The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

by Aharon Appelfeld

  58

  The country was seething. Everyone was conscripted, and my friends stopped visiting me. The convalescent home was emptying of its patients. Only one nurse remained in the infirmary, an unpleasant woman who grumbled all the time, as though she were surrounded by patients who meant only to annoy her.

  —

  I stopped copying and trying to write. Rumors of bad news raged around us. The deaths of thirty-five soldiers turned the convalescent home into a house of mourning. The few patients walked about with clenched fists, spitting out suppressed words of anger or weeping.

  Now my recuperation didn’t seem like a determined return to life but, rather, like evading the front lines. I didn’t show myself much in the dining hall, preferring to take my meals to my room. I didn’t go out onto the balcony until evening.

  One of the patients, who noticed my withdrawal, commented, “You’ve already done your part. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  I didn’t know exactly how to reply, so I just said, “It’s too bad my recovery is slow.”

  “Shattered legs don’t heal easily. You have to take care of your recovery. That’s your task.”

  “It’s hard for me to think of myself at this time.”

  The patient didn’t give up. “It’s your duty.”

  I didn’t like this persistent conversation. It clouded my spirit. What did he mean by “You have to take care of your recovery”?

  —

  Miri, the physiotherapist, came on time. We did exercises to strengthen the leg muscles. The bedsores were getting better, and she was pleased with my progress; she was a practical and determined woman. Miri was from a moshav, and she brought the fragrance of the fields with her to the convalescent home. Every time she touched me, I keenly felt a hand that gripped and strengthened. After the exercises, I was exhausted. I laid my body on the bed and closed my eyes.

  —

  After a sleepless night, I took two painkillers. Cool tranquility fell upon me, and I wrote the following lines at the first light:

  Unseen, the changes will come. Growth is slow, almost imperceptible. Only occasionally—at a station, at a temporary resting place, on a balcony—a face will peek out at you. It is encircled with wrinkles and, as on a sawed-off tree stump, you can count the rings of its years.

  I read it over and over. From where within me did those words sprout? And how had they joined together into a paragraph? Who was that face that peeked out at you? The wrinkles, the rings of trees? Still, I knew that they had emerged from my pen. Were they mine? I copied the paragraph, and my astonishment only increased.

  I was already beyond fatigue. I went into the empty dining hall and made myself a cup of tea. The hot drink erased the night’s uncertainties from my mind, and I fell asleep.

  —

  Robert surprised me with a visit. Our friends were still on the kibbutz, on alert, and soon they would be going to one of the fronts. He brought me a few sketches. More than anything, they reminded me of lost people from the ghetto.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Misgav Yitzhak.”

  “Are you sure?” I couldn’t keep from asking.

  “I’m trying to be faithful to what my eyes see.”

  As they used to say back home, a person can’t shed his skin. That rule apparently applied to Robert, too. He drew the ghetto and thought he was drawing Misgav Yitzhak.

  In any event, the times had left their mark on him. His face was longer, and his eyes had sunk slightly into their sockets, as happens to a person who has been making a prolonged effort.

  “I sometimes think about my parents,” Robert told me. “At the end of the war, I waited for them and was sure that in a few days they would reach me. Two refugees, passersby, told me they had seen them, with their own eyes, and they were on their way to me. Rumors also reached Italy that someone had seen them. I was going to stay in Naples and wait for them, but because they were so long in coming, I decided to take Ephraim’s advice and emigrate. ‘All the survivors will immigrate to the Land. You have nothing to worry about,’ Ephraim said to me. I’m sorry I listened to him.”

  They’ll certainly find you, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.

  “I should have stayed and waited for them. During the war, I imagined them returning to me and all of us going home together. My first mistake was that I left Stash’s house and went to look for them. Like a sleepwalker, I dragged myself from one refugee camp to another. In the end, I wound up as far away from them as Naples.

  “My second mistake was worse, and unforgivable. I should have stayed in Europe, even in Naples, and waited for them and not let them wander. They were afraid to return to Stash, in case they wouldn’t find me there. It was wrong for me to leave. I should have insisted on staying at some crossroad to wait for them. Now, go find them! I have no idea where they are. Sometimes I imagine them sitting in one of the abandoned camps and waiting for me. Everyone has already left the camps, but they’re sure I’ll come to them. Now the sea separates us. How can I cross it?”

  Then he addressed me in a different tone. “I want to ask something of you. If by chance my parents come here—by the way, they aren’t tall; they’re pleasant people; I look a lot like my mother—if they’re looking for me, tell them I’m very sorry that I didn’t wait for them. I was swayed by rumors and my moods betrayed me. Ask them to wait for me nearby, not to go far away. I hope to return safe and sound from the war. Tell them I’m sketching and painting. Father will certainly be happy. Tell Mother, please, that she is always with me. Do you understand?”

  “Very well.”

  “I have to go back to the kibbutz. They gave me a two-and-a-half-hour leave to see you. Excuse me for throwing myself on you. You’re my closest friend. Don’t worry about me. We’re a solid group now, and we’ll watch over one another. ‘See you at six p.m. after the war.’”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “Of myself?” His lips twisted strangely, and he left.

  “Robert!” I called after him, but he was already outside.

  I went out and sat on a bench. Again I saw his face and that strange grimace as he stood on the threshold. I was angry at myself for casting doubt on what he drew. A person draws what he knows how to draw.

  “Watch over him, God,” I said and gripped the back of the bench so I could stand up.

  59

  The days passed. There were battles on every front. No one spoke about casualties, but I could see my friends before my eyes, climbing steep hills and storming fortified positions. They were climbing with all their strength, and while climbing, they reached out to Yechiel and pulled him up so he wouldn’t fall or be left behind.

  Robert had gotten a lot stronger over the past months, but at our last meeting, he seemed wounded from within. I, like a fool, looked at him with a critical eye and didn’t even offer him a single kind word of my own.

  I was afraid that when the fighting died down they would send me back to the kibbutz. I would be on display there, and everyone would pity me. That fear depressed me, and not only in the light of day.

  At night I dreamed that my friends were dragging me, and I was gripping my bed and screaming, Leave me alone! This is where I belong now! But my friends, who had received instructions from the woman responsible for the war-wounded, held me with bony fingers that dug into my shoulders and pulled me. Don’t hurt me! I shouted with all my might, warning them with my last breath that all of Dr. Winter’s work was going down the drain; the connections would be severed and there would be no alternative to amputating my legs. I would remain a cripple all my life. That plea also fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, I then woke up and was rescued from that suffering.

  —

  Benno came to visit me and brought me greetings from my friends. All of them were at the front together, and they had already experienced short battles. Some had been wounded, but no one had died.

  It seemed that danger had done Benno good. He looked tan and robust. His
voice was hearty and a bit hoarse. He spoke about the expanses of the Negev and the beauty of the desert, as if he weren’t the Benno I knew but a man who had overcome his sorrow.

  “And who was wounded?” I asked.

  “Light wounds.” He made a dismissive gesture with his right hand.

  I didn’t believe him, but I refrained from asking for details.

  Benno didn’t talk about music, and I had the feeling that, to some degree, the progress of the battles, the gains and conquests, compensated for the loss of flexibility in his fingers. But before he left, he told me, “After the war, I’m going to try to get a violin. I haven’t given up on playing. Life without playing music isn’t a life. If you find someone who’s willing to lend me his violin, I’ll be very grateful. I’ll never be a soloist, but I believe I can play in an orchestra. I promised my parents, before they separated us, that I’d keep playing every day. There were times during the war when music played strongly in my mind. I was sure it would be retained in my fingers, too. I was wrong. If your fingers don’t move on the strings, they lose their agility.

  “But now I have energy, and I want with all my might to return to the violin. When I was a boy, I didn’t like practicing exercises, and I tried to avoid them. But Mother watched over me and sat next to me for two full hours every day, so that I’d do all my tasks. That was that.”

  Pessimism and sarcasm had fallen away from Benno. For a moment, the child within him resurfaced—the boy whose mother supervised him and worried about his progress.

  “And how are things with you?” he asked me like a brother.

  “There’s been improvement in my walking, but I have a long way to go,” I confided in him.

  “And the writing?”

  I showed him the opening passage I had written. He read it and called out jubilantly, “How beautiful! Even if I copied out seven books, I couldn’t manage to write a passage like that. Wonderful! You’ll be an author. I have no doubt you’ll be an author. Are you pleased with yourself?”

  “No. It’s a long road, full of obstacles.”

  “If I were you, I’d be pleased. ‘Unseen, the changes will come.’ That’s a fine sentence. I’m proud of you. A great beginning. After the war, we’ll sit and talk. I feel that we have a lot in common.”

  “Will the war will be long?” I asked.

  “In my opinion, it will be short. It has changed us beyond recognition. I, in any event, feel that I have changed. I learned to respect my friends. We’re working like a solid team. We help one another and overcome the obstacles the war presents.”

  “Too bad I can’t be with you.”

  “You have a different task. You’re fighting on a different front. You’ll be our storyteller. I have no doubt you’ll recount everything that life did to us.”

  “I haven’t started yet. I need plenty of grace.”

  “You’ll do it. All your friends support you.”

  “I don’t deserve it yet.”

  “My time is up. I’ve got to go. See you soon,” Benno said, and dashed out.

  An hour after he left, sobs welled up from within me, prolonged sobbing that wouldn’t let go of me. Fear crept into my soul that I wouldn’t fulfill the hopes they had pinned on me.

  —

  I saw the Bible teacher Slobotsky in my sleep. I told him that I had copied many passages from the Bible, even a whole chapter of the book of Job.

  He looked at me skeptically and asked, “Copying or studying?”

  “Copying,” I disclosed.

  “And what does the copying teach you?”

  “I connect with the words and their melody. I do it with great awareness.”

  “That’s a new invention,” he said, chuckling. It was a laugh that pained me.

  “Is it forbidden to copy?”

  “You’re allowed, but what for?”

  “I want to become a writer.”

  “How strange. When did that occur to you?”

  “My father was a writer.”

  “And you want to follow in his footsteps?”

  “I don’t know what my father wrote. I never read his work. I was a boy. But I want to continue from the exact place where he left off.”

  “That also seems a little strange to me.”

  “The Hebrew letters will show me the way. They won’t mislead me.”

  “I can’t believe my ears.”

  “Believe me, Mr. Slobotsky, I took possession of the Hebrew letters through great suffering, and now they are part of me.”

  “A person mustn’t be blamed in his sorrow,” he said in a voice that sounded gloomy to me, and close to tears.

  I woke up, and I was glad that this had been a night vision and not reality. I kept myself from falling back to sleep, so that Slobotsky wouldn’t return and be puzzled by my decision.

  60

  In the convalescent home the fog of war was very thick. They said that Ben-Gurion was surrounded by excellent army officers. But in the end he would make the decisions, and he would lead us to victory.

  “Now the whole world will know that Jews aren’t cowards. They know how to fight.” One of the patients expressed this opinion, a thin man who could barely walk.

  “‘One who puts on his armor should not boast like one who takes it off,’” replied another patient, who was sitting next to him.

  The mood around the table fluctuated between high and low, but I, to my shame, became interested in women again. I knew that during those fateful days it was more fitting for me to be concerned about the public good, and especially about my friends at the front. But what could I do? The pretty women of Naples once again agitated my nighttime visions. They were lovely and charming, and one of them invited me to lie with her on the sand.

  “I don’t have a penny,” I told her.

  “No matter. Pay next time.”

  They knew what excited a boy’s heart. They didn’t talk a lot but wrapped themselves around him, so that every part of his body could feel their warmth.

  The taste of that astonishing love in the soft sand came back to me with great clarity, and I was sorry that it was beyond my power to make love as I had. Now every movement hurt me. Once, I asked Dr. Winter if I would ever be able to make love to a woman properly.

  “Of course you’ll be able to. But only with pretty, attractive women,” he joked.

  —

  While my life was still stuck at crossroads, the woman responsible for the war-wounded appeared and announced that an appropriate solution had been found for me. Nothing could be more suitable. A man from Tel Aviv with no family had died, and in his will he had bequeathed his small apartment to the defense forces, requesting that a war invalid be housed in it, preferably a young man from Bukovina.

  “You come from Bukovina, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “You’ll be moving there next week. A woman will come to you every day for three hours. She’ll cook your meals, do the laundry, tidy the house, and take you out for walks. What do you say?”

  I didn’t know whether or not I should be enthusiastic about this, so I just said, “Fine.”

  “It’s better than fine. It’s heaven sent!”

  “Thank you.” That was all I could say.

  “Not everybody merits an arrangement like this.”

  In my heart I felt anxious but not happy. The look of the woman in charge of the war-wounded and her expressions—“from Bukovina”; “It’s heaven sent”; “Not everybody merits an arrangement like this”—individually and taken together gave me the feeling that I had left the channel of random events and shifted over to the path of fate.

  —

  Daniel, one of my friends, came to visit me and told me that Yechiel had been wounded in the arm, not a serious wound, and had returned to the kibbutz. He wasn’t working for the time being and spent most of the day praying.

  “Everybody wishes you well and hopes to see you soon.” He spoke as if he’d learned the words by heart.

  I conf
ided in him that the woman in charge of the war-wounded had just visited me and offered me a small apartment in Tel Aviv, where I could recuperate and be independent.

  “So you won’t return to the kibbutz?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Your friends told me to tell you that they’re thinking about you and that after the war everything will be as it always was.”

  It was evident that these words had cost him a considerable effort. He had always been inarticulate, but his awkward way of speaking now stood out even more.

  “Was the fighting difficult?” I wanted to hear the details from him.

  His face showed that it was beyond his ability to answer my question, but he tried. He put together a few words and said, “We advanced. There wasn’t a lot of resistance.”

  Suddenly, I saw them all, and myself as well, on the burning hot beach of Naples, running with all-out strength and shouting, “alef is ohel, ohel is ‘tent’; beit is bayit, bayit is ‘house,’” trying to bond with our first Hebrew words. The refugees stood alongside their sheds and were amazed, like proud parents. It should be said again: we didn’t try to associate with them, but despite this, they were pleased by every achievement of ours. No one could imagine then that the war we were leaving behind would not be our last.

  Daniel sat by my side for a long time. I didn’t know what to say to him or how to make him happy. His awkwardness of speech clung to me, too. Finally, I asked, “When will you go back to the kibbutz?”

  Daniel shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, Who knows?

  I was annoyed with myself for not finding the right words to draw him out of his muteness, even for a moment. If I didn’t have anything to say to a friend who was fighting and who came to visit me, what was all my copying and my lame writing for?

  —

  That day I got a letter from Benno:

  Thanks for the passage you showed me. It’s very promising. The first sentence is engraved in my memory: “Unseen, the changes will come.”

  Anyone who has dealt in art knows how slow and small the achievements are. Don’t despair. You have anger and determination. They will take you forward. Your father was a writer. Sometimes parents transfer the essence of their aspirations to their children. My poor mother wasn’t musical. She was enchanted by music, but the enchantment didn’t work on her. She put all her effort into supervising me. My father was an active, practical man. Music seemed to him like work that had no reward. Excuse me for talking about myself. I meant only to cheer you up.