The Torch in my Ear, page 8
Nevertheless, during intermission, I left the auditorium, and Hans introduced me to the woman who was to be chief witness to the effect I had just experienced. But she was quite calm and self-controlled, everything seemed easier to endure in the first row. She looked very exotic, a precious object, a creature one would never have expected in Vienna, but rather on a Persian miniature. Her high, arched eyebrows, her long, black lashes, with which she played like a virtuoso, now quickly, now slowly—it all confused me. I kept looking at her lashes instead of into her eyes, and I was surprised at the small mouth.
She didn’t ask me how I liked the performance; she said she didn’t want to embarrass me. “It’s the first time you’re here.” She sounded as if she were the hostess, as if the hall were her home and she were handing everything to the audience from her seat in the first row. She knew the people, she knew who always came, and she noticed, without compromising herself, that I was new here. I felt as if she were the one who had invited me, and I thanked her for her hospitality, which consisted in her taking notice of me. My companion, whose forte was not tact, said: “A great day for him,” and jerked his shoulder in my direction.
“One can’t tell as yet,” she said. “For the moment, it’s confusing.”
I didn’t sense this as mockery, even though each of her sentences had a mocking undertone; I was happy to hear her say something so precisely attuned to my frame of mind. But this very sympathy confused me, just like the lashes, which were now performing lofty motions, as though they had important things to conceal. So I said the plainest and most undemanding thing that could be said in these circumstances: “It sure is confusing.”
This may have sounded surly; but not to her, for she asked: “Are you Swiss?”
There was nothing I would have rather been. During my three years in Frankfurt, my passion for Switzerland had reached a boiling point. I knew her mother was a Sephardi, née Calderon, whose third husband was a very old man named Altaras; and so she must have recognized my name as being Ladino. Why did she inquire about the thing I would have most liked to be? I had told no one about the old pain of that separation; and I made sure not to expose myself to the Asriels, who, for all their satirical arrogance, or perhaps precisely because of Karl Kraus, plumed themselves on being Viennese. Thus, the beautiful Raven Lady couldn’t have learned about my unhappiness from anyone, and her first direct question struck me to the quick. It moved me more deeply than the lecture, which—as she had accurately said—was confusing, for the moment. I answered: “No, unfortunately,” meaning that unfortunately I wasn’t Swiss. I thereby put myself completely in her hands. The word unfortunately betrayed more than anyone knew about me at that time. She seemed to understand, all mockery vanished from her features, and she said: “I’d love to be British.” Hans, as was his wont, pounced upon her with a flood of chitchat, from which I could glean only that one could be very familiar with Shakespeare without having to be English, and what did the English today have in common with Shakespeare anyhow? But she paid as little attention to him as I, even though, as I soon saw, she missed nothing of what he said.
“You ought to hear Karl Kraus reading Shakespeare. Have you been to England?”
“Yes, as a child, I went to school there for two years. It was my first school.”
“I often visit relatives there. You have to tell me about your childhood in England. Come and drop in on me soon!”
All preciousness was gone, even the coquettish way she paid homage to the lecture. She spoke about something that was close to her and important, and she compared it with something important to me, which she had touched quickly and lightly and yet not offensively. As we stepped back into the auditorium, and Hans, in the brief time remaining, quickly asked me two or three times what I thought of her, I pretended not to understand, and it was only when I sensed that he was about to pronounce her name that I said, in order to forestall him: “Veza?” But by now Karl Kraus had reappeared and the tempest broke loose and her name went under in the tempest.
The Buddhist
I don’t believe I saw her again right after the lecture; and even if I did see her, it wouldn’t have meant much, for now Hans’s sluices were open all the way. A shallow flood of chitchat poured over me, lacking everything of the public speaker’s impact: the self-assured passion, the wrath, the scorn. Everything Hans said washed past you as though it were addressed to someone near you, but who wasn’t even there. “Naturally,” and “of course,” were his most frequent words, added to strengthen every sentence, but actually weakening them. He sensed how lightweight his statements were and tried to strengthen them by making them more general. But his generality was just as feeble as he was; his misfortune was that you believed nothing he said. Not that he was considered a liar; he was too weak to make anything up. But instead of one word, he used fifty, and nothing of what he meant was left over in this dilution. He repeated a question so often and so swiftly that you couldn’t squeeze an answer in edgewise. He said “How come?” “I don’t like that,” “I know,” interjecting them into his endless explanations, perhaps in order to give them more emphasis.
He had been unusually thin as a child, and now he was so skinny that there were no clothes that didn’t look baggy on him. He seemed most assured when he swam; that’s why he always talked about it. He was tolerated by the Felons (we’ll hear more about them later) when they went swimming in Kuchelau, but he wasn’t really part of them. He was part of no group; he was always on the periphery. It was his mother who attracted young boys in order to hear their verbal jousts, and she made sure that her son restrained himself on such occasions, out of hospitality, so to speak, and in order that things might be interesting. But he listened carefully, took in everything—I might almost say—greedily; and no sooner were the real jousters gone than the tournament was repeated as an epilogue, between him and some more intimate family friend, who remained longer, since he felt he had claims on the mother. Thus, every dispute and every topic were thoroughly rehashed until all that was left of spontaneous life and charm was an insipid aftertaste.
Hans wasn’t yet aware of his problems in dealing with other people. So many young people came to their home, more and more duels took place—spurred on by Frau Asriel’s admiring glances—nothing eluded her and nothing lasted too long for her. The duelers remained as long as they pleased, but they were never held back; they came and left whenever they felt like it. It was because of this freedom, which she knew how to deal with, and which was vitally necessary to her, that Frau Asriel’s home was never deserted. However, Hans, who lived on intellectual imitation and consisted of nothing else, owed it to his mother that there was always something to imitate and that the torrent of what was called “stimuli” never dried up. He didn’t notice that people never invited him to their homes, for Frau Asriel was welcome wherever things weren’t too middle class, and, as a matter of course, she took along her intelligent son (for she did consider him intelligent).
April 17 had really turned out to be a big day for me: one and the same day had brought into my life the two people who were to rule my life for a long time. And then came a period of dissembling, which lasted nearly a year. I would have liked to see the raven woman again, but I didn’t want to let on that I did. She had invited me to visit her, and the Asriels, mother and son, kept talking about this invitation, asking me whether I didn’t feel like taking her up on it. Since I didn’t really respond to the invitation, indeed acted almost negatively, they assumed I was too shy and they tried to encourage me with the prospect of their presence. They said they visited her often; they would soon be going again and would simply take me along. But that was exactly what intimidated me. I was used to Hans’s chitchat and didn’t take it too seriously—but the thought of it there of all places was highly unpleasant, as was the realization that Alice Asriel would interrogate me afterwards about what I thought of this and that. I couldn’t possibly have talked about England in front of them, and I would have been unable to say anything about Switzerland in their presence. Yet it was the prospect of talking about Switzerland that attracted me the most.
Alice didn’t want to miss out on this pleasure, and every Saturday, when I went to the Asriels, they would sooner or later ask me, amiably but insistently: “When are we visiting Veza?” I even found it unpleasant to hear them pronounce her name, which I regarded as too beautiful to come from anyone’s lips. I excused myself by pretending I disliked her; I avoided her name and ascribed not very respectful attributes to her.
* * *
It was at Alice’s that I met Fredl Waldinger, with whom I had wonderful conversations for several years; I couldn’t have wished for a better interlocutor. We disagreed about nearly everything, but we never grew irritable or fought. He never let himself be bulldozed or violated: his calm cheerful resistance opposed my vehement manner, which had been molded by stormy experiences. The first time I met him, he was just back from Palestine, where he had spent six months on a kibbutz. He liked to sing Yiddish songs, which he knew a lot of; he had a nice voice and sang them well. You didn’t have to ask him to sing; it was so natural to him that he would start singing in the middle of a conversation. He cited songs: they were his quotations.
Other boys whom I met in this circle indulged in the arrogance of higher literature: if not Karl Kraus, then Otto Weininger or Schopenhauer. Pessimistic or misogynous utterances were especially popular, even though none of these boys was a misogynist or misanthrope. Each of them had his girlfriend and got along with her, and both he and she and the friends, forming a group called the Felons (one of them was named Felo), went swimming in Kuchelau, a group of strong, healthy optimists. However, the severe, witty, scornful statements were viewed by these young people as the cream of intellect. You were not allowed to articulate these gems in anything but their correct wording; and much of the mutual respect consisted in taking the linguistic form of such things as earnestly as was demanded by the real master of all such circles, Karl Kraus. Fredl Waldinger was loosely associated with the Felons. He liked to go swimming with them; but he was no totally relentless fan of Karl Kraus’s, since other things meant no less to him and some even more.
His eldest brother, Ernst Waldinger, had already published poems. Returning heavily wounded from the war, Ernst had married a niece of Freud’s. He was friendly with the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, a friendship based on artistic convictions. Both men were devoted to classical models; rigorous form was very important to them. “The Gem Cutter,” a poem by Ernst Waldinger, could be called programmatic; it provided the title for one of his books of verse. Fredl Waldinger owed part of his inner freedom to this brother, whom he respected. He didn’t show more than respect: he wasn’t the sort to be proud of external things. Money impressed him as little as fame; but he would never have dreamt of scorning a poet merely because he had published books and was gradually making a name for himself. When I met Fredl, Josef Weinheber’s Boat in the Bay had just come out. Fredl had the book on him and read aloud from it; he already knew several of the poems by heart. I liked the fact that he was serious about poetry; my home was filled with disdain of poets, who were generally put down as “poetasters.” However, Fredl’s quotations, as I have said, usually came from songs, Yiddish folk songs.
When singing, he raised his right hand halfway, opening it upward like a cup; it was as if he were offering you something for which he apologized. He seemed humble and yet self-assured; he reminded you of an errant monk, but one who comes to give people something instead of begging from them. He never sang loud; any immoderateness seemed foreign to him; his rustic grace won the hearts of listeners. He was aware that he sang his songs well, and he enjoyed his ability as other singers do. But far more important than any self-complaisance was the attitude he was testifying to: his love of country life, the tilling of soil, the clear, devoted, and yet demanding activity of his hands. He liked to talk about his friendships with Arabs; he made no distinction between them and the Jews in Palestine; any arrogance based on differences in culture and education was alien to him. He was strong and healthy: it would have been easy for him to fight with other men his age. But I have never known anyone as peaceful as Fredl; he was so peaceful that he never competed with others. It made no difference to him whether he was the first or the last; he never got involved in hierarchies and didn’t even appear to notice that there was such a thing.
With him, Buddhism entered my life; he had come to it through poetry. The Songs of Monks and Nuns, translated into German by Carl Eugen Neumann, had cast a spell on him. He would recite many of the poems from memory, in a rhythmic singsong that was fascinatingly exotic. In this milieu, where everything focused on intellectual discussion as a contest between two young men, where an opinion obtained as long as it was defended wittily and cogently—in this milieu, which made no scholarly demands, which chiefly emphasized the fluency, agility, and variability of speech—in this milieu, Fredl’s singsong, always the same, never loud or hostile, yet never losing itself, must have seemed like an inexhaustible, slightly monotonous well.
However, Fredl knew more about Buddhism than the singsong of these poems, even though they seemed strangely familiar to him. Fredl also knew Buddhist teachings. He was well acquainted with the Pali canon (to the extent that Neumann had translated it). The Dīgha-nikāya and the Majjhimanikāya, the Book of Fragments, the Path of Truth—he had assimilated anything of these works that was published, and he articulated it in the same singsong as the poems whenever the two of us had a conversation.
I was still filled with public experiences of the Frankfurt period. Evenings, I had gone to meetings, listened to speakers; and the ensuing discussions in the street had deeply agitated me. The most diverse sorts of people—professionals, proletarians, young, old—spoke away at one another, vehement, obstinate, unflappable, as though no other idea were possible; and yet the man each was talking to was just as stubbornly convinced of the opposite. Since it was night, an unusual time for me to be in the street, these disputes seemed like something unending, as though they went on forever, as though it were no longer possible to sleep, for each man’s conviction was too important to him.
However, there was a very particular experience I had in these Frankfurt years, a daytime experience: the crowd. Early on, about one year after arriving in Frankfurt, I had watched a workers’ demonstration on the Zeil. They were protesting the murder of Rathenau. I stood on the sidewalk; other people must have been standing near me, watching too, but I don’t remember them. I can still see the large, powerful figures marching behind the Adler Works sign. They marched in serried ranks and cast defiant glances around. Their shouts struck me as though addressed to me personally. More and more of them came. There was something consistent about them, not so much in their appearance as in their conduct. There was no end of them. I sensed a powerful conviction emanating from them; it grew more and more powerful. I would have liked to be part of them; I wasn’t a worker, but I took their shouts personally as though I were one. I can’t tell whether the people standing next to me felt the same way; I can’t see them, nor do I recall anyone leaving the sidewalk and joining the procession; people may have been discouraged by the signs identifying specific groups of marchers.
The memory of this first demonstration that I consciously witnessed was powerful. It was the physical attraction that I couldn’t forget. I was so anxious to belong to the march, but it wasn’t deliberation or reflection and certainly not skepticism that kept me from taking the final leap. Later on, when I gave in and did find myself in a crowd, I felt as if this were what is known in physics as gravitation. But of course, this was no real explanation for that absolutely astonishing process. For one was not something lifeless, either beforehand, when isolated, or afterwards, in the crowd. And the thing that happened to you in the crowd, a total alteration of consciousness, was both drastic and enigmatic. I wanted to know what it was all about. The riddle wouldn’t stop haunting me; it has stuck to me for the better part of my life. And if I did ultimately hit upon a few things, I was still as puzzled as ever.
In Vienna, I met young people of my age whom I could talk to, who made me curious when they spoke about their central experiences, but were also willing to listen when I came out with my own. The most patient person was Fredl Waldinger; he could afford to be patient, for he was immune to contagion: my account of my experience with a crowd, as I called it then, made him cheery, but he didn’t seem to be mocking me. He realized I was coping with a state of intoxication, an intensification of possibilities for experience, an increase of the person, who leaves his confines, comes to other persons leaving their confines, and forms a higher unity with them. He doubted that this higher unity existed, and, most of all, he doubted the value of intoxicated intensifications. With the help of Buddha, he had seen the worthlessness of a life that doesn’t free itself from its involvements. His goal was the gradual snuffing of life, Nirvana, which seemed like death to me. And although he offered many very interesting arguments denying that Nirvana and death were the same, the negative accent on life, which he had gotten from Buddhism, remained undeniable.
Our positions solidified in the course of these talks. Our mutual influence consisted particularly in our becoming both more thorough and more careful. He assimilated more and more of the Buddhist religious texts, not just limiting himself to Neumann’s translations, although these remained closest to his heart. He delved into Indian philosophy, using English-language sources, which he translated into German with Veza’s help. I tried to learn more about crowds, which I spoke about. I would have investigated this crowd process anyway, it was so deeply on my mind, having become the enigma of enigmas for me. But perhaps, if it hadn’t been for Fredl, I might not have started in so early with the Indian religions, which repelled me because of the multiple deaths in their doctrine of reincarnation. In our conversations, I knew that the richly elaborate doctrine that Fredl advocated was one of the most profound and most important that mankind has developed. And I was painfully aware that all I could pit against it was the somewhat meager description of a single experience, which he termed “pseudomystical.” He could resort to so many explications, interpretations, cause-and-effect series when he spoke about his things—and I was unable to come up with even one single explanation for my one single experience, which I was so zealous about. I obstinately harped on my experience, precisely because it had been so inexplicable; and my obstinacy must have struck Fredl as narrow-minded, perhaps even absurd. Indeed it was. And were I to talk about the stubborn streaks in my character, I’d have to say that they operate in regard to overwhelming experiences that I cannot explain. No one has ever succeeded in explaining something away for me; and neither have I.
