Suddenly, Love

48

ONE MORNING ERNST OPENS HIS EYES, GETS OUT OF BED, and says, “Last night I dreamed that I was in my parents’ house. Father lay on the sofa, and Mother was in the kitchen. They were glad that I had come home. I expected Father to say a happy word to me, but he, as usual, didn’t utter a syllable. He looked at me with his tired gaze, which hadn’t changed at all, as if to say, What is there to say? But Mother was overjoyed. She came up to me and said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come home. I knew that one day you would return, but I didn’t know when. Father didn’t believe it, but I did. Too bad I don’t have anything in the house to serve you.’ Upon hearing her words, Father smiled with the same skeptical smile that would appear on his face after an exhausting day at work in the grocery store. Finally, he overcame his silence and asked, ‘Where are you going?’

“ ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I replied succinctly.

“Father’s expression was suddenly like a mirror. Now I plainly saw how similar my appearance was to his. Mother apparently knew that. She always used to say, ‘You look like your father.’ But I refused to accept it. I didn’t regard skepticism and moroseness as noble qualities. Now this dream came and, as it were, slapped me in the face.”

Irena listened to the dream and said, “That’s a good dream.”

“How do you know?”

“Your parents are watching over you.”

Irena’s faith is simple, anchored in the God of her parents and grandparents. Her faith has concrete expression: the candles, the dried flowers, the corner where she secludes herself with her parents. Her faith or, more accurately, her beliefs are her secret. She doesn’t talk about them much. Ernst understands some of them, and when he occasionally asks her about them, she is frightened; she blushes and doesn’t know how to answer. Now a new conviction has been added to her beliefs: her faith in Ernst’s writing. It tells her that Ernst is writing important things, perhaps new teachings for life. She expects that Ernst will tell her more about them.

In the afternoon, if his pains subside, Ernst sits in the armchair and reads the Bible. Sometimes he pulls out a word or a verse and talks about it. The Bible doesn’t distinguish between heaven and earth. The patriarchs loved their wives, their open spaces, and their flocks. They were bold nomads and sometimes cruel, but at the same time they heeded heaven. Death didn’t scare them. When a man believes that he is gathered up unto his fathers, death has no dominion over him.

Now the Carpathians are Ernst’s sanctuary. Sometimes it’s plain to see that he isn’t even here but instead is leaning on the trunk of a plane tree or sitting next to a window that leads to heaven. Sometimes it seems to Irena that he’s praying. That’s a mistake, of course. Ernst does look into the prayer book sometimes and is impressed by the prayers, but he doesn’t pray. “It’s doubtful whether a Jew in our day and age knows how to pray,” she has heard him say.

When her soul is filled with everything that Ernst tells her or writes down, Irena feels that she must share her experiences with her parents. She rushes to her house, tidies it, lights a candle, and sits in her chair.

Irena’s parents have come back, and they are happy to hear everything that she tells them. Her only regret is that her words aren’t properly phrased. She worries that she hasn’t told them the important things, that she has instead turned minor matters into major ones. More than once, instead of recounting something, she has wept.

In her sleep Irena accompanies Ernst to the Carpathians. Since Ernst began reading to her about life in the Carpathians, those mountains are always in view. She immerses herself in their darkness and rises with the morning light breaking through the treetops. Sometimes it appears that in the depths of the night Ernst is struggling with the commissars who filled the Jewish storekeepers with dread. His expression is tense, like someone who has drawn his sword from its sheath and is ready for hand-to-hand battle. Once he told her, “The Jewish commissars were the worst of all. They didn’t spare their brethren.” She was horrified, for he included himself among them.

Ernst’s life is now within her body. In one of her dreams she saw him praying with his grandfather, and the next day she told him about the dream. Ernst listened and commented, “I loved Grandfather, and I loved to hear his prayers. But I didn’t know the prayers. My father knew them, but he had lost the ability to pray. When I came to my grandfather, my father’s muteness was already embedded in me.”

Ernst keeps opening windows into his soul. What’s easy for her is like splitting the Red Sea for him. There are many burning places in his life. Every time he approaches them, he is stunned or angry.

“You’re never angry,” he says to Irena.

“Whom should I be angry at?” she says, shrugging her shoulders.

Where does she get that strength? Ernst asks himself and has no answer. Innocence, certainly, but it isn’t an innocence lacking in practical wisdom. Her practical wisdom is accompanied by simple happiness. She never exaggerates, never burdens him with questions, and when she’s distressed, she turns to her parents. Her path to God is always by means of her parents.