Suddenly, Love

27

A WEEK AGO IT APPEARED AS THOUGH ERNST WOULD BE fully recovered in a few days. This proved to be merely wishful thinking on Irena’s part. Ernst still writhes in pain, and his heart is not beating as regularly as it had been before the attack. But in between stabs of pain he engages in conversation with Irena. Usually he talks and Irena listens. Sometimes she asks him about a word or a concept. Ernst in the hospital is a different Ernst. Now one can see him as the Red Army officer that he once was. He doesn’t grumble about his pain but jokes about it instead. It’s annoying, he says, not only denying him movement but also forcing him to deal with his body and to trouble the people around him. A person ought to be self-sufficient and not bother a whole medical staff, he says. If Ernst knew how much Irena yearned to help him, he would not refer to her efforts as “trouble.”

“Is she your daughter?” one of the nurses asked, observing Irena’s devotion.

Ernst wasn’t put off by the question. “Does she look like me?” he asked.

“A lot.”

“Then she’s my daughter.”

One evening, when the pain had subsided, Ernst spoke about his parents again. “It seemed to me then,” he said, “that they were competing with each other, who could keep silent longer. I had plenty of words then, words from the books I read and words that the Party stuffed me with. When I would open my mouth and talk, they would both stand there and wonder where I had gotten so many words. I didn’t understand the meaning of their silence, and this would drive me crazy. I was sure that only someone who presents facts, analyzes them, and explains them was worthy of being counted as part of the human race; the others were clods who had to be guided and taught. I admired explainers, people with a doctrine who knew what was good and what was bad. I thought stammering was a flaw. I was sure that one day they would send all the stammerers to special schools to correct their speech. There were months when I ignored my parents, as if they didn’t exist. They didn’t dare ask me what I was doing or what I planned to do. I saw their silence as annoying inertia and submission. I was glad to leave the house. Whenever I came to visit, my mother would stuff a banknote or two into my pocket, and that always stung, as if I had deceived them or stolen from them.

“I hated their passivity. ‘You have to coax customers,’ their neighbors kept advising them. ‘A customer won’t buy unless you coax him, show him, and convince him that the merchandise is good. Without persuasion, there are no sales.’ ‘Right,’ my father would say, but he didn’t change his ways. Not only were they both laconic; they also had an aversion to overdoing, to too much interference. I didn’t understand their focus on themselves, their way of walking about on tiptoes, their constant mindfulness. Everything within them was derived from fear, from prolonged, static ignorance, from an unwillingness to adhere to great beliefs and take action on behalf of the general good. All I saw was how miserable they were. Only over the past few years did I come to understand that my parents bore within them an ancient heritage from which they had been cut off. Perhaps they themselves didn’t realize it, but their behavior bespoke a nobility that had been diminished and had lost its value. Only during the past few months, in fact, did their silence palpably return to me. It was a silence born of a nobility that extended back for many generations, generations that have taught themselves this silence. They understood that life is short, incomprehensible, and ugly and that speaking didn’t necessarily add to understanding.

“Unfortunately, my parents had lost the positive silence of their ancestors, the silence that is prayer and connection with the God of their fathers. What remained with them was only a barren silence, without any connection to heaven, just a noble despair.”

Ernst stopped speaking, and Irena felt that this was a kind of pain that he had never before revealed to her.

Later he added, “They wanted to give me their soul and their might, but I didn’t know how to accept anything from them.”