The Torch in my Ear, page 11
At other times, especially evening, he involved Mother in a conversation which she couldn’t get out of. He began by praising her three well-bred boys. “One just can’t believe it, dear Frau Canetti. They’re as pretty as princes!”
“They’re not pretty, Herr Ring,” she retorted indignantly. “That’s unimportant for a man.”
“Oh, don’t say that, dear lady; it helps in life! If they’re pretty, they’ll get ahead much more easily. I could tell you stories! Young Tisza hangs out in our bar. I don’t have to tell you who the Tiszas were. They’re still the Tiszas in Hungary today. A charming person, this young Tisza! A beauty, not just handsome, and a heartbreaker! He’s got the world at his feet. I’ll play anything he wants, and he says thank you every time; he says thank you for each number specially. ‘Wonderful!’ he says and looks at me. ‘You played that wonderfully, dear Johnnie!’ I anticipate his every wish. I’d go through fire for him. I’d share my last bathrobe with him! And why is he like that? Breeding, dear lady, breeding is responsible for everything. Good manners are half a heart. It all depends on the mother. Yes, indeed, to have such a mother! I wonder if your three angels realize how lucky they are to have such a mother! It took me a long time to say thank you to my mother. I don’t wish to compare myself to your angels, dear Frau Canetti!”
“Why do you always say ‘angels,’ Herr Ring? Why don’t you just say ‘brats’? I won’t be offended. They’re not stupid, that’s true, but that’s no merit; I went to enough trouble educating them.”
“You see, dear lady, you see, now you admit it yourself. You went to the trouble! You, you alone! Without you, without your self-sacrificing efforts, they might really have turned into brats.”
Self-sacrificing—that was the word he caught her with. Had he known what part the word sacrifice, in all its derivations, played with her, he would have used it more often. At an early time, she had already begun to talk about how she had sacrificed her life for us; it was the only thing she had preserved from her religion. As the faith in God’s presence gradually waned in her, as God was there for her less and less and almost disappeared, the meaning of sacrifice grew in her eyes. It was not only a duty, it was the highest human achievement to sacrifice oneself; but not at God’s command; he was too far away to care; it was sacrifice in and of itself, sacrifice at one’s own behest, that’s what mattered. Although bearing this concentrated name, sacrifice was something compounded and extensive, something stretching over hours, days, and years—life compounded of all the hours in which you had not lived—that was sacrifice.
Once Johnnie had caught her, he could talk away at her all he liked. She couldn’t let him go. It was he who finally left, to walk his German shepherd, Nero; or else the doorbell rang, and Johnnie had company. A young man appeared and vanished into the pad with Johnnie and Nero, remaining for several hours, until it was time for Johnnie to go to the bar and play the piano. We couldn’t hear a sound from his room. Nero, accustomed to sleeping there, never barked. We could never tell whether Johnnie and the young man conversed. My mother would never have lowered herself to eavesdrop at the door; she simply assumed they never talked. The room, into which she never glanced (she avoided it like the plague), was tiny: there wasn’t space for much more than a bed. And she just couldn’t understand how two people, one of them the opulent Johnnie, and a huge dog could stand that tiny space for hours at a time. She never mentioned it, but I could sense when she was thinking about it. What really worried her, however, was that I might think about it—which never occurred to me; it didn’t interest me in the slightest. Once she said: “I believe the young man sleeps under the bed. He always looks so pale and tired. Maybe he has no room of his own, and Johnnie feels sorry for him and lets him sleep under the bed for a couple of hours.”
“Why not on the bed?” I asked, in all innocence. “Do you think Johnny is too fat, and there’s no room for both of them?”
“Under the bed, I said.” She glared at me. “What kind of odd things are you thinking?” I wasn’t thinking any odd things, but she tried to anticipate them in any case, pushing my thoughts into the space under the bed, so that there was only enough room for the dog on the bed. This seemed harmless to her. She would have been greatly surprised if she could have read my mind: the events in the tiny room didn’t interest me, for my thoughts were occupied with something else, connected with my mother, something that struck me as obscene, even though I wouldn’t have used this word back then.
Every morning, a very pregnant woman, Frau Lischka, came to clean up. She remained after lunch to do the dishes and then went home. She came chiefly for the heavy chores: laundry, beating the carpets. “I don’t need her for the lighter work,” said Mother, “I could do that myself.” No one wanted to hire her in that condition: people were afraid her pregnancy was so advanced that she couldn’t work well. But she had assured us she did do a good job; we should just try her out. Mother felt sorry for her and allowed her to come. It was risky, said Mother. How unpleasant if she suddenly got ill, or if the expected came over her—out of consideration for our youth, Mother didn’t get any more precise, sparing us the details. The woman had sworn it wouldn’t be for another two months, and until then she could do everything right. It turned out she was telling the truth; she was amazingly hardworking. “Nonpregnant women could take an example from her,” said Mother.
One day, when I came home for lunch, I peered down to the courtyard from the staircase: Frau Lischka was standing there, beating a rug. She had a hard time keeping her belly out of the way, and every time she struck the rug, she performed a strangely twisting motion. She looked as if she were turning away from the rug in disapproval, as if she disliked it so much that she didn’t care to see it for anything in the world. Her face was crimson; from up where I was, one could have mistaken the color for anger. The sweat dripped down her crimson face, and she shouted something that I didn’t understand. Since there was no one she could have been talking to, I assumed she was spurring herself on to keep beating.
I entered the apartment in dismay and asked Mother whether she had seen Frau Lischka down in the courtyard. She was coming right up, was the answer. Today she was getting something to eat: on days when she beat the rugs, she got something to eat. Contractually, said Mother, she wasn’t at all obligated to do this (she used the word contractually), but she felt sorry for the woman. The woman had told her she was accustomed to not eating all day long: she fixed herself something in the evening, at home. Mother just couldn’t stand the thought of this, and on days when the woman beat the rugs, she gave her a meal. The woman always looked forward to it, said Mother, and that was why she beat away so powerfully. She was bathed in sweat, said Mother, when she arrived upstairs with the rugs; you couldn’t stand it in the kitchen because of the stench; that was why Mother herself served the meal in the dining room on those days, leaving Frau Lischka in the kitchen with her hunger. She gave her a gigantic plate, she said. None of us three, not even Georg, could eat that much. All the food vanished. Perhaps she packed some away and took it home in her grocery bag. The woman refused to eat before her, saying it wasn’t proper. We discussed it at the table. I asked why she didn’t always get something to eat. When she did the laundry, she did get something, too, said Mother, only not as much. But on days when the work was lighter, no—she wasn’t contractually obliged to give her anything, and besides, Frau Lischka was grateful for whatever she got, more grateful, in any event, than I.
Gratitude was a frequent topic. If I was furious about something and criticized Mother, she promptly came out with my ingratitude. A calm discussion between us was impossible. I was ruthless when voicing my thoughts, but I voiced them only when I was angry about something; hence they always sounded offensive. She defended herself as best she could. When she felt cornered, she resorted to her sacrificing herself to us for twelve years and reproached me for showing no gratitude.
Her thoughts focused on the overcrowded tiny room and the danger threatening us three boys from those doings, whereby she spoke openly only about laziness, about the poor example of a grown man lying in bed all day or wandering around half naked in a greasy bathrobe; but secretly, she thought of all kinds of vices that I had no inkling of. My thoughts went to Frau Lischka in the kitchen. She was grateful for getting something to eat now and then, and I never ran into her without her joyfully asserting, “You’ve got a good mother,” and corroborating it by vehemently waggling her head. She constantly served to bolster our egos: Mother had a good heart, for she gave her meals “noncontractually,” and I was decent, for I felt guilty about her working in her condition. We plunged into a tournament of self-righteousness, two indefatigable knights. With the energy we applied to these jousts, we could have beaten the rugs of all the tenants in the building, with enough to spare for the laundry. But, as we were both convinced, it was the principle of the thing: gratitude for her, justice for me.
Thus distrust had moved into the apartment with us. For Mother, it wasn’t good that this secret existed in the apartment—Johnnie’s overcrowded pad. While the highly pregnant woman, drudging away in the courtyard or the kitchen, filled me with horror. I was always scared she would collapse, we would hear screams, run into the kitchen, and find her lying in her blood. The screams would be those of her newborn baby, and Frau Lischka would be dead.
The Gift
The year on Radetzkystrasse, where we lived in such crowded conditions, was the most oppressive year I can remember.
No sooner had I entered the apartment than I felt under observation. Nothing I did or said was right. Everything was so near, the little room in which I slept and which contained my books lay between the dining room and the bedroom that Mother shared with my brothers. It was impossible for me to slip into my room unseen. Greetings and explanations in the living room formed the start of every homecoming. I was questioned, and although my mother never accused me of anything, her questions did betray mistrust. Had I been to the laboratory or had I killed the time at lectures?
I had let myself in for such questions by being so open. I especially told her about lectures whose topics were almost generally accessible. European History since the French Revolution was closer to most people than Physiology of Plants or Physical Chemistry. My failure to talk about these latter subjects did not in any way spell a lack of interest on my part. But all that counted was what I said; this alone was valid; I was charged on the basis of my own words: the Congress of Vienna interested me more than sulfuric acid! “You’re spreading yourself too thin,” she said. “You’ll never get anywhere at this rate!”
“I have to attend these lectures,” I said, “otherwise I’ll suffocate. I can’t give up everything I’m interested in just because I’m studying something that’s not in my line.”
“But why isn’t it in your line? You’re preparing to practice no profession. You’re afraid that chemistry might suddenly interest you. This is a profession of the future, after all—and you’re blocking yourself off and barricading yourself against it. Just don’t get your hands dirty! The only clean things are books. You go to all sorts of lectures, just so you can read more books about the topics. It’ll never end. Do you still not realize what you’re like? It began in your childhood. For every book in which you learn something new, you need ten others to find out more about it. A lecture that interests you is a burden. The subject will interest you more and more. The philosophy of the pre-Socratics! Fine, you have to take a test in that. You’ve got no choice. You take notes, you’ve filled up whole copybooks. But why all the books? Do you think I don’t know about all the titles you’ve got on your list? We can’t afford it. Even if we could afford it, it would be bad for you. It would keep luring you further and further away and divert you from your true studies. You said Gomperz is important in this field. Didn’t you say that his father was famous for his Greek Thinkers?”
“Yes,” I interrupted, “in three volumes. I’d like that, I’d like to get it.”
“All I have to do is mention your professor’s father, and a three-volume scholarly opus gets on the list. You don’t honestly believe I’m going to give it to you, do you? The son should be enough for you. Just take notes and study out of your copybooks.”
“That’s too slow for me. It crawls and crawls, you just can’t imagine. I’d like to get into it more deeply. I can’t wait until Gomperz reaches Pythagoras. I want to find out something now about Empedocles and Heraclitus.”
“You read so many ancient authors in Frankfurt. Evidently, they were the wrong ones. Those books were always lying around; they were so ugly, and they all looked alike. Why weren’t the Greek philosophers among them? You were already interested back then in things you wouldn’t need later on.”
“I didn’t like the philosophers then. I was put off by Plato’s theory of ideas, which turns the world into a semblance. And I could never stand Aristotle. He’s omniscient for the sake of categorizing. With him, you feel as if you were locked up in countless drawers. If I’d known the pre-Socratics back then, I would have devoured every word they wrote. But no one told me about them. Everything began with Socrates. It was as if no one had thought about anything before him. And do you know, I never really liked Socrates. Maybe I avoided the great philosophers because they were his disciples.”
“Should I tell you why you didn’t like him?”
I would rather not have learned it from her. She had a highly personal opinion even about things she didn’t really know very much about. And though I knew that what she said couldn’t be correct, it struck me every time, settling like mildew on the things I loved. I sensed she was trying to spoil things for me merely because they tore me too far away. My enthusiasm for so many things was something she found ridiculous at my age and unmanly. This was the word of censure that I heard most from her during the year on Radetzkystrasse.
“You don’t like Socrates because he’s so sensible: he always starts with everyday things, he has something solid, he likes to talk about craftsmen.”
“But he didn’t work very hard. He talked all day long.”
“That’s not good enough for you silent souls! I know just how you feel!” There it was again, the old scorn that I had gotten to know so early, when I had been learning German from her. “Or is it that you only want to keep talking yourself, and you’re scared of people like Socrates who very carefully test everything that’s said and won’t let anyone get away with anything?”
She was as apodictic as a pre-Socratic, and who knows whether my preference for the pre-Socratics, whom I was just getting acquainted with, wasn’t connected with her manner, which I had made all my own. With what self-assurance she always voiced her opinions! Can one even call them “opinions”? Every sentence she uttered had the force of dogma: everything was certain. She never had doubts, at least not about herself. Perhaps it was better like this; for had she felt doubts, they would have been as forceful as her assertions, and she would have doubted herself left, right, and center, till death and destruction.
I felt the narrow confines and pushed out in every direction. I returned to the narrowness, and the resistance I felt gave me strength for pushing out again. At night, I felt alone. My brothers, who seconded her, emphasizing her criticism of me with escapades of their own, were already asleep; she herself had gone to bed. I was free at last. I sat at the tiny table in my tiny room, interrupting whatever I was reading or writing with tender glances at the spines of my books. Their numbers weren’t increasing by leaps and bounds as in Frankfurt. But the influx never quite dried up. There were occasions on which I received presents, and who would have dared to give me anything but a book.
There was chemistry, physics, botany, plus general zoology, which I wanted to study at night; and when I did so, it wasn’t regarded as a waste of light. However, the textbooks didn’t stay open for long. The lecture notebooks, in which one lagged behind the lectures, were soon replaced by the real, the true notebooks, in which I jotted down every exuberance, as well as my sorrows. Before going to sleep, Mother saw the light under the door of my little room; the relationship we had had on Scheuchzerstrasse in Zurich was reversed. She could imagine what I was doing at the little table; but since I was staying up for the sake of my studies, which she approved of once and for all, she had to accept my lucubrations and undertook nothing against them.
She had reasons, she felt, to supervise my activities during this period. She had no real trust in chemistry. It didn’t attract me enough, nor could it interest me in the long run. The study of medicine lasted too long, and so I had given up the idea, out of consideration for my mother’s material worries, even though I thought they were unfounded. She accepted this renunciation and praised the sacrifice she saw in it. She had sacrificed her own life to us, and her periodic weaknesses and illnesses proved how earnest and difficult this sacrifice was. So now it was time that I, as the eldest son, made a sacrifice. I renounced medicine, which I pictured as an unselfish calling, a service to mankind, and I chose a vocation that was nothing less than unselfish. Chemistry, as she could hear on all sides, belonged to the future. It offered promising jobs in industry; it was useful, oh, so useful; anyone who settled in this field would earn a good living, a very good living; and the fact that I gave myself up, or wanted to give myself up to this usefulness, seemed like a sacrifice, which she recognized. However, I had to stick to it through four years, and about this she had serious doubts. I had resolved to study chemistry only on one condition: namely, that Georg, whom I loved more than anyone else in the world ever since our months together on Praterstrasse, could study medicine in my stead. I had already filled him with my own enthusiasm for it, and there was nothing he desired more than someday to do what I had renounced for his sake.
