by Alan Isler
How can I convey to you the living woman? It is an impossible task. She is beyond my grasp, where I thrust her. How could such innocent Beauty have loved so guilty a Beast? Desire needs food, like anything that lives. I had fed on Meta but offered her only poisoned scraps.
principal business of the morning, the going over of my notes for the afternoon's rehearsal, the arrival of the players at Elsinore.
Leonard Sweetchild, the First Player, is giving me trouble. The role demands a subtlety beyond his grasp. The First Player, after all, has to deliver his lines and control his gestures in two distinct styles. On the one hand, he has to speak as a professional actor responding to the warm hospitality offered him and his fellows by his princely patron; on the other, he has to speak as an actor "in character," first in the Hecuba passage in act 2, scene 2, where Hamlet requests a sample of his thespian skill, and later, of course, as the Player King. Shakespeare distinguishes the two language modes clearly enough for any ordinary understanding, but Sweetchild, unfortunately, has a tin ear. Worse, if he has an iota of acting talent in him, I have yet to see it. Worst, he has a dismaying and highly visible habit of taking steps as if every inch of his shoe sole were required to make contact with the stage in a deliberate and slowly rolling gait. To this comical rhythm he recites his lines. There is no discernible distinction whatever in the two aspects of his part.
He remains in the play for historical and sentimental reasons. Unlikely as it must seem, Sinsheimer was very fond of him. They sang the songs of the old operettas together, the sentimental Scbmalzof Kalman, Lehar, Fall, arm in arm beside the piano. Sweetchild took the death of Sinsheimer very hard; not even Lipschitz had the heart to oust him after that, and now I have inherited him. Well, somehow I must penetrate his denseness.
Meanwhile, I was sitting in the library, as I have said, my own denseness such that the newspaper paragraphs failed to penetrate it, my hand trembling rather more than usual. The day was severely overcast, with a grim, darkly smudged sky. Not much light entered the windows; all the lamps were lit. It might have been late on a winter's afternoon. Impatient with myself, I
was on the point of abandoning the paper unread when Kunstler and Hamburger came in.
"God save you, sir," said Hamburger.
"My honored lord," said Kunstler.
"Good lads, how do you both?" I said.
They were in a jocular mood. I tried my best to match them, if only for Hamburger's sake. They got on well together.
"We've been looking for you, Gerhardt and I," said Hamburger. "Guess who were last night's big winners? You wouldn't believe how much."
That Hamburger, who knows well enough my attitude toward these nightly debauches that sap our players of their energy, should thrust his glee under my nose, I looked not to find. "Congratulations," I said, in as even a voice as I could muster.
"So, Otto," said Kunstler, "you, too, are in luck. We're going to treat you to breakfast at Goldstein's. Whatever you want, you order. The sky's the limit."
"Actually, Lottie Grabscheidt is treating, in case you don't want to spend our money. Can you imagine? She's holding three aces and a king, and she loses the pot." Thus Hamburger.
"And she folds with a full house," said Kunstler. "Don't forget that."
' 'Better we were playing strip poker,' she tells us."
" 'Do me a favor,' says Blum—he's also losing heavily— 'don't strip.' "
"So, old friend," said Hamburger, "we're taking you to breakfast."
"Unfortunately, I've already had breakfast. Besides, Comyns has put me on a regimen."
"Well, coffee, then, Otto," said Kunstler. "Come and have coffee. You can watch us eat."
"Many thanks, good of you. But alas, I have a full sched-
ule this morning. And rehearsals, as always, this afternoon." I shook the newspaper and lifted it, dismissing them. "You find me trying to catch up with the news before getting to work."
"Half an hour you can spare," said Hamburger, his disappointment, like a child's, painted on his face.
"Sorry. A rain check."
"Listen, Benno," said Kunstler, "if he can't, he can't. Do me a favor, go over to Goldstein's and get us a table. I'll be along in a minute. I want to have a private word with Otto."
The last thing I wanted was a private word with Kunstler! I rustled the newspaper impatiently. Kunstler, meanwhile, waited until Hamburger had disappeared and then sat down on the chair opposite. I lowered the paper and made a show of disgruntled resignation.
"So, Otto, we can talk."
"The library is not the place for a conversation." I pointed to the sign: Silence Pleases; Please, Silence.
"It's no secret you don't like me."
"Mr. Kunstler, I scarcely know you."
"I get on with most people."
"I've observed."
"Take just now, for example: all I wanted was to be sociable, treat you to breakfast. Was that so terrible?"
"Very kind of you. But as I said, I'm on a regimen."
"So what is it? What's bugging you? Get it onto the table, clear the air, talk turkey."
"Your command of idiom is exemplary."
"Is that what you do to the hand of friendship? Spit on it?"
"Very well, Mr. Kunstler, since you ask. You've been making secret inquiries about me. That, as you can imagine, I don't like."
He seemed genuinely puzzled. "What d'you mean?"
"You want I should spell it out? All right. I saw you in
Selma Gross's office. No doubt you remember the day. When you spotted me outside, you put your finger to your lips, and Selma nodded."
"But that had nothing to do with you! It was a private matter—Selma's. You got it back to front: she asked me to keep quiet."
"Of course."
"I swear it." He put up a hand as if about to take the Oath of Allegiance. "Look, I can even tell you about it now, if you want. The rumor's already circulating, the blabbermouth must've told one person too many. Selma's leaving Bernie, that's all. She says that since his operation he's a changed person, wants to be waited on hand and foot, even refuses his Friday-night duties. He's afraid of the strain, a relapse. She's going to take him for a bundle; then she's going to quit work and become a resident here. She says it's a lively place, the Emma Lazarus."
And Selma had said not a word about it to me!
"You believe me now?"
How could I not? A pause. "I apologize, Mr. Kunstler."
He grinned and waved my apology aside. "Never mind the 'Mr. Kunstler.' You can call me Gerry. But you see how it helps to clear the air? Okay, another thing." He grew serious. "Benno tells me you don't like to talk about the old days. Of course, I understand. Perfectly. You'll excuse me, I've seen the number on your wrist. But in Dr. Comyns' office I scraped a raw nerve, I could see, and that had nothing to do with the war years; the subject was your writing. Yet you clammed up. Why?"
"A man does not bare his soul to the first stranger who comes along."
"Who asked you to bare your soul? We were only chatting, that's all. But you looked as if I'd pulled your trousers down. Why should you be ashamed?"
"Because I've much to be ashamed of. And I still don't want to talk about it, not to you, not to anybody. You want to be friendly? Be friendly: drop the subject. You don't know what you're putting your nose into." I was trembling, whether from anger or terror I cannot say.
"But you're wrong just the same. First, you were not the only one. Second, you may even have done some good, particularly in the early days. Third, what counts is motivation and intent. You did what you did for the good of all. What more could you do? No one could have imagined what was coming."
I said nothing.
"Think about what I've said. If you want to talk later, we'll talk. If not, not." He got up and put out his hand. "Friends?"
Well, I took his hand, of course. What choice did I have? Kunstler, who knows everything, knows nothing! But in his ignorant wisdom he put his finger very preci
sely on my shame.
The PROBLEM as I came to see it in the camps was not the terror or the physical deprivation or the pain or even the utter lack of hope, the gray misery of squatting in filth for weeks and months and years while the mad dance of death went on all around. The problem was how in such circumstances to retain the merest shred of human dignity. The signposts of civilization, the countless unrecognized details of ordinary life through which we find our bearings, gain our sense of time and place and personhood—these were gone, vanished forever. Beyond the barbed wire was a scarcely imaginable Paradise, peopled with golden gods and goddesses. Yes, the world at war was Paradise! Within the compound was Hell. We were creatures of nightmare, ugly, stinking, subhuman. You see, it was getting harder and harder not to believe the propaganda. I was beginning to assume that they were right, that / was where I belonged. That was the danger.
My solution was simple: I reentered the past. Time, of course, does not exist in Hell, but before the camps there had been time. I dived into the ocean of time, and when I surfaced, lungs bursting, gasping for air, I held in my hands nuggets of memory. I dived again and again, returning always with treasure. Eventually I underwent a metamorphosis, reversing the process of evolution. Gills appeared, a tail, fins. I became a fish and stayed in the ocean.
Well, I grow fanciful, and I blush to think of you smiling at me. "Speak plainly, Otto," my father would say. "Spare us the poetry." Meta would have understood, though. She could trade me metaphor for metaphor.
To put it plainly, then, I chose a day from the past and relived it. At first it wasn't easy. The memories were fragmentary, brittle, evanescent, and the brutal facts of the camp were insistent. But little by little I gained in skill, recalled details I had thought gone forever, joined shard to shard. I relived whole days, then weeks. It was important not to cheat: it was tempting to reshape the past. But all I wanted was to become a human being again, and life for human beings, after all, is not unalloyed bliss. I relived sorrow as well as joy, and more often than either I relived perfectly ordinary, utterly humdrum days.
It was like learning to ride a bicycle. The child falls off, rubs his bruises, perhaps cries a little, and tries again; at length he can wobble along, he has the hang of it; at last he flies like the wind. It was just a matter of balance, after all. Yes, but that was the tricky part: one could not sit idly by, mouth agape, immersed in fantasy. The routine of the camp had to be fulfilled, the formations, the work details, the attempts to avoid the notice of our capricious dance masters in their polished boots. One had to maintain a pious subservience to the transient hierarchy of doomed souls within the compound, pay careful attention to the shifts in faction and power. One had to give such care as was possible to the minimal imperatives of the
body, to the bestial scramble for a rotted turnip-top or scrap of rancid fat, to evacuation, ablutions, rags stolen for warmth, to sleep.
What was required to balance the bicycle was a radical shift in temporal perception. The stuff of memory became my everyday reality; everyday reality became a figment of my mind. I negotiated the routines of the camp with the same degree of involved disengagement that you yourself grant yesterday's incidents remembered today. Think about yesterday: you see yourself, don't you? You know what you did, what you said, what you felt. You might even "relive" some of yesterday's emotions, embarrassment, exultation, anger. But of course where you are today is in fact. . . where you are. That is perfectly normal. For me, however, the normal relationship between yesterday and today was reversed. Where I was was the past; what I seemed only to "remember" was the present. It was a deliberate effort of the will, and it saved my life.
Here is how I did it. I would select a date—for example, July 17, 1914. I was with the Infelds, on holiday in Baden-Baden. My aunt and uncle had kindly invited me to keep Joachim company. Neither the "old people" nor his little sister were much fun for him. It was a particularly happy time. My book had just been published. The juices of youth were flowing. Baden-Baden was in bloom with pretty young ladies—all chaperoned, of course, but that only added an exquisite spice to our enjoyment. The fun was in the stolen moment, the covert glance, the blushes, the sighs. We were young, very young, with straw hats on our heads, boutonnieres in our lapels.
We had lunch that day at a restaurant in the Black Forest, the Blue Trout. The room was cool and timbered. The fish swam lazily in the tank. The diner would tell the waiter which one he wanted, and within twenty minutes it would appear on a plate before him, cooked to perfection. What was astonishing was the resignation with which the fish met their fate: they
seemed to know when their number was up. Down would go the net into the tank. All the fish but the chosen one would scatter in alarm. But the chosen fish, your fish, would make only the most desultory effort to escape, a minimal motion of the tail, a shudder, and hoopla! it was caught. I can still ride the bicycle.
It IS NOT TRUE that I retain nothing of the past but my letter from Rilke, and of course my memories. I have some photographs that once belonged to Lola, which Kenneth Him-melfarb thrust on me, along with a few family odds and ends, when Lola died. Some of the furniture, the paintings, the books that made their way from Nuremberg to Central Park West to West Eighty-second Street are still to be found here in my room in the Emma Lazarus. The photographs, generations of them, some brought by Lola to New York, many sent to her from Germany in the few years after she left us, are collected in an old shirt box that sits on a shelf in the closet, here as on Eighty-second Street. When Lola died, I got off the bicycle, packed up my memories, and put them out of reach, in a closet of the mind. Until today I have never wanted to look at the photographs, frozen warrants of life, of happiness, of belief in continuity that could show me only the dead. But today, impelled by I know not what, I took them out, sifted through them, grouped them. How they skew the past! Well, no one reaches for his camera, after all, to take a snapshot of family misery. There they were, all my dead, not knowing they are dead. Why describe them? All families have such photographs. I was able to look at them without emotion. Then I put them back on the shelf.
You know now that I had a son, Hugo. He was named after Metas maternal grandfather. He was a splendid little boy, you must take my word for it, born with a sense of humor. Of
course, his smile tended to fade in my presence. But I've told you about that. He got his looks from Meta. Today he would have been in his early fifties; that's hard to grasp, impossible to understand. But of course he is long since dead.
I AM ON THE BICYCLE AGAIN, but I have lost my sense of balance. I am dizzy, both literally and figuratively. What is happening to me?
For the last thirty years I have existed in the present, disposing of my life a day at a time. Only, unlike most people, I had no past. My first fifty years, at any rate, were high on the shelf, behind the closet door. I began these memoirs "to set the historical record straight," to leave a written record of the origin of the word Dada. Prompted by the seemingly purposeful arrival of Mandy Dattner in our midst, that became important to me.
Accordingly, I went to the closet of the mind and removed a few items for display, a carefully controlled "retrospective," so to speak, of the Zurich years of Otto Korner. But once the box was opened, the contents tumbled out, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, revealing folly upon folly. The last pitiful truths demand to be told.
The BICYCLE races downhill, and I cannot control it.
THIS TIME I do not choose the day. This time the day chooses me. It is April 3,1933. The Nazis have been in power for a little over two months. The Jews are in shock. Waves of violence have swept over Germany, and not against the Jews alone: the Brownshirts are settling old grudges. The New Order has begun in high gear. There is nothing to restrain the hooligans
now; the mobs are in the streets. Today is the third day of a state-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses. Coincidentally, Korner's has been closed for "inventory and reorganization."
We are in my parents' living ro
om, where we are having tea and those delicious pastries that my mother knows Hugo is so fond of. The spring sunshine pierces the curtains; the ormolu clock ticks away on the mantel shelf. There is a fire in the hearth, for despite the sunshine, the day is chill. I see it all so clearly.
Meta sits straight-backed, as always, holding little Hugo to her as if to protect him from immediate attack. She is clearly agitated. She bites her finger, breathes with effort. I imagine that my first duty is to calm her. Hysterics, I feel, cannot help. She is alarming Hugo: seven years old and he is wetting his bed again. This is how I react to the beginning of the end: it is a matter of family decorum.
My father sits in his stuffed chair by the fire. His hand trembles, his cup and saucer clink against his watch chain. He is sixty-eight now, but you would suppose him much older. In the new era he has lost his robustness, his air of decisiveness. He, too, is adrift, bewildered by the events that have overtaken his beloved Fatherland. Meanwhile, my mother is at the table selecting a cream puff for Hugo: "Let me see. . . . Which one will make him grow the fastest?" She deals with the looming disaster by ignoring it. Politics, phooey!
And where in this domestic scene is Otto Korner? He leans against the bookcase, a study in nonchalance, one hand in his pocket, the other resting lightly on a leather-bound volume of Goethe's collected works.
Meta can restrain herself no longer. She appeals to my father. "Tell him we must all leave—you and Mutti, too. Lola and Kurt, Joachim, my parents, we must all get out!"
"Really, Meta, leave Father alone, he has enough to worry about." In my voice I express a hint of indulgent exasperation.
"We can't simply drop everything and run for the border because a few idiotic louts get out of hand, now can we?"
My father rallies. "Before there were Germans in Germany, there were Jews."
