The Torch in my Ear, page 25
She readily began nagging; he avoided her as much as he could. But in the early afternoon, before going to town, he occasionally spelled her in the shop. This was how I met him, and he told me about Siberia. After some two years, the tension between the two of them got so bad that she kicked him out of their home. She said it was no marriage; they had nothing to do with one another. He used their home only to sleep in. Otherwise, he never talked to her anymore. Whenever she was awake, he was asleep, and no sooner did she fall asleep than he woke up again.
He finally left, and she told me so the next morning, both content and embittered. He had scarcely brought anything; he had had nothing, after all. But whatever he had brought, he took along, even a couple of rusty nails. “Just imagine, he took along the rusty nails; he didn’t leave me a single nail.” She sounded as if she would have liked to keep one of his rusty nails—as a memento? to annoy him?—and he had begrudged her even a nail. Had they been new … But they weren’t, they were old, rusty nails.
Herr Fontana was very short and also buckled and hunched, as though he had a serious hernia. He was totally bald, looked haggard and somewhat the worse for wear. His eyes seemed about to drip, yet they never did. When he was in the store, he sometimes had a special customer: the splendid, opulent countess, who lived nearby with her family, a tall, strong woman, apparently a horsewoman, trained to hunt—although I had never seen her mounted or hunting. She had a loud voice and always did her shopping as if the dairy existed purely for her sake. Yet she never bought all that much, for she never had enough money on her. Sometimes, she brought along her three little children, whereby one instantly had to think of her tremendous bosom. Herr Fontana’s eyes fell out of his tired sockets. He waited on the countess readily and not hatefully; otherwise, he was annoyed at everyone who came in during his shift. She was scarcely out the door when he turned to me and said enthusiastically, with eyes that now really dripped: “What a goddamn mare! What a goddamn mare!”
I believe he came into the dairy at these hours purely to see her—perhaps he might otherwise have slept longer. And she, virtually on schedule, always came at the same time and would have no one but him wait on her. Sometimes, everything she had ordered was gathered before her on the counter. Then—she was very bad at figures—she began to add up. Herr Fontana, who liked to keep her there in order to gaze at her for a longer time, helped her count. She always had too little cash; but even though he liked her, she never got credit. And so one requested item after another had to disappear under the counter again. She was never ashamed of this operation; it was no disgrace that she couldn’t do arithmetic. To make up for it, she knew about horses. So, never showing chagrin, she handed back one item after another. Herr Fontana took the liberty of opening her hand with a gentle pressure; he quickly saw how much money she had. It was he who then suddenly stopped her in the midst of her giving back the items, and he said: “Now it’s right. You’ve got just enough for what’s left!”
She missed him after he left; for now she was waited on by Frau Fontana, who was less sympathetic with the countess’s poor arithmetic and secretly inferred dishonest intentions behind her inability. The proprietress, too, had something to say when the lady with the children had left the shop: “She’s never been to school. She can’t add, and she can’t write either. Now just imagine someone like her running my shop!” The countess, not insensitive to this hostility, said to me, outside the shop: “Too bad that fine man is gone! He was a fine man!” It was clear that she had heard nothing about the rusty nails.
I, too, missed Herr Fontana, especially the conversations about Siberia. In reality, he was still living there. His buddies in his pub liked to hear him tell about Siberia. He had to go to the pub every day, he told me: they were waiting for him, they wanted to hear more. There was a lot left to tell; he was a long way from being finished. He could write a book about Siberia, he said. But he found it easier to tell about it orally. His wife had fallen asleep the first time he said something about Siberia to her. For her, everything was: the wedding band. His friend, her first husband, had told him so: For God’s sake, bring her back the wedding ring, otherwise she won’t have a minute of peace! For her, it’s a valuable object. After all, he said, he could have held on to it. But if he made a promise to a dead friend, he kept it. And even if it had been a million, he would have given it back for a reward. And what had he gotten for all his honesty? Now he had a milk woman on his back instead of a countess.
One year after he left, Siberia surfaced again in the area.
Among Death Masks
What attracted me about Ibby Gordon was her wit and her merriment; she came out with one flash of inspiration after another. I never heard an expected sentence from her; it was always something else. She was Hungarian, but she managed to surprise you even with her nationality, so that every mistake of hers turned into a bright flash. There were some words that she first made you conscious of; if she particularly liked a German word, she would suppress it, letting it out only in new formations, which reminded you that it had vanished, and which now kept referring to the lost word in one new way after another. She never spoke fast; nothing she said went under; every syllable had its weight. No word was hurried or pushed out by the next. But since she thought quickly, many things in her waited for their turn to come and were mirrored in their own joy before becoming visible. Many joys, all new, lined up, and their never ending merriment left no room for grief, terror, chagrin, or anxiety. When you were with her, you never believed that there was grief anywhere in the world; for any grief that she laid eyes on or that was brought to her was transformed into something that lost its heaviness and grew wings. And since she never complained about anything that happened to her, you were not so resentful that she made fun of the terrors of other people.
She looked like a Maillol figure, a rustically classical shape, and her face was like a fruit that would soon shimmer in its ripeness. All the incongruence and grotesqueness she saw was her nourishment. You might have considered her ruthless; but she was ruthless toward herself, too. You were amazed that her witty and entertaining mockery had such a good effect on her. Ibby, an epitome of utterly blissful health, often had nothing to eat, but she did not waste a word on her hunger, unless she had a story to tell about it: how well nourished she seemed to male gazes, which could not get their fill of the splendor of her shoulders.
All things of tradition, order, a regulated daily life had slid off her without a trace. Anything she told about her background was as indifferent as if it had never existed. She came from a place called Marmaros Sziget in Eastern Hungary, at the foot of the Carpathians; and I noted the name of her birthplace because it reminded me of the German word Marmor, marble, the marble from which Maillol had carved her. Her first name, Ibolya, Hungarian for violet, sounded ridiculous; luckily, you never thought of it because she was nicknamed Ibby. I preferred her maiden name, Feldmesser; she was embarrassed by it, perhaps because of her family, whom I knew nothing about. She had taken the pen name of Gordon, and she loved it; it seemed to be the only thing she cared about.
In Budapest, she had met Fredric Karinthy, a Hungarian satirist, famous in his country. I had read nothing by him; her descriptions of his writings made him sound like Swift. She became his mistress. She wrote poems that he liked; supposedly, he had fallen for both her poems and her beauty. Aranka, his wife, a violent woman, with a dark Gypsy beauty, as Ibby said, was so jealous that she jumped out of a fourth-floor window. Although seriously injured, she survived by a miracle. Her desperate act made such an impression on Karinthy that he decided to break off with Ibby on the spot. And in order to save Aranka’s life, he exiled Ibby from Budapest and from Hungary.
A friend of his took her across the border to Vienna; she arrived with no baggage except for a toothbrush, which she liked to flaunt. It was a harsh fate, but she talked about it uncomplainingly. She had as little pity for Aranka as for herself; all she felt was the ridiculous quality of her situation. The famous writer had asked his most reliable friend to escort her. The friend was to make sure that she didn’t sneak back across the border into Hungary. He rented a room for her on Strozzigasse; she had to report to him in a coffeehouse every day. He would then promptly go to the phone and call Karinthy in Budapest: “Ibby’s in Vienna. Ibby hasn’t disappeared.” She would then get something to eat. The rent was paid for her, she got nothing else. They were afraid she might buy a train ticket for Budapest. If she didn’t report, Karinthy’s friend would go to Strozzigasse to check up on her; but in that case, she got nothing to eat. Thus she stood before me the first time I saw her: the goddess Pomona, with a toothbrush in her hand instead of an apple.
It took a few weeks, and then Ibby found herself in a circle of Vienna’s jeunesse dorée, the object of a conflict between two brothers. Every man in this circle was after her; and since there were many, all courting her at the same time, she deployed utmost cunning to play the men off against one another, fending off all attacks. She had an especially hard time with the two brothers; they were both very serious about her.
She remained in Vienna for almost a year. I saw a lot of her; we would meet in a coffeehouse, where she told me stories about everything that happened around her. She talked in her calm, impartial way, cold and radiant and hysterically funny. I had to listen, but she also had to tell about it. She was grateful that I didn’t try to take advantage of the situation. She was resting with me, as she put it, resting from her innocent beauty. She sensed that I felt the same way about her beauty as she did: it was a burden the effects of which you were helplessly exposed to.
One of the two brothers ran a large bookstore, which he had taken over after their father’s death. The second brother, regarded as more intelligent and more knowledgeable, had studied all sorts of things, constantly switching majors; at this point, it was philosophy. Rudolf, the bookseller, was a little nothing of a person, tiny and homely; he tried to make an impact by dressing carefully and styling what little hair he had left. He was as much under Ibby’s spell as his brother; but because of his rather dry, unimaginative ways, he had a much harder time arousing her interest than his brother, a good listener, who gave lightly stuttering but persistent advice. Rudolf, who needed advice and never gave any, had to rely on new books, particularly art books, to which he had access through his bookstore; he would surprise Ibby with them, giving her something to busy her mind. Once, he brought her The Eternal Countenance, a collection of death masks, which had just come out. I came by just as Ibby was about to open the book, and after only a few pages, both she and I were captivated. Something happened that would have been unthinkable between us: we lapsed into silence. We sat down side by side. Rudolf, who couldn’t endure the rapport of our silence, left us the book and vanished.
I had never seen death masks: they were something completely new for me. I sensed that I was close to the moment that I knew least about.
I accepted the title of the book, The Eternal Countenance, without giving it a second thought. I had always been fascinated by the variety among human beings; but I had never expected this variety to intensify into the moment of death. I was also astonished that so many things can be preserved. Since childhood, I had suffered from the disappearance of the dead. Preserving a name or one’s works did not suffice for me. I cared about their physicality, too, every feature, every twitching of their faces. When I heard a voice that lodged in my mind, I futilely looked for the face; it appeared in dreams, when I did not wish for it; but I could not evoke it by will. If ever I did see the face (seldom enough), it had become different, subject to its own laws of decomposition. And now I saw the people with whose thoughts and works I lived, whom I loved for their deeds, hated for their misdeeds; they were before me, unchangeable, their eyes closed—as if these eyes could still open, as if nothing irreparable had happened. Were these people still in control of themselves? Could they still hear what was said to them alone? I reeled from one face to another, as though I had to catch and hold each single one. It did not hit me that they were together in this book. I was scared they would decamp in all directions, each in a different one. There were few faces that I recognized without looking at the name. Without a name, they were expelled into helplessness. But the instant you tied a face to a name, the face felt safe from decay. I leafed on and then unexpectedly leafed back; and there they were still, each single one of them; none had decamped, none resented the structure of the sequence in which he had been taken in; the random way this book was put together was not unworthy of them.
The final instant before decay: as though a man had taken up, once and for all, anything that he could be, consenting to this final presentation. This consent, however, is not given to all masks: there are some that wound you—masks that expose. Their purpose is the dreadful truth that they churn up, the dominating principle in which this specific life had to end: the burden on Walter Scott, the sharp madness of old Swift, the terrible, consuming disease of Géricault. One could seek only horror in all masks, the horror of death. They would then be murder masks. But that would be a falsification: there is something in them that goes beyond murder.
It is the bating of breath, but as if the breath were preserved. Breath is man’s most precious possession, most precious of all at the end; and this ultimate breath is preserved in the mask, as an image.
But how can breath become an image? The mask that I opened up to, sought, and always found again was that of Pascal.
Here, pain achieved its perfection; here, it found its long-sought meaning. Pain that means to remain thought is not capable of anything more. If there is a dying beyond lament, then this is where we are confronted with it. A gradually acquired nearness to death, in ineffably tiny, minute steps, borne by the wish to cross the threshold of death, in order to gain unknown things beyond it. One can read a great deal about believers and martyrs who, for the sake of the afterlife, wish to be saved from this life. But here, we have the picture of one of them in the moment of achieving his wish—a man who did know how to castigate himself, but who thought infinitely more than he castigated himself. Thus, everything he did against his life was reflected in his thought. His countenance can be called an eternal one, for it expresses the eternity that he was after. He rests in his pain, which he does not wish to abandon. He wants as much pain as eternity is willing to absorb; and when he has reached the full measure permitted by eternity, he will present that full measure to eternity and enter eternity.
The Fifteenth of July
A few months after I had moved into my new room, something occurred that had the deepest influence on my subsequent life. It was one of those not too frequent public events that seize an entire city so profoundly that it is no longer the same afterwards.
On the morning of July 15, 1927, I was not at the Chemical Institute on Währingerstrasse as usual; I happened to be at home. I was reading the morning newspaper at the coffeehouse in Ober Sankt Veit. Today, I can still feel my indignation when I took hold of Die Reichspost: the giant headline said: “A JUST VERDICT.” There had been shootings in Burgenland; workers had been killed. The court had declared the murderers not guilty. This acquittal had been termed, nay, trumpeted, as a “just verdict” in the organ of the government party. It was this mockery of any sense of justice rather than the verdict itself that triggered an enormous agitation among the workers of Vienna. From all districts of the city, the workers marched in tight formations to the Palace of Justice, whose sheer name embodied the unjust verdict for them. It was a totally spontaneous reaction: I could tell how spontaneous it was just by my own conduct. I quickly biked into the center of town and joined one of these processions.
The workers, usually well disciplined, trusting their Social Democratic leaders and satisfied that Vienna was administered by these leaders in an exemplary manner, were acting without their leaders on this day. When they set fire to the Palace of Justice, Mayor Seitz mounted a fire engine and raised his right hand high, trying to block their way. His gesture had no effect: the Palace of Justice was burning. The police were ordered to shoot; there were ninety deaths.
Fifty-three years have passed, and the agitation of that day is still in my bones. It was the closest thing to a revolution that I have physically experienced. Since then, I have known quite precisely that I would not have to read a single word about the storming of the Bastille. I became a part of the crowd, I fully dissolved in it, I did not feel the slightest resistance to what the crowd was doing. I am amazed that despite my frame of mind, I was able to grasp all the concrete individual scenes taking place before my eyes. I would like to mention one such scene.
In a side street, not far from the burning Palace of Justice, yet out of the way, stood a man, sharply distinguished from the crowd, flailing his hands in the air and moaning over and over again: “The files are burning! All the files!”
“Better files than people!” I told him, but that did not interest him; all he could think of was the files. It occurred to me that he might have some personal involvement in the files, be an archivist. He was inconsolable. I found him comical, even in this situation. But I was also annoyed. “They’ve been shooting down people!” I said angrily, “and you’re carrying on about files!” He looked at me as if I weren’t there and wailed repeatedly: “The files are burning! All the files!” He was standing off to the side, but it was not undangerous for him; his lament was not to be missed—after all, I too had heard him.
In the following days and weeks of utter dejection, when you could not think of anything else, when the events you had witnessed kept recurring over and over again in your mind, haunting you night after night even in your sleep, there was still one legitimate connection to literature. And this connection was Karl Kraus. My idolization of him was at its highest level then. This time it was gratitude for a specific public deed; I don’t know whom I could ever be more thankful to for such an action. Under the impact of the massacre on that day, he put up posters everywhere in Vienna, demanding the voluntary resignation of Police Commissioner Johann Schober, who was responsible for the order to shoot and for the ninety deaths. Kraus was alone in this demand; he was the only public figure who acted in this way. And while the other celebrities, of whom Vienna has never had a lack, did not wish to lay themselves open to criticism or perhaps ridicule, Kraus alone had the courage of his indignation. His posters were the only thing that kept us going in those days. I went from one poster to another, paused in front of each one, and I felt as if all the justice on earth had entered the letters of Kraus’s name.
