Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (28 page)

All the blood shot back into her face. She vehemently shook her head. For the first time, I saw how rich and fine her hair was. “We didn't just find devotional pictures, did we?” she said, staring right into my eyes. “I know it sounds paradoxical, but the love of my kinfolk would soon have become squalid without their bigotry. Their piety prohibited them from interpreting the tidings of salvation through love as if sexuality were the great, venerable motor of creation and thus the crown of all beauty. Were it not for their piety, they would have joined the followers of Saint D. H. Lawrence, if you get what I mean by that: stigmatized barbarians. But their religion demanded that they view sexual love as something ugly, despicable, something to be concealed—in short, as something sinful. If you remember that, dear friend, then this happy union of what cannot be unified acquires a macabre touch.” Her shoulders drooped. “That's exactly what disheartens me so.”

“Then you still believe in your severe God of shalts and shalt nots!” I cried in foolish triumph. “He just happens to be named Jehovah!”

“No,” she said with no trace of bombast. “I believe in the devil.”

“You can't believe in the devil without believing in God.”

“Yes,” she then said, half turning from me. “I know. That's logical. And if I were occasionally overcome by poetic impulses, like Nietzsche, I would reply, ‘But God has grown old and no longer has the strength to stand firm against the devil.' But I'm afraid even the devil has grown senile—or is banality his last and most dangerous disguise?” She shrugged her shoulders and turned away.

She was packing a bag with things she'd decided to keep. I had persuaded her to take a large writing case in red, gold-embossed leather with an Armenian inscription we'd been unable to decipher. She looked up and handed it to me: “I should like you to accept it as a souvenir and a modest token of my gratitude,” she said simply.

I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, sensed her start and draw back. I took her hand, bent and kissed it also. Her lips were trembling. She quickly turned away and closed her bag.

When I got back to Löwinger's, I lay down on the sofa in my room and was filled with the realization that nothing had changed since my days on the roof above the Biserică Albă; I was in the same melancholic state I'd been in then. The release from the plaster cast hadn't meant rebirth after all; I was being born back into my old wayward self again. There appeared to be no way out, only a flight forward, through enemy lines, the same route Miss Alvaro's aunt had taken to escape the specters of the past: making myths of them.

Olschansky knocked and opened my door before I could open my mouth. As he reached for my cigarettes, he noticed the writing case on my desk. “A trophy?” he asked, with his perfidious grin.

“In a manner of speaking,” I answered.

“So it worked out?”

“What?”

“Don't act so stupid; you bloody well know what I mean.”

“A lot more happened than you think,” I said.

“So, come on, give; did you screw her or not?”

“What? Today? Oh yes, yes, today as well.” I didn't lie. In a literary sense it had as good as happened. “Lots of times recently, several times a day ….” Reality had undergone transfiguration and become fiction.

He looked at me quizzically. “Are her tits as good as I reckoned them to be?”

“Oh, much better. Go away now; leave me in peace.”

“I understand: Monsieur wants to savor his memories. Very well, and congratulations. But I think it was unfriendly of you to keep it to yourself for so long. After all, we belong to the same club, don't we?”

I couldn't sleep that night either, partly because the little dog yapped out in the passage for hours until someone—Cherkunof, presumably—opened his door and let him in. I was wide awake. I decided to write my mother a letter, and got up. The case Miss Alvaro had given me was already filled with my notepaper. The blotting paper on the inside covers was crisscrossed with the impressions of handwriting, and on one of them the lines of a letter showed up clearly; judging by the fine, sloping hand, I guessed that Miss Alvaro's uncle must have written them. I turned the blotting paper over, saw, as I'd hoped, that the reverse side was even clearer, fetched my shaving mirror, and read:

I could hardly wait to run to Miss Alvaro and tell her of my discovery the next morning. I knocked on her door several times before she finally opened it. She looked at me with an expression of loathing that took my breath away. “I never want to set eyes on you again. Never.” Her packed suitcases were lying on the bed behind her. “I shall do everything in my power to erase you from my memory as quickly as possible, and I shall succeed, don't worry. We Jews have had excellent training in this.” Then she slammed the door in my face.

A dreadful suspicion overcame me. I went to Olschansky's room, got no answer, searched the whole house, and finally found him in the bathroom we were allowed to use on a rotation system worked out with astronomical precision. He was standing naked under the shower with his back toward me, and I saw the ugly, festering, earth-filled pits all over it.

“You said something to Miss Alvaro,” I hissed at him.

He had his face stretched up to the nozzle with his eyes screwed up and his lips sucked in between his teeth. “I took the liberty, yes,” he spluttered through the cascading water. “If I'd waited for your permission, she'd still be a virgin.”

“For God's sake, don't tell me you have done this to her!” I was ready to jump on him.

He turned his face toward me, opened his eyes wide, and, with the most perfidious smile I'd ever seen, said, “I did, yes. But it was a great help that you claimed to have done so. The argument that good friends and members of the same club must share and share alike was difficult for a school mistress to reject.”

I grabbed his throat. He seemed to think I was joking. He laughed as he tried to struggle away from me, spluttered water and soap suds, and groaned. “Don't get so excited, you moron. What's the problem? Are you going to let some Jewish broad interfere in our friendship?” I let go of him.

Miss Alvaro moved out of Löwinger's Rooming House that same day; I followed suit some weeks later. It was November 1937. After nearly four years of the Balkans I'd had my fill and felt homesick for Vienna. I arrived there just in time for March 1938.

I never saw Olschansky again. In the flush of my twenty-three years, I often did battle with him in my thoughts, of course, and reproached myself equally often. What shocked me most about the story was that in telling it to Olschansky, I had unwittingly predetermined the only logical, literary conclusion. But soon, far more shocking events put it from my mind completely, and by the time I came to take my strolls along the banks of the lake at Spitzingsee, twenty years later, in 1957, it was very far away. But it was still as clear as the pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Castel Sant' Angelo one could see through the little lenses inserted in the holders of Mr. Löwinger's more expensive pens.

The big something falling from the floor above my grandmother's apartment cast a sudden shadow on the window before it bumped on the cobblestones, and my grandmother's gouty claw reached for the little bell beyond the flowery field of playing cards she had laid out on the table for her game of patience and shook it violently. Decades of strained impatience made her movement awkward, and the thin silver sound seemed to mock her intention to reach the deaf ears of old Marie. Nevertheless, as in a vaudeville gag, the door opened instantly and old Marie appeared, trembling with age and the suppressed contradictions of nearly fifty years of service to a most complicated family.

“Yes, please?”

My grandmother majestically stretched her tortoise neck as if it still were encircled by half a dozen rows of pearls and turned her head toward the window. “Something fell down from the upper floor. The Jews must have put their featherbeds in the windows to air or something of that kind. Go and have a look.”

Old Marie pushed her head out of the window and then brought it back into the room. “Please,” she said triumphantly. “That's no featherbed. It is the young Raubitschek girl.”

I spent part of my youth in this apartment house, which was in a drowsy residential section of Vienna. When I met the “old Raubitscheks” on the stairs, I greeted them with the same polite reserve they used in saluting my grandmother, whose recognition was a delightful mixture of joviality and distance. Never a word was exchanged. They were educated people, though. Papa Raubitschek being a professor at the University of Vienna, famous artists came to their apartment, and every Wednesday evening the remote sounds of chamber music reached my grandmother's apartment and would make her—she was very sensitive to noise—say contemptuously, “They are playing Beethoven's ‘Allergique' again or something equally horrid.” Because so many Jews were successful in musical endeavors, my grandmother no longer quite considered it one of the fine arts.

Whether those chamber-music concerts got on the nerves not only of my grandmother but also of Minka Raubitschek I am unable to say. However, she was a high-spirited girl with a strong and stubborn will, and on the occasion I have just mentioned, during a quarrel with her mother, she jumped out of the window. “Exaggerated” was my grandmother's comment. “As those young Jewish intellectuals usually are.” Fortunately she didn't do herself much harm. She broke a hip and was slightly lame thereafter, that was all. In later years, when I had been accepted into the circle of her friends, we used to put a mountain climber's cord around her waist and let her down the steep stairs to the ladies' room of the Kärntnerbar. This was necessary not only because of her lame hip but also because her sense of equilibrium was impaired by too many whiskeys. She used to thank us with bits of cultural-historical information. “Do you realize where you are, you drunken swine? This place was designed by Adolf Loos, an architect as important as Frank Lloyd Wright. It is one of the early masterpieces of modern architecture—a room that would normally not be big enough for a dozen ignoramuses of your kind shelters half a hundred. If that isn't progress …”

As the grandson of an architect who had done his share to make Vienna's monuments conform to the taste of the
fin de siècle
, I should have given particular consideration to such remarks of Minka Raubitschek's. Her tastes were exquisite and her knowledge was profound. But at the time I was merely reminded of my grandmother. “It is disgusting,” my grandmother would say, “how very much like your father you have become. He is a perfect barbarian, with his monomaniacal passion for shooting. But when I think that I gave my daughters Renan to read in order to have them take up spiritualism …”

The two neuralgic points in my grandmother's existence were the marriage of her eldest daughter, my mother, with my father and the “exaggerated ideas” of my unmarried aunts. My grandmother never set foot in the back rooms of her apartment, which, after the death of my grandfather, were occupied by her two spinster daughters; for there, every Wednesday evening, accompanied by the remote sounds of the Raubitschek chamber music, the meetings of the esoteric community of Mr. Malik took place. Mr. Malik was an engineer with supernatural powers that enabled him to massage the souls out of the bodies of ladies who had metaphysical talents so that the emptied vessel could be filled with some free soul of a dead person not yet reborn, who would then use the mouth of the medium to utter mystical nonsense, the theosophical interpretation of which was left to my aunts. The soul massaged out of the body remained attached to it by an astral navel cord, and when the free soul, who came like a guest into your body for the duration of the séance, had left, Mr. Malik would massage your waiting soul along that very same astral navel cord back into your body, and you would be yourself again. In later years, when we were letting Minka down to the ladies' room of the Kärntnerbar, I had great success with what I had learned of Mr. Malik's teachings. “It's only her cursed
materia
that descends,” I would explain. “Her soul stays with us and her whiskey.”

The presumably free, not yet reborn soul of Mr. Malik will perhaps forgive me. I was only eighteen years old when I thus profaned his messages, and all during my childhood nobody had done much to make me take him very seriously. “I am sure that man is not an engineer at all but just a cheap crook,” my grandmother used to say. “Probably a Jew who has changed his name.”

The suspicion that somebody could have changed his name already made him a Jew—provided, of course, he was not an Englishman, like charming Mr. Wood, who one beautiful day became Lord Halifax. But that was quite another thing. It was typically Jewish to change your name, for Jews quite understandably did not want to be taken for what they were. Since their names usually made it quite clear what they were, they had to change them, for camouflage. Had we been Jews, we should certainly have done the same, because it must be painful to be a Jew. Even well-bred people would make you feel it—either by their reserve or by an exaggerated politeness and coy friendliness. But fortunately we were not Jews, so, though we could see their point, we considered it a piece of insolence when they changed their names and pretended to be like us. Part of the certain esteem my grandmother had for the Raubitscheks came from the fact that they had not changed their name. Jews who changed their names, like Mr. Malik, were crooks and swindlers. Their camouflage was but a falsehood to which they were driven by their disgusting greed for profit and their repulsive social climbing. This was particularly the case with the so-called Polish Jews—the prototype of the greedy, pushing little Jew one met so often in the Bukovina. There were crowds of them; you could not take a step without running into swarms. The elder ones and very old ones, particularly the very poor, were humbly what they were—submissive men in black caftans and large-brimmed hats, with curls at their temples, and in their eyes a sort of melting look which the sadness of many thousands of years seemed to have bestowed. Their eyes were like dark ponds. Some of them were even beautiful in their melancholy. They had spun-silver prophets' heads, with which the butcher's face of Mr. Malik would have compared very unfavorably, and when they looked at you, humbly stepping aside to let you pass, it was like a sigh for not only themselves but all the burden of human existence which they knew so well. But the young ones, and especially the ones who were better off, or even rich, showed an embarrassing self-confidence. They wore elegant clothes and drove dandified roadsters, and their girls smelled of scent and sparkled with jewelry. Some of them even had dogs and walked them on leashes, just as my aunts did. When they spoke to one another, it was in a pushing, impatient way, even when they had just met. They asked direct personal questions and looked around for someone more worth knowing. They were not humble at all.