That night Ernst told Irena that after his demobilization from the Red Army he fled to Italy, and from there he was about to sail to Australia. A lot of people were going to Australia and New Zealand then, and it seemed to him that the distant continent would make his heart forget his life. “I didn’t go to Australia because a ship had docked in Naples that was gathering refugees on their way to Palestine. And so, almost by chance, I arrived here.”
Meanwhile, Irena is preparing the apartment for Ernst’s return. The thought that life would soon return to its routine thrills her. Ernst’s injury and slow recovery brought her closer to him through his sleep. From his sleep she learns whether his pain persists or has begun to subside.
One night he told her, “If I had destroyed everything I had written at the right time, perhaps I could have started afresh. Since I didn’t destroy it, I can’t begin again. I saved my labor, even though I knew it was fruitless labor.”
Later that night he awoke and said, “Forgive me, Irena.”
“For what?”
“For asking you to destroy my manuscripts.”
“Why?”
“A person should do that kind of thing by himself and not via an agent.”
Irena was momentarily relieved, although she understood that his earlier request had disturbed him. Don’t worry, she almost said to him, whatever you command me to do, I’ll do.
In her heart Irena knew that submission of this sort would not please him. More than once Ernst had said to her, sometimes in a tone of reproach, “You work too much. You have no life of your own. Complete self-abnegation isn’t a good trait.” Occasionally Irena feels that Ernst wants to expel her from his life. She is mistaken, of course. He is in fact becoming increasingly attached to her.
Sometimes he says: “I miss our house, waking up and knowing that in a little while you’ll come and make me breakfast. Since the end of the war, I’ve been struggling. But now I’m not alone.” Those declarations frighten her, and she wants to tell him, Not because of me. I’m a simple woman. But in her heart she preserves every word that comes from his mouth.
Irena has thoroughly cleaned the apartment. For the first time she looks closely at Ernst’s manuscripts. There are eight thick folders and four envelopes containing clean manuscripts, orderly, with headings. Ernst has occasionally said of these manuscripts that they are full of flaws and need to be rewritten. The harshest word he used was “counterfeit.”
Irena doesn’t understand how they are flawed. Ernst’s devotion to his work—and this she could testify to in any court—is complete, and without respite. Day and night he toils at his writing. But for the most part he tears up and throws into the wastebasket what he has written, leaving very little. It isn’t a pointless devotion, she says to herself, rejecting Ernst’s severity.
A few nights earlier, as Irena sat at Ernst’s bedside, she shut her eyes and fell asleep. In her dream she was in a courtroom. It was almost empty, lit here and there with patches of sun. Ernst sat in the defendant’s seat, alongside two lawyers. It all looked official but also frightening, perhaps because of the dim light that surrounded the empty benches. The prosecutor made accusations. Irena didn’t understand a single word from the many that he fired off.
Suddenly, Irena was called to the witness box. I’m here by mistake, she wanted to say. I don’t know how to testify. But the judge, seeing her hesitation, glared angrily at her, and so she stepped forward.
How many years have you known the accused? the prosecutor asked her.
Two and a half years, she said, glad that there were words in her mouth with which to reply.
What do you know about the accused? asked the prosecutor, without raising his voice.
Ernst speaks very little, sir. Irena spoke cautiously, as though handling a fragile vessel.
Nevertheless, what did you hear? What did he say? And what did he talk about?
He mainly accuses himself, she said and was glad she had found the appropriate words.
What does he accuse himself of?
That his writing is full of flaws.
And what else?
Mainly that.
Irena awoke from her nightmare. Ernst was sleeping quietly, the lights in the rooms were dim, and the other patients near him were sleeping peacefully. But Irena wasn’t at ease. She could still see the courtroom. She didn’t feel completely awake, and she was afraid that she would soon be called upon to testify again. That fear got her to her feet.
Ernst opened his eyes. “Why don’t you go to sleep?”
“I’ve slept more than enough.”
“Go home, my dear.”
“I’m not tired,” she said, laughing softly to herself.
31
THE NEXT DAY ERNST IS RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL and returns home. Irena had prepared the house carefully. Ernst is surprised. “Everything is in its place. I didn’t imagine that I’d ever be back here.”
“Now let’s celebrate,” Irena says, and she takes a cheesecake out of the refrigerator, like the one she had made for him on his seventieth birthday.
“Irena …” He doesn’t hold back his gratitude.
“Thank God you’ve come home.”
“I don’t know how to recite blessings, and I don’t think that I ever will.”
Irena doesn’t understand his comment. She remembers her dream and says, “Last night I had a dream about you.”
“About me?”
“You were in a courtroom.”
“And I was found not guilty?” He is eager to know.
“You were very quiet, and you smiled every once in a while.”
“Irena!” he cries out.
“What?” She raised her voice, as though she had been caught in a regrettable error.
“Why did you light candles?”
“On a holiday it’s customary to light candles, isn’t it?”
“What holiday is it today?”
“Isn’t your return home a holiday?”
On Passover Irena sets the table for the holiday. Ernst is very moved.
“I would like to say the blessings,” he says, “but I don’t know the melodies.”
“It’s just nice to sit at a Passover table,” Irena says.
Strange, Ernst says to himself, Sabbaths and holidays brighten Irena’s face, but they only depress me. I must have inherited this depression from my father.
“My father didn’t like holidays,” he can’t resist telling her. “My mother would set the Passover table exactly the way it had been set in her parents’ house, but that meticulousness embarrassed my father. He would skip things when he read the Haggadah, close his eyes, and sink into himself. His separation from his father and mother apparently pained him, but he didn’t talk about it. Sometimes in the middle of the Seder he would rouse himself and start singing.
“In the Party everything was in a ferment. Our activities were festive and full of energy, and they took place in the fields, in barns, and on riverbanks. For obvious reasons we weren’t called the Communist Youth but, rather, the Progressive Culture Club.
“By the age of twelve we had already learned to hate religious Jews. We would watch the way they hurried to the synagogue, speaking to one another in whispers, trading merchandise or promissory notes. The young commissars explained to us that no act of the Jews was pure. Everything was done with cunning or deceit. Helping the poor didn’t count with them, only performing rituals.
“We were organized into sections. Each section was divided into squads, and each squad had five members. We were supposed to steal from the Jewish stores. We would distribute the stolen goods to the needy in the poor part of the neighborhood. The mission had to be planned well. We would watch the store owner for a few days and figure out the opening and closing times. We would choose stores that didn’t have thick grilles or bolted doors. We didn’t examine only the doors and windows but also the narrow openings to the basements. We quickly learned that even a narrow opening offered an excellent gap that w
e could wriggle through.
“Usually we succeeded, but if we were caught, the section leader would hold an inquiry. If it turned out there had been a flaw in the plan, they would put the squad leader on trial, and sometimes the whole squad. It was like the army, and sometimes more serious. We often broke down the door of a store, and to cover our tracks we would burn down the store after robbing it.
“The violence was accompanied by a feeling of justice. We weren’t stealing for ourselves, but for the poor. The stolen goods would be delivered to the poor neighborhood at night, and there we would distribute it according to a list.”
Irena listens. It’s hard for her to understand this tangled reasoning, but in her heart she feels that the flaws Ernst keeps talking about haven’t yet been corrected in his writing.
A few days after he returns from the hospital, Ernst begins to talk about his summer vacations with his grandparents in the Carpathians. They dressed in long smocks, just like the peasants, and they were attached heart and soul to the fields of grain and the orchards. That was before the Communists arrived and confused everyone. The Communist years erased, among other things, those splendid sights. Ernst saw marvelous things during his visits to the Carpathians. But exactly what he saw is hard for him to say now. He makes an effort to remember.
Several times Irena finds Ernst drunk and merry when she arrives in the morning. She fears his drunkenness, and because of it she stays longer in his house. In truth, she feels that she has to stay with him to watch over him.
On one of his drunken nights Ernst embraced Irena. “You are my light,” he said. “You brought me everything that was stolen from me.” Irena was stunned but not frightened. His big body felt solid but also had a great gentleness, and she felt his hands on her, and his breath.
When she returned home that night, Irena couldn’t sleep. She walked from room to room and finally sat down and read the diary of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who had died in the Holocaust. In her young life she had known many men and also a powerful love of God. Love of God and love of people are the same thing, Irena decided, but then became alarmed by this thought.
32
ERNST’S SCHEDULE HAS CHANGED. HE SPENDS MOST OF the day at home and goes out to the café in the afternoon. He no longer issues his commands upon leaving the house. Irena is frightened by this restraint and worries that he might destroy his manuscripts himself. When Ernst returns from the café, supper is ready. After the meal Irena offers him a glass of grapefruit juice, or tea and cake. If Ernst accepts, she stays for a few minutes and then goes home.
Since Ernst’s injury, Irena has neglected her own house. Still, once a week she vacuums the carpets and washes the floor. When she’s finished with her errands, she sits at the table and reads a book. Sometimes she feels that her parents’ presence in the house has diminished in the past months, as if they have realized that she is now given over entirely to Ernst. It pains Irena that her parents have distanced themselves. Don’t worry, she heard her mother say one night, we’ve withdrawn because we don’t want to disturb your thoughts. We’re as close to you as ever. You don’t disturb me, she wanted to answer, but the words wouldn’t leave her mouth.
It’s pleasant for Irena to think about her parents. Her parents aren’t a memory for her, but a warm closeness. She tells them everything that her heart tells her. She doesn’t conceal feelings or thoughts from them, but since she started working for Ernst, her parents have been closing themselves off from her, as if they were embarrassed by their limited education. Now Irena tries to bring them back, to seat them in their usual places in the living room or the kitchen.
It is actually easy to bring them back. They now sit where they always sat. They don’t ask what or how, as they sometimes used to when they were still alive. They are intensely attentive. Everything that Irena tells them interests them, and it’s evident that they are content with the way she keeps the house.
She tells them what happened to Ernst, about the burglary and his injury. She wants to relate it all in an orderly way, and for a moment it seems to her that she can do it in an uninterrupted flood of words, but the words are able to form only a few sentences. She concludes by saying, Ernst told me about his time in the Communist youth movement.
The Communist youth movement was the worst, her parents say. They would burn holy books and synagogues. Didn’t we tell you that they tried twice to burn down the two synagogues of Zalachov? The synagogues were saved by Ukrainian peasants, who drove off the Communists.
And didn’t Hashomer Hatsa’ir burn holy books? Irena asks.
In Hashomer Hatsa’ir they held bonfires on Yom Kippur and wild parties, but they didn’t burn holy books.
Ernst regrets it now, Irena says, defending him.
And rightly so, her father says, rising from his seat. Irena knows that her father is unwilling to forgive those sins of Ernst’s youth. She had heard Ernst say more than once: We distressed our parents, who had done nothing wrong. They were honest people, hardworking, loyal to the faith of their fathers. Both in the ghetto and in the camps, they observed even the minor commandments.
While Irena was still a child, her parents used to compare the Communist youth to Hashomer Hatsa’ir in Zalachov, and their conclusion was that both movements had treated the faith of their fathers brutally. But the Communists went too far.
Ernst is an author, not a Communist. Irena tries to appease them.
What does he write about?
About his life.
Let’s hope he’s not writing against the Jews.
Irena clearly recalls Holocaust Remembrance Day in their home. Twenty-seven memorial candles burned in the kitchen. Her parents fasted and took on a vow of silence for the day. Her mother would lie on the sofa and groan now and then. In her last year of life Irena’s father begged her to break her fast and drink a glass of water. Irena’s mother responded without opening her eyes and with a strange movement of her head. “Nothing will happen to me,” she said.
Usually her parents depart after an hour or two. They leave suddenly, without warning, which momentarily frightens Irena. In the past she believed that by doing this they were expressing dissatisfaction with her way of keeping the house. Of course that fear was groundless. They had never once uttered even a word of criticism. They always apologized for not bringing flowers.
After her parents depart, Ernst appears in front of Irena again. One time she saw him drifting on the river, trying to stop the boat he was on. It was obvious that he was expending great effort, but the boat didn’t stop. In vain he steered it toward the bank, but the current was stronger than he was. Finally, he raised one oar in a gesture of protest and shouted. But the next day, when Irena told Ernst what she had dreamed, he just smiled and said, “In my youth we used to row on the river.”
Since Ernst returned from the hospital, another matter has been troubling Irena: his medicine. Every four hours she hands him his pills. But she forgot several times, and this torments her. Ernst swallows the pills and explains to Irena that his writing was flawed because spite and didactic thinking distorted it, and now it’s hard to correct. “Every night I try to uproot the poisonous weeds, but there’s still a lot of work to do. The Russian authors knew how to love their people, together with their pain and their wounds. Why does that effort cost me blood?”
Irena has heard these arguments before. But since Ernst’s return from the hospital, they have become more strident. Irena wants to tell him, You mustn’t be angry at yourself, but she doesn’t say it. She feels his intense closeness now, and every time she touches his hand or he touches her neck, her nights are stormy. One evening he grabbed her and, without any warning, kissed her leg.
33
ERNST IS WRITING FEVERISHLY NOW, AND HE HAS EVIDENTLY connected with distant worlds. Since his return from the hospital, the sharp gleam has returned to his eyes. When Irena arrives in the morning, he lifts his eyes up from his papers. “And what did you bring me from the outside world?” he ask
s. Irena tells him what happened to her on the way there, what she saw in the bakery, and whom she met.
Yesterday, Ernst asked Irena whether her father used to pray. The question greatly embarrassed her. Her father didn’t pray regularly, but several times a year he would wrap himself in his tallis, put on his tefillin, and begin to pray and weep. Irena was fearful at this sight of her father, and when she would ask her mother why he was praying that way, she was given no clear answer. She wouldn’t dare ask her father. In her heart she was sorry she had touched upon this secret of his. There are things one mustn’t speak about, she would say to herself, and when she said it, her father would appear again, wrapped in his tallis, weeping and keening. Her mother would sit in the kitchen with her face in her hands, frightened. When her father finished his prayer, she wouldn’t go to him or say anything; this was his secret, and she had no part in it.
One evening Ernst tells Irena that a great stone has been rolled off his heart, and perhaps now the route would be clear. Irena knows the word “route,” but she has never used it that way. What route? she is almost tempted to ask. She knows that if Ernst wants to explain, he’ll do so. If he doesn’t explain, that means that he’s in the midst of his work and his thoughts haven’t yet fully matured. When Irena returns home that night, she lights a candle and prays in her soul for Ernst’s recovery to be rapid and for him to find his way in his writing.
Irena knows that writing is Ernst’s arena. For years the devil stood in his way and blocked him with obstacles. Not very long ago Ernst explained to her at length that all his efforts to reach the “hidden source” had been in vain. Without access to that source, there was no point to his work.
Suddenly, Love Page 9