The Retreat

by Aharon Appelfeld

  From here they returned to the entrance lobby, the passage, and turned right to the stairs. Herbert opened the door and lit a match. It was a long, narrow room with a window at one end and a bed against the wall. There was a bureau and a desk.

  “It’s not too terrible,” said Lotte carelessly.

  “I’ll light the oil lamp and you’ll see better.”

  A world without electricity. The thought crossed Lotte’s mind that it was like a country village. She thought of the rural inns with their roofs thatched with straw, their courtyards noisy with chickens, dogs barking, the stove in the passage blazing hot and smelling of freshly baked bread.

  Herbert said, “The room is not very grand, as you will discover by daylight, but it’s yours.”

  “Thank you,” said Lotte, sensing the tears gathering in her eyes. She was tired after the long day, the journey and the emotions.

  Herbert placed the oil lamp on the table, said goodnight, and retired.

  She longed for sleep, but pictures from recent days rose before her eyes as if to spite her; trudging up and down the streets, the employment agencies, the officials, the embarrassing questions. In the whole of the little town where she had spent her childhood, youth and maturity, nobody wanted her. Not even the streets. They all avoided her as if she had some infectious disease, and yet she was nicely dressed, in her new dress, and her hair was freshly combed. Ever since her dismissal, her disgrace seemed to have become public knowledge. I’m an actress, a professional actress, as nobody can deny. I’ve entertained this town to the best of my ability, in small roles, admittedly, but not insignificant nevertheless. Ignored and avoided by everyone, she poured out her wrath on her daughter. Her daughter followed her like a sleepwalker, from street to street and alley to alley. And as if in a dream she clenched her fists and gritted her teeth, knocked on all the doors and blamed her daughter for all the misfortunes that had come upon her. Her daughter did not answer back, she tried to calm her down. When she saw that her mother was beside herself with anger, she suggested: Come home and have a cup of coffee. But this proposal infuriated her the more.

  Only now did the mother understand what she had done. She wanted to get up and write her a long letter, beg her pardon, promise her that from now on she would take care to behave properly. But she did not get up. She was too tired. Or rather, she was beyond tiredness. The vivid scenes of the night had weakened her.

  At midnight she rose. She took a writing pad out of her bag and wrote: Dear Julia, forgive your mother. More than this she could not coax out of her pen. She sat by the desk for a long time. The quiet, narrow room calmed the commotion inside her. Suddenly, as in days gone by, she stood up and took off her clothes and stood in front of the mirror.

  THREE

  “They’ve closed the hatch.” A strident female voice woke her. Lotte opened her eyes and the dream dissolved. She sensed only this: she had been very far away inside herself. The smell, without the pictures, lingered on inside her for a long time. There was a commotion in the passage. The cook, it seemed, had closed the hatch. No coffee after nine o’clock, let the latecomers learn a lesson. People stood in the passage, half awake, baffled expressions on their faces. A few stood in a corner and made fun of the situation. One woman, elegantly dressed, approached the hatch and banged on it with her fists: “Coffee. I will not be deprived of my morning coffee.” She voiced her protest with a kind of grim severity, as if she were speaking of an obvious injustice. There was no response from within. On the walls painted slogans hung next to a notice board and an ancient portrait of the Emperor.

  “Have you just arrived?” One of the men approached her.

  “Last night, only last night.”

  “A newcomer, in that case.”

  “Of my own free will,” she said, in the manner to which she was accustomed.

  “I’ve been here for six months already.”

  The scene reminded Lotte of an army canteen hastily set up in some deserted barracks hall. But here everything was more brightly lit. A healthy mind in a healthy body, it said on one of the walls. So there are gymnastics here, said Lotte to herself.

  “Where from,” asked the man in a whisper.

  “From Wirzbaden, not far from here.”

  “A charming spot, no two opinions about it.”

  The man’s closeness embarrassed her. She had not even had time to look at her face in the mirror. Unwashed and unpowdered. Her new dress creased. The thought that her dress was creased and her face unpowdered made her forget for a moment her thirst for a cup of coffee.

  The man said, “I used to visit Wirzbaden as a young man. A charming spot. An excellent theater too, as I recall, for a provincial town.

  “Indeed.” Lotte opened her eyes wide. “I work there myself.”

  “Wonderful,” said the man, and bowed. “As far as I remember, they used to put on delightful humoresques, but there was some serious acting too. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “You’re not wrong. At one time we had a proper classical repertoire. The theater has changed since then, of course.”

  “A holiday of sorts, I understand.”

  “In a sense. If you can call being fired from your job a holiday. I have no regrets. I’ve learned to have no regrets.”

  “You have my heartfelt respect,” said the man with Old World courtesy.

  He looked about fifty. His suit was of the old-fashioned cut, not new but very well preserved. He may have been a bank clerk, or perhaps a tutor to the sons of the rich.

  “Engel is my name. Permit me to invite you to join me in a cup of coffee. I have a thermos flask. I would never have imagined how useful that little gadget would prove to be in this place. Without coffee and cigarettes I can’t get through the day. The hatch is opened and shut according to the caprices of the cook.”

  “A moment,” said Lotte. “Be so kind as to wait for me a moment.”

  She stood in front of the mirror and made up her face. Over the years she had invested much labor in this face. It had changed, grown ravaged, the neck, the eye holes. Her late mother had been fond of saying that maturity too had a beauty of its own. How she hated those old saws. Adding insult to injury. If not for her face, her career would have been different. Beautiful woman always got to the top in the end. She suffered especially on account of her ears, which seemed to her too long and prominent. And in recent years, her hair. It was falling out at a horrifying rate. And dyeing it only emphasized its sparseness. The time she spent in front of the mirror making up her face was always one of stocktaking and soul-searching. At these moments generalizations hardened in her brain like needles. Now she felt her reflections gathering into a point again. She finished quickly, stepped outside, and announced: “I’m ready.”

  “We men are billeted on the ground floor, but as long as we have our thermos flask life’s not as bad as it seems.” The time Lotte had spent in front of the mirror with her makeup had relaxed her facial muscles. She felt a sense of relief.

  The room was full of books, reminding her of her father’s room at home. Her father was addicted to books like other men are to alcohol. What little money he had he spent on buying books. In the remote provincial backwater books were expensive, and he wasted half his salary on them. Right up to the end her mother reproached her dead husband for this sin. Immediately after his death, her mother had sold his books for a pittance to a Jew with a skullcap who came from Vienna with a van. Lotte remembered the empty room with its insides ripped out.

  “The coffee may not look like anything special, but it’s hot, if I may be permitted to say something in its praise.”

  “I find it delicious,” said Lotte. “By the way, what does one do here? Is there a program?”

  A look of surprise crossed the man’s face and he said, “I play the violin. Three or four hours a day, for the time being. I can’t say that I have improved. Improvement on an instrument like the violin is no easy matter.”

  “Nevertheless.”

 
“My dear lady, I have made great efforts over the years. The will exists, but that one little defect makes any real progress impossible.”

  “What defect are you speaking of?”

  “Internal, in the main. The great Sebastian, with whom I studied, even succeeded in locating it exactly. It’s the shoulder, the right shoulder upsets the balance, and with it the sound and all that implies.”

  “Strange,” said Lotte. She was still thirsty.

  “The defect is essentially hereditary, that’s why I was so glad when I was invited to come here and eradicate it for once and for all. The rest of the time I spend in exercise.”

  “A kind of refresher course, in other words,”

  “You might say so. The truth of the matter is that I was dismissed from my job. I don’t blame them. When all is said and done, you can’t hide a defect for ever.”

  “Did you ever happen to come across Manfred Shtorch?”

  Engel opened his eyes wide and said, “A childhood friend. We went to school together, at the liberal arts high school, and after that we both studied with the same violin teacher. I haven’t seen him for years. I hear he’s gone over to the viola. A gifted man.”

  “My ex-husband,” said Lotte.

  “Forgive me,” said Engel, as if he had touched a hidden wound. “It’s been years since I saw him. At school we were very friendly. He was brilliant, not only at music. He sat in the second row, at the desk in front of mine. Please forgive me,” he adeed, as if he had been burned again.

  Lotte suddenly felt as if her former life, full of action, frenzy and excitement, had stopped clamoring inside her. She lowered her head, as she always did when she was faced with a decision which was beyond her strength.

  “The grant is very generous, and enables me to devote myself completely to the violin. I’m not sure if it’s possible to eradicate hereditary defects. The gymnastics appear to be beneficial, but hardly sufficient, it seems to me, to eradicate defects. They are great believers in gymnastics here.”

  “On the contrary,” said Lotte, scarcely aware of the words coming out of her mouth. “On the contrary. Improvement is possible, perfection is possible.”

  “Is it really?” asked the man in surprise.

  “Of course it is. I believe in will power. Where there’s a will there’s a way.”

  Engel bowed his head, like a man whose error has been exposed.

  “Reform is possible. Of course it’s possible. Anything is possible. All you need is the will, and that we have in full measure.” All at once she sensed that she was talking as if she had been drinking brandy. It was the weariness, the fatigue of the past few weeks, which had spread through all her limbs. “I’m dying for the long vacation,” she said, “but before that I need a rest, long vacations require long rests, if I may put it that way.”

  “I understand. No one comes here the easy way. And everything is different here, including the climate. I myself slept the whole day.”

  “I’m glad,” said Lotte absentmindedly. “A wonderful holiday. My work over the past few years has worn me out. I need a long, deep vacation in order to get back on my feet and begin again. It’s possible to begin again; if only there’s a will it’s possible to begin again.”

  “It’s possible to recuperate here.” The man echoed her words.

  “In that case, let us begin right away,” said Lotte, and rose to her feet.

  “Permit me to escort you to your room. Sleep here, as you will see for yourself, is wonderful.” He spoke to her the way the family doctor, Dr. Lachan, used to speak when examining her as a child. He too was a short, thin man. “Straight ahead, straight ahead,” he said. “Up the stairs and here we are. Room number thirty-seven, if I’m not mistaken.” But to Lotte it seemed, for some reason, that he was talking not to her but to himself.

  FOUR

  That whole day she slept and when she woke the light was already streaming through the window again. She remembered that she had wandered very far inside herself. She did not remember where. Her sleep was heavy and she swam in it as in a thick liquid. Now she extricated herself and sat up in bed. The room was bare of decoration. On the shelf were a few bottles of makeup, a couple of books and a pair of scissors: in other words, a woman had lived here before her.

  She wiped the sweat off her forehead. This act, as if by magic, conjured up her daughter’s face, a face heavy with sorrow. After her marriage to George her hands had lost their freedom and she had begun to stand like a muzzled animal. Now, for the first time in years, Lotte felt a kind of closeness to her. She wanted to embrace her and press her swollen hands to her heart.

  —

  There was a commotion in the passage again. An elegantly dressed woman, no longer young, stood next to the hatch and set forth her complaints in fluent, urban German without the faintest taint of a foreign accent. The arrangements in this place were driving her out of her mind. She could no longer endure the muddle. Herbert stood beside her, tall and embarrassed, and tried to pacify her: it was only the cook. A woman with no manners, she would be taught a lesson. He spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone. But the woman was firm, she refused to accept his explanations. All the arrangements here were chaotic. For some reason, she called them disgracefully Jewish arrangements. “On no account am I prepared to go on staying here,” she said, as if she were addressing the proprietor of a hotel whose establishment had been found wanting.

  Herbert, who did not leave her side and appeared to understand her anger, announced firmly: “Order will be restored.” This sentence made an impression on the woman. She passed her right hand over her brow, as if she were exhausted after some strenuous effort, took a step backward, and stopped. Herbert, who appeared deeply appreciative of this gesture, said, “The Director of the Institute will be notified of this immediately,” and escorted her elegantly from the scene of the fire.

  The woman, whose posture was now very erect, walked straight into the hall. The faces of the people standing around the hatch expressed satisfaction. It was hard to tell what it was, exactly, that had aroused their admiration: Herbert’s powers of persuasion or the woman’s resolute stand. The uproar, in any case, calmed down.

  A few coffee pots and slices of bread smeared with jam lay scattered about on the tables. The sight made Lotte think of a hasty meal in an army barracks. But she was very thirsty and she overcame her disgust. The lukewarm coffee slid down her gullet and caused her pain. In the last few months her ulcer had come to life again. Ever since she was a child her digestive organs had given her trouble. After she separated from her husband the pains suddenly subsided, but in the last few years they had revived again, flooding her in wave after wave, like gusts of rage. In the end they had discovered the ulcer. When the doctors informed her of the diagnosis she burst into tears. That was seven years ago. Many storms had raged over her head since then. She made up her mind: no one would discover her secret. And while she was standing there a voice was heard in the hall. The affair, it appeared, was not yet over. The woman sat on the armchair speaking quietly but distinctly: “What am I doing here? These Jewish arrangements. They don’t even give you a cup of coffee in the morning.” Vestiges of beauty were still apparent on her face. Her clothes too were full of simple elegance. There was no one next to her and she was giving vent to her feelings with a quiet bitterness. Herbert appeared at the side door and immediately informed her: “I’ve just spoken to the Director of the Institute. He promised to reprimand her. Tomorrow the hatch will be open till nine o’clock.”

  “He’s already promised once.” The woman was not appeased.

  “This time he promised solemnly.”

  The woman raised her head and with a gesture full of disdain she said, “I don’t believe in the solemn promises of these people.”

  “You don’t say so.”

  “These Jews, all they can think about is money. Their meanness drives them out of their minds.”

  “As for me,” said Herbert calmly and deliberately, “I’d
be inclined to wait and see.”

  “My patience is at an end,” she said shortly.

  Herbert knew that the time for words and arguments was now past. His long, pale face grew somewhat anxious. No one came to his assistance. The sharp words stood in the air. Lotte took a few steps toward Herbert. “Do you remember me?” This was the way she would always approach close friends she had not seen for years, with a kind of demonstrative self-confidence. And Herbert, preoccupied with his own little worry, said absentmindedly, “Lotte Schloss. Who could forget. Allow me to introduce Lotte Schloss.” He turned to the seated woman.

  “Isadora Rotenberg,” said the woman with deliberate dryness.

  “We are discussing a very weighty matter,” said Herbert.

  “What can it be,” wondered Lotte.

  “Our cook. The controversy has already been raging for a month. From when to when should the hatch be open for morning coffee? A whole theology has been constructed around this point by the cook.”

  “How admirable of her,” said Lotte with affected gravity.

  “The hussy,” hissed Isadora.

  “Who is she?” asked Lotte in a whisper.

  “A woman who is not content to be a cook, but who harbors pedagogical ambitions as well. She wants to teach us punctuality, order and what she refers to as self-discipline. Thank goodness her sphere of influence is but a narrow one, thank goodness it’s only the hatch. Otherwise she would have made our lives a hell on earth.”

  “You call the hatch a narrow sphere of influence, sir? You call our morning coffee a narrow sphere? If that’s a narrow sphere I’d like to know what a broad one is. Perhaps you would be so good as to explain it to me.”

  Herbert’s face lost its gravity in an instant and he burst out laughing. “I beg your pardon. The hatch is not a narrow sphere, not by any means.”

  Isadora did not move a muscle. She pursued her lips as if in anticipation of some new argument. But no new argument was advanced.