Suddenly, Love

50

ERNST NO LONGER WRITES WITH MOMENTUM OR WITHOUT interruption. He pauses and reads the little that he has written to Irena. Irena listens attentively. She believes that he is conveying important things to her. She doesn’t know whether they are practical or more esoteric, but she feels that her world is expanding from day to day.

Sometimes Irena thinks that in his youth Ernst trained to be a priest, like Samuel in the Bible, who served Eli the High Priest. Ernst also contemplated nature and people and heard voices, but the circumstances of his life made him stray from the path of his fathers, and he was captured by the enchantments of the Communist Party. Now he was trying to understand why his life went astray, why he served Moloch for so many years, why his ancestors didn’t help him get free of the trap. They are now the focus of his longings. He searches for them in the Bible. He has no doubt that there is a close connection between the patriarchs in Genesis and his ancestors in the Carpathians, but he has no proof.

Irena, to tell the truth, has no interest in questions that are beyond her comprehension. Ernst’s pains and whatever she can do to ease them — most of the time she concentrates on this and this alone. Ernst’s pains are not apparent. He suppresses them, so they are not expressed outwardly, but Irena knows how fierce they are. She makes certain to serve him food that he finds palatable, to give him his medicine at the correct time, to change the pillows as needed, and to distract him. When the pain attacks him, she curls up with him. The wall that once separated them has been completely erased, and she is ready to go anywhere their paths may take them.

Irena is a woman like other women but somehow different. When she sits next to Ernst, or even at some distance from him, it seems to him that she is touching his thoughts. There are no conflicts, reservations, resentments, accusations, or torments of conscience in her world. She blesses that which is good and beautiful or keeps silent.

Often in his dreams Ernst sees Irena standing in wonder among the trees in the Carpathians or working in the vegetable garden. When evening comes, she puts the hoe on her shoulder and returns home.

He is certain that his grandparents would have been pleased with her and would have received her cordially. She, for her part, would have been excited by all the charms of the Carpathians. Irena likes wooden bowls, blue sky, and open fields. When she sees a flower, she is likely to cry. She’s sentimental. Sentimentality doesn’t suit everyone, but it suits Irena. Ernst’s mother and father would certainly have accepted her cordially as well, and they would have been happy with her, too. A house where silence and melancholy reign all day seeks someone whose face glows with life.

“Irena, do you understand me?” Ernst rouses from his reverie and asks her.

Irena doesn’t always know exactly where Ernst is at any given time and what thoughts that place arouse in him, but she can usually guess. When he tells her about the Carpathian Mountains, the sights are not alien to her. More than once she wanted to tell him, Don’t worry. I have been there, too. I’m not a stranger to those paths because you’ve taken me there more than once.

When strong pains wake him and Irena’s embraces don’t work, she doesn’t hesitate to give him an injection to ease the pain. The injection works immediately, and Ernst is so grateful that he hugs and kisses her.

The pain lacerates his body, but Ernst is not a miserable person. Irena’s presence, her closeness, opens corridors for him to worlds he never knew. Or if he knew of them, he was blind to them. He had never imagined such love.

Some nights when Ernst is awake, he tells Irena about previously unknown parts of his life. When he tells her about his grandparents, his face immediately takes on the look of his grandfather: that of a proud peasant with the faith of his fathers instilled in him, his forehead broad and determined. And when he tells her about his parents, his face quickly turns gloomy; their misery clings to his cheeks, and he is as lost as they were. But then the story of his time in the Red Army rouses him to life.