The Tongue Set Free, page 28
We met in the Rigiblick restaurant on Mount Zurich, in the place where I had gotten my first glimpse of Zurich six years ago. All seventeen came, the petition was voted on and drafted immediately. In a few business-like sentences, we, the collected Jewish pupils of the third year, called the attention of the administration to the increasing anti-Semitism prevailing in these classes and we asked that measures be taken against it. All the Jews signed their names; there was great relief. We put our trust in the headmaster, who was slightly feared as being stern, but was also considered very just. I was to present the petition to the administration. We expected miracles from it, and Dreyfus declared that he wanted to stay alive.
Now came weeks of waiting. I assumed we would all be summoned together to the administration, and I thought about what I ought to say. It would have to be dignified words, we must not compromise ourselves, everything had to be terse and clear and we mustn’t whine, for goodness’ sake. But we had to bring up honor, for that was the crux. Nothing happened, and I feared that the petition had landed in the wastebasket. Any response, even a scolding for our independent action, would have been preferable to me. The taunts did stop for the moment, and that surprised me even more, for if the other pupils had been reprimanded behind our backs, I would have had to find out from someone or other whom I was closer to.
After five or six weeks, perhaps it was more, I was summoned to the headmaster’s office alone. I was not received by stern Headmaster Amberg. His assistant, Usteri, stood there, with the petition in his hand, as though he had only just gotten it and was reading it for the first time. He was a short man, and his high-slung eyebrows made him look as if he were always merrily smiling. But he wasn’t merry now, he merely asked: “Did you write this?” I said yes; it was my handwriting, and I had actually composed and not just penned it. “You raise your hand too much,” he then said, as though the affair concerned only me; he tore up the paper with the signatures before my eyes and threw the pieces into the wastebasket. With that, I was dismissed. The whole thing had happened so fast that I couldn’t say anything. “Yes,” in answer to his question, had been my only word. I found myself outside the headmaster’s door, as though I hadn’t even knocked in the first place, and if the pieces of the petition, which had landed in the wastebasket, hadn’t made such an impact on me, I would have thought I’d been dreaming.
The closed season in the class was over now, the taunts resumed as before, except that now they were more resolute and hardly ever stopped. Each day brought a well-aimed remark, and it confused me that they were against Jews in general or against Färber in particular, but left me out, as though I didn’t belong. I regarded that as a deliberate tactic to pull us apart, and I cudgeled my brain a great deal to figure out what the assistant headmaster had meant with my raising my hand too much. Until this moment, when he had uttered his six words, it had never crossed my mind that I ever did anything wrong by sticking my arm aloft incessantly. I really did have the answer ready before the teacher had quite finished asking his question. Hunziker resisted this haste by ignoring me until I lowered my hand again. Perhaps that was the wisest tactic, but this too altered little in my lively reactions. Whether an answer was permitted or not, my arm incessantly shot into the air. Never once in all those years had it occurred to me that it might bother the other pupils. Instead of telling me so, they had nicknamed me Socrates, much earlier, in the second year, encouraging me even more with that honor, for that was how I took it. It was only Usteri’s lean sentence, “You raise your hand too much,” that lamed my arm; it was high time, and it did stay down, to the extent that I could keep it down. Besides, I had lost interest, I didn’t enjoy school anymore. Instead of waiting for the questions in class, I waited for the next taunt at recess. Every put-down of Jews triggered counter-thoughts in me. I would have liked to refute everything, but things didn’t reach that point; it was not a political debate, but, as I would phrase it today, the formation of a mob. In my mind, I formed the elements of a new ideology; Wilson had taken over the goal of saving humanity from war. I left that goal to him without losing my own interest in it; all my open conversations were still on that theme. But my secret thoughts, which I kept to myself—for whom could I have talked to about it?—concerned the fate of the Jews.
Färber had a harder time than I, for he did poorly with the teachers. He was indolent by nature, but now he gave up trying altogether. He dully waited for the next humiliation and then suddenly flared up. He flew into a temper and struck back, perhaps not noticing that his angry reactions warmed the cockles of his enemies’ hearts. But that was an internal feud, for he retorted to insults with good Swiss curses, in which he was inferior to no one. After a few weeks, he resolved upon a serious measure. During recess, he went to Hunziker and complained about the hostile behavior of the class. He told him that his father was asking Hunziker in due form to convey this complaint to the headmaster’s office. If nothing changed, he said, his father then planned to go to the headmaster himself.
Now we again waited for an answer, and again nothing came. We discussed what Färber would say if he were called into the headmaster’s office for questioning. I urged him not to lose patience. He had to stay calm, I told him, and simply report on what was happening. He asked me to rehearse it with him, and we did it more than once. His face turned red even with me when he started talking, he got muddled and cursed our adversaries. I sometimes went to his place to help him with his homework. At the end of each tutoring session, we practiced the speech for the headmaster’s office. So much time passed that he actually managed to learn it, and when I finally could tell him that it was okay, I remembered Demosthenes, and I comforted Färber by telling him about the Greek’s difficulties. Now we were armed and we kept on waiting. No reaction ever came, the headmaster’s office remained silent, as did Hunziker, whom we observed during his classes to catch even the slightest sign of a change. Hunziker got drier and drier, he outdid himself in his sobriety and assigned an essay topic for which I never forgave him: a letter to a friend, asking him to order a room, a bicycle, or a camera for us.
However, the atmosphere in the class did change. In February, four months after the start of the campaign, the taunts stopped at one swoop. I didn’t trust the situation, I was sure they would start again, but this time I was wrong. The other pupils behaved as in earlier days. They no longer attacked, they no longer mocked, indeed, it even seemed to me as if they were deliberately avoiding the word that concentrated all the humiliation. Most of all, I was surprised at the true enemies, who had launched the action in the first place. Their voices had a warm ring when they talked to me, and I was delirious with joy when they asked me something they didn’t know. I reduced my hand-raising to a minimum, and I succeeded in what was a peak of self-renunciation—I sometimes kept to myself things that I knew and I sat there dully, though I itched all over.
At Easter, the old school year ended; this brought some drastic changes, the most important being that the teachers now used the polite form Sie with us. The class had been in the square, merloned main building of the Gymnasium, which was thrust, oblique and fairly sober, into a bend in Rämistrasse, an ascending street. From this building, which dominated the nearby urban landscape, the class was moved into the Schanzenberg (the entrenchment mountain), very close by on its own hill; and, not having been meant as a schoolhouse originally, it had an almost private character. The classroom had a veranda and faced a garden; during lessons, we kept the windows open, and the room was fragrant with trees and flowers; the Latin sentences were accompanied by bird sounds. It was almost like the garden of the Yalta in Tiefenbrunnen. Färber had been left back, which was certainly not unjust, considering his performance, and he was not the only one. The class had gotten more compact, and there was a new mood about it. Everyone took part in the lessons in his own way, I made sure not to keep raising my hand immeasurably, and the others’ resentment against me seemed gone. To the extent that one can imagine a community in a school class, we really had one. Each pupil had his qualities and each one counted. No longer feeling threatened, I noticed that my classmates were not uninteresting, even those who did not excel in any special school knowledge. I listened to their conversations, I recognized my ignorance in many areas outside of school, and I lost something of the arrogance that had contributed to the misfortune of the past winter. It was obvious that some, who had developed slowly, were now catching up. In a sort of chess club that formed, I was often thoroughly beaten. I entered the role that others had once had towards me, I admired the better players and began thinking about them. I was entranced with an essay of Richard Bleuler’s, which was so good that it was read aloud in class, it was free of all schoolishness, inventive, light, and full of imaginative ideas; it made it seem as if there were no such thing as books. I was proud of Bleuler, and during recess I went to him and said: “You’re a real writer.” I wanted—as he couldn’t realize—to tell him that I was no writer, for my eyes had meanwhile opened in regard to the “drama.” He must have gotten a wonderful upbringing at home, for he waved me off modestly and said: “It’s nothing special.” He meant it too, his modesty was genuine. For I had had to read my essay aloud before him, it was full of the inexplicable self-confidence I was stamped with, and when I returned to my seat and he then passed me while going up front, he quickly whispered to me: “Mine is better.” Thus he knew it, and now I saw how right he was, and now, when I sincerely bowed to him, he just as sincerely said to me: “It’s nothing special.” I realized that he lived among writers at home—his mother and her friend Ricarda Huch; I pictured him being present when they read their new works aloud, and I wondered if they also said: “It’s nothing special.” It was a lesson: One could do something special and not preen oneself on it. Something of this newly experienced modesty left its mark in my letters to Mother; it didn’t last long, but now my conceitedness had a worm, which prevented me from carrying out further drama plans of the same sort. This was the same Bleuler whose rejection had hurt me so deeply the previous winter, for I had always liked him, and now it became clear to me that he had good reason not to like a lot of things about me.
All told, the winter had been a drastic one: getting used to the Yalta, without a single other male, doing what I felt like, borne by a blind affection, nay, a kind of worship, by females of all ages; the sharp attack by my uncle, who wanted to suffocate me in his business dealings; the daily campaign of the class. When the campaign was finished, in March, I wrote my mother that for a while I had hated people, I had lost all joie de vivre. But now it was different, I said, now I felt forgiving and no longer vengeful. In the subsequent happy period at the Schanzenberg, a time of forgiveness and newly aroused love of humanity, some things did remain in doubt, but the doubts—this was something new—were aimed at myself.
The attacks, incidentally—as I later found out—had been stopped from above, in an intelligent way, without noise or ado. True, the petition, which I was so proud of, had landed in the wastebasket, but individual pupils had been questioned in the headmaster’s office. The comment that Usteri had made so casually, “You raise your hand too much!” had been one of the results. Because of its enigmatic isolation, it had struck me deeply and it got me to change my behavior. And there must have been useful comments to our adversaries too, otherwise they wouldn’t have suddenly stopped their campaign. Since everything had happened so quietly, I must have gotten the impression, during the period of humiliation, that no one was doing anything about it; but in reality, the opposite was the case.
Getting Prepared for Prohibitions
The earliest prohibition that I recall from my childhood had to do with space; it referred to our garden, where I played and which I was not allowed to leave. I was not permitted to set foot in the street outside our gate. I cannot, however, determine who uttered the prohibition, perhaps it was my cane-wielding grandfather, whose house stood by the gate. That prohibition was seen to by the little Bulgarian girls and the servant; Gypsies in the street outside, as I often heard, simply thrust stray children into a sack and took them along, and that fear may have contributed to my observing the prohibition. There must have been other prohibitions of a similar nature, but they have drifted away, for they vanished behind one that broke in upon me with utter passion, when I, at five, in a dreadful moment, nearly became a murderer. At that time, when I, with a war whoop on my lips—”Now I’m going to kill Laurica!”—dashed towards my playmate with a raised ax because she had always, and in the most tormenting manner, refused to let me see her school writing; at that time, when I would certainly have struck her down if I had managed to get close enough to her, Grandfather, as wrathful as God himself, strode towards me, waving his cane, and grabbed the ax away from me. The horror with which I was then viewed by all, the seriousness of the family conferences on the homicidal child, the absence of my father, who was thus unable to tone anything down, so that Mother—an unusual event—secretly stepped in for him and tried to comfort me for my terror, despite severe punishment—all those things, but especially my grandfather’s conduct (he subsequently caned me amid the most horrifying threats) had such a lasting effect on me, that I have to describe it as the actual, the primal prohibition in my life: the prohibition to kill.
Not only was I forbidden ever to touch the ax again, I was also ordered never again to enter the kitchen yard, where I had gotten it. The Armenian servant, my friend, no longer sang for me, for I was even shooed away from the window of the big living room, from which I had always watched him. To keep me from ever seeing the ax, they forbade me to so much as glance into the kitchen yard; and once, when I yearned so strongly for the Armenian that I managed to sneak unnoticed to the window, the ax had vanished, the wood lay there unchopped; the Armenian, standing there idly, gave me a look of reproach and motioned at me with his hand to disappear as fast as possible.
It was a recurrent relief for me that I hadn’t struck; for weeks afterwards, Grandfather kept scolding me, telling me—if my plan had worked—how dead Laurica would have been, how she would have looked in her blood, how her brain would have foamed out of the split skull, how I, punished by being chained up in a small kennel, would have had to spend the rest of my life alone, a pariah, never going to school, never learning how tho read or write, futilely begging and weeping for Laurica to come back to life and forgive me; Grandfather said there was no forgiveness for murder, for the dead person was never again in a situation to grant that forgiveness.
Thus, that was my Sinai, that was my shalt-not; and my true religion thus originated in a very definite, personal, unatonable event, which, despite its failure, adhered to me as long as I encountered Grandfather in the garden. Whenever I saw him in the following months, he threateningly brandished his cane, reminding me of the evil I might have committed, had he not interfered in the nick of time. Furthermore, I am convinced, though unable to prove it, that the curse he hurled at my father not many months later, before our removal to England, was connected with the grandson’s wild behavior, as though I had prompted the threats and punishments with which his control over us finally crumbled.
I grew up under the domination of the commandment not to kill, and while no later prohibition ever attained its weight and meaning, they all did draw their strength from it. It was enough to designate something clearly as a prohibition, new threats were not pronounced, the old threat was still in force, the most effective threats were the horrible images that had been painted as the consequences of a successful homicide: the split head, the brain foaming out; and if later on, after my father’s death, Grandfather turned into the mildest of all tyrants towards me, it altered nothing in the terror he had evoked. It is only now, when reflecting on these things, that I understand why I have never been able to touch the brain and other innards of animals; these are food prohibitions that came upon me of their own accord.
Another food prohibition, springing from my earliest religious lessons in Manchester, was nipped in the bud by a cruel action of my mother’s. A few sons of our closer friends gathered for religious instruction in the Florentin mansion on Barlowmore Road. The teacher was Mr. Duke, a young man sporting a Vandyke and coming from Holland. There were not more than six or seven of us boys. Arthur, the son of the house and my best friend, also took part. There were only males present, and when Mirry, Arthur’s eldest sister, entered the room where we were gathered—she may have done it out of curiosity or to look for something—Mr. Duke stopped talking and waited in silence until she had left again. What he was telling us must have been very much of a secret. The story of Noah and the Ark, which he told us, wasn’t new to me. I was, however, surprised by Sodom and Gomorrha, perhaps that was the secret; for just as Lot’s wife was about to turn into a pillar of salt, the English chambermaid came into the room and got something out of the buffet drawer. This time, Mr. Duke broke off in the middle of the sentence. Lot’s wife had frivolously looked back, and we were in great suspense to hear about her punishment. Mr. Duke scowled, wrinkled his forehead, and eyed the maid’s movements with unconcealed disapproval. Lot’s wife got a deferred sentence; when the maid was outside, Mr. Duke shifted closer to us and said, almost whispering: “They don’t like us. It’s better if they don’t hear what I tell you boys.” Then he waited a bit and announced in a solemn voice: “We Jews do not eat pork. They don’t like that, they enjoy their bacon at breakfast. You are not permitted to eat pork.” It was like a conspiracy, and although Lot’s wife still wasn’t turned into a pillar of salt, the taboo sank into me, and I resolved never again to eat pork for anything in the world. It was only now that Mr. Duke cleared his throat, returned to Lot’s wife, and announced her salty punishment to us, as we listened breathlessly.
