“So what am I supposed to do, sing rosy songs?”
“Keep your thoughts to yourself, and don’t preach them.” She spoke in cutting tones.
Ernst notices that Irena has changed during the past few weeks. She watches over him like a bodyguard, alert and tense, and every time the Angel of Death approaches the window, she rises to her feet and pushes him out. The Angel of Death apparently evaluates her alertness correctly and retreats, but sometimes her obstinate resistance angers him, and he digs in on the windowsill. Irena doesn’t surrender: instead, she closes the shutter. Some nights Ernst sleeps in her arms, and in the morning he rises full of vitality and the will to accomplish things. No one is happier than Irena. She makes breakfast and sits at Ernst’s side for a long time. Toward evening she bathes him and massages his arms and legs with lotion. A few days ago Ernst told Irena that in his regiment there had been a Russian nurse, about twenty-five years old, who had taken care of the wounded soldiers like a mother. She would stay awake all night, singing to them and telling them about life in the Caucasus Mountains. Near the end of the war a shell struck her, and she died in terrible torments. The soldiers in his regiment followed her coffin and wept like children.
48
ONE MORNING ERNST OPENS HIS EYES, GETS OUT OF BED, and says, “Last night I dreamed that I was in my parents’ house. Father lay on the sofa, and Mother was in the kitchen. They were glad that I had come home. I expected Father to say a happy word to me, but he, as usual, didn’t utter a syllable. He looked at me with his tired gaze, which hadn’t changed at all, as if to say, What is there to say? But Mother was overjoyed. She came up to me and said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come home. I knew that one day you would return, but I didn’t know when. Father didn’t believe it, but I did. Too bad I don’t have anything in the house to serve you.’ Upon hearing her words, Father smiled with the same skeptical smile that would appear on his face after an exhausting day at work in the grocery store. Finally, he overcame his silence and asked, ‘Where are you going?’
“ ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I replied succinctly.
“Father’s expression was suddenly like a mirror. Now I plainly saw how similar my appearance was to his. Mother apparently knew that. She always used to say, ‘You look like your father.’ But I refused to accept it. I didn’t regard skepticism and moroseness as noble qualities. Now this dream came and, as it were, slapped me in the face.”
Irena listened to the dream and said, “That’s a good dream.”
“How do you know?”
“Your parents are watching over you.”
Irena’s faith is simple, anchored in the God of her parents and grandparents. Her faith has concrete expression: the candles, the dried flowers, the corner where she secludes herself with her parents. Her faith or, more accurately, her beliefs are her secret. She doesn’t talk about them much. Ernst understands some of them, and when he occasionally asks her about them, she is frightened; she blushes and doesn’t know how to answer. Now a new conviction has been added to her beliefs: her faith in Ernst’s writing. It tells her that Ernst is writing important things, perhaps new teachings for life. She expects that Ernst will tell her more about them.
In the afternoon, if his pains subside, Ernst sits in the armchair and reads the Bible. Sometimes he pulls out a word or a verse and talks about it. The Bible doesn’t distinguish between heaven and earth. The patriarchs loved their wives, their open spaces, and their flocks. They were bold nomads and sometimes cruel, but at the same time they heeded heaven. Death didn’t scare them. When a man believes that he is gathered up unto his fathers, death has no dominion over him.
Now the Carpathians are Ernst’s sanctuary. Sometimes it’s plain to see that he isn’t even here but instead is leaning on the trunk of a plane tree or sitting next to a window that leads to heaven. Sometimes it seems to Irena that he’s praying. That’s a mistake, of course. Ernst does look into the prayer book sometimes and is impressed by the prayers, but he doesn’t pray. “It’s doubtful whether a Jew in our day and age knows how to pray,” she has heard him say.
When her soul is filled with everything that Ernst tells her or writes down, Irena feels that she must share her experiences with her parents. She rushes to her house, tidies it, lights a candle, and sits in her chair.
Irena’s parents have come back, and they are happy to hear everything that she tells them. Her only regret is that her words aren’t properly phrased. She worries that she hasn’t told them the important things, that she has instead turned minor matters into major ones. More than once, instead of recounting something, she has wept.
In her sleep Irena accompanies Ernst to the Carpathians. Since Ernst began reading to her about life in the Carpathians, those mountains are always in view. She immerses herself in their darkness and rises with the morning light breaking through the treetops. Sometimes it appears that in the depths of the night Ernst is struggling with the commissars who filled the Jewish storekeepers with dread. His expression is tense, like someone who has drawn his sword from its sheath and is ready for hand-to-hand battle. Once he told her, “The Jewish commissars were the worst of all. They didn’t spare their brethren.” She was horrified, for he included himself among them.
Ernst’s life is now within her body. In one of her dreams she saw him praying with his grandfather, and the next day she told him about the dream. Ernst listened and commented, “I loved Grandfather, and I loved to hear his prayers. But I didn’t know the prayers. My father knew them, but he had lost the ability to pray. When I came to my grandfather, my father’s muteness was already embedded in me.”
Ernst keeps opening windows into his soul. What’s easy for her is like splitting the Red Sea for him. There are many burning places in his life. Every time he approaches them, he is stunned or angry.
“You’re never angry,” he says to Irena.
“Whom should I be angry at?” she says, shrugging her shoulders.
Where does she get that strength? Ernst asks himself and has no answer. Innocence, certainly, but it isn’t an innocence lacking in practical wisdom. Her practical wisdom is accompanied by simple happiness. She never exaggerates, never burdens him with questions, and when she’s distressed, she turns to her parents. Her path to God is always by means of her parents.
49
BY NOW IT IS HARD FOR ERNST TO GET UP IN THE MORNING. Irena washes him and, after drying him off, hands him his razor. Ernst jokes, saying that he’s now reached the level of a baby that needs to be taken care of.
His daily schedule has changed. He’s still awake for most of the day, writing for two hours and reading. He embroiders plans for the future: a book about the Jews of the Carpathians. He’s certain that if he becomes immersed in that enchanted land, it will open its soul to him. He has already carved out a bit, but the way forward is still a long one. The Carpathian Mountains won’t let just anyone enter them. You have to prepare yourself, to shake off the confusions that have stuck to you, and only then can you start from the beginning.
Ernst lies in bed, once again calling up pictures from his past in Jerusalem. His writing had been imprisoned by matters concerning all of mankind, lacking time and place, and distant from his own life. He had once spoken about this with S. Y. Agnon. Ernst had placed great faith in Agnon. He admired Agnon’s devotion to his ancestors and to their faith, and he was certain he would find in him a brother for his way of thinking. But for some reason Agnon didn’t welcome him. On the contrary, he spoke ill of his home city, Czernowitz, of its rabbis, authors, and poets, most of whom, like Ernst, had adopted the German language, developed it, and written in it. He even found fault with some of the great Hasidic masters in his city, or, rather, with their followers. But above all he hated the apostate Jakob Frank, who claimed that redemption would come not to a generation worthy of it, but to one that was unworthy of it. Therefore one should commit many sins, and whoever sinned the most was the most praiseworthy. Frank had polluted many regions, but above all
he had laid waste to Galicia and Bucovina.
Now that the pain is robbing Ernst of sleep, he’s sorry he hadn’t devoted time to studying Jakob Frank, to learning how that cheat had managed to tempt women and men with his secret rituals. Who knows what happened to those souls and their descendants? Who has continued to worship Frank in secret and who had atoned for his sins? Ernst agrees with Agnon: wanton souls like the ones that Frank fostered don’t disappear. They are reincarnated and take on new faces in the next generation. But Ernst doesn’t agree that every Jew from the Czernowitz region has to examine his soul, lest a spark of that apostate’s alien fire be reincarnated within him. It angers Ernst that Agnon wanted to exempt Buczacz, his native city, from the possibility of influence of that evildoer and that Agnon attributed all of Frank’s pollution to Ernst’s city instead. It was well known that no city or town in Galicia and Bucovina, including Buczacz, had escaped that reprobate’s poison.
The matter of Jakob Frank darkened Ernst’s relations with Agnon, and he avoided him. Once he met Agnon in Café Hermon and said to him, “My ancestral roots are in the Carpathians, where the Ba’al Shem Tov secluded himself for many days.”
“And how did you get to Czernowitz?”
“My parents ended up there.”
“Too bad,” said Agnon, without explanation.
Ernst has not seen Agnon since that meeting in Café Hermon. Egotistical people weren’t to Ernst’s liking. Agnon’s egotism was mingled with arrogance, and that was a shame. He was the only one from that generation who possessed the key to the world of their fathers, and it was too bad he hadn’t passed that key on to anyone else.
When Ernst wakes up in the morning, he sometimes sees his grandfather before his eyes, but not as he had been revealed to him in his early childhood. Now he is taller, as though heaven had drawn him toward it. Seeing his grandfather, Ernst wants to say, Irena, dear, give me the prayer book. I want to touch its binding, but he realizes that if he says that, he would look foolish to her.
When he is overcome with fatigue, Ernst asks Irena to read a chapter of the Bible to him. Her voice is young, and the verses that she reads have a pleasant sound. She has already read several chapters of Genesis. The Bible stories suit her. Though she may not have the cunning of the patriarchs, their warmth is planted in her.
Irena reads without asking questions. When Ernst questions something, she raises her head from the book as though surprised by what he is asking. She has no reservations, and she doesn’t look for contradictions. She can picture what the scripture recounts.
“Irena,” Ernst says every time she finishes reading a chapter.
“What?” Irena asks, raising her head.
“I just wanted to tell you that you read nicely.”
Every day Ernst discovers a new aspect of Irena: now it’s her fingers. They are long and the joints bulge a little. When she moves an object or a flower, she wraps her fingers around it delicately. Her fingers don’t grasp things tightly, so sometimes she has to use both hands. When she bathes him or rubs his body with lotion, her touch is solid but not heavy.
50
ERNST NO LONGER WRITES WITH MOMENTUM OR WITHOUT interruption. He pauses and reads the little that he has written to Irena. Irena listens attentively. She believes that he is conveying important things to her. She doesn’t know whether they are practical or more esoteric, but she feels that her world is expanding from day to day.
Sometimes Irena thinks that in his youth Ernst trained to be a priest, like Samuel in the Bible, who served Eli the High Priest. Ernst also contemplated nature and people and heard voices, but the circumstances of his life made him stray from the path of his fathers, and he was captured by the enchantments of the Communist Party. Now he was trying to understand why his life went astray, why he served Moloch for so many years, why his ancestors didn’t help him get free of the trap. They are now the focus of his longings. He searches for them in the Bible. He has no doubt that there is a close connection between the patriarchs in Genesis and his ancestors in the Carpathians, but he has no proof.
Irena, to tell the truth, has no interest in questions that are beyond her comprehension. Ernst’s pains and whatever she can do to ease them—most of the time she concentrates on this and this alone. Ernst’s pains are not apparent. He suppresses them, so they are not expressed outwardly, but Irena knows how fierce they are. She makes certain to serve him food that he finds palatable, to give him his medicine at the correct time, to change the pillows as needed, and to distract him. When the pain attacks him, she curls up with him. The wall that once separated them has been completely erased, and she is ready to go anywhere their paths may take them.
Irena is a woman like other women but somehow different. When she sits next to Ernst, or even at some distance from him, it seems to him that she is touching his thoughts. There are no conflicts, reservations, resentments, accusations, or torments of conscience in her world. She blesses that which is good and beautiful or keeps silent.
Often in his dreams Ernst sees Irena standing in wonder among the trees in the Carpathians or working in the vegetable garden. When evening comes, she puts the hoe on her shoulder and returns home.
He is certain that his grandparents would have been pleased with her and would have received her cordially. She, for her part, would have been excited by all the charms of the Carpathians. Irena likes wooden bowls, blue sky, and open fields. When she sees a flower, she is likely to cry. She’s sentimental. Sentimentality doesn’t suit everyone, but it suits Irena. Ernst’s mother and father would certainly have accepted her cordially as well, and they would have been happy with her, too. A house where silence and melancholy reign all day seeks someone whose face glows with life.
“Irena, do you understand me?” Ernst rouses from his reverie and asks her.
Irena doesn’t always know exactly where Ernst is at any given time and what thoughts that place arouse in him, but she can usually guess. When he tells her about the Carpathian Mountains, the sights are not alien to her. More than once she wanted to tell him, Don’t worry. I have been there, too. I’m not a stranger to those paths because you’ve taken me there more than once.
When strong pains wake him and Irena’s embraces don’t work, she doesn’t hesitate to give him an injection to ease the pain. The injection works immediately, and Ernst is so grateful that he hugs and kisses her.
The pain lacerates his body, but Ernst is not a miserable person. Irena’s presence, her closeness, opens corridors for him to worlds he never knew. Or if he knew of them, he was blind to them. He had never imagined such love.
Some nights when Ernst is awake, he tells Irena about previously unknown parts of his life. When he tells her about his grandparents, his face immediately takes on the look of his grandfather: that of a proud peasant with the faith of his fathers instilled in him, his forehead broad and determined. And when he tells her about his parents, his face quickly turns gloomy; their misery clings to his cheeks, and he is as lost as they were. But then the story of his time in the Red Army rouses him to life.
51
SO THE DAYS PASS, AND THEY REACH THE MONTH OF April. Ernst lies in bed most of the day, dozing, reading a book, or watching Irena’s doings. Her body is full, but her movements are quick. The house is tidy and shining, with a vase of flowers or a landscape in every corner. Irena’s taste is like her personality: simple and not overly decorated. The corner where she secludes herself with her dear ones also has nothing that offends the eye. When she has finished the housework, she sits at the dining room table or in the kitchen. “A woman devoted to her house,” says the doctor, but Ernst knows that there is a secret hiding within her simplicity. He has not deciphered it, but he feels it throughout the day.
When evening comes, Irena expresses to Ernst her feeling that life is a continuum that extends into the unknown. There’s no point in listening to the voices of the spirits or of the doctor, who announces each time he arrives that parting is unavoidable. Irena, i
n any case, won’t leave Ernst alone at any of the way stations that are ahead of him. She now sees him as that low-ranking officer who took command after most of the senior officers were killed or taken prisoner, organized the remnants of the division, and launched a counterattack that defeated the enemy. For that deed he was awarded a medal for heroism by the Soviet Union and raised to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Irena has worked for Ernst for only three years, but she can’t imagine her life without this house and without him. Her own home has grown distant from her, more like a house where life is mummified. Ernst is a model patient. He seems like a soldier who has been badly wounded at the front, but determination to defeat the enemy burns in his bones. Even now, if someone only gave him crutches, he’d join his regiment.
When Irena discovers this determination, her faith that Ernst will confound all the doctors’ predictions, will rise from his illness and return to his former habits, is strengthened. He still has a lot of work to do, and he will doubtless need a drink or two during the day. The doctors have forbidden strong drink, but to boost his spirits Irena will on occasion secretly give him a shot of vodka. He’ll sip it and look at her with a victorious expression.
There had been days when Kafka’s writings took possession of Ernst, and his own voice was stifled. Thank God, he was no longer under the influence of that great author. Kafka’s focus was entirely inward. Even the exterior was his interior. No wonder he fascinated those who were like him. Ernst explains to Irena why he had been drawn to Kafka and what dangers lurked in that attraction. Now Irena understands most of what he says, and what she doesn’t understand, she intuits.
Suddenly, Love Page 15