Appelfeld will only write only of the effects of this event, of the Shoah, or of its premonition. No one, in his novels, is its contemporary; there is no contemporaneity, no presence. If there is ‘now’ in his novels, it is a ‘now’ displaced by what is to come, or what has happened.
I think of Greek tragedy, of the freedom into which the hero is set as necessity rises against him. What splendour! But when there is no such freedom? When you are marched into the railway cars through the streets of your own town – the same town, the same place as you lived, and your parents lived; the same town in which you converted or did not convert, in which you forgot your traditions or sought to remember them, it does not matter which?
No freedom. Perhaps that is one of the things Theo finds repulsive in his fellow refugees. They cluster together. They huddle. They do not stride out over the hillcrests. They will not allow themselves to scatter. Is this why Theo dreams of conversion, of chapels filled with music and the silence of a monastery. Freedom!
But something of Theo remains snagged; he also huddles with the others, he cannot help it. He receives coffee and cigarettes from others, and sometimes he dispenses them too. The superabundance of what was once forbidden: what luxury! To give and to receive – a minimal ritual. Nothing exchanged – a giving on both sides, each time singular, each time from the singular one to the singular other. What is more simple than this?
Then can one say simply, easily, that freedom does not lie in the hillcrests over which Theo would stride, but in a life lived alongside the sick, the dying. That freedom is to give coffee and cigarettes to those who need them? Too simple. Too simple!
Theo vacillates. Theo is not the woman with trembling hands who lives only to distribute coffee. He is not the educated woman who has learned to love each refugee and listen to each story with love. He is on the hillcrests and in the valleys. Only later, in the last pages, does he learn the hillcrests offer no escape. There is no simple abnegation in him – no holy fool (is that who Mendel is – one of Dostoevsky’s fools?).
To give out coffee and cigarettes – is that enough? It must be. There’s nothing else. Religious consolations have evaporated. Political consolation – the prewar communism of the parents of the protagonist of The Iron Rails – has likewise vanished. The ideologues of the new Israel have not yet appeared (though they are there among the refugees in Appelfeld’s memoir, The Story of A Life).
Now. There is only the now still snagged by the event. The now, the new day that is nearly pulled under by the undertow of the past. Serve those who suffer, even as you suffer. Give to them, the others, even as others have given coffee and cigarettes to you. No thought – do not think, act. It is the time for action, but an action without ground, without project.
How is such action different from simple spontaneity – from the cows who allow one of the characters to suck milk from their udders? How is it different from the growing of the trees in the green darkness of the woods? ‘After all, man is not an insect: phrase said by many of Appelfeld’s characters. Then it takes effort to give. To offer – and even to receive. Effort – even though there are some whom the war revealed as holy in their generosity, their sacrifice, as Appelfeld remembers in his memoir.
How many encounters are there in For Every Sin? How many gifts of coffee and cigarettes? Nothing happens, yet something has happened. How is it that Theo learns he has no homeland, not anymore, and that the language of his mother and father is no longer his? How is it he learns to stay with the other refugees and not to march away from them, over the hillcrests?
There’s no lesson. No learning. Only a kind of resignation. Theo is claimed in a new way by the undertow, the event. Freedom does not rise up against necessity. Is there glory in the woman with the trembling hands? In the educated woman who loves each refugee? It’s as if these small kindnesses were also part of necessity. That one has to give in to what occurred. To experience it as fate like the blinded Oedipus.
Oedipus looks only for a place to die. What would it mean to live? Fate, necessity: these words echo in a direction they cannot reach. The refugees do not live in the world of the Greeks, or of the Germans who, after Kant, would move tragedy to the centre of philosophical reflection. Then what words will do, instead? How will what happened let itself be spoken?
Are Appelfeld’s novels an answer? Not even that. There are ruins where an answer might be. The question insists in each clear, calm sentence. The sentences are clear and calm because of its insistence.
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