The Tongue Set Free, page 11
I liked that, for it fitted in with my readings. I was reading the English books I had brought along from Manchester, and I prided myself on going through them over and over again. I knew precisely how often I had read each one, some of them more than forty times, and since I knew them by heart, any rereading was merely to increase the record. Mother sensed this and gave me other books; she felt I was too old for children’s books, and she did everything she could to interest me in other things. Since Robinson Crusoe was one of my favorites, she gave me Sven Hedin’s From Pole to Pole. It was three volumes long, and I received each one on a special occasion. The very first volume was a revelation. It told about explorers in all possible lands, Stanley and Livingstone in Africa, Marco Polo in China. With the most adventurous voyages of discovery, I got to know the earth and its nations. What my father had begun, my mother continued in this way. Upon seeing that the explorers displaced all my other interests, she returned to literature, and to make it appealing for me and not just have me read things I wouldn’t understand, she started reading Schiller in German with me and Shakespeare in English.
Thus she came back to her old love, the theater, thereby keeping my father’s memory alive, for she had once talked about all these things with him. She made an effort not to influence me. After each scene, she asked how I understood it, and before saying anything herself, she always let me speak first. But sometimes, when it was late, and she forgot about the time, we kept reading and reading, and I sensed that she was utterly excited and would never stop. If things got that far, it also hinged a bit on me. The more intelligently I responded and the more I had to say, the more powerfully her old experiences surfaced in her. As soon as she began talking about one of those old enthusiasms, which had become the inmost substance of her life, I knew that it would go on for a long time; it was no longer important now for me to go to bed, she herself could no more part from me than I from her, she spoke to me as to an adult, enthusiastically praised an actor in a certain role, but also criticized another, who had disappointed her, though that was rarer. Most of all, she loved talking about things that she had absorbed without resistance and with total devotion. Her wide nostrils quivered vehemently, her large, gray eyes no longer saw me, her words were no longer directed at me. I felt that she was talking to Father when she was seized in this way, and perhaps I myself, without realizing it, had become my father. I did not break her spell with a child’s questions and I knew how to stoke her enthusiasm.
When she fell silent, she became so earnest that I didn’t dare come out with another sentence. She ran her hand over her enormous forehead, there was a hush, my breath stopped. She did not close the book, she let it lie open, and it remained open for the rest of the night after we went to bed. She said none of the usual things, such as that it was late, that I should have been in bed long ago, that I had school tomorrow, everything relating to her normal maternal phrases was wiped out. It seemed natural for her to remain the character whom she had spoken about. Of all of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae, the one she loved the most was Coriolanus.
I don’t believe I understood the plays we read together. I certainly absorbed a lot from them, but in my memory she remained the sole character; it was really all one single play that we enacted together. The most dreadful events and conflicts, which she never spared me, were transformed in her words, which began as explanations and turned into radiant ecstasy.
When I read Shakespeare for myself five or six years later, this time in German, everything was new to me; I was amazed at remembering it differently, namely as a single torrent of fire. That may have been because German had now become the more important language for me. But nothing had translated itself in that mysterious way of the early Bulgarian fairy tales, which I promptly recognized at every encounter in a German book and could correctly finish myself.
The Indefatigable Man
Dr. Weinstock, our family physician, was a small man with a monkey face and indefatigably blinking eyes. He looked old, though he wasn’t; perhaps it was the monkey creases in his face that made him appear old. We children did not fear him, although he came fairly often, treating us for all the usual childhood diseases. He was not at all severe; the very fact that he was always blinking and grinning prevented any fear of him. But he liked conversing with Mother and always stuck close to her. She would flinch very slightly, but he would promptly move his hand towards her, placing it on her shoulder or her arm as if soothing or courting. He said “my child” to her, which went against my grain, and he never liked leaving her, his viscous eyes clung to her as if touching her. I didn’t like his coming, but since he was a good doctor and never did anything bad to anyone else among us, I had no weapon against him. I counted the times he said “my child” to her, announcing the result to my mother the instant he was gone. “Today he said ‘my child’ to you nine times,” or “Today it was fifteen times.” She was surprised at these counts, but never rebuked me; being indifferent to him, she didn’t find my “supervision” burdensome. Without understanding such matters, I must have seen his form of address as an “advance,” which it probably was, and his image stuck ineradicably in my mind. Fifteen years later, long after he had vanished from our lives, I turned him into a very old man: Dr. Bock, family doctor, eighty years old.
At the time, Grandfather Canetti was very old. He often came to Vienna to visit us. Mother herself cooked for him, something she didn’t do frequently; he always wanted the same dish, “Kalibsbraten,” roast veal. Consonant clusters were hard for his Ladino tongue, and he turned Kalb (veal) into “Kalib.” Appearing at lunchtime, he would hug and kiss us, and his warm tears always ran down my cheeks; he wept at the first greeting, for I was named after him, and I was an orphan, and he never saw me without thinking of my father. I secretly wiped the wetness off my face, and, although fascinated by him, I wished each time that he would never kiss me again. The meal began cheerfully, both of them, the old man and the daughter-in-law, were lively people, and there was a lot to talk about. But I knew what this cheeriness concealed, and I knew it would turn into something else. Every time, as soon as the meal was over, the old argument commenced. He sighed and said: “You should never have left Bulgaria, he’d still be alive today! But for you, Ruschuk wasn’t good enough. It had to be England. And where is he now? The English climate killed him.”
His words had a deep impact on my mother, for she had really wanted to leave Bulgaria and given Father the strength to stand his ground against his father. “You made it too hard for him, Señor Padre” (she always addressed him in that way, like her own father). “If you had let him go with a clear conscience, he would have gotten used to the English climate. But you cursed him! You cursed him! Who ever heard of a father cursing his son, his very own son!” All hell broke loose, he leaped up in a fury, they exchanged phrases that made things worse and worse, he stormed out of the room, grabbed his cane, and left the apartment without thanking her for the “Kalibsbraten” (which he had so excessively lauded during the meal), and without saying goodbye to us children. But she remained, weeping, and nothing could calm her down. Just as he suffered from the curse, for which he could never forgive himself, so too she could see my father’s last hours, for which she bitterly reproached herself.
Grandfather stayed at the Hotel Austria in Praterstrasse; sometimes he brought Grandmother along. At home in Ruschuk, she never rose from her divan, and how he managed to get her up, talk her into traveling with him, and bring her to the Danube ship always remained a riddle for me. At the hotel, he took a single room, either alone or with her, always the same room, and aside from the two beds, there was also a sofa, on which I slept on Saturday nights. He had made that condition; for this night and breakfast on Sunday morning, I belonged to him whenever he was in Vienna. I didn’t much care about going to the hotel, it was dark and smelled fusty, whereas our home by the Prater was bright and airy. But on the other hand, the Sunday breakfast was a big event, for he would take me to the Kaffeehaus, I would get café au lait with whipped cream and, most important of all, a crisp Kipfel (a Viennese croissant).
At eleven o’clock, the Talmud-Torah School at 27 Novaragasse began; it was there that you learned how to read Hebrew. He set great store by my having religious instruction; he didn’t expect much zeal in these matters from my mother, and my spending the night in the hotel was meant as a check: he wanted to be sure that I arrived at the school every Sunday morning, the Kaffeehaus and the Kipfel were supposed to make it more palatable for me. Everything was a bit freer than with Mother because he wooed me, he wanted my love and my friendly attitude, and besides, there was no one in the world, no matter how small, whom he didn’t care to impress.
The school itself was a woeful place; this was because the teacher looked ridiculous, a poor, groaning man who looked as though he were standing on one leg and freezing. He had no control over the pupils, who did whatever they pleased. We did learn how to read Hebrew and reel off the prayers from books. But we didn’t know what the words we read meant; no one thought of explaining them to us. Nor were we told any Bible stories. The sole aim of the school was to teach us to read the prayerbooks fluently, so that the fathers or grandfathers could reap honors with us in temple. I complained to my mother about the stupidity of this instruction, and she confirmed my opinion. How different were our reading sessions! But she explained that she only let me go there so that I might properly learn how to say the kaddish (the prayer for the dead) for Father. In the entire religion, that was the most important thing, she said, nothing else mattered except perhaps the Day of Atonement. As a woman, having to sit off to the side, she didn’t much care for the worship in temple; praying meant nothing to her, and reading was important only if she understood what she read. For Shakespeare, she could develop the ardor that she had never felt for her creed.
She had already escaped her religious community by attending school in Vienna as a child, and she would have gone through fire and water for the Burgtheater. Perhaps she would have spared me all the external duties of a religion that had no more life for her and even the Sunday school, in which I couldn’t learn anything, if the deep tension between her and Grandfather hadn’t forced her to give in on this point, which was considered a male issue. She never wished to know what went on in this religious school; when I came home for lunch on Sunday, we were already talking about the play we would read that evening. The dark Hotel Austria and dark Novaragasse were forgotten as soon as Fanny opened the apartment door, and the only thing that Mother asked, very hesitantly, which was unlike her, was what Grandfather had said, by which she meant whether he had said anything about her. He never did, but she was afraid he might some day try to bias me against her. She needn’t have worried for if ever he had tried (something he guarded against), I would never again have gone to him at the hotel.
One of Grandfather’s most conspicuous traits was his indefatigability; he, who otherwise seemed so Oriental, was always on the move. No sooner did we think he was in Bulgaria than he popped up again in Vienna, soon taking off for Nurenberg (which he pronounced “Nürimberg” instead of Nürnberg). But he also traveled to many other cities, which I can’t recall, because he never mispronounced their names badly enough for me to notice. How often did I run into him on Praterstrasse or some other street in Leopoldstadt; he was always hurrying, always with a silver-tipped cane, without which he never went anywhere, and as hurried as he was, his eyes, which darted every which way, the eyes of an eagle, never missed anything. All the Sephardim who ran into him (and there were quite a few in that part of Vienna, where their temple stood on Zirkusgasse) greeted him with respect. He was rich but he was not arrogant, he spoke to everyone he knew, and he always had something new and surprising to tell. His stories made the rounds; since he traveled a great deal, observing everything that interested him, except for people, and since he never told the same stories to the same person, knowing until an advanced age what he had said to each one, he was always amusing to his peers. For women, he was dangerous, he never forgot a single woman whom he had ever set eyes upon, and the compliments which he was skillful at making (he found new and special compliments for every kind of beauty) lodged in their minds and kept working. As old as he grew, barely aging, his passion for all that was new and interesting, his swift reactions, his domineering and yet ingratiating personality, his eye for women—everything remained equally alive.
He tried to speak to all people in their language, and since he had only learned these languages on the side, while traveling, his knowledge of them, except of the Balkan languages (which included his Ladino), was highly defective. He liked counting his languages off on his fingers, and the droll self-assurance in totting them up—God knows how, sometimes seventeen, sometimes nineteen languages—was irresistible to most people despite his comical accent. I was ashamed of these scenes when they took place in front of me, for his speech was so bristling with mistakes that he would even have been flunked by Herr Tegel in my elementary school, not to mention our home, where Mother corrected our least errors with ruthless derision. On the other hand, we restricted ourselves to four languages in our home, and when I asked Mother if it was possible to speak seventeen languages, she said, without mentioning Grandfather: “No. For then you know none at all!”
Although the world in which her intellect moved was utterly alien to him, he had great respect for Mother’s education and especially for her being so strict and demanding with us. Much as he resented her luring Father away from Bulgaria with the aid of that very education, he nevertheless set great store by her filling us with it. I believe that he was spurred not only by thoughts of usefulness and advancement in the world, but also by the impetus of his own endowment, which had never been fully realized. Within the narrow circle of his own life, he had gotten very far, and he would never have given up one iota of power over his vast family, but he felt there were plenty of things on the outside that were denied him. He knew only the Hebrew alphabet in which Ladino was written, and the only newspapers he read were in that language. They had Spanish names like El Tiempo (Time) and La Voz de la Verdad (The Voice of Truth). They were printed in Hebrew letters and appeared, I believe, only once a week. He could read the Latin alphabet, but he felt unsure of himself, and so in all his long life—he lived over ninety years—and in all the many countries he traveled, he had never read anything, much less a book in the local language.
Aside from his business, which he sovereignly mastered, his knowledge was exclusively his own observations of other people. He could mimic them and play them like an actor, and some of the people, whom I knew personally, became so interesting to me because of the way he played them that they bitterly disappointed me in the flesh, while fascinating me more and more in his playacting. Yet with me, he held back in his satirical scenes, letting himself go altogether only in a large company of adults, whose center he was, and entertaining them with his stories for hours and hours. (He had been dead for a long time before I found his peers among the storytellers in Marrakesh, and although I didn’t understand a word of their language, they were more familiar to me because of my memory of him than all the countless other people whom I met there.)
His curiosity, as I have said, was always active; I never, not once, saw him tired, and even when alone with him I sensed that he was observing me incessantly, never stopping for an instant. In the nights that I spent in his room at the Hotel Austria, my last thought before dropping off was that he wasn’t really sleeping, and implausible as it may sound, I never did catch him asleep. In the morning, he was awake long before me, washed and dressed, and usually he had already spoken his morning prayer, which took rather long. But if I awoke at night for any reason, he would be sitting up in his bed as if having known for quite a time that I would now awaken, and merely waiting to hear what I wanted. Yet he was not one of those people who complained about insomnia. On the contrary, he seemed fresh and ready for anything, a devil of constant alertness and preparedness; many people, despite their respect for him, found him a little eerie because of this excessive vitality.
One of his passions was collecting money for poor girls who wanted to marry but had no dowry. I often saw him in Praterstrasse, accosting someone for money for this purpose. He was already holding his red-leather notebook, in which the name and contribution of each donor were recorded. He was already accepting the banknotes and stowing them in his wallet. He never got no for an answer; it would have been scandalous saying no to Señor Canetti. Prestige within the community hinged on this, people always had cash on them for the not-so-small contributions; a “no” would have meant that a man was on the verge of being one of the poor himself, and that was something no one wanted to have said about himself. I do believe, however, that there was also true generosity among these businessmen. Often, with restrained pride, I heard that so-and-so was a good person, which meant that he was lavish with donations for the poor. Grandfather was known for the fact that people especially liked giving to him, if for no other reason than because he himself, in his round Hebrew letters, figured at the head of the collection in the notebook. Since he had started out so generously, no one cared to make a poor second, and he very quickly got together a respectable dowry.
In this portrayal of my grandfather, I have concentrated a number of things, including some that I did not discover or experience until much later. Thus, in this first Viennese period, he occupies more space than he really ought to.
For the most incomparably important, the most exciting and special events of this period were my evening readings with my mother and the conversations about everything we read. I cannot render these conversations in detail anymore, for a good portion of me consists of them. If there is an intellectual substance that one receives at an early age, to which one refers constantly, which one never escapes, then it was this. I was filled with blind trust for my mother; the characters she quizzed me about have become so much a part of my world that I can no longer take them apart. I am able to follow all later influences in every detail. But those characters form a dense and indivisible unity. Since that time, that is, since I was ten, it has been something of a dogma for me that I consist of many people whom I am not at all aware of. I believe that they determine what attracts or repels me in the people I meet. They were the bread and salt of my early years. They are the true, the hidden life of my intellect.
