The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld

Author:Aharon Appelfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

40

When I awoke, the sunlight was already streaming into the room. Everything was in its place. My crutches were propped up against the dresser. The green shirt that I’d been given by the convalescent home was on the wheelchair. Only my body was still moving with the rhythm of the train. That stranger, who looked amazingly like my uncle Isidor, still appeared before my eyes, as though refusing to part from me.

For a moment I forgot that my legs were injured. I tried to pull myself up the way I used to, and I hurt myself.

In the dining hall the other patients greeted me cordially and invited me to join them at their tables. I was still puzzled by the dream and by the patients who didn’t belong to it. Right away, they started asking me about the circumstances of my injury.

“The time hasn’t come to talk about it.” The sentence popped out of my mouth.

The other patients mistakenly believed that I was in pain or depressed. In fact, I was still immersed in sleep and didn’t want to leave it.

“How long have you been in this country?” One of them couldn’t keep himself from asking.

I told him.

A woman raised her eyes to mine and said, “We don’t want to make things hard for you. But we want you to know that you’re one of us, flesh of our flesh. You’re not alone in the world.”

I wanted to thank her, but I couldn’t find the right words.

“If you need something,” she continued, “don’t hesitate to tell us. We’re not rich, but we have enough to make things easy for you.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“We’re like a family, and we watch over one another.”

“At this time, I want to be by myself.” I spoke bluntly.

“And you don’t need anything?”

“You don’t have to worry about me. My injury is temporary. I’ll soon manage to get up and walk.”

My words surprised them, and they looked at me with a pity that hurt me.

—

I was sorry that the clear images from my dream were fading, that even the rhythmical rocking of the train had stopped. The powerful feeling that had throbbed within me and had borne me on its wings—that I was getting closer to my home, to my parents, and to my room—dissolved in the light of day, as if it had never been.

I went back to my room. Depression plunged its claws into me. I could go out and totter around on my crutches, but I know that they couldn’t take me away from here. Again I would be exposed, and again everyone would stare at me. If I’d had a book to read, I would have sunk into reading. The last book I read at home was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. All the years I was imprisoned in the cellar, images from that book appeared before my eyes.

It occurred to me that if I could find the book, it would connect me to my home and my parents and make my legs move.

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