The Tongue Set Free, page 3
Aside from Grandmother, there was a lot in Ruschuk that was Turkish. The first children’s song I learned— “Manzanicas coloradas, las que vienen de Stambol,” “Little apples, red, red apples, those that come from Istanbul”—ended with the name of the Turkish capital, and I heard how gigantic it was, and I soon connected it with the Turks we saw in our city. Edirne (Turkish for Adrianople, the city from which both Canetti grandparents came) was often mentioned. Grandfather sang never-ending Turkish songs, the point being to dwell on certain high notes for a very long time; I much preferred the fiercer and faster Spanish songs.
Not far from us, the well-to-do Turks had their homes; you could recognize them by the narrow-set bars on the windows for guarding the women. The first murder I ever heard about was when a Turk killed someone out of jealousy. On the way to Grandfather Arditti’s home, my mother took me past one of those houses; she showed me a high grating, saying a Turkish woman had stood there and looked at a Bulgarian passing by. The Turk, her husband, then came and stabbed her. I don’t believe that I had previously really grasped what a dead person was. But I learned what it meant during this promenade with my mother. I asked her whether the Turkish woman, who had been found in a pool of blood on the floor, had gotten up again. “Never!” she said. “Never! She was dead, do you understand?” I heard, but I didn’t understand, and I asked again, forcing her to repeat her answer several times, until she lost patience and spoke about something else. It was not just the dead woman in the pool of blood that impressed me in this story, but also the man’s jealousy, which had led to the murder. Something about it appealed to me, and much as I balked at the woman’s being definitively dead, I accepted the jealousy without resisting.
I experienced jealousy personally when we arrived at Grandfather Arditti’s home. We used to visit him once a week, every Saturday. He lived in a spacious, reddish mansion. You entered through a side gate, to the left of the house, into an old garden, which was far more beautiful than ours. A huge mulberry tree stood there, with low branches and easy to climb. I was not allowed to climb it, but Mother never passed it without showing me a branch at the top; it was her hiding-place, where she used to sit as a young girl when she wanted to read undisturbed. She would steal up there with her book and sit there as quiet as a mouse, and she did it so cleverly that they couldn’t see her from below, and when they called her, she didn’t hear, because she liked the book so much; she read all her books up there. Not far from the mulberry tree, steps led up to the house; the residential rooms were higher than in our house, but the corridors were dark. We would walk through many rooms until the last room, where Grandfather sat in an armchair, a small, pale man, always warmly bundled in scarves and tartans; he was sickly.
“Li beso las manos, Señor Padre!” said Mother. “I kiss your hands, Señor Father!” Then she pushed me ahead; I didn’t like him and I had to kiss his hand. He was never funny or angry or tender or severe like the other grandfather, whose name I bore; he was always the same, he sat in an armchair and never budged, he never spoke to me, never gave me anything, and merely exchanged a few phrases with my mother. Then came the end of the visit, and I hated it, it was always the same. He would eye me with a sly smirk and ask in a low voice: “Whom do you like better, Grandfather Arditti or Grandfather Canetti?” He knew the answer, everyone, old and young, was bewitched by Grandfather Canetti, and no one liked Grandfather Arditti. But he wanted to force the truth out of me, and he placed me in a horribly embarrassing predicament, which he enjoyed, for it happened again every Saturday. At first I said nothing, gazing at him helplessly, he asked his question again, until I found the strength to lie and said: “Both!” He would then raise his finger threateningly and yell—it was the only loud sound I ever heard from him: “Fálsu!” (False child!) And he drawled out the accented a; the word sounded both ominous and plaintive, I can still hear it as though I had visited him only yesterday.
Walking out through the many rooms and corridors, I felt guilty for lying and I was very low-spirited. My mother, though unshakably attached to her family and unwilling ever to give up this ritual of a visit, must have also felt a bit guilty for always re-exposing me to this accusation, which was really meant for the other grandfather but struck only me. As a solace, she took me to the bagtché, the orchard and rose garden behind the house. There she showed me all her favorite flowers from her girlhood, and inhaled their fragrances deeply, she had wide nostrils which always quivered. She lifted me up so that I too could smell the roses, and if any fruits were ripe, she would pick some, but Grandfather was not supposed to know because it was Sabbath. It was the most wonderful garden that I can remember, not too well kept, a bit overgrown; and the fact that Grandfather was not to know about this Sabbath fruit, the fact that Mother herself did a prohibited thing for my sake, must have relieved my feeling of guilt, for on the way home I was quite cheerful and kept asking questions again.
At home, I learned from Cousin Laurica that this grandfather was jealous because all his grandchildren liked their other grandfather more, and she confided the reason to me in utmost secrecy: He was mizquin, avaricious, but I mustn’t tell my mother.
Purim; The Comet
The holiday that we children felt most strongly, even though, being very small, we couldn’t take part in it, was Purim. It was a joyous festival, commemorating the salvation of the Jews from Haman, the wicked persecutor. Haman was a well-known figure, and his name had entered the language. Before I ever found out that he was a man who had once lived and concocted horrible things, I knew his name as an insult. If I tormented adults with too many questions or didn’t want to go to bed or refused to do something they wanted me to do, there would be a deep sigh: “Hamán!” Then I knew that they were in no mood for jokes, that I had played out. “Hamán” was the final word, a deep sigh, but also a vituperation. I was utterly amazed when I was told later on that Haman had been a wicked man who wanted to kill all the Jews. But thanks to Mordecai and Queen Esther, he failed, and, to show their joy, the Jews celebrated Purim.
The adults disguised themselves and went out, there was noise in the street, masks appeared in the house, I didn’t know who they were, it was like a fairy tale; my parents stayed out till late at night. The general excitement affected us children; I lay awake in my crib and listened. Sometimes our parents would show up in masks, which they then took off; that was great fun, but I preferred not knowing it was they.
One night, when I had dozed off, I was awakened by a giant wolf leaning over my bed. A long, red tongue dangled from his mouth, and he snarled fearfully. I screamed as loud as I could: “A wolf! A wolf!” No one heard me, no one came; I shrieked and yelled louder and louder and cried. Then a hand slipped out, grabbed the wolf’s ears, and pulled his head down. My father was behind it, laughing. I kept shouting: “A wolf! A wolf!” I wanted my father to drive it away. He showed me the wolf mask in his hand; I didn’t believe him, he kept saying: “Don’t you see? It was me, that was no real wolf.” But I wouldn’t calm down, I kept sobbing and crying.
The story of the werewolf had thus come true. My father couldn’t have known what the little girls always told me when we huddled together in the dark. Mother reproached herself for her sleigh story but scolded him for his uncontrollable pleasure in masquerading. There was nothing he liked better than play-acting. When he had gone to school in Vienna, he only wanted to be an actor. But in Ruschuk, he was mercilessly thrust into his father’s business. The town did have an amateur theater, where he performed with Mother, but what was it measured by his earlier dreams in Vienna? He was truly unleashed, said Mother, during the Purim festival: He would change his masks several times in a row, surprising and terrifying all their friends with the most bizarre scenes.
My wolf panic held on for a long time; night after night I had bad dreams, very often waking my parents, in whose room I slept. Father tried to calm me down until I fell asleep again, but then the wolf reappeared in my dreams; we didn’t get rid of him all that soon. From that time on, I was considered a jeapordized child whose imagination must not be overstimulated, and the result was that for many months I heard only dull stories, all of which I’ve forgotten.
The next event was the big comet, and since I have never thought about one event without the other, there must be some connection between them. I believe that the appearance of the comet freed me from the wolf; my childhood terror merged into the universal terror of those days, for I have never seen people so excited as during the time of the comet. Also, both of them, the wolf and the comet, appeared at night, one more reason why they came together in my memory.
Everyone talked about the comet before I saw it, and I heard that the end of the world was at hand. I couldn’t picture what that was, but I did notice that people changed and started whispering whenever I came near, and they gazed at me full of pity. The Bulgarian girls didn’t whisper, they said it straight out in their unabashed way: The end of the world had come. It was the general belief in town, and it must have prevailed for quite a while since it left such a deep stamp on me without my fearing anything specific. I can’t say to what extent my parents, as educated people, were infected with that belief. But I’m sure they didn’t oppose the general view. Otherwise, after our earlier experience, they would have done something to enlighten me, only they didn’t.
One night, people said the comet was now here and would now fall upon the earth. I was not sent to bed; I heard someone say it made no sense, the children ought to come into the garden too. A lot of people were standing around in the courtyard. I had never seen so many there; all the children from our houses and the neighboring houses were among them, and everyone, adults and children, kept staring up at the sky, where the comet loomed gigantic and radiant. I can see it spreading across half the heavens. I still feel the tension in the back of my neck as I tried to view its entire length. Maybe it got longer in my memory, maybe it didn’t occupy half, but only a smaller part of the sky. I must leave the answer to that question to others, who were grown up then and not afraid. But it was bright outdoors, almost like during the day, and I knew very well that it actually ought to be night, for that was the first time I hadn’t been put to bed at that hour, and that was the real event for me. Everyone stood in the garden, peering at the heavens and waiting. The grownups scarcely walked back and forth; it was oddly quiet, voices were low, at most the children moved, but the grownups barely heeded them. In this expectation, I must have felt something of the anxiety filling everyone else, for in order to relieve me, somebody gave me a twig of cherries. I had put one cherry into my mouth and was craning my neck, trying to follow the gigantic comet with my eyes, and the strain, and perhaps also the wondrous beauty of the comet made me forget the cherry, so that I swallowed the pit.
It took a long time; no one grew tired of it, and people kept standing around in a dense throng. I can’t see Father or Mother among them, I can’t see any of the individual people who made up my life. I only see them all together, and if I hadn’t used the word so frequently later on, I would say that I see them as a mass, a crowd: a stagnating crowd of expectation.
The Magic Language The Fire
The biggest cleaning in the house came before Pesakh, Passover. Everything was moved topsy-turvy, nothing stayed in the same place, and since the cleaning began early—lasting about two weeks, I believe—this was the period of the greatest disorder. Nobody had time for you, you were always underfoot and were pushed aside or sent away, and as for the kitchen, where the most interesting things were being prepared, you could at best sneak a glance inside. Most of all, I loved the brown eggs, which were boiled in coffee for days and days.
On the seder evening, the long table was put up and set in the dining room; and perhaps the room had to be so long, for on this occasion the table had to seat very many guests. The whole family gathered for the seder, which was celebrated in our home. It was customary to pull in two or three strangers off the street; they were seated at the feast and participated in everything.
Grandfather sat at the head of the table, reading the Haggadah, the story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. It was his proudest moment: Not only was he placed above his sons and sons-in-law, who honored him and followed all his directions, but he, the eldest, with his sharp face like a bird of prey, was also the most fiery of all; nothing eluded him. As he chanted in singsong, he noticed the least motion, the slightest occurrence at the table, and his glance or a light movement of his hand would set it aright. Everything was very warm and close, the atmosphere of an ancient tale in which everything was precisely marked out and had its place. On seder evenings, I greatly admired my grandfather; and even his sons, who didn’t have an easy time with him, seemed elevated and cheerful.
As the youngest male, I had my own, not unimportant function; I had to ask the Ma-nishtanah. The story of the exodus is presented as a series of questions and answers about the reasons for the holiday. The youngest of the participants asks right at the start what all these preparations signify: the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs, and the other unusual things on the table. The narrator, in this case my grandfather, replies with the detailed story of the exodus from Egypt. Without my question, which I recited by heart, holding the book and pretending to read, the story could not begin. The details were familiar to me, they had been explained often enough; but throughout the reading I never lost the sense that my grandfather was answering me personally. So it was a great evening for me too, I felt important, downright indispensable; I was lucky there was no younger cousin to usurp my place.
But although following every word and every gesture of my grandfather’s, I looked forward to the end throughout the narrative. For then came the nicest part: The men suddenly all stood up and jigged around a little, singing together as they danced: “Had gadya, had gadya!”—“A kid! A kid!” It was a merry song, and I was already quite familiar with it, but it was part of the ritual for an uncle to call me over when it was done and to translate every line of it into Ladino.
* * *
When my father came home from the store, he would instantly speak to my mother. They were very much in love at that time and had their own language, which I didn’t understand; they spoke German, the language of their happy schooldays in Vienna. Most of all, they talked about the Burgtheater; before ever meeting, they had seen the same plays and the same actors there and they never exhausted their memories of it. Later I found out that they had fallen in love during such conversations, and while neither of them had managed to make their dream of the theater come true—both had passionately wanted to act—they did succeed in getting married despite a great deal of opposition.
Grandfather Arditti, from one of the oldest and most prosperous Sephardic families in Bulgaria, was against letting his youngest, and favorite, daughter marry the son of an upstart from Adrianople. Grandfather Canetti had pulled himself up by his bootstraps; an orphan, cheated, turned out of doors while young, he had worked his way up to prosperity; but in the eyes of the other grandfather, he remained a playactor and a liar. “Es mentiroso (He’s a liar),” I heard Grandfather Arditti once say when he didn’t realize I was listening. Grandfather Canetti, however, was indignant about the pride of the Ardittis, who looked down on him. His son could marry any girl, and it struck him as a superfluous humiliation that he wanted to marry the daughter of that Arditti of all people. So my parents at first kept their love a secret, and it was only gradually, very tenaciously, and with the active help of their older brothers and sisters and well-disposed relatives, that they succeeded in getting closer to making their wish come true. At last, both fathers gave in, but a tension always remained between them, and they couldn’t stand each other. In the secret period, the two young people had fed their love incessantly with German conversations, and one can imagine how many loving couples of the stage played their part here.
So I had good reason to feel excluded when my parents began their conversations. They became very lively and merry, and I associated this transformation, which I noted keenly, with the sound of the German language. I would listen with utter intensity and then ask them what this or that meant. They laughed, saying it was too early for me, those were things I would understand only later. It was already a great deal for them to give in on the word “Vienna,” the only one they revealed to me. I believed they were talking about wondrous things that could be spoken of only in that language. After begging and begging to no avail, I ran away angrily into another room, which was seldom used, and I repeated to myself the sentences I had heard from them, in their precise intonation, like magic formulas; I practiced them often to myself, and as soon as I was alone, I reeled off all the sentences or individual words I had practiced—reeled them off so rapidly that no one could possibly have understood me. But I made sure never to let my parents notice, responding to their secrecy with my own.
I found out that my father had a name for my mother which he used only when they spoke German. Her name was Mathilde, and he called her Mädi. Once, when I was in the garden, I concealed my voice as well as I could, and called loudly into the house: “Mädi! Mädi!” That was how my father called to her from the courtyard whenever he came home. Then I dashed off around the house and appeared only after a while with an innocent mien. My mother stood there perplexed and asked me whether I had seen Father. It was a triumph for me that she had mistaken my voice for his, and I had the strength to keep my secret, while she told him about the incomprehensible event as soon as he came home.
It never dawned on them to suspect me, but among the many intense wishes of that period, the most intense was my desire to understand their secret language. I cannot explain why I didn’t really hold it against my father. I did nurture a deep resentment toward my mother, and it vanished only years later, after his death, when she herself began teaching me German.
