All Whom I Have Loved by Aharon Appelfeld

Author:Aharon Appelfeld [Appelfeld, Aharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48132-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

35

Throughout the long hours of the afternoon I sat at the window, waiting for Mother to return. When it got dark, I heard footsteps approaching; it was Father. Father came back in good spirits. He had had a few drinks on the way home, and the moment he walked in, he announced, “Dinner should be lavish.” I was happy, too, and forgot to tell him about Mother's visit. I told him later.

“And what did she want?” he asked lightly.

“To take me back with her.”

“I understand. And what did you say?”

“I refused.”

“And what did she say?”

“Nothing.”

Father did not scold me, and he did not praise my behavior. We sat up till late, he on the bed and I on the floor. Father read intently and I watched, observing how his eyes raced from line to line. When he read, he looked like a man who is searching. Sometimes he seemed to be searching for something he lost many years ago. I noticed that when he finished reading, he made a gesture of dismissal with his right hand, as if to say, “It's all nonsense.”

That night he revealed to me that Mother had married and was living in André's house. It was hard to know if he was angry. Whenever he spoke about Mother, he was careful, and it was clear he did not reveal all his thoughts to me.

“Has she become Christian?” I asked for some reason.

“Supposedly,” he said.

“But we are Jews, aren't we?”

“True.”

Then I remembered what our landlord had said, and my heart was sore. I tried to remember it in detail, but I couldn't. Later, I recalled a bit and asked, “Is it true that Jews are the sons of kings?”

“Who told you that?” Father laughed quietly.

“The landlord.”

“He lives in a world of his own.”

“Jews are like everyone else?”

“A little less,” Father said, and chuckled again.

I was indignant that Mother had converted. “Why did she convert?” I asked.

“Because she married André.”

Later, I could see her before me: her cropped hair, her legs in their heavy galoshes, and the difficulty she had in walking. The expression on her face was that of a person whose thoughts had been uprooted, with other thoughts implanted in their place. We talked no more that night. Father read and I leafed through his art books. I didn't understand most of the things that I read in Father's books, but I still liked to go through them. Sometimes I wanted to ask him the meaning of a word, but I didn't. Once, he blamed me for interrupting his reading.

One morning when I was looking through his books I saw Father's name and I gasped. I read it again: Arthur Rosenfeld. On the facing page there was a photo of him when he was young. Father, it turned out, was born in Czernowitz in 1905. His parents died when he was five years old, and he grew up in an orphanage. It was at the orphanage that his talent was recognized, and he was sent to study at the Academy for Fine Arts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.