The Tongue Set Free, page 30
The Arrival of Animals
The kind of teacher you wish for, bright and energetic, was Karl Beck. He came into the classroom as swiftly as the wind, he was already standing in front, he lost no time, he was already in the middle of things. He was erect and slender, he held himself very straight, with no trace of rigidity. Was it because of the subject that his teaching never got involved in private complications? His mathematics was lucid and addressed everybody. He made no distinctions between us, everyone existed in his own right for Karl Beck. But he was candidly delighted if pupils responded well, he had a way of showing his delight, which you didn’t take as preference, nor could anyone take his disappointment as discrimination. He didn’t have very much hair for his age, but the hair he did have was silken and yellow; when I saw him, I had a joyous feeling of rays. But it wasn’t that he subdued you with warmth, it was actually a kind of fearlessness. He courted us as little as he bullied us. A very slight mockery lay on his face, but no trace of irony; feigning superiority was not his thing, it was more as if he had retained his mockery from his own schooldays and had to make a little effort now not to show it as a teacher. He must have had a critical mind, I realize that in my memory of him; the detachment he maintained was an intellectual one. His effect was due not to importance, which teachers tend to show, but to his evenness of vitality and to his lucidity. The class was so unafraid of him that they initially tried to give him a hard time: one day, they greeted him with yells, he was already in the open doorway, the class kept on yelling. He took a very quick look, angrily said, “I’m not teaching! “, slammed the door behind him, and was gone. No punishment, no court, no investigation, he was simply not there. The class remained alone with its yelling, and what was at first regarded as a victory ended with a feeling of ridiculousness and fizzled out.
Our geography book was written by Emil Letsch, and we also had him as our teacher. I knew his book before he came to us, I had half memorized it, for it contained very many numbers. The heights of mountains, the lengths of rivers, the populations of countries, cantons, and cities—I memorized whatever could be expressed in numbers, and I am still suffering from these mostly obsolete figures. I set great hopes on the author of such riches, anyone who had written a book was a king of god for me. But it turned out that the only thing this author had of God was the wrath. Letsch commanded more than he taught, and with any object he mentioned, he would add the price. He was so stern that he never once smiled or laughed. He soon bored me because he never said anything that wasn’t in his book. He was maddeningly terse and expected the same terseness from us. Bad marks drummed down like beatings over the class, he was hated, and so intensely that this hatred became the only memory of him for many of his pupils. I had never seen such a concentratedly wrathful man, for other men, likewise wrathful, express themselves in greater detail. Maybe he was used to giving orders, maybe it was more taciturnity than wrathfulness. But the sobriety he emanated had a paralyzing effect. He wore a Vandyke; he was a short man, that may have contributed to this resoluteness.
I never gave up hope of eventually finding out something from him that would have justified his occupation with geography—he had even gone on expeditions. But the metamorphosis I experienced in him was of a different sort. He was present at a lecture on the Carolina and Mariana Islands, to which Fräulein Herder had taken me at a guild hall. The lecturer was General Haushofer from Munich, a scholarly geopolitician, superior to our Letsch not just in rank. It was a rich lecture, precise and lucid, which stimulated my subsequent occupation with the South Sea islands. His bias was unpleasant; I thought it was the military deportment that bothered me, and didn’t hear any details about him until later. But I did learn a great deal in that short hour and I was in the expansive, cheerful mood one gets into on such occasions, when Professor Letsch suddenly greeted Fräulein Herder. They were old acquaintances who had met on a trip to Crete; and since he lived in Zollikon, we all walked home together. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard him conversing with Fräulein Mina. He spoke three, four, five sentences in a row, he smiled, he laughed. He expressed his amazement that I was living in the Yalta Villa, which he still remembered as a girls’ boarding school. He said: “That’s where our boy’s geography comes from. He has it from you, Fräulein Herder!” But that was the least: he inquired about the other ladies, whom he called by name. He asked Fräulein Herder if she often got to Italy. He said he had run into Countess Rasponi on the island of Djerba a year ago. Thus it went, back and forth, all the way home; he was an affable, an almost courteous man, who finally took leave of us, emphatically, indeed heartily, albeit somewhat hoarsely.
On the journey, said Fräulein Mina, he had known all the prices and never stood for any cheating. The prices that that man had in his head—she still couldn’t grasp it today.
Letsch’s teaching meant nothing to me, and his book could just as easily have been written by someone else. But I do owe him the experience of a sudden metamorphosis, certainly the last thing that I would have expected from him.
There would be better things to report about Karl Fenner, the teacher for natural history. Here, the man disappears in the immense landscape that he opened up for me. He did not continue something for which the groundwork had been laid at home, he began with something completely new. Mother’s ideas of nature were a conventional sort. She not very convincingly enthused about sunsets and chose our apartments in such a way that the rooms we used the most always faced west. She loved the orchards of her childhood because she loved fruits and the scent of roses. For her, Bulgaria was the land of melons, of peaches and grapes, that was a matter of her strongly developed sense of taste and smell. But we had no pets in the house, and she had never earnestly talked to me about animals except as delicacies. She described how geese had been crammed in her childhood, and while I practically died of indignation and pity, she remarked how good such fat geese tasted. She was quite aware of the cruelty of the fattening process, and the implacable thumb of a maid stuffing more and more corn mush into the beak of a bird, which I only knew from her description, became a terrifying image in my dreams, in which I myself had turned into a goose and was getting stuffed and stuffed, until I woke up screaming. My mother was capable of smiling when I talked of such things, and I knew she was now thinking of the taste of goose. She did make me familiar with one kind of animal, the wolves on the frozen Danube; she respected them because she had so greatly feared them. In Manchester, Father took me to the zoo. It didn’t happen often, he was not given enough time; she never came along, she never joined us, perhaps because it bored her, she was utterly devoted to human beings. It was thus my father who began my animal experiences, without which no childhood is worth living. He mimicked the animals to my delight, he was even able to change into the tiny turtle that we, like all children in England, kept in the garden. Then, everything had broken off suddenly. For six or seven years now, I had been living in my mother’s world, which had no animals. Our life teemed with great men, but none wore an animal’s face. She was familiar with the heroes and gods of the Greeks, although she preferred human beings to them too; it was only as an adult that I learned about the dual-shaped deities of Egypt.
From the kitchen balcony of the apartment on Scheuchzerstrasse, we looked down at a vacant lot. Here, the tenants of the surrounding houses had started little vegetable gardens. One belonged to a policeman, who also kept a pig; he battened it devotedly and with all sorts of cunning. In summertime, school began at seven; I got up by six and caught the policeman jumping over the fences of the neighboring gardens and hastily tearing up fodder for his pig. He first cautiously peered up at the windows of the houses to see if anybody was watching, all the people were still asleep, he didn’t notice me, perhaps I was too small, then he hastily pulled out whatever he could and jumped back over to Sugie (that was what he called his pig). He wore police trousers, the long vertical stripe on each leg didn’t seem to bother him in his undertaking, he leaped from one small vegetable bed to the other, a good jumper, helped himself, and thus spared his own truck. Sugie was insatiable, we liked hearing her grunt, and when George, my little brother, who had a terrible sweet tooth, had stolen chocolate again, we made fun of him by calling him Sugie and grunting tirelessly. He then cried and promised never to do it again, but the policeman had an irresistible effect on him, and the very next day, more chocolate disappeared.
In the morning, I awakened my little brothers; all three of us hid on the balcony and breathlessly waited for the policeman to emerge; then, not making a peep, we watched him jumping, and it was only when he was gone that we started grunting for all we were worth, Sugie had become our pet. Unfortunately, she didn’t live very long, and, when she vanished, we were alone again, starving for animals, but without realizing it. Throughout that period, Mother was uninterested in Sugie, and the only thing on her mind was the dishonest policeman, whom we were profusely lectured on. She dilated zestfully on hypocrisy, got all the way to Tartuffe, and swore to us that the hypocrite would not escape his just deserts.
Our relationship to animals was still so miserable back then. This changed only with Fenner and his natural-history class at school; it changed thoroughly. With infinite patience, he explained the structure of plants and animals. He got us to do colored drawings, which we did at home, meticulously. He was not easily satisfied with these pictures, he went into every mistake, gently but doggedly urging us to improve them, and he often advised me to throw away the picture and start all over again. I spent nearly all my homework time on these natural-history notebooks. Because of the efforts they cost me, I was lovingly devoted to them. I admired my schoolmates’ labors, which seemed marvelous to me; what effortless and beautiful drawings they did. I felt no envy, I felt astonishment at viewing such a notebook, there is nothing healthier for a child who learns easily than utter failure in some field or other. I was always the worst in drawing, so bad that I felt sympathy from Fenner, who was a warm and affectionate person. He was short and somewhat pudgy, his voice was soft and quiet, but his teaching was down-to-earth and carefully planned, with a thoroughness that was sheer pleasure; we advanced only slowly, but the things we took up with him were never forgotten, they were inscribed in us forever.
He took us on excursions, which we all liked. They were merry and relaxed, nothing was overlooked; at Lake Rumen, we got all sorts of small water creatures, which we brought back to school. Under the microscope, he showed us this fantastic life in the smallest space, and everything we saw was then drawn. I have to hold myself back from going into detail and launching into a science course, which I can hardly force upon readers who know all this anyhow. But I must point out that he did not share my emerging sensitivity on all questions of eating and getting eaten. He took these things for granted; whatever happened in nature was not subject to our moral judgements. He was too plain, perhaps also too modest to let his opinion interfere with these inexhaustibly cruel processes. If there was any time to talk during an excursion and I let out some emotional remark in that direction, he kept silent and didn’t answer, which was not really like him. He wanted to accustom us to a virile, stoic attitude in these things, but without dreary, sanctimonious claptrap, merely through his attitude. So I had to perceive his silence as disapproval and I restrained myself a bit.
He was preparing us for a planned visit to the slaughter house. During several lessons beforehand, he often talked about it, always explaining over and over again that they didn’t let the animals suffer, they made sure—in contrast to earlier days—that the animals died a quick, painless death. He went so far as to use the world “humane” in this context, impressing upon us how to act towards animals, each of us in his milieu. I so greatly respected him, I liked him so much, that I also accepted these somewhat overly prudent preparations for the abattoir without feeling any aversion towards him. I sensed that he wanted to get us used to something inevitable, and I liked the fact that he was going to so much trouble and starting long before the visit. I pictured how Letsch, had he been in his place, would have ordered us off to the slaughter house and tried to solve the ticklish problem in the gruffest way, with no considerations for anyone. But I greatly feared the day of the visit, which came closer and closer. Fenner, who was a good observer and whom nothing easily escaped, even in people, noticed my fear, although I stubbornly locked it up inside myself and never said anything to my classmates, whose jokes I was scared of.
When the day came, and we were passing through the abattoir, he never left my side. He explained each device as though it had been thought up for the sake of the animals. His words imposed themselves as a protective layer between me and everything I viewed, so that I couldn’t clearly describe it myself. When I think back upon it today, I felt that he acted like a priest trying to talk a person out of believing in death. It was the only time that his words seemed unctious to me, though serving to shield me against my horror. His plan worked, I took everything calmly, with no emotional outburst, he could be satisfied with himself, until his science ran away with him and he showed us something that destroyed everything. We came to a ewe, who had just been slaughtered and lay there open before us. In its water bag, a lamb was floating, tiny, scarely an inch long, its head and feet were perfectly recognizable, but everything about it looked transparent. Perhaps we wouldn’t have noticed it, but he stopped us and explained, in his soft but unmoved voice, what we were seeing. We were all gathered around him, he had taken his eyes off me. But now I stared at him and quietly said: “Murder.” The word came easily over my lips because of the war, which had just ended, but I think I was in a sort of trance when I said it. He must have heard, for he broke off and said: “Now we’ve seen everything,” and he took us out of the slaughterhouse without stopping again. Perhaps we really had seen everything he wanted to show us, but he walked faster, he very much wanted to get us out.
My trust in him was shattered. The notebooks of drawings lay unopened. I did no more drawings. He knew it, he never asked me for any in class. When he walked up the aisles to criticize and correct the drawings, my notebook stayed shut. He never so much as glanced at me; I remained wordless in his lessons, I pretended to be sick at future excursions and had myself excused. No one but us perceived what had happened, I believe he understood me.
Today I fully realize that he was trying to help me through something that I wasn’t meant to get over. He had confronted the slaughterhouse in his way. Had it been meaningless to him, as to most people, he wouldn’t have taken us out again so quickly. In case he is still in the world today, at ninety or one hundred, I would like him to know I bow to him.
Kannitverstan; The Canary
Very early, in the second year of Gymnasium, we had stenography as an elective subject. I wanted to master it, but it was hard, I could tell how hard it was for me by the progress that Ganzhorn, in the next seat, was making. It went against my grain to use new signs for letters that I knew well and had been using for a long time. Also, the shortenings deprived me of something. I did want to write faster, but I would have preferred a method of doing it without altering anything in the letters, and that was impossible. I memorized the signs with great difficulty; no sooner did I have one in my head than it vanished again, as though I had swiftly dumped it out. Ganzhorn was amazed, he found the signs as easy as Latin or German or as the Greek letters, in which he wrote his creative works. He felt no resistance against using different signs for the same words. I perceived each word as if it were made for eternity, and the visible form it appeared in was something inviolate for me.
I was used to the existence of different languages since my childhood, but not to the existence of different scripts. It was annoying that there were Gothic letters along with the Latin ones, but they were both alphabets with the same realm and the same application, fairly similar to each other. The shorthand syllables introduced a new principle, and the fact that they diminished writing so greatly made them suspicious in my eyes. I couldn’t get through dictations, I made hair-raising mistakes. Ganzhorn saw the kettle of fish and corrected my mistakes with lifted eyebrows. Perhaps it would have gone on like that and I would eventually have given up stenography as something unnatural for me. But then Schoch, who also taught us calligraphy, brought us a reader in shorthand: Hebel’s The Treasure Chest. I read a few of the stories in it, and without knowing what a special and famous book it was, I kept reading. I finished it in the briefest time, it was only a selection. I felt so sad when it was done that I promptly started all over again. I reread it several times, and the shorthand, which I didn’t even think about—I would have read those stories in any script—had entered into me of its own accord. I reread the booklet many times, until it fell to pieces, and even when I later owned the book, in normal print, complete and in every available edition, I returned most of all to those crumbling pages, until they dissolved under my fingers.
The first story, “Memorabilia from the Orient,” commenced with the words: “In Turkey, where queer things are said to happen occasionally.…” I always felt as if I came from Turkey, Grandfather had grown up there, Father had been born there. In my native city, there were many Turks, everyone at home understood and spoke their language. Though I hadn’t really learned it as a child, I had heard it frequently; I knew a few Turkish words that had passed into our Ladino and I was generally aware of their origin. To all this were joined the tales of earliest days: how the Turkish sultan had invited us to live in Turkey when we had to leave Spain, how well the Turks had treated us ever since. With the very first words that I read in The Treasure Chest, I had a warm feeling; what may have touched other readers as something exotic was familiar to me, as though it came from some kind of homeland of mine. Perhaps that was why I was also doubly receptive to the moral of the story: “One should not carry a rock in one’s pocket for a foe or any revenge in the heart.” At that time I was certainly not capable of putting the moral to any good use. I still cultivated an irreconcilable hatred for the two men whom I had named the chief foes of my early life: the bearded professor in Vienna and the ogre-uncle in Manchester. But a “moral” has to contrast with the way you feel and behave in order to strike you, and it has to remain in you for a long time before it finds its opportunity, suddenly braces itself, and strikes.
