Aharon Appelfeld - Suddenly, Love

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.

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.