Suddenly, Love

6

QUIET DAYS FOLLOW. EVERY MORNING ERNST GOES OUT to the café. Irena does the housework diligently, without undue haste, as though directed by an inner guide. At first Ernst thought that she didn’t talk because she lacked the words. He knew that Irena had left school after the tenth grade. She helped her mother in the house, and when she turned eighteen she enrolled in a school for practical nurses. But he soon realized he was mistaken. True, Irena doesn’t speak much, but the little that leaves her mouth is drawn from deep within her. Her words are well chosen and have an inner charm. Ernst has also noticed: she moves swiftly, but without nervousness or unrest. She takes care of things with caution, but not in weakness.

“Were your parents observant?” he once asked, as though incidentally.

“Yes,” she said, surprised by the question that landed upon her.

“And you’re observant, too?”

“I do what my mother did,” she said simply.

Ernst wanted to keep questioning her, but seeing her embarrassment, he stopped. Yet he couldn’t restrain himself and a bit later asked, “Were your parents always observant?”

“In their youth, they were in the Hashomer Hatsa’ir youth movement,” she said, blushing.

“When did they go back to a traditional lifestyle?”

“After the war.”

Strange, Ernst said to himself, specifically after the war.

Only that night, after having had a drink, did Ernst grasp that his questions had been invasive and coarse. Irena had answered because he was her employer, but even an employer has to be polite. If it hadn’t been so late, he would have telephoned her to apologize.

“Forgive me,” he said as soon as she arrived the next morning.

“For what?”

“For my questions.”

“I wasn’t insulted.”

“But I insulted myself with my behavior.”

Irena doesn’t keep all the commandments, just the ones that her mother observed. On Friday evening she lays two loaves of challah on the table and lights the Sabbath candles. The sight of the candles stirs her memory, and she sees not only her mother but also her grandfather and grandmother, whom she knew only through photographs. On Yom Kippur she fasts, but she doesn’t go to synagogue.

She doesn’t say the Grace After Meals, but she will say the appropriate blessing when she eats a fruit for the first time each year. Right after Yom Kippur her father would put up a sukkah on the balcony. Since her parents died, she has not had a sukkah, but on Sukkot her thoughts dwell on the sukkah that her father used to build.

Since childhood Irena has had the ability to imagine things from afar, to describe places and people even though she had never seen them. Her mother had been frightened by that ability, and she used to say to her, “You mustn’t imagine things. People who imagine things end up being liars.” When, for example, Irena said, “I see Grandpa,” her mother would interrupt her and say, “You can’t see him. You’re just imagining that you do. The Germans murdered Grandpa.” Those comments did hamper her imagination, but since she started to work for Ernst, Irena has regained her ability. When she sits at home now, she sees her grandfather and grandmother as they were before the war, before they were murdered.

Ernst has recently begun to contemplate Irena from different perspectives. She’s a woman like any other, but different nonetheless. The difference isn’t evident. Sometimes she seems like a woman who knows how to listen, but mostly she is reserved. Sometimes he discovers a smile in her, as though she were embracing a secret. Sometimes she says, “Thank God.” When she does so, Ernst wants to say, It’s not proper to proclaim your faith in public. Faith must be hidden. Of course he doesn’t say it. But once, in a moment of deep gloom, he couldn’t restrain himself.

“Why do you say ‘thank God?’ ” he asked. “Not everything he does, if he does anything, is worthy of thanks. You mustn’t justify his cruel acts. Say thanks for what’s good and beautiful, but not for what’s ugly and filthy.”

Irena was alarmed and left the room.

When depression seizes Ernst, he mainly keeps silent. But sometimes he’s flooded with speech and talks vehemently about ugliness and cruelty, which blacken the heavens and sow despair. Irena knows that his words are not directed at her, but she does feel that a bit of it is, and she is filled with both sorrow and guilt.

In the depths of her heart, Irena loves Ernst’s rage. Rage adds to the strength of his face. “In my youth love was uprooted from within me!” he once cried out. Irena didn’t understand what he meant, and of course she didn’t ask. But at home one night, her heart opened and she said, I’ll give you all the love that I’ve gathered up.