After rearranging the shelves, Irena opens the package of pictures. Most of them are from her parents’ house back in Zalachov. They didn’t take many pictures in Israel. Irena knows the pictures very well, but still a small discovery awaits her: her young mother being hugged by two tall fellows. On the back of the picture is written: “The Nest of Hashomer Hatsa’ir in Zalachov.” Once Ernst had asked her something about her parents. She was alarmed and said, “They’re always with me.”
“How?” he wondered.
“I changed nothing in the house.”
“Everything is as it was?”
“Just as it was.”
That gave him pause for a moment, but he didn’t ask anything else.
4
IT RAINED DURING THE NIGHT, AND ERNST’S SPIRITS have sunk. It’s hard to know why. Apparently, he wrote for many hours yesterday. He writes and crosses out, and in the end he rips up the paper and throws it in the wastebasket. Irena serves him breakfast, and he sits and eats. Irena has noticed that over the past few weeks Ernst has been struggling with gloom. Going out to the café in the morning is one of his strategies for deceiving his stubborn enemy.
Writing is Ernst’s secret domain. He says nothing about it, and Irena doesn’t ask. But she senses that it’s a harsh arena of struggle. More than once she has found him in the morning exhausted at his desk. But during the day as well, when he has withdrawn into his corner, his concentration is evident, as though he were trying to whet a sword that refuses to be sharpened. Sometimes it seems to her that he is contending with tiny demons who vex him. Sometimes, when she comes to visit in the evening, they slip away like evil mice.
Ernst has indeed gone out to the café, and when he returns, the somberness has been erased from his brow. On the way home he had met one of his acquaintances, a man much younger than he, who told him that in the brokerage house where Ernst had formerly worked, everything was as it had been. A few people had retired, but most of them were working in the same offices. The thought that he had spent twenty years of his life there saddened him for a moment, but happiness that he wasn’t still there overcame the sadness.
“I’m free,” Ernst calls out when he returns home.
Irena doesn’t understand the meaning of his happiness and asks, “What happened?”
“I no longer work for Manfeld Associates, Brokers, Ltd. I work in my own company. My company may not be splendid, and it doesn’t make huge promises, but it’s mine, right?”
Irena is pleased that the depression has loosened its grip on him.
In the afternoon, Ernst sits in the armchair and reads with concentration. As Irena is about to leave the apartment, he asks for a glass of cognac. She pours it for him, and Ernst downs it in a single gulp. Since she started serving him cognac, Irena has learned to appreciate this fiery liquor. Sometimes, when she gets home, she pours a glass for herself. At first it made her head spin, but now it opens her eyes, her imagination leaves its den, and she sits at the table and visualizes what happened to her during the day.
After she has had a drink, Irena’s father and mother sometimes appear and sit next to her. She tells them about Ernst, and they listen without commenting or expressing an opinion. Since she started working for Ernst, she has noticed, they don’t offer her advice. They just listen and appear to be content with what she tells them.
A year ago, on a rainy evening, Irena went to visit Ernst and found him drunk. He mixed up his languages and called her Ida. Irena was alarmed, and in her panic she said, “What have you done?” as though he weren’t Ernst, but a delinquent boy. Her strange way of speaking to him made him laugh, and he said, “What did I do? I’ve done a lot. I wrote three books and ripped them up. Isn’t that a lot? I saved the world from three bad books.”
“Forgive me,” said Irena, withdrawing.
“What are you apologizing for?” He gave her a severe look.
“Forgive me,” she repeated.
“My dear, you’re not to blame for anything. All the blame is on me,” he said, striking his chest.
Since that confused encounter, every time she has a drink, she remembers Ernst’s rumpled face. Fear that he’ll get drunk and fall down grips her. Sometimes when she finds him hung over, he confesses, “I had too much to drink last night. What can I do? I wanted to rise above it, but I couldn’t.”
Once a month, if his health allows it, Ernst goes to Tel Aviv, stays there for a few hours, and then returns. At first Irena suspected that he had a woman there. Some time ago she found out that he really does go there to see a woman. Her name is Toni. They studied together in high school, and she has been confined to a wheelchair for years.
“Toni wrote an important book,” Ernst told her.
“About what?” The words slipped out of her mouth.
“About German romanticism.”
Abstract matters are far from Irena’s mental grasp. Sometimes a guest comes to the house and speaks to Ernst in a language Irena cannot understand. At such times she realizes that there are areas in Ernst’s life to which she has no access. Still, she catches a few things. From one of the conversations she learned that Ernst had taken his first steps as a writer in Czernowitz, the city where he was born. He had published some poems in German there. He mentions them sometimes, but he’s not proud of them. “The sins of my youth,” he says.
After the war there were years of roving, of journeying from country to country; finally he dropped anchor in Jerusalem. For years he has tried to call up his life from within him, but it turned out that telling the story is no simple matter. Sometimes the “what” is an obstacle, and sometimes it’s the “how.” Usually both of them block him at the same time. But there are days when the writing flows, when words join together with words, expressions to expressions, and in the end a passage acceptable to his heart glows on the page. That is a miracle, and such miracles don’t happen every day.
5
WINTER IS MAKING ITS PRESENCE FELT. THE BOOK ERNST wants to write keeps getting more complicated. He mercilessly uproots words, expressions, and descriptions, but still the pages aren’t free of weeds. Every night there is a new disappointment. Ernst knows that no one will read his book; if he sends the manuscript to a publisher, they will return it. But he continues working and takes care with every word and expression. The years have not softened his self-criticism. Sometimes a faulty word will keep him awake all night. The old, tame words are his enemies, and he desperately battles against them.
After a night of struggle Ernst’s depression intensifies, and his words almost cease.
“What should I make, a cheesecake or an apple pie?” Irena asks, trying to change his mood.
“It doesn’t matter.”
When Ernst says, “It doesn’t matter,” that’s a sign that his appetite has diminished and depression is overwhelming him. This makes Irena spring into action. She doesn’t rest for a moment. She cooks; she tries new recipes. Maybe he’ll find one of her dishes tasty.
One day he said to her, “Last night I dreamed about my hometown.”
“Were you happy?”
“It was my city, but everything in it was arranged differently. The houses on Herrengasse had moved over to Siebenbirgerstrasse. The public garden was shifted over to the city hall plaza. I said to myself, everything can be put back in place, but I immediately understood that what had been uprooted couldn’t be restored.”
Irena had often heard Ernst speak about his hometown, but never with longing or with nostalgia. Her parents used to talk about Zalachov with hidden love, but every time Czernowitz was mentioned, Ernst’s face filled with sorrow, as though it was a secret that refused to be erased.
For years Ernst had tried to write, but every time he sat at his desk, some obstacle would get between him and the letters. They estranged themselves from him, but he didn’t give up. Even in his darkest moments he would write sentences and half sentences on slips of paper. He collected the slips of paper in a bag. Every now and then he would pick
up the bag and take out a slip of paper. The notes were snippets of self-mockery, reproaches for weakness, notions about blindness, and false beliefs. But not a single word about his parents or about the grandparents who had enveloped his childhood and youth.
Ernst would wait for the new words to come to him at night, and as though in spite, they wouldn’t. If they did appear and he was ready for them, his job in the investment company used up his hours. His wife wickedly declared: A person shouldn’t write for the drawer. If you don’t publish, you’d be better off stopping.
The phone rings. Sylvia is calling. Irena approaches Ernst and whispers in his ear.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” he grumbles.
“Ernst can’t come to the phone.” Irena tries to be tactful.
“Did you tell him who was calling?”
“I did.”
“Tell him that he’s bad.”
Of course she doesn’t tell him that.
“I don’t want to see her,” Ernst says. “If she comes here, don’t let her in.”
Irena is pleased with Ernst’s vigorous response. For a moment she thinks that the evil spirits that have assailed him for the past few days have receded. Indeed, they have, but not his backache. Irena keeps rubbing salve on his back. The salve relieves the pain, and he gets out of bed and sits at his desk.
Since the beginning of winter, Irena’s own life has meant nothing: all her thoughts have been devoted to Ernst. Even when she is at home, surrounded by the objects she has lived with since her childhood, she thinks about him. Sometimes she telephones Ernst from home to ask whether the supper was tasty and whether she should bring him anything besides some rolls in the morning. If he asked her, she would have stayed in his house at night, too. Irena knows there are times when Ernst has to be by himself, to write and struggle. Though the struggle weakens him and usually depresses him, in the end it gives him the will to live. One morning he said to her, “Last night I wrote a chapter that I’m pleased with.” His face was drained, but there was a flash of victory in his eye.
Ernst is tall and robust, and his struggle to write is also robust. Irena envisions this struggle as the bending of iron bars. But when he is calm, sitting in the armchair and looking through a magazine, she wants to kneel at his feet, cover his hand with both of hers, and say, I’m so pleased that you allow me to serve you.
Once he commented to her: “You’re not a servant.”
“You don’t let me serve you,” she said with distress.
“We are friends, and friends don’t serve each other,” he replied.
Irena thought so much about those words that she began to think he was mocking her.
6
QUIET DAYS FOLLOW. EVERY MORNING ERNST GOES OUT to the café. Irena does the housework diligently, without undue haste, as though directed by an inner guide. At first Ernst thought that she didn’t talk because she lacked the words. He knew that Irena had left school after the tenth grade. She helped her mother in the house, and when she turned eighteen she enrolled in a school for practical nurses. But he soon realized he was mistaken. True, Irena doesn’t speak much, but the little that leaves her mouth is drawn from deep within her. Her words are well chosen and have an inner charm. Ernst has also noticed: she moves swiftly, but without nervousness or unrest. She takes care of things with caution, but not in weakness.
“Were your parents observant?” he once asked, as though incidentally.
“Yes,” she said, surprised by the question that landed upon her.
“And you’re observant, too?”
“I do what my mother did,” she said simply.
Ernst wanted to keep questioning her, but seeing her embarrassment, he stopped. Yet he couldn’t restrain himself and a bit later asked, “Were your parents always observant?”
“In their youth, they were in the Hashomer Hatsa’ir youth movement,” she said, blushing.
“When did they go back to a traditional lifestyle?”
“After the war.”
Strange, Ernst said to himself, specifically after the war.
Only that night, after having had a drink, did Ernst grasp that his questions had been invasive and coarse. Irena had answered because he was her employer, but even an employer has to be polite. If it hadn’t been so late, he would have telephoned her to apologize.
“Forgive me,” he said as soon as she arrived the next morning.
“For what?”
“For my questions.”
“I wasn’t insulted.”
“But I insulted myself with my behavior.”
Irena doesn’t keep all the commandments, just the ones that her mother observed. On Friday evening she lays two loaves of challah on the table and lights the Sabbath candles. The sight of the candles stirs her memory, and she sees not only her mother but also her grandfather and grandmother, whom she knew only through photographs. On Yom Kippur she fasts, but she doesn’t go to synagogue.
She doesn’t say the Grace After Meals, but she will say the appropriate blessing when she eats a fruit for the first time each year. Right after Yom Kippur her father would put up a sukkah on the balcony. Since her parents died, she has not had a sukkah, but on Sukkot her thoughts dwell on the sukkah that her father used to build.
Since childhood Irena has had the ability to imagine things from afar, to describe places and people even though she had never seen them. Her mother had been frightened by that ability, and she used to say to her, “You mustn’t imagine things. People who imagine things end up being liars.” When, for example, Irena said, “I see Grandpa,” her mother would interrupt her and say, “You can’t see him. You’re just imagining that you do. The Germans murdered Grandpa.” Those comments did hamper her imagination, but since she started to work for Ernst, Irena has regained her ability. When she sits at home now, she sees her grandfather and grandmother as they were before the war, before they were murdered.
Ernst has recently begun to contemplate Irena from different perspectives. She’s a woman like any other, but different nonetheless. The difference isn’t evident. Sometimes she seems like a woman who knows how to listen, but mostly she is reserved. Sometimes he discovers a smile in her, as though she were embracing a secret. Sometimes she says, “Thank God.” When she does so, Ernst wants to say, It’s not proper to proclaim your faith in public. Faith must be hidden. Of course he doesn’t say it. But once, in a moment of deep gloom, he couldn’t restrain himself.
“Why do you say ‘thank God?’ ” he asked. “Not everything he does, if he does anything, is worthy of thanks. You mustn’t justify his cruel acts. Say thanks for what’s good and beautiful, but not for what’s ugly and filthy.”
Irena was alarmed and left the room.
When depression seizes Ernst, he mainly keeps silent. But sometimes he’s flooded with speech and talks vehemently about ugliness and cruelty, which blacken the heavens and sow despair. Irena knows that his words are not directed at her, but she does feel that a bit of it is, and she is filled with both sorrow and guilt.
In the depths of her heart, Irena loves Ernst’s rage. Rage adds to the strength of his face. “In my youth love was uprooted from within me!” he once cried out. Irena didn’t understand what he meant, and of course she didn’t ask. But at home one night, her heart opened and she said, I’ll give you all the love that I’ve gathered up.
7
IT’S STRANGE, BUT ERNST HARDLY EVER ENVISIONS HIS parents. For seventeen years he lived in their company, but now their features are faded and blurred. They were withdrawn people who hardly ever spoke. Sometimes his father would erupt, and his mother would rush to do his bidding. Ernst suffered from their silence. It appeared to be repressed anger, and sometimes like a sunset in thick darkness. They left for their grocery store early in the morning and returned home after dark. They were more relaxed in the store than they were at home.
When Ernst began to go to school, the barrier between him and his parents appeared to grow higher. His mother took ca
re of buying notebooks and textbooks and other necessary supplies, but she hardly spoke to him. When he turned nine, he sank deeper and deeper into his books. He was so immersed that nothing around him touched him. He read in German, Romanian, and later in French. His love of languages and literature was boundless.
The teachers liked him; his fellow students, less so. They knew in their hearts that no matter how hard they tried, he would outdo them. If the teacher asked for a German synonym, he would immediately offer three or four. His French pronunciation was precise. His parents were proud of his report cards, but they didn’t know how to express their pride. They were too deeply withdrawn into their silence, as if their tongues were tied up in their mouths.
At home they retained a bit of the tradition, but it was without life, without joy. Every Sabbath eve his mother would clean and straighten up the house, and for the holidays the cleaning was more thorough. But these were preparations for a day that they didn’t know what to do with. Ernst’s father would lie on the sofa and read the newspaper. Sometimes he would go to the synagogue and drag Ernst along with him. Upon their return, his mother’s silence would greet them.
To tell the truth, during those years Ernst hadn’t needed his parents at all. Books were his good friends. To open a book and sink into the yellowing pages, to meld into the flow of the plot—that was his life. Sometimes his mother would rouse from her silence and ask, “What are you reading?” It was an idle question, and Ernst wouldn’t bother to answer.
Suddenly, Love Page 2