“Just now?” Ernst says. “When at long last the sights and the words are joining together?”
“Only for a week—no longer.” The doctor tries to mollify him.
“Next week.” Ernst asks for a deferral, and the doctor agrees.
Despite his weakness, Ernst keeps writing. He writes in bed or in the armchair. Irena tries not to disturb him, and she doesn’t approach him until his meal is ready. Ernst’s appetite has decreased recently, but he makes an effort to eat something to avoid making Irena feel bad.
Visions come to him every night. Sometimes they’re so powerful they refuse to be clothed in words. Ernst knows that without the correct words the visions will fade away as if they had never existed. He tries even harder to capture them.
In the Carpathian Mountains God has many faces. The great plane tree in the yard that raised its upper branches toward heaven—that was one face. Vasil, the peasant who carried a sack of barley on his back and put it down next to the trough—that was another face. Vasil was an unfortunate man who exiled himself from his home because of the disasters that struck him. His wife and their three children were burned to death in their sleep the day he went to town to sell his crops. Years had passed since that tragedy, but the mark it left on him remained. God’s curse was evident in everything he did. He didn’t engage in conversation or ask questions. He worked from morning till late at night. When Grandmother said to him, “Enough, Vasil, go and rest,” he replied, “I’ll rest, I’ll rest,” and kept working. Sometimes he looked like one of the Greek titans who defied God and was severely punished by Him.
And sometimes he seemed like one of God’s secret servants, those who assume pale, indifferent faces and appear to be actual slaves and not servants of God. But someone who observed Vasil well could see that there was another, hidden purpose in his work, a higher goal. It was evident in its steady pace, and it was especially obvious when he stood in the field in the evening and waved his scythe over the clover.
Since Grandfather told me that God dwells everywhere, I was careful not to harm small animals, and I walked cautiously. Mindfulness and caution are always appropriate. In the Carpathian Mountains a person will stand attentively, sometimes for hours, so that the sounds he hears will seep into him.
Grandmother used to say, “Rainwater is good for the body on Sabbath eve.” I heard that more than once, but back then, of course, I didn’t understand its meaning. Grandmother communicated only what was necessary, useful, or helpful—and all in a soft voice. She would raise her voice only if danger threatened.
“God doesn’t like loud talking,” she would say. The word “I” was forbidden. There were many roundabout words that were used to avoid saying “I.” When I was five or six and still a stranger to the place, I asked Grandfather, “Why is it forbidden to say ‘I’?” “Because a person isn’t God,” Grandfather replied sharply in his thick voice, and there was no room for doubt.
Later I learned: in the Carpathian Mountains there is silent worship of God and alongside it high places for idolatry. Worship of God is hidden. It exists in a whisper next to the eastern window. The idolatry is in the field, beneath every tree.
The sides of the roads and paths were sown with crosses and little chapels; tall, sturdy peasants stood next to the crosses like reprimanded children. I would sit for hours and watch them. Grandmother would remind me that it is forbidden to watch idol worshippers. Their ways were liable to cling to one. A Jew must retain his own ways, must not be hasty, must not imitate animals. If a gentile grabs a woman and throws her down into the weeds, one must go away.
39
THE DEFERRAL IS OVER, AND ERNST IS HOSPITALIZED. Irena doesn’t leave his bedside. She’s sorry that his writing has been stopped. His life and his writing are now inseparably joined together: his face is brightened by a page that contains words appropriate for what is being related, a page on which the sentences flow.
“Truth is not enough,” he once told her. “The truth has to be clothed in the right words. Otherwise it will sound counterfeit or, worse than that, pretentious or hypocritical.” Over the past few weeks Ernst realized that extended descriptions were no longer necessary. He mercilessly uprooted words that didn’t further the action of the story. The details emerged selectively, without superfluousness, only what was most needed.
Ernst is pleased that the days he spent toiling over Bible stories weren’t in vain. Life in the Carpathian Mountains didn’t proceed in tranquility; instead, as in the Bible, it had simplicity, solidity, and a belief that life has a purpose. We aren’t a bundle of particles thrown down from somewhere just to disappear. The trees in the forest, the horse in the meadow, and the man in the field—they are all as one.
But meanwhile Ernst is tormented by pain. Irena tries to distract him by telling him things she’s heard or that have happened to her. Ernst listens and asks questions. He has a special ability to follow the details.
“Didn’t your parents tell you about the war?” Again he asks her this.
“Not much.”
“And didn’t you ask?”
“I asked, but they said that it was better not to talk about meaningless suffering.”
“What did they talk about?”
“About their life before the war.”
At midnight, when Ernst falls asleep, Irena goes back to his house. Ernst’s house is tidy, but in it there are no candlesticks, no dried flowers, and no prayer books. Irena clears a corner of the kitchen, lights a candle, scatters dried flowers on the counter, and sets down a prayer book that she brought from her house. Let Ernst’s parents know that they are sought-after guests in their son’s home. After she arranges that corner, the look of the house changes.
The medical tests aren’t simple, but Ernst doesn’t complain. The desire to return home and give himself over to his writing makes him a determined man. Irena is anxious, but she suppresses her anxiety so as not to worry Ernst. One day he asks her whether she has been to his house.
“I go there every day,” she tells him.
“What’s happening there?”
“Nothing,” she says, alarmed by Ernst’s question.
Over the past few days Ernst has been asking questions that he hadn’t asked before. Irena realizes that he has been shaken by the sights revealed to him in his parents’ house and his grandparents’ house. Ernst recently realized that he suffered more from his mother’s silence than from his father’s. His father was a chain smoker; it was as though he was trying to detach himself from the place that shackled him. Once Ernst heard him say, “I feel like burning the grocery store down.” His mother was frightened but didn’t say anything.
Years ago, when Ernst was very involved with the Party, he heard a head commissar say, “Propaganda is the very essence of our doctrine.” He was a short Jew, the son of one of the real estate brokers in the city, and he always spoke in a loud voice, as though trying to silence the voices around him with his own. That wasn’t his only strong suit. Words shot out of his mouth as though out of a machine. It was clear that his strength lay in deception, and his loud talk was one of his methods. Then, as though visualizing something through the dimness of twilight, Ernst understood his parents’ silence, and he knew that in their silence was the truth. He knew it, but he refused to accept it. At that time he had not yet realized that their silence was a mighty instrument of torture that they had built to torment themselves.
In the Carpathians the people knew silence with their bodies. Ernst’s grandfather, after reading a book, would sit quietly for a long time. His silence was a kind of covert labor. He would sift thought the day’s events so he could approach his night’s sleep cleansed of all delusions and confusion.
“Were there delusions in the Carpathian Mountains?” Irena asks in surprise.
“They tried to shake them off so they could fall asleep without them. Delusions bring nightmares. Reciting Shema Yisrael before going to sleep prevents nightmares.”
Ernst mines his
memory for visions and fragments of visions. Sometimes he’s surprised that a certain detail has been preserved within him: his mother, sitting on the mourner’s mat with her brothers and sisters, the glow returning to her face. She doesn’t waste words, but she does reply to questions that have been addressed to her. She prays like her mother and sisters. Her mannerisms once again resemble those of a pure believer. One evening she turned to Ernst distractedly and said, “Isn’t this an enchanting place?” Ernst was stunned by her question and didn’t know what to say. Only later did he realize that the word “enchanting” wasn’t used in the Carpathian Mountains. Only a person coming from the outside would say “splendid” or “enchanting”—words that tried to cover up an emptiness or fear. He was angry with his mother, who had been devoted to her silence all her life, for using a word she had borrowed from others.
All night long Irena stays close to Ernst in his sleep, and with first light she rises from her chair and stands next to his bed. She observes the taking of his temperature and the blood tests, and later she eavesdrops on a conversation between the doctors on their rounds. To his question about what the tests show, Ernst receives a hesitant answer.
“And how do you feel?” they keep asking him.
“Backaches and weakness.”
Each doctor is, individually, a courteous person, asking questions and taking an interest in the patient, but when seen together they look like a stern panel of judges. They do take note of his questions, but their attention is mainly given over to numbers and X-rays, which they pass from hand to hand. The way they stand there frightens Irena. “There’s nothing to worry about,” says Ernst after the doctors have left the room, more than anything to calm her down.
Then Ernst closes his eyes and falls asleep. His brow is untroubled. The white beard that has sprouted on his face gives him the look of a person who has overcome his suffering. Death is apparently preoccupying him, but he doesn’t talk about it.
When Ernst rouses from his slumber, he’s glad to see Irena. She peels a pear or an apple for him, and if he’s thirsty, she hands him a cup of water. Since he has been in the hospital, her attention to him has become more intense. She watches his breathing and hurries to hand him what he needs. “It’s too bad I never finished high school,” she said to him a few days ago. “If I had finished, I would have been accepted in nursing school.”
“You’re dear to me without a high school diploma,” Ernst said quickly.
At night, when Ernst and the other patients are asleep, Irena sits in a corner and reads. She always liked to read, but since she has been working for Ernst, she has learned how to get more out of books. She especially likes to read books about the Second World War.
The war is a very mystifying chapter in Irena’s soul. Since reading books by Leyb Rochman* and Primo Levi, she understands why her parents didn’t tell her more about it. In her dreams she sometimes sees her mother trudging with the last ounce of her strength from her work to the barracks, swallowing weak soup and trying to reattach the sole of her shoe with two pieces of rope. It’s strange, Irena says to herself. To see my father and mother during their most difficult ordeals, I had to read Primo Levi. The Italian Jew revealed what my parents never revealed to me.
Irena’s mother never told her a thing, not even the names of any of the camps that she was in. Every time Irena asked her about the camps, her mother’s face would close up. It was no wonder that in her childhood Irena thought that her mother had had a love affair during the war and that she was hiding it from her husband and daughter. That was another reason why she loved her father more than her mother. She used to take long walks with him at night, and she went with him to the movies. He was tall and good-looking, and women would follow him with their eyes. Over time she learned to love her mother, too, but not the way she loved her father.
* * *
* Leyb Rochman was a Jewish writer and journalist who, while in hiding in Europe during World War II, kept a diary that was published as The Pit and the Trap after the war ended. (Ed.)
40
AFTER TEN DAYS OF TESTS AND OBSERVATION, THE DOCTORS reached a conclusion: nothing more could be done. Though it would be possible to try chemotherapy, in this case it probably wouldn’t work. There were some other, innovative treatments available, but their effectiveness was dubious. Medical science wasn’t raising its hands in surrender, but for the moment it had nothing to suggest. If the patient wanted to try something, they would try it.
The short doctor announced his verdict with some emotion, but he left no doubt as to the majority opinion. The majority left the decision in the patient’s hands. For a moment it seemed to Ernst that the doctor was about to pull a pistol out of his cloak, hand it to him, and say: It’s your decision, to shoot yourself or to bear with prolonged suffering until your death.
Ernst ignores that thought. He asks the doctor how many weeks or months he has left to live. The doctor’s answer is long and detailed, full of medical terms and Latin words, most of which Ernst doesn’t understand. But what he implies is that they can’t estimate how long he has; it varies with the individual, and there are exceptions. He himself had met a patient in Ernst’s condition who lived for a long time after being diagnosed and finally died of another disease. The doctor’s final words sound less like a medical evaluation than like worthless consolation. He stretches out information that could have been conveyed in two sentences.
Ernst returns home that very day and immediately feels better.
Irena leaves the house only to buy medicine and groceries. Now her life is Ernst, only Ernst. She places a folding bed in a corner of the living room, and at night, when Ernst shuts his eyes, she brings her bed close to his. After midnight she gets up to see how he’s sleeping. Ernst sleeps until four and sometimes until five. Irena makes him breakfast and sits at his side.
Since returning from the hospital, Ernst has been telling Irena again about his military service, about the camps that were liberated, and about the soldiers who served in his unit. Even then he had doubts about the path of the Communists and the purity of their intentions, but the war united their hearts. Every advance, every conquered village planted the feeling in the soldiers’ hearts that they were plunging a sharp bayonet into the monster’s scales. That feeling made them drink even more and strengthened their resolve.
They liberated camp after camp. Ernst wanted to love his tormented brethren, but he didn’t allow himself to. He was certain that humanity was marching toward unity and that one day there would be no difference between Jews and non-Jews. But reality slapped him in the face. He ran into anti-Semites everywhere, within the division and outside of it. They liberated the camps, but they were in no hurry to provide the liberated people with basic supplies. After a while, when canned goods from the Joint Distribution Committee began to arrive, he heard the supply officer say, “The whole world takes care of the Jews. The Russian people suffered more.” Ernst heard this and gritted his teeth.
The simple soldiers with whom he fought changed him. They turned him, the commissar-informer, into a fighting man, a devoted officer. When they approached the first camp and he saw his brethren for the first time, pressed up against the fences, Ernst knew how alienated he had become from them. While he was standing there in astonishment, one of the Russian officers whispered, “They look like Jesus of Nazareth. Every one of them looks like Jesus.” The young officer’s display of emotion upon seeing the human skeletons hanging onto the fences gripped Ernst by the throat.
“How do you know they’re like Jesus?” he asked the officer.
“From church,” the officer replied when he had recovered. “In our church the image of Jesus hangs from the cross, thin and tormented, and the thorns on his head are like that barbed wire.”
“Those are Jews,” Ernst said, to test him.
“I know. Jesus was also a Jew.”
Ernst felt as if he had been hit in the face. He stepped back and murmured, “That’s right. That’s right.
”
The encounter with the young Russian officer next to the barbed-wire fence was engraved upon him like an accusation. From now on Ernst was fighting on two fronts: against the Germans, of course, and on a second front against the Russian anti-Semites. Every time he managed to steal a food truck, he would drive it to one of the liberated camps.
One night when he entered a camp, some of the wretched inmates were still awake. They had gathered around a small bonfire. Their arms, or rather their bones, were stretched toward the flame. When he spoke to them in Yiddish, they were silent, as if they couldn’t believe their ears. When they recovered, they crawled over to him, hugged his legs and arms, and kissed him. “Take us away from here,” they begged. “Don’t abandon us.”
Ernst felt his flesh crawl, and he wanted to escape. That very night he enlisted the regimental doctor and some medics. They went to the camp, bringing medicine and cans of milk with them. The survivors were so gaunt that they couldn’t even stand on their feet.
The sights of the camp wouldn’t leave him. On several occasions at the nightly roll call, Ernst addressed the company.
“We’re fighting an enemy that built concentration camps and tortured innocent people in them,” he said. He knew that not everyone identified with what he was saying, but most of them, particularly the young, innocent soldiers, knew what he was talking about.
One time one of the soldiers approached him and asked, “What harm did the Jews do, to make the Germans abuse them so badly.”
“It’s hard to know,” Ernst said, to avoid revealing too much.
“They don’t have God in their hearts,” said the young soldier, his innocence evident in his face.
When Ernst tells Irena about the soldiers at the front, something of the officer returns to his face. His words are decisive, and he pushes weakness and the doctors’ report aside, clearing the way for the strength and vitality that fill his large body. If we overcame the fascist monster, we’ll also overcome this weakness, his face says. Irena is so pleased that she doesn’t know what else to do to keep his spirits up.
Suddenly, Love Page 12
