The Tongue Set Free, page 9
One day, somebody suddenly rattled the door. Mother had come home unexpectedly and had been listening outside the nursery. It had been so beautiful, she said later on, that she just had to listen, she was amazed that other people had gotten into the nursery, for it couldn’t have been we. Eventually, she did want to know who was singing “Jerusalem” and tried to open the door. When she found it locked, she got annoyed at those insolent strangers in our nursery and shook the door harder and harder. Miss Bray, using her hands to conduct a little, refused to interrupt the song, and we sang it through. Then she calmly opened the door and stood before “Madame.” She explained that it did the children good to sing, hadn’t “Madame” noticed how happy we had felt lately? The terrible events were behind us at last, she said, and now we knew where we would find our father again; she was so inspired by these hours with us that she promptly tried to convince Mother, courageously and freely. She spoke to her about Jesus, saying he had died for us too. I butted in, fully won over by her, Mother got into a dreadful temper and menacingly asked Miss Bray whether she didn’t know that we were Jews, and how could she dare lead her children astray behind her back? She was especially furious at Edith, whom she liked, and who helped her dress every day, talking to Mother a lot, even about her sweetheart; yet she had deliberately concealed what we had been doing in these hours. Edith was dismissed on the spot, Miss Bray was dismissed, the two women wept, we wept, finally Mother wept too, but in anger.
Miss Bray did remain after all; George, the youngest, was very attached to her, and Mother had been planning to take her along to Vienna for his sake. But she had to promise never again to sing religious songs with us or say a word about Lord Jesus. Because of our imminent departure, Edith would have been dismissed anyway in the near future; her notice was not rescinded, and Mother, who was too proud to endure disappointment in a person she liked, refused to forgive her.
But with me, Mother experienced for the first time something that was to mark our relationship forever. She took me to her room, and no sooner were we alone than she asked me, in the tone of our almost forgotten evenings together, why I had been deceiving her for so long. “I didn’t want to say anything,” was my answer. “But why not? Why not? You’re my big son, after all. I relied on you.” “You never tell me anything either,” I said, unmoved. “You talk to Uncle Solomon and you never tell me anything.” “But he’s my eldest brother. I have to confer with him.” “Why don’t you confer with me?” “There are things you don’t understand yet, you’ll get to know them later on.” Her words went in one ear and out the other. I was jealous of her brother because I didn’t like him. Had I liked him, I would not have been jealous of him. But he was a man “who would stop at nothing,” like Napoleon, a man who starts wars, a murderer.
When I think about it today, I consider it possible that I myself inspired Miss Bray with my enthusiasm for the songs we sang together. In the rich uncle’s mansion, the “Ogre’s Palace,” as I privately called it, we had a secret place that no one knew about, and it may very well have been my deepest wish to shut Mother out because she had surrendered to the ogre. Every lauding word she spoke about him was taken by me as a sign of her surrender. The groundwork was now laid for my decision to be different from him in every respect; and it was only when we left the mansion and finally went away that I won Mother back for myself and watched over her faithfulness with the incorruptible eyes of a child.
German on Lake Geneva
By May 1913, everything had been prepared for moving to Vienna, and we left Manchester. The journey took place in stages; for the first time, I grazed cities that would eventually expand into the measureless centers of my life. In London, we stayed, I believe, only for a few hours. But we drove through the town from one railroad station to the other, and I stared in sheer delight at the high, red busses and begged my mother to let me ride in one on the upper deck. There wasn’t much time, and my excitement at the jammed streets, which I have retained as endlessly long black whirls, merged into my excitement at Victoria Station, where countless people ran around without bumping into one another.
I have no recollection of the voyage across the Channel, but the arrival in Paris was all the more impressive. A newlywed couple was waiting for us at the station, David, my mother’s plainest and youngest brother, a gentle mouse, and, at his side, a sparkling young wife with pitch-black hair and rouged cheeks. There they were again, the red cheeks, but so red that Mother warned me they were artificial when I refused to kiss my new aunt on any other spot. Her name was Esther and she was fresh out of Salonika, which had the largest Sephardic community, so that young men who wanted to marry would get their brides from there. In their apartment, the rooms were so small that I impudently called them doll’s rooms. Uncle David wasn’t offended, he always smiled and said nothing, the exact opposite of his powerful brother in Manchester, who had scornfully rejected him as a business partner. David was at the peak of his young bliss, they had married a week ago. He was proud that I was instantly enamored of my sparkling aunt, and he kept telling me to kiss her. He didn’t know, the poor man, what lay ahead; she soon turned out to be a tenacious and insatiable fury.
We stayed a while in the apartment with the tiny rooms, and I was glad. I was curious and my aunt allowed me to watch her put on her makeup. She explained to me that all women in Paris used makeup, otherwise the men wouldn’t like them. “But Uncle David likes you,” I said; she didn’t answer. She applied some perfume and asked whether it smelled good. I was leery of perfumes; Miss Bray, our governess, said they were “wicked.” So I evaded Aunt Esther’s question, saying: “Your hair smells best!” Then she seated herself, let down her hair, which was even blacker than my brother’s much-admired curls; while she dressed I was allowed to sit next to her and admire her. All this took place openly, right in front of Miss Bray, who was unhappy about it, and I heard her tell Mother that this Paris was bad for the children.
Our journey continued into Switzerland, to Lausanne, where Mother planned to spend a few months. She rented an apartment at the top of the city, with a radiant view of the lake and the sailboats sailing on it. We often climbed down to Ouchy, strolling along the shores of the lake and listening to the band that played in the park. Everything was very bright, there was always a soft breeze, I loved the water, the wind, and the sails, and when the band played, I was so happy that I asked Mother: “Why don’t we stay here, it’s nicest here.”
“You have to learn German now,” she said, “you’ll attend school in Vienna.” And although she never spoke the word “Vienna”‘ without ardor, it never enticed me as long as we were in Lausanne. For when I asked her if Vienna had a lake, she said: “No, but it’s got the Danube,” and instead of the mountains in Savoy across from us, she added, Vienna had woods and hills. Now I had known the Danube since my infancy, and since the water that had scalded me came from the Danube, I bore a grudge against it. But here there was this wonderful lake, and mountains were something new. I stubbornly resisted Vienna, and that may have been one slight reason why we stayed in Lausanne somewhat longer than planned.
But the real reason was that I had to learn German first. I was eight years old, I was to attend school in Vienna, and my age would put me in the third grade of elementary school there. My mother could not bear the thought of my perhaps not being accepted into this grade because of my ignorance of the language, and she was resolved to teach me German in a jiffy.
Not very long after our arrival, we went to a bookshop; she asked for an English-German grammar, bought the first book they showed her, took me home immediately, and began instruction. How can I depict that instruction believably? I know how it went—how could I forget?—but I still can’t believe it myself.
We sat at the big table in the dining room, I on the narrower side, with a view of the lake and the sails. She sat around the corner to my left and held the textbook in such a way that I couldn’t look in. She always kept it far from me. “You don’t need it,” she said, “you can’t understand it yet anyway.” But despite this explanation, I felt she was withholding the book like a secret. She read a German sentence to me and had me repeat it. Disliking my accent, she made me repeat the sentence several times, until it struck her as tolerable. But this didn’t occur often, for she derided me for my accent, and since I couldn’t stand her derision for anything in the world, I made an effort and soon pronounced the sentence correctly. Only then did she tell me what the sentence meant in English. But this she never repeated, I had to note it instantly and for all time. Then she quickly went on to the next sentence and followed the same procedure; as soon as I pronounced it correctly, she translated it, eyed me imperiously to make me note it, and was already on the next sentence. I don’t know how many sentences she expected to drill me in the first time; let us conservatively say a few; I fear it was many. She let me go, saying: “Repeat it all to yourself. You must not forget a single sentence. Not a single one. Tomorrow, we shall continue.” She kept the book, and I was left to myself, perplexed.
I had no help, Miss Bray spoke only English, and during the rest of the day Mother refused to pronounce the sentences for me. The next day, I sat at the same place again, the open window in front of me, the lake and the sails. She took up yesterday’s sentences, had me repeat one and asked what it meant. To my misfortune, I had noted the meaning, and she said in satisfaction: “I see this is working!” But then came the catastrophe, and that was all I knew; except for the first, I hadn’t retained a single sentence. I repeated them after her, she looked at me expectantly, I stuttered and lapsed into silence. When this happened with several sentences, she grew angry and said: “You remembered the first one, so you must be able to do it right. You don’t want to. You want to remain in Lausanne. I’ll leave you alone in Lausanne. I’m going to Vienna, and I’ll take Miss Bray and the babies along. You can stay in Lausanne by yourself!”
I believe I feared that less than her derision. For when she became particularly impatient, she threw her hands together over her head and shouted: “My son’s an idiot! I didn’t realize that my son’s an idiot!” Or: “Your father knew German too, what would your father say!”
I fell into an awful despair, and to hide it, I looked at the sails, hoping for help from the sails, which couldn’t help me. Something happened that I still don’t understand today. I became as attentive as the devil and learned how to retain the meanings of the sentences on the spot. If I knew three or four of them correctly, she did not praise me; instead, she wanted the others, she wanted me to retain all the sentences each time. But since this never happened, she never praised me once and was always gloomy and dissatisfied whenever she let me go during those weeks.
I now lived in terror of her derision, and during the day, wherever I was, I kept repeating the sentences. On walks with the governess, I was sullen and untalkative. I no longer felt the wind, I didn’t hear the music, I always had my German sentences and their English meanings in my head. Whenever I could, I sneaked off to the side and practiced them aloud by myself, sometimes drilling a mistake as obsessively as the correct sentences. After all, I had no book to check myself in; she stubbornly and mercilessly refused to let me have it, though knowing what friendship I felt for books and how much easier it would all have been for me with a book. But she had the notion that one shouldn’t make things easy for oneself; that books are bad for learning languages; that one must learn them orally, and that a book is harmless only when one knows something of the language. She didn’t notice that I ate little because of my distress. She regarded the terror I lived in as pedagogical.
On some days, I succeeded in remembering all the sentences and their meanings, aside from one or two. Then I looked for signs of satisfaction in her face. But I never found them, and the most I could attain was her not deriding me. On other days, it went less well, and then I trembled, awaiting the “idiot” she had brought into the world; that affected me the worst. As soon as the “idiot” came, I was demolished, and she failed to hit the target only with her remark about Father. His affection comforted me, never had I gotten an unfriendly word from him, and whatever I said to him, he enjoyed it and let me be.
I hardly spoke to my little brothers now and gruffly pushed them away, like my mother. Miss Bray, whose favorite was the youngest, but who liked all three of us very much, sensed the dangerous state I was in, and when she caught me drilling all my German sentences, she became vexed and said it was enough, I ought to stop, I already knew too much for a boy of my age; she said she had never learned a foreign language and got along just as well in her life. There were people all over the world who understood English. Her sympathy did me a lot of good, but the substance of her words meant nothing to me; my mother had trapped me in a dreadful hypnosis, and she was the only one who could release me.
Of course, I listened when Miss Bray said to Mother: “The boy is unhappy. He says Madame considers him an idiot!”
“But he is one!” she was told. “Otherwise I wouldn’t say so!” That was very bitter, it was the word on which everything hinged for me. I thought of my cousin Elsie in Palatine Road, she was retarded and couldn’t speak properly. The adults had said pityingly: “She’s going to remain an idiot.”
Miss Bray must have had a good and tenacious heart, for ultimately it was she who saved me. One afternoon, when we had just settled down for the lesson, Mother suddenly said: “Miss Bray says you would like to learn the Gothic script. Is that so?” Perhaps I had said it once, perhaps she had hit upon the idea herself. But since Mother, while saying these words, gazed at the book in her hand, I grabbed the opportunity and said: “Yes, I would like to. I’ll need it at school in Vienna.” So I finally got the book in order to study the angular letters. But teaching me the script was something for which Mother had no patience at all. She threw her principles overboard, and I kept the book.
The worst sufferings, which may have lasted for a month, were past. “But only for the writing,” Mother had said when entrusting me with the book. “We shall still continue drilling the sentences orally.” She couldn’t prevent me from reading the sentences too. I had learned a great deal from her already, and there was something to it, in the emphatic and compelling way she pronounced the sentences for me. Anything new I kept learning from her as before. But whatever I heard I could subsequently strengthen by reading, thus making a better showing in front of her. She had no more grounds for calling me an “idiot” and was relieved about it herself. She had been seriously worried about me, she said afterwards; perhaps I was the only one in the huge clan who was not good at languages. Now she was convinced of the reverse, and our afternoons turned into sheer pleasure. It could even happen that I astounded her, and sometimes, against her will, words of praise escaped her, and she said: “You are my son, after all.”
It was a sublime period that commenced. Mother began speaking German to me outside the lessons. I sensed that I was close to her again, as in those weeks after Father’s death. It was only later that I realized it hadn’t just been for my sake when she instructed me in German with derision and torment. She herself had a profound need to use German with me, it was the language of her intimacy. The dreadful cut into her life, when, at twenty-seven, she lost my father, was expressed most sensitively for her in the fact that their loving conversations in German were stopped. Her true marriage had taken place in that language. She didn’t know what to do, she felt lost without him, and tried as fast as possible to put me in his place. She expected a great deal from this and found it hard to bear when I threatened to fail at the start of her enterprise. So, in a very short time, she forced me to achieve something beyond the strength of any child, and the fact that she succeeded determined the deeper nature of my German; it was a belated mother tongue, implanted in true pain. The pain was not all, it was promptly followed by a period of happiness, and that tied me indissolubly to that language. It must have fed my propensity for writing at an early moment, for I had won the book from her in order to learn how to write, and the sudden change for the better actually began with my learning how to write Gothic letters.
She certainly did not tolerate my giving up the other languages; education, for her, was the literature of all the languages she knew, but the language of our love—and what a love it was!—became German.
She now took just me along on visits to friends and family in Lausanne, and it is not surprising that the two visits that have stuck in my memory were connected with her situation as a young widow. One of her brothers had died in Manchester even before we moved there; his widow Linda and her two children were now living in Lausanne. It may have been because of her that my mother stopped over in Lausanne. She was invited to dinner at Linda’s and took me along, explaining that Aunt Linda had been born and bred in Vienna and spoke a particularly beautiful German. I had already made enough progress, she said, to show what I knew. I was ecstatic about going; I was burning to wipe out all traces of my recent derision for ever and always. I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep the night before, and I talked to myself in long German conversations that always ended in triumph. When the time for the visit came, Mother explained to me that a gentleman would be present, he came to Aunt Linda’s for dinner every day. His name was Monsieur Cottier, he was a dignified gentleman, no longer young, and a highly prominent official. I asked whether he was my aunt’s husband and I heard my mother saying, hesitant and a bit absent: “He may be someday. Now Aunt Linda is still thinking of her two children. She wouldn’t like to hurt their feelings by marrying so quickly, even though it would be a great support for her.” I instantly sniffed danger and said: “You’ve got three children, but I’m your support.” She laughed. “What are you thinking!” she said in her arrogant way. “I’m not like Aunt Linda. I have no Monsieur Cottier.”
