The Torch in my Ear, page 4
I believe that Dreyfus never realized what drew me to him. Had he known, he would have made fun of it. After our very first conversations, I made up my mind to be his friend; and since he was always cordial and civilized, the process of becoming friends took a certain amount of time. On the paternal side, his family owned one of the largest private banks in Germany; we imagined that his father must be very rich. Since I felt encircled and threatened by my own relatives, his situation would have inevitably aroused my distrust and dislike. But such a response was prevented by the fact—overwhelming for me—that his father had resisted the banking tradition and become a poet, quite simply a poet. Not a writer aiming for cheap success as a novelist, but a modern poet, intelligible to very few, writing, I presumed, in French. I had never read anything of his, but he had books out; I made no attempt to lay hold of them; on the contrary, it strikes me today that I felt qualms about getting them, because what I cared about was the aura of something obscure, unfathomable, so difficult that it would have been absurd for me to seek access to the poems at my age. Albert Dreyfus was also interested in modern art. He wrote art reviews and collected paintings, was friendly with many of the most original new painters, and was married to a painter, my classmate’s mother.
At first, I didn’t quite catch this fact. Jean mentioned it casually; it didn’t sound like anything particularly honorable, more (so far as one could divine anything behind his well-formed sentences) like a problem. But when he invited me over and I came into a home full of paintings—powerful impressionist portraits, including childhood pictures of my friend—I found out that these were his mother’s works. They were so lively and full of bravura that, despite my meager knowledge in this area, I instantly blurted out: “Why, she’s a real painter! You never told me!” To which he replied, somewhat astonished: “Did you doubt it? I did tell you!” It all depended on what one meant by tell; he hadn’t announced it, just tossed it in casually; and, given the great solemnity that I associated with any kind of artistic activity, his way of informing me had seemed to aim at distracting my attention, at apologizing cordially for his mother’s painting. I had expected something like Fräulein Mina’s flower pictures at the Yalta school [see The Tongue Set Free] and I was thunderstruck.
It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask whether Jean’s mother was a famous painter; all that mattered was that I saw the paintings, that they existed, that they were vibrant and vital, and also that the whole rather large apartment was brimming with them. During a later visit, I met the painter. She looked nervous and a bit scattered; she appeared unhappy, even though she frequently laughed. I sensed something of her deep affection for her son. Jean seemed less balanced in her presence; he was worried, as anyone else would have been, and he inquired after his mother’s health. Her answer didn’t satisfy him. He asked again. He wanted to know the whole truth, no trace of irony, sympathy (the very last thing I’d have expected of him) instead of superiority; if I had seen him and his mother together more often, I would have had a very different conception of him.
But I never saw her again; I saw him every day, and so I got from him what I needed most at that time: an intact, unquestioned notion of art and the lives of those who devote themselves to it. A father who had turned his back on the family business and become a poet, whose passion was paintings, and who had therefore married a real painter. A son who spoke marvelous French even though he went to a German school, and now and then (what could be more natural with such a father!) wrote a French poem himself, even though he was more interested in mathematics. Then there was the uncle, his father’s brother, a physician, a neurologist, a professor at the University of Frankfurt, with an absolutely beautiful daughter, Maria, whom I met only once and would have liked to see again.
Nothing was missing: the science for which I had the greatest respect, medicine—I kept catching myself thinking that I would study medicine—and finally, the beauty of an apparently capricious cousin. Jean, who acted as if he knew a little about women, admitted she was attractive, but tended to apply more rigorous standards to a cousin.
It was nice to talk to Jean about girls: actually, he did the talking, and I listened. It took me a while to gain enough experience from his conversations to come up with my own stories. They were all made up. I was still as inexperienced as I’d been in Zurich; but I learned from Jean and took on his aura. He never noticed that I regaled him with tall tales, whereby I preferred to stick to very few—normally one continuous story, which dragged on through many vicissitudes. My story was so suspenseful that he always asked me for more, and he was keenly interested in one girl in particular, whom I had named Maria in honor of his cousin. Not only was she beautiful, but she also had the most contradictory qualities: on one day, you were sure she liked you—only to learn on the next day that she was totally indifferent to you. But this didn’t end the matter. Two days later you were rewarded for your persistence with a first kiss, and then came a long list of insults, rejections, and the tenderest declarations. We puzzled a great deal about the nature of women. He confessed that he had never run into such an enigmatic girl as my Maria, yet he had had all sorts of experiences. He expressed a desire to meet her, and I didn’t say no point-blank. For, thanks to her whims, I was able to put him off without arousing his suspicions.
These conversations went on practically uninterrupted, they had their own weight and continued for months on end; and they first aroused my interest in things that I basically still felt indifferent to. I knew nothing; I had no inkling of what went on between lovers aside from kissing. At the boarding-house, Fräulein Rahm lived in the next room, receiving her Friend evening after evening. Although Mother had taken the precautionary measure of placing the piano against the connecting door, one could hear enough without eavesdropping. It must have been because of the nature of this relationship that the sounds from next door surprised me, but didn’t occupy me. First came Herr Ödenburg’s pleas, which Fräulein Rahm answered with a harsh “No!” The pleading became a beseeching, then a whimpering and begging that wouldn’t stop and was interrupted only by colder and colder “No!”s. Finally, it sounded as if Fräulein Rahm were seriously angry. “Get out! Get out!” she ordered, while Herr Ödenburg wept heartbreakingly. Sometimes she actually threw him out, in the middle of his tears, and I wondered whether he was still crying on the stairway when he ran into any of the boarders; but I didn’t have the heart to go and see for myself. Sometimes he was allowed to stay; the weeping became a whimpering. He had to leave Fräulein Rahm at ten on the dot anyway, because women couldn’t have male callers after 10 P.M.
When the weeping grew so loud that we couldn’t read, Mother shook her head, but we never talked about it. I knew how unpleasant it was for her to have such a neighbor; but, so far as our childishly innocent ears were concerned, she wasn’t really dissatisfied with this sort of relationship. Whatever I heard, I kept to myself; I never associated it with Jean’s conquests; but perhaps, without my realizing it, it had a remote influence on the behavior of my Maria.
Things were never improper in Jean’s accounts or my fictions. We recounted them as people used to do. Everything had a chivalrous tinge; what counted was admiration, not capture. If the admiration was clever and skillful enough to penetrate and not be forgotten, then you had won; conquering consisted in making an impression and being taken seriously. If the flow of beautiful things that you thought up and then articulated was not interrupted, if the chance to apply them depended not only on your own skill, but also on the expectation and receptivity of the girl in question, then this was proof that you were taken seriously, and you were a man. You had to prove yourself in this way; this attracted you more than the adventure itself. Jean told about an uninterrupted chain of incidents in which he’d proven himself. Although my own stories were invented from beginning to end, I believed every word he told me, just as he believed me. It never crossed my mind to doubt what he told me simply because I was making up my stories. Our reports existed in themselves; perhaps he embellished details; the things I created out of whole cloth may have stimulated him to juice up a few particulars. Our accounts were attuned to each other, they dovetailed, and they influenced his inner life at this time no less than mine.
My attitude was altogether different in my conversations with Hans Baum. Jean and Hans weren’t friends, Jean considered Baum boring. He despised good students; and duty, which Hans fairly emanated, struck Jean as ludicrous, because it was rigid and lifeless and always remained the same. Their aloofness toward one another stood me in good stead; had they compared what I told them about love, I would have soon lost all prestige with them.
I meant what I said to Baum, while I was only playing in my conversations with Dreyfus. Perhaps I was intent on learning from Dreyfus, although I competed with him only in conversations and made sure not to emulate him otherwise. Once, I had a very serious talk with Baum when, to his astonishment, I told him my latest opinion on the topic: “There’s no such thing as love,” I declared. “Love is an invention of poets. Sooner or later, you read about it in a book and you believe it because you’re young. You think it’s been kept from you by adults, so you pounce on it and believe it before you experience it personally. No one would hit upon it on his own. There is really no such thing as love.” He hesitated to reply. I could tell that he totally disagreed with me. But since he took everything so seriously and was extremely reserved to boot, he made no effort to refute me. He would have had to expose intimate experiences of his own, something he was incapable of doing.
My extreme negation was in response to a book that had been in Mother’s possession since Zurich and that I had now read against her will: Strindberg’s A Fool’s Confession. She liked this book very much; I could tell because it always lay out by itself, while she heaped up all the other Strindberg volumes in one pile. Once, when in an antiquated and arrogant manner, I called Herr Ödenburg a “necktie salesman” and wondered how Fräulein Rahm could stand his company evening after evening (while my hand, by chance or design, played with A Fool’s Confession, opened it, leafed through it, closed it, went back to it and opened it again), she said, assuming I meant to read this book after all because of the nightly scenes next door: “Don’t read that! You’ll destroy something for yourself that you’ll never be able to restore. Wait until you’ve had your own experiences. Then it can’t harm you.”
For so many years, I had blindly believed her. She had never had to argue to prevent me from reading a book. But now, since Herr Hungerbach’s visit, her authority was shattered. I had met him, and he was totally different from the man she had described and whose visit she had announced. Now, I wanted to see for myself what Strindberg was all about. I didn’t promise her anything, but she felt confident, because I hadn’t talked back either. The next chance I got, I took A Fool’s Confession and raced through it behind her back, as quickly as I had once read Dickens, but with no desire to reread it.
I felt no sympathy with this confession; it struck me as one long lie. I believe there was a certain sobriety about it that repelled me, the attempt to say nothing that went beyond the moment, a reduction and restriction to the given situation. I missed an impetus, the impetus of invention, by which I meant invention in general, not in specifics. I didn’t discern the true impetus: hate. I didn’t see that the core was my most personal experience, my earliest one: jealousy. I was bothered by the lack of freedom at the beginning, because it was another man’s wife. The story seemed “barricaded.” I didn’t like circuitous routes to people. With the pride of my seventeen years, I looked straight ahead and felt scorn for concealment. Confrontation was everything; only the other person counted. I could take side glances no more seriously than side cuts. This book, far too readable, would have slid off me as though I had never read it. But then came the passage that struck me like a club, the only passage I can still remember down to the tiniest detail, even though I have never picked the book up again, perhaps because of this scene.
The hero of the book, the confessor, Strindberg himself, is visited for the first time by the wife of his friend, an officer in the Guards. He undresses her and places her on the floor. He sees the tips of her breasts shimmering through the gauze. This description of intimacy was something completely new for me. It took place in a room that could be any room, even ours. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why I rejected the passage so vehemently: it was impossible. The author wanted to talk me into something that he called “Love.” But I wouldn’t let him bulldoze me, and I called him a liar. Not only didn’t I want to know anything about this business, which I found thoroughly reprehensible, for it took place behind the back of the woman’s husband, a friend, who trusted both of them—but I viewed it as an absurd, a wretched, an implausible, an insolent invention. Why should a woman let a man put her on the floor? Why did he undress her? Why did she let him undress her? There she was on the floor, and he was looking at her. The situation was both incomprehensible and new to me. It made me furious at the writer, who dared to present something like this as if it had really taken place.
A sort of campaign against it began in me; even if all others weakened and let themselves be convinced that this was true, I didn’t believe it, I would never believe it. Herr Ödenburg’s whimpering next door had nothing to do with it. Fräulein Rahm walked through her room upright and straight as an arrow. Once, when I was on the balcony of my room, peering at the stars through opera glasses, I had seen Fräulein Rahm naked. Accidentally, as I thought, the opera glass had focused on the brightly lit window of her room. There she stood, naked, her head high, her body slender and shimmering in the reddish light. I was so surprised that I kept looking. She walked a few steps, straight as an arrow, just as she walked dressed. From the balcony, I couldn’t hear the whimpering. But when I stepped back into the room, embarrassed, I instantly heard it again, as loud as ever. This meant that it had gone on all the time that I was on the balcony. While Fräulein Rahm had walked up and down in her room, Herr Ödenburg had continued whimpering. He had made no impact on her; she acted as if she didn’t see him, as if she were alone. I didn’t see him either; it was as if he hadn’t been there.
The Fainting
Every night, I went out on the balcony and looked at the stars. I sought constellations that I knew and I was glad when I found them. Not all of them were equally clear; not all of them had a conspicuously blue star of their own, like Vega in Lyra overhead in the zenith, or a huge red star, like Betelgeuse in Orion rising. I felt the vastness that I sought. In the daytime, I couldn’t feel the vastness of space; this feeling was aroused at night by the stars. Sometimes, I helped by uttering one of the enormous numbers of light-years separating me from this star or that.
Many things tormented me. I felt guilty about the poverty that we saw around us and didn’t share. I would have felt less guilty if I had succeeded just once in convincing Mother of how unjust our “prosperity,” as I called it, was. But she remained cold and aloof whenever I launched into such things. She deliberately closed herself off; and yet, just a moment earlier, she had been carrying on about some book or piece of music. It was quite easy to get her to talk again; all I had to do was drop the subject which she didn’t want to hear about, and she would wax loquacious again. But I made it a point of honor to force her to say something. I told her about the distressing things I’d seen that day. I asked her point-blank if she knew about this or that: she lapsed into silence, a vaguely scornful or disapproving look on her face. It was only when I brought up something really terrible that she said: “I didn’t cause the inflation,” or “That’s the result of the war.”
I had the impression that it made no difference to her what happened to people she didn’t know, especially when they were poor. Yet during the war, when people were being maimed and killed, she had been full of sympathy. Perhaps her commiseration had been exhausted by the war; at times, I felt as if something had been consumed in her, something that she had been all too lavish with. But that was still the more bearable conjecture; for what tormented me more and more was the suspicion that in Arosa she had come under the influence of people who impressed her because they “were in the thick of life,” “stood their ground.” She had never employed such locutions before. When I heard them too frequently now, I defended myself against them and attacked her (“In what way were they in the thick of life? They were patients in a sanatorium. They were sick and idle when they told you these things”). She became angry and accused me of being heartless toward sick people. It was as though she had withdrawn all commiseration from the world and limited it to the narrower mankind in her sanatorium.
However, there were far more men than women in this smaller world, because men pursued her as a young woman. And when they vied for her attention, they stressed their masculine features—perhaps precisely because they were ill—and made such a to-do about them that she believed them and accepted traits and characteristics that she had scorned, even loathed, just a short while ago, during the war. Her position among these men rested on her willingness to listen to them. She wanted to find out as much as possible from them. She was always ready for their confessions, but never exploited, or intrigued with, the intimate knowledge she thereby gained. Instead of the child with whom she was used to conversing for years, she now had many people to talk to and she took them seriously.
