Ernst writes until late at night and sleeps no more than four hours. “At my age, there’s no need for too much sleep.” His opinion is firm. Irena feels that four hours of sleep are not enough. True, Ernst dozes off in the afternoon, but he doesn’t sleep. “Don’t pay attention to me,” he says when depression assails him. Irena complies with his request and doesn’t enter his room unless he calls her. In her heart she knows that Ernst’s depression arrives as a stubborn and intransigent wave and that until it passes he will lie curled up in bed.
Last fall Ernst took some bundles of manuscripts out of a drawer and said to Irena, “These are the books I wrote and never finished.”
“One day you’ll sit down and finish them,” Irena said, and hoped he would not contradict her.
“I’ll never finish them.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re unworthy.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, frightened at his words.
Ernst struggles with life and with writing. He cannot change his life, but he is trying to give a new form to his writing. It is no longer descriptions of experiences and a mass of details, but only what is most necessary. For years he tried to write about human beings without any ethnic traits. He called his heroes Eldorado, Homer, and other names taken from ancient myths. They fought for justice, loyalty, and purity. But since Irena’s arrival in his home, many things in his life have changed. For years he tried to avoid contemplating his life, to ignore it, to build floating towers on it. Now his life is coming back to him like a spirit returning from the dead, and he knows that it seeks correction.
Rain falls without pause, the drops covering the windows. Most likely Ernst won’t go out to the café today. He’s sitting at his desk, copying. When Ernst copies something, it means he has a passage or a chapter that he wants to preserve. When he makes a copy, his handwriting is clear and without flourishes. He sits at his desk until noon.
“There’s fresh vegetable soup,” Irena announces ceremoniously.
“Thank you.”
Irena knows that there’s nothing like vegetable soup to lift Ernst out of the darkness. His struggle against depression is fierce. There were times when he lay in bed all day, but now Irena won’t allow him to give in to his pain. She invents all sorts of ruses and temptations to bring him to the table. Good food, she believes, can extricate him from his distress.
Sometimes, to make him happy, Irena wears her embroidered blouse and matching skirt, and she puts on makeup and earrings. Ernst is very pleased to see Irena in festive clothing.
I’ll do whatever you ask me to do, she wants to tell him. Ernst usually refuses to accept help. Even when he’s weak, he doesn’t want her to support him, not to mention wash him. Ernst is a proud man, and his pride is evident in his erect bearing. After the operation he was forced to accept assistance, but only to a slight degree. I’ll live as long as my legs can carry me. If I can’t walk, life is meaningless. When he goes out, striding confidently along, his weakness is not visible.
Irena serves Ernst soup and asks, “Is it good?”
“Very tasty.” That’s the answer she likes to hear. It’s a sign that the depression is lifting and that the light will soon return to his face.
“How is it outside?”
“Rainy and windy.”
“But now it seems to have stopped.”
As Ernst sits and sips the soup, his usual demeanor gradually returns, and a thin, ironic smile pinches his lips. Irena knows that smile very well. In a moment he will make some critical remark about himself or his situation. After lunch he shaves, dresses, and says, “I’m going to the café.”
“It’s cold out.”
“I like the cold.”
Ernst puts on his gray suit and his winter coat, wraps a thin woolen scarf around his neck, and says, “See you later.” After he leaves Irena feels a secret pride in her success, and for a long while she is wrapped in joy.
17
ERNST WROTE LAST NIGHT AND WAS PLEASED WITH WHAT he wrote. When he is pleased, his face opens up, and his weakness isn’t apparent. He shows Irena things that she didn’t expect to see: his city in its seasons, the hidden little parks where he loved to walk after school, and the tiny kiosks that looked like chapels, where you could buy a glass of cold lemonade or a cup of ice cream and from there go directly to the municipal library. High school was his racecourse. There he brilliantly demonstrated not only his knowledge but, mainly, his ability to think. French, literature, and philosophy were the subjects he loved, but he was also outstanding in the sciences. The teachers favored him, and everyone was impressed by his abilities and courtesy. No one doubted that he would become a university professor. How strange, he would later say to himself, that I sold my soul to a false faith. Communism, which took hold of him while he was in high school, halted his progress.
Irena has made Ernst breakfast: thin toast, low-fat cheese, and vegetables. She tries to vary his meals. This time she has added black olives and homemade plum preserves.
“You should sit and eat with me,” Ernst says in a commanding tone.
“I enjoy serving you.”
“But you also deserve breakfast.” He has demanded this on several occasions, but Irena doesn’t feel comfortable sitting next to him.
When it rains hard and the weather is very cold, Ernst lies in bed and reads the Bible. He discovered the Bible two years ago, and since then he has been charmed by the rhythm and the economy of the text. He reads a chapter or two in Hebrew every day, assisted by Martin Buber’s translation, which sounds too clever in comparison to the clarity of the original.
Yesterday Ernst recalled that three months before his thirteenth birthday, his father brought home a private tutor to prepare him for his bar mitzvah. The tutor was an old man whose eyes abounded with good-hearted gentleness. The old man grasped the Bible in his two pale hands, looked straight into Ernst’s eyes, and said, “This is our holy Torah, which we received from heaven. There are marvelous things in it. Our fathers watched over it with vigilance.” He spoke to Ernst in German mixed with Yiddish, which detracted somewhat from the value of his words. At that time Ernst was far from Jews and Judaism, and the old man’s words, full of conviction, sounded to him like a counterfeit appeal, if not a deceitful one.
A few of the lessons amused him, but before three weeks had passed, Ernst’s patience wore out. The sacrificial rituals seemed to him like a slurry of blood that belonged to a prehistoric age. He didn’t hide his opinion from the old man.
“You mustn’t talk that way,” his tutor replied. “God, the Master of All, hears you.”
“I’m not afraid. God is an invention of primitive man. We have been liberated from that invention.”
Ernst spoke to him as one speaks to an ignoramus. Upon hearing those impertinent words, the old man hung his head. After he recovered he turned to Ernst and said, “I see that you don’t want to learn our holy Torah.”
“No.” The answer came without delay.
The old man tried another tactic. “You can’t be a Jew without Torah,”
“I willingly give up that title.”
The old man said nothing further. He rose from his chair and headed toward the kitchen, where Ernst’s father was. After hearing what the old man had to say, Ernst’s father paid him, apologized, said a few words about the younger generation, and accompanied him to the door.
“I see that the Torah doesn’t interest you,” Ernst’s father said to him later.
“Correct.” Ernst was brief.
“You can learn history from the Torah.” His father tried to speak in the language of Jews who had attended high school.