The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Everyone knew that when it came down to it, Adi was a decent fellow. But his curious outbursts and screaming were not good for business. Because of that remarkable performance, Julius Waldvogel formally banished him from the tavern.

  I DON’T KNOW exactly when my great-uncle and Frombichler first met, but I do know that at first he found Frombichler extremely annoying. It bothered him that in the middle of a chess match Frombichler would often get wound up talking about this Adi fellow. The more experienced older Eastern European immigrants kept their distance from Frombichler when for no reason at all he would trot out his friend’s visions of improving the world. Most of the immigrants avoided playing chess with him.

  AT THE CLOSE of the Great War Adi had been lying in the hospital, a victim of poison gas. He had plenty of time for reflection. He then made the rounds of the offices of all of Vienna’s major architects with his portfolio of sketches without securing a single offer of employment. His watercolors had been met with indifference at the art galleries. He was deeply disappointed by his Austrian countrymen. They were obvious degenerates, he declared, and he moved to Munich, a city where he had yearned to live since his boyhood.

  In his new home country, he discarded his paintbrush and tossed aside his palette, since his lack of success showed he had no future as an artist. He tried his luck at politics instead and became the chairman of a newly established German political party. In hissing consonants and with thundering vowels he spewed tirades about morality, racial purity, the mission of the Germans, and the treachery of the Slavs.

  Frombichler’s contention was that Adi brought hope to a German working class ravaged by alcoholism, syphilis, tuberculosis, and nervous disorders. He commented that with those frantic harangues in various Bavarian inns his friend had made scoffers choke on their laughter—all those people who had mocked him for his short stature and comical mustache—and predicted that with his unprecedented power over the emotions of his audience, Adi soon would have the whole German nation at his feet. Frombichler even went so far as to say that he could foresee a coming world revolution led by his friend, one that would eliminate expressions such as “mine” and “yours” from human consciousness. He spoke of the firestorm that Adi and his inflexible strength of will was setting in motion, a burning feeling of new purpose that would ignite even the underclasses of the direst slums.

  “The time will soon come,” Frombichler declared, “when workers will no longer put up with poverty, begging, and apathy. All they have to do is listen to my friend Adi and be bold. Playing chess is a fine way to sharpen one’s senses.”

  Adi wound up in jail after a failed coup attempt. Frombichler suddenly wasn’t speaking about him so often, and sometimes when he did, his voice was dull, with no trace of his former enthusiasm. Everyone in the tavern could see he was bitterly disappointed by his friend in Munich, particularly because Adi had dropped his theme of class struggle in favor of an anti-Semitic devil myth: the depiction of the Jews, first within the bourgeoisie and later in the founding of Marxism, as a people striving to dominate the world. Because he himself was half Jewish, Frombichler felt betrayed when he found that Adi’s anti-Semitism was not only incidental pandering to popular discontent but was in fact the very core of his friend’s political mission. Frombichler continued to annoy his chess opponents with his chatter, but now it consisted chiefly of tales about his own family.

  FROMBICHLER WAS HEAVYSET and compact, raised on starchy food, the son of peasants, imprinted from an early age with the notion that bread and meat were essentials. His face was round and his head bald; his eyebrows formed one thick line and his bull neck was furrowed with deep wrinkles. There was something wrong with one of his feet, and he limped badly. He was a curious sight whenever he got up from the chessboard to make his way to the toilet. But in the kitchen of the Hotel Imperial, where he was employed as a cook, he was agile and alert, perfectly suited to his life among the pots and pans.

  Sometimes my great-uncle was seized by a dark suspicion that Frombichler was not always entirely truthful—not because he thought that Mathäus was a liar or a fabricator but because many of the events in his accounts of his family were so bizarre that it was difficult to imagine they could actually have occurred.

  Karl, the first to bear the family name of Frombichler, married in 1601. Since his wife’s dowry consisted of several acres of fertile land, he took up residence in the village of Güttenbach in Burgenland, the same region where his ancestors, proprietors of their own farms and imbued with an ancient sense of dignity and honor, had cultivated their fields for hundreds of years. The people of Mathäus’s mother were not as firmly rooted. She came from a family of Jews and had grown up in the splendid Biederhof castle, some forty kilometers southeast of Vienna. Her maternal grandfather was said to have been a finance minister for the double monarchy, serving as trusted counselor to Kaiser Franz Josef. In addition, the family, whose ancestors included several famous philosophers, had moved all about Europe.

  “My Jewish lineage offers not just enough to fill a book,” Frombichler said adamantly, “but enough for a whole library. You have no idea what sorts of legends feature the Spinoza family. The fictions of writers are childish fantasies compared with what happened to my forefathers. Fiction is no match for reality. When you know what actually happened, you don’t have to make up fanciful stories. That’s why it’s easier to catch up with a liar than with a lame old dog.”

  What awakened my great-uncle’s serious interest in those accounts was the fact that Frombichler once happened to mention that he had some cousins in Budapest. He immediately added that he didn’t particularly care for them, for when his maternal grandfather’s fortune was divided, his uncles refused to be moved by any feelings of brotherly affection. His mother received nothing because she had married a Gentile, a man who to top it off was a farmer’s son. He was particularly incensed at his cousin Nathan who, according to his version, had for no justifiable reason appropriated the most valuable possession of the family: philosopher Benjamin Spinoza’s invaluable treatise The Elixir of Immortality.

  “Nathan—you don’t mean Nathan Spinoza, do you?” my great-uncle asked, his pulse suddenly accelerating. “The Nathan Spinoza who married Sara Neumann?”

  “Yes, in fact, that’s my cousin. Do you know him?”

  “No, I don’t. The fact is, I’ve never met him. But it’s certainly a small world. You see, he married my wife’s cousin Sara, the most wonderful woman on earth. We grew up together, so I know. Now you’ll have to tell me more about your family. I want to know everything there is to know about the Spinozas.”

  UP TO THAT POINT my great-uncle thought he had succeeded in burying his love for Sara in a deep dark hole inside him. The many pleasures of the work at Circus Jack had almost allowed him to forget her. But the fire that had been burning inside had not entirely gone out, and the name of Nathan Spinoza made it blaze up fiercely. Suddenly he felt a sick longing for Sara. Buried memories came to the surface as if pulled up from some deep mine shaft inside him. He again felt the stir of her breath against the top of his head and the pressure of her breasts against his chest as they embraced in the kitchen of his childhood home. He recalled the happy delusion of hope for the future that her love had inspired in him.

  AFTER HER FOURTH MISCARRIAGE Elsa remained in bed for several weeks, listless and melancholy. One afternoon she heard a feeble knocking at the door. She got up and staggered to the door. When she opened it, her neighbor Aron Reinherz stood there. He saw instantly that she was not doing well and inquired about her condition. Elsa tried to wave away the question, but the old Jew understood. He consoled her with some entertaining anecdotes and offered to accompany her to visit a Tatar princess from Baku who had been forced by the 1917 Revolution to leave Russia. She now had a practice in the suburb of Simmering, where she cured all sorts of ailments with essential oils of flowers and plants.

  People came from afar to Olga Bashkir. She not only sold the oils, flowers,
and plants but also prescribed how long one should inhale their odors, always while seated and never for more than ten minutes a day. For high blood pressure she recommended inhaling woodland geranium; rosemary was best for asthma; and she cured backaches with bay laurel. She raised the flowers and plants in her own garden.

  The princess advised Elsa to take Siberian lily (Lilium pensylvanicum). She said to inhale the flower’s perfume for eight minutes each day for three weeks.

  “I don’t smell anything,” Elsa said suspiciously. “This flower has no perfume at all.”

  “No flower produces a scent for its own sake; it emits its perfume for someone else,” Olga Bashkir explained patiently. “You must gently rub the stalk so that the flower becomes aware of your interest. It will then render up its perfume. It seeks to please everyone, and every touch elicits its perfume. Siberian lily will cure you, meine Frau. It will infuse your womb with blood. With a little passionate assistance from your husband, you will provide him with as many offspring as he can possibly wish. But I must warn you: If one inhales the scent of the Siberian lily for too long, the children will inevitably be girls.”

  Elsa begged Aron Reinherz to say nothing to her husband about the visit to the Tatar princess. He nodded his understanding.

  ON A COLD OCTOBER DAY in 1929, called Black Thursday by historians because of the stock market crash on Wall Street, Else gave birth to twins. The two girls, radiantly beautiful, were both in fine health.

  As my great-uncle peered into their little faces he saw that one of them had a marked resemblance to his maternal grandmother, while the other’s features were a perfect copy of his mother’s. He was happy beyond words.

  “I would like very much,” he said humbly, “to give the girls the names of my sainted mother and my blessed grandmother, Annuskya and Margit.”

  At that time everyone knew my great-uncle as “Fernando,” except for his wife—she still used his childhood nickname.

  “Franci,” Elsa answered, “those are splendid names. I’m happy to give them to the girls. But even more than that, I want to honor you. So let us to call them Anci and Manci.”

  SINCE THE FIRST DAY Elsa set foot in Vienna she had yearned to return to Budapest. That desire haunted her and held her for all those years. She had never discussed her secret dream. Once home from the hospital, she gave in to its insistent call and suggested to my great-uncle that it might perhaps be a good idea to go home to the family in Budapest to show them the twins.

  He wouldn’t hear of it.

  His pretexts were thin. He claimed that he didn’t have enough money, he couldn’t stand his mother-in-law, he was doing splendidly in Vienna, and he couldn’t get any time off from Circus Jack.

  The real reason that he wanted to stay away from the city of his birth forever was entirely different, of course: Sara. His reluctance was mixed with a strange apprehension, as if he feared he would somehow be disappointed. It was as if coming face-to-face with Sara again would destroy his vision of true love, the dizziness that had blinded him one February afternoon long ago, when he was only fifteen and their hands met and their fingers intertwined in the age-old game of touching, squeezing, and caressing.

  THE TRAIN SET OFF toward Vienna. Hermann Jack sat slumped in a corner, silent and downcast, worn out from a long succession of sleepless nights and burned out from hundreds of late-night cigarettes. He was confronting a crisis. Everyone knew that business was terrible; all those empty seats were mute witnesses to that. And they could all see that the ringmaster was distracted, uneasy, and more bleary-eyed than ever before. He had done his best for a long time, striving to keep from his circus family the truth about their finances. When a Hungarian friend promised to make some helpful introductions to prospective lenders, he took the train to Budapest in one last desperate attempt to put his financial house in order. Not one of his Viennese creditors was willing to provide more support. They had been patient with Hermann Jack for a remarkably long time, overlooking his inability to pay down the principal on his loans, but recently he had begun to receive threatening letters written in insulting language. The Depression had emptied everyone’s pockets, and lenders had become noticeably more coldhearted. Most were refusing all requests for extensions or renegotiation. They now insisted that unless he pay up by September 14, 1931, they would ignore his pleas, foreclose upon Circus Jack, and force it into bankruptcy. The meetings in Budapest had come to nothing, and Herman Jack had only thirty-six hours left before the deadline.

  He closed his eyes and imagined he heard something. It sounded as if an enormous wheel was breaking loose beneath his secure universe, rolling toward him and his circus, pitiless and uncontrolled, about to carry them into the abyss. At that instant the idea came to him. He had neither wife nor children, and the circus was his only family. The next morning he would take out a policy insuring his life for a huge amount of money, and that evening he would kill himself. The circus would be saved and he would not fail his friends and employees.

  When Hermann Jack asked himself if he was afraid to die, he had to admit that unfortunately he was not a particularly courageous soul. The thought of physical suffering had always frightened him terribly. He knew he would have to devise some simple, rapid way of taking his own life. In the moment that followed he heard a violent crash. For a thousandth of a second he experienced a strange weightlessness.

  ———

  EXACTLY TWENTY minutes after midnight on September 13, 1931, the Vienna Express was dynamited on the railway viaduct outside the little town of Biatorbágy, some thirty kilometers west of Budapest. The locomotive and the first six carriages plunged into a deep ravine. The next morning rescue teams found twenty-two mangled cadavers in the twisted, burned-out railway cars. One of the bodies bore on the ring finger of its right hand a gold signet ring with the engraved initials H.J.

  A VIOLENT QUARREL erupted immediately after the people of Circus Jack received the news of Hermann Jack’s death. It had nothing to do with impending seizure and bankruptcy, for none of them had had any illusions about circus finances. The dispute was whether Jack was a Jew or a Catholic. Where should his remains—if indeed they were his, since they were burned beyond recognition—be buried? The circus divided into opposing camps. Finally the Gordian knot was cut by the Russian giant Oleg, who suggested a nonreligious funeral at a Protestant cemetery. After hours of discussion they voted and unanimously accepted his proposal.

  Several hundred people attended the funeral. My great-uncle stood there in his black suit, mute and freezing. He could not bring himself to heave even a single sigh. The whole situation was simply too unreal. Of course, he was grieving at the loss of his friend and mentor who lay there in the coffin, a blackened tangle of bones. All around him he saw people he did not recognize, people who were wailing with grief and flooding the place with their tears.

  A Catholic priest—Hermann Jack’s nephew who had converted when still a young man—approached the grave, and the Jews began shouting. Everyone sensed that something momentous was about to happen. Within seconds a bloody fistfight broke out between the groups of different religious faiths. Friendships of long years’ duration were pounded to pieces.

  THE FIRE that had consumed the sections of the train was still smoldering when a state of emergency was proclaimed in Hungary. Every paragraph in the constitution related to freedoms and human rights was set aside. As regent and head of state, Admiral Horthy was not particularly interested in arresting the culprits, since he had more important things to deal with. It was clear that his principal aim was to jail troublesome political opponents.

  Two weeks later the police arrested the Hungarian Szilveszter Matuska at his home in Vienna. Without the least expression of remorse he confessed his responsibility for the attack as well as for five other train bombings he had carried out earlier in Germany. He was even proud of his accomplishments. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. And that cleared up the affair, most people thought.

  But that wa
s only the beginning. In the weeks that followed, the conservative Hungarian press published a lengthy series of impassioned articles blaming the deed upon the communists. Two prominent Jewish members of the Communist Party were promptly arrested. Even though their alibis were watertight, they were condemned to death for the Biatorbágy bombing. Everyone knew the truth. In the liberal press, in parliament, and in the general public there arose an outcry demanding that the men be released. Vigorous protests were organized across the world. The Horthy regime paid no attention to any of that. Sándor Fürst and Imre Sallai were hanged two weeks after their trial.

  EARLY ON THE MORNING of July 15, 1927, the workers at Vienna’s electricity plant cut off the power. That was the signal for people to abandon their places of work for a march on parliament. A couple of months earlier, a faction of illegal right-wing vigilantes had murdered a number of demonstrating Social Democrats. A court in Vienna had released the killers, even though they admitted firing upon the demonstrators. The day after that verdict, tens of thousands of workers marched on parliament in protest. Mounted police drove them back. The workers armed themselves with paving stones and surrounded the Palace of Justice. Soon, approximately two hundred thousand people were in the streets. Some carried pails of gasoline. Toward lunchtime the Palace of Justice went up in flames. Fire trucks were immediately dispatched to the blaze, but the masses of humanity refused to let them through. Confronted with this situation, the police chief made the decision to equip six hundred policemen with rifles and dumdum bullets to disperse the crowds. The police fired wildly in every direction. Men and women, children and the elderly, and even four policemen were mowed down. In all, eighty-nine were killed and more than a thousand were wounded. The doctors at the hospital told journalists that not even during wartime had they seen such carnage caused by firearms.