13
When the season displeases me, I head north to the barren Graten Mountains. I go most of the way on foot, but if it rains hard, I hire a wagon and ride up. When I first told Rabbi Zimmel about my trips there, he remarked, “In that place, as far as I know, Jews never lived.” But I, for some reason, am drawn there. I readily obey my legs; never have they deceived me. Once they revealed Stark’s hiding place to me. By means of them I discovered the good fairs, and even my Bertha. My thoughts are always full of conflict, my feelings about to explode. Only my legs have composure.
The Graten Mountains are high but not steep, and they extend over a large area. At the end of summer a dense silence hangs there, completely intoxicating me. I rent a room from a peasant woman, Gretchen, and I sleep. When I first came to her she still worked in the fields. Her married daughters would come from far away and visit her. They would sit together outdoors and chat late into the night. Occasionally I, too, would join them. Now she’s eighty, her face has shriveled, but when she wears her straw hat in the garden, her youth returns to her face, and she hoes the flower beds with spryness.
In the evening she serves me cottage cheese in sour cream, a salad of garden vegetables, and fresh village bread. She is a simple woman, and her ideas are limited, but when she talks about her garden, about the cow that no longer gives milk in abundance, about the dog that died an untimely death, and about her daughters who no longer visit her as in the past, her words have a kind of hidden wisdom. I know that, unlike me, she has always been close to plants and animals, and from them she has drawn vitality. Now, in her old age, she speaks about her death in a natural way, as if she knows when her day will come. I ask her various questions because I like to hear her voice. There is nothing superfluous in her words. What she knows from her experience, she tells me, without affectation or pretense.
A year ago, when I told her I was Jewish, she was surprised, but she didn’t burden me with questions. That evening I realized that the information had stunned her. Though she continued to serve me meals with the same care, she no longer sat beside me. A kind of sadness that I had not seen before began to register in her face. Gretchen, I wanted to tell her, if my presence disturbs you, I’ll look for another place. Your old age is precious to me, and I wouldn’t want to bring any distress to it.
She apparently understood my expression, and at a certain point seemed about to apologize, but her aversion was obviously too strong for her to overcome. Jews, I had learned, are intimidating, and now that they are absent their memory arouses a kind of hidden panic. Once a whore on a night train confided to me that she was willing to sleep with any man, in any place, but not with a Jew. Jews cast a pall over her appetites, and it was hard for her to abide her body afterward.
“How do you know who is a Jew?” I feigned innocence.
“They’re circumcised, didn’t you know?” She betrayed her foolishness.
Last year, when I left Gretchen, I didn’t say, “Until we see each other again,” and she didn’t see me out as usual. I knew that she didn’t want to see me again.
But life is not only failures, it turns out. As I was leaving her house, I saw, as in a bad dream, a short, bearded man coming up from the valley. I couldn’t believe my eyes and drew closer to him. Indeed, he was a Jew.
“What’s a Jew doing here?” I blurted.
“I live here,” he answered quietly.
It turned out that not far away, in an isolated house, he and his wife lived with their seven children. Later he told me their story. They had been brought here during the war, and here they had been saved. He hasn’t left since. They keep a little shop and an inn for travelers. His faith was embodied in all his manners, even in the way he looked at his children. His wife was short and thin, and it was hard to believe that her belly had borne seven children.
“Do you come from an observant home?” I asked.
“No.”
Religious Jews frighten me. They are very conspicuous, and it is easy to identify them. More than once over the years, in remote railway stations, I wanted to approach one of them and whisper in his ear, Your appearance gives you away. Why wear a yarmulke? Why? But I didn’t feel this man was in danger. His movements were calm, and his face serene. The children surrounded him with softness and sheltered him. I told him that I came there once a year, that I stayed with Gretchen and hiked in the countryside. I was glad he didn’t ask about my business. When people do that, my insides shrivel up. His house reminded me of Grandfather’s house, which was also suffused with calm. Only a believer, it seems, knows tranquility.
“How did you attain faith?” I ventured into his territory and immediately regretted it. He looked at his wife, and the two of them looked at me as if to say, We cannot answer that. If we say that we felt it was the only way we could live after the camps, would we have conveyed anything? And if we added that we felt this place was entrusted to us, and that we had to preserve it, would that be understood?
Later he told me that he intended, in another year, to sell what he could and emigrate to Jerusalem. The period of isolation was ending, and the time had come to rejoin the Jewish people. The words were familiar to me, and I understood their meaning. Despite that a barrier descended between us, divided us in silence.
Meanwhile, he told me that in the past year some hooligans had poured kerosene on his house with intentions of setting it afire. Had it not been for the brave dogs that attacked them, the house would have burned down. “You need a pistol,” I said.
We talked until late at night. It turned out that they had been in the same labor camp I was in, they had worked in the same “pits,” but they remembered more than I did. They not only remembered Stark and Mina, but also my Bertha. When I told them that Bertha had gone back to her hometown, they weren’t surprised. They told me that she had spoken about her parents with great longing. The hospitality of these people showed me how cut off I was from this world, as if I had lost everything, even my few memories.
That night I didn’t sleep. I was angry that Gretchen, whose ways I admired and still admire, had estranged herself from me, as if she had discovered in me an unforgivable flaw. Though she had made no insulting remark, all of her being had said, Something about you isn’t right. Maybe it’s not your fault, but still it’s hard to bear the presence of someone so hideously flawed within. It seemed that because of me her blue eyes had changed color and become metallic so as to have the power to drive me out of her life, which was nearing its end.