Smooth the evening down around you; let the world settle. Intimacy of reading: he would make his way back home alone, in a straight line, without twists or turns. And then a little later: He rose to his feet, looked for a stick and found one, and he immediately thrust it into the soft earth. That would be his sign. ‘I shall no longer stray from my course’, he vowed to himself.
The book makes the silence around it. Sentences like the brushstrokes of a Zen calligrapher: sure, even simple – but that simplicity is at the service of a telling that moves like the unfolding of a destiny. It could not be otherwise: I shall no longer stray from my course, is written in the book; but that writing is already fidelity. In these opening pages, it is as though writing is redoubled – and writing itself is allowed to speak.
Tiredness and disgust. Then the book which in the midst of that same tiredness, that same disgust seem to stand straight up like the dorsal fin of a fish? It redeems nothing – still tiredness, still disgust, but now that standing up, that uprightness, and even a forward movement. No more listlessness; the book is moving. And it commands that you, too, must move.
He slept tranquilly and dreamlessly. The chill of the night seeped into his torn shoes, but he didn’t wake up. He had become used to sleeping in bitter cold. Toward dawn he roused himself and got up. The stick, he found, was still standing in place, and he was happy for it as though for a familiar sign of life.
Move – but where am I going? Into what am I leaning? The same tiredness, the same disgust. And like the narrator, I carry a stick and lodge it in the earth. The book is the stick. Or the stick is the pencil I use to mark where I am. But where am I? In truth, I am rereading, and discovering again the signs I wrote then as I read. What is that word? Reduction. My word. And that phrase? Everything pointed in the same direction. My phrase.
The reduction – what books are they that bring you back to the simple? I wrote the word, sacred, thinking now of what need makes of the starving and the desperate. Egotism without ego – whose phrase is that? The sacred – homo sacer – whose phrase is that? ‘People need poetry more than bread’ – obscene statement. Was it Mandelstam’s? But is there a poetry of need – a poetry of the homo sacer? Certainly there is a prose.
Appelfeld said writing Tzili unlocked something in him, the writer. He allowed that book to be subtitled in English, The Story of a Life. The same title the translation of his autobiography will bear. The Story of a Life: does it speak of a life now reduced to itself? That is only life, only living? But over and again, Appelfeld’s characters will say, ‘after all, men are not insects’. Not insects, which means more than bare life – or at least it is that insect-like life that must be resisted.
On page 27, I wrote sleep – pagan. Mina, a character, is sleeping. Soon she will show Theo, the protagonists, her wounds. I did not know that as I read, then. I wrote, sleep – pagan. She sleeps. later, he will go out in search of a doctor for her. When he returns, she is gone. Her loss haunts the novel. Where did she go? No resolution. Appelfeld will not permit that. She’s gone – and that is all.
Mina sleeps.
Mina was drowning in a long sleep which gre longer daily. Fatigue also tried to cling to him, but he decided: I will only sleep in moderation. Prolonged sleep is a disgraceful surrender.
Out goes Theo. When he returns, without a doctor, she is gone. The rest of the novel sees him wandering, sometimes alone, sometimes with the other refugees. He is going home, he tells others. He will convert to Christianity, he tells the others. He remembers his mother, who ended up in a sanatorium. And his father, a quiet, learned man, who died in the same labour camp as Theo.
Now, after the liberation, Theo wanders with the others, sometimes despising them – no more togetherness, he thinks. No more huddling. But sometimes drawn to them, to the others. He is going home, he tells them. Hundreds of miles, but nevertheless – home. And then to convert. What matters is movement, and he is moving. On the penultimate page, my pencil mark against this passage:
At that time it became clear to Theo beyond any doubt that he would never return to his hometown. From now on he would advance with the refugees. That language which his mother had inculcated in him with such love would be lost forever. If he spoke, he would speak only in the language of the camps. That clear knowledge made him dreadfully sad.
Theo is with a band of refugees. The novel ends with him drinking coffee, as he has done again and again – being offered a cup by others. Coffee – but it is also the gift of cigarettes that become, in the novel, a sign that human beings are not insects. Coffee and cigarettes with the others, the refugees. And he too, giver, recipient, a refugee with no destination.
What kind of ending is that? Theo’s mother, who loved Bach and Mozart and Salzburg, is falling away from him. She who took him off from school on trips across Germany, and who walked to the train a few days ahead of Theo and his penniless father, falls away.
Theo, of course, strays from his course. Such a course was never his; he was not to be alone. I admit it, I wanted him to move from the others, to walk across the hilltops, avoiding the valleys. I wanted him to move and to hear nothing of the others, and for writing, in that movement, to speak of itself. I wanted what reveals itself in Handke’s No Man’s Bay: movement, only that.
What of others? What of those others to whom cigarettes and coffee are to be given, and from whom they might be received? How dully does this book lead me right back into the world from which I would turn. Dully – no solitude. No solitude with writing. Not the striding away across hill-tops.
What is it I wanted when I read those first pages (the opening paragraph was enough)? To leave everyone; to read, and to depart by way of this reading. To take departure, then, to wander as my eyes pass over the sentences of For Every Sin. And isn’t this the surprise of the book, its wonder: that it refuses to depart thus?
Remain. You are with the others. With – but what does it mean to be with? To walk with, to drink coffee with, to smoke cigarettes with in the sun? With – not alone. You are with them even when you are alone. Unless to remain thus is not to remain – that the journey begins only when the dream of home falls away. Of home and the language of home.
But the novel is not an allegory. More than that, it resists those like me who dream of a writing reduced, that pares itself away until it is only itself. Sacred writing, where are you? Sacred writing, reduced to only to its need for itself, where are you? And it says, I vanished when the sacred groves vanished. Vanished with the deportations, even before the refugees from the camps started their long voyage.
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