Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (6 page)

I must confess I was afraid of him—as one might secretly fear a conjuror with all-too-sinister grimaces. Yet I believe that my blend of repugnance and admiration was something he must have aroused in everyone—except, of course, Aunt Sophie, who had taken him under her care like any creature in need of protection: a jackdaw with a broken wing; a superannuated dray horse that was supposed to be driven to the slaughterhouse; the gardener's feebleminded son, who could, after all, perform a few useful services, like peeling potatoes for the kitchen or carrying firewood. My father, in contrast, had no sympathy whatsoever for Stiassny's dichotomous nature, and he bluntly despised him, mistreating him whenever he visited my uncle's house; even though I felt it served Stiassny right, my father's rudeness tormented me.

Withdrawn as Stiassny was in the household, he was pushy in that he was always around. Normally, he was not to be seen. He sat in his room over books and all kinds of weird studies. For instance, he cast the horoscopes of all the servants, explaining to Aunt Sophie that their character defects came from inauspicious constellations; or he tinkered on an apparatus for counterbalancing the harmful earth radiation under Aunt Sophie's and Uncle Hubi's marriage bed. Allegedly, he sometimes consulted ghosts or at least could conjure them up. All these activities took place in sensational secrecy, which made him generally present in an abstract way. But at mealtime, Stiassny appeared fully in person and with impressive punctuality. No matter how small or makeshift the meal—a quick snack before a long outing, a cup of tea and some sandwiches for someone coming home late—Stiassny was there waiting, as inevitably as if he belonged with edibles, as a knife and fork belong with eating and a glass with drinking.

He stood with eyes lowered and hands folded in clerical modesty, wearing his dark, well-tailored, but dreadfully stained suit, the shirt with frayed cuffs and collar, and the skew and sloppily knotted tie; yet his elegance was undeniable. His tall stature and well-proportioned frame, the distinguished head with the blazing white hair and the very beautiful red lips, were as attractive as the rest of him was repulsive—his terribly ruined teeth; his dark-brown fingers tanned by incessant smoking; the pale, decayed, and overfed flesh bloated from his stay-at-home existence. As long as his almost colorless light eyes between the half-closed lids scrutinized the all-too-familiar furniture in the dining room and the usually quite sumptuously laden table, they expressed scornful irony. But barely had they encountered the eyes of the host, the hostess, or one of the other guests when they faded; abruptly they seemed like a blind man's eyes, even though they must have perceived as sharply as before; and Stiassny's face resumed a look of the most servile self-denial, as though he were about to say, “But then who am I to be so forward as to venture even the least critique on what is so magnanimously offered us here? If, however, such an impression may have arisen, then I beg you not to take any notice of it.”

At meals, Stiassny sat at the end of the table: that is, next to or near me. He ate with a greed that had become proverbial. “He eats like Stiassny” was said, for instance, about a horse that had been under the weather and refusing its fodder but was now finally starting to recuperate. Greatly as his excessive gusto repelled me, I could not help watching Stiassny from the corner of my eye. It afforded me a dark pleasure to see his noble, finely carved, sensitive, and overindulged profile wolfing down incredible amounts of all kinds of food, at times even compulsively, mechanically. My pleasure was the sort one receives from certain Mannerist paintings that along with beauty also show us its terrible reverse. Stiassny was far too sensitive not to feel my stealthy sidelong glances. He would turn to me when I least expected it, catch me off guard, and, offering his repulsiveness
en face
to my scrutiny, strike me with a smile of perfidious complicity, as though recognizing in me a confederate of similar vice. But he was generously content to establish this without showing that, even on a level of equal lowness, there is a hierarchical difference between the sovereign perpetrator and the subaltern wisher who is a sinner merely in thought. Yet his colorless eyes remained so expressionless that he seemed to be striving to conceal any advantage of his person—the aura of his intellect, enormous knowledge, and superiority—over the lowbrows he was forced to live among, his presumable vulnerability, and perhaps even his kindness and need for love; to camouflage them behind the mask of undisguised evil.

Naturally, such a look bewildered me. I would be disquieted for days, flung out of the saddle of my self-assurance, in which I sat—by no means a descendant of Count Sàndor—none too securely anyhow. Stiassny seemed to know this, and sometimes I thought he was trying to embarrass me permanently. Ever since I had come into my relatives' home—or rather, ever since he had to watch me entering into a growing intimacy and familiarity there, a familiarity that was more and more taken for granted (“Like an epiphany,” he said with a smile, baring his ruined teeth)—he treated me with a civility that was too exaggerated not to convey an impression of sheer irony to even the most impartial observer. “Lo and behold, the heir apparent!” he would say, rising ceremoniously, whenever I came into the room, and waiting until I took my place before he sat down again, leaning forward as though waiting assiduously to hear what I had to say. Such behavior was bound to confuse me as much as his always addressing me with “
Sie
,” the polite form, even though Aunt Sophie rebuked him about this several times. Finally, Uncle Hubi could endure it no longer, and when he exclaimed, “You sound like a bunch of shop assistants!” Stiassny stopped. But then he switched to apostrophizing me in a respectful and impersonal tone—of course, no less ironic—with a general “one”: “One looks like a painting by Philipp Otto Runge this morning! Need I bother asking whether one has slept well?”

I had no idea who Philipp Otto Runge was, but I could grasp the malice in the reference, even if it was just the malice of Stiassny's knowing how incapable I was of puzzling it out. He was equally aware of how strictly I had been trained to display attentive cordiality toward adults. It was impossible for me not to answer or instantly parry his civility with even more eager civility. It thus came to out-and-out contests of amenities, which occasionally assumed grotesque forms—for instance, the classic situation of a door at which each of us wanted to let the other pass first. Ultimately, Uncle Hubi or Aunt Sophie had to terminate our rivalry with an irritated “Would you please cut out your ceremonies! It's like blackcock-mating season!”

The first time Stiassny saw me in my makeshift student getup, his pale eyes sparkled with amusement, but then instantly faded. He bowed servilely: “Oh, I see! One is reliving the prime of life of our venerable uncle, our mutual generous host. This is lovely—an act of true piety! The reenactment of collective high spirits—this is ethical in the finest sense. Passing on the banner from generation to generation—one feels German! Of course, with innate generosity, one will overlook the fact that the venerable Herr Uncle's mother was Hungarian and Frau Aunt Sophie, a cousin of one's mother—if I am not mistaken—has as much Irish as Rumanian blood in her veins; nay, on one's father's side, one would have to wend one's way to Sicily to bare the roots of our Germanhood. But then who am I to bring up such things! We are all of mixed blood, we Austrians, especially we so-called German Austrians: children of an imperium of diverse peoples, races, religions. If, that legendary imperium having disappeared, we did not still, comically enough, feel Austrian, then we would have to own up to being American … but we lack political insight for that…. Such is life, alas; thinking is often replaced by moods. They are more durable, they are livelier in withstanding time, and, in fact, the more irrational they are, the better. For instance, the German yearning, the yearning for the Reich, the sunken Roman Empire of the German Nation, of Charlemagne, or Karl the Great, as he is known in German, the empire over which Emperor Barbarossa fell asleep so profoundly in the Kyffhäuser mountains that his beard grew through the stone tabletop he leaned on … to restore this Reich, to reunite it afresh, to revive it in all its mystical power and glory … yes indeed! That was what German-speaking youth wanted a century ago, and it is still their dream and longing, no matter where or what they may be today, this German-speaking, German-thinking, German-feeling youth—on the Rhein, from the days of Armin the Cheruskan and his Roman adversaries, perhaps of largely Nubian and Libyan blood; or in the territories east of the Elbe and of course especially in the nuclear states of Bismarck's new edition of the Reich, mainly of Prussian and Finnish and Wendish blood; not to mention in the lands along the Nibelungen Danube, so close to one's heart, of Slovenian and Bohemian blood…. No matter: it feels German, this German youth, Imperial German, Greater German,
nicht wahr?
Wistfully they dream of themselves under the grand rolling of the black, red, and golden flag—that most youthful of all flags, the black of death and the red of foaming blood and the gold of blissfully dreamt promise…. Verily, I confess myself deeply moved: who am I that I may live to witness such things! A young German, still wet behind the ears, if I may be permitted to express it thus, not yet a stripling, but still a lad—and already he is gaily garbed in the costume of the Wars of Liberation, of the epigones of the
Sturm und Drang
, of the constantly redreamed and ever-abortive German Revolution! I sense a German yearning here, in the mother country of Rumanian voivodes, between the Prut and the Seret rivers, surrounded by Rumanians, Ruthenians, Poles, and Galician Jews. And one is proudly heedless of any possibility that one might look ridiculous in a disguise suggesting Puss in Boots—how beautiful, too, this fidelity to the folk wealth of German fairy tales! … No, no, one need not be ashamed; one is right in every respect. Even this Kingdom of Rumania in which one lives today is still a slip and a shoot of the Great Reich—after all, this realm is ruled by a monarch from the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a German prince…. Permit me to utter my unqualified admiration for such a candid expression of belief, one that sweeps aside any petty qualms of political tact! Nothing strikes me as more solemnly German than the steadfastness of this attempt, here of all places, to maintain the proper tone against Herr Uncle's eardrum-killing deviations while one roars
Lieder
to Frau Aunt's nimble-fingered piano-playing! “Oh, Ancient and Fraternal Splendor”! “The God Who Let Such Iron Grow”! Surely one is pierced by the same holy thrills that must have throbbed in the hearts of those who first sang those songs, those young Germans three or four generations ago, who in the songs recognized one another as brethren, and recognized the nation in the community of brethren, and saw in the nation the promise of freedom…. But, certainly, one also senses in these songs the pain and bitterness, the gloomy defiance and yearning, that afflict all emotionally exuberant youth. One recognizes oneself, presumably; one sees oneself in the spring tempests of this mood; one is probably uneasy with the sense that the burgeoning florescence could perish all too easily under a new frost. One also senses the martyrdom, the gallows humor in one's realization of frailty, the revolt in the defiant “Nevertheless!” and the shriek of despair…. Yes, indeed, that is what it is, over and over: youth infects youth, and experiences itself as disease, as both foaming life and suffering; it sings its experience out into the world and foments the same rebellion in kindred souls. Everywhere and over and over, the yearning for the uniting, soul-uplifting, liberating flag…. If one were to be so kind as to visit me in the wretched chamber assigned as my abode thanks to the noble-mindedness of our host and hostess, then I would take the liberty of producing a small object from my modest collection: nothing more than a tiny piece of clay, baked and glazed a turquoise color—albeit several thousand years old, from the earliest days of Egypt. This ordinary thing has the shape of a T-square: one long and one very short side—a
tau
, as we know, of course…. Well, to make a long story short, it is the hieroglyph for the notion of god—the first abstract depiction ever of divinity…. And originally, it was nothing more than the likeness of a pole with a whisk of straw tied to it and moving in the wind—the first flag, as it were ….”

I sensed rather than grasped the perfidy in this speech. Still, the reference to being wet behind the ears and above all the image of Puss in Boots stuck in my mind, festered. I am certain it was Stiassny's allusion to my ludicrous bedizenment that aroused me.

One bright day, wearing my getup, plus the doddering rubber boots, with the fox major's cap on my head, I strolled from the safe preserve of the tower and the house, the garden and the courtyard, through the gates, and out into the village. I knew I would at least cause a stir; and though I did not exactly reckon with open hostilities, I was ready for them. Of course, I had not dared to spirit one of Uncle Hubi's sabers off the wall and buckle it on, even though this weapon really belonged to the fraternity arms. But I had my dachshund Max along, my slingshot, and a good handful of lead pellets in my pocket. As expected, after the first dozen paces, I was encircled by a host of curious Jewish children, which increased into a larger and larger, more and more tumultuous swarm as more children came running.

I walked on, my head high, and started up the road to the marketplace. I did not have to show my scorn of the urchins, who danced around me, howling gaily; I ignored them just as when I sat in the coach, next to Uncle Hubi or Aunt Sophie or both of them, and the urchins scattered before the horses' hooves, and certainly when they fled from the Daimler and then ran around it in the yellow cloud of dust, trying to cling to the trunks strapped on in back.