We spent the rest of the night in the kitchen; we drank tea and didn’t talk. I suddenly sensed the same dread we had felt at home in the last weeks before our deportation. My mother’s face bore signs of illness. My father ran from hospitals to private clinics. There were doctors who thought an operation was urgent and should be done immediately, and others who advised us to postpone it until we were settled in the new place.
“Who knows what will be in the new place?” Papa said, and he decided the operation should be performed by the renowned surgeon Dr. Orenstein.
I was still a student at the gymnasium and didn’t accompany my father on the day of my mother’s surgery. I was studying for the comprehensive exam in German, but my soul was consumed by Anastasia. Dark rumors rustled everywhere, but I continued to meet her every evening.
We promised each other loyalty and everlasting love. A smile I didn’t recognize appeared in Anastasia’s eyes. I asked her if she regretted the promise. She laughed out loud at my question, as if I didn’t understand her. I apologized.
It’s hard to describe how blind I was, but it was more than blindness. I saw my parents’ agony, but their agony didn’t touch me. My contact with them had shrunk to a quick hello in the morning and evening. As soon as I left the house, I pictured Anastasia. I ran to meet her on Lilac Lane.
Meanwhile, my mother underwent the surgery. Papa didn’t budge from her bedside. When I came and went, Mama looked at me with compassion. I knew what I should tell her, but I didn’t say it.
I was an only child and meant everything to my parents. They saw me growing distant from them but let me do so. They didn’t want to disrupt my happiness. Who knows what they thought of me in those days at the edge of the abyss.
The ghetto opened my eyes but not wide enough. I kept telling myself: it’s a mistake, a misunderstanding. I would stand by the fence for hours waiting for Anastasia. I was certain that she, too, was a captive in her home and unable to come to me. Her father had once said to me, “Edmund, don’t be like the Jews.” It sounded like a joke. Only later did I realize it was a warning that meant, Don’t go too far with my daughter. Our girls, unlike the Jewish girls, protect their chastity until the wedding.
Later on, at the train station, surrounded by dozens of soldiers, I kept looking for Anastasia among the people who walked freely a short distance from the fence.
Several young people escaped from the station. I, too, wanted to escape, but the sense of obligation I had belatedly come to feel held me back. Were it not for Papa and Mama, who began to whisper urgently, “Run away!,” I might not have escaped.
ISIDOR CAME OVER and put his hand on my shoulder, which snapped me out of my reverie. He was focused on the fighters who had gone out that night on the dangerous mission. I was ashamed that at this fateful hour my thoughts were not with those who went down the mountain to risk their lives.
“Isidor,” I said to him, “your prayers are not only moving, they also show us our parents and grandparents in a light we hadn’t known.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Isidor said, lowering his eyes.
“My parents kept their distance from collective ritual,” I said, “but their hearts were attuned to the mysteries of nature and art. Their ongoing love for Bach connected them with God.”
My words must have confused Isidor, and he closed his eyes.
It occurred to me that Isidor is not a cantor but an artist of prayer. Like an artist, he doesn’t know exactly what he is doing or what he makes happen.
I didn’t want to further confuse him, and so I kept quiet.
“It’s too bad they didn’t include me with the fighters,” Isidor mumbled.
Time inched along slowly, tensely. Tsila and Miriam made sandwiches for the fighters’ return.
One of the fighters waiting with us, whose voice I hadn’t heard till now, tried to explain his worldview to another fighter who sat beside him. “A person must reject Darwinism and not be part of the struggle for existence. We have an inner world that guides us.”
The other fighter listened and said, “When you say ‘inner world,’ I assume you mean a moral world.”
“Correct.”
“Who is the ruler of this inner world?”
“How do you mean? The individual ‘I’ of each of us.”
“But isn’t the ‘I’ likely to fall into error and become addicted to itself, or to some corrupt ideology? Man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
“The self cannot be damaged or corrupted; it is good, it is moral.”
This conversation seemed to have been uprooted from elsewhere and brought here. The fighter who began the conversation appeared to forget where we were and what was happening to us. Perhaps in order to distract himself, he returned to a place he loved—the philosophy department at the gymnasium.
I went outside with Isidor. The snow didn’t stop and lit up the darkness with its falling flakes. I’ve loved to watch this magic since childhood.
“Did you graduate from the gymnasium?” I asked Isidor.
“A year ago.”
“I was about to graduate, but I didn’t. How is it that I never met you there?”
“There were so many of us, running down the long corridors, everyone to his classes and examinations.”
“Many things happened in my parents’ house in the last weeks before the deportation, but they didn’t affect me. Not even my mother’s illness,” I found myself saying.