“ ‘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.
49
BY NOW IT IS HARD FOR ERNST TO GET UP IN THE MORNING. Irena washes him and, after drying him off, hands him his razor. Ernst jokes, saying that he’s now reached the level of a baby that needs to be taken care of.
His daily schedule has changed. He’s still awake for most of the day, writing for two hours and reading. He embroiders plans for the future: a book about the Jews of the Carpathians. He’s certain that if he becomes immersed in that enchanted land, it will open its soul to him. He has already carved out a bit, but the way forward is still a long one. The Carpathian Mountains won’t let just anyone enter them. You have to prepare yourself, to shake off the confusions that have stuck to you, and only then can you start from the beginning.
Ernst lies in bed, once again calling up pictures from his past in Jerusalem. His writing had been imprisoned by matters concerning all of mankind, lacking time and place, and distant from his own life. He had once spoken about this with S. Y. Agnon. Ernst had placed great faith in Agnon. He admired Agnon’s devotion to his ancestors and to their faith, and he was certain he would find in him a brother for his way of thinking. But for some reason Agnon didn’t welcome him. On the contrary, he spoke ill of his home city, Czernowitz, of its rabbis, authors, and poets, most of whom, like Ernst, had adopted the German language, developed it, and written in it. He even found fault with some of the great Hasidic masters in his city, or, rather, with their followers. But above all he hated the apostate Jakob Frank, who claimed that redemption would come not to a generation worthy of it, but to one that was unworthy of it. Therefore one should commit many sins, and whoever sinned the most was the most praiseworthy. Frank had polluted many regions, but above all he had laid waste to Galicia and Bucovina.
Now that the pain is robbing Ernst of sleep, he’s sorry he hadn’t devoted time to studying Jakob Frank, to learning how that cheat had managed to tempt women and men with his secret rituals. Who knows what happened to those souls and their descendants? Who has continued to worship Frank in secret and who had atoned for his sins? Ernst agrees with Agnon: wanton souls like the ones that Frank fostered don’t disappear. They are reincarnated and take on new faces in the next generation. But Ernst doesn’t agree that every Jew from the Czernowitz region has to examine his soul, lest a spark of that apostate’s alien fire be reincarnated within him. It angers Ernst that Agnon wanted to exempt Buczacz, his native city, from the possibility of influence of that evildoer and that Agnon attributed all of Frank’s pollution to Ernst’s city instead. It was well known that no city or town in Galicia and Bucovina, including Buczacz, had escaped that reprobate’s poison.