The Torch in my Ear, page 10
He spoke Ladino to them and scourged them for their arrogance, which was based on this language. I was amazed to discover that it was possible to use this language, which I regarded as a stunted language for children and the kitchen; it was possible to speak about universal matters, to fill people with such passion that they earnestly considered dropping everything, leaving a country in which they had been settled for generations, a country which took them seriously and respected them, in which they were certainly well off—in order to move to an unknown land that had been promised them thousands of years ago, but didn’t even belong to them at this point.
I had come to Sofia at a critical moment. No wonder they couldn’t have a bed for me under these circumstances. One of the sons had to sleep out in order to make room for me. Thus, the generosity they welcomed me with was all the more remarkable. They moved things around, they packed; the normal hubbub that obviously prevailed here was joined by an unusual kind of house-moving. I heard the names of other families who were going through the same thing. A whole group of them was emigrating together; it was the first major action of this kind, and people hardly talked about anything else.
When I went out to sightsee or just to escape the noise, I often ran into Bernhard, the cousin whose speeches had begun all this or at least given the decisive thrust to the ultimate action. He was a thickset, corpulent man with bushy eyebrows, some ten years my senior, always in youthful motion, and never talking about anything private (the antipode of his father). His German words were as round and sure as though they were his native language; everything he said seemed immovable, and yet it remained white-hot and flowing, like lava that never cooled. If I voiced objections merely to stand my ground, he wiped them away with superior wit, laughing magnanimously and by no means offensively, as if apologizing for being practiced in political debate.
What I liked about him was the fact that material things didn’t matter to him. Since his law practice didn’t interest him and was more of a burden, he never concerned himself with profitable affairs. Walking alongside him through the broad, clean streets of Sofia, you wondered only what he was doing for his livelihood. It was obvious that he needed his own kind of nourishment: he lived on what fulfilled him. Perhaps his words were so effective because he never twisted or distorted them to his daily advantage. People believed him because he wanted nothing for himself; he believed himself because he wasted no thought on property.
I confided in him that I had no intention of becoming a chemist. I was only pretending to study in order to prepare myself for other things.
“Why pretend?” he said. “You’ve got an intelligent mother.”
“She’s gotten under the influence of ordinary people. When she was ill in Arosa, she met people who are ‘in the thick of life,’ as the phrase goes—successful people. Now she wants me to ‘stand in the thick of life,’ but in their way, and not in mine.”
“Careful!” he said, suddenly looking at me very earnestly, as though seeing me as a person for the first time. “Careful! Or you’re doomed. I know that kind. My own father wanted me to continue all his litigation for him.”
That was all he said; the matter was too private to interest him any further. But he was plainly on my side; and it was only when I told him I wanted to write in German and no other language that he shook his head: “What for? Learn Hebrew! That’s our language. Do you believe there’s a more beautiful language?”
I liked getting together with him; he had succeeded in escaping money. He earned little, and yet no one was as respected as he. Among all the devoted slaves of business, including most of my family, none berated him. He knew how to fill them with hope, which they needed more than wealth or ordinary good fortune. I sensed that he wanted to win me over, but not brutally, not with a speech in a mass assembly, but man to man, as though he felt I could be as useful to the movement as he. I asked him what his state of mind was when he gave a speech, whether he always knew who he was, whether he didn’t fear losing himself in the enthusiastic crowd.
“Never! Never!” he said, terribly resolute. “The more enthusiastic they become, the more I feel I’m myself. You’ve got the people in hand like soft dough and you can do anything you want with them. You could get them to start fires, to ignite their own houses. There are no limits to this sort of power. Try it for yourself! You only have to want it! You won’t abuse this kind of power! You’ll use it for a good cause, just as I do for our cause.”
“I’ve experienced a crowd,” I said, “in Frankfurt. I was like dough myself. I can’t forget it. I’d like to know what it’s all about. I’d like to understand it.”
“There’s nothing to understand. It’s the same everywhere. You’re either a drop dissolving in the crowd or someone who knows how to give the crowd a direction. You have no other choice.”
He found it pointless to wonder what this crowd really was. He took it for granted, as something one could evoke in order to achieve certain effects. But did everyone who knew how to do it have a right to do it?
“No, not everyone!” he said decisively. “Only the man who does it for the true cause.”
“How can he know whether it’s the true cause?”
“He can feel it,” he said, “here!” He thumped his chest powerfully several times. “The man who doesn’t feel it can’t do it!”
“Then all a person has to do is believe in his cause. But what about his enemy, who may believe in the very opposite!”
I spoke hesitantly, tentatively. I didn’t want to criticize or embarrass him. Nor could I have done so, he was far too self-confident. I only wanted to get at something that I felt vaguely, that had been on my mind since my experiences in Frankfurt and that I couldn’t quite grasp. I had been moved by the crowd, after all; it was an intoxication; you were lost, you forgot yourself, you felt tremendously remote and yet fulfilled; whatever you felt, you didn’t feel it for yourself; it was the most selfless thing you knew; and since selfishness was shown, talked, and threatened on all sides, you needed this experience of thunderous unselfishness like the blast of the trumpet at the Last Judgment, and you made sure not to belittle or denigrate this experience. At the same time, however, you felt you had no control over yourself, you weren’t free, something uncanny was happening to you, it was half delirium, half paralysis. How could all this happen together? What was it?
Yet by no means did I expect Bernhard the orator to answer my still unarticulated question now, at this special high point of his effectiveness. I resisted him, although I approved of him. It wouldn’t have sufficed for me to become his follower. There were many people whose follower one could become, and they advocated all sorts of things. Basically (but I didn’t say this to myself), I viewed him as someone who knew how to excite people into a crowd.
I came home to Rachel, and the place was full of the agitation in which his speeches had been keeping these people, like so many others, for years. I witnessed this mood of departure for three weeks. I experienced its peak intensity when they started out at the railroad station. Hundreds of people had gathered to see off their near and dear. The emigrants, all the families occupying the train, were inundated with flowers and good wishes; people sang, people blessed, people wept. It was as if the station had been constructed specially for this leavetaking, and as though it had grown just big enough to hold this wealth of emotions. Children were held out from the windows of the compartments; old people, particularly women, already half shrunken, stood on the platform, blinded by tears, unable to see whether these were the right children, waving at the wrong ones. They were all grandchildren, they were what mattered, the grandchildren were leaving, the old were staying, that’s what the departure looked like—not quite correctly. A tremendous expectation filled the station hall, and perhaps the grandchildren were there for the sake of this expectation and this moment.
The orator, who had also come, was staying behind. “I still have things to do,” he said. “I can’t leave yet. I have to give courage to those who are still afraid.” He kept to himself at the station, didn’t push forward; he looked as if he’d much rather have stayed incognito, in a cloak of invisibility. Now and then, people greeted him and pointed him out; this seemed to irritate him. But then someone insisted that he say a few words; and with the very first sentence, he was a different person; fiery and self-assured, he blossomed under his own words, he found the good wishes that they needed for their enterprise, and he gave them these good wishes.
Rachel’s apartment was empty and deserted now, so I moved in with Sophie, my father’s eldest sister. After the tumult of the past few weeks, everything now seemed dull and low-key, as though the people here distrusted any undertaking that went beyond everyday life. They did share the conviction of the emigrants, but they didn’t speak about it; they saved excitement for festive occasions and just did what they had always done. This home was ruled by repetition, the routine of my early childhood, which now meant nothing to me. After all, we had escaped it by moving to England; and the dreadful thing that had happened in Manchester, my father’s death, blocked the road to my childhood. I listened to Sophie’s domestic talk; she knew all about diets and enemas, a caring woman; but she never told any stories. I listened to her sober husband, a man of few words, her more sober eldest son, who said just as little with many words, and, my greatest disappointment, her daughter Laurica, my childhood playmate, whom I had wanted to kill with an ax when I was five [see The Tongue Set Free].
Something was wrong with her size: I remembered her as tall, high above me; now, she was smaller than I, delicate, coquettish, intent on marriage and a husband. What had become of her dangerous character, her envied copybooks? She knew nothing about them now; she had forgotten how to read; she couldn’t recollect the ax I had threatened her with, or her own shrieks. She hadn’t pushed me into the hot water: I had fallen in myself; I hadn’t lain in bed for several weeks: “You got a little scalded.” And when I, thinking she had forgotten only the things concerning herself, reminded her of Grandfather’s curse, she let out a ringing laugh, like a chambermaid in an opera. “A father cursing his son—oh, c’mon—there’s no such thing, you made that up, those are fairy tales. I don’t like fairy tales.” And when I threw up at her that I had witnessed countless scenes between Grandfather and Mother in Vienna, scenes about the curse, that Grandfather had stormed out of the house without saying goodbye, and Mother had then collapsed, weeping for hours and hours, Laurica snippily wiped it all away: “You just imagined it.”
No matter what I said, it was useless: nothing terrible had happened, nothing terrible was happening. And so—reluctantly—I came out with the fact that I had bumped into Dr. Menachemoff on the Danube steamer. We had spent hours talking, I said, and he recalled everything. He could remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. Now he had been her family’s doctor in Ruschuk, she knew him better than I because she had lived there until they moved to Sofia. But she had an answer for this, too: “People get like that in the provinces. Those are old-fashioned people. They concoct all these things. They have nothing else to think about. They believe all kinds of stuff and nonsense. You fell into the water yourself. You weren’t so sick. Your father didn’t come from Manchester. It’s too far away. Besides, traveling wasn’t so cheap in those days. Your father never came back to Ruschuk. When could Grandfather have cursed him? Dr. Menachemoff knows nothing. Only the family knows things like that.”
“What about your mother?” The day before, her mother had talked about pulling me out of the water, stripping my clothes off, and about all my skin coming off in the process. “Mother keeps forgetting everything, now,” said Laurica. “She’s getting senile. But one mustn’t tell her that.”
I was furious at how stubborn and obtuse she was. Nothing existed for her but her one determination: to get a man at last and marry. She was twenty-three and afraid that people already considered her an old maid. She assailed me, begging me for the truth: I should tell her whether a man could still find her attractive. At nineteen, I ought to know these feelings. Did I feel like kissing her? Did her hairdo today make a man feel more like kissing her than the hairdo yesterday? Did I find her skinny? She was gracile, she said, but not skinny. Could I dance? Dancing was the best way to attract a man. A girlfriend of hers had gotten engaged while dancing. But afterwards, the man had said it didn’t count, it had only been because they were dancing. Did I think the same thing could happen to her, Laurica?
I thought nothing, I had no answer to any of her questions, and the faster they rained down upon me, the more mulish I became. I didn’t have such feelings, I said, though I was nineteen. I just didn’t know whether a woman attracted me. How can one tell? They were all stupid, and what could you talk to them about? They were all like her, I went on, and remembered nothing. How can a man be attracted to someone who forgets everything? Her hairdo was always the same, I said. She was skinny; why shouldn’t a woman be skinny? I couldn’t dance. I had tried to dance once, in Frankfurt, and had always kept stepping on the girl’s feet. A man who gets engaged while dancing is an idiot. Any man who gets engaged is an idiot.
I drove her crazy, and thereby made her see reason. In order to get an answer out of me, she began to remember. Nothing much came of it, but she did still see the raised ax, and she said she had dreamt of it over and over again; the last time was when her girlfriend’s engagement was broken.
Cramped Quarters
In early September, we moved into Frau Olga Ring’s apartment in Vienna. Olga Ring was a very beautiful woman with a Roman profile, proud and fiery, never wanting special treatment. Her husband had died some time ago, their love for each other had become almost legendary in their circles, but Frau Olga hadn’t let it deteriorate into a death cult, if only because she owed him nothing. She wasn’t afraid to think of him, she never embellished his picture, and she remained the same. Many men courted her, she never wavered, and she kept her beauty until the late, dreadful end.
She spent most of the year with her married daughter in Belgrade. Her Vienna apartment, where nothing had changed—or rather, its furthest part, a shabby little room with one window—was tenanted by her son Johnnie, a bar pianist. In both his own and his mother’s eyes, he was no failure; but in the eyes of the rest of the family, he was. He, too, was a beauty, the very image of his mother, and yet very different from her, for he had run to fat. People were surprised that he didn’t dress up as a woman; he was often taken for one. He was a cunning flatterer; he took whatever you gave him; his arm was always outstretched, his hand always open. He felt he deserved everything and even more, for he was a good pianist. At his bar, he was the darling of the customers. He played both the current and the most recondite hits; once he had played something, he never forgot it, he was the living inventory of nocturnal sounds. During the day, he slept in his pad, which was just big enough for a bed. The rest of the apartment, appointed with middle-class heaviness, was sublet.
For a while, he had the job of collecting the rent for his mother and sending it to Belgrade after a few deductions. That was what he was supposed to do. But in fact, the deductions ate up the entire rent, and nothing was left for the mother. All she received were unpaid bills; and since she didn’t know how to pay them—nothing but the apartment remained from the happy marriage—some better arrangement had to be found. Her niece, Veza, took charge of subletting the apartment and collecting the rent every month; she made sure that bills were paid, and the remainder was given to Johnnie only if he needed it. He always did need it, and, as before, not a penny was left over for Frau Olga. She never complained, for she worshipped her son. “My son the musician,” she used to call him. And since everything she said was marked by her pride, some people, who didn’t know him, tended to view him as a secret Schubert, despite his bar moniker, Johnnie.
We were happy to move into this apartment; although furnished, it was nevertheless our own place. The vision of Scheuchzerstrasse, where we had lived in Zurich, hovered before us. And while this wasn’t Zurich, my paradise, it was nevertheless Vienna, Mother’s Vienna. We had left Scheuchzerstrasse five years earlier; in between came the Villa Yalta in Zurich for me, the forest sanatorium in Arosa for her, and later the rooming house and the inflation in Frankfurt. It was astonishing that after all those things, we could look forward to living together without tension. We all talked about it, each in his own way, as if a new era of health, study, and peace were commencing.
But there was one fly in the ointment, and this fly was Johnnie Ring. Our living and dining room bordered on his pad. And when the finally united family was dining, the door would open, Johnnie’s corpulent figure appeared, wrapped in an old bathrobe and nothing else, and, with a “Hi, there!”, he whisked past us in slippers, en route to the toilet. He had stipulated this right, but we had forgotten to restrict it to the periods between meals, for we liked to remain undisturbed at mealtimes. Thus he always showed up punctually, as soon as we had dipped our spoons into the soup. Perhaps our voices had awoken him and reminded him of his need; but perhaps he was also curious and wanted to find out what was on our menu. For he didn’t come back through very soon; he made sure the entrée was already on our plates when he rustled back into his room. It really sounded like rustling, although he wasn’t wrapped in silk; the noise came from the way he moved and from a series of certainly one dozen “Hi there excuse me hi there how are you excuse me hi how’s everything excuse me how are you all excuse me.” He had to pass behind Mother, squeezing between the sideboard and her chair in a skillful pirouette, managing not to graze her even once. She waited for the touch of his greasy bathrobe, let out a deep sigh of relief when the danger was past and he had vanished behind his door, and she then always said the same thing: “Thank goodness. He would have ruined my appetite.” We knew the vastness of her disgust, without divining the cause; but what amazed all three of us was the polite way she responded to his words. The choice of her greeting—”Good morning, Herr Ring!”—was certainly ironic; but there was no hint of irony in her intonation: it sounded innocuous, friendly, even cordial. Nor was her sigh of relief after his passage ever loud enough to be heard behind the closed door of his room; and the conversation at the table then went on as if he had never appeared in the first place.
