The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

by Aharon Appelfeld

  This blending in worried me. It seemed that with every day I was drawing farther away from my parents’ house, forgetting my experiences in the war, and building an illusory shelter for myself. Mother didn’t scold me, but Father’s ironic tongue grew sharper each night, and one time he called me a new Jew.

  “What’s new about me?” I asked, looking at him directly.

  “It seems to me that you’re changing and growing distant from us.”

  “You’re wrong, Father. Since I lost you, I’ve been connected to you with all my might. External conditions don’t have the power to change me. What was is what will be. You will always be with me. And so will Grandfather and all the tall trees on his farm, which live in me now even more.”

  “Pardon me if I insulted you,” Father said, lowering his head.

  —

  One night my friend Mark took his own life. Aside from his first name, I didn’t know a thing about him. The bitter news spread through the training group, and people stood in shock in the area in front of the dining hall.

  “How old was he?” asked a passerby.

  “Our age,” one of us answered.

  “Did he have problems?” the man added in a strident and toneless voice.

  “No,” came the answer, in the same tone.

  —

  It was hard for the people in charge of our training to accept exceptional people. They called them “self-serving.”

  “We’re in the service of the nation” was the iron sentence they kept repeating. But now they were also stunned, as though they had been slapped in the face by reality.

  Mark was tall and broad, and he had passed through the physical training and language instruction in Naples and Atlit splendidly. He stood out because of his light leaps and high jumps. But with all that, he refused to change his name. Ephraim, to his credit, was considerate of Mark’s refusal and didn’t impose his opinion upon him.

  Death, which had only been waiting for us in the thicket, had pounced again. How little we knew of Mark. In Naples I shared a tent with him, and at Misgav Yitzhak we were both in room 32. He hardly spoke, and I was afraid to talk to him. At night he would lie in bed with his eyes open and not say a word. When I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, he would be awake. His concentrated gaze seemed to pierce the darkness. Once in Italy he woke up in the middle of the night and stood next to the tent, not moving until dawn.

  Meanwhile, the local kibbutz members gathered in the yard.

  “He is no more,” they said. “He has gone from us. Why did he do it? Why was there no one to stop him? He was apparently attracted to death.”

  And so their words rolled by, as though they would be able to banish the twinges of conscience that threatened to strike them.

  Everyone expected us to tell them something about Mark, but we didn’t know anything, either. Because we stood in silence, they pointed an accusing finger at us.

  That afternoon the coffin was placed in the yard in front of the culture hall. We surrounded it with guilty eyes. The kibbutz secretary apologized and said, “We know nothing about Mark, not even his family name. He was with us for months; how is it that we didn’t sense his intention?”

  The sun was low in the sky, shining on us and revealing our transience. From the time that we were separated from our parents, we had been wandering from place to place. Ephraim tried to plant the feeling in us that this soil was our true home. His success, I must say, was only partial.

  Benno, as usual, didn’t hold his tongue. After the kibbutz secretary spoke, he said, “Why speak? Better to be silent. When will we learn to be silent?” We seemed like a frightened herd compared to him. He always knew how to separate the essential from the trivial.

  A woman, not very young, read a poem, and then a young man stood on a crate and played the flute. For a moment it seemed as if someone would come from far away, stand there, and recite an elegy for the handsome young man who had taken his own life. No one came. A weighty bewilderment spread across people’s faces, as though enveloping them in a dreadful secret. The secret grew from moment to moment.

  At the graveside a man with thin gray hair spoke about the survivors, that not all of them were capable of withstanding this long struggle. But we mustn’t accuse them of weakness of will. They had been in the ghettos and the camps and had seen horrible sights. Despite his considerate words, I felt that his speech was laden with anger. He concluded by saying, “The Jewish settlers here are about to face great trials. No one must act on his own accord.”

  After the grave was covered, the young man with the flute played a sad song, and that was the end of the ceremony.

  Everyone dispersed. We didn’t know what to do, so we gathered in Mark’s and my room and sat on the beds. Ephraim now stood out in his silence. He wanted to say a few words, but they were stuck in his throat. Finally, he suggested making coffee.

  Where did Mark go? the silence asked. Now I clearly saw his sculpted movements: his high jumps, his rope jumping, his rhythmic running along the shore in Naples. All of his movements had a natural elegance. He never said, That’s mine! Or, Who took my blanket? He spoke little, asked few questions. His inner world guided his expressions, and in his expressions there was the beauty of a young man whose outward appearance corresponded to his inner self.

  Mark strove like the rest of us, but he had a different goal. His refusal to change his name was not ideological but aesthetic. “It isn’t right to change the name given to you by your parents,” he once declared.

  His whole being expressed a quiet meticulousness—the way he rolled up his sleeves, for example. Little things like that bestowed on him a grace that cannot be imitated.

  Toward midnight one of the quieter fellows, someone whose voice we hardly knew, stirred. He spoke in a quavering, restrained voice, mixing Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish words that trembled in his mouth. Let Mark, who has just left us, rest in peace. Don’t disturb his repose, we understood him to say. You could tell that he had caught the unspoken claims and accusations, and now he wanted to defend his friend.

  “Let him have his death the way he wanted it,” he said, raising his voice. Strangely, his were the words that made us weep.

  I once again saw the distant shore near Naples, and Mark: different from the rest of us but not conspicuously so. Only after you had been in his company did you learn that you couldn’t get close to him. He closed himself off behind locks and bolts. His silence was a kind of intense, frozen speech. I tried to get close to him, but I didn’t know how. I had hoped he would open his mouth and speak to me as to a friend, but that didn’t happen. If someone came too close or tried to deprive him of what he regarded as his privacy, he would glare at that person and protest, as when they asked him to change his name or to sing at the campfire. His speech was always brief: one or two sentences, and the words were sharp blades. It was impossible to like him. When he heard a compliment he would grimace, as though he had been served tasteless food.

  Now his death had come, as sudden as a bolt of lightning.

  19

  Mark’s death stirred things up everywhere, but no one talked about him or expressed an opinion. Caution was evident in the movements of the training course staff, as if they had just now realized that in these boys, usually quiet and introverted, a dangerous restlessness roiled. It was clear that words did not have the power to lay bare their dark secrets. It was better to concentrate on work.

  The winter rain began, and we stopped building terraces. Ephraim taught us to prune. Pruning is not a simple job. You have to keep the balance between the shoots and the fruit-bearing branches, and let the light reach the leaves. It was possible to prop up young trees with stakes. Branches that grew out of the trunk were called “pigs” in Hebrew, and they had to be removed, too. In summary, this was the science of pruning. We would learn a lot more about growing deciduous trees.

  —

  “Did you ever talk with Mark?” Yechiel asked me one day. He was a boy who did
all his duties diligently and brought us a wheelbarrow full of snacks every day at ten and four.

  “Not much,” I answered.

  “I didn’t talk to him, either. How is it that we didn’t speak with him?” he asked.

  “It was hard to speak with him.”

  “I should have talked with him.” Yechiel blamed himself.

  “There was no sign he was in distress,” I said, immediately regretting my superficiality.

  Yechiel concentrated on his work. You couldn’t say he was smart or exceptional. He just did what he was told to with diligence. The thin sandwiches that he made for our snacks were tasty; they were wrapped in white paper that was pleasant to touch. He had actually been transferred to the kitchen, where he prepared the snacks.

  Yechiel was careful about the words that left his mouth. He never exaggerated or claimed to have done something he hadn’t done or been part of. His character was already evident in Naples. True, he didn’t stand out in running or calisthenics, but he did what was asked of him and was enthusiastic about the boys who were outstanding. “A colorless young man,” he was called behind his back.

  Work and the activities after work distracted us from Mark’s death, but not Yechiel. After Mark’s death, his concentration deepened. From time to time he raised his head and expressed surprise that we had stopped asking about Mark. Once I heard him say to himself, “Mark is gone.”

  Yechiel was a bit older than most of us, but the child in him sometimes surfaced and filled his face.

  “Tonight I dreamed that Mark came back to life,” he told me.

  “How did he look?” I was drawn in by his voice.

  “Exactly the way he was. He was wearing the green sweater. Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead?” He surprised me, and I didn’t know what to answer.

  “I don’t have a clear opinion,” I said.

  Without looking at me, he said, “My mother used to tell me that the day would come when the dead would come back to life.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to this revelation, so I kept silent.

  Yechiel noticed my embarrassment and said, “I try to believe what my mother believed. I don’t always manage.” His face was pure, as though he hadn’t been in the ghetto and the camps but instead had sat in his mother’s house and absorbed her beliefs.

  I felt unclean and stepped aside.

  —

  Meanwhile, we turned a new page. At night we went out to learn the mountain trails and wadis around us. Ephraim called that walk “scouting.” In my imagination, he intended to take us to Mark’s hidden cave, where he was now living alone. The night was dark, and very few stars were visible in the sky.

  The months of training in Naples, Atlit, and Misgav Yitzhak had left their mark on us. Our step was taut and agile. We easily managed to climb up and pass over obstacles. We were light and fleet on our feet.

  Ephraim proved to be not only an expert in building terraces but also an excellent scout who knew the trails perfectly. The stars in the sky also showed him the way. I can still hear him call out, “Raise your eyes to the heavens and use the stars.”

  On the way back Yechiel told me that he spoke with his mother and brothers every night.

  “What do they say to you?” I asked sharply, without considering his feelings.

  “They are interested in my new place.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “I tell them everything I do.”

  “Have they changed?”

  “No.”

  The honesty of his words pinched me. I was ashamed to be fishing around in his soul without revealing a thing about myself.

  Sometime earlier, when they had asked for a volunteer to prepare sandwiches for the ten o’clock and four o’clock snacks, Yechiel rose to his feet and said, “Me.” Any job would have suited him, but that job was most fitting of all. He always made more food than was necessary and served it all with a bright face. Because of his modesty, he wasn’t seen as a worker who did an efficient job but as a servant, someone not strong enough for the building of terraces. Most likely, he sensed that contempt, but I never heard him complain.

  In time, when I came to think about the nature of religiosity and about the self-abnegation and innocence needed for it, Yechiel appeared before my eyes. I doubt that he regarded himself as a believer, but every time he recalled his mother, his face changed, as though he was merging with her.

  20

  After Mark’s death, the illusory silence in which we had wrapped ourselves dissolved. Our instruction—calisthenics and field training at night—was intense. We could take apart and put together the Sten with our eyes closed. This firearm was now a part of our body. Soon we would study the Bren light machine gun.

  On some nights we were fired at, and the training course staff took up positions and returned fire. But the daytime was quiet and clear. We worked in the orchard and planted plum seedlings on the terrace.

  I saw Robert looking around with wonder.

  “What amazes you?” I asked cautiously.

  “The light.” He surprised me.

  “Is the light here different from what we knew?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I noticed that he didn’t look only at the light. A few days earlier he had found a small fossil among the rocks. He showed it to me and said, “This is a different perspective on life.”

  “I don’t understand.” I wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

  “A chance reminder that we’re transitory.”

  His words astonished me. There was a sense of detachment in them that I myself had not yet been able to express. Like all of us, Robert worked diligently, but sometimes a delicate wonderment touched his face, showing me that he had his own way of seeing.

  Robert noticed that the Judean Hills were rounded and covered with thin scrub. Unlike the Carpathians, the mountains of our youth, in the Judean Hills, horizontal areas were more common than verticals. He saw the world in geometrical terms: vertical, horizontal, or curved lines. His father had been an artist, and he had inherited that way of seeing.

  “Do you want to be an artist?” I invaded his privacy.

  “I hope to,” he said.

  During the war, Robert was sheltered by a friend of his father’s, a Polish nobleman who had lost his fortune. Despite his bitterness, he stayed loyal to his Jewish friend. There were precious things in his village home—textiles, carpets, and many paintings. Most of the paintings were done by Robert’s father, in return for sheltering Robert.

  So Robert was surrounded by his father’s paintings during the war. His father had done many paintings of the members of the nobleman’s family, of his house, and of the landscape around the house. Robert did not go hungry, and he wasn’t beaten. This was evident in his conduct at Misgav Yitzhak: He was quiet and not overeager. His contemplations were soft and pleasant.

  “What’s your mother tongue, if I may ask?”

  “German. But during the war, with Stash, I spoke Polish.”

  “And what’s easier for you?”

  “Polish.”

  There was no need to worry about Robert. He had his own language, the language of line and color.

  I liked his quietness, the few words that would leave his mouth, his gaze when it rested on an object or looked out onto the landscape.

  “Was Stash kind to you?”

  “He was introverted, and nothing outside himself interested him. He was afraid that his daughter would come one day and get her hands on his property.”

  I wanted to ask him more about that marvelous hiding place, but I didn’t.

  —

  That was the way my friends emerged from their hiding places and were revealed. But slumber tried once again to capture me at midday. I felt it approaching, and only with great effort did I manage not to collapse. Finally, I asked Ephraim for a sleep day. He agreed, but this time he asked, “Is it necessary?”

  Without taking off my clothes, I laid my head on the pillow and w
as borne on waves of darkness. I slept for two days straight. If it weren’t for the noise of tractors returning to the garage, it’s doubtful that I would have awakened then. My strange sleep habits were already well known, and when I woke up, everyone’s eyes were upon me.

  In my sleep I ran after Mark, but he quickly sailed by, going around obstacles and climbing walls. I eventually caught up with him. He looked at me angrily and then tried to ignore me.

  “Mark.” I stopped, out of breath. “Where are you running?”

  “From you,” he replied.

  “What harm did I do you?”

  “Why are you following me?”

  “Your death gives me no peace.”

  “Go back to your place, and don’t run after me,” he said and disappeared. I kept going, but now it was a voyage with no destination. There were many dangers in my path. Somehow I overcame them, and when I woke up, I was tired, as if I hadn’t slept at all.

  I was glad that no one asked me anything. I went back to the terrace to water the seedlings we had planted. Very gradually, the slumber dissipated and wakefulness returned.

  21

  Winter. The work outside stopped, and we sat in the classroom and studied the book of Samuel. Slobotsky, the teacher, read slowly and softly, and his voice hovered over the pages. I saw Elkanah, the prophet Samuel’s father, as a tall, restrained man, whose movements were imbued with silence. I also saw his two wives, Peninah and Hannah. Peninah was broad and angry, and Hannah was thin and trembling. Elkanah spoke to Hannah’s heart with soft words, but the words only increased the trembling of her shoulders. She did not dare raise her head.

  The words of the story were simple, but their melody was new to me. This was the language of these hills, absent all decoration and radiating silence.