The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  ONE AFTERNOON there was a knock at the door. Their neighbor asked if he could borrow a little salt. Aron Reinherz was a pious Jew from Galicia. Many rumors about him circulated in the apartment building. My great-uncle and Elsa had their own worries and they were not interested in gossip. Even so, some of their neighbors’ talk had reached their ears.

  Aron Reinherz was reputed to be a good man who had suffered a life of terrible misfortune. His only daughter had gone one day to the mikvah, the ritual bath, where she had been seized with cramps and drowned. His elder son was killed on the Italian front in the war and the younger one died of the Spanish influenza. His wife had taken the losses so hard that her heart had simply stopped. Despite all this, Aron Reinherz was always good-humored, a man with a ready quip or jest wherever he went.

  REINHERZ WAS CLEVER and alert, and no one ever needed to explain anything to him. He simply knew it already. He was no philosopher; he was just a gentlemen’s tailor. He instantly grasped my great-uncle’s precarious situation and promised at once to arrange for a job with his cousin Herschele Jankelevitch, better known in Vienna as Hermann Jack.

  WHEN MY VISIBLY NERVOUS GREAT-UNCLE arrived at Circus Jack, he thought the place totally bizarre and despaired of finding any employment there. Then he entered the big circus tent and suddenly felt himself transported to another world. A jovial mood reigned within. A handful of people sat around a long table set up next to the animal cages. They were eating and drinking with great pleasure as a giant with an enormous mustache and thick bushy eyebrows was telling some convoluted tale in Russian. It seemed to be a hilarious story, as far as my great-uncle could make out. A kind of strange nobility shone in the giant’s face. My great-uncle immediately realized that in this tent there existed what he had long missed in Vienna: warmth, humor, and camaraderie.

  A gray-haired fatherly figure with steel-rim glasses riding low upon his large nose got up from the table and introduced himself as Hermann Jack. He welcomed the visitor with a congenial smile and invited him to join them at the table. Before taking his seat, my great-uncle told them he was Franz Scharf from Budapest. An elderly man asked if he happened to be related to Andrej Scharf. My great-uncle confirmed that Andrej had been his grandfather, and the man expressed his most profound admiration for the theater manager in Budapest. He offered my great-uncle a glass of a tasty but extremely strong alcoholic drink that he himself had distilled. My great-uncle was also urged to taste several delicate sausages and cheeses. Everyone around the table treated him well, as if they’d known him forever.

  After many a heartfelt laugh and an additional two glasses of the strong drink, he gathered his courage, turned to Hermann Jack, and declared, “I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in a long time. You’ve all made me feel at home.” In a hopeful voice he added, “Perhaps it’s too forward of me to ask if you might have some sort of job I could do for you?” He explained that his attempts to establish himself in Vienna and find work had so far met no success.

  The circus ringmaster pointed to a large poster on the wall featuring a clown with a red nose and a tragicomical expression. “Our dear friend André, the chief attraction of the circus, has been promoted. He is now keeping the angels amused. He never came out of the anesthetic after his operation for gallstones. You can be his successor. A good clown needs a few years on him and has to have experienced plenty of misfortune. True, you’re young, but I can see by your eyes that tragedy is no stranger in your life. Fate has brought you all sorts of defeats. For that very reason I can see a place for you in the circus. We’ll teach you to do magic tricks and lots more. From now on your name will be—Fernando!”

  CIRCUS JACK was one of Vienna’s most popular institutions. The audience was constituted principally of working-class families with children, and they were delighted to have something better than the amateur artists so typical among itinerant entertainers in the suburbs. Hermann Jack had attracted a number of unrivaled international stars: the bearded Neapolitan sisters with enormous breasts and bulging backsides who gleefully sang romantic arias in Italian while riding around the ring on their unicycles; the world’s smallest dwarf, who dressed as a Roman senator with a laurel wreath on his head and drove around triumphantly in a carriage drawn by four Icelandic ponies; the one-legged English sailor George, who was shot from a cannon and disappeared into space; the Russian giant Oleg, who swallowed rats alive, burst strong chains with his teeth, and had a bus loaded with twenty people drive across his chest; the Italian triplets Uno, Bruno, and Duno, who performed death-defying acrobatic numbers. The repertory also featured the most professionally accomplished tightrope dancers, trapeze artists, lion tamers, and Indian snake charmer ever to grace a circus ring in Vienna. Just as impressive was Circus Jack’s collection of exotic animals: a fat pig with five legs, a few stumpy Lipizzaner horses, and an irresistibly charming little monkey with unusually long arms.

  My great-uncle performed as a clown and magician. Six days a week he stood in the ring wearing a red potato nose, a glowing golden wig, shoes that were far too big for him, and an enormous belly that made him look as if he had swallowed three dozen billiard balls. At first his stance was awkward and his dancing was hopeless. But he rehearsed and repeated his number endlessly and worked single-mindedly to perfect it; his goal was to raise his art to a level that exceeded even that of the most highly polished illusionists. He opened his number by holding his black top hat out to people and showing its empty white bottom. After establishing in this way that his art was not to be doubted and stood above any suspicion of deceitful manipulation, he waved his magic wand and described complicated gestures in thin air. Then with exaggeratedly precise movements and an intent expression he began to pull quantities of bright multicolored paper ribbons from the hat. Eventually he filled the whole ring with a rustling mass that seemed to have no end to it.

  Fernando always got thunderous applause, not so much for his abilities as a magician as for his charmingly foolish antics. They appealed to the child in all of us and set the whole audience roaring with laughter.

  ELSA DID NOT SHARE her husband’s delight with circus life. She found it hard to understand how he could thrive and feel normal in that collection of—to use her words—“ridiculous creatures.”

  As for her, she sat home all day long, waiting patiently for his return. The old sewing machine she had purchased at the flea market hummed from morning to night next to the kitchen window as she made ladies’ blouses for a shop. Her German was broken at best. She was embarrassed that there were so many words she did not understand. She rarely ventured outside the house, especially because she had begun to suffer from asthma and her vision had deteriorated. Her isolation from everything and everyone became more pronounced as the years went by. Her thoughts and feelings, all the sorrows that had fastened themselves to her like tar, were sealed up in words that she never shared with anyone.

  Some of those days she felt deeply unhappy because her husband was so seldom home. But to preserve the peace she never raised the subject with him.

  FROM TIME TO TIME Elsa suspected that my great-uncle was seeing other women and that like his grandfather he had illegitimate children all over Vienna. The thought of this would set her weeping hysterically, and she would totter across the way to Aron Reinherz, mostly because there was no one else in whom she could confide.

  She actually didn’t like visiting the old Jew, because of the foul air in his lodging. It was never cleaned or aired out, the air was warm and stuffy, clumps of dust covered the floor, and spiderwebs stretched across every corner. The bed was unmade and the sheets bore traces of bedbugs. Several times Elsa caught herself contemplating the impossible: asking her neighbor why he never cleaned up and then offering to take care of it for him.

  She knocked on the door but she rarely managed to put into words the miseries that weighed her down. Aron Reinherz could read them all with a single glance.

  “Just remember, too much thinking can drive a person mad,” he said
gently. Then he assured her that no man was more faithful than her husband. He counseled her to go to synagogue instead of leaving herself prey to evil thoughts and depression. Instead, she should pray to have a child.

  “I am no prophet,” Aron Reinherz said, “but I am sure that a prophecy whispered into my ears by Providence will be fulfilled. It will not be long before you find yourself with child. Perhaps even with two. And when there are children at home, your husband will be there with you.”

  After a time Elsa began to feel less agitated and started to talk about various other aspects of her everyday life.

  “This must remain between the two of us,” Elsa said, when she had regained her composure. “Not a word to anyone. My husband would only misunderstand and think that I was accusing him.”

  After visiting her neighbor she went outside to the street, filled her lungs with fresh air, and took the trolley to the Church of Our Lady of Succor. She sat in the empty church deep in thought and remembered her mother’s good advice: A woman must incite her husband’s desire if she is to keep him and get her own way.

  Embracing a man was also a way of controlling him. But what if one felt only a vague discomfort in such close physical contact? Was a woman lost if she felt no desire? A shiver passed through Elsa as she thought of her husband. Everything suggested that he was suffering from the disruption of his sex life. He was her lord and master, and it was her duty to please him. She concluded that a man’s sexual drives were a necessary evil that woman must endure. That was the way of the world. So she lit a candle and prayed to the Virgin Mary to make her fertile.

  LATE THAT EVENING, when my great-uncle came back to a home shrouded in darkness, Elsa unfastened his trousers and pulled him into bed, meekly opening her legs and allowing him to penetrate her. His orgasm was almost instantaneous, and the knotted tension of his body relaxed. But once it was over, he felt disappointed. He yearned for something more than cold hands and chilly sex.

  A few weeks after this Elsa discovered that she was with child. That pregnancy lasted only three months. She miscarried again, the fourth time in recent years.

  AT FIRST my great-uncle would tell Elsa all sorts of tales about his life with the circus. When it became clear that she was not interested, he lapsed into silence at the dinner table. They hardly exchanged a word anymore. He did what he could to lighten the mood at home, even when he was most despondent over the gloomy marriage into which he had thrown himself so thoughtlessly. He felt more resigned with each passing day. Eventually he tired of Elsa entirely and was no longer pained at the thought of having married the wrong woman, this uneducated, contrary creature whose thin, ailing body was worthless except for an occasional brief bout of copulation in the dark.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE rarely bothered to go home after the matinee performance. He went instead to the nearby Waldvogel Tavern to spend his free time. He usually arrived at about half past five and always sat at the same table. He ordered the cheapest fare on the menu. He was not much given to alcohol and would drink only a single beer. But he always brought his chess game, and there was generally someone to play with.

  For some people the game of chess offers exhilaration and escape. That’s how my great-uncle experienced it. As a ten-year-old he had learned how to play from a neighbor, a scrawny butcher, also Jewish and just as poor as everyone else in their building. The butcher was kindhearted, unlike my great-uncle’s perpetually drunken father, who struck his children with violence, shouted, and erupted in tantrums. An encouraging word, a pat on the shoulder, and a kindly look could have gotten Franci to do absolutely anything, but his father’s approach to child rearing denied him all of that. In contrast, the butcher warmly greeted the children of the apartment house and initiated the young boys into the magical world of chess. Because he was endowed with a lively imagination, Franci adored the game, even though he found the theory of opening gambits completely uninteresting. After the butcher died, the children could no longer play chess and returned to dreary reality. But my great-uncle never forgot the indescribable pleasure he associated with those black-and-white chess pieces.

  HE WENT to the Waldvogel Tavern not only to play chess but also, and just as important, to talk with other people. He found it easy to fall into conversation and enjoyed the back-and-forth of it. He would regularly lean back comfortably on a chair with his legs crossed and a cigarette between his lips, and as he sipped a beer he would shower his new acquaintances with questions. Why had they come to Vienna? What were they doing in the city? He would shift the conversation gradually to their pasts and to their political views. He didn’t say much about himself, and if someone reproached him for that, he always gave a disarming laugh.

  “If you were to hear about my life,” he used to say, “it wouldn’t give you any pleasure. My existence has always been humdrum and devoid of interest.”

  THE COZY PUBLIC ROOM in the tavern was a meeting place for men who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. These rootless creatures spent their time playing chess and discussing politics.

  In a world that was becoming ever more divided and complicated, these idlers regularly indulged in stirring declarations. They were ready to offer cures for all the world’s ills. Some advocated anarchism, others Marxism. Some set their hopes on Zionism, while the socialists among them maintained that Lenin was not as bad as the bourgeois press in Vienna painted him. Certain of them maintained that the salvation of mankind lay in psychoanalysis; others advocated terror as a weapon against the oppression of the authorities.

  On Tuesday evenings the tavern was crowded with a group of younger men. These deluded poets drank new ale in great quantities and dreamed of transforming the art of verse by rediscovering the use of powerful metaphor and bold expression. They worshipped youth, which they predicted would blow away all the outmoded quaintness of contemporary structures and performance. They invoked the deadly beauty of lightning and yearned for the day when the heavens would unleash their unavoidable destiny. They were always high-spirited as they read their latest works out loud to one another. Almost every week one or several would feel faint with the excitement.

  MATHÄUS FROMBICHLER was a talented chess player, a bold attacker perfectly willing to sacrifice a piece or two to set up a checkmate. People said that before the war he had played to a draw with Emanuel Lasker. Grand master Lasker had visited Vienna at the invitation of the Socialist Party and played twenty-six simultaneous games, winning twenty-two of them. Four ended with a draw.

  The only opponent to whom Frombichler regularly lost was his friend Adi. They had met during their school years in Linz. Two desolate souls, they had trailed miserably behind their classmates and been held back several times. Both felt that they had suffered indignities. They shared an implacable hatred of authority and often disagreed with their teachers. They found each other quickly and remained inseparable for life.

  Frombichler was clearly the better chess player. One time he opened a match with a dashing forward thrust of pawns along either side of the board and then attacked Adi’s center from the sides. He won in about twenty moves. Adi was already in a foul humor that day and the ignominious defeat affected him badly. He became so furious that he pulled out a pistol and tried to fire it at Frombichler. Luckily, several people were close by and one of them snatched the weapon out of the hands of the hot-blooded Adi. Frombichler almost had a heart attack. He decided that from that day on he would allow Adi to win. At the same time, he felt a grim gratitude toward his friend for not having killed him.

  IN THEIR YOUNGER DAYS Adi had been capable of flying into a rage at almost anything. Frombichler told my great-uncle about it and gave as an example something that happened one freezing January night in 1913. Dr. Trotsky came to play chess at the Waldvogel Tavern, accompanied by a swarthy Georgian with a bristling mustache.

  Trotsky came every Wednesday to seek company and was valued by everyone for his elaborate politeness and his admirable conversational gifts. But his guest, dressed in heavy dirty boo
ts and a ragged overcoat, had the manners of a real peasant and was incapable of polite conversation. On the other hand, he was a remarkable chess player, at his best in the middle game where he had mastered a great variety of clever and complicated moves. Forceful attacks on the king were his specialty, and his opponents rarely survived them. He moved the pieces with his left hand even though it was somewhat withered. He made short work of everyone in the tavern.

  Trotsky called him “Koba.” Some say that his real name was Josef Dzhugashvili. Others used his nickname: Stalin.

  In his last match he played against Adi, who had learned that very day of his failure for the second time to pass the entrance exam for the Art Academy. Adi glowered his dislike for the Georgian throughout the evening. He was determined to defeat that unpleasant individual at any price. He quivered with almost unbearable tension. But after only eight moves he fell directly into a trap.

  Adi felt deeply humiliated. He began to perspire, his temperature rose, his hands trembled, and he saw black specks before his eyes. The Georgian smiled slyly, clapped Adi on the shoulder, and said, “Spasiba.” This was no more than an innocent word of thanks, Adi knew that, but he had never heard the Russian word before. The momentary touch shot through him like an electric shock. He was trembling with fury and could hardly control his hands. He felt a murderous urge to assault the fellow. It was a sudden attack of insanity, a hatred that he could not suppress. For a moment he almost gave way to the impulse to reach out and seize the Georgian by the throat. But he realized there were too many witnesses, so he managed to restrain himself.

  Trotsky and his guest left the tavern shortly afterward. Adi followed them, murder in his heart. After they had walked a considerable distance in the cold air he came back to his senses and calmed down somewhat. When he returned to the tavern, he shouted so everyone could hear him that he hated people from Eastern Europe. His shock of hair swayed over his forehead, his hands contorted in the air, and his voice rose to a falsetto as he vowed one day to take the life of that swarthy Georgian with the big mustache.