The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

by Aharon Appelfeld

  I was afraid to keep reading. I stood at the threshold of the story. It would be best to absorb that passage before I continue, I said. I assume that there is much treasure hidden in this story. I ought to prepare myself for it.

  Robert came and brought me some sketches and a drawing. The sketches were better than the drawing. I concealed my opinion from him. The sketches were of a landscape that was not from here. The trees were bathed in moist darkness, and sadness dripped from them. Robert liked to draw the local cypresses, but what could he do? The charcoal tricked him and wrapped them in the darkness of another place.

  I told him that this darkness wasn’t local. Robert didn’t agree with me and claimed he was trying to be precise in the amounts of light and shade and to make his sketch faithful to what his eyes saw.

  “Do we know what our eyes show us?” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, as though he had caught me saying something inexact. I didn’t have the right words within me to explain it to him.

  “It’s not important,” I said.

  But Robert kept claiming that he was drawing exactly what his eyes saw—in order to mingle with this soil, among other things. He said he liked these landscapes better than the ones we came from. They were more spiritual.

  —

  No one to whom God has granted the ability to do something is miserable. Benno couldn’t do what he wanted to do, and he was burdened with restlessness. Restlessness makes a person bitter and critical. Benno mocked my copying and called it a useless activity. It would have been easier for me if he had refrained from visiting, but he insisted on coming once a week, bringing me some fruit or a chocolate bar. Apparently, I was the only one with whom he could talk about his problems. Unfortunately, he was a bitter person and cast his bitterness onto me.

  And so each of us climbed his own path up the steep mountain. Instead of helping one another, we made each other fail. I was sorry for Benno because his talent was frozen, and he wasn’t even trying to thaw it out.

  —

  Again I read the beginning of “In the Prime of Her Life.” Only an artist who knows his way achieves such clarity and restraint. I don’t have that stillness, I said to myself, and for now I don’t have the ability to choose my words. Sleep is what takes me by storm and sweeps me on its waves, and when I emerge from the darkness, the light doesn’t help me. It blinds me.

  —

  One of the patients, a talkative one, asked me if I was writing.

  “No,” I answered decisively.

  “How do you expect to become a writer if you don’t write?”

  “I’m waiting for better days.”

  “If you’re talking about quiet, you should know that a great war is on its way.”

  Stupidly, I told him that I was reading “In the Prime of Her Life” by Agnon.

  “You have to read current literature and not moldy stories about the shtetl.”

  “Are you referring to S. Yizhar and Moshe Shamir?” I asked.

  “Both of them.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Practical people silenced me. In the end I wanted to tell them, You’re right. There’s no doubt that you’re right. But what could I do? The great sleep directed me. I lived in its seasons. The other seasons didn’t influence me.

  The man couldn’t understand my way of thinking.

  “You have to train yourself for secretarial work,” he persisted. “People are considerate of war invalids, and the employment agency sends them to offices.”

  “No,” I blurted out.

  “Why not?”

  “Invalids also have ambitions. It’s wrong to stifle their ambitions.”

  He cut me off. “Work comes before everything,” he said.

  “I worked in an orchard,” I said, raising my voice, “and I’ll continue working there. With my friends I built a big terrace, and I planted the first seedlings there. I hate office work. I’ll continue training and going out on missions at night. My legs will return to me, and they will be at my disposal. It’s wrong to send injured people to gray offices.”

  The man didn’t expect to hear a protest like that and retreated somewhat. But I refused to listen to his apologies and stood up on my crutches.

  “Office work destroys the soul,” I said. “I’m connected to the orchard, and every day I will get up early to see the buds and flowers. That is my eternal inheritance.”

  I went back to my room.

  50

  Dr. Winter showed me the X-rays and assured me that the upcoming operation would greatly improve my walking. I wanted to believe him, but I was hobbled by doubt. Every day I would copy a chapter from the book of Samuel and two or three passages from “In the Prime of Her Life.” Sometimes I felt that copying was like a prayer whose content is not understood, and sometimes it seemed that I wasn’t copying of my own free will but that somebody was forcing the task on me.

  I was hoping for the day when I would place my pen on the paper and my own words would flow in measured abundance, word after word.

  I had a long conversation with one of the patients, who stunned me with his insights. When I told him I was copying the book of Samuel and the story “In the Prime of Her Life,” he looked me in the eye, without a hint of arrogance, and said that was the correct way to acquire the Hebrew letters.

  “Who instructed you to do that?”

  “I myself.”

  “The Hebrew language has many secrets, and we must approach it modestly, as we approach the holy scriptures. Do you feel the secrets?” he whispered in wonderment.

  “I feel that copying brings me nearer to the letters,” I said.

  “You’re doing it the right way.” Again, he encouraged me. This man didn’t speak the way other people at the convalescent home spoke.

  “Where are you from, sir?” I asked him cautiously.

  “From a little village in the Carpathians,” he told me. “I learned Hebrew from the prayers. I used to pray three times a day. Once, I knew the whole prayer book by heart. Years of work in the orange groves have driven quite a few prayers from my heart, but now they’re slowly returning to me. What you learned in childhood isn’t easily erased.”

  “In my house they didn’t pray.” I didn’t conceal it from him.

  “I also didn’t know how to value prayer. I believed that working the soil would cure my bodily and spiritual pains, and, like everyone, I sang, ‘We’ve come to the Land to build and be rebuilt by it.’ I was glad to call the tools by their Hebrew names, as if they were holy vessels: hoe, pick, spade, rake. Unfortunately, people aren’t careful in their speech. They’ve uprooted words from ancient books and thrown them into an open field and onto a noisy street. Words that have been stored in books are accustomed to a different environment. One mustn’t pluck them out high-handedly.”

  “How are you allowed to use them?” I was drawn to his voice.

  “With great caution.” He spoke in a whisper.

  I didn’t understand him fully, but I sensed that his words hit on what I had merely guessed at, without knowing how to express it.

  “What do you want to write?” he asked after a brief silence.

  “About my parents’ life and mine.” The words, to which I hadn’t given much thought, popped out.

  “But you’re a young man. For a young person, there’s no past and no future.”

  “I left my childhood days on the slopes of the Carpathians, and they’re waiting for me to return to them.”

  “So we’re from the same area. Where did your family live?”

  I told him.

  “Many lofty souls walked about in our region, including the Ba’al Shem Tov and his disciples. The disciples reinforced the words of their master by putting them in the Holy Tongue. The time will come when you’ll copy them, also. Who were your ancestors?”

  I told him.

  “Your great-grandfather Rabbi Michael was blind; he was a Torah scholar and a prayer leader. His way of praying was well known throughout
the region. Anyone who heard him pray became a new person. He changed people not by talking but by the power of prayer.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “I wasn’t privileged. I just heard about him from trustworthy people. I left the Carpathians and went to a Zionist training farm. I was sure that agricultural training was more important than prayer. I was a boy, about your age. I went to the training camp, and it seemed like I was breaking a siege. I ran away without saying goodbye to my parents. Now they are up there, and I’m here, the last remnant. All these years I’ve worked in the orchard, and I was sure that the work would heal me. Then I got sick, and now I spend my time with doctors and in convalescent homes. That’s the punishment for a man who left his elderly parents and sailed to a distant land.”

  “At the training farm, did you also train your hearts?” I said, glad that I thought to ask.

  “I don’t know what we did. Sometimes it seemed to me that the orange groves made their owners rich and emptied my soul. If my parents were still alive, I’d go back to them and ask forgiveness.”

  “Your ancestors have certainly forgiven you,” I said, trying to comfort him.

  “I haven’t forgiven myself. I sometimes dream that I’ve returned home, to the Carpathian region, and I find everyone just as I left them. In my heart I know that’s an illusion and a deception.”

  “If you bring me a prayer book, I’ll copy from it, too.” This thought just then occurred to me.

  “I’ll bring you one. I have two prayer books: one is from home and one is local. It’s hard for me to pray. Sometimes I see myself praying, but I haven’t achieved actual prayer. At times, I feel that if I returned to the Carpathian Mountains, they would restore prayer to me. I beg your pardon; I’ve been incessantly talking about myself. Where were you wounded, my friend? In battle?”

  “They surprised us.”

  “Many of my friends were killed in the orange groves. They lay in wait for them. The silence there is a false silence. Suddenly, a human serpent leaps out and kills you. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m still digging shallow trenches around the trees and filling them with water. The end justifies the means, we used to say. That’s a false saying. Anyone who abandons his parents can never atone for his sin.

  “I’m ashamed that I can’t pray for your recovery. In the Carpathian Mountains, a person would open up the prayer book and pray for his friend. Today, when I open the prayer book, it appears to be angry at me. The letters of prayer aren’t like regular letters. They look for the right soul so they can rise up with it.

  “I’ll bring you the prayer book that I brought with me from home. Maybe you, who were tormented from childhood, will find the way to prayer. You should know, prayer isn’t speech, but silence. Whoever knows how to be silent can hear God talking to him. Spoken prayer is on a lower level. To be silent with the prayer book demands great strength. I’ve spoken too much. Forgive me.”

  “Too little, in my opinion.”

  “We’ve forgotten, my friend. We’ve forgotten what was shown to us. We ran away to the orange groves to redeem the Jewish people. We were sure that the hoe would bring redemption.”

  “I love the orange groves.” I held nothing back.

  “Maybe they sinned without malice, but they sinned.”

  After the man left, I felt his presence even more strongly. The longer I kept my eyes shut, the more clearly I saw that he had come from another world, and I was sorry I hadn’t asked him more about my great-grandfather Rabbi Michael, because only vague rumors about him had reached my ears.

  I was suddenly afraid that I would never again see that wonderful man, whom I’d been with for only a short time.

  I rose, gripped my crutches, and went outside.

  51

  I copied diligently, and while doing so, I saw Edward before my eyes. He was wandering in Tel Aviv in search of work. People noticed his handicap right away and refused to employ him. He didn’t tell them he had been wounded in action, had left the training course, and had come to Tel Aviv to be close to buildings that looked like those in the city of his birth.

  “Everyone will eventually return to his native city.” One of the patients surprised me by saying this. As I heard this emerge from his mouth, I understood that he was revealing an innermost thought. But most of the other patients had a different opinion.

  I expected that adults would speak about their past with yearning or nostalgia, but that wasn’t the case: the present was more important to them.

  “We sacrificed our lives for the present,” they said. “We cut ourselves off from our parents and homes to build a new present.”

  It was hard for me to resist that pointed observation. I felt that these people had done something unbelievable. The sharpest of all was a short man whom everyone called Lonek.

  “I was right,” he said repeatedly. “If I hadn’t left my city in time, we wouldn’t have had anything.”

  “What a terrible way to be right.” The answer came quickly.

  “Even so…”

  “I’m ashamed not only of your words but also of your tone.”

  “We didn’t do what we did for our own sake.”

  The arguments went on for hours. There was no lack of insults, of sudden outbursts, of accusations. I didn’t understand all of it.

  I went back to copying. Copying soothed me. The clear letters, separate from one another, contained everything that was beyond my power to say. I looked forward to the day when the letters would be joined to my body and my voice.

  —

  That night I told Mother that Edward had left the kibbutz and was wandering around Tel Aviv, among houses that looked like the ones in his city, Cracow.

  Mother’s reaction surprised me.

  “Edward is flesh of our flesh,” she said. “He was tested in that horrible war and was saved. But in the new war he lost two fingers. He’s a handsome young man. The wound those evil people inflicted didn’t spoil his good looks.”

  “And I?” I asked.

  “You, too, will stand on your own soon. More and more, you resemble your father. I pray that fortune will favor you and that what you write will light the way for people.”

  “What happened to Father’s manuscripts?”

  “They’re hidden.”

  “Can we get to them?”

  “The ways of God are hidden. But I’m sure that Father hid his soul in yours, and the day will come that you will write.”

  “Will I write like Father?”

  “You’ll write in your own voice. Every person has his own voice and tone.”

  Mother spoke to me often. Her tone of voice was the same, but her movements were different. I felt that she was trying to tell me things that words couldn’t convey. The effort was visible on her lips, and it blocked the words in her mouth.

  “You’re trying too hard,” I told her. “There’s no reason to hurry. What we don’t manage tonight, we’ll manage in the coming nights. So long as we’re connected, there’s nothing to fear.” My words brought a smile to her face, and that made me happy.

  —

  The seasons changed. Most of the patients returned home, and new ones were expected. Only I stayed where I was.

  The practical nurse no longer hid her intentions. She ignored my injury and was planning to surprise me. I was afraid of the size of her body and of her desire. My legs weren’t what they had been. Had she been a quiet sort of woman, I would have said to her, Leave me alone. I’m about to have an operation. If Dr. Winter manages to restore my legs, we’ll get drunk and make love. But for the moment, I was limited in my movements. Pain sucked my blood. I didn’t need a woman to embrace but a woman to listen to me.

  —

  A patient who came to the convalescent home after an operation recognized me.

  “It’s the sleepy boy!” he called out in a voice that startled me. I considered denying it, but the man’s happiness was so radiant that I didn’t dare. He had also been wounded in the war, but
his injury appeared to be more serious than mine: in both his arms and his legs.

  “The sleepy boy,” he called out again. “You were so handsome. We looked at you and asked ourselves, who are you, and what do you bear in your soul? Miracles didn’t happen for us during the war, but you, your existence, was a miracle. Your sleep bore witness to your connection to deeper realms, and from there you were drawing your sustenance. We were sure you would sleep forever, and we would carry you from place to place. Who woke you up?”

  “I woke myself up.”

  “We also tried to wake you, but we didn’t know how to dive down into where you were. Where were you wounded?”

  “They surprised us.”

  “The same for us as well.”

  He was about thirty. His thin face was unshaven, but the light hadn’t gone out of his eyes. I was glad that I would be near him so he could tell me about himself and about the refugees.

  “As soon as we were freed from the camp in Atlit, we were drafted. We were so glad. There was a great surge of enthusiasm among us, and a desire to do great deeds. We didn’t imagine that this enthusiasm might be cut off. We didn’t realize that here, too, we could be wounded or killed. The doctor told me I was lucky. I’ll eventually be walking in the land of the living. The doctor was religious. I never saw a religious doctor before in my life. None of the doctors in our district went to synagogue, not even on Yom Kippur. ‘You will walk in the land of the living,’ he said simply. Nowadays, only a believer can be optimistic. By the way, where are you from?”

  I told him.

  “We’re from the same area. And what’s your name, if I may ask?”

  I told him.

  “That name rings a bell with me, and I can tell you that somebody with that name was out and about in our village. Let me think about it.”

  “It’s not at all important.”

  “If it rings, it’s for a reason. We’ll talk. We’ll remember. But now I have to shut my eyes. I got tired from the trip.”