All Whom I Have Loved

62

We reached the railway station in Storozynetz sometime after midnight. It was empty, and the ticket-office windows were shuttered. Father asked the guard when the next train was leaving, and he answered indifferently, “Just five minutes ago.” Two dim bulbs lit the platforms, and darkness surrounded us on all sides. We had no choice but to go to town and look for a hotel. “I was wrong,” said Father, as we set off.

I remembered Storozynetz well, but in the darkness it looked different. The tall chestnut trees cast their heavy shadows on the sidewalks. We went from street to street, finally stopping at the entrance of a low house with a sign on it: HOTEL SALZBURG. Father knocked on the door. A woman opened it, and Father asked her for a bed for the night. She offered us a room with two beds.

I slept only fitfully, and again I saw the funeral. Now it seemed to me that Mother's funeral, unlike Halina's, had been hasty and short, with the monks hurrying through the prayers and dispersing rapidly.

Father awoke. “Why aren't you sleeping?” he asked.

“I can't fall asleep.”

“Count to a hundred.”

That old ploy, which Mother would suggest from time to time, sounded ridiculous to me now. But I started counting and fell asleep.

We were late getting up. Father's request that he be woken in the morning for the six o'clock train must have been forgotten. The cleaning woman claimed that she had knocked on the door and called out that it was five o'clock and had heard Father call back, “Very good, thank you.”

Father did not argue and was not angry. He ordered breakfast, and we sat and ate as if we weren't in a hurry to leave. The coffee was delicious, and Father ordered another pot. The owner of the hotel, a Jew of the old kind and involved in everything going on in the region, had of course heard of Father and immediately called his wife and daughters to see the marvel. Father, initially embarrassed, eventually responded to the owner's questions, telling him at length that he had only recently returned from Bucharest, where he had held a large exhibition, and that he was now on his way to Czernowitz. The Jew, for his part, told Father that anti-Semitism in this region was on the rise, and that now Jews were being beaten in the streets in broad daylight.

“And what do the Jews do?” Father asked.

“What can they do?”

When we reached the station it was already noon. Father went to the ticket office and asked about the times of the trains, and on the spot he decided that it was best to travel now to Campulung and rest a bit, before the vacationers came. I had once spent a summer vacation with Mother in Campulung, and I remembered the long boulevards and the slender poplars whose shadows trembled on the sidewalks.

We left on the first train, but just as the train pulled out of Storozynetz it started to rain. At first Father was happy, but as the day went on, he grew more withdrawn, and he buried himself in his coat. We arrived in Campulung at night. It was raining heavily there, too, and we huddled near the snack counter together with the station workers. The food there did not seem fresh, and we went outside to wait for a wagon. Everything that had happened to us since we left Bucharest now seemed like one nightmare that had become entwined with another nightmare. Wagons passed us, but the drivers didn't stop. Finally a wagon stopped and we got into it.

“Take us to a hotel,” called Father.

“Which one?”

“Doesn't matter.”

And that's how we came to the Hotel Bukovina. The woman who owned it — a woman who was not young — welcomed us politely and immediately served us coffee and rolls. The beds were comfortable, and we slept late. In the morning we sat next to the window and ate breakfast. Suddenly I saw how past years had remained frozen here, inside the tall vases on the sideboards. Father said, “It's a hotel like those from the old days; hotels like this are vanishing.”

The rains did not cease. Father's plans to take walks and show me all the wonders of the place were out of the question.

“It's a good time to sleep; sleep is no less pleasant than staying awake. A man who sleeps a week rises like new.” The woman who owned the hotel spoke genially, but her voice was not pleasant. I felt that she was trying to persuade Father. He listened to her and asked some detailed questions, while she elaborated: “A week of sleep is a real adventure.”

“Adventure?” wondered Father.

“Correct.” The proprietress held fast to her opinion.