Aharon Appelfeld - Suddenly, Love

Ernst is pleased that the days he spent toiling over Bible stories weren’t in vain. Life in the Carpathian Mountains didn’t proceed in tranquility; instead, as in the Bible, it had simplicity, solidity, and a belief that life has a purpose. We aren’t a bundle of particles thrown down from somewhere just to disappear. The trees in the forest, the horse in the meadow, and the man in the field — they are all as one.

But meanwhile Ernst is tormented by pain. Irena tries to distract him by telling him things she’s heard or that have happened to her. Ernst listens and asks questions. He has a special ability to follow the details.

“Didn’t your parents tell you about the war?” Again he asks her this.

“Not much.”

“And didn’t you ask?”

“I asked, but they said that it was better not to talk about meaningless suffering.”

“What did they talk about?”

“About their life before the war.”

At midnight, when Ernst falls asleep, Irena goes back to his house. Ernst’s house is tidy, but in it there are no candlesticks, no dried flowers, and no prayer books. Irena clears a corner of the kitchen, lights a candle, scatters dried flowers on the counter, and sets down a prayer book that she brought from her house. Let Ernst’s parents know that they are sought-after guests in their son’s home. After she arranges that corner, the look of the house changes.

The medical tests aren’t simple, but Ernst doesn’t complain. The desire to return home and give himself over to his writing makes him a determined man. Irena is anxious, but she suppresses her anxiety so as not to worry Ernst. One day he asks her whether she has been to his house.

“I go there every day,” she tells him.

“What’s happening there?”

“Nothing,” she says, alarmed by Ernst’s question.

Over the past few days Ernst has been asking questions that he hadn’t asked before. Irena realizes that he has been shaken by the sights revealed to him in his parents’ house and his grandparents’ house. Ernst recently realized that he suffered more from his mother’s silence than from his father’s. His father was a chain smoker; it was as though he was trying to detach himself from the place that shackled him. Once Ernst heard him say, “I feel like burning the grocery store down.” His mother was frightened but didn’t say anything.

Years ago, when Ernst was very involved with the Party, he heard a head commissar say, “Propaganda is the very essence of our doctrine.” He was a short Jew, the son of one of the real estate brokers in the city, and he always spoke in a loud voice, as though trying to silence the voices around him with his own. That wasn’t his only strong suit. Words shot out of his mouth as though out of a machine. It was clear that his strength lay in deception, and his loud talk was one of his methods. Then, as though visualizing something through the dimness of twilight, Ernst understood his parents’ silence, and he knew that in their silence was the truth. He knew it, but he refused to accept it. At that time he had not yet realized that their silence was a mighty instrument of torture that they had built to torment themselves.

In the Carpathians the people knew silence with their bodies. Ernst’s grandfather, after reading a book, would sit quietly for a long time. His silence was a kind of covert labor. He would sift thought the day’s events so he could approach his night’s sleep cleansed of all delusions and confusion.

“Were there delusions in the Carpathian Mountains?” Irena asks in surprise.

“They tried to shake them off so they could fall asleep without them. Delusions bring nightmares. Reciting Shema Yisrael before going to sleep prevents nightmares.”

Ernst mines his memory for visions and fragments of visions. Sometimes he’s surprised that a certain detail has been preserved within him: his mother, sitting on the mourner’s mat with her brothers and sisters, the glow returning to her face. She doesn’t waste words, but she does reply to questions that have been addressed to her. She prays like her mother and sisters. Her mannerisms once again resemble those of a pure believer. One evening she turned to Ernst distractedly and said, “Isn’t this an enchanting place?” Ernst was stunned by her question and didn’t know what to say. Only later did he realize that the word “enchanting” wasn’t used in the Carpathian Mountains. Only a person coming from the outside would say “splendid” or “enchanting”—words that tried to cover up an emptiness or fear. He was angry with his mother, who had been devoted to her silence all her life, for using a word she had borrowed from others.

All night long Irena stays close to Ernst in his sleep, and with first light she rises from her chair and stands next to his bed. She observes the taking of his temperature and the blood tests, and later she eavesdrops on a conversation between the doctors on their rounds. To his question about what the tests show, Ernst receives a hesitant answer.

“And how do you feel?” they keep asking him.

“Backaches and weakness.”

Each doctor is, individually, a courteous person, asking questions and taking an interest in the patient, but when seen together they look like a stern panel of judges. They do take note of his questions, but their attention is mainly given over to numbers and X-rays, which they pass from hand to hand. The way they stand there frightens Irena. “There’s nothing to worry about,” says Ernst after the doctors have left the room, more than anything to calm her down.

Then Ernst closes his eyes and falls asleep. His brow is untroubled. The white beard that has sprouted on his face gives him the look of a person who has overcome his suffering. Death is apparently preoccupying him, but he doesn’t talk about it.

When Ernst rouses from his slumber, he’s glad to see Irena. She peels a pear or an apple for him, and if he’s thirsty, she hands him a cup of water. Since he has been in the hospital, her attention to him has become more intense. She watches his breathing and hurries to hand him what he needs. “It’s too bad I never finished high school,” she said to him a few days ago. “If I had finished, I would have been accepted in nursing school.”

“You’re dear to me without a high school diploma,” Ernst said quickly.

At night, when Ernst and the other patients are asleep, Irena sits in a corner and reads. She always liked to read, but since she has been working for Ernst, she has learned how to get more out of books. She especially likes to read books about the Second World War.

The war is a very mystifying chapter in Irena’s soul. Since reading books by Leyb Rochman *and Primo Levi, she understands why her parents didn’t tell her more about it. In her dreams she sometimes sees her mother trudging with the last ounce of her strength from her work to the barracks, swallowing weak soup and trying to reattach the sole of her shoe with two pieces of rope. It’s strange , Irena says to herself. To see my father and mother during their most difficult ordeals, I had to read Primo Levi. The Italian Jew revealed what my parents never revealed to me .

Irena’s mother never told her a thing, not even the names of any of the camps that she was in. Every time Irena asked her about the camps, her mother’s face would close up. It was no wonder that in her childhood Irena thought that her mother had had a love affair during the war and that she was hiding it from her husband and daughter. That was another reason why she loved her father more than her mother. She used to take long walks with him at night, and she went with him to the movies. He was tall and good-looking, and women would follow him with their eyes. Over time she learned to love her mother, too, but not the way she loved her father.