Aharon Appelfeld - Suddenly, Love

“Just as it was.”

That gave him pause for a moment, but he didn’t ask anything else.

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 But during the day as well, when he has withdrawn into his corner, his concentration is evident, as though he were trying to whet a sword that refuses to be sharpened.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.

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.