The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  The emperor’s mood improved markedly after a while, and he began to think of his life in a more positive light. He told his friend Jakob, “Your book has given me new faith in life. I doubt that there exists any greater wisdom than that contained by these covers. Therefore I advise you to burn this dangerous book. Human beings are not yet ready for some truths.”

  EVERY NIGHT BERNHARD WAITED, quivering in anticipation, for the others in the house to fall asleep. Ariadne’s body was the center of his world. Her fragrance intoxicated him. He loved her soft breasts, her thin belly, her moist sex, and her pouting lower lip. But more than anything else he loved her small hands and the way they playfully caressed his member. Nothing was more important to him than the hour he spent alone with her at night. When he was certain that everyone else was sleeping, he tiptoed into Ariadne’s room. The touch of her skin made the rest of the world disappear for him.

  ON A NIGHT OF THUNDERSTORMS after Bernhard had been forced to wait an extra-long time for everyone to drift off, he arrived, feverish with anticipation, in the room of his beloved. But Ariadne whispered tearfully to him, “I can’t, I can’t. No matter how much I want to, I can’t satisfy you, my darling.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, dismayed.

  “I’m with child.”

  She was fifteen; he was seventeen. I was never able to discover which of them had the notion that the only escape from a situation that became more hopelessly complicated with every passing day was to run away from Biederhof. One night they sneaked out of the house and made their way by fits and starts to Budapest, where they managed to get properly married in an outlying neighborhood, joined by a drunken local mayor who wasn’t too demanding and didn’t require any documentation from youngsters nowhere near the legal age of consent.

  Six months later Moricz made his entry into their world.

  JAKOB’S FIFTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY was a tremendous day. That very afternoon the emperor was to grant him a title of nobility and appoint him minister of finance. The ceremony took place in the left wing of the Hofburg, opened in honor of the occasion after reconstruction and restoration work that had taken five years to complete. More than three hundred prominent guests were invited to experience the gleaming splendor of the Habsburg residence at the ceremony for the Jew Jakob Spinoza.

  It began as a festive occasion. Franz Josef was in an especially good humor. Standing straight and tall, bristling with the bushy sideburns that had long been the instantly recognizable symbol of imperial power, he beamed, impeccable and splendid, above the reverently bowed heads of his subjects.

  He offered a number of pompous remarks and then dubbed his friend “von Spinoza,” pinning upon his chest the Grand Cross of the Order of Maria Teresa, First Class. This was a rare honor. At that time only six other individuals held the distinction of the highest rank of the Grand Cross. All were military officers from the finest noble families. No Jew had ever received such a distinction. Nor had any Jew ever been appointed to a ministerial post in Austria.

  Franz Josef seated himself upon the throne. Jakob stood alone in the middle of the enormous hall. Obviously deeply touched upon this momentous occasion, he delivered brief remarks in a tremulous voice, expressing his profound gratitude for the inconceivable honor accorded to him. He instructed the servants to fill everyone’s glass with champagne so he could propose a toast, not only to His Majesty the Emperor but also to the memory of the woman who had been like a mother to him and had most instructed him in life, but who unfortunately could not share that moment: Chiara Luzzatto.

  The sound of popping champagne corks filled the hall. A couple of them flew high into the air. One of them described an arc directly over the heads of those nearby and struck the harness supporting the colossal crystal chandelier from Arnošt Gruša’s renowned workshop in Bohemia. The chandelier fell to the floor with a deafening crash. Directly beneath it lay Austria’s newly appointed minister of finance. The only visible part of the dead man was a large nose, protruding from the heap of broken crystal.

  IT PROBABLY HAPPENED in the early summer of 1964, since my grandfather was already in his grave by then. My brother, Sasha, and I, fully fourteen years of age, were playing with a ball in the bedroom the two of us shared with our grandmother. We were pretending we were at the European Cup soccer finals at the Prater Stadium in Vienna, at the match between Inter and Real Madrid. I was the quick-footed Italian Sandro Mazzola and easily kept the ball away from Sasha, who represented the entire Spanish defense, and I slammed a powerful arching shot against the night table that represented the goal. The ball rebounded directly up in the air and struck the large dark painting hanging on the wall.

  The portrait was of grandmother’s mother, Miriam Neumann, as painted by an amateur artist in 1907. She was thirty-nine years old at that time but she looked much older, an elderly figure with a bleak expression.

  The painting fell to the floor with a crash. My great-uncle was in the kitchen negotiating a miserably small loan from Grandmother, since the five hundred dollars he got from the Salt Lake City Mormons for his autobiography had long been nothing but a memory. The noise brought them both rushing into the bedroom. Grandmother was completely outraged. “How can you do something like this to me? Why can’t you leave my beloved mother in peace? Isn’t anything sacred to you? What horrible children!” And so on, and so on—I can’t remember everything she screamed. She was about to slap us both, but the lady on duty at the building entrance unexpectedly came to our assistance. Grandmother heard the doorbell, and it immediately distracted her from our offense and her grief; she hurried to the front door to get the latest news from the neighborhood, which the all-knowing concierge always generously shared with her.

  My great-uncle helped us hang the portrait in its place once again. With a stern look he admonished us to be careful.

  “It’s a bad omen, disturbing the dead,” he said. “One should never awaken them from their sleep. They’ve earned their rest. No one has the right to make them come back as ghosts.”

  I often wondered why my great-grandmother’s eyes appeared so sorrowful. Her dark look was the last thing I saw every evening before going to sleep and the first thing that met my eyes in the morning, because the gloomy painting hung directly opposite the double bed that Sasha and I shared. Was she annoyed with me? I took the question to my great-uncle, who was always ready to provide answers to difficult issues. He reassured me that her sorrow had nothing to do with me. It was because she was lonely.

  “It’s almost impossible to describe in words how very lonely a person can feel,” he commented. “And Miriam, I should tell you, was an extremely lonely person. She was alone throughout her life.”

  Without our having to ask, my great-uncle took the opportunity to do what he loved most: tell us a story. With a somber voice he began to recount Miriam’s childhood in the shadow of her father, oppressed and unloved in the hovels and the crowds of children in Galicia—to be more exact, in the obscure village of Chertnow, rarely visited by outsiders, where Jews lived in their voluntary isolation, their destiny steered by the zaddik Menachem, reputed to have mysterious powers and held in awe by Hasidic Jews throughout Eastern Europe.

  After a considerable time he got up, stood there for a moment, looked around in the room as if to make sure that Grandmother was nowhere near, and then lowered his voice.

  “I’m going to tell you a secret, boys.”

  I imagined that he was about to reveal some dramatic details about the magical powers of the zaddik. But the secret he shared with us had to do with something completely different.

  “Some time before the death of her father,” he whispered, “Miriam suddenly had an irresistible desire to have a child. The child’s father was poor, a stranger, young, a fair number of years younger than she was—almost a boy, with no home of his own, a refugee from Belarus. He stayed in Chertnow only for a short time, just long enough to catch his breath, and then he set out immediately into the world again.”


  SASHA AND I could scarcely believe our ears. The revelation that Grandmother had never known her father made me feel sad for her. I went hurrying off to offer my sympathy. Standing at the stove, she stuck her thumb into the potato soup, and then licked it. “Not too warm, not too cold,” she pronounced with satisfaction. I told her what we had just heard, thinking that my consideration would please her. Instead of thanking me, she began shouting. She was frightfully angry at me—but curiously enough, not at Sasha—for having listened to such bad-mouthed talk and believing it. Then she gave my great-uncle a terrible scolding for spreading wicked lies and trying to mislead two innocent young boys.

  “My mother, may her memory be blessed, was an honorable woman, the widow of a respected merchant in Chertnow! He was a good man, and I’m proud to be his daughter.”

  She spat out a few vehement sentences in German. We didn’t understand what she was saying, but my great-uncle certainly did. He was visibly intimidated.

  My brother and I sat down on the sofa and followed with awed attention the theatrical spectacle of the adults shouting and gesturing wildly. We weren’t used to that sort of thing in our quiet house. We actually should have been frightened by it, but the quarrel had seemed so unreal that we felt torn between dismay and laughter.

  Grandmother blazed with anger. My great-uncle raised his arms to heaven and called upon God to witness his innocence. Grandmother raised her voice even more. “I am absolutely scandalized. Franci, you have shamed me in front of my grandchildren. This is an absolute horror. Aren’t you ashamed! That with your mouth you should dare to speak the name of my sainted mother!”

  German invective again filled the air. My great-uncle’s face was ashen. Rivulets of sweat ran down his forehead. He tottered to the front door and slammed it behind him.

  It was only a very long time afterward that I next encountered my great-uncle. That was the following year, at Sasha’s funeral.

  MIRIAM NEUMANN was poor but not in the least simple-minded or past her prime. She wasn’t particularly good-looking, true, but she didn’t deserve to be alone or resigned to her fate. She wasn’t tall; she was thick of body and round of build. With a black kerchief tightly knotted under her chin, she looked like a maid or a peasant girl. She was in her very late twenties and still a spinster. The reason that she never married remains a mystery to me.

  It seemed astonishing to those in her hometown that she hadn’t found a husband. The inhabitants of Chertnow exploited family connections for such arrangements, but it was also possible to employ a matchmaker. In certain cases community leaders were asked to send letters to their counterparts in nearby settlements in Galicia. In some way or other, sooner or later an eligible bachelor always turned up. Never in human memory had any Jewish woman of the town had to despair.

  Miriam was the youngest child of a family in humble circumstances. Her parents were well-practiced in the ancient arts of caring for the sick and grieving for the dead. Their first four children, all sons, died in their infancy.

  Rachel, the elder daughter, was everyone’s favorite. She was tutored from an early age to be marriageable. She knew how to do laundry, iron, cook, carry out religious rituals—there was no girl in all of Chertnow who had been better brought up. Her father used to joke that she was born the same way as the greatest Jewish queens in history, with her umbilical cord around her neck.

  Miriam, two years younger, was frail and short of breath. Her parents foresaw an uncertain future for her. As a child, she was reticent and introspective. She answered timidly when spoken to but almost never had anything of her own to say. She received her sister’s clothes as hand-me-downs, mostly items that should have been discarded, and since her feet were larger than Rachel’s, she always wore shoes that were too tight. Her experiences in life had been unhappy from an early age, and she trembled in fear of scoldings, corrections, and dismissive comments. Their father taught her to read and write, of course, but his attention was always elsewhere, as if he was teaching a stranger. He was ashamed that Miriam could never recall a word of a text that she had just read. She understood every sentence, but every single one immediately replaced the previous one, so that the meaning of the whole always escaped her.

  Her mother, a woman of few words, was the only person who sometimes showed some concern for Miriam. Her name was Hanna and she was a native of Plotnow, another small Jewish town in the vicinity. Hanna’s father was a miller, and she was the next to the youngest in a troupe of nine sisters. Her vision was extremely poor and her sluggish, somewhat pained appearance concealed her true character. She devoted herself selflessly to her husband and Rachel, but one seldom saw her do anything other than cook, wash, and weep.

  Even as a girl, Miriam could see how rapidly her mother was aging. Her skin lost its elasticity and her body lost its form; with every passing month new wrinkles appeared in her face.

  Hanna died when Miriam was seven years old. She caught an inflammation of the lungs, an illness fatal for many in those days. She had a feeble constitution and was already relatively worn out, so it all went very quickly.

  No one had any idea how desperately Miriam wept at night or how she secretly attempted to resurrect her mother by muttering Kaddish, the prayer of mourning for the departed.

  HER FATHER, Samuel, was a peddler. His stinginess was legendary, surpassing that of anyone else in Chertnow, and everyone laughed at him behind his back. Even so, he was a highly respected member of the community, for he could cite passages of the Holy Scripture appropriate for any imaginable occasion, and he had a beautiful singing voice. He often served as a substitute cantor for the Saturday morning service.

  After his wife’s death he lived as a widower and became even stingier. In his worn robe tied with a length of rope, he looked like a beggar. He baked the family bread over a fire of wood bark.

  Samuel’s unpredictable temper terrorized his daughters. He was extremely strict and quick to punish the girls for the least offense. Miriam never complained. Every time their father burst into a rage she sat with her head bowed in fright, lost her appetite, and withdrew into herself. Rachel, on the other hand, became ever more rebellious as the years went by.

  Samuel insisted upon absolute compliance with the customs of the Jewish faith. Dietary laws were strictly observed in their home. Tradition smelled faintly of lavender and ancient mildew.

  Piety meant nothing to Miriam. She concluded as a result of her fruitless resort to the earnest recitation of Kaddish that God was deaf and unable to hear her prayers, and that was why her mother couldn’t come back from the realm of the dead. She also remembered how her mother would stand with her bent back turned to the hearth, toothless and prematurely old: What comfort had her Jewish faith ever provided her?

  Everyone in Chertnow knew that Samuel’s quiet life was overshadowed by an immense sorrow. He never got over the fact that Rachel, his favorite daughter, who had just reached her bloom, the most beautiful young woman in the city and not yet quite seventeen, had hurriedly and against her father’s will married the distant cousin of a neighbor, a simple Jewish tailor from Budapest, and moved with him to Hungary. Some said she simply grabbed the first man who came her way in order to escape her joyless home.

  Samuel was even more grieved when Rachel’s marriage produced no children. The more time passed, the more ardently he wished for God’s blessing in the form of a grandchild.

  After Miriam’s twentieth birthday, her father began to look around seriously for an appropriate son-in-law. She discouraged the effort and always found something lacking in the candidates. This one was unacceptable for one reason, that one for another, and a third was simply unthinkable. She pursed her lips and effectively drove off all her suitors.

  ONE DAY at a dance organized in the meeting hall to celebrate the holiday of Purim, where she sat out of the way like a wallflower, she caught sight of a young man, only twenty-one years old, named Jasja Karpilovski. He had arrived in Chertnow the previous month from White Russia—Belarus
—and intended to travel on to America. Jasja was tall and blond; he had a thin face, high cheekbones, and pale blue eyes. When he invited her to dance and put his hands around her waist, his touch whirled her out of the world. Her infatuation was instantaneous; life force pried her open like a mussel, and she shuddered with a desire she was now ready to accept. She had no more objections; she was ready. That same night she lost her virtue and became a fallen woman.

  Once the misfortune could no longer be concealed, Miriam went to her father and stammered out a confession of her crime. She hoped he would welcome the news—for the child within her was the fast grip of life itself, the force that eternally ends and begins again. Granted, Jasja had already disappeared without even saying goodbye, but Miriam declared, “From time to time a miracle occurs.”