The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Copyright © 2012 H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard) AS

  Originally published in Norwegian as Udødelighetens elixir by Aschehoug, Oslo.

  Translation copyright © 2012 Michael Meigs

  This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Gleichmann, Gabi, author.

  [Udødelighetens elixir. English]

  The elixir of immortality / by Gabi Gleichmann; [translated by Michael Meigs].

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-590-7

  1. Jewish families—Europe—Fiction. 2. Europe—History—Fiction.

  3. Epic fiction. I. Meigs, Michael, translator. II. Title.

  PT8952.17.L45U3613 2013

  839.82′38—dc23

  2012046085

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  v3.1

  For my sons

  This is—almost—your own history.

  The future is up to you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One: The Sources

  Two: The Personal Physician

  Three: The Cabalist

  Four: The Storyteller

  Five: The Wanderer

  Six: The Philosopher

  Seven: The Revolutionary

  Eight: The Prince

  Nine: The Minister of Finance

  Ten: The Journalist

  Eleven: The Communist

  Twelve: The Heavy Smoker

  nothing ever repeats itself in human history

  everything that at first glance seems the same

  is in its own way exactly the same;

  every human being is a star unto himself,

  everything happens perpetually and never at all,

  everything repeats itself endlessly and nevermore

  —DANILO KIŠ

  FOR A LONG TIME the words would not come. My mother lay before me in her bed wearing only a thin nightgown, silent and self-absorbed. Her gaze had fixed itself upon some invisible spot on the ceiling. Her breathing was shallow; she was almost motionless. I held her hand, hoping she would grip mine, but her hand was cold and lifeless.

  This was ten years ago on a November day under an endless blue sky. The wind was erratic and a thin layer of new-fallen snow covered Oslo. The sun was shining but the wind carried a sharp, cold winter edge, and on the Continent people were using their bare hands to tear down the wall that had divided Europe for decades.

  For once, early that morning my father had called and told me in a guarded voice that my mother wasn’t doing well. Given the circumstances, I shouldn’t visit her. At first I felt relieved.

  Every day for the previous fifteen years I’d heard that my mother wasn’t doing well, that she was suffering unbearable pain, and that she was dying. My mother wasn’t exactly discreet when it came to suffering. She complained incessantly, increasingly bitter with each passing year, and I responded by adopting a fairly irresponsible strategy: I simply paid no attention to her most of the time. With the passing years I became more or less indifferent and convinced myself that as long as she was still able to complain, I had no reason to worry about her health. I see now that I should have been more attentive.

  At the very moment Father told me in a rush that she was in too much pain to come to the telephone, I realized that Mother was about to leave us. Only then did I understand how poorly prepared I was for this and that I would regret it for the rest of my life.

  Little knowing that hardly half an hour of my mother’s allotted life span was left, I rang the bell outside my parents’ home. Father opened the door, and his expression emphasized the solemn and ceremonial nature of the moment. I took a seat next to the bed and gazed at Mother. Her face was white, almost translucent, and the uncombed hair lying carelessly across her forehead gave her a girlish appearance.

  Who is this, really, this person lying here? She seems so familiar, so near and yet so far away. As I stared I feverishly searched my memory for images of her. In vain. She was nowhere to be found.

  Suddenly it became clear that I had been ashamed of the fact that Mother had cut herself off from the world and closed herself up in her bedroom so no one would distract her from spending time with the demons in the darkest landscapes of her imagination. That’s why I had carefully kept her at a distance. I had suppressed even my fondest memories of her. I shuddered at my selfishness, and I wanted to talk with her, aloud, about all those things we had never discussed. No matter how I tried, the words refused to come.

  My father stood there, unmoving. Then he hastily slipped away, seeking temporary distraction in some routine household task.

  A stark silence reigned in the bedroom. Deeply ashamed and seized by the seriousness of the moment, I tried to comfort my mother. I stroked her cheek softly but found nothing to say.

  Instead, my mother was the one who spoke. Almost imperceptibly her lips quivered and she mumbled something about the worst day of her life: December 12, 1944. Then, still in a tone almost too low to hear, she said something about Lipot, the most devout of all the boys hiding in the house, who was brutally murdered that day by the Germans. His dead body lay in the street for two weeks before friends dared to move it under cover of darkness to the Jewish cemetery. She kept muttering, confused and not making much sense. I listened intently. Her voice was fading away.

  “How could God let that happen?” She sighed. “You have to tell it to everyone. You have to tell them everything about it.”

  I felt the responsibility weigh upon me and pledged that one day I would describe the cramped and isolated universe that had been our abode on this earth. Mother paid no attention; she was already on her way out of this life. She drifted off with a resigned smile and gave herself up to be swallowed by the void.

  FIRST OF ALL, a couple of words about my great-uncle, the shining light and joy of our early childhood. There is so much more to say about him than I can remember. The subject is so vast that it stretches far past the reaches of both my memory and my understanding. Now that I’m trying to tell his story, the gaps have become even more evident.

  He was an idol to my twin brother, Sasha, and me when we were small. We worshipped him. Sometimes when I looked at him as we sat there at the kitchen table, I had the feeling that the world wasn’t big enough for the awe I felt. He taught us all about our extended family, he described things we youngsters knew nothing of and couldn’t possibly have known, and he initiated us all in the countless mysteries revealed to him by voices from beyond the grave. He was a fabulous storyteller. He forever enticed us with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of spellbinding anecdotes, enchanted us, and made us laugh. Whenever he turned up, always unexpectedly, the ordinary days of our lives suddenly became celebrations. Sasha and I, otherwise always in constant conflict, immediately made a sort of tacit truce.

  EVERYONE CALLED HIM FERNA
NDO, an exotic name suggesting he might have been some kind of Spanish aristocrat. Everyone, that is, except our paternal grandmother, who merely called him Franci. His real name was Franz Scharf.

  GRANDMOTHER’S CONTEMPT for Fernando was fierce and inextinguishable. I never understood why—at least not until much later. The reason for her attitude was a dark, impenetrable mystery. It might even have been that Grandmother herself had suppressed it. Whatever the case, she resisted all attempts at reconciliation and never made any secret of her feelings. Of course, she never accused him directly of anything improper or malicious. But on the other hand, whenever the occasion presented itself, she was quick to remind us that he was not really related to us. He’d done nothing more than marry one of her countless cousins. And the least attractive of them all, to boot.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE’S CLOSE RELATIONSHIP with us was his way of dealing with his lonely existence. His wife and their teenage daughters, the twins Anci and Manci, had gone billowing up in smoke through tall chimneys.

  “It’s a very sad thing,” he said one day, seeking to catch our eyes, “but that’s just how it is.”

  I remember that day clearly. It was October 24. The pale autumn sunshine filtered through the curtains. Then suddenly the color of the sky shifted from bright to dark. My great-uncle made a little choking sound and began to weep. The air in our apartment was heavy with the smell of burned porridge, one of Grandmother’s specialties. Fernando’s tears would not stop. His shoulders shook and his eyes were red. You see, that very day was his daughters’ birthday. He opened his mouth to speak but some sort of coughing fit interrupted and words failed him.

  He never raised the subject after that day. But my twin brother, Sasha, and I understood.

  ON ANOTHER OCCASION he confided to us in very measured tones and almost in a whisper that he had loved a woman his whole life long, just one woman, more than anything in the world. We immediately grasped the fact that she couldn’t have been his wife because a moment later he added, “And she was the very one I could never have. But her affection for me was enough.”

  The kitchen door was standing open, and my great-uncle was glancing surreptitiously at Grandmother as she stood before the stove, talking to herself. For some reason I started to grin. Perhaps I understood intuitively that this was his roundabout way of giving us a glimpse of what he carried in his heart.

  “Mein liebes Kind, don’t you laugh—loving her was the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life. No doubt you think it’s strange for an old man like me to cherish a passion. But when everything else falls away, dries up, and disappears, when one is battered and finally overcome by the pitiless onward march of time, the flames of love continue to burn in one’s heart until the day one dies.”

  EVEN THOUGH MY GREAT-UNCLE was not a blood relation, he knew everything about our ancestors, even those from long, long ago. He had an almost sacred devotion to our past. In his eyes the past was the most essential aspect of one’s existence. Sometimes while telling us stories about our relatives in medieval times he would beam proudly at us, pat our heads, and sigh out loud, smiling all the while, his eyes fixed on some invisible horizon. Other times he would get annoyed that my twin brother, Sasha, and I were so ignorant of our own history. I especially remember one time when he became extremely upset—he regarded it as absolutely deliberate malice on our part—when he found we weren’t familiar with every detail of the sad fate of our distant relative Shoshana Spinoza. She was—even though just a young woman in the first flower of her youth when she died—one of the greatest pioneers in the history of physics.

  I SOMETIMES have the impression that because he had lost his twin daughters in the war my great-uncle harbored an unconscious desire for Sasha and me to rise above our family history. I am sure now that more than anything else he believed that our family environment was going to make us weak, timorous, indecisive, humorless men. He wanted to exert a covert influence on our souls and push us in a completely different direction, infusing us with vitality, enterprise, and the will to succeed.

  FERNANDO WAS ALWAYS WILLING to fill in the gaps of our ignorance and to bring back from obscurity some relative from the dawn of time. He did this by quoting at length from some document unknown to us or by confidently revealing secrets hidden in the darkest recesses of the past, secrets he had discovered with the help of a benevolent spirit whispering to him from another dimension. My great-uncle’s words always found ready acceptance with us; neither Sasha nor I ever questioned the truthfulness of his tales of our family history. He was an irresistible raconteur. We sat there with mouths wide open, full of pride and wonder at the mythical world he brought to life around him.

  As for me, I was so delighted with my great-uncle’s stories that I learned them by heart. If he happened to leave out a detail or a date, I could even correct him.

  Only Grandmother, who occasionally grumbled to herself that she had seen through Fernando long ago, found any occasion to question the reliability of his historical sources. She sometimes pressed him for various explanations in a manner that Sasha and I found quite tactless, and he would appear somewhat hard-pressed. Most of the time he simply sat there, silent, his eyes down, with a smile that suggested a slightly guilty conscience.

  But as soon as Grandmother left the room, any trace of concern vanished and the happy, relaxed expression returned to his face. Then he would beckon us over a little closer and in a confiding voice he would say, “Facts are better than fiction. When you know what really happened, you don’t need to make up stories. And anyway, a liar is easier to catch than a lame dog.”

  MOST FASCINATING of all for us was when my great-uncle, warily at times and always with an air of great mystery, described to us just how he regularly contacted the dead through spiritualists and their medium. The group was called Ad Astra. Their meetings took place every Wednesday in the home of Adalbert Nagyszenti, a Freudian psychologist. Because of his bourgeois background and political views, he had been locked up in a Stalinist reeducation camp in northwest Hungary and then formally banned from his profession. At that time he was supporting himself as best he could as a night watchman in a junkyard in a shabby working-class neighborhood. Budapest’s most open-minded and imaginative thinkers used to gather at these meetings. Participants sat at a round table in a room with tightly drawn curtains and no mirrors. Lit only by an array of flickering candles, their meetings would generally begin with the reading of some secret Latin texts. This was supposed to prepare the participants to embrace the spirit world. Following those preliminaries the medium, a pale-faced anorexic woman in late middle age, fell into a trance and served as the intermediary for contacts with the world beyond.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE FIRST HEARD Ad Astra mentioned in the home of Dr. Kisházy, a charming, unscrupulous general practitioner, who supplemented his meager government salary by charging stiff fees to write prescriptions for absolutely any medicines his patients wanted. He wasn’t in the least concerned by the fact that some of the medicines might be deadly poisons. He conducted his life according to the firm principle that mankind could not banish disease and make the world a better place; the only approach was to deal with increasing surplus population. It was evident therefore that Dr. Kisházy was no Florence Nightingale when it came to the seriously ill. On the other hand, his eyes could fill with tears when he heard selections from the poetry of Dante, and his face lit up with unconcealed delight at a glass of delicious Tokay. He made no secret of the fact that he was more concerned with his white wines than with the health of his patients. Even blindfolded, with the very first sip he could identify every variety of Riesling from the Siófok region.

  For some unknown reason my great-uncle had a boundless respect for Dr. Kisházy and regularly sought his advice. He confided to Kisházy that thoughts of his dear dead daughters had been haunting him more than ever. He still found it increasingly difficult to reconcile himself to the arbitrary injustice that cuts some lives so short that they are snatched from this w
orld before they reach adulthood. He also said that the powerful pills he had been taking for years were no longer holding his demons at bay. Every night he had nightmares—he usually saw his daughters burning alive in the enormous oven of a crematorium. The doctor advised him that his abysmal mental condition couldn’t be relieved with stronger pills. He suggested instead a visit to the company of spiritualists led by his brother-in-law. He thought that direct contact with the dead girls would liberate Fernando’s grieving heart from his sunken chest and allow it to fly as free as the autumn leaves that blew down the boulevards of Budapest. Kisházy promised to provide a letter of introduction. At first my great-uncle was reluctant because he did not believe in an afterlife and saw no reason to attend a séance. But the nightmares persisted, and he had a profound desire to know what had happened to his daughters.

  ONE WEDNESDAY EVENING my great-uncle somewhat unwillingly turned his steps toward Adalbert Nagyszenti’s apartment. Dressed in a suit of Scottish plaid, the psychoanalyst received him in the hall and immediately invited him into the adjacent room where five individuals were already seated at a round table. My great-uncle was directed to the chair next to the medium. She was already speaking some indecipherable gibberish, obviously in a trance. The séance had clearly been under way for some time. In the gloom Fernando found it difficult to make out the faces of the others, but he quickly understood that the distinguished elderly gentleman across from him was seeking contact with his only son, feared to have perished sometime in the late 1940s in a labor camp in Kolyma, in northern Siberia. Fernando knew Kolyma all too well and he was just as well-acquainted with suffering and with death. He felt a cramp in his intestines when he heard Joseph Stalin’s name. A silence fell over the room. After a few minutes the host asked my great-uncle in a low voice whom he wished to contact. Fernando whispered, “My daughters,” but he did not specify their names. The medium appeared to sink ever deeper into her trance. She tapped her bony fingers on the tabletop in a curious rhythm. That was her way of summoning the assistance of any spirits willing to locate their guest’s daughters on the other side. She repeated her appeal several times, but no matter how often she tried, she was unable to contact Fernando’s daughters. Half an hour went by. This outcome was as discouraging to him as it could be. The experience merely confirmed my great-uncle’s suspicion that spiritualism was nothing but the clever manipulation of credulous fools to make them believe they could speak with their dear departed ones. He was about to stand up to leave when behind him he heard a soft, distant voice. “Anci and Manci are involved elsewhere.” Fernando’s expression did not change, since he was absolutely sure that this was a farce. The others in the room looked puzzled, and even the experienced medium opened her eyes in surprise.