The Tongue Set Free, page 4
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One day, the courtyard was filled with smoke; a few of our girls ran out into the street and promptly came back with the excited news that a neighborhood house was on fire. It was already all in flames and about to burn up. Instantly, the three houses around our courtyard emptied, and except for my grandmother, who never rose from her divan, all the tenants ran out towards the blaze. It happened so fast that they forgot all about me. I was a little scared to be all alone like that; also I felt like going out, perhaps to the fire, perhaps even more in the direction I saw them all running in. So I ran through the open courtyard gate out into the street, which I was not allowed to do, and I wound up in the racing torrent of people. Luckily, I soon caught sight of two of our older girls, and since they wouldn’t have changed directions for anything in the world, they thrust me between themselves and hastily pulled me along. They halted at some distance from the conflagration, perhaps so as not to endanger me, and thus, for the first time in my life, I saw a burning house. It was already far gone; beams were collapsing and sparks were flying. The evening was gathering, it slowly became dark, and the fire shone brighter and brighter. But what made an even greater impact on me than the blazing house was the people moving around it. They looked small and dark from that distance; there were very many of them, and they were scrambling all over the place. Some remained near the house, some moved off, and the latter were all carrying something on their backs. “Thieves!” said the girls, “Those are thieves! They’re carrying things away from the house before anyone can catch them!” They were no less excited about the thieves than about the fire, and as they kept shouting “Thieves!” their excitement infected me. They were indefatigable, those tiny black figures, deeply bowed, they fanned out in all directions. Some had flung bundles on their shoulders, others ran stooped under the burden of angular objects, which I couldn’t recognize, and when I asked what they were carrying, the girls merely kept repeating: “Thieves! They’re thieves!”
This scene, which has remained unforgettable for me, later merged into the works of a painter, so that I no longer could say what was original and what was added by those paintings. I was nineteen, in Vienna, when I stood before Brueghel’s pictures. I instantly recognized the many little people of that fire in my childhood. The pictures were as familiar to me as if I had always moved among them. I felt a tremendous attraction to them and came over every day. That part of my life which had commenced with the fire continued immediately in these paintings, as though fifteen years had not gone by in between. Brueghel became the most important painter for me; but I did not absorb him, as so many later things, by contemplation and reflection. I found him present within me as though, certain that I would have to come to him, he had been awaiting me for a long time.
Adders and Letters
An early memory takes place on a lake. I see the lake, which is vast, I see it through tears. We are standing by a boat on the shore, my parents and a girl who holds me by the hand. My parents say they want to take the boat out on the lake. I try to tear loose and climb into the boat, I want to go along, I want to go along, but my parents say I can’t, I have to stay behind with the girl who’s holding my hand. I cry, they talk to me, I keep crying. This takes a long time, they are unrelenting, the girl won’t let me go, so I bite her hand. My parents are angry and leave me behind with her, but now to punish me. They vanish in the boat, I yell after them at the top of my lungs, now they’re far away, the lake grows bigger and bigger, everything melts in tears.
It was Lake Wörther, in Austria; I was three years old, they told me so a long time afterwards. In Kronstadt, Transylvania, where we spent the next summer, I see forests and a mountain, a castle and houses on all sides of the castle hill; I myself do not appear in this picture, but I remember stories my father told me about serpents. Before coming to Vienna, he had been to boarding school in Kronstadt. There were a lot of adders in the area, and the farmers wanted to get rid of them. The boys learned how to catch them, and received two kreuzers for every sack of dead adders. Father showed me how to grab an adder, right behind the head, so that it can’t do anything to you, and how to kill it then. It’s easy, he said, once you know how, and it’s not the least bit dangerous. I greatly admired him and wanted to know if they were really quite dead in the sack. I was scared that they would pretend to be dead and suddenly shoot out of the sack. The sack was tightly bound up, he said, and they had to be dead, otherwise you couldn’t have gotten the two kreuzers. I didn’t believe that something could be really fully dead.
Thus we spent three summer vacations in a row in parts of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy: Carlsbad, Lake Wörther, and Kronstadt. A triangle connecting these three remote points contained a good portion of the old empire.
There would be a great deal to say about the Austrian influence on us even in that early Ruschuk period. Not only had both my parents gone to school in Vienna, not only did they speak German to each other, but my father read the liberal Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse every day; it was a grand moment when he slowly unfolded it. As soon as he began reading it, he no longer had an eye for me, I knew he wouldn’t answer anything no matter what; Mother herself wouldn’t ask him anything, not even in German. I tried to find out what it was that fascinated him in the newspaper, at first I thought it was the smell; and when I was alone and nobody saw me, I would climb up on the chair and greedily smell the newsprint. But then I noticed he was moving his head along the page, and I imitated that behind his back without having the page in front of me, while he held it in both hands on the table and I played on the floor behind him. Once, a visitor who had entered the room called to him; he turned around and caught me performing my imaginary reading motions. He then spoke to me even before focusing on the visitor and explained that the important thing was the letters, many tiny letters, on which he knocked his fingers. Soon I would learn them myself, he said, arousing within me an unquenchable yearning for letters.
I knew that the newspaper came from Vienna, this city was far away, it took four days to get there on the Danube. They often spoke of relatives who went to Vienna to consult famous physicians. The names of the great specialists of those days were the very first celebrities that I heard about as a child. When I came to Vienna subsequently, I was amazed that all these names—Lorenz, Schlesinger, Schnitzler, Neumann, Hajek, Halban—really existed as people. I had never tried to picture them physically; what they consisted of was their pronouncements, and these pronouncements had such a weight, the journey to them was so long, the changes their pronouncements effected in the people around me were so cataclysmic, that the names took on something of spirits that one fears and appeals to for help. When someone came back from them, he could eat only certain things, while other things were prohibited for him. I imagined the physicians speaking in a language of their own, which nobody else understood and which one had to guess. It never crossed my mind that this was the same language that I heard from my parents and practiced for myself, secretly, without understanding it.
People often talked about languages; seven or eight different tongues were spoken in our city alone, everyone understood something of each language. Only the little girls, who came from villages, spoke just Bulgarian and were therefore considered stupid. Each person counted up the languages he knew; it was important to master several, knowing them could save one’s own life or the lives of other people.
In earlier years, when merchants went traveling, they carried all their cash in money belts slung around their abdomens. They wore them on the Danube steamers too, and that was dangerous. Once, when my mother’s grandfather got on deck and pretended to sleep, he overheard two men discussing a murder plan in Greek. As soon as the steamer approached the next town, they wanted to mug and kill a merchant in his stateroom, steal his heavy money belt, throw the body into the Danube through a porthole, and then, when the steamer docked, leave the ship immediately. My great-grandfather went to the captain and told him what he had heard in Greek. The merchant was warned, a member of the crew concealed himself in the stateroom, others were stationed outside, and when the two cutthroats went to carry out their plan, they were seized, clapped into chains, and handed over to the police in the very harbor where they had intended to make off with their booty. This happy end came from understanding Greek, and there were many other edifying language stories.
The Murder Attempt
My cousin Laurica and I were inseparable playmates. She was the youngest daughter of Aunt Sophie in the next house, but four years my senior. The courtyard was our domain. Laurica made sure I didn’t run out into the street, but the courtyard was big, and there I was allowed to go anywhere, only I couldn’t climb up on the edge of the draw well; a child had once fallen in and drowned. We had a lot of games and got on very well; it was as if the age difference between us didn’t exist. We had joint hiding places, which we revealed to no one, and we mutually collected little objects there, and whatever one of us had belonged to the other as well. Whenever I got a present, I promptly ran off with it, saying: “I have to show it to Laurica!” We then conferred about what hiding place to put it in, and we never argued. I did whatever she wanted, she did whatever I wanted, we loved each other so much that we always wanted the same thing. I never let her feel that she was only a girl and a youngest child. Since my brother’s birth, when I had started wearing pants, I had been keenly aware of my dignity as the eldest son. Perhaps that helped to make up for the age difference between us.
Then Laurica started school and remained away all morning. I missed her terribly. I played all alone, waiting for her, and when she came home, I caught her right at the gate and asked her all about what she had done in school. She told me about it, I pictured it and longed to go to school in order to be with her. After a time, she came back with a notebook; she was learning how to read and write. She solemnly opened the notebook in front of me; it contained letters of the alphabet in blue ink, they fascinated me more than anything I had ever laid eyes on. But when I tried to touch them, she suddenly grew earnest. She said I wasn’t allowed to, only she could touch it, she was not permitted to part with it. I was deeply hurt by this first refusal. But all I could get from her with my tender pleading was that I could point my fingers at letters without touching them, and I asked what the letters meant. This one time, she answered, giving me information, but I realized she was shaky and contradicted herself, and since I was hurt about her holding back the notebook, I said: “You don’t even know! You’re a bad pupil!”
After that, she always kept the notebooks away from me. She soon had lots of them; I envied her for each one of those notebooks. She knew very well that I did, and a terrible game began. She changed altogether towards me, letting me feel how small I was. Day after day, she let me beg for the notebooks; day after day, she refused to give them to me. She knew how to tantalize me and prolong the torture. I am not surprised that things came to a catastrophe, even if no one foresaw the form it took.
On the day that no one in the family ever forgot, I stood at the gate as usual, waiting for her. “Let me see the writing,” I begged the instant she appeared. She said nothing; I realized everything was about to happen again, and no one could have separated us at that moment. She slowly put down the schoolbag, slowly took out the notebooks, slowly leafed around in them, and then held them in front of my nose lightning-fast. I grabbed at them, she pulled them back, and leaped away. From afar, she held an open notebook out at me and shouted: “You’re too little! You’re too little! You can’t read yet!”
I tried to catch her, running after her all over the place, I begged, I pleaded for the notebooks. Sometimes she let me come very near so that I thought I had my hands on the notebooks, and then she snatched them away and pulled away in the last moment. Through skillful maneuvers, I succeeded in chasing her into the shadow of a not very high wall, where she could no longer escape me. Now I had her and I screamed in utmost excitement: “Give them to me! Give them to me! Give them to me!”—by which I meant both the notebooks and the writing, they were one and the same for me. She lifted her arms with the notebooks far over her head, she was much bigger than I, and she put the notebooks up on the wall. I couldn’t get at them, I was too little, I jumped and jumped and yelped, it was no use, she stood next to the wall, laughing scornfully. All at once, I left her there and walked the long way around the house to the kitchen yard, to get the Armenian’s ax and kill her with it.
The wood lay there, chopped up, stacked up, the ax lay next to it, the Armenian wasn’t there. I raised the ax high and, holding it straight in front of me, I marched back over the long path into the courtyard with a murderous chant on my lips, repeating incessantly: “Agora vo matar a Laurica! Agora vo matar a Laurica!”—“Now I’m going to kill Laurica! Now I’m going to kill Laurica!”
When I came back and she saw me holding the ax out with both hands, she ran off screeching. She screeched at the top of her lungs, as though the ax had already swung and hit her. She screeched without pausing even once, easily drowning my battle chant, which I kept repeating to myself, incessantly, resolutely, but not especially loud: “Agora vo matar a Laurica!”
Grandfather dashed out of the house, armed with a cane; he ran towards me, snatched the ax from my hand, and barked at me furiously. Now all three houses around the courtyard came alive, people emerged from all of them; my father was out of town, but my mother was there. They assembled for a family council and discussed the homicidal child. I could plead all I liked that Laurica had tortured me bloody; the fact that I, at the age of five, had reached for the ax to kill her—indeed, the very fact that I had been able to carry the heavy ax in front of me—was incomprehensible to everyone. I think they understood that the “writing,” the “script,” had been so important to me; they were Jews, and “Scripture” meant a great deal to all of them, but there had to be something very bad and dangerous in me to get me to the point of wanting to murder my playmate.
I was severely punished, but Mother, who was herself very frightened, did comfort me after all, saying: “Soon you’ll learn how to read and write yourself. You don’t have to wait till you’re in school. You can learn before then.”
No one recognized the connection between my murderous goal and the fate of the Armenian. I loved him, his sad songs and words. I loved the ax with which he chopped wood.
A Curse on the Voyage
My relationship to Laurica, however, did not break off fully. She distrusted me and avoided me when she came back from school, and she made sure not to unpack her schoolbag in front of me. I was no longer interested in her writing. After the murder attempt, I was perfectly convinced that she was a bad pupil and was ashamed to show her wrong letters. Perhaps I could save my pride only by telling myself that.
She took a terrible revenge on me, although stubbornly denying it then and later. All I could admit in her favor is that she may not have known what she did.
Most of the water used in the houses was brought in gigantic barrels from the Danube. A mule hauled the barrel, which was installed in a special kind of vehicle, and a “water carrier,” who, however, carried nothing, trudged alongside in front, holding a whip. The water was sold at the courtyard gate for very little, unloaded, and put in huge caldrons, where it was boiled. The caldrons of boiling water were then placed in front of the house, on a fairly long terrace, where they stood for a good while to cool off.
Laurica and I were getting on again at least well enough to play tag occasionally. Once, the caldrons of hot water were standing there; we ran in between them, much too close, and when Laurica caught me right next to one, she gave me a shove, and I fell into the hot water. I was scalded all over my body, except for my head. Aunt Sophie, upon hearing the shriek, pulled me out and tore off my clothes, my whole skin went along with them, the family feared for my life, and for many weeks I lay abed in awful pains.
My father was in England at the time, and that was the worst thing of all for me. I thought I was going to die and kept calling out for him, I wailed that I would never see him again; that was worse than the pains. I cannot remember the pains, I no longer feel them, but I still feel the desperate longing for my father. I thought he didn’t know what had happened to me, and when they assured me he did know, I cried: “Why doesn’t he come? Why doesn’t he come? I want to see him!” Perhaps they really were hesitant; he had only just arrived in Manchester a few days earlier to prepare for our moving there. Perhaps they thought my condition would improve by itself and he didn’t have to return on the spot. But even if he did learn about it immediately and started back without delay, the journey was long, and he couldn’t get here all that soon. They put me off from day to day and, when my condition got worse, from hour to hour. One night, when they thought I had finally fallen asleep, I jumped out of bed and yanked everything off me. Instead of moaning in pain, I shouted for him: “Cuando viene? Cuando viene?” (When is he coming? When is he coming?) Mother, the doctor, all the others taking care of me, didn’t matter; I can’t see them, I don’t know what they did, they must have done many careful things for me in those days. I didn’t register them, I had only one thought, it was more than a thought, it was the wound in which everything went: my father.
Then I heard his voice, he came to me from behind, I was lying on my belly, he softly called my name, he walked around the bed, I saw him, he lightly put his hand on my hair, it was father, and I had no pains.
Everything that happened from then on I know only from what I was told. The wound became a wonder, the recovery began, he promised not to go away any more and he stayed during the next few weeks. The doctor was positive I would have died if my father hadn’t come and remained. The doctor had already given me up but insisted on my father’s return, his only, not very sure hope. He was the physician who had brought all three of us into the world, and later on he used to say that of all the births he had ever known this rebirth had been the hardest.
