Suddenly, Love

29

THERE IS ANOTHER SETBACK IN ERNST’S RECOVERY. THIS time it’s his heart. “When I get home, I’ll be a different man,” he says. How will he be different? Irena wonders. In any case, she will light a memorial candle in his house, too. Her parents were very particular about Holocaust Remembrance Day. They used to fast and sit at home next to the memorial candles and read memorial albums. When the Zalachov memorial album was published, they bought three copies. They sent one copy to their cousin in Bnei Brak and placed two copies in the bookcase. There were articles in the book about Zalachov before and during the war, and a long article about the survivors who gathered after the war.

Holocaust Remembrance Day was like Yom Kippur in their home. Irena’s parents weren’t particular about observing all the commandments. In fact, they kept only a few of them, but the few they kept gave the house an air of exaltation and secrecy. This was especially felt on Holocaust Remembrance Day and on Yom Kippur. There was always something of Irena’s grandparents in her parents’ ways, even in how they sat at the table or kept silent. They didn’t intentionally conduct themselves like their parents, but their parents’ mannerisms were stored up inside them. If they said a blessing, they did it the way their parents had done it.

“What are you thinking about?” Ernst surprises her again.

“About Holocaust Remembrance Day.” She doesn’t keep it from him.

“Is Holocaust Remembrance Day coming?”

“In a month.”

Ernst has noticed that Irena also speaks about the Holocaust with astonishing simplicity. There were years when he didn’t talk about it at all. He was convinced that writing about the Holocaust was impossible, forbidden. He found firm supporters for this opinion. The philosopher Theodor Adorno, for example, claimed that writing poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric.” Ernst accepted this without challenge.

All the texts for Holocaust Remembrance Day sound clumsy to him, meaningless and, even worse, grotesque: a bunch of hacks and politicians spouting trite words, carrying torches, and glorifying the partisans. If that’s the way people talk about the Holocaust, then I won’t talk about it, he would say to himself. And indeed, he kept his silence.

When Ernst married Sylvia, he found a true partner in his feelings. She, too, had cut herself off from her parents and hated their tribe — its way of life and its beliefs. Every Jewish book, every custom — not to mention weddings and bar mitzvah celebrations, Simhat Torah, and funerals — drove her out of her mind.

“The Zionists talked about a free people, about normalcy. Where’s the freedom? Where’s the normalcy? Everything is done here as it was done in the shtetl,” she protested. Her physical beauty and her blunt language combined to give her a wild power. When their fights grew more frequent, first about trivial matters and later about his writing, Ernst felt that her hostility was full of poison.

One day he couldn’t restrain himself. “Monster!” he shouted at her. Sylvia gave as good as she got and screamed back at him. “You sickening skeptic! Incurable busybody! Paper eater!” Ernst had only one word, and he repeated it every time they fought: “Monster!” When she heard it, her mouth would fly open and a flood of invective would pour out. In time he was to say: “How could I have lived with that human beast?”

After Ernst separated from Sylvia, it seemed to him that his writing, which had proceeded hesitantly all those years, with infinite drafts, would now come together and flow. There were a few encouraging signs, but they proved to be only ephemeral. Ernst’s imagination drifted in a chaotic, insubstantial world. Every time he thought about his parents or the grandparents who lived in the Carpathian Mountains, he would push their memory aside.

Not until Irena’s arrival did Ernst understand that his parents, Tina, and Helga, who had detached themselves from him and who now lived in the world of water, would gather together on Holocaust Remembrance Day with other tormented victims. Despite the awkward ceremonies, on that day they would have a tiny resurrection.

A few days ago Ernst saw the Bug River in a nightmare. In it were his parents, Tina, and Helga. For a moment it appeared as though they were bathing in quiet water. Around them floated people whom he knew well, though he couldn’t remember their names. He was about to address them, the way he used to address an audience as a commissar on the first of May or on the anniversary of the revolution, and proclaim, Comrades, we are nearing the day when you who are living eternally in the River Bug and we who are on its banks will intermingle, and there will be no barrier between us. But in the middle of the dream he woke up and grabbed Irena’s hand.