The Tongue Set Free, page 12
Outbreak of the War
We spent the summer of 1914 in Baden by Vienna. We lived in a yellow two-story house, I don’t know what street it was on, and we shared this house with a retired high-ranking officer, an ordnance master, who lived on the ground floor with his wife. It was a time in which you couldn’t help noticing officers.
We spent a good chunk of the day in the health-resort park, where Mother took us. The spa band played in a round kiosk at the center of the park. The band leader, a thin man, was named Konrath; we boys nicknamed him “carrot,” using the English word. I still spoke English nonchalantly with my little brothers; they were three and five years old. Their German was somewhat shaky; Miss Bray had only returned to England a few months ago. It would have been an unnatural restraint to speak anything but English among ourselves, and we were known in the park as the little English boys.
There were always lots of people there, if for no other reason than for the music, but in late July, when war was imminent, the mass of people crowding into the park became denser and denser. The mood became more excited without my understanding why, and when Mother told me that we shouldn’t yell so loud in English when we were playing, I didn’t pay much heed, and the little brothers even less, of course.
One day, I think it was August 1, the declarations of war commenced. Carrot was leading the band, the musicians were playing, someone handed a note up to Carrot, he opened it, interrupted the music, banged his baton, and read aloud: “Germany has declared war on Russia.” The band launched into the Austrian imperial anthem, everyone stood up, even the people sitting on the benches got to their feet and sang along: “God preserve them, God protect them, our Emperor, our land.” I knew the anthem from school and joined in somewhat hesitantly. No sooner was it over than it was followed by the German anthem: “Hail to Thee in Victor’s Laurels.” It was the same tune that I had known in England as “God Save the King.” I sensed that the mood was anti-British. I don’t know whether it was out of old habit, perhaps it was also defiance, I sang the English words along at the top of my lungs, and my little brothers, in their innocence, did the same in their thin little voices. Since we were in the thick of the crowd, no one could miss it. Suddenly, I saw faces warped with rage all about me and arms and hands hitting at me. My brothers, too, even the youngest, George, got some of the punches that were meant for me, the nine-year-old. Before Mother, who had been jostled away from us, realized what was going on, everyone was beating away at us in utter confusion. But the thing that made a much deeper impact on me was the hate-twisted faces. Someone must have told Mother, for she called very loud: “But they’re children!” She pushed over to us, grabbed all three boys, and snapped angrily at the people, who didn’t do anything to her, because she spoke like a Viennese; and eventually they even let us out of the awful throng.
I didn’t quite understand what I had done, but this first experience with a hostile crowd was all the more indelible. As a result, for the rest of the war, in Vienna until 1916 and then in Zurich, I favored the British. But I had learned my lesson from the punches: So long as I stayed in Vienna, I made sure not to let anyone perceive anything of my attitude. English words outside the house were now severely prohibited for us. I observed the taboo and kept on reading my English books all the more fervently.
* * *
The fourth grade of elementary school, which was my second year in Vienna, took place during the war, and anything I remember is connected with the war. We were given a yellow pamphlet of songs, which referred to the war in some way or other. The pamphlet began with the imperial anthem, which we sang at the start and end of each day. Two songs in the yellow pamphlet struck a familiar chord in me. “Dawn of day, dawn of day, to early death you light my way”; but my favorite began with the words: “Two jackdaws are perched at the meadow’s edge.” I think it continued: “If I die in the foeland, if I fall in Poland.” We sang too much from this yellow songbook, but the tone of the songs was certainly more bearable than the terse and dreadful little hate slogans, which found their way down to the youngest pupils: “Serbia must die!” “Crush the Russians!” “Kill the French in the trench!” “Stab the slimy Limey!” The first and only time that I brought such an utterance home and said to Fanny: “Crush the Russians!”, she complained to Mother. Maybe it was a Czech sensitivity on her part; she wasn’t the least bit patriotic and never joined us children in singing the war songs I learned in school. But perhaps she was a sensible person, especially repelled at hearing that crude utterance from the lips of a nine-year-old child. It struck her hard, for she didn’t upbraid me directly; she lapsed into silence, went to Mother, and told her she couldn’t remain here if she heard such things from us children. Mother spoke to me in private, asking me very earnestly what I meant with that sentence. I said: “Nothing.” The boys at school were saying these things all the time and I couldn’t stand it, I told her. This wasn’t a lie, for, as I have said, I was on England’s side. “Then why are you parroting them? Fanny doesn’t like to hear those things. She’s offended when you say such ugly things. A Russian is a human being like you or me. My best friend in Ruschuk was Russian. You no longer remember Olga.” I had forgotten her and now I recalled her. Her name had often been mentioned among us in the past. This single rebuke was enough. I never again repeated such an utterance, and since Mother had so clearly shown her displeasure, I felt hatred for every bestial war slogan that I subsequently heard at school; I heard them daily. By no means did everyone carry on like that, there were only a few, but they kept doing it over and over. Perhaps because they were a minority, they enjoyed standing out.
Fanny came from a Moravian village; she was a strong woman, everything about her was solid, including her opinions. On the Jewish New Year’s Day, pious Jews stood on the bank of the Danube Canal, casting their sins into the water. Fanny, walking past them with us, got worked up. She always had something to say, and say it she did. “It would be better if they didn’t sin in the first place,” she said. “I can throw things away too.” She was put off by the word “sin” and didn’t care at all for grand gestures. Most of all, she disliked beggars and Gypsies. Beggars and thieves were the same for her. She was nobody’s fool and hated playacting. She could detect bad intentions behind excited talking. The worst thing for her was any kind of hullaballoo, and there was too much of that in our home. One single time, she got carried away and made such a cruel scene that I never forgot it.
Someone rang our bell; I was near her when she opened the door. A beggar stood there, neither old nor crippled, threw himself to his knees, and wrung his hands. His wife was on her deathbed, he moaned, he had eight children at home, they were starving, the poor innocent things. “Have pity, Madame! The poor, innocent things aren’t to blame!” He remained kneeling and passionately repeated his speech, it was like a song, and he kept calling Fanny “Madame!” She was dumbstruck, she was no Madame and didn’t want to be one, and when she said “Madame” to my mother, it never sounded subservient. For a while, she gazed wordlessly at the kneeling man; his chant echoed loud and poignant in the corridor. Suddenly, she fell to her knees and mimicked him. He got every single one of his sentences back from her lips in a Czech accent, and the duet made such an impact that I began speaking the words too. Both Fanny and the beggar stuck to their guns. But eventually, she stood up and slammed the door in his face. He still lay on his knees, chanting through the closed door: “Take pity, Madame, the poor, innocent things are not to blame!”
“Crook!” said Fanny. “He doesn’t have a wife and she’s not dying. He doesn’t have a child, he gobbles everything up himself. He’s lazy and he wants to gobble everything himself! A young man! When did he father eight children!” She was so indignant at the liar that she replayed the entire scene for my mother, who soon came home. I assisted her with the kneeling; and sometimes we enacted the scene together. I showed her what she had done and wanted to punish her for her cruelty, but I also wanted to play it better than she. So she got the beggar’s lines from me and then the same lines in her accent. She flew into a rage when I started chanting “Take pity, Madame!” and she forced herself not to kneel again, although my own kneeling tempted her to do so. It was a torment for her because she felt derided in her own language, and suddenly this solid, compact woman was helpless. Once, she forgot herself and gave me a slap, which she would so gladly have given the beggar.
Fanny was now properly scared of theatrics. My evening readings with Mother, which she could hear from the kitchen, got on her nerves. If I told her anything about it the next day or merely spoke to myself, she shook her head, saying: “So much excited, how will boy sleep?” The increase of dramatic life in the apartment irritated Fanny, and when she gave notice one day, my mother said: “Fanny thinks we’re crazy. She doesn’t understand. She’ll stay on this time. But I think we’ll be losing her soon.” I was very attached to her, so were my little brothers. Mother, not without efforts, got her to change her mind. But then Fanny lost her head one day and, honest woman that she was, she gave my mother an ultimatum. She couldn’t stand it anymore, the boy wasn’t getting enough sleep. If the evening hubbub didn’t stop, she’d have to go. So she went, and we were all sad. Postcards often came from her; I, as her tormenting spirit, was allowed to keep them.
Medea and Odysseus
I first encountered Odysseus in Vienna; by sheer chance, the story of the Odyssey was not among those first books that my father had handed me in England. The series of world literature adapted for children must have included the Odyssey; but whether Father hadn’t noticed it or was deliberately saving it for later, I never set eyes upon it. So I only found out about it in German when Mother—I was ten at the time—gave me Schwab’s Myths of Classical Antiquity.
During our drama evenings, we often came upon the names of Greek gods and figures, whom she had to explain to me; she didn’t tolerate leaving anything unclear for me, and sometimes that caused a long delay. Perhaps I also asked more than she could answer; she knew these things only second-hand, from English and French plays, and especially German literature. I received the Schwab book more as an aid in understanding, something that I should tackle myself so as to keep constant digressions from interfering with the élan of the evenings, which were the real thing.
The very first character I thereby learned about, Prometheus, had a tremendous impact on me: a benefactor of mankind—what could be more alluring; and then that punishment, Zeus’s horrible revenge. In the end, however, I encountered Heracles as a liberator before I got to know his other deeds. Then Perseus and the Gorgon, whose gaze turned men into stone; Phaeton, who was burned up in the chariot of the sun; Daedalus and Icarus—the war had begun already, and people often talked about aviators, who would play their part in it; Cadmos and the dragon’s teeth, which I also connected to the war.
I kept silent about all these wonderful things; I took them in without telling about them. In the evening, I could let on that I knew something, but only when the opportunity arose. It was as though I could add my bit to the explanations of what we were reading; that was basically the task I had been assigned. I sensed Mother’s joy when I said something tersely without getting entangled in further questions. Some unexplained things I kept to myself. Perhaps I felt strengthened in a dialogue in which the other side was preponderant, and if she didn’t feel quite sure about something, the fact that I could arouse her interest by mentioning some detail or other filled me with pride.
Before long, I came to the myth of the Argonauts. Medea seized hold of me with a power that I don’t quite understand, and I find it even more incomprehensible that I equated her with my mother. Was it the passion I felt in her when she spoke about the great heroines of the Burgtheater? Was it the dreadfulness of death, which I darkly felt to be murder? Her wild dialogues with my grandfather, which topped off every visit of his, left her feeble and crying. He did run off as though feeling beaten, his wrath was powerless, not the wrath of a victor; but she couldn’t win this fight either. She fell into helpless despair, which was a torment, and which I couldn’t stand to see in her. So it may well have been that I wished her to have supernatural strength, the strength of a sorceress. This is a conjecture that thrusts itself upon me only now: I wanted to see her as the stronger, as the strongest of all, an invincible and unswerving strength.
I didn’t keep quiet about Medea, I couldn’t, and when I brought the conversation to her, a whole evening was lost. She didn’t let on how frightened she was at my equation, I learned that only in later years. She told me about Grillparzer’s Golden Fleece, about the Medea at the Burgtheater, and with this virtual double refraction, she managed to soften the violent effect that the original myth had exerted on me. I got her to admit that she too would have wreaked vengeance on Jason for his betrayal, on him and also on his young wife, but not on the children. She would have taken the children along in the magic chariot, but she didn’t know where. Even if they had looked like their father, she would have been stronger than Medea and would have managed to endure the sight of them. So in the end, she stood there as the strongest of all, and had overcome Medea within me.
Odysseus may have helped her, for when I found out about him a short time later, he replaced everything that preceded him and he became the true figure of my youth. I took up the Iliad reluctantly because it began with the human sacrifice of Iphigenia; Agamemnon’s yielding filled me with a violent dislike of him; so from the very start, I didn’t side with the Greeks. I doubted Helen of Troy’s beauty, the names of Menelaus and Paris were both ludicrous to me. I was generally dependent on names, there were characters whom I despised just for their names, and others whom I loved for their names, before I ever read their stories: these included Ajax and Cassandra. I can’t say when this dependency on names first arose. It was insuperable with the Greeks; their gods divided into two groups for me, and they entered these groups because of their names and only more seldom because of their characters. I liked Persephone, Aphrodite, and Hera; nothing that Hera did could sully her name. I liked Poseidon and Hephaistos; Zeus, in contrast, as well as Ares and Hades, were repulsive. What captivated me about Athena was her birth; I never forgave Apollo for flaying Marsyas, his cruelty overshadowed his name, which I secretly clung to against my conviction. The conflict between names and deeds became a crucial tension for me, and the compulson to harmonize them never let me go. I was devoted to both people and characters because of their names, and any disappointment at their behavior caused me to make the most involved efforts to alter them and make them consistent with their names. But for others, I had to concoct disgusting stories to justify their horrible names. I don’t know in which way I was more unjust; for someone who sublimely admired justice, this dependence on names, which could not be influenced by anything, had something truly fatal. I regard it and it alone as a destiny.
At that time, I didn’t know any people with Greek names, so they were all new to me and overwhelmed me with a concentrated force. I could meet them with a freedom bordering on the miraculous; they sounded like nothing that was familiar to me, they blended with nothing, they appeared as sheer figures and remained figures. Except for Medea, who totally confused me, I decided for or against each single one of them, and they always remained inexhaustibly effective. With them, I began a life that I personally and consciously justified, and in that alone I was dependent on no one else.
Thus, Odysseus, who concentrated everything Greek for me in that period, became a peculiar model, the first I was able to grasp in purity, the first from which I learned more than from any other person, a complete and very substantial model, presenting itself in many forms, each with its own meaning and place. I assimilated him in all details, and as time went on, there was nothing about him that wasn’t significant for me. The number of years he influenced me corresponded to the years of his voyages. Ultimately, recognizable to no one else, he entered Auto-da-Fé, by which I mean nothing more than an inmost dependence on him. As total as that dependence was, and as easily as I could demonstrate it today in all particulars, I still remember very clearly with what his effect on the ten-year-old commenced, what the new thing was that first took hold of him and troubled him. There was the moment at the Phaeacian court when Odysseus, still unrecognized, hears his own story from the lips of the blind singer Demodokos and secretly weeps; the trick by which he saves his and his comrades’ lives by telling Polyphemos that his name is No-One; the singing of the sirens, which he refuses to forgo, and the patient way he, as a beggar, endures the insults of the suitors: always metamorphoses in which he diminishes himself; and in the case of the sirens, his indomitable curiosity.
A Trip to Bulgaria
In the summer of 1915, we visited Bulgaria. A large part of Mother’s family lived there; she wanted to see her native land and the place where she had spent seven happy years with Father. For weeks beforehand, she was filled with an excitement that I didn’t comprehend; it was different from any state I had ever seen her in. She spoke on and on about her childhood in Ruschuk, and the town, which I had never thought about, suddenly gained meaning from her stories. The Sephardim I had known in England and Vienna were always scornful of Ruschuk, calling it an uncultured provincial dump, where the people didn’t have the foggiest clue of what was going on in “Europe.” They all seemed glad to have escaped it and they considered themselves better and more enlightened people because they now lived elsewhere. Only Grandfather, who was never ashamed of anything, spoke the name of the town with fiery emphasis; his business was there, the center of his world; the houses were there that he had acquired with growing prosperity. Yet I had noticed how little he knew about the things that so greatly interested me; once, when I told him about Marco Polo and China, he said it was all fairy tales, I should only believe what I saw with my own eyes, he knew all about those liars; I realized he never read a book, and since he boasted of knowing many languages but could only speak them with ridiculous mistakes, his loyalty to Ruschuk was no recommendation for me, and his travels from there to countries that didn’t have to be discovered anymore filled me with scorn. Still, he had an unerring memory, and once he suprised me, when he came for dinner, with a whole lot of questions about Marco Polo for Mother. He not only asked her who the man was and whether he had ever really lived, but he also inquired about every wondrous detail that I had reported to him, never leaving out a single one, and he almost flew off the handle when Mother explained the part that Marco Polo’s account played for the later discovery of America. Yet at the mention of Columbus’ mistaking America for India, he calmed down again and said triumphantly: “That comes from believing such a liar! They discover America and think it’s India!”
