Aharon Appelfeld - Suddenly, Love

When Grandfather returns in the evening, there is no joy in his eyes. He opens the shutter and prays fervently, but the prayer doesn’t draw him out of his gloom.

Grandmother serves him a drink and immediately brings another. Two glasses of vodka do their work: Grandfather’s forehead becomes flushed, and a fixed smile appears on his face, as though he was smiling at himself. Grandmother doesn’t ask him how he feels or what he wants to eat. She just serves red borscht in a wooden bowl, a saucer of sour cream, and a pot of potatoes in their peels.

THE PAIN IS INTENSE, BUT ERNST DOESN’T SURRENDER TO it easily. He gets up every morning and struggles with his weakness and with the visions that emerge from within him. It’s important to him for his writing to be orderly and the details well chosen. A faulty sentence drives him mad. Years earlier he used to embellish the paragraphs with metaphors. Now he is striving for short sentences, factual, without adjectives. He has declared war against adjectives. Every time he encounters one, he uproots it.

Once a day a nurse comes to gives him an injection to ease his pain. Ernst no longer asks how long he has to live or other questions that there is no point in asking. The nurse, a quiet, devoted woman, reminds him of his daughter. Ernst is certain that if his daughter were alive, she would be like her. During the past month, he has seen Tina and Helga rising up to the surface from the voracious waves of the Bug River. They have become so blended in with the current, it is as if they have become human fish. Ernst is distressed that they have changed their form so that he can no longer approach them. He tries to nevertheless but is blinded by the sparkling water.

One night Ernst woke up, turned to Irena, and said, “Why aren’t we able to love our people the way the Russian authors love theirs? Nothing is simpler than to love. Nothing is more natural than to love. But Jewish artists seem to be handicapped. First they hated those who preserved the tradition and accused them of being primitive and drugged. Then they hated the Jewish shopkeeper and said he was a greedy exploiter who deceived people. And when the Holocaust survivors came, they said they were human dust. Why did Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev love their people, and why aren’t we aren’t able to love as they do?” That thought had clearly raged within Ernst during the night. When he finished speaking, his head sank back onto the pillow and he fell asleep. During the past few nights, Ernst has uttered sentences or sentence fragments in his sleep. Irena understands some of his words, but most of them are garbled and unclear.

Writing has become a struggle against his weakness. Ernst doesn’t give in to it. Every morning he gathers the remnants of his strength, rises, shaves, eats breakfast with Irena, and immediately sits at his desk. Irena is impressed by his determination. A secret belief whispers to her that the struggles are strengthening him and that the time will come when he will stand up, dress, put on his coat, and say, I’m going for a walk . Meanwhile, she is making an effort to stay close to him in every way. She sits at his side and watches his head on the pillow. She holds his hand and places a damp washcloth on his forehead.

A few days ago Ernst turned to her and said, “Irena, dear, even if I’m in coma, don’t send me to a hospice.”

Irena was shocked. She took his hand in hers, kissed it, and said, “What are you thinking of? You’ll always be with me.”

Now Death is a guest in the house. Sometimes he assumes the guise of the tall doctor, who resembles a Christian priest who comes to dying people to hear their confessions. And sometimes death enters as Leiman, the retired man who comes to do physiotherapy with Ernst. More than once Irena wants to say to the tall doctor, We expect the proper medicine from a doctor, not the consolations of a rabbi . Leiman is cynical. One can hear his cynicism in every word he says. Once Irena heard him tell Ernst, “Man is a strange creature, hungry for life. What’s in this life that makes him cling to it so much?” That time she didn’t restrain herself. She went up to him and said, “You don’t have to tell your thoughts to your patients.”

“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.

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.