Aharon Appelfeld - Suddenly, Love

Hearing her son’s words, Ernst’s mother’s face cleared and she said, “We have no one in this city whom we can consult. The big stores are devouring the small ones. We can’t offer customers what a big store offers.”

“I understand,” Ernst said and lowered his head.

“We’ll have to go to work somewhere.”

When he heard that, Ernst was gripped by irritation. “I’ll come again soon and stay longer,” he said.

“Won’t you eat something?”

“I’m in a hurry,” Ernst said, as he used to in the past.

“I made the sweet blintzes you like.” She spoke as if he had never left the house.

“Not now.” Ernst hastily kissed her on the forehead and went to the door.

As the door closed, his father emerged from his inertia. “I don’t understand a thing,” he said, curling up on the sofa.

Ernst dreamed about free love, but the Party forbade all contact between the sexes because it interfered with Party activity, which came before everything. You were allowed to marry and have children, but you weren’t allowed to kiss in the cellars, not to mention have intercourse. Delinquents were reprimanded, and comments were entered in their personal dossiers.

Once Ernst witnessed the trial of a lively, buxom girl who was accused of having had sexual relations with three boys. The poor girl didn’t blame the boys but only herself. The verdict was unequivocal and cruel. She was expelled from the ranks of the Party for life.

ERNST READS THE CHAPTER TO IRENA. IT’S HARD FOR HER to follow his words, but Ernst’s voice captivates her, and for hours afterward her body throbs with excitement. This time she understands the content, and she is stunned by the opacity of his heart. Why did you run away from your mother and father? she wants to ask. Ernst senses her astonishment and tries to explain, but it’s hard for him. He knows that Irena possess a language of her own and has her own images in her heart. When he utters the words he has written, they sound exaggerated and artificial to him, and he immediately retracts them. Were it not for the close attention she pays, he would not read his work to her. Every time he tries to explain something to her, he feels the same disappointment with himself.

“Why did I run away from my parents? you ask. Because I believed that it was possible to correct how life is lived. My parents belonged to the Generation of the Desert, which could not be reformed. For that reason I refused to accept their love. Is that so complicated?”

Usually Ernst addresses Irena abruptly, but this time he speaks at length. Irena can’t understand his words, but she feels that they have come from his heart. When Ernst is moved, his face and neck become delicately flushed. On her way home, Irena thinks again about all the things Ernst has said to her. She opens the door to her house cautiously and immediately lights a candle. She closes her eyes and says, “God, help Ernst find his way to You. If he finds his way, he will be cured. He is very ill, and his thoughts torment him. Give him words so that he can ask for forgiveness from his parents.”

Irena then begins to tidy the rooms. For years after her parents’ death, the house kept the form that her mother had given it. Now it is Irena’s private sanctuary. The clothes and most of the utensils aren’t used. Sometimes it seems to her that they have lost their former life, and no precious memories waft up from them. There are days when Irena sits in one place and tries for hours to absorb what the house evokes from within.

God , she prays silently, restore Ernst’s parents to him. Without parents, we have no grip on the world. They watch over us in this world, and when they’re in the World of Truth, they are no less connected to us . So devoted is her prayer that she actually sees Ernst’s parents. His father reclines on the sofa, and his mother is in the kitchen. The silence between them is tense. It’s hard for her to erase that image, perhaps because Ernst keeps describing it in different ways.

So far he has written nothing about his grandparents, who lived in the Carpathian Mountains. Irena feels closely connected to her grandparents. She knows about their lives in detail. Every night for many years her mother would tell her a story about them or relate an incident. No wonder they have a shadowy place in her memories. Two portraits hang on the eastern wall in her home: her grandfather, a tall man, is leaning on a cane, wearing a peasant shirt belted at his hips; sharp honesty shines from his face. Her grandmother is a short, heavyset woman with a warm smile.

Irena loves to look at their photographs. She often soars away and visits with them in their house and in the fields, accompanying them to synagogue and back. The stories her mother told her become alive, and they bring up images and visions. When she is by herself at home, she is not alone. Irena knows what happened to her grandparents during the war, but the feeling that they live on is stronger than the reality of their deaths. Once her mother told her, in her own father’s name, that death was an illusion and that it should be ignored. This has stayed in her mind.

Irena is sorry that Ernst’s parents don’t come to comfort him. His illness vexes him, and his writing is impeded. Though he does write, he crosses out and rips up what he has written. Irena feels that if he were to ask for forgiveness from his parents, he would rouse them in the World Above, and they would enlist his grandparents to help him as well. Irena doesn’t know how to speak to Ernst about this; she worries that if she does so, he will scold her.

That night Irena lights some candles so that the house won’t be without their flickering flames. When the house is lit by candles, the evil shadows have no power over her or over her dreams.

WHEN ERNST TURNED TWENTY-THREE, THE PARTY APPOINTED him Commissar for Jewish Affairs in his district. By then he had read what every devoted Communist was required to read, secretly visited the Soviet Union, taken part in advanced courses on organizing, and was involved in everything that was being done locally within the Party.

The committee that appointed Ernst knew that no one was better qualified than he. His loyalty to the Party and hostility to the members of his tribe were intertwined. They also knew he never stayed in one place for more than a day. He was systematic, his initiatives were innovative, and he did what he promised.

Within a month of his appointment, Ernst already had a file on the wealthy Jews, on the religious elite, and on everyone who should be recruited for the Party — especially young people in the high school and technical schools.

At that time his hatred for his fellow Jews was at its peak. He was certain that because of their distorted lives, they were damaged beyond repair. If he could, he would have burned down all the synagogues and yeshivas and all the factories and workshops where workers were exploited. He would also have condemned the arts-and-letters clubs to the flames. His closest friends were Ukrainians, half Jews who were disgusted by their Jewishness, and Polish exiles who brought with them from their homes a hatred of Jews.

At night Ernst would walk about in Czernowitz’s Jewish neighborhood. The jumble of grocery stores, dry goods stores, stalls, and synagogues seemed to him the embodiment of sickness and filth. These lairs have to be rooted out , he hissed to himself.

Every few months he would visit his parents. The liquidation of their store took a while. In the end, they sold it very cheaply to a real estate agent in the city. Ernst heard about it and raged. Strangely, he wasn’t angry with the agent who had exploited his parents’ situation but with his parents, who didn’t struggle to keep their bit of property. They remained the same. Actually, they became more confused, more immobile. Ernst would sit with them, pile up fatuous sentences, and then leave. After he left, his parents would sit frozen in their places, as though after a violent robbery.