The Retreat by Aharon Appelfeld

Author:Aharon Appelfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

With Isadora’s death a new cold descended on the retreat. No one spoke about it. They preferred to speak of other matters, sad and remote, which had preoccupied them all autumn long and now too did not cease to trouble them. Lang rejoiced in his achievements with a kind of boyish wonder which made it impossible to be angry with him. Every morning he ran all the way down to the village, drank a tankard of beer and ate a country sandwich, thereby killing two, or rather three, birds with one stone. He exerted his muscles to make his body strong, tasted healthy food and learned the local dialect, bracing as beer to his palate.

Lang had been born in Galicia. He remembered his native town well, but he did not like talking about it. All his defects—his shortness, his long face, his broken accent—he blamed on the place of his birth, his corrupt inheritance. For this reason too he had never married, lived from hand to mouth and drifted from place to place. Two years ago he had decided to come up here to correct his defects, and he was doing so with praiseworthy perseverance.

Every morning he got up early, took a shower, put on his sports suit and ran down the hill. He spent most of the day down in the village, in the tavern and running along the riverbanks. And there was no denying it: he had changed. In his time Balaban had praised him and held him up as an example. When he came back in the evening he was not only too tired to take part in the arguments, gambling and card games, but he deliberately turned his back on them. The previous winter he had suffered from a chest complaint which had obliged him to retire to his room, but in the spring he had recovered his strength and ever since he had not missed even one morning run. Sometimes, in high spirits, he would stand and admire himself: his muscles. A kind of boyish wonder covered his face. It was hard to be angry with him.

When he heard of Isadora’s sudden death he hid his face, wishing in this way to devote himself for a moment to the memory of the dead woman. Of all the people in the retreat, the one who had most enjoyed listening to him was Isadora. And although she had often mocked him, called him “shorty,” “kurz,” ridiculed him for his stupid running and described him as an incorrigible Jew, he liked her. On her sixty-fifth birthday he had made an enthusiastic speech about the new way of life, untainted by any speck of Jewishness, and called Isadora a naturally straightforward human being who detested all crookedness.

Lotte came back from the funeral in a dejected mood. Never before had she so disgraced herself. Not even as an inexperienced young trouper. Herbert sat next to her and comforted her as if she was in mourning. What are you talking about, your reading was great, powerful, incisive.

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