Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (17 page)

One day, the afternoon light was growing dimmer and finally became abstractly transparent; I suddenly realized I had sat there too long. It was late, and I had not filled my quota. I had just enough time left to beautify a single display with fresh crêpe paper and soap bars, and the window I chose was the one closest by. Unfortunately, the proprietress was the most difficult.

Normally, it was pleasant working in Văcăreşti. The usually Jewish shopkeepers were kind and mellow people so long as the two-thousand-year-old panic did not flare up, which made them hysterically vehement, and they never gave me much trouble when I arrived with my motley jumble. But this one woman, the owner of a store called Parfumeria Flora, had always been a ticklish case in the itinerary of the decoration campaign.

She was all on her own—a widow, it was said—and in the trade, even among the salesmen, she had a bad reputation for being harsh and disagreeable. This was not, incidentally, the only reason why she was talked about so much; she had a solid place in the salesmen's erotic gossip. No sooner did her name come up in a discussion at the Aphrodite Company than several voices evoked her with the husky undertones of desire: the embodiment of the raven-haired Jewess, whose succulent ripeness contrasted sexily with her coldness. Probably only the oldest representatives knew her real name; she was generally called the Black Widow. And it was also generally felt that sinning in her company may have been good business, for her shop was doing well and she seemed to have money on the side. Unfortunately, they said, she was a block of ice, and you could freeze off practically any part of yourself.

The Black Widow treated me with an insulting arrogance that was not outdone by the owners of the elegant boutiques around the Hotel Athenée-Palace. But while I had gradually developed a thick skin against their insolence,
her
impertinence here, in the humble Jewish district, around the whorehouses of Crucea de Piatră, made me livid. This time, too, she received me like a bothersome
shnorrer
. And had it not been too late to drive to other drugstores and try my luck there, I would have wordlessly turned my back and gone my way. But then, perhaps out of sheer weariness, she abruptly, albeit still very ungraciously, condescended to allow me to remove a dusty arrangement made by our bitterest rival (world famous for their lanolin cream) and to replace it with one of our artworks publicizing lily-of-the-valley soap.

The day was now swiftly drawing to its end. Along with the twilight, something tormentingly uncertain descended into the world. I was struck—I can still feel it today—by a mournfulness, as though I were utterly orphaned. Like an abrupt pain, I felt homesickness: for home, for the Bukovina, where I had loved this hour just before darkness so much that I had always run out of the house and into the countryside, into that abstract, lilac-colored light. Its lower part would be awhirr with flitting bats and smoky with the dust of darkness, while the night wind wafted the fragrance of hay from distant meadows into my face; and before me the enormous source of night, where, toward Galicia, the flat earth fanned out to melt cosmically into the heavens. I had always been bewildered by the forlornness of the settlements in this landscape under this deeply nocturnal sky, the frailty of the blinking lights, those poor man's stars behind the battered sheet-metal blinds. The light bulbs ruthlessly exposed the stark walls and crooked eaves of the sad little petit bourgeois houses, pulled them out of the swelling and thickening darkness, deprived them of mystery and thrust them into reality, while the surrounding world subsided into the dramatics of creation myths. Few things touched my heart so keenly as the desperate intimacy of a window shining golden yellow in the hard, bluish, whitewashed wall of a Jewish shack at the entrance of such a village.

Now, here, the eternal carnival of the red-light streets in Văcăreşti was still churning away; it kept going on all the more spookily, just a few blocks away, under the radiant street lamps—I still had the tumult at the bottom of my eyes. And now the same forlornness as outside, in the flat land, was descending upon the Jewish district all around me. The city and its hurly-burly, the evening swarm of people into the streets and avenues, the strings of light, the tumbles of light, the cascades of light overhead—all these things were meaningless; they were only a haunted world, a carnival of the bereft and desperate, lost under the enormous sky that was giving birth to the night.

I felt and thought all this while doing my job with an anger turned against myself. I had only barely cleaned the display window—it was still filthy—and now I was putting together the publicity material for Aphrodite, no doubt deploying more awkwardness than artistry. I was furious at this woman, this Jew, this huckster of notions; forlorn and bereft in her stony widowhood, she belonged in one of those Galician shtetls. Her arrogance, too, would have been more appropriate there than here. I owed it to my own stupidity that I was doing such low donkey's work for someone like her and being treated like a peddler.

Scornfully imitating an artist who steps away from his easel to check his masterpiece, I backed off after setting up the last carton of soap—and suddenly blacked out. When I came to an instant later, I found myself in darkness between sacks of coal and oil drums. I had failed to notice an open cellar trapdoor behind me, and my artist's step had led me into the void and plunged me into the depths.

I was quickly on my feet again, checking as a matter of course that nothing was broken and that my fall had not been too hard. And then I looked up. A ladder had softened the impact, and I scrambled up the rungs. Arriving at the top, I still felt a bit numb, but just for a moment. I needed only to make sure that my clothes had not been messed up.

I was absolutely amazed to find the Black Widow in a panic bustling around me, touching me, feeling me up, knocking the dust off my jacket and stammering unintelligibly as though she were the one who had tumbled into the cellar and not I. Laughing, I calmed her down. A minor, trivial accident, a clumsy action on my part, at the very moment when I had been thinking what a stupid person I was—funny, wasn't it—she didn't have to worry; nothing had really happened ….

But she was beside herself with fear and terror. She was probably afraid of being sued for negligence—I couldn't think of any other reason for her being in such a state. It was well known that the Rumanian authorities were not exactly merciful with Jews who got on the wrong side of the law; normally, the mere mention of the police was enough to make a Jew's face turn gray. What if I had broken something, for instance my back, and were still lying down there, dead? Or if, although uninjured, I thought of bringing charges against her? They always expected some calamity, these Jews.

Still, her excitement was peculiar. She babbled away and kept feeling me up to see if any part of me was harmed. Finally, she found a smudge on my jacket and demanded that I take it off so that she could clean it instantly. Then she thought of more important necessities, and, even though I staunchly protested and tried in every way to calm her down, she forced me into a back room, where I had to stretch out on a sofa. She ran off—to get a glass of water or a cognac or even smelling salts.

I must have suffered at least a minor shock, or perhaps I had drunk too much raki and black coffee on an empty stomach earlier in the afternoon. In those days, I ate next to nothing, in order to keep my weight down; I was investing as many lunacies in the dream of becoming a riding champion as I had in the old one of becoming a great artist. Be that as it may—by the time the Black Widow returned, I must have dropped off into a temporary stupor, for I was just coming to when I felt her stroking my cheek; she seemed almost unconscious with fear, kneeling by the sofa, holding my head, her fingers in my hair, caressing me and stammering, “My little boy! My darling! My baby!”

When I put my arms around her, I did it almost instinctively; I had no choice: there was such ardent motherliness in her face, such total identification of her existence with mine, her essence with mine, that it pulled me into her. She was no longer a near stranger whom I barely knew by sight, a notoriously inhibited woman, a pathologically callous person who, just a few minutes before, had made her contempt for me crystal clear (which had been so insolent, downright provocative, when one thought of who and what she really was, with her dumpy Jewish shop next to the hooker district of Văcăreşti). No, at the moment she was the human embodiment of feminine goodness and warmth, the materialization of pure understanding, such as only women can produce, because they alone are capable of giving birth to another human being, creating another human creature through their bodies, flesh of their flesh, blood of their blood, spirit of their spirit. That was why she was the great absolver, the mother of mankind, the cosmic birth-giver, the womb of all life, in which the tormented living creature found its way from its loneliness into being one with the other ….

When I put my arms around her to draw her to me, her eyes widened in horror, as though she had beheld the depth and core of all evil. She made an involuntary movement to repel me. But then I witnessed a surprising change; I could only guess at what it was: the marvelous fulfillment of a dream she would never have expected to come true, the sudden transformation of an age-old fear into joy…. In any case, it was very beautiful: her dramatic face, the “Andalusian face,” as I was to call it later in tender moments, was flooded with happiness more blissful than all desire—and so powerful that it tore a moan out of her.

I know that this change in her face was what made me love her. Subsequently, I did all I could to conjure it up, over and over again, this melting of harshness, nastiness, anxiety, banality, this lovely fading of the bad signs of life under the intensely happy surge of erupting love. I succeeded—at least for a while—in recharging my love in hers. For even though I loved her—and often so passionately that the thought of her was like a punch in my solar plexus; sometimes indeed quite simply, relaxed and happy and always with sincere gratitude for her love—I was tormented by the sense that through her I was deceiving “love” itself: the love I wanted to hold in readiness for the girl whom I could love all my life.

It is mortifying to admit, but she in no way matched my image of this ideal beloved, and I fought a losing battle against this wishful-thinking affliction. The ideal had been stamped into me so early and so thoroughly that I could not rid myself of it. I felt like someone who makes a daily resolution to stop smoking and then greedily reaches for the first cigarette every morning.

Yet I had to tell myself that this ideal of a curly-blond, long-legged horsewoman surrounded by playful greyhounds, a woman with whom I intended to spend my life in a whirlwind of Grand Prix races, operas, masquerades, at ski lodges, seaside resorts, and on the upper decks of ocean liners—I had to own that this ideal was utterly banal and downright embarrassing, truly the clichéd dream image of every shop assistant. In contrast, my Black Widow—or rather, my Andalusian, as I now tenderly called her—was of a different caliber in every respect but one: she was, alas, a petit bourgeois Jewish woman and almost twice as old as I. Our liaison could remain, must remain, but an episode.

Yet her age—she was at least in her mid-thirties; I never found out exactly how old she was, nor did I ever ask her—her age bothered me much less than her being petit bourgeois. She was beautiful. Early on, I had learned the old cavalier saying that a woman's body ages later than her face. She didn't have to prove it. Despite its occasional harshness and sometimes cheapness, her face expressed duennalike dignity; it was smooth and taut and amazingly youthful, especially around the full, fleshy lips with the very lovely teeth, though not around the tragic, darkly embedded eyes. And her body was splendid. Naturally, she was a very ripe woman, but that was precisely what fired my passion; I did not have to consult Dr. Maurer for potency pills.

I felt I could ask the girl in the wheelchair to forgive me for such details if I actually got to the point of offering her my confession. Would she be discriminating enough to know just what I was talking about? Not, of course, a cynically perceived erotic experience: at nineteen, after all, one wants to make sure that everyone understands the moral purity and logical consistency of one's every action, feeling, or thought; whatever one does has to seem of the purest purpose and most honorable intention. No, this was no frivolous sexual encounter; it was sincere love—on my part, too, even though it lasted only a short time. And
that
precisely was the cause of the conflict: despite its genuine and spontaneous beginnings, this love was not intended for the woman it went to. It had, so to speak, dropped into her lap, a fruit that had long since ripened for someone else. It was originally meant for the personification of my
anima
, whom I finally met today: my siren in the wheelchair, of course.

True, the girl in the wheelchair did not correspond to the criteria of my
anima
in all particulars. You could not say that she had blond Jean Harlow hair; her attractive mop of fuzzy hair was an intense chestnut brown; the little face framed by the hair was perhaps a bit too chubby-cheeked and doll-like; and despite the obvious merits of her torso, any mention of the long-legged horsewoman's figure would have been downright tactless. But after all, the physical factor was not the decisive one. In regard to the physical, one becomes more experienced and more mature, and one adjusts one's ideals more flexibly to the insufficient realities. Everything else was all right, and that was the important thing: her proper birth, her careful breeding, the aura of her good background.

I would have been lying if I had not admitted that the aura of her lowly origins was what made my love for the Black Widow as rotten as if it were crawling with maggots—a gradual crumbling under minor irritations that gnawed in, bored in everywhere. It was not just the way she spoke—she could not, of course, deny she was Jewish. Her race was written in her features, in the very face that had overwhelmed me with its inundation of happiness; but not only that: she could also take on a different expression, which I loved, an owllike, archaically wise expression of primordial motherhood. At such times, she looked like an ancient goddess…. But her language, as I was saying: her singsong, the flattened vowels, the peculiar syntax of people who, although having known an idiom since childhood (in her case, Rumanian), remain alien to it, and then the Yiddish expressions interjected all over the place—these things betrayed her the instant she opened her mouth. And yet that was the least that irritated me. I had finally understood that it was quite possible for me to love a Jewess, not in spite of the eternal Jewish tragedy, the age-old Jewish sadness showing in her face, but because of it: to see that face suddenly transformed by happiness—in fact, actually inundated with happiness—affected me deeply. But then I was equally affected by the “earth mother” look on that face when she was in a serious mood. Thus, experiencing so many astonishing things in myself, I accepted her Jewish features as part of her, just as I would have endured tattoos or brass disks grown into the lips, had it been possible for me to love a Central African native.