“Never.”
“He’s truly a magician.”
Several times Freddy’s name came up. Karl spoke of him now with fondness and longing, as if he were a brother living in exile. The peasants wearing that sweet fellow down every night. That couldn’t continue. If there was any reason to return to Neufeld, it was to rescue Freddy from their hands.
The wound hurt a lot, but he was optimistic, promising Gloria he would never quit his struggle. “Life without concern for the community is petty and worthless.” Gloria was pleased with every word he said. “We are few, Gloria,” he called out one night, “but we are not afraid. The monster is not as powerful as it pretends to be.”
The lull turned out to be a brief one. The horsemen returned to the courtyard and threw everything they had at the place, breaking all the windows. After that, they heaped beams and branches onto the front of the house. Now the rooms were dark. Gloria moved Karl to an inner room, where she lit a kerosene lantern and covered him with sheepskin rugs.
“I was mistaken,” he murmured.
“What are you talking about?”
“We should have gone directly to Cracow.”
“We’ll do it. It’s not too late.”
Karl didn’t complain about the pain in his arm, only about his legs, which were cold. Hot water bottles no longer warmed them. His wound changed color, to a purplish red. Karl now spoke a great deal, and eloquently. The thought that Cracow had a university and public libraries inflamed his imagination. Suddenly he could not forgive his parents. “Other parents took out loans and sent their sons to Vienna,” he raged one night. But his anger was mostly directed at Father Merser, for his zeal in converting old women from the nursing home.
Afterward, he spoke only about his cold legs. Gloria rubbed them with her hands. In the end, she stood at the window and called out, “Take the branches away from the entrance to the house! There’s no air in here, there’s no light!”
“What?” a muffled voice was heard to say.
“Don’t you understand? There’s a sick man here.”
The cold was very painful. Gloria placed three bottles of boiling water at his feet, but even that didn’t help. Now he scolded her as if she were his maidservant and ordered her about. She obeyed, saying nothing. From day to day the cold grew more severe. At last he stopped complaining, and his face relaxed. In vain Gloria tried to seal the windows, but the wind blew in with great force. Now the cold gripped her legs as well. She felt its power on her flesh. From time to time Karl would wake up and ask, “What’s that noise?”
“It’s nothing, my dear.”
Thus passed a few more days. Gradually, Gloria was gripped in the paralyzing web of cold. First she wanted to lie on the couch so as not to disturb him, but at last she climbed into bed and curled up at his side.
That night the peasants poured kerosene on the branches. Within seconds the fire seized the corners of the house and it burst into flames.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine). At the age of nine, he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, from which he escaped. Having lost his mother to the Nazis, and separated from his father, he hid in the forests and eventually joined the Soviet army as a kitchen boy, immigrating to Palestine in 1946. The author of twelve internationally acclaimed novels, including Badenheim 1939, The Iron Tracks, Unto the Soul, The Retreat, and The Age of Wonders, he lives in Jerusalem.
GREAT LITERATURE FROM SCHOCKEN BOOKS
A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories
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Edited by Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman
0-8052-1066-0
The Iron Tracks
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Unto the Soul
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