The Tongue Set Free, page 19
Thereupon, Mother made a very serious face. “My poor boy! Why didn’t you tell me that? You’re just not very sophisticated yet. But you will be.” She lapsed into silence and let me writhe a bit. I was alarmed and nagged: “What is it? What is it?” It had to be something quite horrible, I couldn’t hit upon it. Perhaps it was so bad that she would never tell me at all. But now she gave me a superior and pitying look, and I sensed it was about to come out. “She’s simply supposed to discover what I give you to read. Don’t you understand? That’s why she was sent into our home. A genuine spy! She’s got secrets with a twelve-year-old and pokes her nose around in his books. She doesn’t let on that she knows English, and she’s probably read all our letters from England!”
Now, to my terror, I recalled seeing Hedi with an English letter in her hand in the middle of house-cleaning; she had quickly put it away when I approached. I reported this conscientiously now and was solemnly exhorted. I could tell Mother’s solemn intent by the fact that she began with “my son”: “My son, you must tell me everything. You may think something’s not important, but everything is important.”
That was the final verdict. For fourteen more days, the poor girl sat at our table, practicing her English with us. “How innocent she acts!” Mother told me after each meal. “But I saw through her! You can’t pull the wool over my eyes!” Hedi kept reading my Öchsli and even asked what I thought about this or that. Now and then, she had me explain something and then said, earnest and friendly: “My, you’re smart.” I would have liked to warn her, I would have liked to say: “Please, don’t be a spy!” But it wouldn’t have helped, Mother was firmly resolved to dismiss her, and rationalized it after fourteen days by saying that our material situation had unexpectedly worsened, she could no longer afford to keep a house daughter. Could she please write to her father and explain, so that he would come and fetch her. He did and was no less stern and said, upon leaving: “Now you’ll have to work a bit yourself, Frau Canetti.”
Maybe he was gleeful that we were worse off now. Maybe he disapproved of women who don’t do their own housekeeping. Mother saw it differently. “I certainly upset his apple-cart! Was he ever furious! As if there were anything to spy on in our home! Naturally, there’s a war on and they read the mail. They’ve noticed we get a lot of letters from England. Bang, they saddle us with a spy. You know, I do understand. They’re all alone in the world and they have to protect themselves against the murderers.”
She often spoke of how difficult it was to be all alone in the world with three children. How attentive one must be to everything! Now that she had gotten rid of the house daughter and spy at one swoop and felt greatly relieved, she projected that militant sense of loneliness, which has to be defended in such difficulties, onto Switzerland, encircled by belligerent countries and fiercely determined not to be dragged into the war.
Now, the loveliest time began for us: We were alone with Mother. She was ready to pay the price for her arrogance and she did something she had never done in her life: the housework. She cleaned, she cooked, the little brothers helped with drying the dishes. I took over the chore of shoe-shining, and since my brothers watched in the kitchen in order to make fun of me (“Shoeshine boy! Shoeshine boy!” they wooped and danced around me like Indians), I retreated to the kitchen balcony with the dirty shoes, closed the door, and leaned my back against it as I polished the family’s shoes. I was thus alone at this occupation and didn’t see the war dance of the two devils, but their chanting could be heard even through the closed door of the balcony.
Seduction by the Greeks The School of Sophistication
In spring 1917, I began the canton school on Rämistrasse. The daily walk to and fro became very important. At the start, right after crossing Ottikerstrasse, I always ran into the same gentleman strolling there, and the regular encounters lodged in my mind. He had a very lovely white head of hair, walked erect and absent-mindedly; he walked a short piece, halted, looked around for something, and changed his direction. He had a St. Bernard dog, which he often called to: “Dschoddo, come to Papa!” Sometimes the St. Bernard came, sometimes it ran further away; that was what Papa was looking for. But no sooner had he found it than he forgot it again and was as absent-minded as before. His appearance in this fairly ordinary street had something exotic about it, his frequent call made children laugh, but they didn’t laugh in his presence for he had something commanding respect as he peered straight ahead, tall and proud and not noticing anyone; they laughed only when they came home, telling about him, or when they played with each other in the street and he was gone. It was Busoni, who lived right there in a corner house; and his dog, as I found out only much later, was named Giotto. All the children in the neighborhood talked about him, but not as Busoni, for they knew nothing about him, they called him “Dschoddo-come-to-Papa!” They were entranced with the St. Bernard, and even more with the fact that the handsome old gentleman referred to himself as the dog’s Papa.
During the twenty-minute walk to and from school, I made up long stories, which were continued from day to day and went on for weeks. I told them to myself, not too loud, but still in an audible murmur, which I suppressed only when I ran into people who made an unpleasant impression on me. I knew the way so well that I paid no attention to anything around me, neither right nor left was there anything special to see, but there was something special in my story. The action was very exciting, and if the adventures were so suspenseful and unexpected that I couldn’t keep them to myself, I would subsequently tell them to my little brothers, who nagged me for the next installment. All these stories were about the war, or more precisely: about overcoming war. The countries that wanted war had to be taught a lesson: namely, they had to be conquered over and over again until they gave up war. Goaded by heroes of peace, the other countries, the good ones, formed an alliance, and they were so much better that they ultimately won. But it wasn’t easy, there were endless hard, bitter struggles, with more and more new inventions, unheard-of cunning. The most important thing about these battles was that the dead always came back to life. There were special charms that were invented and employed for that, and it made no small impact on my brothers—who were six and eight years old—when suddenly, all the corpses, even those of the bad party, which refused to stop the warfare, arose from the battle field and were alive once more. That ending was the point of all the stories, and whatever happened during the adventurous weeks of fighting—the triumph and the glory, the actual reward of the storyteller, was the moment when all, without exception, stood up again and had their lives back.
The first class in my school was big; I didn’t know anyone, and it was natural that my thoughts initially gravitated to the few schoolmates whose interests were related to mine. And if they actually mastered anything that I lacked, I admired them and never let them out of sight. Ganzhorn excelled in Latin, and although I had a big head start from Vienna, he was able to compete with me. But that was the very least: He was the only one who knew the Greek alphabet. He had learned it on his own, and since he wrote a great deal—regarding himself as a poet—the Greek letters became his secret code. He filled notebook after notebook, and when one was finished, he handed it to me; I leafed through it, unable to read a single word. He didn’t let me hold it for long; scarcely had I expressed my admiration for his ability when he took the notebook back and with incredible speed he began a new one right before my eyes. As for Greek history, he was no less enthusiastic than I. Eugen Müller, who taught us that subject, was a wonderful teacher, but while I was concerned with the freedom of the Greeks, Ganzhorn cared only about their great writers. His ignorance of the language was something he didn’t like to admit. Perhaps he had already begun studying it on his own, for we spoke about the fact that our ways would part as of the third year—he wanted to attend the literary Gymnasium—and when I said, respectfully and a bit enviously, “Then you’ll have Greek!”, he arrogantly declared: “I’ll know it beforehand.” I believed him, he was no braggart; he always carried out anything he announced, and he did a lot of things he hadn’t announced. In his scorn for anything ordinary, he reminded me of the attitude that I was familar with at home. But he never put it into words; if the conversation touched upon anything that seemed unworthy of a great writer, he turned away and lapsed into silence. His head, long and narrow, as though squeezed together, held very high and at an angle, would then have something of an open penknife, which, however, stayed open, it wouldn’t close; Ganzhorn was not capable of a mean or nasty word. In the midst of the class, he seemed sharply separated from it. No one who copied from him felt comfortable about it, he always pretended not to notice, never pushing his notebook over, or pulling it away; since he disapproved of cheating, he left every detail of the action to the other person.
When we found out about Socrates, the class had fun nicknaming me Socrates, thereby perhaps unburdening itself of the seriousness of his fate. This happened casually and with no deeper significance, but it stuck, and the joke got on Ganzhorn’s nerves. For a whole while, I saw him busy writing, sometimes giving me a searching look and solemnly shaking his head. A week later, he had completed another notebook, but this time he said he wanted to read it to me. It was a dialogue between a poet and a philosopher. The poet was named Cornutotum, literally “whole horn,” that was Ganzhorn himself, he liked translating his name into Latin; the philosopher was I. He had read my name backwards, hitting upon the two ugly words Saile Ittenacus. The latter was nothing like Socrates, just a run-of-the-mill sophist, one of those people whom Socrates had picked on. But that was only a side issue of the dialogue; the more important fact was that the poet harshly browbeat the poor philosopher on all sides, finally chopping him to bits, nothing was left of him. And that was what Ganzhorn, certain of victory, read to me; I wasn’t the least bit offended. Because of the reversal of my name, I didn’t apply it to myself; had he used my own name, I would have been touchier. I was glad that he was reading one of his notebooks to me. I felt elevated, as though he had initiated me into his Greek mysteries. Nothing changed between us, and after a while, when he asked me—timidly for him—whether I wasn’t planning to write a counter-dialogue, I was sincerely amazed: He was right, after all; I was on his side—what was a philosopher next to a poet anyway? I wouldn’t have had an inkling of what to write in a counter-dialogue.
Ludwig Ellenbogen impressed me in a totally different way. He came from Vienna with his mother, and he too had no father. Wilhelm Ellenbogen was a member of the Austrian parliament, a renowned orator; I had often heard his name in Vienna. When I asked the boy about him, I was struck with his calm way of saying: “That’s my uncle.” He sounded as if he didn’t care one way or another. I soon realized he was like that about everything, he seemed more grown-up than I, not just taller, for pretty much all of them were taller. He was interested in things I knew nothing about; you found out by chance and casually, for he never boasted, he always kept aloof, without pride or false modesty, as though his ambition were not within the class. He was by no means reticent, he was open to any conversation; he merely didn’t like coming out with his things, perhaps because none of us knew anything about them. He had special short talks with our Latin teacher, Billeter, who was different from the other teachers, not only because of his goiter; they read the same books, told each other the titles, which none of us had ever heard of, they discussed the books, expressed their opinions, and often felt the same way about them. Ellenbogen spoke quietly and matter-ox-factly, without boyish emotions; it was really Billeter who acted capriciously. If such a conversation began, the entire class listened uncomprehendingly, no one had the foggiest notion of what was being discussed. At the end, Ellenbogen was as imperturbable as at the start, but Billeter showed a certain satisfaction about such talks; and he respected Ellenbogen, who didn’t care what they were learning in school at that point. I was sure that Ellenbogen knew everything anyhow, I actually didn’t count him among the other boys. I liked him, but in a way that I would have liked him as an adult; and I was a bit embarrassed with him that I was so vehemently interested in certain things, especially all the things we learned from Eugen Müller in history class.
For the really new thing that first grabbed hold of me at this school was Greek history. We had Öchsli’s history books, one on general and one on Swiss history, I went through both of them immediately, and they followed each other in such rapid succession that they blended together for me. The freedom of the Swiss fell together with that of the Greeks. Starting all over again, I read now one and now the other book. The sacrifice of the Thermopylae was made up for by the victory at Morgarten. I experienced the freedom of the Swiss as present and felt it in myself; because they had self-determination, because they were not ruled by an emperor, they had managed not to get drawn into the world war. I felt queasy about emperors as commanders-in-chief. Kaiser Franz Joseph wasn’t much on my mind, he was very old and said little when coming forward, usually a single sentence; next to my grandfather, he seemed lifeless and dull. Every day, we had sung the Austrian national anthem, asking God to preserve and protect our Kaiser; he appeared to need this protection. While singing, I never looked at his portrait, which hung on the wall behind the teacher’s desk, and I tried not to imagine him. Maybe I had absorbed some dislike of him from Fanny, our Bohemian maid; she never batted an eyelash when he was mentioned, as though he didn’t exist for her, and once, when I came home from school, she had scornfully asked: “Didja sing for Kaiser again?”
But as for Wilhelm, the German kaiser, I saw pictures of him in shining armor, and I also heard his blasts against England. When England was at stake, I was always her partisan, and after everything I had absorbed in Manchester, I was of the unshakable opinion that the British did not want a war and that it was the German kaiser who had started it by invading Belgium. Nor was I any less biased against the Russian Tsar. At ten, while visiting Bulgaria, I had heard the name Tolstoy, and I was told he was a wonderful man who regarded war as murder and had never been afraid to say so to his emperors. Although he’d been dead for several years, people spoke of him as though he hadn’t really died. Now, for the first time, I found myself in a republic, far from any imperial doings, and I eagerly plunged into its history. It was possible to get rid of an emperor, you had to fight for your freedom. Long before the Swiss, much, much earlier, the Greeks had successfully risen against a tremendous superior power, maintaining the freedom that they had already won.
It sounds terribly vapid to me when I say that now, for back then I was intoxicated with this new realization, I pounced on everyone with it, and I devised barbaric tunes to the names of Marathon and Salamis, and kept vehemently chanting them at home, a thousand times over, just to the three syllables of those names, until Mother and my brothers said their heads were buzzing and they forced me to stop. Professor Eugen Müller’s history lessons had the same effect each time. He spoke to us about the Greeks, his big wide-open eyes seemed like those of an intoxicated seer; he didn’t even look at us, he looked at what he was talking about. His speech wasn’t fast, but it never stopped, it had the rhythm of sluggish waves; whether the fighting was on land or at sea, you always felt you were out on the ocean. He ran his fingertips over his forehead, which was covered with a light sweat; less frequently, he stroked his curly hair as though a wind were puffing across it. The hour waned in his sips of enthusiasm; if he took a breath for new enthusiasm, it was as if he were drinking.
But occasionally, time was wasted, namely when he quizzed us. He had us write essays and discussed them with us. Then we were sorry for every moment that he might otherwise have taken us out on the ocean. Often, I raised my hand to answer his questions, if for no other reason than to get them over with fast, but also to show him my love for each one of his sentences. My words may have sounded like part of his own excitement, annoying my classmates, some of whom were slower. They didn’t come from an empire, Greek freedom couldn’t mean much to them. They took freedom for granted and didn’t first have to be won over by way of the Greeks as proxies.
At this point, I was absorbing as much at school as normally through books. Whatever I learned through the living words of a teacher retained the shape of that teacher and was always linked to his shape in my memory. But while there were some teachers from whom I learned nothing, they nevertheless did make an impact through their own selves, their peculiar appearance, their movements, their way of speaking, and especially their like or dislike of you, the way you happened to feel it. There were all degrees of warmth and benevolence, and I do not recall a single teacher who did not strive to be fair. But not all of them succeeded in handling fairness effectively enough to hide dislike or benevolence. Then there were the differences in inner resources—patience, sensitivity, expectation. Eugen Müller, by his very subject, was obligated to a high measure of ardor and narrative talent, but he brought something along that went far beyond this obligation. So I was entranced by him from the very start and counted the days of the week by his lessons.
Fritz Hunziker, the German teacher, had a harder time; he was somewhat dry by nature, perhaps also hampered by his not very clear stature, whose effect was not improved by his slightly strident voice. He was tall, with a narrow chest, and stood as though on one long leg; he lapsed into patient silence when waiting for an answer. He never attacked anyone, but he also never probed into anyone either, his shield was a sarcastic smirk, to which he held fast; it was often still there even when it no longer seemed apt. His knowledge was balanced, perhaps overly categorized; we weren’t swept off our feet by him, but he didn’t lead us astray either. His sense of moderation and practical behavior was highly developed. He didn’t care much for precociousness or over-enthusiasm. I saw him—and this wasn’t so unjust—as Eugen Müller’s antipode. Later, when Hunziker returned after a period of absence, I noticed how well-read he was, but his wide reading lacked arbitrariness and excitement.
