This is, probably, precisely one of the reasons Uncle Ferdinand hasn’t given up this world of his for lost, even though one can hardly conceal that it is threatened in its core: his unbroken confidence in his strong-toothed playmates from the greens of polo fields and chemin-de-fer tables; these are people who will not easily give up the succulent morsels for which they waged such bloody battles, even if the devastations of WWII were to prove even more catastrophic than those of WWI. There is something like a quantum law even in times of danger, a law that those who have a great deal to lose will ultimately lose even less than those others who from the very start had little to lose—and men like Bully Olivera and Sir Agop Garabetian weren’t exactly sleepy, even though dawn usually caught them in a swallowtail or a tuxedo. Indeed, one could expect that, like most of the people in the inner circle, these men, thanks to markets made accessible again by the huge and general devastation, would simply seize even larger morsels in their teeth (as experience taught in WWI, to be confirmed after WWII by the various Economic Miracles of defeated fatherlands in Western Civilization and newly created fatherlands in Africa and Asia). But still: these men would most likely not be able to chew their morsels as unabashedly as before.
Meanwhile, however, these marvelously unchallenged consciences, with which my diverse nominal uncles and godfathers (and fellow travelers of Uncle Ferdinand’s) managed to enjoy everything that their unscrupulous conception of the world permitted them, are probably the reason that Uncle Ferdinand appreciates them not only individually but all together, as a group, a troop, a swarm, a cheerfully baying, eagerly sniffing, keenly hunting pack, yes, presumably he even loves them, with the plainness of self-evident identification. Well, the sharp and shiny toothfulness of carnivore jaws is as old as mankind, as life itself, and will probably perish only when life itself does; yet in the unadorned fashion of the Bully Oliveras and Agop Garabetians, it belonged specifically to the most beautiful period in Uncle Ferdinand’s life (a period whose late flowering coincided with my first flowering); and with it Uncle Ferdinand was always in agreement, he loves it effortlessly, self-evidently, with the surety of a profound inner correspondence.
He especially loves the era bestowed on him and his kind, the era of precarious armistice between two phases of a Hundred Years’ War (for Uncle Ferdinand, just like John, sees WWI and WWII not as two distinct conflicts having distinct causes and goals and carried out with murderous weapons among European nations but as two skirmishes of one and the same European civil war, fought with all means and methods and bestowing on him and his kind a wonderful hybrid blossom during twenty-one years while the armies, aggressions, and weapons were renewed).
No doubt, the thing that Uncle Ferdinand most loves—as do I—about that era, the thing that gave its style that incomparably piquant mestizo character of refinement and violence, making it quite unforgettably vivid, charming, promising, the time of our lives, was: the American touch.
You may not believe it, Mr. Brodny, but that’s what it was like. Uncle Agop’s Venezuelan tango orchestra and nigger band as well as Dada and the Constructivist vision, bobbed hair and Expressionism as well as the conveyor-belt production of superfluous consumer goods and political street scuffles, transvestite nightclubs and the “simple life” reform movement, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Fascism, Greta Garbo and Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Mistinguette and James Joyce, Mayakovski and various secret police (et quelle est la différence entre le Négus et Léon Blum? Aucune: tous les deux ont une barbe, sauf Léon Blum)—all the things that now make the years between WWI and WWII seem like a paradise lost we owe to the return of the prodigal daughter, America.
The delicious blend in that time of chaos and extreme stylization, of decadence and tempestuous promise; the suspenseful coexistence of gangster violence and pure, self-sacrificing faith in man and his right to light, beauty, happiness—the myriad contradictions, the perilous extremes, the explosiveness of all the legacies and tendencies of the zeitgeist made those years a time, a lifetime, more stimulating than could ever have been experienced before or after. It was most likely, as Stella maintained, Europe’s most European hour. And just as she, Stella, realizes it, so too does Uncle Ferdinand realize (both of them, presumably, from the proclamations dropped by John at the ends of his sentences) that this historic hour of Europe could not have come without the return of Europe’s prodigal child, America, without America’s intervention in, its regress into European history. Be proud, sir. It’s your century. It’s your world.
Certainly, Uncle Ferdinand is an aristocrat and a European, a European’s European, sated by the spirits not only of Roman civilization but also of Byzantium; were I to attempt to draw up his spiritual pedigree, I would have to show Irish apostles crossed with Moorish mathematicians, and Venetian seafarers with German philosophers. Nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, Uncle Ferdinand loves the American touch in the years of precarious armistice between WWI and WWII. He is delighted by the fedora’s smart bootlegger look: the crease in the hat brim, so to speak, the brim clapped down at a slant over the brow of a killer’s eyes. He enjoys the spirit of adventure that entered the remnants of a beau monde salvaged from WWI with the polo-playing tin-mine magnates and poker-playing oil tycoons and arms runners, a high society in which the coteries of the Guermantes had long since become intimately entangled with those of the Verdurins as well as those of the Astors and the Vanderbilts.
Uncle Ferdinand is neither a moralist nor a romantic. He is really an aesthete of a school for which antiquarian value per se does not exist. A man who has grown up among Gainsboroughs and lives with Roentgen furniture will appreciate a Sumerian cowbell or an iron spoon from the Fu-Ku or Shen-Si excavations only if it’s an especially beautiful specimen. And he will, incidentally, always prefer the latest model of a first-class sports car.
16
Which, of course, does not explain why Uncle Ferdinand, now, in the heart of winter 1940, is still here in Bessarabia, no doubt in the most uncomfortable, most badly heated of his houses, and the one most remote from civilization. Only the bone-hard, frozen Dniester and thirty-five kilometers of land flat as the palm of your hand separate him from the Russians, who are just waiting to march in and clean house with his sort just as thoroughly as they did at home in 1917. In back of him lies a fatherland, Romania, which in 1919 welcomed Bessarabia’s return to the Kingdom of Greater Romania by dispossessing my uncle of the best of his estates. Now, Romania will soon be blackmailed into putting up no resistance to the new invasion of the Russians; then, forcibly allied with her natural enemies, she will plunge into an escapade that can lead only to losses even greater than that of a single province.
Thus, Uncle Ferdinand would not need to stick his neck out for the heritage that his forefathers have left him here. This legacy is all too wretched compared with what these sage gentlemen have long since taken to more reliable countries like England, Holland, and Switzerland. And it is all too meager next to what he himself (vying here too with his friends from the polo greens and baccarat tables) has multiplied and invested in safe valuables and bank accounts throughout territories with a great future—like Brazil, South Africa, and Canada. Uncle Ferdinand certainly doesn’t have to fear the emigrant’s hard lot as I did or (initially, no doubt) you did as well, Mr. Brodny, my comrade in fate. If he wanted to sell just his coin collection (now in the vault of a private bank in New York belonging to one of his closest friends), the yield would allow him to live tolerably well till the end of his days (which end would no doubt be happily deferred by the necessary restriction of alcohol and luxury foods).
But, for the moment, there needn’t be any talk of such an emergency measure. Even after the loss of his Bessarabian properties, Uncle Ferdinand would still be frightfully rich and could thus live carefree in California or the Bahamas, in Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, he would be meeting a good number of the people about whose well-being he is occasionally anxious, cut off as he is from their co
cktail and dinner parties and galas and often without even news of such events.
Meanwhile, Uncle Ferdinand is staying on in Bessarabia. He prefers it where he is, isolated and exposed, living in rustic simplicity—even without his French chef (who, as a defender of his fatherland, sulks in some bunker on the Maginot Line). The temperature here would freeze the radiator of his Cadillac and is even turning the shooting of wild geese into a dubious pleasure. Uncle Ferdinand holds out, even though without cheerful camaraderie or female companionship he is bored to tears every evening. His life is downright monastic—in a lovely, crazy, lordly gesture toward his friends, as though, by eschewing the chance to be safe with them, he could deny the very idea that for them, for their world, for his world, for their Middle Kingdom, a certain danger is now approaching: the terrible danger that henceforth they will have to camouflage themselves; they will no longer have the security of an unimpeached conscience in enjoying that they were what they are.
In the meantime, Uncle Ferdinand is doing what he would do if he were with them. By conjuring up his various friends and circles, he is weaving this world of his friends together, weaving away at its myth, re-creating it in a new dimension, perpetually resurrecting it. He takes it out of time, present as well as past, and places it in a sort of no-man’s-land of time: makes it eternal. He lives through it once more, and all the more systematically for that. He pursues an enormously ramified, no doubt mostly one-sided correspondence with addressees in all countries still in postal communication with Romania. He instructs these people in minute detail about himself and his present circumstances, his social calendar as it would be if the circumstances were different, if things were as they once were—hunting, travel, and vacation plans in countries lying well out of harm’s way. He reports on everything—no matter what—that he knows about his and their kind, and he requests equally detailed and precise answers. He has the caution, methodology, and pedantry of a general staff officer (which he was—in Russian uniform, intriguingly enough—during an after all halfway chivalrous WWI). And whatever information he picks up he tries to supplement out of his own (phenomenal) memory, photo albums, older correspondence, and newer memories and biographies, as well as items snipped out of society gazettes that manage to arrive every now and then. Moreover, he excerpts all pertinent notices from the most recent arrivals and departures in Lloyd’s Insurance Register of Private Yachts, in the membership lists of the Cresta Run Club, the Jockey Club, the Circolo della Caccia, the Royal English, Dutch, Spanish, Belgian, and Italian automobile clubs, the Almanach de Gotha of Princely Families, Burke’s, the Libro d’Oro, and Who’s Who. With the material thus gained (makeshift, to be sure, but as good as circumstances permit) he keeps his people up to date on the thing that bears the most infallible witness to the existence of a world of friends: the roster of their personnel.
Amusingly enough, the introverted quality of real aristocracy is thus more purely expressed in spiderlike Uncle Ferdinand than in the big extroverted rooster of his bon-vivant heyday. In high nobility, a more frequent type than this is the elderly gentleman absorbed in some kind of abstruse (even serious) research or collecting, and so neglectful of his obligation to present himself as a nobleman that only very sharp eyes can distinguish him from the next-best white-collar worker. And indeed, the intellectual disciplines in which aristocrats excel are the ordering, categorizing ones rather than the analytical, speculative ones. (Schwab tried to talk me into writing an essay on the difference between aristocratic and non-aristocratic intelligence.)
Uncle Ferdinand’s close relations include ornithologists, shell collectors, and lepidopterists of the highest scientific rank, an important genealogist (important because he specialized in the multinational aristocracy of the former Ottoman Empire), and (lovingly esteemed by one and all) a princely cousin who had raised the aristocratic mastery of timetable perusal to such an art that he could reel off both the summer and the winter schedules of the entire national railroad network (à propos, as a true scientist, he was not content with this abstract lore: he traveled throughout the land, stationed himself on various overpasses, and, watch in hand, checked whether the timetable data corresponded to the facts).
In earlier years, Uncle Ferdinand made a nice name for himself as a numismatist. But what he is doing now is something more general, more profound, more fundamental. He is transcending into the metaphysical. Uncle Ferdinand makes the world he lived in eternal. Because he sees that it threatens to lose its self-evident quality (thus even were it to continue to exist, it would never be what it was), he captures it in the most beautiful blossom of its existence and transfers it from the transience of the timely to the timelesness of myth. He thus makes himself eternal, becomes an artist: the inventor, after the fact, of his own lifetime. He would never have existed if he did not exist in its chronicle.
The spider at the beginning of the world. Weaver of the world. Squatting in the no-man’s-land of eternity and drawing its threads from time into timelessness, knotting them together there, weaving them back and forth and up and down, making sure that no tiny thread is disconnected from all the others. He has truly given himself over to his mission. (Naturally, he no longer reads any newspapers, no longer concerns himself with the administration of his estates, his foreign possessions, his business dealings; indeed, he no longer even entertains.) As narrow-minded as a spider that builds its web in a cranny where no fly would ever venture, Uncle Ferdinand has withdrawn here, to a remote, wintry, icy Bessarabia, in order to weave the myth of his radiant bon-vivant world, shone upon by an everlasting spring sun. It is an image of utmost faith in God: the spider hanging its web like a sail in the wind of destiny. . .
And lo and behold: against even the most visionary estimation, his web was well woven, and the wind of destiny bore me into it.
17
I repeat: It is the heart of winter in early 1940, toward the middle of February. Earth as hard as iron; one can scarcely believe that it will ever thaw again. No traces of spring breezes, of spring winds shaking the poplars, of pale-blue distances arousing yearning. True, the sky is silky blue now—the same Adriatically deep, spotless, ice-cold blue as over Vienna two years earlier, in March 1938. It is the sky under which the first half of my life froze, God alone may know how and why; I can’t explain it, I can only tell about it . . . the fact is: this country, Bessarabia, the landscape of my childhood, has also frozen, a land of hoar and frost, with white foggy mornings before the icy blue of the sky stiffens the mist into feathery star crystals.
I am walking through an abstracted world, therefore, a world preserved under the glass bell of a well-nigh metaphysical coldness that I recognize and acknowledge as the world of my childhood. I am living again in my childhood home, from which I was torn away (virtually overnight, and not very considerately), from which I was driven for fourteen years (my entire youth, from the seventh to the twenty-first year of my life). Some of the domestics (a daffy lady’s maid; a flatfooted footman, his head and body shaking; a gardener palsied with age) claim to recognize me. It’s not true; they’re just imagining things. One does not recognize the little boy who resembled the daughter of Madame Vigée-Lebrun in this cavalryman who screws the night away through all the hooker hangouts of Kishinev and spends a rueful morning scouring his pubic hair for crabs.
I stroll through the village, and I think I know every house, every crooked, willow-plaited fence, every mushroom-shaped, snow-laden, icicle-hung thatched roof, and also every face that gapes at me without knowing who I might be, and every eye, sparkling with curiosity, peering through the panes of the little windows:
but not a single eye can see me at one-third my present size, in a small gray coat with a tobacco-colored velvet collar, a round gray hat on my curly head, and the hated bow—enormous, spotted like a toadstool—under my chin; no one sees me holding Miss Fern’s hand, nicely lifting my little legs in their buttoned leggings over the beer-colored puddles in the mire of the village street. No, I am no longer
Christopher Robin.
I walk through rooms so musty, dusty, seedy that my heart contracts. I think I can still sense a breath of my mother’s perfume—a sentimental delusion, of course. Only after a few days do I realize that some of the rooms have been completely repapered, refurbished, rearranged. . .
I listen to the huge, mysteriously chattering stillness of the park, whose floods of summery green were always filled with invisible life: busy birdsong and birds whooshing in the boughs, the needle-fine squealing of a dormouse in the foliage of the bushes, a rocking branch from which a squirrel, a marten, has leaped, an owl has soundlessly soared, bits of bark dropping down from heaven knows where, the soft gurgling of frog heads peeping out of the water and then vanishing in the reeds around the motionless water lilies on the pond, a rustling in the leaves, perhaps from a hedgehog or a ring snake . . .
I have always, all my life, carried it in my blood, this park. It was my Garden of Eden, my paradise promised and lost. Missing it was the bitterest part of my exile. I traveled toward it as toward a beloved, its image in my senses: the soughing of its treetops in the night wind, the sun-dappled coolness of its shade, the damp fresh moldy smell rising in autumn from the leopard skin of the forest floor, its mushroom taste of fern and moss and bark . . .
I regard myself as its creature. Whatever is in it I find also in myself: as the decor of my childhood legend, the proper grooming of its gravel paths, and the vain complacence of the Russian pavilion with the ornamental stained-glass lozenges in the birch woods; the Mondrian severity of the rolled, red, white-lined subdivisions of the tennis court, and the sumptuous flowering of the shrubs on the tall fence surrounding it . . .
Abel and Cain Page 20
