The Hideout

Dearest Hanichka:
At last I can hope that some day you will learn the
true facts of my strange story. The good people about
whom I want to tell you promise me that they can take my
notes somewhere to safety, somewhere beyond the ocean,
perhaps, and give them to you after the war is over. You
are still alive; I don’t doubt that for an instant, and you will
be alive long after this awful storm of horror, madness and
hunger has blown over. I am absolutely certain of it. I see
you all the time; we’re together whenever I fall asleep; I know
every new line that creases your face; I know that your hair
is white and that you are bent now. Dear God, I know so
many details about you—just as if we were together and
saw each other day in and day out. You have been waiting,
and not in vain, dear Hanichka! Some day you will read
what I am writing now. Otherwise nothing would have any
meaning, nothing at all—our life, our marriage, our worries
and our mistakes. But I don’t believe that, and it is not so.
Everything has its meaning, every event, every chance, every
catastrophe, every slightest thing that happens.
You must live to get this, because you and I have to
understand each other. And it is only now that I am ready
to understand you. I have come to know so much, so much
has become clear, I have found so many words and thoughts
that I never even knew of before.
I don’t know if they will tell it to you after the war, or
if they will write it to you. It may even be that you will
learn of it only from these notes—from this paragraph. I,
Hanichka, shall not live to know. It seems so silly to write
that I want to die, or that I must die. I don’t really know how
to tell you in just a few words that we can never meet again
and live together and make up for all the things we did to
hurt each other, and be happy together in the lives of our
children. It would be ridiculous if I tried to make my death
appear heroic. It isn’t altogether voluntary and perhaps it
isn’t inevitable, but it is natural.
Please keep on reading; don’t let yourself go. It truly
means nothing at all that I shall no longer be living at the
moment you read these lines. It’s so long since you’ve seen
me; you’ve probably buried me and wept for me many times
over in your imagination. Truly it is nothing, my darling!
I am closer to you, and I shall be closer, than I was when
I lived beside you.
There, now I have written it. You know it and I feel much
better. Look, until a short while ago, I had one fixed image.
I saw my return and our meeting. I dreamed that we met
again in Rokytnice, in the home of your parents. The door
there still opens with difficulty and creaks; along the walls
of the entry, casks and boxes are still piled, and it’s always
cold twilight there. Of course you aren’t expecting me.
I come back quite unannounced; you call from the kitchen:
“Is that you, Father?” I don’t answer, because I can’t. You
ask again and then you come out across the threshold; you
come farther, you walk down several steps—and then you
see me and recognize me. I see it all so plainly! You want
to lift your arms, but you can’t; you want to cry out, but
you only whisper. It is not my name that you whisper. For
a while I am frozen to the spot. We are both deathly pale,
and we feel as if we were dying. The air between us is not of
this earth. You start to collapse, and that gives me strength.
I am beside you in a bound and catch you in my arms. You
don’t cry and you don’t smile. You only whisper that word,
which is not my name.
A hundred times, a thousand times, I have imagined,
dreamed and lived our meeting. I could picture everything:
the twilight of the passage, the smell of it, the sound of your
steps on the stairs, myself and you. There is only one thing
that I can not imagine: the pain that would close around
our hearts and throats while our hands sought each other
and met. Everything but that dizzy feeling of happiness, or
unhappiness, or some deep feeling without a name.
Would it be happiness, or would it be unhappiness?
I don’t really know. I don’t know what my first words would
be; I don’t know what I would ask about, whom I would look
for; I don’t know where I would sit, what I would do with
my hands and my memory and my will. And still I never
longed for anything more than I have longed for our meeting
and for that unimaginable something that would come after
it. When I thought of my return, about that unredeemed
miracle, I felt that I would be capable of doing anything to
make it come true—capable of every sacrifice and every
crime. Not from longing and not from exhaustion, but from
a kind of burning curiosity, more burning than any longing
or desire I ever knew.
But today I know, Hanichka, that I was dreaming of the
impossible—as I have done so many times before. I should
bring you no happiness from far away. I should come back
to you, old before my time (I’ll soon be fifty) a man whose
story would seem like senseless gibberish to you. I should be
a hindrance to you and our children. (Ah, I know nothing
at all about them! Marta is twenty and Johanna eighteen,
I believe? I think of them shamefully little, and I don’t see
them even in my dreams. I lost them and they lost me.) Well,
I should be returning to a life where something had been
lacking while I lived it. I should be returning to it out of a
bad fairy tale, without the golden key and the elixir of life.
There would be an emptiness between us and I shouldn’t
know how to fill it. All the love I am able to wring out of my
desolate heart, all the feeling and devotion I may be putting
into these lines, is released in me only because I know that
I shall soon die. It is the knowledge that I have found the
right ending for my ordinary life, and that happiness lies in
renunciation, and peace where there is no fear of death.
I wish I could say it in some other way; I wish that I could
let you look into my thoughts which are so much clearer, so
much less brittle than the sentences I have just written! But
I believe that with all my clumsiness I shall still find words
now and then that I should not have found before, and words
that will find their way to your understanding.
The most important thing of all is that you should know
at the very beginning that I did not run away from you. I did
not say good-bye to you and the children because I thought
I should be coming back in a few days, but I was kept from
doing that by events. Later on, as I write, I want to explain
all that to you too, if I have time to do it. I don’t know if
I’ll be able to finish this little notebook, and so I’m going
to put down the most important things first and then come
back to the details later.