Ernst would wait for the new words to come to him at night, and as though in spite, they wouldn’t. If they did appear and he was ready for them, his job in the investment company used up his hours. His wife wickedly declared: A person shouldn’t write for the drawer. If you don’t publish, you’d be better off stopping.
The phone rings. Sylvia is calling. Irena approaches Ernst and whispers in his ear.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” he grumbles.
“Ernst can’t come to the phone.” Irena tries to be tactful.
“Did you tell him who was calling?”
“I did.”
“Tell him that he’s bad.”
Of course she doesn’t tell him that.
“I don’t want to see her,” Ernst says. “If she comes here, don’t let her in.”
Irena is pleased with Ernst’s vigorous response. For a moment she thinks that the evil spirits that have assailed him for the past few days have receded. Indeed, they have, but not his backache. Irena keeps rubbing salve on his back. The salve relieves the pain, and he gets out of bed and sits at his desk.
Since the beginning of winter, Irena’s own life has meant nothing: all her thoughts have been devoted to Ernst. Even when she is at home, surrounded by the objects she has lived with since her childhood, she thinks about him. Sometimes she telephones Ernst from home to ask whether the supper was tasty and whether she should bring him anything besides some rolls in the morning. If he asked her, she would have stayed in his house at night, too. Irena knows there are times when Ernst has to be by himself, to write and struggle. Though the struggle weakens him and usually depresses him, in the end it gives him the will to live. One morning he said to her, “Last night I wrote a chapter that I’m pleased with.” His face was drained, but there was a flash of victory in his eye.
Ernst is tall and robust, and his struggle to write is also robust. Irena envisions this struggle as the bending of iron bars. But when he is calm, sitting in the armchair and looking through a magazine, she wants to kneel at his feet, cover his hand with both of hers, and say, I’m so pleased that you allow me to serve you.
Once he commented to her: “You’re not a servant.”
“You don’t let me serve you,” she said with distress.
“We are friends, and friends don’t serve each other,” he replied.
Irena thought so much about those words that she began to think he was mocking her.
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.
7
IT’S STRANGE, BUT ERNST HARDLY EVER ENVISIONS HIS parents. For seventeen years he lived in their company, but now their features are faded and blurred. They were withdrawn people who hardly ever spoke. Sometimes his father would erupt, and his mother would rush to do his bidding. Ernst suffered from their silence. It appeared to be repressed anger, and sometimes like a sunset in thick darkness. They left for their grocery store early in the morning and returned home after dark. They were more relaxed in the store than they were at home.