It is a dramatic story, which I jotted down somewhere and then threw away. My interpretation did not fit; the reason I gave for the breakup (jealousy of the most abstract, artificial of my loves: Dawn) was quite unnecessary, could just as easily have been entirely different or altogether superfluous. It is nonetheless interesting that during this ideal love, I could still feel a need for that other, abstract, artificial love (for Dawn). Nature, esteemed Mr. Brodny, does not suffice for us, even in matters of love; here too we want to, must, achieve something artificial . . .
But I realize I could be suspected of playing a coy game of hide-and-seek. Nothing could be further from my mind. I am speaking of my love for my (and Christa’s) son. He is now twenty years old. A hectically, indeed hysterically new generation. Plus de pères, rien que des fils. To play it safe, he no longer speaks to me, and he has taken his mother’s name. I wish him love, beauty, the very best. There are moments, even now, when (with a pang in my heart) I understand him: during his first fourteen years, I must have been for him rather as my mother had been for me half a century ago or Stella almost thirty years ago, except that I was fortunate enough to lose both those figures at the right moment. I have been (biologically) preserved for him, and it must have been painful for him to learn something I didn’t have to learn: that I was a human being, and that he was not exclusively the god next to whom there could be no other gods as I was for him. The old, old trouble. Always comes right before the natural end (of unstrenuous love).
But what good does it do us to be so wise, Mr. Brodny, my fellow sufferer? What good would it do if I told him that for fourteen years he was the dearest and most beautiful of my gods and closer to my heart than any of my goddesses?
However, Stella in those far-off days (1938 in Vienna, and then in the Salzkammergut, and then in Bucharest, and then here there and everywhere during the rat hunt of the early war years until her disappearance in a concentration camp) was quite simply everything for me. She was my life, the air I breathed, all the warmth and sweetness of this earth. She bore me anew. She nursed me with her milk. She liberated me from the dreadful confinement poverty stupidity dullness of my formative years in Vienna. Thanks to her, my “family” evaporated: my foster parents (Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha—those names!), my actual foster mother (Aunt Selma, spellbound, and thus the only one truly related to me), and my cousin Wolfgang (my brother Abel, highly gifted, earnest, blond, youthfully robust, industrious, reliable, all the things that I’m not and wasn’t, the born sacrificial animal, the smooth slaughter-sheep with the lovely, gentle eyes and the warm, meadow-scented breath). All those exemplary petit bourgeois people escaped from the narrator’s box of toys, which had weighed on me like Fuseli’s Nightmare after a bright, spoiled, suddenly and cruelly interrupted childhood with my beautiful mother (safe and secure in the sumptuous households of her Balkan-prince gallants; lovingly cared for and tended by my lavender-scented nanny Miss Fern—sounds good, doesn’t it?), weighed on me through a dozen horrible years in Vienna, weighed on my so-called youth, my dully brooding puberty, my tormented, masturbatory, straying and strolling adolescence—all those petit bourgeois people disappeared into the fable land of memory, became the specters of a bad but happily concluded dream; at best, they were mere puppets from the trash bin of anecdote.
Stella liberated me from what she, in finest harmony with her husband, John (and perhaps because of my scruples concerning him), called the appalling hypocrisy of the bloody fucking middle classes. “Life in dark waters, fishing in them at second hand, a deceived hand, the pond already empty; life cowering under the whip of imperative shall’s and must’s that no one believes in but everyone clings to, because it gives a few not entirely stupid people the chance to do business and everyone hopes that some will fall his way; the ingrained dishonesty that tries to rig up a solace in every oppression and humiliation; the unnatural, invented, insane quality of existence in a constant as-if; the envious, mistrustful creature, concerned with and demanding rank and position . . .”
we know it all, don’t we, know it by heart: all the qualities that make intellectuals and artists . . .
but let us not speak of that now. Stella, in any event, saved me from that petit bourgeois morality that turns everything sour; saved me from—even worse!—the insinuatingly intimate, pseudo-artistic sensibility of the philistines into whose hands I was delivered after my mother’s death. She released me from the shameful ignorance into which my Viennese relatives had plunged me when they tried to pull me down to their level. To Stella, and to her alone, I owe my having lived the first half of my life consciously, with open eyes, as lived life and not just as a literary phenomenon, part fairy tale and part tenement story. She brought me to myself and brought me back to myself—myself as I had been meant to be, as God, the Creation, or Mother Nature, or whatever had originally designed me and meant me to become.
Stella revived in me the possibility of becoming that which should have become of me, the child graced with the gay, goodly, tender, and intelligent creature of my mother and the most beautiful conditions for growing up under the protection of my various nominal uncles and godfathers: a free self without bitterness, rancor, resentment (marvel at the result) . . . and at any rate: Stella opened my eyes to my time, too—the time that would soon form the last half of my life. Stella showed me not only that it was a gray, abject time, a dismal, impoverished time of wretched need and humiliating necessity, of social injustice, scarcity, envy, malice, anxiety, constraint, but also that one could still find, in this time, the “reality within reality,” as she put it, the world that had made my childhood bright and brilliant and given me an inkling of what man is meant to be.
Stella aroused this vision of me, a vision horribly frustrated for twelve years, of my original destiny as the Son of Man (how appropriate! how true to the zeitgeist!), and she let me live that vision for a brief while. At the last minute, so to speak, before the era that could afford the luxury of such ideal notions went under in the icy blue-gold of a March day—or rather: froze at first . . .
For the moment, you see, it froze, congealed, became alien and distant, as if no longer belonging to us, as if it had never belonged to us nor we to it. We knew the era and recognized ourselves in it by hearsay, as it were. We experienced ourselves as history (which I had already experienced in my childhood). From then on, we lived with our past like Nagel with his shot-off arm—without it and yet with it in some abstract fashion. (Incidentally, to be precise: the day I am speaking of was March 12, 1938, in Vienna; the sky was Adriatically blue, the sunshine sparkling, and the temperature eleven degrees below zero Celsius.)
11
As for the phenomenology of that era, which has been preserved in me like an alien life: its light.
In my childhood: a bright, clear, wind-stirred, wide-open spring light. (Which signals a dragging of the past into presence, Jugendstil light dragged into art deco; our first impressions are not only our own: they are bathed in the light of our parents’ heyday.) My mother sometimes sang, in her delightfully airy, sunlight-dappled mood (Bonnard), and I would ask her over and over again to sing the one that began
Mach mir kein bitteres Gesicht,
Es geht nicht, lieber Schatz,
Denn was dein Herr Papa verspricht,
Ist alles für die Katz!
A frivolous song. My mother sang it for fun. Of course, I took it very seriously; I suffered it, as I later suffered my Rilke. The stanza I loved most retains even now the entire mood of those happy days:
The poplars on the highway there
Sway in the wind of March.
That was it: the Jugendstil mood of my early days (1919–26). Still no end of nature: distance, urging, promise. And light, conjured up in another stanza:
The far blue distance calls for me
Pale-blue like your corset . . .
Pale-blue. Silk-blue. Intensifying in the yearning exultation:
And if it weren’t for Paree
&nbs
p; Then I might dream of you and me
In your most decent bed.
Do you hear it: Paris the yearning goal of migratory birds. The capital of Europe. But no matter: the wanderlust of those days. The lure of the horizon. And beyond it, yet another Beyond. The only anguish of my childhood: the pale-blue promise beyond the birches and beeches and alders and spruces and all the other dendrological brica-brac of the park in Bessarabia; there, way way beyond the fields, along the forest tracts and meadows of the river Pruth, where poplars, strung far across the land, lie westward on the great highway—îţi mai aduci aminte, domnule Brodny? . . .
March-weather yearning. The land wide open in the fresh light. Spring once again lets its blue ribbon waft through the air. The threshing machine stands in the barn: be patient until autumn. The naked twigs still drip in the morning. The fields lie fallow. There is a powerful rush under the willows along the park wall. In the village, tiny brooks shoot along the paths. The village children send reed boats over their rapids, and I envy their freedom. Miss Fern tugs me past them. “Come on, you must not stare. It will embarrass them.”
Uncle Ferdinand’s bags are being packed, the servants drag them into his dressing room: huge calf-leather trunks fitted with brass latches, brass corners, buckled with straps, girded with the blue and gold ribbon of his armorial colors. Through the corridors the chambermaids cluck like big black-and-white brood hens, bearing piles of shirts ironed so smooth that they are slippery, balancing them firmly under their chins, the tissue paper crackling (a superfluous protection: Uncle Ferdinand will have his laundry rewashed and re-pressed in Paris anyway).
He struts enormously before us, up and down, past the open window, which contains treetops, bright spring breezes, and yearning. At regular intervals his shadow falls across the tea table where we are sitting. I in my Norfolk jacket with a bow under the broad, striped shirt collar, and I can’t bear the bow because I find it girlish and it makes the village children laugh. My mother in a frock of light brocade as iridescent as snakeskin; her dress closes under the armpits in an intersecting line, leaving the throat and shoulders bare, as if placed there (this too is quite art nouveau—ivory inlaid in cloisonné, imitative of Luca della Robbia terra cottas; in art deco, the dress would be batiked, the superimposed bust would be plastic, the hair japanned).
When Uncle Ferdinand’s large shadow falls across the tea table, the firmament of sunlight reflections on the silver—the samovar, the sugar bowl, the butter dishes and toast racks, the honey pot, and various containers in which tarts and pastries are kept warm—is for a moment snuffed out. My mother fiddles with the tea things, her movements uncommonly light. She is slender, erect, and wears a hothouse blossom in her hair: a Balinese gamelan player.
Uncle Ferdinand struts around us with solemn, almost ceremonial steps. He is celebrating himself. At each step, his powerfully vaulted torso—and his elegantly sloping bon-vivant shoulders, his alert head constantly turning to and fro, his sharply protruding nose and un-commonly powerful mustache, twirled thread-fine at each end—his torso nods, awe-inspiring, self-confident, self-certain, earnest: an immense rooster.
His eyes are rooster eyes: perfectly circular, light brown, with piercing black pupils. When he ogles at the cheese- or mushroom-patties, the currant tarts, he tilts his head as though taking aim, then stalks step by step to the tea table to seize the goodies with a nimble whisk of the hand. He balances the teacup very delicately before the vertical line of his vest buttons, then goes over to my mother to have her pour him more tea: “Comme c’est dommage que vous n’ayez pas envie de venir à Paris, cette foi ici, mon ange. Vous nous manquerez à tous et surtout à Anne, qui vous aime si tendrement. D’ailleurs, autant que j’en sache, il y aura aussi John—cela ne vous ferait pas changer d’idée? . . .”
He stands close to the tea table, arching his rooster chest toward the samovar; and the samovar belly, arching too (convex where he is concave, concave where he is convex), reflects him mockingly, caricatures him, distorts him grotesquely. He is suddenly drawn upward, as thin as thread, and then is collapsed into a broad sphere . . .
Fourteen years later, I was to see him like that again: in February 1940; I was a Romanian soldier, a defender of the Fatherland, a Fatherland in which I had become an alien; after returning home to Bessarabia from Vienna I was taken in again by the forgetful patron of my remote childhood as if I had been gone for only a school year: “Ah, te voilà finalement. Il était grand temps qu’on te voie. Va vite te changer pour dîner. Ta chambre est celle sur la cour, comme d’habitude. C’est John, d’ailleurs, qui m’avait annoncé ton arrivée . . .”
( John, d’ailleurs . . . D’ailleurs, il y aura aussi John . . . always John is in the background and guiding the course of my life . . .)
12
He is still Uncle Ferdinand the Magnificent. But something strange has happened to him; a bizarre retromorphosis has occurred, a development back into the species and genus, which makes the individual recede and the type come to the fore—and not the rooster type. He is no longer the giant cock-of-the-walk of yore.
God help me I was twenty-one years old then, and was still inexperienced in what age can do to a man—I mean, how much it brings him home, brings him back to his origins. Is it that my eyes, after fourteen years of Vienna, are unused to such immediate Balkanness and are more sensitive to it? I wondered, terrified. Uncle Ferdinand looks to me as if whole phalanxes of Levantine ancestors had marched right into him—all those Greeks from the phanar of Constantinople, who ruled for the Sublime Porte as princes over Moldavia and Wallachia, who married the daughters of the land, uncommonly black-haired daughters of boyars, with noses as sharply curved as their scimitars and the plumes of their otter caps. Uncle Ferdinand’s nose is so crooked now that, like a parrot beak, it presses down on his (now yellowish white, now sparse) bristly mustache (as if the nose were devouring a narrow sheaf of bleached straw; similar tiny sheaves are proliferating in his nostrils and ears). This nose arches from its tip (overshadowing the chin and double chin) in a resolute curve right around the entire arc of the skull, between the eyes (now slightly bulging and mounted in reddened lids and pale lashes), seamlessly (with no notch in the root of the nose) into the receding forehead and then the dully shimmering parchment spheres of the cranium, over which a few damp, grayish-white strands are still combed (remnants of patent-leather-black hair, once brushed back from the forehead smooth as a mirror).
A balding old cockatoo, I would have been tempted to think, if Uncle Ferdinand’s head alone had developed homeward into the Oriental and thereby into history. But the intrinsic, typical quality now coming to the fore, the element that makes a personal feature a revelatory mark not only of race and class but also of a specific human condition, the potentiality of man in a specific form—this quality has been elaborated (with admirable thrift in the use of artistic devices) by means of a contortion and distortion of the entire figure.
It is the same grotesque distortion that I saw in the fun-house mirror of the samovar belly during the remote childhood days of 1926: Uncle Ferdinand is both elongated and compressed at once. His stilt legs are drawn out; exceedingly long and skinny, they seem to go all the way up to his shoulders, on which his ears are set (with the yellowish gray-white sheaves of hair now sprouting from them). Once, his high rooster-chest was tremendously vaulted, and what a horned pearl-string of waistcoat buttons ran down it like a seam in a bold self-assured curve to his artificially tightened waist—like the trill that Miss Fern, a Schnitzelpolka piano virtuoso, fondled out of the keys at the end of the piece, her middle finger rigid, a trill like the energetic gondola arc in the emphatic underscrawl of a signature. But now, this conceitedly bloated, girdled, truffle-fed bon-vivant body is broadly squashed and billowed like a melon, precariously thrust on its spindly leg-trestle like a hunchback’s torso.
There will soon be nothing human about this at all. It is merely a caricature now, and its essence has developed perfidiously. Uncle F
erdinand’s personality has not been rendered harmless by the change, or banalized into cheerful reconciliation. On the contrary, it now emerges in all its sharp certainty. His incontestable authority has intensified, is now uncanny, but is no longer expressed by the complacent power of the rooster: it is as if the rooster’s pomp has risen aloft and been suspended. Uncle Ferdinand is now devoid of pompous gravity, is virtually hovering in air, light, weightless . . .
In short: Uncle Ferdinand has not simply aged but taken a step beyond himself into the timelessness of symbolism. No, no: he is no longer the proud rooster on the hilltop who greets the radiant new day with the drawn scimitar of his crowing. He is something far older, more archaic, more archetypal; something has shifted him to the dawn of creation, as though he were perched at the beginning of time, still bringing his mythic influence to bear on Today, spinning threads of destiny. . .
of course—that’s what he is: Arachne. He has become a spider. Uncle Ferdinand has turned into a gigantic, gray-yellow-white spider.
13
You understand my dilemma, Mr. Brodny. I am telling you stories not just for my personal pleasure. I am not letting my figures stroll across the page just for fun. No sooner have I drawn the picture of Uncle Ferdinand as a spider than I feel compelled to extend the metaphor wherever Uncle Ferdinand leads us—he too a phantom of the narrator, a tale about telling.
Abel and Cain Page 18
