Ernst was in pain and asked for a sedative. After receiving it, he sank into a deep slumber. If he would only awaken, Irena thinks, he would tell her about the war: about the front and about the artillery that shelled the German headquarters without letup.
26
ERNST’S RECOVERY IS SLOW. IRENA STAYS AT HIS SIDE, even at night. In vain he tells her, “Go and rest.” Her devotion is a combination of quietness and patience. Her eyes don’t leave his face, and her ears are attentive to his breathing. Pills and injections sooth his pains for two or three hours at a time, but after midnight they return and awaken him. Irena quickly gives him a pill, and if that doesn’t work, she asks a nurse to give him an injection. Irena imagines his sleep to be like that creature he battles at night at his desk.
After a week of intermittent sleeping and wakefulness, Ernst’s face is still pale and his jaws still sunken, but the spark of life has returned to his eyes. He tries to get out of bed. Irena hands him crutches, and he grabs them, raises himself, and stands up.
“Another trial,” he says and begins to walk toward the bathroom.
Now, too, it seems Ernst remembers nothing of what had happened to him. Irena tells him that robbers broke into his apartment and stole his wallet and his watch.
“And they didn’t touch my books or manuscripts?”
“They just scattered them.”
“Quite a robbery!” he says and chuckles.
Interesting, Irena says to herself. It’s important for him to know that the manuscripts weren’t destroyed, which means that they’re important to him. Why did he order me to burn them?
Many thoughts go through her mind, but they don’t for a moment distract Irena from her devotion to Ernst. She is entirely given over to him. Although the sparkle has returned to his eyes, his thoughts are still scattered and jump from one thing to another. One night he tells her again about his service in the Red Army. She has noticed: Ernst doesn’t tell a story all at once. First he prepares the heart, traces the framework, and gradually brings the images into it.
“I was at the front for a year and a half. They were marvelous times. I loved the soldiers, and they loved me. They were downtrodden, most of them were drunkards, and they revered Stalin and Jesus. Their ideas were a mixture of Communist propaganda and the beliefs that their mothers transmitted to them in secret. I was with them from the Ukraine to Berlin, and we felt that we were chopping down the writhing Nazi monster that extended up to Stalingrad and from there was trying to dominate all of Russia. Our cannons thundered and our tanks raced forward, and the sense of destruction swept us along and delighted us. Every one of us, Jew and non-Jew, was wounded. This one had lost a brother, that one, his mother. We were fired up with feelings of vengeance that drove us and urged us on. They called us the ‘iron panthers,’ and we really were panthers.
“In those marvelous days we forgot the evil of communism; we were united by one impulse: to drive out the twisted Nazi serpent. After conquering a village, a provincial city, or a railway station we would celebrate and get drunk. Plundering was the order of the day; drunkenness was widespread. Women were raped in houses and yards, but we felt that we were cutting the Nazi serpent into pieces.
“But after that, at the end of the war, on the golden beaches of Naples, on the way to Israel, I lost my will. That was when the first seeds of despair were sown. At first I didn’t know it was despair. It appeared as though the other refugees were in despair, not I.”
Ernst continues telling his story, but after half an hour he begins to doze off. When he’s asleep, the firmness in his face doesn’t fade. Irena prays with all her heart that he’ll recover, that he’ll return to his desk and to his enchanting habits. Once when he woke up he told her, “I didn’t understand that it was just the beginning of the struggle then.”
“What is the struggle about?” Irena wants to know more.
“About having a clean mind and a life with a purpose.”
Ernst dozes for most of the day. One time he uttered a few long sentences, complex and incomprehensible. Another time he shouted, “We will drive out the serpent no matter what!” Irena was alarmed and approached him cautiously. Now his sleep is sound, like that of a soldier. Soon they’ll wake him, or he’ll wake himself up. Without delay he will put on his uniform and set out for his unit. Apparently the unit is already standing in formation, ready for his orders.
27
A WEEK AGO IT APPEARED AS THOUGH ERNST WOULD BE fully recovered in a few days. This proved to be merely wishful thinking on Irena’s part. Ernst still writhes in pain, and his heart is not beating as regularly as it had been before the attack. But in between stabs of pain he engages in conversation with Irena. Usually he talks and Irena listens. Sometimes she asks him about a word or a concept. Ernst in the hospital is a different Ernst. Now one can see him as the Red Army officer that he once was. He doesn’t grumble about his pain but jokes about it instead. It’s annoying, he says, not only denying him movement but also forcing him to deal with his body and to trouble the people around him. A person ought to be self-sufficient and not bother a whole medical staff, he says. If Ernst knew how much Irena yearned to help him, he would not refer to her efforts as “trouble.”
“Is she your daughter?” one of the nurses asked, observing Irena’s devotion.
Ernst wasn’t put off by the question. “Does she look like me?” he asked.
“A lot.”
“Then she’s my daughter.”
One evening, when the pain had subsided, Ernst spoke about his parents again. “It seemed to me then,” he said, “that they were competing with each other, who could keep silent longer. I had plenty of words then, words from the books I read and words that the Party stuffed me with. When I would open my mouth and talk, they would both stand there and wonder where I had gotten so many words. I didn’t understand the meaning of their silence, and this would drive me crazy. I was sure that only someone who presents facts, analyzes them, and explains them was worthy of being counted as part of the human race; the others were clods who had to be guided and taught. I admired explainers, people with a doctrine who knew what was good and what was bad. I thought stammering was a flaw. I was sure that one day they would send all the stammerers to special schools to correct their speech. There were months when I ignored my parents, as if they didn’t exist. They didn’t dare ask me what I was doing or what I planned to do. I saw their silence as annoying inertia and submission. I was glad to leave the house. Whenever I came to visit, my mother would stuff a banknote or two into my pocket, and that always stung, as if I had deceived them or stolen from them.
“I hated their passivity. ‘You have to coax customers,’ their neighbors kept advising them. ‘A customer won’t buy unless you coax him, show him, and convince him that the merchandise is good. Without persuasion, there are no sales.’ ‘Right,’ my father would say, but he didn’t change his ways. Not only were they both laconic; they also had an aversion to overdoing, to too much interference. I didn’t understand their focus on themselves, their way of walking about on tiptoes, their constant mindfulness. Everything within them was derived from fear, from prolonged, static ignorance, from an unwillingness to adhere to great beliefs and take action on behalf of the general good. All I saw was how miserable they were. Only over the past few years did I come to understand that my parents bore within them an ancient heritage from which they had been cut off. Perhaps they themselves didn’t realize it, but their behavior bespoke a nobility that had been diminished and had lost its value. Only during the past few months, in fact, did their silence palpably return to me. It was a silence born of a nobility that extended back for many generations, generations that have taught themselves this silence. They understood that life is short, incomprehensible, and ugly and that speaking didn’t necessarily add to understanding.
“Unfortunately, my parents had lost the positive silence of their ancestors, the silence that is prayer and connection with the God of their fathers. What
remained with them was only a barren silence, without any connection to heaven, just a noble despair.”
Ernst stopped speaking, and Irena felt that this was a kind of pain that he had never before revealed to her.
Later he added, “They wanted to give me their soul and their might, but I didn’t know how to accept anything from them.”
28
ERNST’S RECOVERY IS SLOW, AND IT HAS ITS UPS AND downs. When the pain attacks him, he grits his teeth and bites his lip. He struggles with it and receives praise from the nurses and doctors. One time Irena was about to tell him, We’ll light a memorial candle on the anniversary of your parents’ death. They will come back and forgive you. Parents always forgive their children. When Irena has taken care to keep her house properly maintained and has gone to prostrate herself on her parents’ graves on the anniversaries of their deaths, she knows that ghosts won’t disturb her rest at night.
Irena has noticed that since Ernst has been in the hospital, his speech has been flowing in torrents; whenever the pain lets up, he talks about his parents, about his home, and about the distance between the house and the grocery store. The narrow space disturbs him. Irena doesn’t know how to respond or what to do to calm his spirit. On Sabbath eve, when she lights the candles, she prays and asks Ernst’s parents not to be angry with him, to speak slowly to him. He will listen to everything they say, but in the state he is in they mustn’t be angry with him. One evening, Irena went to Ernst’s house, dusted, washed the floor, and before leaving lit a memorial candle. Perhaps his parents would hear of this and forgive him.
Ever since Ernst told her about his parents at length, Irena has known no rest. She listens to his thoughts, and she keeps trying to reach his parents in another way. She tries so hard that she can see them before her eyes: they are tall people, somewhat stooped, and wrapped in silence. There is no anger in their eyes, just the perplexity of forgiveness. When they draw near to Irena, she wants to say to them: Ernst is looking for you. He has been looking for you for years. What should I tell him? They look back at her, and their confusion increases. But they have no words.
Of course Irena tells Ernst nothing about these secret contacts; nevertheless, he seems to feel that she is trying very hard to raise his parents up from the depths. Every morning, when he opens his eyes and sees Irena, he says, “Why don’t you go to sleep?”
“I slept.”
“But you’re always at my side.”
“I slept for three hours straight.”
Sometimes it appears to Irena that he, too, is trying to reach his parents with all the strength of his pain, and she wants to tell him, There can be no doubt that you’ll reach them one day. The path is unpaved, but longing can reach any place. You aren’t alone. There’s someone watching over you. Ernst is aware of her efforts, and he says to her, “Thank you, Irena.”
“What are you thanking me for?”
“For sitting by my side.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing more than I deserve.”
“You deserve every help.”
Sometimes Ernst speaks about his writing, about the many nights he has invested in digging up the wrong wells.
“For years I didn’t understand why the wells were dry. I thought that if I dug deeper, I’d find a living spring.”
Once he told her, “I have to go home urgently.”
“To which home?”
“To my parents’ home.”
You’ll go there. You have already been going there, she was about to say, but she didn’t say it.
Irena knows that Ernst doesn’t like useless consolations, ornamental words, or hollow expressions. Once he told her something that she will never forget: “Words that aren’t connected to pain aren’t words, but fluff. For so many years I went to places where I didn’t belong, with words that didn’t grow from within me.” What did he mean by “words that didn’t grow from within me”? Irena wanted to ask. Ernst sensed this and said, “Words that don’t grow out of one’s pain.”
29
THERE IS ANOTHER SETBACK IN ERNST’S RECOVERY. THIS time it’s his heart. “When I get home, I’ll be a different man,” he says. How will he be different? Irena wonders. In any case, she will light a memorial candle in his house, too. Her parents were very particular about Holocaust Remembrance Day. They used to fast and sit at home next to the memorial candles and read memorial albums. When the Zalachov memorial album was published, they bought three copies. They sent one copy to their cousin in Bnei Brak and placed two copies in the bookcase. There were articles in the book about Zalachov before and during the war, and a long article about the survivors who gathered after the war.
Holocaust Remembrance Day was like Yom Kippur in their home. Irena’s parents weren’t particular about observing all the commandments. In fact, they kept only a few of them, but the few they kept gave the house an air of exaltation and secrecy. This was especially felt on Holocaust Remembrance Day and on Yom Kippur. There was always something of Irena’s grandparents in her parents’ ways, even in how they sat at the table or kept silent. They didn’t intentionally conduct themselves like their parents, but their parents’ mannerisms were stored up inside them. If they said a blessing, they did it the way their parents had done it.
“What are you thinking about?” Ernst surprises her again.
“About Holocaust Remembrance Day.” She doesn’t keep it from him.
“Is Holocaust Remembrance Day coming?”
“In a month.”
Ernst has noticed that Irena also speaks about the Holocaust with astonishing simplicity. There were years when he didn’t talk about it at all. He was convinced that writing about the Holocaust was impossible, forbidden. He found firm supporters for this opinion. The philosopher Theodor Adorno, for example, claimed that writing poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric.” Ernst accepted this without challenge.
All the texts for Holocaust Remembrance Day sound clumsy to him, meaningless and, even worse, grotesque: a bunch of hacks and politicians spouting trite words, carrying torches, and glorifying the partisans. If that’s the way people talk about the Holocaust, then I won’t talk about it, he would say to himself. And indeed, he kept his silence.
When Ernst married Sylvia, he found a true partner in his feelings. She, too, had cut herself off from her parents and hated their tribe—its way of life and its beliefs. Every Jewish book, every custom—not to mention weddings and bar mitzvah celebrations, Simhat Torah, and funerals—drove her out of her mind.
“The Zionists talked about a free people, about normalcy. Where’s the freedom? Where’s the normalcy? Everything is done here as it was done in the shtetl,” she protested. Her physical beauty and her blunt language combined to give her a wild power. When their fights grew more frequent, first about trivial matters and later about his writing, Ernst felt that her hostility was full of poison.
One day he couldn’t restrain himself. “Monster!” he shouted at her. Sylvia gave as good as she got and screamed back at him. “You sickening skeptic! Incurable busybody! Paper eater!” Ernst had only one word, and he repeated it every time they fought: “Monster!” When she heard it, her mouth would fly open and a flood of invective would pour out. In time he was to say: “How could I have lived with that human beast?”
After Ernst separated from Sylvia, it seemed to him that his writing, which had proceeded hesitantly all those years, with infinite drafts, would now come together and flow. There were a few encouraging signs, but they proved to be only ephemeral. Ernst’s imagination drifted in a chaotic, insubstantial world. Every time he thought about his parents or the grandparents who lived in the Carpathian Mountains, he would push their memory aside.
Not until Irena’s arrival did Ernst understand that his parents, Tina, and Helga, who had detached themselves from him and who now lived in the world of water, would gather together on Holocaust Remembrance Day with other tormented victims. Despite the awkward ceremonies, on that da
y they would have a tiny resurrection.
A few days ago Ernst saw the Bug River in a nightmare. In it were his parents, Tina, and Helga. For a moment it appeared as though they were bathing in quiet water. Around them floated people whom he knew well, though he couldn’t remember their names. He was about to address them, the way he used to address an audience as a commissar on the first of May or on the anniversary of the revolution, and proclaim, Comrades, we are nearing the day when you who are living eternally in the River Bug and we who are on its banks will intermingle, and there will be no barrier between us. But in the middle of the dream he woke up and grabbed Irena’s hand.
30
ERNST HAS RECOVERED: HIS BLOOD TESTS, BLOOD PRESSURE, and EKG are all normal. Soon they will remove the cast from his leg. As for his constant sleeping, the doctors say that it’s curative. Irena knows that the struggle he has been engaged in for so many months has changed its location; now it’s being waged in his sleep. Ernst’s sleep is chock-full of bits and pieces, and every few minutes he wakes up and utters a few words or sentences.
It’s hard for Irena to understand whether Ernst is talking about his life or about his writing. His writing preoccupies him no less than his life. Over the past few days she has heard him murmur: “Facts, facts, and not descriptions. An overabundance of details only blurs the main point. The prose of the Bible has to be a model for any writer.”
One time when he awakened he said, “My best years were when I was in the Red Army. You know who’s a friend and who’s a foe. The soldiers are your sons, and the enemy is the serpent you have to drive out. The grief is great and it is difficult, but your thoughts are clear. There are few doubts, and they don’t gnaw at you. You do your duty, and at night, even when the cannons thunder, you sleep the sleep of the righteous.”
Suddenly, Love Page 8
