But now Irena is with him. Her presence is the gateway to life. In her company, every high or inflated word sounds foolish. Now Ernst uses only those words whose content one can see, words that have no ambiguity, words to which one can reach out, as one reaches for a slice of bread or a pitcher of milk.
When his spirit is ablaze, Ernst envisions himself writing an essay on biblical prose: on word choices, on the severe factuality, on the avoidance of descriptions and embellishments, on the eschewing of explanations and interpretations, on the absence of allusion to externals, on simplicity and straightforwardness, on wonderment with no doubts, on the silence between sentences and between words.
At night Irena dreams that they are walking together in the Carpathian Mountains. Ernst is wearing khaki trousers and a military jacket, with an officer’s cap on his head. He is tall and graceful. Irena also feels light on her feet, and she wonders at the splendid meadows. “When did I become so closely acquainted with this place? After all, I was never there.” She is amazed. Ernst smiles and says, “We were born here. Because of some mistake we were driven from this paradise and cast into exile. But finally the mistake has been corrected, and we have returned to the place where God and man dwell together. And soon we will come to the sanctuary.”
“The sanctuary?” Irena asks in surprise.
“You have nothing to fear. Grandfather’s house is his sanctuary. There is no altar; no one makes sacrifices. It’s just the gateway to heaven.”
Ernst embraces Irena and swings her into the air; he catches her and swings her again. In his arms she is light. She is a bird. She hangs onto his neck. Her hair smells of pine. She breathes in the fragrance and is drunk with it.
“I had a dream,” Irena tells Ernst.
“What did you see?”
“I saw the Carpathians, and in the middle of the meadows there were only the two of us.”
Ernst wants to thank her for pulling him up out of the depths of despair and into a life that has sunlight, but he doesn’t know how to say this without embarrassing her.
In the afternoon Ernst feels better, and he sits down to write. The brick-colored shirt suits his face. The effort is visible in his arms but not in his face. A glow illuminates his brow, and for a moment Irena wants to approach him and say, Ernst, you don’t know how much happiness you gave me when you swung me up. I was so light in your arms.
Later she serves him a cup of tea. Ernst drinks and keeps writing, and Irena has no doubt that it will be this way from now on. Ernst will write, and every day he will discover a new corner of the Carpathians. She, for her part, will watch over him, wash him, prepare the food he enjoys, iron the clothes he likes, and sit by his side. The doctor will come, and they will talk about writing, and she will reinforce the house on every side. No harmful creature will ever dare to approach the window.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aharon Appelfeld is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Badenheim 1939, Tzili, The Iron Tracks (winner of the National Jewish Book Award), The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and Until the Dawn’s Light (winner of the National Jewish Book Award). Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion, and Yeshiva University. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he lives in Israel.