The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

by Aharon Appelfeld

  12

  When I awakened, I wondered why Dr. Weingarten had felt the need to tell me that Father once planned to study in the rabbinical seminary in Berlin. I looked around and couldn’t see him. There was a huge commotion on the ship, and the air seethed with violence.

  What am I doing here? I said to myself and tried to go back to sleep, but sleep was beyond my reach. My inner world was once again in shreds.

  Meanwhile, our ship was intercepted by the British Navy. We knew that somewhere warships were pursuing us, but we didn’t imagine that one would actually swoop down on us. We were surrounded by sailors who lined us up, took us off the ship, and brought us to a fenced-in camp in Palestine.

  We arrived in Atlit toward morning. The Atlit Detention Camp wasn’t like a ghetto or a concentration camp. We strolled about freely, without any of the soldiers shouting at us. Ephraim made sure we had our own shed so we would be separate from the other refugees.

  I looked for Dr. Weingarten and found him curled up in one of the sheds. He came out and hugged me. I felt that my inner world hadn’t been extinguished after all.

  “Dr. Weingarten,” I said and hugged his arm. I didn’t hide the fact that it was now hard for me to talk about my past. But I very much wanted to hear from him, if he had things he wanted to tell me.

  Dr. Weingarten recovered his bearings and told me that he had been with my father in a labor camp for a year and a half.

  “Thanks to your father, a lot of people managed to hold on without being discouraged.”

  “How?”

  “Every night your father would tell us a story by Kleist or by Kafka, or one of his own. He had a quiet voice, not soft, and people followed him wherever he led. Sometimes he would tell the same story night after night. People said his voice wasn’t from this world. They said he was sent to bind our wounds after a day of discouraging work. They said that his stories were also parables to be deciphered in the future. He was himself one of the prisoners, humiliated and oppressed and no different from the rest of us. But at night, in the darkness, when he opened his mouth, his voice would unite us. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for two.”

  I listened, and in my eyes Father’s stature increased. He no longer seemed the way I had known him. Dr. Weingarten didn’t fade away but continued speaking.

  “In the tranquil years it seemed to your father that his writing had no purpose. But, amazingly, in a place where the world became hell, his voice was like one that came from on high.”

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I saw Father telling a story slowly, as though counting the words, while his companions in suffering listened and drank in every syllable. Still, I was surprised that my father, a man of average height who never raised his voice, spoke every night to dozens of people tormented and in pain, and they all listened to him.

  Precisely now, amid the commotion in Atlit, I heard my father speaking clearly, quietly, and full of nuances. Father didn’t like ideological talk, neither Marxist nor Zionist, not to mention Orthodox. They pained his ears with their unequivocal statements. Sometimes he imitated their slogans to ridicule them.

  Father had adopted several principles: A person shouldn’t display his ego, either in speech or in writing. Expressing a position or a feeling before presenting the facts is forbidden. Attention to detail enhances speech. The subtleties are important. But never speak with total seriousness. You always have to maintain a bit of irony. Irony distinguishes a thinking person from someone who just spouts words.

  During the war, I had lost those principles that had accompanied my childhood morning, noon, and evening. In fact, they were already lost in the ghetto. At that time people needed another language: muttering, grumbling, shouting, and cursing—the language of oppression.

  During the war, I hardly spoke. I followed and listened in and was as cautious as I could be. No wonder it was hard for me to get a word out of my mouth after the war.

  “Father was a shy man, not to mention a very private person. How could he stand in front of so many people, night after night?” I asked Dr. Weingarten. “Where did he get that spiritual courage?” Weingarten’s answer surprised me with its directness.

  “When he told stories at night, he was a different man. He had a different voice. That was everyone’s opinion.”

  “Did he speak before he told stories?”

  “No, he just told stories.”

  My desire to sink into myself grew stronger. In my spare time I would sit and observe, not observation in order to estimate distance or danger, but inner observation. That ability was apparently embedded in me, but I discovered it only in Atlit. In time I came to know that inner contemplation can draw up images of the soul that had sunk into me years earlier. Amazingly, when they rose up to the surface, they were as intact as when I first heard and saw them.

  13

  In the camp at Atlit I remained close to my brother refugees. I could still absorb the shadings of their speech, follow their expressions, listen, if only at a distance, to their clamorous skepticism.

  “What was is what will be.”

  “True, the detention camps are a change for the better this time, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?”

  “There’s no certainty. Everything is a deception.”

  “Deception” articulated their experiences—in fact, my experiences as well. But I slipped away from them and from their experiences and took shelter in Ephraim’s training.

  In the depths of my heart I knew that the refugees were part of my family. I was bound to them by thousands of blood ties. I was fluent in their gestures. If I had been honest with myself, I would have stayed in their sheds, eaten with them, and drunk the bitter coffee from their pots. I would most likely have heard details about the way Father told them his stories. But in those days I felt obligated to follow Ephraim’s training, and I observed the rules that kept the refugees at a distance. Because I kept my distance, I lost some of their bodily expressions, not to mention the life lessons that were expressed in their incisive sayings. Later, I would seek them out with longing and despair.

  Dr. Weingarten was now like a member of my family. We would meet after night training. I learned things from him about my uncle Arthur, who had appeared to me on that hidden beach near Naples. Uncle Arthur never lost faith in communism, not even in the darkest days of the Party. He fled to Russia, then was imprisoned there, accused of treason, and exiled to Siberia. Dr. Weingarten received two letters from Siberia, brimming with optimism about a future that would be unblemished.

  “From his youth, he was an optimist. He refused to see evil. He saw it as an error, a misunderstanding, a passing situation,” said Dr. Weingarten, half praising, half mourning.

  We kept practicing poems by Natan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, and Leah Goldberg, exercising, and ignoring the refugees. Fear that we would become like them—sitting in the doorways of the sheds, gaping and muttering, grumbling, getting angry or blowing up for no apparent reason—that fear settled within me, kept me apart from them. But the refugees recognized me from afar and called out in astonishment, “There’s the sleepy boy. There he is.” One of the refugees said to me, “You slept well. We watched you in your sleep, and we said to ourselves, what is the boy doing in his sleep? Where is he? What does he see? We forgot you several times, but in the end we went back and found you. Come back to us. Who knows what’s in store for us? We’ll watch over you.”

  Dr. Weingarten, the wisest of men, observed my rejection of those who had taken care of me. He knew that contradiction from within himself: as a boy he had been in the communist youth movement, had heard endless lectures about Marxism, and had been captivated by its doctrines.

  In time he was sent out on several dangerous missions. Once, he was dispatched to set fire to a synagogue, and he obeyed the order: he poured kerosene on the entrance and the windows and set fire to the building. But the faithful Jews who had been alerted to save the Torah scrolls ignored the flames and burst in.

  Af
ter the fire died down, the men tore the lapels of their shirts and mourned for the Torah scrolls—some of them very old—that had been burned. Toward dawn, after a night of lamentations and weeping, the rescuers rose from their mourning and began to dance with the Torah scrolls they had saved. The joy of the dancers and their spiritual devotion was so intense that Dr. Weingarten’s action seemed to him not only stupid but also criminal. The next day he told his handlers he was leaving the Party.

  That distant memory affected Dr. Weingarten. But I didn’t understand that he was offering me a scrap of his living soul—in fact, of the souls of his entire generation. And that he was, in a way, warning me about what was to come. Years passed before I understood what Dr. Weingarten meant to me and what he gave me at that moment of life’s passage.

  My thinking at that time was so flaccid that everything that entered my ears in the Hebrew language sounded correct and just to me. The language and the poetry enchanted me. Because at that time the language was full of elevated words, slogans, and expressions of faith in the future, I, too, was charmed not only by the sounds of the new language, but also by the abundance of words.

  In the evenings we read chapters from the book of Joshua. The counselor, a kibbutznik who was about thirty years old, spread a map out on the wall and showed us the places mentioned in the book. It was more a geography lesson than the study of holy scriptures. I didn’t understand. Were we, too, required to be like Joshua and his army, who conquered Canaan by storm? Or was this only preparation for a trip, to familiarize us with the Judean Hills and the Jordan Valley, which we would plow with our feet when we were released from this prison?

  Particularly in Atlit, far from any context, I remembered the long summer vacations in my grandparents’ house in the Carpathian Mountains. I didn’t see the mountains in my sleep, but when I woke up, I was face-to-face with them, in all their blue, green, and pink colors. Grandmother loved roses, and she had a large bed of them. Mother and Father used to stand and breathe in the fragrance, enthralled, and they would say, “Only here, only in these mountains, are there such heavenly smells.”

  Once, I saw Grandfather on a visit to the city. That tall, sturdy man seemed strange and lost on the sidewalks, as though constantly asking, What am I doing here? Then it occurred to me that Grandfather realized that the people around him no longer prayed, and that he would be better off returning to the mountains, where his comrades in prayer awaited him.

  I asked Ephraim for a day of sleep, and he authorized it. I tried to overcome the bonds of sleep and not to ask for any concessions, but some days I felt suffocated: I couldn’t go on without sleeping.

  Once, in the midst of a conversation with friends, I collapsed into sleep. Ephraim leaned over and tried to wake me. Eventually, he understood that I was shackled to my sleep, and he left me alone. After that, whenever I asked Ephraim for a day or two of sleep, he allowed it, without even raising his head to look at me, as if it were a hidden weakness I couldn’t control. My comrades ignored my weakness and didn’t ask about it.

  —

  The High Holidays approached. There was a stirring throughout the camp but not among us. We kept on with our calisthenics, our drills in Hebrew words, the study of new poems and chapters of Joshua, and games of dodgeball and soccer.

  On Yom Kippur a tense silence prevailed. Most of the refugees didn’t attend services. They lay in their sheds and played chess, checkers, and cards. Here and there the rumble of a kerosene stove was heard, and the smell of coffee filled the air.

  While we were busy among ourselves, a short man appeared. He didn’t seem to be from there, with his crown of gray hair and prayer shawl. He approached us and called out, “The holy day is drawing to a close. The gates are being locked. Come to the prayer shed to be with the God of Israel at this time. Your grandfathers would be very pleased that you were privileged to go up to the Land of Israel. Come and pray together with your grandfathers.”

  The man stood there, expecting an answer, but we were as though frozen in place. No one dared to raise his head, ask a question, or object. The sun was low, and its fiery rays shimmered above us, but we didn’t move. Seeing that there was to be no response to his request, the man quickly departed.

  14

  At that crossroad, between what was and what would be, I had very little time to myself. In those hours I didn’t think of the future, as was expected of me, but looked inward and dredged up images that had been sunk inside me: Father and Mother and their bright youth.

  The refugees continued to observe us. The calisthenics and language drills amazed them. They stood behind the pile of crates that separated us from them, watched, and were impressed.

  “Look how tan they are,” we heard someone exclaim.

  But some of the refugees didn’t hold their tongues.

  “They’re already arrogant,” one said. “It doesn’t suit them to come to us. They’ll be sorry. A few muscles don’t make a person excel.”

  Meanwhile, one of the refugees recognized me and came over.

  “Is it you, the sleepy boy?” he wondered.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I replied, “I guess so.”

  “You should know,” he said, “we carried you all the way. You weren’t heavy, but, still, you were a bother for us. Your whole being annoyed us. You didn’t seem to be beaten or in pain, but you clung to sleep with a mighty strength. Some believed we shouldn’t let you sleep. It was a bad sleep that was liable to kill you. So they tried to wake you. But sleep was cast inside you like lead, and shaking didn’t wake you. From the depths of our hearts, we pinned great hopes on you, if I may speak for us all. We said, In a little while the lad will wake up and tell us things we don’t know about. So now you’re awake. What or who roused you?”

  “I have no idea,” I said with all the simplicity I could muster.

  “Still, what was shown to you in your sleep?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I replied, and I meant what I said.

  “When will you know?” The refugee wouldn’t let me alone.

  “When the time comes,” I said, since I had no other words.

  I didn’t tell him of course that I still carried sleep with me to that very day, that every once in a while I would draw upon its darkness, and that recently I had slept for a whole day without anyone approaching me to wake me up.

  —

  Dr. Weingarten didn’t come to our meeting place. I searched for him for several days and finally learned that he had fallen ill and was being treated in the camp infirmary. When I stood beside his bed, he opened his eyes and recognized me.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “A slight heart attack. It will pass. Nothing to worry about. It’s not so easy to die.” Even now, in this situation, irony twisted the corners of his mouth.

  When I went to visit him the next morning, he was in a good mood. He was pleased by my erect posture and suntan, and he was interested in my doings. It was hard for me to talk. The words I had known since childhood had slipped away. I made use of the Hebrew words I had acquired, but they couldn’t help me to complete a sentence, either. In great embarrassment, I cut the visit short.

  The next day, I was told that his condition was more serious, and the British had transferred him to a hospital outside the camp.

  “And does he feel better now?” I asked the nurse.

  “Let’s pray together,” she said without looking at me.

  I stood in the empty courtyard in front of the infirmary without moving. I now realized that Dr. Weingarten had connected me to my true world with many fine threads. Had I been smarter and less confused, I would have listened not only to his words but also to the way he uttered them.

  When I returned to our shed, my friends greeted me with a shout of joy. Soon, very soon, they would free us. That joy only increased my sadness.

  Every day I went to the infirmary to ask about Dr. Weingarten.

  “We don’t know a thing,” the nurse told me. “We have no contact with the
hospitals here. Are you a relative of his?” she asked and looked at me. I didn’t know how to explain my closeness to him, so I said, “He’s my beloved uncle.”

  —

  We spent the next days running and reciting poems as we ran. It seemed we had to complete a specific number of runs and poems, and only then would they free us. The constant effort made my heart forget Dr. Weingarten. At night I would collapse onto my bed like a sack.

  Our group was now in top shape, with agile bodies that were capable of climbing over any wall or up any steep hill. But when it came down to it, the “young people,” as we were sometimes called, didn’t maintain proper standards of behavior when we were tested.

  —

  A fight broke out in the refugee camp, a bitter fight, in which men, women, and children took part. It wasn’t clear what the fight was about or who the opposing sides were. Boards and iron bars flew on all sides, and shouts deafened the ears.

  During all the weeks we had been at Atlit, there had been no evident threat of an eruption. Because no one forced them to work, the refugees seemed content to us. They could lie down quietly, drink coffee, and play cards.

  All the trainees were conscripted to calm the quarrel down. The instructions were to separate the adversaries, pacify them, and appeal for quiet. But, unfortunately, the refugees saw us as an alien force and began to hit us. We got an order to protect ourselves and strike back.

  The quarrel grew fiercer. The wounded shouted for help, but no one paid attention to them. Finally, the British Army intervened and did what we hadn’t known how to do. In that first battle we had five wounded, including my friend Mark, whose wound, luckily, was slight.

  “What happened? What was the fight about?” No one had an answer. The quarrel was groundless, like a dream. Some of our fellows were still angry, even after the storm died down. They grumbled and called the refugees parasites. The refugees holed up in their dark sheds. Their hostility to us, we who were exercising every day, was well concealed, but it was clear that they hadn’t forgiven us.