Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (21 page)

I knew these dancing bears; they had been the delight of my childhood. Most of them were trained to kiss the hand that tossed a few coins into the tambourine, and I could never forget the fearful, blissful tickle in the pit of my stomach the first time the muzzled jaws, one bite of which could have mashed my hand into a bloody pulp, sent the long lilac-colored tongue slithering out like a serpent to lick my fingers, while the bear's trainer raked in the coins from the tambourine with a magician's skill. I called out to the man who led the bear to bring him near me.

I had not reckoned with my lady friend's panic. She leaped up, incapable of uttering a sound, her eyes widening in mortal horror, her fingers clawing at her teeth. I found this terror so overexaggerated that I could not help laughing. Her behavior was too childish—after all, the bear was muzzled, and a powerful man was holding him on a thick chain. I felt I was about to lose my temper. I said, “C'mon, stop acting so silly; he only wants to kiss your hand nicely!” And I took her hand and tried to bring it to the bear's moist nose. But she resisted vigorously, and now I really did lose my temper and pulled her hand to the bear's nose. She whimpered like a child. Then, with a final desperate exertion, she wrenched her hand free. For an instant, I totally forgot myself and slapped her face.

It was like a stroke of black lightning. For one split second, the pain brought forth the look of her ecstasy. But instead of ending in transfiguration, it slowly changed to bedazzlement. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her face was lifeless; it revealed no intelligible expression. Yet it was marked; it bore an invisible sign, the blemish of something beyond comprehension whose overpowering reality must be accepted. No personal sorrow could mark a face in that way. What I saw was no longer a face; it was humanity facing the inevitable character of suffering beyond all notion of despair. I had seen this lack of expression in the face of a thief who had been caught in the act and then captured after a wild chase.

I must add here that all these reflections came retrospectively. At the moment, I had no time to think: someone had grabbed my shoulder and was pulling me around. I stood nose to nose with four or five of the men who had been sitting at the nearby tables. One of them, whom I knew from the factory, a carpenter with whom I had often joked around when we met, was clutching my shoulder and hissing into my face: “Take it easy, punk, if you don' wan' us to beatcha outta your jacket! In dis place, you don' hit a woman ‘cause she's scared of a bear, unnerstan', you piss-elegant dude! In this place, ya don' force no body to play wit' wild animals. We'll teach you to act like a
boyar
!”

My urge to punch him, no matter how badly it would turn out, was paralyzed by amazement. These men, whom I had all liked, whom I had considered my friends, were standing around me as enemies. They had not just become hostile after my faux pas, which I regretted already. No: they had always been hostile to me; they had never considered me as one of their own, never taken me seriously. I had always been fundamentally different for them, someone of a different race. And they despised this different race to which I belonged, and I probably repelled them all the more for trying to ingratiate myself by acting like one of them ….

This reflection too I must have had only later on, even if I felt it fully at that moment. I had no chance to think, for Mr. Garabetian interceded. “Let's not have a riot here, fellows!” he said with a compelling authority in his indolent voice. He took me aside, and the circle of my opponents disbanded.

“If you hit a woman, it has to come from the heart,” said Mr. Garabetian as he walked me to my Model T, signaling the tavernkeeper not to worry about my check. “Otherwise, you show them that you're afraid of them.” And after a tiny pause: “We”—I knew he did not mean the community of slum dwellers but rather the members of a very advanced and fragile state of civilization, where he was probably quite lonely—“we do not hit. We stopped hitting long ago ….” It was up to me to glean from this humiliating rebuke that he rather regretted having spared the rod with his son or that other fathers had spared it with their sons.

The Black Widow was waiting mutely at the car. During the drive home, she said not a word. I held my tongue, too. There may have been a lot to say; perhaps something could have been made good again. But nothing could be restored to what it once had been.

When we came to her house, she got out, unlocked the door, and walked in. This time, she did not leave the door open, but pulled it to: without dramatics, without the arrogance of the offended lady, without any
éclat
, but firmly and definitively. I never saw her again. Through the district salesman, she informed the Aphrodite Company that she no longer wished to be inconvenienced by visits from the display-window decorators of the firm. This made little difference to me as I soon left the company anyway.

I could only be grateful for my departure from Aphrodite, for how would I have felt if I had encountered the girl in the wheelchair as I crept out of a drugstore window with a pile of soap boxes and shampoos under my arm? Now that I no longer had to fear being caught at such an embarrassing occupation, I looked back with some ironic aloofness to my anxieties in this respect; ultimately, my excursion into the world of shop assistants could be taken as good fun. Yet even now, at the sight of the girl in the wheelchair, I involuntarily whirled around as though trying to conceal myself; and this threw me back once again into the spiritual ordeals and the muddled conflicts of that time.

Something must have happened to me. Something basic in me had shifted, had broken and crumbled—and it was the ground under my feet. No longer did I feel I belonged to a caste enjoying authority by dint of universal respect. Rather, it was a caste that blemished me, as though I were Jewish. And no matter what I did, I could no more change my nature than a Jew could. The most painful humiliation of all was how I had been rebuffed by the men I had tried to ingratiate myself with. That would never happen again, I promised myself. It was worse than when a Jewish woman running a dumpy shop put on ladylike airs.

A lot of things that Mr. Garabetian had said whirled through my mind. Was it really true? Was I afraid of women? The girl in the wheelchair—but she was a phantom: I had walked past her, turning away as if not really noticing her, as if my attention had been caught by something else. Then I was cowardly, too! Frightened in this, too! … She had probably not even noticed me; I could not have meant anything whatsoever to her, a passerby, a pedestrian among hundreds of other pedestrians. Any possibility of her becoming my mistress and ideal beloved was sheer fantasy. And yet I was answerable to her.

Very well, I had been charmed by her being so well taken care of, by the aura of the child from a good background. The mama's boy in me was homesick. That was all. No doubt, the sight of her passed so spectacularly into my gonads because of my involuntary notion that she, being crippled, could hardly defend herself if I attacked her. Jews, too, challenged you with defenselessness, especially Jewish women, and particularly Jewish widows ….

So perhaps Mr. Garabetian was right, and I would never tell him so, now that I did not drop in on him every day. But if he wasn't right, he wasn't wrong either: I did fear women. And whenever I might believe I did not need to fear a woman, then a shaft instantly grew in my trousers—and aimed into nothingness.

In 1957, for reasons and under circumstances I won't go into now, I stayed for a few days at a place called Spitzingsee, in upper Bavaria. As I had to spend the greater part of my time there waiting, I often went for walks. On one such excursion I discovered a place to hire boats at the lakeside.

I am not a dedicated oarsman; on the contrary, a traumatic experience in early adolescence put me off rowing forever, and I still tend to regard it as a vulgar and in no way exhilarating pastime.

The instigator of this aversion was a relative of mine, my senior by many years, a man who was recommended to me as a paragon in every sense. He was what one calls a
Feschak
in Vienna: an Uhlan squadron leader who had returned from the Great War safely and in one piece, he had adapted to civilian life easily and become a successful businessman, was handsome, elegant, a sports- and ladies' man. He used to spend his Sundays at a rowing club on the Danube, and since it was hoped that his company and the fresh air would influence my frail character and wan state of health beneficially, I was often encouraged to accompany him there. I transferred all my carefully nurtured hatred from him to the club he frequented.

It was rigorously exclusive; already at that date, 1927, one of the conditions for admission into the aquatic society was watertight proof of Aryan birth. The comradeship of its members was generally regarded as exemplary. These venerable gentlemen—one and all of an optimistic disposition—would climb into the single sculls, double, foursome, and eights, and heave up the river moving like metronomes all morning, then turn and shoot back down on the crest of the current in little more than a quarter hour. Under the showers, where they then sluiced away the sweat of their labors, I was to hear the remark that became the basis for my lifelong animosity against rowing.

I was scarcely thirteen and very shy. I hated the studied nonchalance with which these muscular men dropped their shirts and shorts and stepped naked into the showers. There they would stand, spitting and spluttering, their hair plastered over their faces, and, without the slightest abashment, mix yellow jets of urine into the clear white of the water, send farts reverberating around the tiled walls, and discuss “women.”

A prominent subject was Josephine Baker, who was appearing at a Viennese theater at the time. Needless to say, I was head over heels in love with her, and I suffered torments as I listened to the detached professionalism with which her charms were discussed as though she were some favored racehorse. “Class,” my dashing relative said, turning his face in a screwed-up grimace to the nozzle, soap suds oozing from his armpits and pubic hair, “that's what she's got, class, even though she's black. Better than a Jewess, though, all the same. I tell you, if I weren't in training …” And like an echo coming from the tiled walls a voice answered him: “Well, let us know if you succeed—it's only fair among friends and members of the same club.”

Thirty years later, then, on the banks of the Spitzingsee, I felt not the slightest desire to hire a rowboat. Out of sheer boredom I exchanged a few words concerning the weather and the business prospects of the morrow, a Sunday, with the proprietress. The woman's odd accent arrested my attention.

“You're not a Bavarian,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Yugoslav?” I ventured.

“No,” she said, “you'll never guess.”

Nevertheless I tried; the gulash of nationalities and accents in Central Europe is indeed quite confusing, but an attentive ear can generally localize them, and to my trained one it was clear that she came from some neck of my own woods.

“I'm from Bucharest,” she finally admitted, and I delightedly addressed her in Rumanian. “But I'm not Rumanian,” she added.

“What, then?”

She was Ukrainian.

Her evasiveness aroused my curiosity. “What did you do in Bucharest?” I wanted to know.

“I was an artiste,” she replied with a coy mixture of demureness and twinkling eyes that put me on the scent of some nocturnally practiced art.

“A dancer?”

No, a singer, not of the operatic or
Lieder
kind, simply a singer in a Russian chorus.

I felt a thrill. “In a garden restaurant behind the Biserică Albă?”

She gazed at me in astonishment. “How did you know?”

Yes, that indeed was the question. By the grace of God alone, apparently, and it confused me even more than it did her, for I had never set foot in this restaurant, wasn't even sure on which street or passage behind the Biserică Albă it was situated. But I had heard the chorus, every night, a whole summer long.

It was a summer that according to my memory consisted solely of lavender-blue skies and unfulfilled longings; only a few isolated events and disjointed situations still hover in my mind; the one thing I remember distinctly is that it was insufferably hot; no dog showed its nose on the streets until sundown. I spent most of my days, certainly most of my evenings, under a canopy on the terrace of my tiny apartment, which was perched on the flat roof (today one might grandly refer to it as a penthouse) of one of the high-rise buildings that even at that early date and especially in the quarter around the Biserică Albă had shot up all over Bucharest. At that time my passion for horseracing had taken me by the scruff of the neck in the truest sense of the word: I'd been thrown, had dislocated three joints in my spine, and was obliged to wear a plaster cast around my neck and shoulders, like the unforgettable Erich von Stroheim in
La Grande Illusion
.

With this mishap my own illusions, which had also been sweeping, evaporated into the lavender-blue heavens: my intention, for instance, to transport steeplechase horses to Abyssinia, making a fortune with them in the flourishing colony of the Italian Empire, and then returning home to convince a certain young lady that her refusal to unite her life with mine had been a mistake.

I felt no need of company. I stayed at home, cooked my own meals; a half-crazed jockey who had lost his license ran my errands. I lay on a deck chair in the shade of my canopy and read, and when it got too dark, I laid my book aside and drifted back into the dreams which the paling void above my head had absorbed so effortlessly. And night after night, on the stroke of nine, the strains of abrasive-sweet young girls' voices singing “
Hayda troika
,” the prelude to an ensuing nonstop revue of banal Russian folk music, rose from one of the alleys below me.