The Torch in my Ear, page 14
The first of the three left-hand rooms was the parents’ bedroom; Veza’s stepfather, a haggard old man of almost ninety, lay in bed or sat in a bathrobe, upright, in front of the fire in the corner. Next came the dining room, used mostly for company. The third room was Veza’s room, which she had furnished to her own taste, in colors she liked, with books and paintings, unsettled and yet serious. It was a room that you entered with a sigh of relief and were sorry to leave, a room so different from the rest of the apartment that you thought you were dreaming when you stood at its threshold—a severe threshold to a blossoming place. Very few people were allowed to cross into it.
The occupant of this room reigned over the others with an unbelievable control. It was no reign of terror; everything occurred soundlessly; a raising of the eyebrows sufficed to drive intruders away from the threshold. Her chief enemy was her stepfather, Mento Altaras. In earlier days, before I came on the scene, the struggle had still been waged openly, the demarcation lines had not been drawn, and it was still uncertain whether peace would ever be concluded. Back then, the stepfather would suddenly slam open the door and bang his cane repeatedly and ominously on the threshold. The skinny, haggard man stood there in his bathrobe, his narrow, somber, emaciated head resembling that of Dante, whose name he had never heard. Momentarily pausing in his banging, he spouted dreadful Ladino curses and threats, and, alternately banging and cursing, he stood at the threshold until his wish, for meat or wine, had been fulfilled.
As an adolescent girl, the stepdaughter had tried to help herself by locking both her doors—to the dining room and to the hall—from the inside. Then, as she grew older and more attractive, the keys used to vanish; and when the locksmith brought new ones, these vanished, too. The mother would go out, the maid wasn’t always around, and when the old man craved something, he had the strength of three despite his age and could have overcome his wife, his stepdaughter, and the maid. They had every reason to be scared. The mother and the daughter couldn’t stand the thought of separating for good. In order to remain in her mother’s apartment, Veza devised a tactic for taming the old man. Her tactic demanded a strength, insight, and persistence that were unheard of in an eighteen-year-old girl. What happened was that the old man would receive nothing if he left his room. He could knock, rage, curse, threaten, all to no avail. He got neither wine nor meat until he was back in his room; if he asked for them then, they were instantly brought. It was a Pavlovian method, thought up by the stepdaughter, who knew nothing about Pavlov. It took the old man several months to give in to his fate. He saw that he received juicier and juicier beefsteaks, older and older wines by skipping his assaults. If ever he did lose his temper again and appeared at the forbidden threshold, cursing and raging, he was punished and got nothing to eat or drink before evening.
He had spent most of his life in Sarajevo, where, as a child, he had peddled hot corn on the cob in the streets. People talked about these beginnings. That was back in the middle of the past century, and his origins had become the most important part of his legend, its commencement. You learned nothing about his later life. There was an enormous leap. Before retiring from his business in old age, he had become one of the richest men in Sarajevo and Bosnia. He owned countless houses (forty-seven was the number that you always kept hearing) and huge forests. His sons, who took over his business, lived in grand style; it was no surprise that they wanted to get the old man out of Sarajevo. He insisted that they live frugally and quietly and not flaunt their wealth. He was renowned for both his avarice and his harshness: he refused to donate to charities, which was considered scandalous. He showed up unannounced at the great festivities given by his sons and drove the guests out with a cane. They managed to get the widower, who was over seventy, to remarry in Vienna. A very beautiful widow, much younger than he, Rachel Calderon, was the bait he couldn’t resist. The sons breathed a sigh of relief the instant he was in Vienna. The eldest son—and this was unusual back then—bought himself a private airplane, which greatly enhanced his prestige in their home town. From time to time, he came to Vienna, bringing his father cash—thick packets of banknotes; the father demanded the money in this form.
During the first few years in Vienna, the old man still went out, refusing to let anyone accompany him. He donned worn-out trousers and a baggy, threadbare overcoat, and, in his left hand, he carried a raggedy hat, which looked as if it came from a garbage can. He kept the hat in a secret place and refused to let it be cleaned. No one understood why he took it along, since he never put it on.
One day, the maid came home all atremble and said she had just seen the master at a midtown street corner, the hat had lain open in front of him, and a passerby had tossed in a coin. No sooner was he back than his wife confronted him about it. He grew so furious that they were afraid he would kill her with the cane, with which he never parted. She was a gentle, terribly kind person and normally stayed out of his way; but this time, she wouldn’t let up. She grabbed the hat and threw it away. Without the hat, he wouldn’t go begging anymore. However, he continued to wear the worn-out trousers and the threadbare coat whenever he left the house. The maid was dispatched to observe him and followed him all the long way to Naschmarkt. She was so scared of him that she lost the trail. He returned with a bag of pears, holding them up triumphantly to his wife and his stepdaughter: he crowed that he had gotten them for free, from a market woman; and truly, he could look so famished and down-at-the-heels that even hard-boiled hawkers at Naschmarkt felt sorry for him and handed him fruit that wasn’t even rotten.
At home, he had other worries: he had to hide the thick packets of banknotes somewhere in the bedroom, so that they’d always be at hand. The mattresses on both beds were bursting with them, a subcarpet of paper money had accumulated between the rug and the floor; of his many shoes, he could only wear one pair: the others were chock full of cash. His dresser contained a good dozen pairs of socks, which no one was allowed to touch, and whose contents he frequently checked. Only two pairs, which he wore alternately, were used by him. His wife received a weekly amount of household money, carefully counted out; it had been established by his son in an agreement with her. The stepfather had tried to cheat her out of part of it, but this affected his wine and meat, of which he devoured enormous quantities; so he then paid the stipulated amount.
He ate so much that they feared for his health. Nor did he stick to the usual meals. At breakfast, he already asked for meat and wine, and for the midmorning snack, long before lunch, he asked for the same. He wanted nothing else. When his wife tried to satisfy his appetite with side dishes, rice and vegetables, to keep him from devouring so much meat, he scornfully sent the food back. And when she tried again, he angrily dumped it on the carpet, ate only the meat in one gulp, and demanded more, saying they had given him far too little. There was no coping with his raging hunger, which concentrated on this one bloody food. The wife summoned a doctor, sedate, experienced, himself a native of Sarajevo, informed about the old man, speaking his language, and able to converse with him fluently. Nevertheless, the old man refused to be examined. He said there was nothing wrong with him, he had always been skinny, his only medicine was meat and wine, and if he didn’t get as much of them as he wanted, he would go into the streets and beg for them. He had noticed that nothing horrified his family so deeply as his lust to beg. They took his threat as seriously as he meant it. The doctor warned him that if he kept on eating like that, he’d be dead within two years; to which the old man replied with a terrible curse. He wanted meat, nothing else. He had never eaten anything else, he said; he had no intention of becoming an ox at the age of eighty. That was that, ya basta!
Two years later, instead of him, it was the doctor who died. The old man was always delighted when people died. But this time his joy kept him awake for several nights, and he celebrated with meat and wine. The next doctor they tried it with, a man in his late forties, sturdy and very much of a meat-eater himself, had even less luck. The old man turned his back on him, refused to say a word, and dismissed him without cursing him. The doctor died like his predecessor; but this time it took longer. The old man took no notice of his death. Survival had now become second nature for him; meat and wine were nourishment enough, and he needed no more doctors as victims. One more attempt was made when his wife fell ill and lamented her complaint to the doctor. She said she wasn’t getting enough sleep: her husband would wake up in the middle of the night and ask for his feed. Since he was going out less, it had become worse. The physician, a daredevil—perhaps he didn’t know about his predecessors’ fate—insisted on having a look at the old man, who was devouring his bloody beefsteak in the next bed, unconcerned about his sick wife. The doctor grabbed the plate and scolded him: What did he think he was doing? This was mortally dangerous! Did he realize he was going blind? The old man got scared for the first time; but the reason for his fright didn’t come out until later.
Nothing changed about his food intake; but he totally gave up going out; now and then, he locked himself up in his bedroom for an hour or two—something he had never done before. He wouldn’t respond to any knocks. They heard him poking around in the fire, and since they knew he liked the fire, they assumed he was sitting in front of it lost in thought; he would surely respond as soon as he got hungry for the usual. This always happened. But one day, the stepdaughter, accustomed to the hide-and-seek game with her own keys, took the key for the door between the dining room and the bedroom and suddenly opened it when she heard him poking around the fire. She found him clutching a packet of banknotes, which he was tossing into the fire before her very eyes. A few packets lay next to him on the floor, others had already turned to ashes in the fire. “Leave me,” he said. “I don’t have time. I’m not done.” And he pointed to the unburned packets on the floor. He was burning his money so as not to leave it to anyone; but enough was still left, the room was brimming with packets of banknotes.
It was the first symptom of senility: old Altaras was burning money. This third physician—who hadn’t even been summoned for him, whom he received disinterestedly, as though it were no concern of his, to whom he wanted to show, by means of his usual food, his indifference to his wife and her complaints—this physician had impressed and frightened him with his grossness. Perhaps, he now felt doubts that things could always go like this; in any case, the threat about his eyes had confused him. He gazed at money and fire as often as possible; and more than anything, he loved it when one was consumed by the other.
Having been found out, he didn’t lock himself in anymore; he sat down openly to his occupation. It would have taken the strength of several men to hinder him. The helpless wife was at her wit’s end. She brooded about it for a while and then wrote to the eldest son, in Sarajevo, who, for all his generosity, was so indignant at this willful destruction of money that he instantly came to Vienna and hauled the old man over the coals. Neither mother nor daughter ever found out what he threatened him with. It must have been something that he feared more than the rare announcements of the doctor—perhaps he was told he would be legally dispossessed and thrown into a sanatorium, where there would be an end to the usual quantities of meat and wine. At any rate, the threat worked. He kept whatever was left of the banknotes in his hiding places, but he burned them no more and had to put up with the family’s entering the bedroom regularly to check up on him.
Veza was marked by saving her own atmosphere from the banging cane, the threats and curses of this sinister man; she had succeeded in doing so at the age of eighteen. It now seldom happened that he appeared at her threshold. He would tear her door open at most every few weeks, and stand there, tall and haggard, in front of her visitors, but always at a distance; and they were more astonished than frightened. He did clutch the cane, but he didn’t bang it, he didn’t curse, he didn’t threaten. He came for help. It was fear that now drove him to the forbidden door. He said: “They’ve stolen my money. It’s burning.” No one could endure him, and so he spent a lot of time alone, and the anxieties that overcame him were always connected with money. Since he could no longer burn it, he was being robbed: the flames leaped into his room to obtain forcibly what was no longer sacrificed to them voluntarily.
He never came when Veza was alone, but only when he heard voices from her room. His hearing was still good, he always heard when she had company: the ringing of the doorbell, the footsteps past his room, the lively voices in the hall and then in her room, speaking a language he didn’t understand—seeing nothing of all this, he got scared that a secret attack on his money was being plotted. Thus I witnessed his appearance two or three times during my early visits. I was struck by his resemblance to Dante.
It was as if the Italian poet had risen from the grave. We were just talking about the Divine Comedy, when suddenly the door flew open, and he stood there, as though draped in white sheets, raising his cane not in defense but in lament: “Mi arrobaron las paras—They’ve stolen my money!” No, not Dante. A figure from hell.
The Blowup
On July 24, 1925, one day before my twentieth birthday, the blowup came. I have never spoken about it since then, and it is difficult for me to describe it.
Hans Asriel and I had planned a hike through the Karwendel Mountains. We wanted to live very modestly, sleeping in huts. It wouldn’t have cost very much. Hans, who worked for Herr Brosig, a manufacturer of leather goods, had saved just barely enough from his tiny salary. He was extremely careful—he had to be: he lived in the most straitened circumstances with his mother and two siblings.
He calculated the entire hike budget; it was to last less than a week. After that, we might have settled in somewhere for another week, for I wanted to use this time for working, namely for starting a book on crowds. I would much rather have been all alone somewhere in the mountains. But I didn’t say so, because I didn’t want to hurt Hans’s feelings. However, we were all the more thorough in preparing for our hike. Hans, very methodic, sat hunched over maps, calculating every stretch of road and every mountain peak. We spent the first few weeks of July discussing our project. At home, I reported on it during meals. Mother listened to everything and said neither yes nor no. But as our preparations grew more and more detailed, and we were absolutely abuzz with the name “Karwendel Mountains,” it seemed unthinkable that she could have anything against our hike. Indeed, I almost felt as if she were participating mentally. Our goal was to be Pertisau on Lake Achen. Once, she even toyed with the idea of taking a vacation in Pertisau and waiting for us there. But this plan wasn’t serious, and she promptly dropped it, while the detailed discussions between Hans and myself continued. Then, on the morning of July 24, Mother suddenly declared that I should forget about the hike, it was out of the question, she had no money for luxuries. She said I ought to be glad I could attend the university; wasn’t I ashamed to make such demands when other people didn’t even know what they could live on?
It was a hard blow, because it came so suddenly, after weeks of her benevolent, even interested, tolerance of our plans. After almost a year of pressure and friction in our apartment, it was imperative for me to get away and feel free. Lately, the pressure had grown worse and worse; after every embarrassing exchange of words, I took refuge in looking forward to the hike. The naked chalk rocks, which I had heard so much about, appeared to me in the most radiant light. And now, during a breakfast, the relentless guillotine blade crashed down, cutting off my breath and my hope.
I wanted to beat my hands on the walls, but I controlled myself to prevent any physical outburst in front of my brothers. Anything that did occur took place on paper, but not in my normal intelligible and reasonable sentences. Nor did I use my familiar notebooks. I grabbed a huge, almost new pad of writing paper and covered page after page with gigantic capital letters: “MONEY, MONEY, AND MONEY AGAIN.” The same words, line after line, until the page was full. Then I tore it off and began the next page with “MONEY, MONEY, AND MONEY AGAIN.” Since my handwriting was huge, such as it had never been, every page was soon filled; the torn-off pages lay scattered around me on the large table in the dining room. There were more and more of them, then they dropped to the floor. The rug around the large table was covered with them, I couldn’t stop writing. The pad had a hundred sheets; I covered each single page with my writing. My brothers noticed that something unusual was going on, for I pronounced the words I wrote, not excessively loud, but clearly and audibly. “Money, money, and money again” sounded through the entire apartment. They cautiously approached me, picked the pages up from the floor and read the writing aloud: “Money, money, and money again.” Then Nissim, the middle one, dashed over to Mother in the kitchen and said: “Elias has gone crazy. You’ve got to come!”
She didn’t come; she said: “Tell him to stop immediately. Letter paper is so expensive!” But I ignored him and kept covering the pages at a furious speed. Perhaps I had gone crazy at that moment. But whatever it was, the word in which all oppression and baseness was concentrated for me had taken over and held me fully in its control. I heeded nothing—neither my jeering brothers (the younger one, Georg, jeered only halfheartedly: he was very frightened) nor my mother, who finally deigned to come in. She was either annoyed at the waste of paper or else no longer sure that I was “play-acting,” as she initially phrased it. I paid as little attention to her as to my brothers. I would have ignored anyone. I was possessed with that one word, which was the essence of all inhumanity. I wrote, and the power of the word driving me did not diminish; I didn’t hate her, I hated only this word; and so long as any paper was left, my hatred was inexhaustible. What impressed her most was the furious speed of this act of writing. It was my hand that raced over the sheets, but I was breathless, as though I were racing. Never had I done anything at such a speed. “It was like an express train,” she later said, “heavy and fully charged.” There it was, the word that she couldn’t speak often enough, that she knew tormented me so dreadfully. There it was, thousands of times over, insanely lavish in contrast to its character, evoked and reevoked, as if it could be spent in this way, as if one could thereby come to an end with it. It is not out of the question that she feared for both of us, me and her favorite word, which I was pouring out right and left.
