Aharon Appelfeld: Suddenly, Love

After her parents’ death, Irena worked in an old age home for a while. The old people were fond of her and gave her nicknames. But some of the old women tormented her, called her “tight-lipped,” and cursed her. One time an old woman threw a plate at her, and Irena decided to leave.

Fortunately for her, she didn’t need that job. Along with the apartment, her parents had left her their savings and the reparations they had received from Germany. In fact, she could have gotten by without working, but her imagination preyed on her, made her head spin, and finally drove her out of the house.

Years earlier her parents had tried to find a husband for her. They were men much older than she, short and crammed with urges. Irena had been so embarrassed she hadn’t even raised her head. At last they stopped pestering her. After her parents’ death, a man began to accost her, making advances every time she entered her building and went upstairs. One time he attacked her at the door to her apartment and pulled up her dress. She struggled with him and escaped into her apartment. For a long time she didn’t leave home.

So the years passed. Irena tidied the apartment just as her parents had done while they were alive. The thought that she was guarding their home, the kitchen and its utensils, the living room, the wide bed in her parents’ bedroom, her bedroom — this gave her strength. Not only would she envision her parents here, she would also sail away to their village in Galicia.

Once Irena’s mother came to her in a dream. Her advice was the same as when she was alive: You have to get out of the house, dear. You’re still young. Your life is before you. If not now, when? Irena wanted to tell her about the frightening man who had attacked her, but when she saw her mother’s face, the words stuck in her mouth. When Irena awoke the next morning, she was sorry that her mother hadn’t noticed that the apartment was tidy, just the way she had left it. In great pain, she wept.

Irena sat at home most of the time, as though it weren’t an apartment but a house of prayer, where one changes nothing and only preserves what is already there. With great caution she even shuttered the windows so the sun wouldn’t damage the furniture. The thin darkness in the summer was pleasant. In the winter she raised the shutters, but never the way her mother had done. Her mother used to open the windows every morning energetically. Irena hadn’t inherited that vigor from her.

AT TWELVE-THIRTY ERNST RETURNS FROM HIS JOURNEY, bringing with him everything he has collected in the café and on the street. His step is heavy, and his face is filled with concentration. He ought to sit at his desk and write down his thoughts. But he is too excited; he prefers to sit in the armchair and wait for Irena to announce that lunch is ready.

Ernst’s return today is different. He has brought a letter with him and immediately announces, “My ex-wife wrote to me. What did she write?” In his voice there is a mixture of faultfinding and contempt. He lays the letter on the table without opening it. Ernst has many ways of expressing reservations. Placing a letter on his desk without opening it is one of them. “My ex-wife wrote to me,” he repeats, knowing there would be no response to his words.

Irena has noticed: there is no trace of that wife in the house, but the memory of his first wife is evident in several places. A family photograph stands on the cupboard: Ernst in shorts, his wife hugging a baby. Irena occasionally studies the photograph. Sometimes it seems to her that she met them years ago. Once she dreamed that Ernst’s wife and daughter came to visit him, and she made a festive meal for them.

Ernst has finished his meal and is sitting in the armchair. At this hour he likes to read magazines or doze off. Irena restricts her activity so as not to make noise. When Ernst is asleep, his face is young and his forehead shines.

“It’s three-thirty, and you’re still working.” Ernst has awakened from his nap.

Irena thinks that she is disturbing him. She immediately puts the laundry in the wicker basket without folding it and heads for the door.

“Will you have a cup of tea?” he asks, turning to her.

“I’ll have one at home,” she says and slips out of the house.

The letter from Sylvia has upset Ernst. They were married for five years, but their life together wasn’t happy. She was an opinionated woman, a former Communist, who expressed her views vehemently. Her ideas weren’t unreasonable, but the way she presented them made him furious. To shield himself from the torrent of her words, Ernst would lower his head or hide his face in his hands, but to no avail. She persisted. The house wasn’t a home. He prepared the meals himself. Her attitude toward his work was even more scandalous: in her heart she was contemptuous of him because, as she said, one shouldn’t write for the drawer. If you can’t publish, don’t write . Every statement of hers, every gesture, drove Ernst out of his mind.

Sylvia was a handsome woman, but her opinions belied her beauty. They strove only for the utilitarian. Something that brought no benefit should by rights not exist. She had spent the war years in Siberia, absorbing the cold and the contempt for Jews there, and when she reached Israel, nothing pleased her, neither the place nor the people. The years after their separation was a time of bitter spiritual accounting for Ernst.

Irena makes her way home slowly, almost without thinking. She doesn’t usually mull over her thoughts. If she happens on an interesting sight, she contemplates it and stores it up in her heart. Often the sight is revealed to her again in a dream. Sometimes a word gets stuck in her mind, plays there for a moment, and then disappears, going back to where it came from. But now the image of Ernst’s return from his walk reappears to her — the way he entered the house and laid the letter on his desk. His face had narrowed, as though he had been gripped once again by sounds that had previously let him go. When he sat in the armchair, his lips were twisted in disappointment.

Then a vision of tall, cold Sylvia accosts her as well. That woman, who in the past lost no opportunity to weaken Ernst, is trying to inject him with her venom now, too, from a distance, by means of letters. Serpent , Irena is about to call out, but since she has never used that word, it is stuck in her mouth.

Irena returns home as the last splinters of light are filtering through the slits in the shutters, and she immediately begins to arrange her parents’ armoire. The clothes are folded the way they always have been. She carefully removes them, shakes them out, and then puts them back. Irena does this once a month, so she can be involved in the silent life of the garments. The clothes have lost their odor but not their form. As Irena stands by the armoire, her mother sometimes appears and urges her to go out to a club and pass the time with friends. Nothing comes of all that urging. Irena used to go to the movies with her father and sometimes with her mother. Her father was a good-looking man, and she enjoyed going out with him.

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?”