The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

by Aharon Appelfeld

  —

  The man from the Carpathians who promised to bring me a prayer book kept his word. He brought it to me wrapped in a brown cloth.

  “Keep this prayer book, and it will watch over you,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You don’t thank people for this type of thing,” he said, and went away.

  52

  About a year before the outbreak of the war, Father received a booklet with a story in it by a little-known author named Franz Kafka. Father read it and was overwhelmed. When Mother noticed his excitement, she served him a cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake. In response to her question about what was so moving about the story, Father didn’t cite anything specific.

  “That’s exactly the way you have to write today,” he finally said.

  “Do you feel an affinity with his writing?” Mother asked cautiously.

  “He’s my brother, dear, my big brother, who broke through the barriers by storm. Now we know who we are and what our place is in this world.” All that day, the thin book never left Father’s hands.

  I now recalled Father’s shrunken way of walking around in his study, and I felt what I hadn’t felt back then: the pain and humiliation of his continued failure.

  “You, too, will break through the siege,” Mother kept saying.

  None of us imagined what the near future held for us. Father was busy with the sawmill. But his hours at home were devoted to his artistic asceticism. I also wanted to make things easier for him, but I didn’t know how.

  —

  I asked Dr. Winter whether he had heard of an author named Franz Kafka.

  “I’ve heard of him,” he said, “but I’ve never read anything by him. Why do you ask?”

  I told him that Father loved his writing.

  Dr. Winter read what people had read before the war: Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, and, most beloved of all, Rilke. His time was limited. The operations took up his days and nights.

  “My friend, your operation is also approaching,” he finally said. “You’re no longer afraid, right?”

  “I am afraid.” I didn’t hide it from him.

  “Let’s hope this one will be your last. If we can improve your walking, that will be our reward.” Again he explained what he was going to do. His explanations didn’t enlighten me at all, but I did absorb at least one of the things he said: proteins. You have to eat food rich in protein. Proteins are important for building muscle. The food they served us took on a new purpose. The thought that the proteins would knit together my torn muscles encouraged me to ask for seconds.

  The last night I was in Naples, I ran along the seashore and was surprised to feel like I was floating. Before long, I collapsed on the ground, like a body struck down just as it hit its stride. I woke up and was happy that my breathing was normal.

  —

  The patients continued to take care of me. One of them brought me a long box of oranges.

  “Years ago I had my own orange grove,” he said. “I prepared the soil and planted each tree in the grove. I believed I would have the grove till the end of my days and then leave it to my son. It wasn’t a big orange grove, but it was very well taken care of. Everyone who saw my orange grove couldn’t stop raving about it. I lived there for only twelve years. Then I got sick and had to sell it. Now I have five trees in my garden.”

  Just a few months earlier, these patients used to drive me crazy with their questions. But now they no longer annoyed me. Instead, they told me about their lives, and I felt close to them. They spoke Hebrew, but their tone and their choice of words made my heart recall people I had been close to in my earlier incarnations, at home and in the ghetto. It sometimes seemed that they, too, had been there. The Hebrew they spoke wasn’t a local dialect; it stayed with them wherever they were.

  “I was young and sure that the earth would redeem us. It did redeem, but not us,” the man with the oranges said, and a smile spread across his face. “I’ll be able to bear my illness for another month or two, and in the end it will vanquish me.”

  I pray that you’ll be with us for many more days, I was about to say, but I didn’t.

  “I was young and frivolous, and I went after big ideas. I was certain I was building a better world in this one.” He turned to me. “You believe in the world to come,” he said with wonder.

  I was alarmed. “Yes,” I said.

  “Until I was fourteen, I believed in the world to come. After that, my prayers became flawed, and my faith became tarnished. I don’t know which came first.”

  I knew this was to be my last meeting with him. Stay with me a bit longer, I wanted to say, but I didn’t dare. He looked at me fondly and said, “I hope the operation is successful and that you’ll be able to stand on your own. You’re very young.” He rose to his feet and left quickly.

  53

  I was sent back to the hospital and prepared for my seventh operation. The nurses tried to entertain me. The anesthesiologist—a short man—was devoted to his instruments and looked at me benevolently. In the next room, Dr. Winter was talking earnestly to a wounded man from the Haganah, trying to convince him that sometimes an artificial limb was preferable to a damaged leg that couldn’t be fixed.

  “Doctor, save my leg,” begged the wounded man. “I have no one in the world.” His weeping was not loud, but it reached into every fiber of my being. “If you save my leg, I’ll thank you all my life. Not only will I thank you, but my mother, who went up to heaven in smoke, will thank you, too. She did everything she could to save me. If I’m left without a leg, what will happen to me? My mother’s sorrow will be greater than mine, believe me.”

  Dr. Winter stopped replying. The wounded man made all sorts of entreaties and finally cried out in a voice that made the walls shake, “If you can’t save my leg, kill me. Death is preferable to life without my leg.”

  The young man kept murmuring and begging, as if Dr. Winter were a man of God who had the power to change the way of the world.

  “I’m just a doctor, my friend. I’m neither an angel nor an archangel.” He spoke softly to the wounded man.

  Those were the last words that filtered into me before the anesthesia separated me from the world of light.

  —

  Each time I was anesthetized, I would revisit the trains of my childhood.

  In first class they served coffee and cheesecake, and cocoa for the children. The waitresses were young women dressed in red-and-white uniforms; they were full of mischief, quick-witted, and ready to entertain every passenger. Sometimes, to amuse me, they would bring me a small chocolate bar wrapped in shiny colored paper.

  This time, it seemed to me, something was different.

  “Where are you going, sweetie?” one of the waitresses asked me.

  “Home,” I told her.

  “Where is your home?”

  I whispered in her ear.

  “And where are your parents?”

  “They’re waiting for me at the station.” I spoke out clearly.

  “Aren’t you afraid to travel alone?” she asked in sympathy.

  “I’ve already gotten used to it,” I said, surprised by what came from my mouth.

  The train raced forward with great power. The smells of coffee and tobacco surrounded me. The people next to me were strangers. They looked at me and smiled. Their smiles were unpleasant, but that didn’t prevent me from keeping myself happy, because in a little while I would reach the last stop, and my parents would come to greet me with shouts of joy.

  At every station a few people got off, and the carriage gradually emptied. The waitresses stopped serving coffee and cake. They had disappeared. Soon I would be left alone.

  It seemed to me that this wasn’t the first time this train had been emptied of its passengers. Every time I rode in it, it emptied out. What will happen to me when I’m all alone? I wondered, worried. My parents will be steadfastly waiting for me. I mustn’t disappoint them.

  As fear increasingly too
k hold of me, Uncle Isidor appeared at the forward door, neatly dressed, pleasantly elegant, just as he used to appear in our house. For a moment I hesitated. Was it really Uncle Isidor? Because several times during the past year, I had seen his silhouette and was sure it was he. He liked to join us on our summer trips, and, not surprisingly, every time we traveled by train, he would appear. This time he stood there at his full height.

  “Uncle Isidor!” I called out, trying unsuccessfully to get to my feet. I explained to him that just now they were doing the seventh operation.

  “I don’t understand you,” said Uncle Isidor, his eyes widening.

  “The famous Dr. Winter is setting the fractures in my legs so that I will be able to stand on them.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he approached me. “What operation are you talking about?”

  Finally, I understood that he didn’t know a thing about what had happened to me since we parted. I didn’t know where to begin.

  “Uncle Isidor,” I said, “why don’t you sit next to me until we get to the last stop, and I’ll tell you what it’s possible to relate.”

  “Do you have secrets?” He was puzzled.

  “I have no secrets. It’s just that the story is very long. It’s not my fault.”

  “I’m ready to hear everything.”

  “Where shall we start?” Some of his playfulness had rubbed off on me.

  “With whatever you wish to start with.” His benevolent smile, which I knew so well, lit his face.

  While I was groping for a way to begin, the nurse woke me up.

  —

  “The operation was a success,” Dr. Winter said warmly. My attachment to him was a mixture of awe and love. For a long time I had been placed into his hands and into the hands of his staff—all doctors from abroad. They spoke German to one another, or Romanian, and here and there a word in Yiddish. They had joined together what could be joined. Shattered legs could not be completely restored to what they had been. But they could make some kind of walking possible. You must not be ungrateful. You had to respect Dr. Winter’s efforts and not ask the impossible of him. If it weren’t for the infections that invaded my wounds, my recovery would have been smoother. It wasn’t Dr. Winter’s fault that there were unexpected delays, I had to repeat to myself.

  I lay in bed, still enveloped in the web of anesthesia, surrounded by flowers and chocolate, presents from the nurses and the patients. I closed my eyes and waited for the train to come pick me up and take me to the station in my city.

  —

  That night Dr. Weingarten came to visit me, with one of Father’s manuscripts in his hand.

  “How did it get to you, Dr. Weingarten?” I held my breath.

  “One of the refugees, an educated man, happened to come upon this treasure. He knew he had a treasure and asked a huge sum for it. ‘I knew the author,’ I told him. ‘No publisher was willing to publish his writing.’ In the end I bought the manuscript for my gold watch. Now let’s read it together.”

  I recognized Father’s handwriting, but I couldn’t read it. Dr. Weingarten read it easily, and he quickly brought Father’s voice to life. I didn’t understand a lot of the words, but the melody captivated me.

  “Thank you, Dr. Weingarten.”

  “Thank your father, who brought such a marvelous work into the world.”

  54

  After recuperating from the operation, I was sent back to my room in the convalescent home. I went to sleep in the bed I had gotten used to. When I woke up, it seemed to me that bits of feeling had returned to my legs. I got to the dining room on crutches. The effort was great, but I did it to abide by the will of the physiotherapist, whom I liked.

  Meanwhile, the Hungarian boy whose arm had been amputated returned to the convalescent home. His friends, who accompanied him, had been trying to convince him that a prosthetic arm would be useful to him. You mustn’t reject the doctors’ opinion. You must try. Although he had come back and registered in the office, the Hungarian boy was not convinced that the “hanging rag,” which was what he called the prosthesis, would be useful to him. Better an exposed stump, without any adornment.

  His friends continued to speak earnestly to him, saying that a false arm made of stiff leather wasn’t a rag. He grimaced at their words.

  “I want to be the way I was,” he declared. “If the unseen authorities have decided that I must live in this world without my right arm, I won’t play hide-and-seek.” I was stunned by the phrase “the unseen authorities.”

  —

  The pain didn’t let up. To overcome it or to distract myself from it, I copied from the book of Psalms: a book full of the correct words for prayer. The act of copying conquered me completely, and I felt the letters clinging to my thoughts.

  One of the patients invaded my room and saw that I was copying from the Bible.

  “You should copy from the newspaper,” he said to me loudly. “The newspaper will teach you everyday language and our new ways of thinking. The Bible is rooted in the ways of the ancient world.”

  I didn’t know how to reply to him. I felt that in one fell swoop he was snatching away the thoughts and feelings that had been inundating me for a long while. If he kept on talking to me in his hammering voice, he would take away the little that I had acquired with such great effort.

  I wanted to cry, but I controlled myself.

  “Hebrew today isn’t what it used to be,” he went on. “It has cut itself off from books, and now it’s connected to life.” I had heard that cliché more than once, but the patient’s harsh words were like salt being rubbed into my wounds. Leave me alone! I wanted to shout.

  He apparently noticed my distress and stopped bothering me.

  —

  After that came long days of brightness. I sat in my room and read S. Y. Agnon’s A Guest for the Night. The librarian kept urging me to read S. Yizhar. She promised that if I read some of his stories, I would feel a connection to the Land.

  The Hungarian boy approached me.

  “How do you feel after the operation?” he asked.

  “It hurts.” I felt close to him and told him I was copying from the Bible.

  “Painters copy great artists to learn their secrets,” he quickly replied.

  I considered saying to him, But the Bible was written by unseen authorities, using the same expression he had used, but I didn’t say it.

  The boy spoke German with a heavy Hungarian accent. He hadn’t managed to learn Hebrew. He was drafted immediately after immigrating and was wounded in his first action. I wanted to tell him about the joy that copying gave me, but I felt it wasn’t proper to mix my slight happiness in with his disaster.

  For his part, the boy told me that from the age of five he had trained to be a dancer. “But without an arm, it’s impossible to be a dancer,” he said, chuckling.

  I was embarrassed by my luck. My body wasn’t my instrument of expression.

  The boy asked if I wanted to be an author.

  “I’m preparing myself,” I said, “and I look forward with all my heart to the day when I’ll be able to find that inner melody.” It seemed to me that I hadn’t explained myself properly. I told him that I’d lost my mother tongue and that only with my father and mother, whose whereabouts were unknown, did I speak it as I used to. If they were still with me, my mother tongue would be growing along with me.

  After a short pause, the boy said, “If it weren’t for my wound, I would have gone onstage after getting out of the army. Now I’m like a bird with one broken wing, and without flight, there’s no dancing. I’m sorry. I never introduced myself. My name is Paul.”

  “My name is Erwin,” I said. I felt that this was an outstanding young man, and his fate would be so, too.

  “Both of us are from the Hapsburg Empire that fell apart,” said Paul. “You were born in Bukovina, and I was born in Budapest. But a hint of it remains in us both, right?”

  I saw before my eyes the young mothers who used to walk their
sons and daughters to the conservatory, one carrying a violin, the other a viola. There was an undercurrent of competition in the air: Who would rise to the top? There was one boy among us, Raul Dienstag, for whom everyone predicted a brilliant future. His mother was always with him. She wouldn’t allow him to play dodgeball or soccer, but she let him work out in the gymnasium. He was tall and muscular for his age because a violinist must not only be talented but also sturdy—so his mother claimed.

  Raul and his mother were among the first to be deported from the city. Raul carried a heavy backpack and held his violin in his hand, and his thin mother carried two overstuffed bags. I didn’t know them well. He was one year below me in school. Some students admired him, but quite a few mocked him and called him the Child Prodigy.

  When I was six, Mother asked me if I wanted to study violin. I said no. She didn’t pressure me. Father was so immersed in his writing that the matter wasn’t discussed with him.

  Of course I didn’t know then that the violin demands all of your energy, from childhood on, and there was no guarantee that you would excel. My friend Benno was in the midst of his ascent, but the war interrupted it. What good would his fingers do him now that they’d lost their agility?

  That night I wrote four lines:

  Not one word remains

  That wasn’t refined in the furnace of pain.

  The storm is closed within me

  Behind bolted doors.

  I revised them again and again, and I knew there was much more to revise. But my hands became fists, and I lay the pen down on the paper.

  55

  I closed my eyes and was borne on waves of darkness. Sometimes I raced along on railroad tracks and sometimes in a truck. On other days I rode in a wagon loaded with refugees. If it weren’t for meals, I wouldn’t have gotten up at all. Being detached from the darkness was hard for me. In the darkness, no one asked me what I was going to do with my life, where I was going to live, and so on—questions I had no answers for.