The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  The family lived on the fifth floor. The children were awake; astonished, ashamed, and silent, they had watched their parents struggle. Franci, as my great-uncle was then nicknamed, was six years old. From that moment on, he hated the God who had taken his mother from him. He regularly wet his bed for the next six years.

  ALTHOUGH THE DEATH of their loving mother carved a piece out of each child’s heart and she left behind grief and a terrible absence, they never mentioned her in their home. Ervin prohibited the children from pronouncing her name. He insisted that she had failed the family, for a woman’s fundamental duty was to be a wife and mother, no matter how unhappy she might be.

  Once the family’s mainstay had disappeared, it became harder every month to scrape together the money to pay the rent. They were repeatedly obliged to move. Eight times in less than two years the children endured the humiliation of being put out of their home by a succession of landlords. Finally the Scharf family wound up in the most ramshackle house on the poorest street of the Jewish ghetto, where they had to share a filthy privy in the yard with all the other renters. That is where they were Grandmother’s closest neighbors.

  Their apartment was cramped and dirty. Hardest of all for the children was the cold of winter, for they had no money to buy coal or firewood. The pipes froze and there was no drinking water. Icicles hung from the windowsills, and the thirsty children would break them off and suck on them. At night the cold was unbearable; to make things worse, the house was infested by rats. Huddled in bed with three of his brothers, Franci dreamed of hidden treasure and magic spells to help the family. He imagined himself achieving marvelous things.

  AT LONG LAST fate showed some pity on Ervin and granted him a success.

  In the spring of 1919 the communists took power in Hungary and declared the short-lived people’s government, much to the surprise and misery of the people. But in those days Ervin was not worried by the widespread disquiet and general chaos in the country; the only thought in his head was whether he could overcome his nerves and get up on stage again. An acquaintance who was a director at the Vidám Színház comic theater had offered him a place as an understudy in a burlesque cabaret. By then Ervin had reached absolute bottom and may have been slightly out of his mind. He was certain that a waiter in his favorite tavern was trying to poison him on the orders of a landlord who was hounding him. Ervin hadn’t been anywhere near a theater for more than twenty years. The thought of it scared him to death, but his pressing need for cash decided the matter. He accepted the offer.

  Ervin appeared onstage with a gloomy expression, carrying an accordion. He took a seat at center stage. With careful gestures but without a single word he began to pull the instrument farther and farther apart until to the growing amusement of the audience it stretched to an immeasurable length. Finally, with a worried expression, he commented, “Well, it’s out about as far as it’ll go.”

  The audience was in the mood for gallows humor and seized upon his remark. “It’s out about as far as it’ll go” became the most popular motto of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The newspapers were full of glowing reviews. Critics hailed Ervin’s comic genius and discussed his remarkable stage presence.

  One evening the communist dictator Béla Kun attended a performance. Once the applause had died away after Ervin’s act, a voice was heard in the room. “How far can it go when hunger and want are everywhere in the country? We have no bread, no vegetables, no meat!”

  Béla Kun knew instantly that the catcall was intended for him. He stood up from his seat in the royal box and called down to the crowd, “It’ll go just fine. You’ll see how far it goes!”

  ———

  A FEW NIGHTS later Ervin collapsed onstage and was carried unconscious to a nearby hospital. He lay in a coma for a full week. During the last days of his life he was granted a few brief moments of clarity. They coincided with Béla Kun’s visit to the hospital, surrounded by a flock of journalists, to award him with the nation’s highest award for theater arts. Ervin received his medal and an enormous wreath of red roses. He died an hour later.

  More than fifty thousand people attended his funeral. The coffin was draped with a banner of communist red. Béla Kun gave a speech at the graveside. He effusively hailed the great artist who had lavished his impulsive generosity upon the proletariat and opened new artistic perspectives on the brotherhood of man. In this manner Ervin Scharf became the one and only artistic martyr of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

  FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of his childhood my great-uncle loved to tell stories. One person who never tired of listening to them was Sara, a girl from the neighborhood—and my future grandmother. Few of his tales were completely truthful, but that bothered Sara not a bit. One summer evening as the dusk fell gently over them, Franci wanted to impress the neighbor girl. He promised to share a great secret with her, on the condition that she swear never under any circumstances to say a word of it to anyone. Then he told her in as convincing a voice as he could muster that his father was not really an actor; that was just a disguise. In fact, he was the richest man in the world. He possessed many palaces in different lands, including a castle overlooking the Mediterranean, a coffee plantation in Brazil, and vast rice fields in China that stretched as far as the eye could see. He had also had deep tunnels excavated beneath the Black Forest, where the Danube has its source, and filled them with gold and precious stones.

  “How could your papa get so rich?” asked Sara, impressed.

  “My father is a bandit,” Franci explained. “He robs banks. He has a rifle.”

  “But then why does he have to live like a poor actor?”

  “So the police won’t find him and put him in prison. He’s also the leader of a gang of five hundred robbers he sends out all across the world to rob banks and deliver the booty to him.”

  Sara found it difficult to imagine Herr Scharf as a dangerous bandit, considering that she had often seen him tottering around the yard and having difficulty keeping his balance on the stairs. Her eyes showed her disbelief. Franci saw that and quickly added, “I have another secret that I haven’t told anyone. Swear that you’ll never give it away to anyone.”

  “I swear,” muttered Sara.

  “My father is also the world’s best magician. He can slip into a bank vault without anyone seeing him. He reads out a magic spell that he found in the Cabala and then he flies fifteen feet up in the air and becomes invisible.”

  He expected Sara to ask for more details, but she sat there silently, thinking it over.

  “My mother,” he then said, “is the daughter of Count Esterházy. She’s shut up in a clinic in Vienna. She went out of her mind when she found out that father was a dangerous bandit and had six wives, each one in a different country. That chubby girl with fat cheeks who pretends to be my sister and takes care of the little ones is actually Father’s mistress. My father is holding a princess prisoner in his castle in Portugal. He keeps her shackled to a pillar so she won’t run away. Her name is Kunigunda and Father wants me to marry her when I grow up. She has golden hair that hangs down all the way to her ankles.”

  “Franci, you’re a liar. You’re the worst liar in the world! This is just terrible. Nobody can believe a single word you say. You’re just trying to trick me,” exclaimed Sara, and she got up to leave.

  Suddenly the ten-year-old realized that his attempt to impress the neighbor girl had gone terribly wrong. Sara had seen right through him. He had piled up too many lies for her. He was scared of losing his only friend, so he quickly made a solemn pledge to her.

  “Sara, I will never ever, as long as I live, tell you another lie. I promise. You have my word of honor.”

  ON A FEBRUARY AFTERNOON five winters later with only an hour of daylight remaining to the day, my great-uncle and my grandmother were barely fifteen, and their fingers intertwined in the ancient game of pressing, stroking, and caressing. Sara had taken the initiative. That encouraged Franci to become more daring. He leaned closer to
her to breathe in the dizzying scents of her young body, whose delights had just begun to make themselves evident to his newly awakened senses. He placed his hands on her knees and imagined all the sorts of delicious pleasures that lay between them. But how could he approach them? He resolved to kiss Sara. In the instant that their lips met he knew that he was in love with her. They held each other close and kissed for several minutes.

  ON JUNE 28, 1914, with his hands sweating and urine running down his legs, the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip planted six bullets in the Habsburg crown prince Franz Ferdinand and his spouse.

  That same afternoon in Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Franz Josef sat bleakly toying with his imperial royal seal. The face of the powerful demiurge with his milk-white back-combed side whiskers was that of a defeated old fox. For almost seven decades he had done everything he could to hold back the political development of central Europe. The dried-up, unattractive old fellow knew well what forces had been set in motion. He saw that he would be unable to prevent social and political upheaval in the empire. In short, he knew that his time was done. His last hopes had vanished with the tragic death of his nephew in Sarajevo. He ordered a period of thirty days of public mourning.

  One month later as the sun went down, Franz Josef stood at an open window in the palace, his gloved hands grasping the balustrade as he looked out over the world. Then he seated himself behind his desk and cast his shadow across the future of Europe. He knew that empires wither if not fed with blood, and their viability is sustained by brutality and war. In a sort of farsighted benevolence he had understood the threat to the double monarchy. With an unconcerned hand he signed the document that plunged the countries of the Continent into the First World War.

  A FULL YEAR PASSED before Franci was drafted into the Imperial Royal Army and thereby forfeited two of his basic human rights: the right to his own life and the right not to take the life of another human being.

  He cherished two great ambitions in those days, but they had to be laid aside for the time being because his battalion was assigned to the Italian front.

  The first of his dreams was to pursue studies of phrenology in Vienna with Tancred Hauswolff—considered by a handful of like-minded psychoanalysts to be superior to Freud—who declared that he could reveal a person’s innermost inclinations and characteristics by simply passing his palms over the surfaces of the subject’s cranium. Dr. Hauswolff’s astonishing research was reported for all in the Magyar Estilap, a daily evening tabloid that served up to its readers sensational news from every corner of the world. My great-uncle could not resist the thought that someday he might become an outstanding interpreter of the dark depths of the human soul.

  The other dream was that of marrying Sara and having a family with her.

  THE TRAIN DEPARTED in late August from the western railway station where a ragtag crowd of men had assembled and a military band was playing high-spirited marches. Only Sara had come to wave farewell to her beloved. They stood together on the platform for a long time. They rocked back and forth, locked tightly in each other’s arms. Before he climbed aboard the train, full of disdain for all the dangers that awaited him, he promised Sara that they would begin their life together as soon as he came back from the war. That declaration made her burst into tears. With them at that moment came the vague foreboding that they would never, ever belong to each other, that she would miss him her whole life long, and that she would never find happiness with any other man.

  THE ITALIAN ARMY and an Austro-Hungarian army consisting principally of Hungarian nationals fought twelve great battles between June 1915 and November 1917 along the Isonzo River, hemmed in on the northeast by Italy’s highest mountains. Day and night the cannons spat their projectiles toward the positions in the mountain face and the bullets hailed down as the soldiers attempted to scale the heights. These violent encounters are held to have been the bloodiest of the First World War. Historians estimate the number of the fallen at half a million young men. And there were even more who came home alive but terribly injured, with mutilated limbs and lost illusions.

  My great-uncle came face-to-face with war at the third battle, which began on October 18, 1915. No one in his brigade slept a wink that night. Some prayed, while others devoted themselves to preparations and to cleaning their weapons. They were all awake, waiting for dawn. There was not a breath of wind. My great-uncle was nervous and could feel a knot in his stomach. He took a couple of deep breaths and thought of Sara. He heard her voice. She was speaking about love, saying that she was waiting for him. The thought of his future life with her chased away every trace of his fear. In a ringing voice an officer delivered the call to attack. The soldiers fired their rifles and the bravest of them began to move forward. The Italians answered their fire and the first of the comrades around my great-uncle fell. Many were martyred in the opening tumult. Several hours later the shooting died away to stillness, but the moment of silence was quickly broken by the sounds of renewed combat. It did not take long for my great-uncle to see that war was the invention of the devil himself; he himself had no quarrel with any of the Italians.

  On the final night of the sixth great clash along the Isonzo River—recorded in history books as the Battle of Gorizia—my great-uncle was on guard duty. By then he had served a full year on the front, not thinking too much about his luck or the misfortunes of others. His brigade was under orders to hold fast against the advancing Italians. He squinted through binoculars toward the plateau next to Doberdò del Lago where the enemy was encamped. He knew that he and his companions were surrounded and easy targets for Italian rifles. He suddenly felt the white-hot burning of a dumdum bullet as it pierced his uniform, bored into his chest, penetrated his left lung, and exploded with the force of a small grenade. He fell over, rolled about, and lay stretched out on the ground, confused and unable to move. He had never been afraid of dying, but now he could smell death approaching. He was filled with terror and regret. His brain burned with questions. He thought of all the young Italian men he had killed. He thought of Sara. He looked about, searching for her. It was a dark night and a myriad of stars were gleaming in the sky. The last thought that went through his head before he lost consciousness was that no one had taught him how to die with at least a little bit of dignity.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the eleventh day of that sixth battle, the Imperial Royal Army raised a white flag. A surrender document was signed by commanding officer Svetozar Boroević. The ceremony was short. Afterward Boroević offered the Italian chief of staff, Luigi Cadorna, French cognac to show that the war had not undermined his good manners in the least. The gentlemen exchanged a few pleasantries. When Boroević had assured himself that none of his closest adjutants was within earshot, he expressed his admiration for the Italian’s ingenious military strategy.

  Cadorna felt enormous pride at his triumph, the greatest of his career. As a reward to his men for their immense heroism, he had extra portions of spaghetti served to all. But the price of victory was so high for the Italians—fifteen thousand wounded and twenty thousand dead—that his exhausted soldiers did not even have the strength to congratulate one another on the defeat of the enemy.

  On the losers’ side the officers were busy for several days inspecting their decimated troops and preparing lists of the dead and missing. Great confusion reigned. There were emotional discussions and loudly declaimed prayers. After a week there were no further discoveries of warriors who had survived by taking refuge among the crags. Now the work could turn to sending letters of condolence to the families on the home front.

  SARA READ the official report and collapsed onto the floor. She wept and screamed, stammered and moaned at her misfortune and unhappiness. Along with her saliva and tears she spewed forth a rant of bitterness and desperation. She lay in bed for three days, weeping without interruption. She was completely exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and dazed from lack of sleep. She told herself she had to try to push aside the whole appalling nightmare.

/>   The awareness of Franci’s death lay over Sara like a dark cloud. Two months later, however, she had a dream. It returned to her each succeeding night. She could see that her love was still alive, and that dark-haired angels were taking care of him in Italy. She began to cherish a faint hope that the army leadership, in a sort of miracle, would discover that Franci had survived and had been taken prisoner by the Italians. A friend of a friend offered to check via his contacts within the Ministry of Defense in Vienna. Several weeks later he returned, expressed his deepest sympathy to her in the most polite terms, and unfolded a telegram with the brief reply that the report of the death of Franz Scharf had been confirmed.

  Sara’s lips began to tremble as if with fever. Tears ran from her unblinking eyes. “The greatest grief of all,” she said to her mother, who was trying to console her, “is that my children and my grandchildren will grow up without knowing who Franci was.”

  IT OCCURRED to my great-uncle when he came back to Budapest after two and a half years as an Italian prisoner of war that it would have been better if he had simply died there on the battlefield at Doberdò. That thought was his reaction to a terrible disappointment. As soon as he appeared, his sister told him that Sara had married and was expecting a child—who turned out to be my father. His sister tried to console him by saying that he could certainly find an attractive girl now that the war had taken the lives of so many men. There was a surplus of young women. She promised to make inquiries of an acquaintance, a lady of great standing with a wide circle of friends, who would be able to help him meet a Jewish girl of good family. My great-uncle was speechless. His hands shook and he shivered. He huddled as close to the hearth as possible to drive away the icy chill that invaded him. It did no good; he was bathed in perspiration. What is happening? he asked himself. He had never before felt this way, not as a child, not even in the trenches. And not in the military hospital outside Bologna where the nurses had cared for him for many months to restore his health before he was sent to the prisoner-of-war camp at Emilia-Romagna. Pain pierced his heart like a burning blade, and he was obliged to sit down, to breathe deeply, and to blink. A few seconds later—or, as it seemed to him, several decades later—as he opened his eyes once more, he saw only one way to escape his misery: by throwing himself into the Danube.