Notes from Hampstead, page 4
The first several days I felt proud but calm. There was a certain positive tension, but it was containable. I did, though, note the anxious look an old woman gave me when her grandchild, an impressionable little girl, pointed her finger toward my fez and began to cry softly. I thought, she must want it, but I didn’t dare kneel down for her to play with it. I bowed my head slightly, swaying the hat gently. At first the child was silent, then she burst into tears. Her sobs were heartbreaking, and I pulled away, embarrassed by the unseemly commotion she was making. I saw groups of people whispering on the other side of the square, but as I approached them they fell stonily silent. A dog put its tail between its legs and slunk away. A young woman fell to her knees in front of me and begged the fez for its blessing. How could I have withheld from her the very thing she so longed for? With a nod of my head I granted her wish; she clasped my knees and fell into a swoon. I was very moved, but got away somehow and left her lying there in bliss. How little, how little a human being needs. For him God can even take the form of a fez.
I so often agree with Tolstoy’s way of thinking: how is it possible that his manner of expression disappoints and repels me? It irritates me that he forgoes surprise. For clarity and simplicity he states at the very outset how he will end things. The moral is there from the beginning; he never forgets it, nor does he change it. But he really ought to tell the story as if he had forgotten it and lost it; he should have forgotten it in the course of telling the story. Its sudden rediscovery would then be a revelation for the reader instead of being a storybook moral.
But one should not forget that he knew that most Russian people of his time were illiterate. So he may have viewed his task too broadly, deciding that he had to create books that would enable people to comprehend morality without outside help, each person for himself.
But he was also led astray by overplaying the significance of simple relationships. He liked to see people as simple, which they are not. Like all people, he was basically opposed to lies, to transformations. But this way of thinking ignores a major characteristic of humanity, and any further ideas that may be expressed are boring, as if meant for creatures who don’t exist: the great advantage of the Greeks, whose learning starts with the Odyssey, a “lie” that here seems fortunate: namely, transformation.
Tolstoy cannot dictate laws to men since his whole critique of humanity is simply the residuum of his own past life, once rich and colorful. And it is just this, life’s richness and color, that people will not be cheated of.
The day before yesterday, late: Sonia, a story reminiscent of Grimmelshausen. The father, a Hungarian landowner in Slovakia, the mother a Jew, three daughters (of whom I now know Enid and Sonia). The father always in his library. His talks with Sonia, the strongest daughter, during the second half of the war, his certainty of coming catastrophe. He sent two of his daughters to Budapest—Sonia studied agriculture at the university in Altenburg. Her last visit to the estate: she was never to return. Her parents’ last postcard: “We are going to Komorn in a truck.” A student who she knows is half-Jewish but who has false papers warns her she is in danger. Sonia demands to see her own papers and she gets them: her Jewish grandparents are there in bold underlining. The friendly student goes with her, first to Komorn, where she tries to get news of her parents. She learns that the only man who can tell her anything is the head of the local militia, a photographer. She tracks him down in his shop; he is in uniform. She asks about her father. “Baron Weiss? Sure, I remember him, he left four days ago.” Not till much later does she learn what happened. The photographer was responsible for selection for transport. First the “intellectuals” were sorted out from the “manual laborers”; the latter were to be sent back home since there were no trains or trucks around. But first the Jews in the group were separated out; they would not be sent home. Her mother was with the Jews. Her father said, “Then I am going too.” “By all means, if you like,” said the photographer, and made note of Baron Weiss, the only non-Jew to go along of his own free will, so to speak. But then the women were separated from the men immediately. Her father ended up at Flossenburg, doing hard labor; he was killed there in December 1944. Her mother was sent to Ravensbrück; she was too weak to work. She died on January 12, 1945.
Sonia and the student left the photographer and started off for Budapest. In the next town there was a great hue and cry; she had strange premonitions and nearly fainted, without knowing why; then she heard that they were having a “Jew drive.” She wanted to look among the people for her parents, but the student pulled her away: “Your parents have been gone four days.” Sonia knew this, but the thought that she had somehow passed her parents by as they were being taken away never left her. The student accompanied her as far as Budapest and brought her to her sisters.
Later she heard about a position as chambermaid to the Archduchess Stephanie, the widow of Crown Prince Rudolf (she had married a Lonyai and now, age eighty, lived in the Orosvar Castle). “Her Royal Highness” wanted to emigrate to Switzerland and wanted a chambermaid who spoke languages to take along. Sonia made herself known to her, but the old lady didn’t understand why she wanted the position. Sonia confided in her and found empathy: “She was not an anti-Semite.” A week later Sonia started work; most of the castle was occupied by German soldiers, and she had to pass the sentry point. “That’s sure no chambermaid.” She pretended not to know German and got through. She was gradually trained in her duties by the archduchess, but already by the fifth day she had been entrusted with her mistress’s wig; from then on she was indispensable. They were busy making preparations for the journey to Switzerland when the old lady had a stroke, and that was the end of travel plans. A German staff medical officer visited “Her Highness”; he went up to Sonia and declared, “You’re no maid! Who are you? I want to help you!”
Sonia trusted him and told him her whole story. He told her that she was the subject of talk among the German soldiers in the castle, that they thought she was a Jew in hiding. He could help her only if he could say she was his lover. She agreed to this. He behaved honorably; in the course of the next week he confessed to her that he loved her. He was around fifty, married, he had children but his wife did not understand him. When the Russians came, the Germans vacated the castle; he wanted to stay for her sake, if she would agree to marry him later. They discussed the idea at length and came to the decision that he could not stay. He left, and she stayed behind, in great consternation.
As the Russians approached, a priest (a Benedictine who happened to be at the castle) gathered all the women and girls, to wall them in (and thus protect them from the Russian soldiers). But Sonia had to stay with the archduchess. The Russians arrived, and on hearing that an old princess was living in the castle, they wanted to have a look at her. They were expected any minute in the old lady’s sickroom, and to save Sonia the priest hit upon the idea of having her hide in the old lady’s bed. Still clothed she crawled under the covers and squeezed up against the wall. Now came the parade of Russians; one after the other they filed politely by the bed of the “princess” and looked at her curiously. While they were plundering all over the castle, here in the room of the “princess” they touched nothing. The priest received them all and did the honors, so to speak. They did not touch him; it was simply not true that the Russians were after aristocrats, priests, or other Hungarians. They were looking only for German soldiers and, when they were drunk, for women.
After they had left the sickroom, she thought she was saved. But when night came, she heard a drunken Russian in the courtyard below. He was yelling that he knew the chambermaid was there, hiding in the bed of the “princess.” He came upstairs, she squeezed more tightly against the wall, she heard his steps approaching, all at once he pulled the covers from off the archduchess, and she saw a machine gun pointed at her. In her shock she forgot everything that had gone before, even the name of the German staff doctor, and in the seventeen years since, she has wracked her brain for his name, unable to remember it again. She got up from the bed and followed the Russian, the whole time under threat of the machine gun. Now I have only two choices, she thought to herself, to die or to give in. Suddenly in the long corridor the roll call started. Fighting was still going on: the Russian left her standing there and ran to his unit. Russians could plunder and take women, but when the roll call was read, they had to obey instantly or be shot. So she was saved; a miracle, said the priest, a true miracle.
She stayed a while longer at the castle; Archduchess Stephanie’s condition went rapidly downhill. The priest bought a horse for Sonia, and she rode for four days to Budapest. During those four days the value of the horse increased tenfold. She sold it immediately on arriving, and here she was lucky, for two hours later she would not have been able to sell it. From this windfall her two sisters lived for six months. That was what I heard of her story. Much more would have followed, but it had gotten so late I had to stop, and she had to go to bed. I have told only the most important parts, and in abbreviated form, and the story has lost all its color. When I visit her in Paris, I hope to hear more.
Interpreting a statement’s meaning—all that remains of the tradition of consulting oracles. But since this takes place outside the scope of fear, not even that is left.
The true stories that we tell are false; with false stories at least there is the chance that they might come true.
All our lives we circle around the same ideas, as if they were so many suns. So why should we not at least hope for comets?
The progress of friends who include us in their progress: nothing makes us feel lonelier and more alien.
How much it bothers him when he recalls something, but with the wrong people. It makes even the realest memories false, and they cry out like stuck pigs.
One book! Three-fourths of your life is there—your hope, your pleasure, your melancholy, your sorrow, and your doubt. All of that you have now lost. Where are you? What is left of you? The crater your book left.
A man who delights in touching every woman because she will never be his.
The French: they sit down for dinner as if for life everlasting.
Since visiting Greece, I read the Greeks differently: more haltingly, as if going from name to name; more easily, as if my visit were still to come.
Never to see again the highest beauty.
After Paris: to find my way back to the Chinese, my greatest joy. And if it takes me the whole winter, I want to be with the Chinese and stay there. With them, all the forms of my own thinking are more clearly outlined. I feel myself unfolding, opening up around them. Nature and custom have their full meaning. The spirit has not sucked life dry. Life is everything; it is ready and waiting for every transformation. Not even Buddhism has smothered China in spirituality. Nor will the narrow modernists be able to. And I know I need China more than I need my bread.
The brevity of Chinese books: I’d like to be, and stay, that brief.
The parallel reader. He has ten books open at once and reads one sentence in each, then the next sentence in the book beside it. What a scholar!
Have you listened to all this music only to succumb to the voices of those entirely unknown to you?
You are a simple man, you put your trust in few ideas, but in those completely.
A beast that has lived since the beginning of creation.
“Quel dérèglement de jugement, par lequel il n’y a personne qui ne se mette au-dessus de tout le reste du monde, et qui n’aime mieux son propre bien, et la durée de son bonheur, et de sa vie, que celle de tout le reste du monde!”
(The survivor)
Pascal
If prayers were to be answered, they could not be retracted: a highly alarming state of affairs.
“The human race uses thought only as an evasive tactic.”
from Conversations with Goethe
1964
A man’s wife dies. Now he has no one. He knows a young woman who lives far from him, half a continent away. He calls her every night. She speaks with him, they have long talks together. He no longer wants to talk to anyone living closer. Being in communication with her night after night from this distance makes him feel hopeful about his dead wife. Now he does nothing during the day, he just waits for the night. When he can’t get through or she isn’t home yet in the evening, a fearful desperation comes over him. She alone can calm him, but only at this remove. When she is closer to him he does not know who she is. He tells her everything, every night, and talks with her for hours and hours. He has his wife’s ashes, letters, and pictures in his home, and he knows very well that it is not she with whom he converses. The speaker is far younger, her voice is different, she comes from a totally different country. He never confuses her with someone else, he knows her as well as he does himself, and her moods are as familiar to him as his own. He listens to her, responds, listens more, sometimes gets impatient with her when she has nothing to say or takes too long to say it, and makes threats. It is not easy to say what he threatens her with. For even when he says he won’t call her for a few days, they both know better.
To make a secret of waiting so no one in the world knows about it except the person expected and the person waiting—an emotion exceeding all others in intensity. And when love is involved, especially love at great distances, say requiring a plane trip from one continent to another, then the final arrival is the greatest happiness human beings can experience, for that other joy, which would be even greater, the return of the dead, is denied them.
The question of belief, which has always occupied me, which I have wanted to resolve, and whose center I am now plunged into. Things are such that my life depends on my belief in a certain person. But nothing is as difficult for this particular person, who is by nature a poet, as “truth.” I am confronted, so to speak, with the self that I once was; and from this person, who is a kind of deputy of myself, I must force the absolute truth. But he is totally incapable of it. I need belief where I know I cannot find it, and the old obsession that has plagued me for decades is replaced by a new one, no less hopeless: belief. But this way I can still get closer to the nature of belief: by observing and noting every phase of this struggle for it. For my insight into its hopelessness takes nothing away from its seriousness.
The young yield to every impression in order not to be obsessed by anything. Are they right? Is this kind of person more natural? Are they the forerunners of future generations without beliefs? Are they the only ones to have gotten rid of the biblical God? We might think so if we didn’t know that they, too, can become a crowd, just as irretrievably as we, as irretrievably as everyone before us.
To say the most horrible thing such that it is no longer horrible; it gives one hope because it was said out loud.
But there are days too much enriched at the expense of other days, days filled retroactively with the years that came after, to the point that less is left of these years than of those days. We should eradicate these forged days.
“History” is made of these forged days.
Diaries which are too accurate are the end of freedom. Thus we should keep them only intermittently, so that the “empty” intervals become the fullest entries.
The sufferer whom people admire because he never forgets himself.
Why? he says to himself, why do I walk this road when there are a hundred thousand others? Are they all really so similar that it doesn’t matter? Or is this road so special that I would go wrong on all the others? He will never know; but for fifty years he will continue on this road, sure and certain of his goal, one man, one pace.
A man whom all abandon so he can learn to be silent. Yesterday this story of a young German woman’s search for her father’s remains. Her mother, brother, boyfriend, and she drive from northern Germany to Collioure in Roussillon, on the Spanish border, where her father, who had been called up toward the end of the war into the field corps, was captured and died. He was taken to a prison camp in February 1945 and died at the end of the year. He did not know what had happened to his family, and vice versa. Late in 1946 they received a card saying “Décédé.” Four years later, from Paris, someone sent them his briefcase with scraps of paper on which he had occasionally written notes. On his daughter’s birthday he had embossed her name on a piece of metal; she was nine then. The four traveled to Collioure in 1957 and looked up one of his prison guards. North of Perpignan they also found the cemetery where more than five hundred German prisoners of war were buried. There was his grave and his name. He had never previously traveled farther than Bavaria, where he had hiked on the Zugspitze with his wife. His imprisonment was his only foreign southern vacation.
The young woman now has an eleven-month-old child, and she keeps the scrap of metal that her father embossed with her name hidden in her home. She hardly dares to look at it and has hidden it so well that all of a sudden she will forget where she put it and will live in mortal fear that it is lost. At which point she conducts a complete search of her entire, very large apartment; on finding it, she immediately hides it again.
He positively hisses with kindness. To what avail? Nobody believes such grimacing.
Praise of one’s rival as self-praise: Stravinsky on Schoenberg.
Don’t seek the silent syllables within yourself; you will find them only in the babbling of others.
Self-satisfied: a self worn out.
Orestes: Euripides
Read Euripides’ Orestes today. Reaffirms for me that in every way Greek tragedy deals with death. The variations are countless, from murder to death to lament. The originality, the invention of the dramas, depends on where they begin. In this case, Orestes and Electra are just about to be stoned to death, the people of Argos will judge them, and they await the verdict without much hope. Later Pylades joins them, wanting to die along with them. Remarkable, the last-minute plot to murder Helen: the idea of taking vengeance on her, for whom so many Greeks have fallen.
