Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (41 page)

that, my son, was my good deed: I can book it to my credit. You can believe me: it is the truth ….

Even though Pontius Pilate most likely treated that question in the only possible form—philosophical challenge. Should the ninety-four-year-old aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife have a lucid moment today, he would talk to her about it: in regard to memory; his focusing more and more pointedly on his childhood, washing up more and more flotsam of a distantly lived life—and this focus had made him feel he was preparing to return home; in the past, he had dreamed ahead, now he dreamed himself back—and he had
actually
returned home.

One day—just a few days ago—he had taken a plane and flown to Bucharest: home. Not really his home, for his home no longer existed there, but the moment the airplane landed, he knew he had come home; even though the landscape around the airfield did not look at all like what he remembered—it was much flatter, much more elementary: when he had lived here, had he not perceived how sober, how unromantic and unpicturesque, how unemphatic the countryside was? Only the vastness was impressive, but he had expected that…. And although the soldiers all over the place—wearing thick earflaps on their Muscovite fur caps, automatic rifles at the ready, as they stood guard when the plane discharged its passengers—in no way recalled the uniformed red-cheeked peasant boys whom he had commanded as an operetta lieutenant during one happy peace-time summer more then forty years ago, nevertheless, he knew: I'm home.

He knew it also because everything went as a matter of course. He was not the least bit excited. He thought, it's been forty years since I was last here. No doubt a couple of things must have changed, but he was afflicted neither by expectation nor by curiosity. He now knew, he had three days to convince himself of the truth of his memories. And that had happened the very instant he set foot on the ground.

Bucharest—yes indeed, there was the Shossea Khisseleff, fairly unchanged. Only instead of the racetrack where he had ridden there stood a gigantic building in Stalinist style. Downtown: more space had been cleared around the old royal palace, the Café Corso was gone, the palace was confronted by a newer, mightier one (in proper Stalinist style): the seat of the Party. Biserică Albă was unchanged; the house he had lived in just a bit shabbier.

“That was the truth behind my dreams of forty years,” he wanted to tell the ninety-four-year-old woman. “
Vous comprenez, ma chère:
it was all so overwhelmingly banal. Certainly, the colors of the past are missing. Do you know why they deploy their strength to industrialize a rich country of farmers, an agricultural land? Not to manufacture consumer goods but in order to create a proletariat. Rumania, my farmland of the past, has become a country of class-conscious proletarians. Naturally, this changes the picture a few shades. But the land is unchanged—the land I was born in, lived in, loved, and have dreamed about for forty years—unchanged in essence, I mean to say, and therefore, to me, of an overwhelming banality. Oh, you should thank the Creator that He has not brought you back to St. Petersburg ….”

needless to say, he had had to look up his childhood sweetheart—the great love of his life, a cousin, flesh of his flesh (although marked by a gigantic hooked nose from their common grandmother), of course not as fresh as forty years ago, but unchanged—that is to say: unchanged in essence, therefore, to him, banal. Then, she had rejected his tempestuous courtship, marrying late, only after the war; the husband was Jewish, originally highly respected in the Party, then arrested and locked up for years; she did not care much to see him, she still had the same proud neckline, her aquiline nose boldly cut the air as in the past, yes, she had a son, twenty-five years old now ….

she had wanted to avoid meeting him where she might be seen with a foreigner. Picking as neutral a place as possible, they went to the “Village Museum” on Shossea Khisseleff.

“Our youth is preserved here. Do you remember the girls leaning on fences like these when we rode by?” She remembered. The embroidered blouses those girls had worn were now valuable collectors' items; of course, the state confiscated them from private collectors. “Were there really such wooden houses in our part of the Carpathians?” Yes, it was true. What else? …

on the third day, she sent her son to take him to the airport. He was frightened at how Jewish the boy looked. He had the hooked nose from their common blood. As well as the dark hair and piercing blue eyes. The young man was cordial and utterly indifferent. The old man from the West concerned him not at all. No use pointing out to the boy that he might have been his son. When parting, they barely shook hands. Then the airplane spiraled up over the bleak landscape, in which countless ponds were glittering.

“Thank the good Lord,
ma chère
, that you will never see Tsarskoye Selo again …” he would say to the old Russian woman.

When he arrived at the old lady's building, the concierge was standing there as if awaiting him. “I just telephoned your wife,” she said, peering at him as though expecting consternation before she even told him the bad news. “The old contessa vanished,” is what he heard, for the woman said, “
La vecchia contessa è mancata
.” Only a fraction of a second later he realized that this was a euphemistic expression to avoid the rude word “died.” Aha. Well, they had been expecting it for weeks.

The concierge had been taking care of her during the last weeks. Things had gone downhill rapidly. “I wanted to get in touch with you a couple of days ago, but you were out of town, your wife told me.” This morning, the contessa had sat up once again and gazed straight ahead and loudly exclaimed, “
Pravda!
” And then she had crumpled up, dead.

“It's a Russian word,” he said, removing the wrappings from the box of
marrons glacés
.

“I know,” said the concierge. “My husband's been in the Communist Party for thirty years. It's a Moscow newspaper.”

“Yes. Truth. Here—would you like a chestnut? Take the whole box, I'll just eat one, I really mustn't, you know—at my age, one has to be careful.”

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1969, 1981 by Gregor von Rezzori

Introduction copyright © 2008 by Deborah Eisenberg

Translation to the stories “
Skushno
,” “Youth,” and “
Pravda
”

© 1981 by Viking Penguin, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Originally published in German as
Memoiren eines Antisemiten
by Verlag Steinhausen GmbH, München, 1979.

The stories “
Skushno
,” “Youth,” and “
Pravda
” were translated by Joachim Neugroschel and are used here by permission of Penguin, Inc.

Cover image: Oskar Kokoschka, Murderer, Hope of Women II, 1910

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

 [Memoiren eines Antisemiten. English]

 Memoirs of an anti-Semite / by Gregor von Rezzori; introduction by Deborah Eisenberg; translated by Joachim Neugroschel and Gregor von Rezzori.

     p. cm.—(New York Review books classics)

 ISBN-13: 978-1-59017-246-9 (alk. paper)

 ISBN-10: 1-59017-246-9 (alk. paper)

 I. Eisenberg, Deborah. II. Neugroschel, Joachim. III. Title.

PT2635.E98M4513 2007

833'.912—dc22

2007029789

eISBN 978-1-59017-550-7
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
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