of course, that one never stops coming back. Today, at my age, I see myself hemmed in by these perpetual returns from centers that shift and toward centers that move no less. That is what this diaspora is, this inner dispersion that makes it impossible to know any longer whether one is on the point of going off somewhere else again, or whether one has not yet finished coming back one more time. Have I really returned? one wonders. Or rather, am I “returning” — not quite settled yet, and already with the idea of leaving?
Am I about to leave? Or already gone? Gone you must be, a little, I tell myself — Niala tells himself — the way one says of someone “that he’s a bit gone.” But that’s how it is! From seeking my center so hard, I no longer have one. At my age — already a little on the wane — I ought to be settled. In my own home, with my own furniture. But no. I live in nothing but a furnished studio on a temporary lease. “Unstable!” the psychologists would surely diagnose. Perhaps, indeed; but at least — even if I suffer from never being able to return, once and for all — I am compelled to stay light. I do not weigh myself down, in fact, being only passing through. I constrain and condemn myself to the essential.
So: no final return to end this round of perpetual returns. And yet — yes, there is one! — a return that cannot be avoided. The change of life! The years pass. Bodies put on weight. So do thoughts. The joints grow less supple. And from where does the change of life return? From youth? From the long-cherished hope of a life exempt from aging? Those utopian places of a perpetually youthful existence, bathed in the waters of eternal youth, we once went there and reveled in them. We shall go back no more, now. We are done with them. That is the change of life, and it is also what makes one wish to settle somewhere now, to grow old in perfect peace within one’s domestic walls. But no, once again! No walls for you, Niala tells himself. Or else, movable walls for transhumant furniture. The change of life is forbidden. Only the out-of-place is permitted; the no-place; the obligatory renewal.
Is it growing old in rejuvenation, to be forbidden the change of life? Perhaps, Niala tells himself. But, at the same time, it is to deprive oneself of wisdom; of poise. Weight is not only heaviness. It is gravity. Poise, precisely. Toward what heaviness, then, toward what gravity, do I forbid myself to return when I force myself, endlessly transmigrating, into lightness? I forbid myself to consent to what weighs within me, to what gravely burdens me at the risk of drawing me down toward depths I refuse. But which depths? And yet perhaps it is there that the true return lies! Return to what? If I put the question to myself like that — letting come what comes to mind, spontaneously — what I perceive are, first, the lights — those of the South — fragrances (thyme, rosemary, lavender), shapes (the leaves of fig trees, the trunks of olive trees), tactile sensations — the sand beneath bare feet, the sea in the heat of the day.
Is this what has weight for me? Is this what — as far as my deepest desire is concerned — I can scarcely keep myself from returning to? To each his land of milk and honey. But to each, too, often, a kind of prohibition against returning to what one desires. I have, if I think about it, turned all my life toward the West, and yet I carried within me an East that held me back from leaving entirely for wherever I was migrating. Hence my returns. Then my departures. Then my returns, necessarily. The West, for me, rightly or wrongly, was efficiency, clarity of ideas, restraint of gesture, the rights and laws of democracy. And the East? The matrix, probably. Ancestrality. Provenance. Sensuality. The subtlety of attitudes. The thicknesses of duration. Hard to put into words, all that…
So sometimes — from very far off, I must say — the idea of a return to Israel crosses my mind. West and East intertwined. The father and the mother. Law and love. Becoming and the ancestral. No matter! This departure — would it in fact be a return? The Return? The Return before the great Departure? Where, then, to finish never finishing always beginning again? That is the question.
*
Niala walks through Paris. He likes it: setting his steps in his own steps each time he comes back to this city. He once lived here. He finds himself again here. Memory comes back to him. It is the memory of footsteps, he muses: that of the feet; of the places traversed. A memory of situation: it is enough to be there, in this place — for example, this square, behind Notre-Dame — for memories to come back at once. They make return. Where were they before they came back? In a corner of his head, buried under strata of time? Or did they remain in this square, lying in wait, ready to reveal themselves the moment he stepped through the gate opening onto the central island?
And then this footbridge leading across to the Île Saint-Louis… How many times had he crossed it! With his children carried on his back. With sweethearts. He returns to those memories that his walking, at its own rhythm, exhumes. No doubt that is what they are, these centralities one returns to. They are within us and outside us at once, in those places that preserve our own memory. And we forget them, often, these places.
And why, after all, do we keep, in drawers, albums of yellowed photographs? Because they allow us to make return to ourselves. Without them, would we still know what childlike face our mother had when she was rocked in a cradle? These memory-albums trace the cartographies of journeys that lead us toward beginnings. Returning to them, we turn back toward ourselves. Who, precisely, were we? Who were our own people? The uncles? The aunts? The grandparents and the ancestors? Niala walks on, head bowed, along the banks of the Seine. A barge passes slowly. What we seek in these albums, he muses, is perhaps, in the end, the place of an inner Orient: that point thanks to which we can orient ourselves anew, having taken our bearings with ourselves.
Is this enough? Is it enough to leaf through a few pages, to consult a few snapshots, to set off again toward the world, strengthened by the assurances this return will have given us? Niala doubts it. It takes far more than such a return to begin again: to begin anew. Forty years ago, Niala recalls, he used to get off at the Corvisart metro station, in the thirteenth arrondissement, twice a week, for his psychoanalysis sessions. There, slowly, laboriously, a spiral return toward himself was pursued, a return that never finished unwinding its loops until new loops appeared to lead elsewhere, toward unknown places. So the journey went on, month after month, and it had one day seemed to Niala that the loops, curiously, widened as they tightened. The more intensely — intensively — he went toward himself (to the point of risking suffocation beneath his own weight), the more amply, extensively, he felt free to play with himself, with what had until then seemed made up of so many knots that bound him fast.
Finally, one day, he had returned enough, it had seemed to him, to be able to set off again. And he had indeed left, breaking off his analysis. Perhaps it would have taken only a little more time for him to escape, once and for all, this succession of returns and departures that circled around him. Perhaps… But that is how it was.
He had ended up in Quebec, and lavender, there, was not exactly thick on the ground. The matrix had drawn back, or rather it was he who was gradually moving away from it. All that whiteness of snow and cold made him happy. It cleansed him. The earth, here, had not fed on the mass graves of the great wars. The concentration camps remained in Europe with their atrocious memories. Moving away from Europe, from the Balkans, from the Middle East, had he made return, without precisely meaning to, to a kind of innocence? Things, here, were simpler. Newer. More naive.
But the matrix remained there in the shadows, waiting for him to despair of no longer being able to despair. He needed drama, probably. Uncertainty. Complexity. All this, beneath the snow, was too clear-cut. This cold was far too sharp to leave room for doubt: for half-measures. This vitality seemed to him to lie in the oblivion of past centuries. In short, he missed Europe, with its endless litany of questions forever taken up, never settled. Had one been part of the Resistance? Was secularism threatened by immigration? Did Iran really threaten Israel? And would post-Mubarak Egypt be a credible partner? And Libya? Syria?
There! He had come back. Here, in Europe, one had one’s nose pressed to these problems. But at least things moved! Information crisscrossed, contradicted itself. Too much, no doubt! Too much intelligence for too few means of action. Too many commentaries, too many cutting formulas, for too few pieces to fit into place. Over there, on the other shore of the Ocean, it was a bit of a void. But the freedom of movement. Here it was the crowd, the overflow, the compression. But also the effervescence.
Which to choose? Freedom or feverishness? Perhaps neither one nor the other, in the end, but calm in rootedness: a happy solitude on a recovered land. He had heard Amos Oz, the other evening, in one of his lectures, tell how he walked each morning, at dawn, drinking his coffee, in that scrap of desert adjoining his farm. The smell of the Sinai. The recovered lights and those distant summits, so near. The sound of emptiness. The breaths of the hollowing-out. The amplitude! A tiny country to know the amplitude and the dilation of the heart? Was that what Israel was? That, in spite of everything: in spite of the will to annex, the settlements, the balance of forces? In spite of the missiles and the assassinations, the suicide attacks and the battle tanks?
Niala no longer knew. Since he no longer knew, he could no longer make return to the land of the ancestors, condemning himself thereby to the ancestral return in foreign lands. But he had come to terms with it! He was a Jew in diaspora, no doubt about it. A stranger in a strange land, he was therefore at home, strangely, wherever he stood. As long as he stood there.
But the dream remained there, obstinate, in the folds of his head. To recover the Place! The territory. To recover the land, to lie down upon it and love it. To sow it. To return in order to recover. To make it bloom. To be as close as possible to the matrix; to let oneself be taken by it, to fold back within its enclosure, to think according to its hopes — its hopes, its own — to speak according to its words, to act according to its wishes. To die for it, if need be. To protect it…
Am I ready for that? Niala asks himself. Too late for me now, at my age, and perhaps it was always too late. I needed open space, diversity, cosmopolitanism, strangeness. The illusion of internationalism. Nothing human could be foreign to me, I wanted to believe. I wanted to be a Jew as a man, and not a man as a Jew. Have I gotten over that? Not really. I say it again: I am a Jew who has not made return to Israel and who, for that reason perhaps (after all, it is possible), never stops returning to his own returns, to the very heart of his perplexities. But, truth be told, is it not better to be this way — uncertain and alert — rather than cast in a single block and steeped in certainties? The answer to this question is itself uncertain.
*
Niala, following the banks of the Seine, has reached the level of the Pont des Arts. Here, he remembers — more than fifty years ago, already — he had kissed Iris, that young German woman with blonde hair. She would not go back home, she had explained to him. Never. She was thinking of leaving for Peru, “because it’s far away.” Or somewhere else. No matter. Family matters that were not very clear, at home, in Munich. A father compromised with the Third Reich? She was discreet about that. In any case, she would not go back “over there.” The world was large. They had set off, the two of them, for Greece, for a whole month, before they parted. No news since. And how could he have received any, with all those changes of address? What remained to him of Iris was a few photographs. Photographs that were passing in their turn, with time. For everything passes without making return.