The Tongue Set Free, page 10
So German became less important and I had to stand my ground in two ways. Monsieur Cottier was a large, corpulent man with a Vandyke and a belly, who greatly enjoyed the meal at my aunt’s. He spoke slowly, pondering every sentence, and gazed with delight at my mother. He was already old and he struck me as treating her like a child. He talked only to her, he said nothing to Aunt Linda, but she kept filling up his plate; he acted as if he didn’t notice and kept on eating calmly.
“Aunt Linda’s beautiful!” I said enthusiastically on the way home. She had a dark skin and wonderfully large, black eyes. “She smells so good,” I added; she had kissed me and smelled even better than my aunt in Paris. “Goodness,” said Mother, “she has a gigantic nose and elephant’s legs. But the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” She had already said that once during the meal, sarcastically eyeing Monsieur Cottier. I was surprised at her repeating it and asked her what it meant. She explained, very harshly, that Monsieur Cottier liked to eat well, and Aunt Linda kept a fine cuisine. That was why he came every day. I asked if that was why she smelled so good. “That’s her perfume,” said Mother, “she’s always used too much perfume.” I sensed that Mother disapproved of her, and though she had acted very friendly to Monsieur Cottier and made him laugh, she didn’t seem to think very highly of him.
“No one’s going to come to our house to eat,” I said suddenly, as though grown up, and Mother smiled and encouraged me further: “You won’t allow it, will you, you’ll watch out.”
The second visit, to Monsieur Aftalion, was a very different matter. Of all the Sephardim that Mother knew, he was the richest. “He’s a millionaire,” she said, “and still young.” When I asked if he was a lot richer than Uncle Solomon, and she assured me he was, I was instantly won over to him. He looked very different too, she told me, he was a good dancer and a cavalier. Everyone lionized him, he was so noble, she said, that he could live at a royal court. “We don’t have such people among us anymore,” she said, “we were like that in the old days, when we lived in Spain.” Then she confided that Monsieur Aftalion had once wanted to marry her, but she had already been secretly engaged to my father. “Otherwise, I might have married him,” she said. He had been very sad after that, she told me, and had not wanted any other woman for years. He had only gotten married very recently, and was spending his honeymoon in Lausanne with his wife Frieda, a renowned beauty. He lived in the most elegant hotel, she said, and that was where we would visit him.
I was interested in him because she put him above my uncle. I despised my uncle so much that Monsieur Aftalion’s marriage proposal had no special effect on me. I was anxious to see him, merely to have that Napoleon shrink down to a wretched nothing next to him. “Too bad Uncle Solomon won’t come along!” I said.
“He’s in England,” she said. “He can’t possibly come along.”
“But it would be nice if he came along, so he could see what a real Sephardi is like.”
My mother did not resent my hatred of her brother. Although admiring his efficiency, she found it right for me to rebel against him. Perhaps she realized how important it was for me not to have him replace Father as my model, perhaps she regarded this early, indelible hatred as “character,” and “character” was more important to her than anything else in the world.
We entered a palace of a hotel, I had never seen anything like it, I even believe it was called “Lausanne Palace.” Monsieur Aftalion lived in a suite of gigantic, luxuriously appointed rooms; I felt as if I were in The Arabian Nights, and I thought scornfully about my uncle’s mansion in Palatine Road, which had so deeply impressed me a year ago. A double door opened, and Monsieur Aftalion appeared in a dark-blue suit and white spats; with his face wreathed in smiles, he walked towards my mother and kissed her hand. “You’ve grown even more beautiful, Mathilde,” he said; she was dressed in black.
“And you have the most beautiful wife,” said Mother, she was never at a loss for words. “Where is she? Isn’t Frieda here? I haven’t seen her since the institute in Vienna. I’ve told my son so much about her, I brought him along because he absolutely wanted to see her.”
“She’ll be along in a moment. She hasn’t quite finished dressing yet. You two will have to put up with something less beautiful for the moment.” Everything was very elegant and refined, in accordance with the grand rooms. He asked what Mother’s plans were, listening very attentively but still smiling, and he approved of her settling in Vienna, approved it with fairy-tale words: “You belong in Vienna, Mathilde,” he said, “the city loves you, you were always most alive and most beautiful in Vienna.”
I wasn’t the least bit jealous, not of him, not of Vienna. I found out something that I didn’t know and that wasn’t written in any of my books, the idea that a city can love a human being, and I liked the idea. Then Frieda came in, and she was the greatest surprise. I had never seen such a beautiful woman, she was as radiant as the lake and splendidly attired and she treated Mother as though she were the princess. Culling the loveliest roses from the vases, she gave them to Monsieur Aftalion, and he handed them to Mother with a bow. It wasn’t a very long visit, nor did I understand everything that was said; the conversation alternated between French and German, and I wasn’t all that good yet in either language, especially French. I also felt that some things that I was not supposed to understand were said in French; but whereas I normally was outraged at such a secret tongue of the adults, I would have cheerfully accepted much worse things from this victor over Napoleon and from his marvelously beautiful wife.
When we left the palace, my Mother struck me as slightly confused. “I nearly married him,” she said, looking at me suddenly and adding a sentence, that frightened me: “But then you wouldn’t exist today!” I couldn’t imagine that, how could I not exist; I was walking next to her. “But I am your son,” I said defiantly. She may have regretted speaking to me like that, for she paused and hugged me tight, together with the roses she was carrying, and then she praised Frieda: “That was noble of her. She has character!” She very rarely said that, and simply never about a woman. I was glad that she too liked Frieda. When we talked about this visit in later years, she said she had left with the feeling that everything we saw, all that splendor, actually belonged to her, and she had been surprised that she didn’t resent or envy Frieda, granting her what she would never have granted any other woman.
We spent three months in Lausanne, and I sometimes think that no other time in my life has been as momentous. But one often thinks that when focusing seriously on a period, and it is possible that each period is the most important and each contains everything. Nevertheless, in Lausanne, where I heard French all around me, picking it up casually and without dramatic complications, I was reborn under my mother’s influence to the German language, and the spasm of that birth produced the passion tying me to both, the language and my mother. Without these two, basically one and the same, the further course of my life would have been senseless and incomprehensible.
In August, we set out for Vienna, stopping in Zurich for several hours. Mother left the little brothers in Miss Bray’s care in the waiting room and took me up Mount Zurich in a cable car. We got out at a place called Rigiblick. It was a radiant day, and I saw the city spread out vast before me, it looked enormous, I couldn’t understand how a city could be so big. That was something utterly new for me, and it was a bit eerie. I asked whether Vienna was this big, and upon hearing that it was “a great deal bigger,” I wouldn’t believe it and thought Mother was joking. The lake and the mountains were off to the side, not as in Lausanne, where I always had them right before my eyes; there they were in the center, the actual substance of any view. There weren’t so many houses to be seen in Lausanne, and here it was the huge number of houses that amazed me, they ran up the slopes of Mount Zurich, where we were standing, and I made no attempt whatsoever to count the uncountable, although I usually enjoyed doing it. I was astonished and perhaps frightened too; I said to Mother reproachfully: “We’ll never find them again,” and I felt we should never have left the “children”—as we called them in private—alone with the governess, who didn’t know a word of any other language. So my first grand view of a city was tinged by a sense of being lost, and the memory of that first look at Zurich, which eventually became the paradise of my youth, has never left me.
We must have found the children and Miss Bray again, for I can see us on the next day, the eighteenth of August, traveling through Austria. All the places we rode through were hung with flags, and when the flags took no end, Mother allowed herself a joke, saying the flags were in honor of our arrival. But she herself didn’t know what they were for, and Miss Bray, accustomed to her Union Jack, was getting more and more wrought up and gave us no peace until Mother asked some other passengers. It was the Kaiser’s birthday. Franz Joseph, whom Mother had known as the old Kaiser twenty years earlier during her youth in Vienna, was still alive, and all the villages and towns seemed delighted. “Like Queen Victoria,” said Miss Bray, and through the many hours of our train ride to Vienna, I heard stories from her about the long-dead queen—stories that bored me a little—and, by way of variety, stories from Mother about Franz Joseph, who was still alive.
Part Three
VIENNA
1913–1916
The Earthquake at Messina Burgtheater at Home
Outside the Tunnel of Fun, before the ride began, there was the maw of hell. It opened red and huge, baring its teeth. Small devils, with humans beings skewered on pitchforks, were feeding their victims into this maw, which closed slowly and implacably. But it opened again, it was insatiable, it never got tired, it never had enough; there was—as Fanny, our nursemaid, said—enough room in hell to swallow the whole city of Vienna and all its inhabitants. This wasn’t a threat, she knew I didn’t believe it; the maw of hell was meant more for my little brothers. She held their hands tightly, and much as she may have hoped for their improvement at the sight of hell, she wouldn’t have surrendered them for even an instant.
I hurriedly climbed into the train, squeezing hard against her to make room for the little brothers. There were a lot of things in the Tunnel of Fun, but only one thing counted. I certainly looked at the gaudy groups that came first, but I only pretended: Snow White, Red Riding Hood, and Puss in Boots; all fairy tales were nicer to read, in tableaux, they left me cold. But then came the thing I had been waiting for since we left the house. If Fanny didn’t instantly head for the Wurstelprater, the amusement park, I would pull and tug and shower her with questions until she gave in, saying: “Are you nagging me again! Okay, let’s go to the Tunnel of Fun.” I would then let go and hop around her, run ahead and wait impatiently, have her show me the kreuzers for the tickets, for once or twice we had arrived at the Tunnel of Fun only to find that she had forgotten the money at home.
But now we were sitting in it and riding past the fairy-tale tableaux; the train halted briefly in front of each one, and I was so annoyed at the superfluous wait that I cracked silly jokes about the fairy tales, spoiling my brothers’ fun. They, in contrast, were utterly unmoved when the chief attraction came: the Earthquake at Messina. There was the town on the blue sea, the many white houses on the slopes of a mountain, everything stood there, solid and peaceful, shining brightly in the sun, the train stopped, and now the seaside town was close enough to touch. At this point, I leaped up; Fanny, infected by my panic, held me tight from behind. There was a dreadful peal of thunder, the day turned dark, a horrible whimpering and whistling resounded, the ground rattled, we were shaken, the thunder boomed again, lightning cracked loudly: all the houses of Messina were swamped in glaring flames.
The train got under way again, we left the ruins. Whatever came after that, I didn’t see. I staggered away from the Tunnel of Fun, thinking that everything would be destroyed now, the whole amusement park, the booths, and the giant chestnut trees beyond. I grabbed the trunk of a tree and tried to calm down. I punched it, feeling its resistance. It couldn’t be moved, the tree stood fast, nothing had changed, I was happy. It must have been back then that I put my hope in trees.
* * *
Our building was on the corner of Josef-Gall-Gasse, no. 5; we lived on the third floor; to the left, a vacant lot, which wasn’t very big, separated our house from Prinzenallee, which was part of the Prater. The windows faced either Josef-Gall-Gasse or west—the vacant lot and the trees of the Prater. On the corner, there was a round balcony connecting the two sides. From this balcony, we watched the setting of the big, red sun, with which we became very intimate, and which attracted my youngest brother in a very special way. The instant the red color appeared on the balcony, he dashed out, and once, when he was alone for an instant, he quickly urinated and declared he had to put out the sun.
From here, we could see a small door at the opposite corner of the empty lot, a door leading to the studio of Josef Hegenbarth, the sculptor. Next to it, there were all kinds of litter, stone and wood from the studio, and, always, a small, dark girl was wandering around there; she stared at us curiously whenever Fanny took us to the Prater, and she would have liked to play with us. She stood in our path, sticking a finger in her mouth and twisting her face into a smile. Fanny, who was spic and span and couldn’t bear dirt on us either, never failed to shoo her off. “Go away, you dirty little girl!” she gruffly said to her, forbidding us to talk, much less play, with her. For my brothers, these words became the child’s name; in their conversations, the “dirty little girl,” who embodied everything they weren’t allowed to do, played an important role. Sometimes they yelled down from the balcony: “Dirty little girl!” They meant it yearningly, but the little girl wept below. When my mother found out, she gave them a good scolding. But the segregation was all right with her, and it could very well be that, for her, even the yells and their effect were too much of a link to the child.
* * *
The residential district by the Danube Canal was called the Schüttel; you walked along the canal until the bridge, the Sophienbrücke, that’s where the school was. I came to Vienna with the new language that I had learned under duress. Mother delivered me to the third grade, which was taught by Herr Tegel. He had a fat, red face in which you could read little, almost like a mask. It was a big class, with over forty pupils; I knew nobody. A little American joined the class on the same day with me and was tested at the same time; before the test, we quickly exchanged a few phrases of English. The teacher asked me where I’d learned German. I said from my mother. How long had I been learning it? Three months. I sensed that he found this odd: instead of a teacher, just a mother, and only three months! He shook his head, saying: “Then you won’t know enough for us.” He dictated a few sentences to me, not very many. But the real point of the test was to catch me by using the word läuten (to ring) in one sentence and Leute (people) in the other; the vowel is pronounced the same, but spelled differently. I knew the distinction, however, and wrote both sentences correctly, without hesitating. He picked up the notebook and shook his head again (what could he know about my terror instruction in Lausanne!); since I had fluently replied to all his questions beforehand, he said—and it was as expressionless as everything he’d said previously: “I’ll try it with you.”
However, when I told Mother about it, she was not surprised. She took it for granted that “her son” ought to know German not just as well as, but better than, the Viennese children. The elementary school had five grades; Mother soon learned that you could skip the fifth if you had good marks, and she said: “After fourth grade, that’s in two years, you’re going to Gymnasium, you’ll learn Latin there, it won’t be as boring for you.”
I can scarcely remember my first year in Vienna, so far as school is concerned. It was only at the end of the year that something happened, when the successor to the throne was assassinated. Herr Tegel had an extra edition of the newspaper framed in black on his desk. We all had to stand up, and he announced the event to us. Then we sang the Kaiserlied, the imperial anthem, and he sent us home; one can imagine how glad we were.
Paul Kornfeld was the boy I walked home with; he lived on the Schüttel, too. He was tall and thin and a bit awkward, his legs seemed to want to go in different directions, there was always a friendly grin on his long face. “You walk with him?” Herr Tegel asked me upon seeing us together in front of the school. “You’re offending your teacher.” Paul Kornfeld was a very bad pupil, he answered every question wrong if he answered at all; and since he always grinned at such times—he couldn’t help it—the teacher was hostile to him. On the way home, a boy once scornfully shouted at us: “Yids!” I didn’t know what that meant. “You don’t know?” said Kornfeld; he heard it all the time, perhaps because of his conspicuous way of walking. I had never been yelled at as a Jew—either in Bulgaria or in England. I told Mother about it, and she waved it off in her arrogant way: “That was meant for Kornfeld. Not for you.” It wasn’t that she wanted to comfort me. She simply didn’t accept the insult. For her, we were something better, namely Sephardim. Unlike the teacher, she didn’t want to keep me away from Kornfeld, on the contrary: “You must always walk with him,” she said, “so that no one hits him.” It was inconceivable for her that anybody could dare to hit me. Neither of us was strong, but I was a lot shorter. She said nothing about what the teacher had said to me. Perhaps it was all right with her if he made such a distinction between us. She didn’t want to give me any sense of togetherness with Kornfeld, but since, as she thought, the insult had not been meant for me, I ought to protect him chivalrously.
