Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (26 page)

She looked at me. “I want to ask another favor of you. As the sole heiress, I inherited not only the ring you saw but the complete contents of my stepparents' apartment. Everything else my uncle possessed—a modest bank account, a few securities, a share in a house, in a word, the remnants of a great fortune, he left to the Armenian Church. I'm very happy; it would have embarrassed me to receive a penny of it. Just the fact that he paid for my education at the convent and later in Germany—quite apart from countless other tokens of generosity—always made me feel, under the covert circumstances, something of a fraud. I have always had a bad conscience that my family concealed our Jewish faith from him. Naturally my aunt made no attempt to have me baptized; she simply let it be assumed that I was a Christian. And perhaps we were in our hearts, but not by right. I often found the conflict hard to bear and was more than once on the point of confessing everything to my priest, then suffered all the more afterward for not having done so. I saw myself as a criminal, not so much before God and my new faith, you understand, but before this wonderful, noble man, to whom I had so much to be grateful for, whom I loved as a father.

“Now to my request: can you understand that I cannot go alone to the apartment? There are the usual things to be done—go through the possessions, make an inventory, pack things up. To be honest, I feel unable to manage alone and know of no one else I might ask. Because of the years I spent in Germany I have grown away from the few friends I made here in my childhood, and of my present acquaintances you are the only one I dare impose on.”

Again I was tempted to ask her why, but it hardly seemed the right moment. “May I now buy you a cognac?” I said instead. “From what you tell me, I'm sure we shall find all manner of exquisite beverages in your uncle's flat. We'd better get in training.”

The apartment was in a high-rise building not far from Biserică Albă. “How strange,” I remarked. “I lived round the corner until not very long ago, up there, on one of the roofs. I probably passed your uncle and aunt on the street many times without knowing that sad circumstances would bring us together one day. By the way, there must be a Russian garden restaurant around here somewhere, with a girls' chorus that starts caterwauling every evening on the stroke of nine.”

She didn't know it. “My stepparents moved here only a few years ago,” she said. “These buildings are quite new. I wasn't here often—not because they kept me away or anything but they were so happy together that I always was a little shy. I felt I might intrude. They were like the lovers in David Teniers' painting, sitting on top of the hay wagon gazing into each other's eyes, oblivious of the emperors and popes being crushed to death under the wheels below; the
Weltgeist
itself spun a cocoon around their love.”

As she said this, Miss Alvaro smiled the little smile that was so becoming to her. I could well imagine her as the prim pupil of the Armenian sisters. The line of her neck was simple and lovely, expressing a modest but defiant pride.

The apartment was on the sixth floor of a building that conceded nothing in hideous barrenness to the one I had lived in myself. We went up in the lift, and Miss Alvaro said, “It's a wonder it's working. I'm afraid this too had something to do with my uncle's premature death: nine times out of ten he had to walk up.”

We got out, and again she dipped into her blouse to extract the bunch of keys; I turned my head to hide my smile, as I wondered that her uncle hadn't guessed the origin of his womenfolk from such characteristically careful traits, but then again, as with their physiognomy, perhaps Armenian girls had this in common with Jewish girls also.

She opened the door and we stepped in. It was a typical immigrants' flat: a mixture of old and new junk, purely decorative, impractical pieces salvaged from the ruins of former prosperity standing side by side with the banal indispensables of day-to-day life in incongruous equality, creating that atmosphere of improvised coziness which one suffers gladly only in the comforting knowledge that it's temporary. I had seen the same combinations in the dwellings of Russians who escaped the Revolution with nothing but what they could carry in their two hands. At second glance, I realized that many of the objects here were of some value, however, even though everything was either faded or chipped, and some pieces ruined completely. The modern, practical articles and gadgets had been chosen carefully from the middle-price range, not quite top quality but not quite rubbish either; the housewife's dream—but a nightmare in taste. It was obvious whose hand had sought these out. Miss Alvaro's aunt must have found in them a perfect outlet for her domestic zeal, and the noble old Armenian had obviously given her her head. Everything was clean and pedantically neat; nevertheless, as we stood there for a moment, I became aware of the odors of dust and musty materials, of biscuits moldering in hidden tins.

All the doors stood open: hallway, living room, bedroom, kitchen. One couldn't see much, for the shutters were closed and the windows covered with heavily embroidered but decrepit curtains. Miss Alvaro crossed and opened a French window facing to the west, and raised the shutters. The sun had just set. I recognized my lavender-blue sky, paler now, colder, less sentimental. It had been late summer when I lived in the neighborhood. Now it was late autumn. Golden leaves fluttered down from the trees along the Boulevard Bratianu. Miss Alvaro trembled slightly. And for a few moments we both stood there looking out, breathing deeply, rather like divers, I thought, before braving the deep; but then the city below had much in common with the mausoleum behind us, much the same mixture of modern supertransience and flea-market curiosities. For all its Art Nouveau villas and futuristic glass-and-concrete buildings, Bucharest was as Oriental as Smyrna. The Occident, with its many-splendored towered citadels, was far away, there where the sun, dipping in, blood red, from the swamps and steppes and scrawny settlements of the east, would now only be prewarming the slate and copper roofs before melting them with its farewell blaze.

Miss Alvaro squared her shoulders and turned to her inheritance. “My aunt always spoke of their possessions, especially the furniture and glass and china, as though they were priceless. I'm afraid I'm no judge,” she said. “I only want to keep a few things for myself, things that are easily transportable. I've no intention of setting up house in the near future.”

On closer inspection it appeared to me that her aunt hadn't boasted; there was a French baroque chest of drawers, an early English grandfather clock, a pair of octagonal Turkish tables with superb inlays of mother-of-pearl, silver and tortoiseshell. The rest was run-of-the-mill stuff: mahogany cupboards; a cumbersome fin-de-siècle bedroom suite, expensive at the time, no doubt; hanging flower baskets; a portable phonograph; a radio. Brocades, gold-thread embroideries, and cashmere shawls were spread everywhere, giving the impression of Oriental luxury. Everywhere too there was evidence of former opulence, surfeit: several solid-silver but aggravatingly incomplete sets of cutlery, dishes and bowls and trays of chipped enamel, fragmentary cloisonné, French and Viennese porcelain sideboard pieces, Bohemian cut glass, but each piece minus a spout, a lid, a handle, with the edges serrated, traces of glue.

I took down one of four leatherbound books with gold stamping that were standing squashed in between pulp novels and department-store catalogues on a bookshelf; it was an edition of Choderlos de Laclos'
Liaisons dangereuses
, early enough still to be signed only “C. de L.” Between the pages were a number of religious bookmarks; “Holy Brigitte, Holy Anthony of Padua, pray for us … ”—tokens of penance for disregarding the Index, most likely.

“The best way to go about it will be to do as we did with the ring,” I suggested. “You choose the things you want to keep, then we'll invite three antique dealers to come and make estimates, first separately, then free for all, and may the best man win.”

“I hope that one day I shall have the opportunity to show my gratitude,” Miss Alvaro replied. “There's just one thing—” She hesitated. “No, I'm sure it's not necessary to remind you again not to mention this business at the boarding house.”

I managed not to for about a week. Then Olschansky confronted me: “You're fraternizing with the Alvaro filly. Don't bother to deny it; my information is irrefutable. You meet her in town; you've been observed several times. Why should you deny it? She's not
that
ugly, no cause for shame. Or do you want to shut me out? That's not very nice between friends.”

I was obliged to tell him the truth, if only to avoid compromising Miss Alvaro, although I knew immediately that this was but a welcome excuse: I was only too glad for the chance to talk about it.

“You can't imagine what it's like,” I said. “We're as complete strangers now as we ever were; apart from what she tells me in connection with her dead relatives, I know nothing about her whatsoever. And she nothing of me, since I've had no call to tell her anything. We still act with the same polite formality as we did on the day she first spoke to me, still keep our distance, partly on purpose and partly because we no longer have any choice. Just think of it: never a personal word, no confidences, and of course, God forbid, no intimacies. It would never occur to either of us to ask the other where or how we were going to spend the evening when we part at the door; our private lives could take place in two different worlds. In reality we simply take separate routes and come straight back here to be under the same roof, sit at the same table twice a day, and watch carefully that no one gets a hint of our relationship, the secret we share—like partners in crime. Then, when we meet at the apartment the next day, we again negate our other life at Löwinger's, never mention it. As a result, instead of becoming easier with each other, the tension builds. The sense of intimacy I feel with her—and she with me, I'm sure of it—grows stronger by the day, our hearts are continually in our mouths, so to speak, and all generated by a purely vicarious experience, by the exploration of two other, dead people's lives. What we find there grows into a monstrous secret between us.

“I say ‘monstrous' because no one should be allowed to delve into another's life in the way we're doing, into the remotest nooks and crannies of intimacy. Each one of us has something we prefer to keep hidden, from ourselves just as much as from others; we shut it away and pretend it's not there. But here we are, Miss Alvaro and I, digging out every last morsel and examining it minutely. We know the lives of these two superb, consummate lovers to the last detail, down to their underwear and toilet articles, their hairbrushes, their soap and
eaux de cologne
, the racy magazines and jam recipes they read as they reclined on the sofa digesting a good dinner, the dentures they popped into a tumbler beside the bed when they went into their lovemaking routine, less and less passionately over the years, possibly, after decades of experience and experiment, but still with heavenly appeasement; the suppositories they needed to ease the passage of their sumptuous fare, probably giggling and thrusting them up each other's flabby backsides—each day we unearth some new dimension that again adds a new dimension to the intimacy between us. We sold their whole wardrobe, complete with everything from his bedroom slippers to his tails and white ties, from her corsets to a moth-eaten mink stole—his Christmas present in 1927—to a secondhand dealer, so that little chapter's over and done with, thank God. Sorting out their clothes gave us an indelible impression of their physiques. We came to know their collar and hip sizes, the shapes of their feet, their body odors, the peculiarities of the stains their sweat left, the irksome sphincter and bladder weaknesses of the people who wore these shirts and pants, shoes and jackets, dresses, overcoats, dressing gowns and nighties, and pressed the contours of their bodies into them ….

“They're ghosts, and because they're ghosts, they take possession of us, enter us like astral bodies. We politely shake hands and take leave of each other every evening, Miss Alvaro and I, but even if the one lies in bed in room number eight and the other in room number twelve at Löwinger's Rooming House, we are in fact lying together in that big double bed near the Biserică Albă, holding each other, making love, taking a sip of camomile tea, then embracing again, lulling ourselves to sleep. We no longer know which is the real existence: that of ardently united lovers, acting as if they are superficial acquaintances who happen to live in the same rooming house; or that of people who are briefly drawn together by chance and who pretend not to realize they are lovers for life. And the next day we crawl a little deeper into the souls of our phantom matchmakers ….

“At the moment we're going through all the drawers in the living room. Piles of documents, letters, diplomas, invitations to all manner of festivities, stacks of photos, all dating from Uncle's glorious Constantinople days, of course, before he met the little Jewish girl from Bessarabia. I have a thorough knowledge of the financial status of this Armenian from the Golden Horn, right down to the last sou, both before and after the momentous day of Mussadegh. He must have been immensely rich, but the way he ran his business affairs is of a naïveté that would make a bookkeeper weep. Even after he had to emigrate, he should have been in a position to live a life of considerable comfort, but he allowed crooked little lawyers to take him for a ride. The deeper one goes into his papers, the more his innocence touches one's heart, the more one is warmed by his open-handed generosity and his love for the woman who meant more to him than anything he'd lost or still might lose. And all the more intensely, almost violently, does the woman herself take possession of us with her total, heartrending, never-despairing humanity ….

“I hope you know me well enough by now to believe me when I say that I'm not normally given to sentimentality. Normally the story of a Jewish woman from the sticks who lives in dread of losing the man who raised her to a certain affluence and security, who gave her a vestige of elegance and social prestige—her efforts to make herself indispensable with her sickly-sweet attentivenesses, his slippers toasting by the fireside, the goose crackling in the oven—wouldn't touch me in the least, nor Miss Alvaro, I think. But the passion this woman invested in her sole
raison d'être
is of such force that one can't help being bowled over by it; she haunts us with her dedication to the goal of becoming everything for her husband, to replace what he'd lost and possibly still mourned. All these impressions and feelings are transmitted to us by ghosts; she's no longer alive, he's no longer alive, they're both dead, and still their love lives on; you can read it in every trace: her recipes, with footnotes underlined in red—‘Aram adores this!' ‘Special favorite of Aram's!' Or in the lists of presents he made for birthdays and Christmases to come, with shaky handwritten notes in the margin toting up his bank balance or the yield of his paltry shares. It's so powerful, it so transcends death, that we feel their presence physically every time we open a drawer.