My dreams ceased to feature pellucid streams in meadows; instead – if they were dreams – they resounded with the echo of his voice, through which the word fate struck repeatedly like hammer blows. Fate! It was the great theme of his later books. Here Fate is the main character and human beings are depicted as struggling helplessly in the grip of its iron claw. But although he witnessed the upheaval of his whole continent and the destruction of his generation, he goes beyond the epoch in which he happened to be living to embrace the entire epoch of Man: Man in the abstract, from birth to death. And this is what astonished him and made him suffer – the suffering of Man, and all he has to endure in the course of a lifetime of inevitable decline; and also the swiftness of that decline, the inexorable swiftness with which a young man becomes an old one. It is no doubt a great theme, but how could I take it seriously when I identified its author with my grandfather, whom I saw suffer because I made a noise playing outside his study door, or because his girlfriend flirted with her dentist? In his last book there is a sort of dance of death in a landscape of night and barren rock where men and women join hands and revolve in a circle, their faces raised to the moon so that its craters appear to be reflected in the hollow sockets of their eyes. This might for others be a powerful metaphor for the macabre dance of our lives; but for me it is only a reminder of a birthday party we attended.
It was Max’s birthday – his last, as it turned out – and, like all our celebrations during this year, the party was held in Netta’s flat. For by then Max was spending all his days in St John’s Wood – even his desk had been moved there – though he still showed up in the Hampstead flat for the sort of nocturnal visits I have described. Netta also came quite often, not with him but alone. I witnessed several scenes between her and my grandmother, only now it was always Netta who was pleading while Lilo remained stubborn and silent. This made Netta desperate and she stopped pleading and was angry, or pretended to be: ‘My God, think of me all these years, in your house, and putting up with it – yes, gladly! Laughing and pretending to be happy, so that everyone could be happy! And you can’t come even once, for one afternoon, for his sake?’ For a long time my grandmother remained impervious, so that Netta might as well have been addressing someone blind and deaf. But gradually, over the years – for no particular reason, or perhaps because it didn’t matter any longer, or that other things mattered more – anyway, we did go to Netta’s flat, to her more important parties like when it was her birthday, or Max’s, or even Lilo’s: everything was celebrated there.
It was always the same guests who had been invited, and they were all Netta’s friends, from the social circle she had formed around herself. They included people we vaguely knew, like Dr Erdmund from Dortmund and some of the other elderly gentlemen whom I remembered from the coffee lounge. They were mostly German refugees who, like Max and Lilo and Netta, had had their youthful heyday during the time of the Weimar Republic. In fact, they might have been the embodiment of the big painting in Netta’s flat of the German café scene, with geometrically shaped faces crowding each other around a café table. Now those triangles and cones had been realigned into the masks of old age, and the expression of nervous restlessness had frozen into the smile of the tenacious survivor. Their clothes were elegant – Netta insisted on glamorous attire for her parties – and they still held a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, some with a long silver or ivory holder; and they were still animated by a kind of frenetic energy, a consumptive eagerness. There was dancing too – Netta rolled up her bear rug and put on some of her old dance records, and when the music started, she stretched herself up by her clenched arms and said, ‘Oh my God,’ and laughed at whatever it was that she remembered. They were all pretty good dancers – mostly foxtrots, with some very intricate footwork. Netta’s favourite was the tango, and it suited her – inside her tight silk metallic dress she made movements as sinuous as those of a young siren; and the expression on her face no doubt reflected the sensations in her heart, which were those of her siren years. Her partners did their best to keep up with her, pretending they were not out of breath; but she discarded them one by one when they began to fail, and imperiously snatched up a fresh old gentleman.
The only person who refused her was Max: he would not dance, he could not, never had done, which was why Lilo had given it up too, long ago. So the two of them were always onlookers – except on that last birthday party when everyone had drunk a lot of champagne and excitement burned through the air like holes made by a forgotten cigarette. In fact, Netta was scattering dangerous sparks from the cigarette held between her fingers; and her eyes too sent out glints of fire and so did her red hair and her metallic dress. Discarding her last breathless partner, she turned to Max: he shook his head, he smiled, no, he would not. But for once she insisted and she grasped his hand and pulled him up; and at last, to please her, he let himself be dragged on to the dance floor and tried to imitate her steps. But he could not, and to help him, she pressed herself as close to him as possible to lead him and make his hips rotate along with hers. But still he stumbled and could not; at first he laughed at his own ineptitude, but when others too began to laugh, he tried to extricate himself from Netta’s close embrace. She would not let him go, and perhaps to drown his angry words, she called to someone to turn up the record; and then, when it was really loud, she called out, ‘Come on, everybody, what are you waiting for – New Year?’ and soon they were all jigging up and down, with Max and Netta in their centre. The more he struggled the tighter she held on to him, so that he appeared to be entangled in the embrace of an octopus or some other creature with long tentacles. His situation made them all laugh – even I did, till I saw how Lilo had hidden her face in her hands, and not because she was laughing. Suddenly she snatched at me in the same way as Netta had done to Max and made me get up with her. Although neither of us knew how, we tried to join the dance – and that made all of them turn from Max and look and laugh at us, at grandmother and granddaughter hopping and slipping on the polished floor. Although Lilo was getting out of breath, we stuck it out till the music stopped, and then she and I thanked Netta for the party and went home.
If it were not for the famous danse macabre in Max’s last book, I might have forgotten all about that birthday party. I prefer to remember our walk home from it, Lilo’s and mine, through empty streets on a cool autumn night. There was the smell of fallen leaves, and layers of clouds shifted and floated across the sky; the moon was dim, so that even when it came sliding out from between these veils, it didn’t light up anything. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that it did illumine my grandmother’s face when she raised it to try and identify some of the stars for me. She pointed at what she said was the Great Bear – or was it the Plough – I think she wasn’t sure, and anyway her eyesight was not good enough to see that far. I don’t know why I expected her to look unhappy – after all, we had just left a party with music and champagne and special birthday cake ordered from Netta’s bakery; but anyway she didn’t, not at all, on the contrary her face appeared as radiant as was possible by the light of that dim moon.
Ménage
Leonora was my mother, Kitty my aunt. Kitty had no children, she never married because Yakuv didn’t believe in marriage, and once she met him, she never looked at anyone else. ‘He treats her like dirt,’ my mother used to say, the corners of her mouth turned down – an expression I knew well, for it was often how she regarded me while telling me, ‘You’ll end up like Kitty: a neurasthenic.’ Physically, it would have been impossible for me to become either like my mother or my aunt. They were both tall, statuesque, whereas I have taken after my father who was a lot shorter than my mother. It’s odd that both these sisters chose men who were short – though this was all that Yakuv and my father Rudy had in common.
Leonora dominated Rudy and he liked it. She was a wonderful manager of all practical details, but at that time I resented and perhaps rather despised her orderly bourgeois ways. I often
took refuge with Kitty, who lived in three tiny rooms in a subdivided old brownstone. My parents had a large apartment in an expensive building on Central Park West, filled with some very fine furniture and pictures that had belonged to Rudy’s family of prosperous Berlin publishers. Unlike Rudy and Leonora, who had funnelled out his family money through Switzerland, Kitty had arrived here in 1937 with nothing – except of course my parents, who were a constant support to her.
Kitty’s apartment was always in a mess, which for me was part of its charm. I associated disorder with artistic creation, and there was usually some piece of work lying around. She had begun with etchings and woodcuts, but later became a photographer; there were prints tacked up of her charming portraits of little girls picking flowers in a meadow. Kitty herself sat on the floor, her arms wrapping her knees and her long reddish hair trailing around her. If my mother was there – and Leonora often came to check up on her sister – she would be tidying panties off the floor, washing the dishes piled in the sink, while clicking her tongue in distress and disapproval. But that didn’t bother Kitty at all, she continued sitting there talking to me about some artistic matter, even when Leonora found a broom and began to sweep around her.
My parents adored New York, were completely at home here, and continued to live the way they might have done if they had been allowed to stay in Berlin. They spoke only in English, though their heavy accents made it sound not unlike their native German. They had many social and cultural activities, mostly with other prosperous émigrés from various Central European countries. It was at one of these cultural events that Kitty first met Yakuv, who had been engaged to give a piano recital after a buffet supper at some rich person’s house. The house was pointed out to me later, a rococo mansion at 90th and 5th, since pulled down. At this concert Kitty had behaved in a crazy way that was not uncharacteristic of her: the moment Yakuv had finished playing, she dashed up to the piano and, kneeling down, she kissed his hand. Leonora said she nearly died of shame, but Rudy was more tolerant of his sister-in-law’s behaviour, which he said was a tribute not to a person but to his art. As for Yakuv himself – I don’t know how he took her gesture, but probably it was in his usual sardonic way.
On account of his art, my mother was prepared to forgive Yakuv for many things: among them, his background. He came from Eastern Europe, from what she assumed to be a tribe of pedlars and hawkers; the language they spoke was to her a debasement of the High German with which she had grown up. But this had nothing to do with Yakuv’s art: ‘Even if his father peddled toilet brushes,’ she explained, ‘an artist is born with his talent. It’s a gift from the gods and comes from above.’ His real background might have disturbed her more. His forefathers had been rabbinic scholars, but more recent generations had abandoned these studies in favour of Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Some of them had rotted for years in jail as political prisoners, and at the beginning of the last century an aunt had been executed for her part in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. The glowering intensity that pervaded Yakuv’s music, and our lives, must have been inherited from these revolutionaries. His looks were as fiery as his playing. He was very short but with broad shoulders and an exceptionally large head, which looked even larger because of his shock of black curly hair.
A year or two after his first meeting with her, Yakuv moved into the brownstone where Kitty lived. His rooms on the top floor were even smaller than hers on the second, and just as untidy. But I have seen Yakuv get much angrier than my mother at the mess in Kitty’s rooms, kicking things around the floor in a fury and sweeping crockery off her table. Then she would fly at him, and a dreadful quarrel break out. These were the first passionate fights I ever witnessed, for between my parents there was only a slight tightening of the lips to indicate one of their rare differences of opinion. Kitty’s fights with Yakuv frightened and thrilled me by their violence. They always ended the same way, with Yakuv going upstairs to his own den as though nothing had happened – he might even have been smiling – while she was left quivering, prostrate on the floor. But soon she would get up and rush to the door to scream up the stairs – uselessly, for by that time he was back at the piano and she could not be heard above his playing.
At the time we first knew him, in the early 1940s, there was a surfeit of talented refugee pianists, so Yakuv had to struggle to make ends meet. He played for a ballet class and gave piano lessons to untalented students, of whom I became one. At six, my eager parents had sent me for piano lessons to a little old Russian lady, who spent most of her time with me writing appeals for visas to consular officials. But when I was twelve, my parents decided that I should take lessons from Yakuv. I was very reluctant, for I had often seen his pupils coming down from their lessons in tears. I knew this would be my fate too – and deservedly, for he was a great musician and I had very little talent. He made no attempt to disguise his despair, putting his hands over his ears and imploring to be struck deaf. He begged me never to come back again, never to think of the piano again, and of course I would have liked nothing better; but however much we swore an eternal farewell when I left, I always returned on time for my next lesson. I knew – we all knew, including himself – that he needed the money, and since he had driven most other pupils away, it seemed up to me to stick it out, however painful this might be for both of us.
And actually, apart from my playing, I liked being with him. He had three little rooms, and the one in which he gave lessons was only just big enough to hold his piano. The window faced the back yard which was wild and overgrown since the first-floor tenant had no money to keep it up. At that time the mammoth apartment buildings had not yet been built, so the house was surrounded by other brownstones with similarly untended gardens and trees growing tall enough to fill his window. Yakuv, in a shabby jacket and rimless glasses, filled the room with smoke from his little black cigars. A cup of coffee stood on the piano, and since I never saw him make a new one, it must have been stone cold; but he kept sipping at it, and dipping a doughnut into it. Although coffee, doughnuts and cigars appeared to be all he lived on, he was full of energy. He roared, stamped, heaped me with his sarcasms. Sometimes I got so mad, I banged down the piano lid, and that always seemed to amuse him: ‘I see you have inherited your aunt’s sweet temper.’ But then he pinched my cheek, almost with affection, and walked me out the door with his arm around my shoulders.
I was not the only one in the family to take lessons from him. I don’t know whether my father did this because he really wanted to learn or to contribute to Yakuv’s income. He came not to play the piano but to sing Lieder; he loved music but was unfortunately as unmusical as I am. I have heard Yakuv tell Kitty that the entire neighbourhood was trilling Die Schöne Müllerin while my father was still struggling with the first bars. Poor Rudy – he must have endured the same sarcasms as I did, but all he would say was that Yakuv had the typical artistic temperament. Then Kitty said: ‘So artistic temperament gives one the right to be a swine?’ She spoke bitterly because he fought with her, wouldn’t marry her, wouldn’t let her have a child with him. This last always came up in their quarrels: ‘All right, so don’t marry, leave it, forget it – but a child, why not a child!’ He wouldn’t hear of it; and it really was impossible to think of him as a father, a gentle comforting presence like Rudy.
Yet he and Kitty had their tender moments together. Sometimes on my visits to her I found them in bed together. They were not at all shy but invited me to sit on the side of the bed. We played games of scissors, paper, stone, with the two of them quickly changing to scissors if they saw the other being paper; or he would teach us card games and didn’t contradict when she told me that he could have made a living as a card sharp. ‘Better than the piano,’ he said cheerfully. Without his glasses, he looked almost gentle, probably because he was so nearsighted; and it was always a surprise to see that his eyes were not dark but light grey.
Then there were the times when he was a guest at one of my parents’ d
inner parties. On those evenings Leonora sparkled in a low-cut evening gown and the sapphire and ruby necklace she had inherited from her mother-in-law. Her successful dinners were her personal triumph, so that she was entitled to the little glow that made two red patches of excitement appear on her cheeks. But at that time, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I was embarrassed by what I thought of as her smug materialism. It seemed to me that she cared only for appearances, for her silver, her crystal and china, and for nice behaviour (she even tried to make me curtsy when I greeted her guests). She was in her middle thirties, in wonderful shape, radiant with health and the exercise and massage she regularly took: but I thought of her as sunk in hopeless middle age with no ideals left, if ever she had any, which I doubted.
Except for me, everyone appreciated her dinner parties, including Yakuv whenever he was invited. In his crumpled, rumpled evening suit, he ate and drank like a person who is really hungry: which he probably was, and certainly Leonora’s exquisite dishes must have been a wonderful change from his stale coffee and doughnuts. After dinner he was persuaded to sit down at the piano, and this my parents made out to be a special favour to them, though before he left Rudy’s cheque had been tactfully slipped into his pocket. He played the way he ate – voraciously, flinging himself all over the keys, swaying, even singing under his breath and sometimes cursing in Polish. All this made him perspire profusely, so that afterwards he could hardly respond to the applause because he was so busy wiping his face and the back of his neck. The enthusiasm was genuine – even unmusical people realized that they were in the presence of a true artist; and I could well imagine how Kitty had been so carried away the first time she heard him that she knelt at his feet.
At the End of the Century Page 28
