The Retreat

by Aharon Appelfeld

  Lang gathered his courage together and said, “We all have homes down below. But of our own free will and in full possession of our senses we decided that for the good of us all we must change our former way of life, eradicate our defects for once and for all.”

  “I?”

  “All of us. Each to the extent of his own defects. And our defects are numerous, not so?”

  “And wht about my home? I was very attached to my home.”

  “It will wait for you. No one will break into private property, and in the meantime you will absorb something of the healthful splendors of the winter. Winter up here, if I may say so, is magnificent.”

  And true enough, the morning light was clear and cold outside the windows. The universe at this moment seemed full of energy. The hatch opened and coffee was served in heavy mugs.

  “Won’t you have some coffee?”

  “With pleasure,” she said, as if she had forgotten her previous intention.

  Lang hurried to the hatch and brought her a cup of coffee. The other inmates were apparently still asleep, shaving or shaking out blankets on the cold back porch. In the hall, at any rate, only a few people were to be seen, and they too seemed in no hurry to approach the hatch. The morning hour stood calm and still, as if time was not measured there by clocks.

  “I didn’t know you had a house in Herngasse.”

  “I left the keys with my sister. My sister, I must tell you, is married to a very wealthy and prominent man.”

  “I understand,” said Lang. “I’m sure she must be looking after the house.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “In that case, why the rush?”

  “An uneasy feeling,” said Mrs. Kron, and shuddered a little at the sound of her own words.

  “Such feelings must be overcome. These little worries can drive us out of our minds,” said Lang in a stern but gentle tone.

  “You’re quite right.”

  “I’ve made up my mind, come what may, nothing is going to deflect me from my purpose any more.”

  “I’m sorry to say,” said Mrs. Kron in a thin, somewhat choked voice, “that there are many things which worry me and disturb my peace of mind.”

  “That’s not good,” said Lang dryly.

  “My elder sister Blanca is determined to make me convert. I have to admit that she is a very intelligent woman, very brave. She converted when she was still a girl.”

  “And what did you say to her,” asked Lang carefully.

  “I told her that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She disagreed with me.”

  “And now you want to go down and convert.”

  Mrs. Kron giggled. It was a rather silly little giggle.

  In the meantime a number of people had gathered outside the hatch. Trude dished out the coffee and peasant bread with a mean hand. The people took their portions and remained standing where they were. The dimly lit hall seemed frozen in immobility.

  “I have no intention of converting.” Mrs. Kron resumed her train of thought.

  “There’s no need of that. No need at all. The air here is good. The food healthy, the walks delightful.”

  “Very true.”

  “There are a lot of crude people down below. I can’t stand crude people.”

  “You’re quite right.”

  “I would give this simple way of life another chance. It promises much.”

  And thus he succeeded in appeasing her. She took her suitcase back to her room. Lang, pleased with his powers of persuasion, embarked upon a lengthy description of everything that had happened to him since his decision to come to the retreat. As he spoke his language grew increasingly bombastic. He spoke of a great nation whose way of life had been corrupted, and which now had no alternative but to rectify the many defects it had accumulated. Each of them separately and all of them together. The cheerful, modest happiness left his face and a boyish earnestness shone from his eyes. Mrs. Kron was drawn to his words as if by magic.

  “But not everybody understands these things,” he said sadly.

  “New ideas don’t catch on easily.”

  “That’s true,” said Lang, surprised by her response.

  Now it was her turn to appease him. She wanted to cheer him up.

  Lang sank for a moment into his thoughts. Mrs. Kron rose to the occasion. “There are good conditions for physical activity here,” she said. “Fresh air, open spaces and a gymnastics hall. In the final analysis a man must take his fate in his own two hands.”

  “The time has come for my morning run. I must go now,” Lang rose to his feet. For some reason he looked shorter than usual.

  “Go, my dear,” said Mrs. Kron in a motherly voice.

  “It’s very cold out. Five hundred meters will be enough today.”

  “Quite enough,” she agreed.

  THIRTEEN

  The next day people played cards again with all the old passion. The cook emerged from the kitchen and stood on one side, watching their enthusiasm with wrathful vigilance, beside herself with anger. In the past, when she and Balaban had worked together as a team, she would burst in and hurl abuse at the card players, but ever since Balaban had defected and begun to play cards and gamble himself, she no longer appeared in the hall but shut herself up in the kitchen, seething with venom.

  Among the inmates there were a few who really knew how to take life lightly and enjoy themselves, for instance, Lauffer. Like the others, he too had arrived here not entirely of his own free will, but he had immediately realized that the place had advantages of its own: chess in the mornings, coffee and cake at five o’clock, farm girls in the village. If there was anyone the cook hated, it was Lauffer. All the Jewish vices were personified in him. On her lips his name was a warning and a lesson. Not so the other residents, who had grown accustomed to his weaknesses, and enjoyed his jokes, the way he dressed, sold his watches and wasted his money.

  At one time he had been married to a gentile woman, an educated woman of the middle classes who played the piano and read books. Lauffer had been captivated by her charms, but it soon transpired that he had made a mistake. She was an incorrigible Christian. For a year she refrained from going to church, but at the end of the year she reverted to her old ways. Lauffer, to tell the truth, did not attach much importance to her beliefs, referring to them in the language of his generation as “atavistic beliefs,” but the smell of incense which she brought back with her from church drove him out of his mind. He tried to make jokes about it, in his usual way, but she was firm. And to make things worse she actually hung a picture of the Virgin Mary on the bedroom wall. Soon after that they separated. The marriage had lasted six years and he was forty when the separation took place. Since then he had drifted from place to place and from one occupation to another. He even had a haberdashary shop in Salzburg.

  Now he was here, free of responsibility. He had a bit of cash, a few watches, a little foreign currency. In short: a penny or two with which to gladden the heart of a woman. And since at Balaban’s retreat the frivolous, the lazy, the idle and the short were hounded mercilessly, he was unwittingly transformed into a modest advocate of the Jewish way of life.

  “I have never loved the Jews. Lovers of the Jews, if they exist at all, are few and far between, I think. But one thing must be said to their credit. They detest cabbage.”

  “Jewish food, you must admit, is difficult to digest.”

  “You should try it. It’s not as bad as you think.”

  “I’m prepared to do without it.”

  “Not me.”

  “I’d sell you the lot for a mess of pottage.”

  “And I’d buy it.”

  “How much will you give?”

  “What a question—all I have.”

  This argument with Lang had been going on for months. Sometimes in passing, and sometimes at length, but never with animosity, for it was not Lauffer’s way to censure or condemn. “We’re all of us on
ly temporary lodgers here,” he would say, “here today and gone tomorrw. As long as they give you a cup of coffee and let you smoke a cigarette, make the most of it.” But it was precisely this nonchalance that drove certain people out of their minds. Especially the cook. She forgave him nothing. And when he appeared at the hatch she filled his bowl with contempt. These Jews make me sick, she said once through clenched teeth.

  Lauffer looked like a traveling salesman, or a small-scale speculator. The kind you can meet in a café of a morning, without dignity or charm. The residents still remembered his arrival. He came with two little parcels and stood in the doorway. Balaban refused to admit him, on the grounds that he was an incorrigible Jew. To a certain extent he was right: Lauffer would not exercise or run. Give Lauffer a cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake, a cigarette and a young woman—not too young—he could treat to a hearty meal in a good restaurant, and he would do himself proud, but running up and down a mountain: no, there was no power on earth that could make him do it. From this point of view, and not only this point of view, he was a true member of his race: frivolous, nimble, shifty as they come and capable of exerting a spellbinding charm on gentile women. When Balaban spoke to him a strange smile spread over his lips. And while Lang and his like ran and exercised, tried to stand up straight, swam and lifted weights, Lauffer had nothing in his head but thoughts of small indulgences and treats. But for his good nature he would have been hated even more. He was generous, of that there could be no doubt. From time to time he would bring back from the village honey cake, fish fried in butter, poppy-seed rolls or a jar of strawberry jam. On the late Isadora’s birthday he had bought a bottle of expensive liqueur. Isadora had been unable to endure his company, calling him frivolous like all his race, but he, for some reason, did not hold it against her.

  If there was anyone in the street who knew the value of a tasty dish, a fragrant perfume, a feminine bauble, it was Lauffer. At one time people would argue with him and blame him, and Balaban once declared in a rage, “If any of you would like to know the true figure of a Jew, look at Lauffer and you’ll understand why people hate us. They’re right to hate us.” Since then a lot of water had passed beneath the bridge, and people had changed. Life at these heights, there was no denying, had its effect.

  But not on the cook. She sat in the kitchen, seething with venom. If her anger had faded, her envy had not.

  “What do the gentile women see in him, be so good as to explain. His height is no height. His clothes, no clothes. His appearance is the perfection of ugliness. What do the gentile women see in him that they are so drawn to him?”

  “They aren’t drawn to him. He draws them.”

  “What does he draw them with?”

  “I don’t know. With perfume, I suppose.”

  Mirzel sitting in the kitchen and listening knew: Lauffer was kind hearted. He understood women, he knew how to listen to them and how to whisper in their ears. No wonder they loved him.

  FOURTEEN

  The accursed memories. But for the memories life on the mountain would have been different. People would perhaps have found a measure of reconciliation. The long winter nights, they all agreed, weren’t easy. You were alone with yourself, with no barriers. A number of them were driven mad by their longings and they escaped, some to the son or daughter who had denied them, some into the anonymous arms of the cold.

  Lotte was happy about her grant. Life was not particularly glorious but it was no longer burdensome. A dormant seed of optimism budded in her. She slept a lot, or sat observing people. To tell the truth, she spent many hours brooding about her childhood home. Her father, whose modest passion for books had caused family quarrels. Now too the thought that she had inherited a number of his physical defects did not endear him to her.

  “Thank you,” she had said to Herbert.

  “Why thank me?” said Herbert. “The board had objective criteria for its choice.”

  For hours she sat musing about the past. And when the fog became too thick to penetrate she began to brood again about her body and its lack of proportion, her spectacles, wrinkles and blemishes.

  Herbert said, “I offered up my life to Moloch.”

  “What Moloch are you referring to?”

  “Like all Jews, the journalistic Moloch.”

  “Strange, everyone has his own Moloch.”

  “What do you mean? You were in the theater.”

  “If second-rate one-acters and erotic jokes constitute the art of the theater, then I was a faithful disciple of the art.”

  People didn’t always talk. For the most part they asked questions. One of them would take his question and pose it in the air of the hall, without expecting a reply. But someone passing there by chance would hear his question and answer it. The answer was seldom given in full. And sometimes there was a mumble of agreement or protest, or a sudden flash of memory, which was a kind of answer in itself. It sometimes happened too that conversations were detailed and lengthy, going on, with interruptions, for many hours. This was what happened to Lotte. Herbert went down with the janitor to bring potatoes. She was standing by the window and gazing at the snow. For some reason the word “Moloch” stuck in her head and conjured up the vision of a kind of circus freak. And while she was standing absorbed in her vision and horrified by its yellow colors one of the inmates approached her and introduced himself: Bruno Rauch. One of the senior residents. He still remembered the retreat in the good old days, the bracing, disciplined days when they got up early and went to bed early, ate peasant bread and yogurt for breakfast and worked on their accents.

  “Do you miss those days?” asked Lotte.

  “Of course. They were great days, days of the reform of body and soul. But how could I possibly forget them.”

  “But they weren’t easy, I think.”

  “Indeed they weren’t. But they were days with a purpose. Once a man realizes that his body is weak and ugly, his nerves destroyed, his soul corrupt, that he bears within him a decayed inheritance, in short, that he is sick and, what is worse, that he is passing his sickness on to his children, what can he desire more deeply than reform?”

  “Interesting,” said Lotte.

  “No doubt about it, the beginning was magnificent. And the continuation too was not lacking in success. I myself, if I may be permitted to introduce a personal note, felt a far-reaching change.”

  “In what sphere, may I ask?”

  “My nerves, in the first place, grew calmer. All the members of our race suffer from weak nerves, and it is via these unsound, inflamed organs that they gain their impressions of the world. You must admit, madam, that an idea of the world which comes from inflamed nerves is not the most reliable. Panic and haste, madam, are the authors of all our sins. And I suddenly felt that I was growing calmer, and the others felt the same. What more could anyone desire?”

  “Wonderful,” Lotte, for some reason, replied.

  “And our height too, madam. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we actually grew taller, but our posture changed. A straight back, madam, is an indication of change. Certainly of a change in one’s perception of the world. The Jews, we cannot deny, suffer from many defects. I myself have counted two hundred defects—no small number in relation to one human being.”

  “And others have no defects.”

  “Others too, of course. But their defects are healthy. People say that the Austrians are heavy drinkers. Of course they are, but that, if it can be called a defect at all, is a healthy defect. A man forgets himself for an hour, which is healthy for him and everyone else. If only the Jews knew how to drink, to relax, they would surely be different—stronger, braver, perhaps even more honest. But the Jews are rodents: not for nothing does the world regard them as animals of the rodent species. I myself, madam, what was I all those years, but a rodent? Balaban, in the simplicity of his heart, understood it better than we did.”

  “I was told that in the beginning he was very harsh.”

  “Correct, he w
as harsh. And isn’t the doctor harsh when he forces his patient to take bitter medicines, injects him or amputates infected limbs? Of course there is a certain degree of harshness here, but deep-seated diseases are not eradicated by aspirin.”

  “And you still remember him at the height of his powers.”

  “Yes, of course. He was completely different. He looked like a farmer, fantastically healthy. The kind of health which is conceivable only in people who work the land. He wanted to share his health with us. And so he did, with the most praiseworthy success. We, the first inmates, will never forget it. His defection is something I shall never understand. We must have infected him with our own frivolity. A great shame.” He spoke quietly, in a balanced, unemotional tone, as if he was talking about some investment which had not made a good profit. And, in fact, he was a banker by profession. This profession had left its traces in his hands, his gestures, his expression and his eyes with their look of suffering and reserve.

  “And you, madam, have you accustomed yourself already to our way of life here?” he asked, with his old politeness.

  “To a large extent.”

  “Do you exercise? You are an actress, I believe.”

  “That is correct.”

  In that case it must be easier for you. Actors are used to physical training. For us the first year was particularly difficult. I must tell you, madam, that I was a sedentary creature all my life and my only contact with the land took place in the summer vacations.”

  “And you gave up your position?”

  “Of my own free will and in full possession of my senses. A man must face his defects in the end. My wife, I must tell you, is not of our race.”

  “She comes to visit you from time to time, I suppose.”

  “No. I forbade her to visit me. In a place like this a man must be by himself.”

  “When do you think of going back?”

  “Not for some time to come.”

  He looked about fifty-five years old. He was not a tall man. There was a quiet kind of seriousness in his voice, as if he was speaking of some religious experience for which he was preparing himself.