Suddenly, Love

26

ERNST’S RECOVERY IS SLOW. IRENA STAYS AT HIS SIDE, even at night. In vain he tells her, “Go and rest.” Her devotion is a combination of quietness and patience. Her eyes don’t leave his face, and her ears are attentive to his breathing. Pills and injections sooth his pains for two or three hours at a time, but after midnight they return and awaken him. Irena quickly gives him a pill, and if that doesn’t work, she asks a nurse to give him an injection. Irena imagines his sleep to be like that creature he battles at night at his desk.

After a week of intermittent sleeping and wakefulness, Ernst’s face is still pale and his jaws still sunken, but the spark of life has returned to his eyes. He tries to get out of bed. Irena hands him crutches, and he grabs them, raises himself, and stands up.

“Another trial,” he says and begins to walk toward the bathroom.

Now, too, it seems Ernst remembers nothing of what had happened to him. Irena tells him that robbers broke into his apartment and stole his wallet and his watch.

“And they didn’t touch my books or manuscripts?”

“They just scattered them.”

“Quite a robbery!” he says and chuckles.

Interesting, Irena says to herself. It’s important for him to know that the manuscripts weren’t destroyed, which means that they’re important to him. Why did he order me to burn them?

Many thoughts go through her mind, but they don’t for a moment distract Irena from her devotion to Ernst. She is entirely given over to him. Although the sparkle has returned to his eyes, his thoughts are still scattered and jump from one thing to another. One night he tells her again about his service in the Red Army. She has noticed: Ernst doesn’t tell a story all at once. First he prepares the heart, traces the framework, and gradually brings the images into it.

“I was at the front for a year and a half. They were marvelous times. I loved the soldiers, and they loved me. They were downtrodden, most of them were drunkards, and they revered Stalin and Jesus. Their ideas were a mixture of Communist propaganda and the beliefs that their mothers transmitted to them in secret. I was with them from the Ukraine to Berlin, and we felt that we were chopping down the writhing Nazi monster that extended up to Stalingrad and from there was trying to dominate all of Russia. Our cannons thundered and our tanks raced forward, and the sense of destruction swept us along and delighted us. Every one of us, Jew and non-Jew, was wounded. This one had lost a brother, that one, his mother. We were fired up with feelings of vengeance that drove us and urged us on. They called us the ‘iron panthers,’ and we really were panthers.

“In those marvelous days we forgot the evil of communism; we were united by one impulse: to drive out the twisted Nazi serpent. After conquering a village, a provincial city, or a railway station we would celebrate and get drunk. Plundering was the order of the day; drunkenness was widespread. Women were raped in houses and yards, but we felt that we were cutting the Nazi serpent into pieces.

“But after that, at the end of the war, on the golden beaches of Naples, on the way to Israel, I lost my will. That was when the first seeds of despair were sown. At first I didn’t know it was despair. It appeared as though the other refugees were in despair, not I.”

Ernst continues telling his story, but after half an hour he begins to doze off. When he’s asleep, the firmness in his face doesn’t fade. Irena prays with all her heart that he’ll recover, that he’ll return to his desk and to his enchanting habits. Once when he woke up he told her, “I didn’t understand that it was just the beginning of the struggle then.”

“What is the struggle about?” Irena wants to know more.

“About having a clean mind and a life with a purpose.”

Ernst dozes for most of the day. One time he uttered a few long sentences, complex and incomprehensible. Another time he shouted, “We will drive out the serpent no matter what!” Irena was alarmed and approached him cautiously. Now his sleep is sound, like that of a soldier. Soon they’ll wake him, or he’ll wake himself up. Without delay he will put on his uniform and set out for his unit. Apparently the unit is already standing in formation, ready for his orders.