All Whom I Have Loved (3 page)

Now the strange man sits and chats with Mother; they laugh and recall lighthearted memories. I stare at the man's face and I can't find a single pleasing feature in it. He's shorter than Mother, bald, and he wears glasses. Apparently Mother doesn't see the defects that I see; she listens to him and they recall names and places that sound strange and unpleasant to me. It's hard for me to take this lightheartedness, and I want to shout, “Stop this chattering, it hurts me!” But of course I hold it in and don't say a word.

Eventually, I feel sick and I throw up. Mother hastens to my side and holds my forehead.

The train has stopped. We get off, and Mother rinses out my mouth with water. The stranger parts from Mother, wishing her good luck in her new position. The train goes on its way, and I'm glad that there is no longer anyone between me and my mother. I cry, and Mother, who does not understand my tears, says, “What's come over you? Does something hurt you?”

She doesn't know that I am crying from sheer happiness.

This time Mother has not exaggerated. The new house is large, and behind it a garden stretches all the way to the forest. “I told you,” Mother says, and there is a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. She will soon begin teaching, but in the meantime there is plenty of time for us to go on walks and outings. Although a small town, Storozynetz does have some splendid stores and a café. Behind the houses and the stores, the fields and the orchards go on and on, and the farther we get from the town, the more I feel my life expanding. It is good to be near Mother.

“Mother,” I say, and she holds my hand tightly.

In the afternoon we sit on the mat behind the house. The landlord comes by to ask if everything is all right and if we need anything. He's short and he speaks German with a heavy accent, but he has a kind face and it seems that we won't have any differences of opinion, as we did with the landlord in Czernowitz.

In the evening Mother lights the large oil lamp and the dusky kitchen fills with light. We eat only vegetables, fruit, and dairy products and do not touch meat. One mustn't kill animals, Mother once said. I'm afraid to look the cows in the
pasture in the eye. They seem to know what their fate is and are asking me to save them.

Dinner lasts about an hour. In Czernowitz, Mother gave private lessons, with students arriving one after another and filling our small apartment with unquiet. At night, Mother would complain of headaches and would lie in bed with a damp cloth on her forehead. Now she doesn't complain. Her headaches seem to have stopped.

After dinner we sit in the bedroom, and Mother reads me
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
I'm so excited that Mother is near me that I find it hard to fall asleep. Even when I'm in bed, we go on talking. Mother reminisces about our vacation in the country, and suddenly all the images I stored up come to life. The river there wasn't deep or swiftly flowing, and perhaps this is why I remember it so well. I'm afraid that these clear images will be erased from my memory, and I repeat to myself: they won't be wiped away, they won't disappear, they will always be with me just as Mother will always be with me. But this very repetition stirs in me a deep sorrow that insinuates itself within me and resurfaces the next evening at twilight, when we come back from the street and stand in front of the house.

“Mother,” I say.

“What is it, my love?”

“Will we return to that village?”

“Why are you asking, my love?”

“I'm afraid that the village will disappear.”

“It won't disappear,” Mother says, and opens the door.

Even as our days are rich and overflowing, I discover that next door to us is a low structure, quite simple, surrounded by a fence, its yard full of bearded men.

“Who are they?”

“Jews.”

“What are they doing here?”

“They've come to pray.”

The bearded Jews frighten me, and when I stare at them from up close, they seem to be hiding something. Their movements are hasty and they're talking in whispers. I tell Mother what I'm thinking and she laughs, saying, “They're just like anyone else.”

Their prayer is also strange, a mixture of calls and shouts.

“That's the way they pray,” Mother says.

“Why are they shouting?”

“So that God will hear them.”

Meanwhile, we spend most of the day outside. We eat lunch in a restaurant, dressed in warm clothes. Sometimes it seems to me that we're only on vacation here, and that we'll soon return to Czernowitz. Sometimes, a man who looks exactly like my father passes us. I let go of Mother's hand and run toward him, but I realize immediately that I am mistaken. And when the evening is clear and there's no rain, we walk all the way down the main street and then on toward the fields. The fields are flat and open, and even if we walked the entire night, we would not reach the horizon.

As we became ever more enchanted with provincial life, Father appeared. He stood in the doorway, dressed in a gray suit, and I hardly recognized his swarthy face.

“Father!” I called.

His face lit up a bit.

Mother offered him a cup of coffee, but Father refused, saying: “I've come to see Paul; I'll bring him back by evening.”

It was strange: I had almost forgotten him.

“And how is it here?” he asked when we were out of the house.

“It's good.”

We crossed the main street and strolled around the alleyways. Eventually we went into the café where I had sat with Mother. The cloud seemed to lift from Father's face, and I saw that he was squinting, as if he were unused to the light.

I couldn't bear his silence, and I asked: “How was the journey here, Father?”

“Splendid,” he answered, and it was obvious that he wanted to make me happy.

One evening Mother revealed to me that Father had been a painter and was successful when he was young, but that later on he had stopped painting. Now, for a living, he taught art at a high school. He didn't enjoy his profession, and most of the time he was very depressed.

“What's depression?” I fumbled like a blind person. Mother explained this word in different ways, but her explanations clarified nothing for me. Much later I envisioned Father pressed between two iron boards and felt a pain in my chest.

I sat in the café with Father. He drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette. It was hard for me to imagine Father without a cigarette; sometimes it stayed stuck to his lower lip. “In another week the school year starts,” he said, and I felt that this burden weighed heavily upon him. I tried to picture him sitting and painting. It was easier to imagine him looking at a painting than painting. When he looked at a painting he had a sour expression, as if there were a serious defect in it.

Father sat next to me and didn't speak. In my imagination, I recalled the places he'd taken me. The chapels, of course. He was extremely fond of these little shrines where passersby stopped to pray. Once, he said to me: “The icons in the chapels are so beautiful, it's only natural that they be used by those who worship God.”

Mother also told me that in recent years Father had become addicted to drink, and that he squandered most of his salary on it. It was hard for me to picture Father staggering
and cursing in the streets like the drunks whom we came upon every Saturday evening.

When we left the café, we walked all the way down the main street again. It was clear that Father did not like the provinces. I tried to pull him toward the fields, but he refused, shrugging. We wandered around the houses and the stores. Finally we went into a tavern. Father gulped down two shot glasses and said, “That's more like it.”

When we arrived home, Father kissed me on my forehead but did not come into the house. He seemed a little more stooped, and his long arms hung limply. I wanted to call out, “Father, when will we meet again?” But I didn't manage to—he was already far off.

I watched how he walked. At first he walked in the middle of the street and kept turning his head to the side, and the farther he went, the clearer it was to me that he was looking for shelter from the harsh light in the street. Finally, he turned onto a dark side street and disappeared.

When I came in, Mother asked, “How was it?”

“We walked around,” I answered.

Only later did I feel the touch of Father's fingers, as if he were still holding my hand. I tried to remember what he had said to me, but I could recall nothing. His unmoving eyes continued to gaze at me for a long time.

Mother was making posters for her classes for the coming school year. I was glad that she left me alone and did not ask anything more. Each meeting with Father left me mute, as if he had poured his silence into me. Sometimes it seems to me that I'm like him, but when Mother holds out her hand to me, her mouth open and her eyes laughing, I immediately meld into her joyfulness.

I dreamed a dream, and in my dream I saw Father becoming more and more distant from me. He was taller than his usual height, and he towered like a giant over everyone in the street. People stared at him, as if he were some marvel that had sprung up before their very eyes. I stood at a distance and also marveled, but as he came nearer, Father seemed to shrink more and more, and people ceased paying attention to him, and eventually he disappeared into the darkness.

Shocked and frightened, I awoke. I remembered the dream clearly and I told it to Mother. Mother hugged me and said, “It's a dream, it'll pass.” And she closed her eyes. I felt a distance in her words, perhaps because she hadn't heard me out. I gazed at her sleeping face, and I was astonished that she didn't sense that I was awake. “Mother,” I called, but she didn't answer.

And so the night passed. The next day, a slim young Ruthenian girl came to us, and Mother said, “This is Halina. Halina will look after you and play with you. I'm starting to teach.”

Mother showed Halina the kitchen and the bedroom and said, “Paul loves to take walks. Take him for walks in the streets and in the fields.” Then she picked up her briefcase,
kissed me on my forehead, and left. I was in shock, and I didn't see her go out.

My mother tongue was German, and Halina spoke Ruthenian. She knew a few words of German and laughingly ticked them off on her fingers.

I stared at her, and it seemed that this was still the dream from the night before, that I was alone in the world among strangers, and that the person who had been brought to take care of me spoke a language that I didn't understand. “Get out of here,” I wanted to shout, but I choked and burst into tears. Halina tried to calm me. She cavorted and jumped up and down, she imitated birds and frogs, but the tears that were stored in me grew stronger and stronger. To distract me, she knelt down and wept with me, but even this ruse did not calm me.

I stood there and wept, and the tears seemed to flow back into me. Eventually I grew tired and fell asleep on the floor. When I awoke and saw Halina, I let out a shout. Halina must have been frightened, because she took me outside. “Take me to Mother! I want my mother!” I yelled, drumming my legs on the ground. Unfamiliar neighbors gathered around and tried to calm me, but I was so immersed in my tears that their every word only stoked my rage. Eventually they said to Halina: “There's no choice, take him to his mother, take him to the school.”

I wailed all the way to the school. Everything was a blur, but I did see the two-story building and the yard full of noisy children. My crying amused them, and they made fun of me. Halina scolded them and pulled me toward the teachers' room.

Mother saw me and was shocked. In her panic she let out a cry that sounded like she was choking. I was completely overcome with weeping and anger, and I lay on the
floor, kicking my legs. Mother knelt and said, “I'm here, my love.” The words barely penetrated my ears. Finally I got to my feet and dragged her outside. Mother didn't resist but let herself be dragged along behind me. I saw she was clenching her jaw, but she didn't rebuke me. The entire way home she tried to distract me by saying things to me, and at the kiosk she bought me an ice cream. Halina stood as if she had been reprimanded, ready to do as she was told. Mother asked her something in her language, and Halina shrugged and said, “What could I do?”

Halina went on her way, and Mother and I entered the house. Mother sat by the table and said nothing of my behavior. I felt that she was waiting for me to come to her and apologize, but something in me refused to do this. Mother went to prepare lunch and I sat on the floor. Suddenly I heard her say, “You'll have to get used to it.”
To get used to it
—I'd already heard this cold expression, but this time it sounded like ice falling from the roof in the winter.

“Mother.”

“What?”

“When is Father coming back?”

“I don't know.”

We ate dinner in silence. A wall of silence had suddenly sprung up between Mother and me. Toward the end of the meal, Mother tried to placate me, but I felt that her words came from her lips and not from her heart. Before going to sleep she said, “I have to go to work. I have no choice. You're a big boy and you understand.”

When I didn't respond she began to cry. In the city she would sometimes cry over Father's behavior, about his wastefulness and the times he didn't come home. But this
was a different kind of weeping; it was sharper and more bitter, as if she were saying, “You, too? You're ganging up with your father so as to hurt me?”

I didn't know what to do, and I knelt down.

“Don't make it so hard for me,” she implored.

“I won't make it hard.”

“I'm a new teacher and everyone's watching me.”

“I won't cry, I promise.”

Mother dried her eyes. Her face, which had become swollen from her tears, returned to itself, and she said, “What can I do? I have to go out to work. There's no one to support us.”

Her words sounded rehearsed, but the more she said, the clearer it became that I would not be able to stop the nanny from coming the next day. So as not to show how much it hurt me and to please her, I said, “Don't worry about it, Mother. I'll go to the park with Halina.”