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spends days sleeping it off in an inn, and then has
to
miss some of his sta–
tion-stops. For the most part, his discipline is as iron as the tracks.
"Thus it is every year," he muses about his bleak life. "And in this rep–
etition lies a strange hopefulness. As if our end were not extinction but a
sort of constant renewal."
Not at once, but slowly, a plan for revenge, a murder, is revealed.
Nachtigel is the name of the man who must be killed, ironically calling to
mind the sweet-voiced bird that sings its way through fairy tales, but that
is also a night-singer, a disturber of rest. He must be killed to avenge the
killing of the narrator's parents.
Train travel with its scheduled starts and stops, itself an anodyne, takes
on a double purpose: to bring the narrator closer to his goal of killing
Nachtigel and to buy up plundered Jewish holy objects for sale in various
towns along the traveler's route. Tracking another man, yet bound to these
tracks himself, the narrator follows his course year after year, notes the
aging of familiar faces, the obli teration of landmarks. Cronies, competi tors,
inn-keepers, women taken for a single night, former comrades-these
appear at the various train stops and then recede as the train moves on.
Even the narrator's name, Erwin Siegelbaum, belatedly revealed and bare–
ly invoked, fades fram rnind.
From a childhood friend of his father's, encountered at a station-stop,
the narrator learns a piece of information that sounds one of Appelfeld's
ironic notes about Jewish assimilation:
Jacob Kron ...told me that Father was once unanimously chosen by
the Ruthenians to be their secretary and to lead their strikes. But at
the last rninute someone remembered that Father was a Jew, and
pointed out that it wasn't right for a Jew to lead Ruthenians. Father
didn't lose faith. He never returned to his origins, the Jewish quarter.
Instead he remained loyal to the Ruthenians, speaking in their behalf
and organizing mass meetings. He outwitted the police and performed
his service in poverty and devotion.
Though Nachtigel was the actual murderer, the whole country
through which the narrator travels is revealed to have collaborated in his
parents' death-from the vicious Jew-hating inhabitants now gloating over
their ral es in the killing of Jews to the Ruthenian neighbors who turned
against his father despite his selfless devotion to their welfare, hounding
him into the forest where, defenseless, he was captured, sent to the camps
and then to his death at Nachtigel's hands.
