“Regret what? Treating Germans like human beings?” Kopelev asked. The judge wrinkled his nose in disgust and told the guards to take the prisoner away. Kopelev had absorbed with his mother’s milk an optimism that not even adversity, profound injustice, and severe punishment could entirely quash. He firmly decided not to allow himself to fall prey to doubts about the infallibility of the party’s justice system. He was particularly determined not to fall into the lassitude he’d observed in many of the German prisoners. He rejected despair. He would use the time in Siberia for some significant undertaking, even if for the moment he didn’t know what that would be. He wound up in the same barracks in Kolyma as my great-uncle. The prisoners called it “the United Nations” because it housed representatives of all the peoples that lived east of the Elbe River. They all had nicknames. Kopelev was dubbed “Ruby” by the other prisoners. I have no idea why they chose that name. Perhaps because of his optimistic nature, or maybe because he had a hard inner core that nothing could break. My great-uncle mentions him in the manuscript he sold to the Genealogical Library. Ruby was the only one my great-uncle could carry on a cultivated conversation with, since no one else in the camp spoke a German as pure and rich in vocabulary as that of the former interrogator. They recommended books to each other—books that of course they had no possibility of acquiring. They carried on passionate discussions of Heinrich Heine’s earthy humor and cutting, ironic verse, especially in Germany: A Winter’s Tale, a book they both loved. They discussed Gramsci’s thoughts about the path to a socialist society. They told each other stories to light up the darkness of the camp. Both knew that Scheherazade—the very symbol of humanity’s desire to elude looming, tragic fate—told stories for a thousand and one nights in order to save her life. They shared their feelings and thoughts because the authorities wanted to silence them, because they knew that when the stories fall silent, death arrives. There’s no indication, however, that either of them mentioned the only acquaintance they had in common: Frombichler.
At first glance all of this might seem to be extraneous to the history of the Spinoza family, so at this point I must not forget to mention the name of Lev Kopelev’s book. He was released in 1954 and rehabilitated two years later. The experience in the Gulag never crushed his ideals or shook his belief in a more just and equitable society. He applied to join the Communist Party, and when he was accepted, the party gave him work at the university. In his lectures and discussions Kopelev praised freedom of expression in literature. He taught a younger generation that the truthful and courageous words of the greatest poets are weapons for peace. The motherland’s brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 finally shattered his illusions about the superiority of the socialist order. Without a thought for his own safety he campaigned in favor of human rights in the Soviet Union. He stressed that men of goodwill can resist evil rulers and even overcome them. The authorities’ reaction wasn’t long in coming. He was isolated and shunned at first, and then he was exiled. He wrote his book To Be Preserved Forever in Germany. He gives a harrowing description of life in the Siberian camps during the great terrors of the Stalinist era. The camp at Kolyma was one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century, on a level with Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Kopelev tells of the fates of several of his fellow prisoners. I recognize his story about F. as that of my great-uncle. F. is a German-speaking Jew from Hungary, a cabaret artist first confined in Dachau and then forcibly conscripted during the war to work in copper mines in Yugoslavia vital to the German war effort. After the liberation soldiers of the Red Army picked him up on the street in Budapest and sent him to forced labor in the Soviet Union, where factories were standing empty because of all the men who had died in the war. F. proved too weak for such hard work and was sent to Siberia. Kopelev writes that F. was already in a weakened condition when he arrived after agonizing weeks of confinement in cattle cars, mired in filth and mad with thirst. Life in the camp with the freezing weather, forced labor, lack of sleep, illness, vermin, fear, humiliation, and suffering ravaged his body even more. By the time he returned to his home in Hungary, he was a man in broken health.
I DON’T KNOW WHY, but another of my great-uncle’s stories has come to mind.
Lavrenty Beria, he told us, still in strictest confidence, was Stalin’s right hand, a cunning, enigmatic little man. He was reputed to be erudite; in fact, he was uneducated but widely read in a completely unsystematic fashion, for he reviewed all literary works and advised Stalin which should be prohibited. He also read all the unpublished manuscripts the secret police seized from poets and artists who more often than not simply disappeared as soon as they signed their forced confessions. Beria’s wide-ranging and extensive reading had left him nearsighted, so he wore pince-nez. Worn leather scourges hung on the walls of Beria’s office at the NKVD. This was where plans were prepared for the extensive purification of Georgia in 1937–1938, for the massacre of more than 4,400 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in 1941, for the murder of Trotsky, for brutal relocation of large populations, and for the systematic use of torture, slave labor, and murder. He sent his fellow countrymen to their deaths for the most trivial reasons. Everyone was terrified of him, for his repulsive nature and horrific overreactions were common knowledge. His outbursts of wrath were legendary. So were his sexual appetites. He drove around at night in a large Volga sedan with dark windows, hunting for women; most of those he found never came home again. It was said that his perverse desires were not limited only to women. He was said to have a taste for young boys. Sasha and I were told that after Beria’s death his closet was found to contain the chopped-off hands of hundreds of children. That private collection was so bizarre that it apparently displeased Stalin, who didn’t care for such evidence of the victims of the regime. The infallible leader decreed that all traces of them were to be eliminated.
My great-uncle’s stories usually incited my imagination. I could usually sit listening to him for hours, but not when he told us about Beria. Those stories scared me. All that talk about children’s chopped-off hands seemed so terribly evil that I wanted to rush off to hide in the bathroom.
That night I had a nightmare. I was at our usual playground, alone in the twilight. All the other children had gone home. A black Volga sedan screeched to a stop right next to me. The driver wore round spectacles perched on his nose. He gave me a friendly smile and invited me to join him in the car. I wanted to refuse, but my throat closed up and I couldn’t get a word out. Then the man said that my brother, Sasha, was waiting for me at home, in the closet, with a pile of candy. As he spoke, I could see that he had jaws capable of gobbling a child whole. He got out of the car to pick me up, and I suddenly saw he had no hands. He opened his arms wide to enfold me. I woke up with a start, soaked in sweat. I was frightened and relieved at the same time. The room was quiet and dark. Sasha and Grandmother were sound asleep. I went to the window and peered through a crack in the blinds, watching for a black Volga sedan that never appeared.
The real Beria was a more complicated and composed person than the one my great-uncle described to us. This I learned from Kopelev’s book. On the one hand Beria had millions of people murdered, out of “necessity,” as he himself termed it. On the other hand, he was eager to reform the Soviet system. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, he criticized the collectivization of agriculture, canceled costly projects, and advocated setting East Germany free and reuniting Germany. Even more important, he shut down and emptied much of the Gulag archipelago in Siberia; almost half of the prisoners were allowed to go home. It was thanks to him that my great-uncle was released and returned to Hungary. But a hundred days after Stalin passed away, Beria was arrested. Everyone knows he was liquidated. The circumstances of his death, however, are completely unknown.
My great-uncle also mentioned that the execution of Beria caused problems for the publisher of The Great Russian Encyclopedia. When subscribers had received the B volume of the reference work—sometime at the end of the 1940s—it f
eatured an article about Beria that dutifully praised him as a great hero of the Soviet Union. After his fall, all of the subscribers received a letter from the publishing house instructing them to clip out and return the pages that mentioned Beria. In exchange they received an article with pictures of the Bering Strait.
Truth is stranger than fiction, my great-uncle always told us. When one knows what actually happened, one doesn’t need to make up stories.
WHEN SECRET LOVERS Ariadne and Bernhard discovered that she was pregnant, everything in their young lives was turned upside down. They were afraid of the consequences. They feared that they would be separated. This was the first time either had been in love, the most glorious experience of their lives. Their love obliged them to look toward the future and rely on themselves alone. Love, Bernhard declared, is the enemy of tradition; it stands on the side of the future. Love is the future, Ariadne said. Love overcomes all, Bernhard answered her.
That very night they decided to run away from Biederhof.
The reason that Ariadne and Bernhard chose to set off to Hungary remains a mystery. Not even my great-uncle could explain it. Once he said it was because Ariadne had unpleasant memories of her early childhood in Vienna. Later he said he believed that the couple, both of them minors, she only fifteen and he seventeen, thought no one would think to search for them in the Hungarian capital.
The youngsters’ first encounter with the city was encouraging. They happened to arrive during the great holiday celebrating the unification of Buda and Pest, each on its respective side of the Danube, to constitute the single city of Budapest. Singing crowds filled the broad boulevards, proudly waving flags and embracing. Even total strangers hugged each other. Ariadne and Bernhard immediately felt welcome, and they saw the unification as symbolic of their own union. She held his hand, the hand that gave her such feelings of security and happiness. In an outlying neighborhood they managed to locate a fairly intoxicated local mayor who didn’t bother to ask the underage couple for any papers when he performed the ceremony that made them husband and wife. The world was bright and beautiful. The future lay before them.
When Rudolf heard that Ariadne had married Bernhard and had given birth to a son in Budapest only a few days later, he changed beyond recognition. Before this he had shown no interest in Ariadne and her disappearance; now he was outraged. As a prince and the patriarch of one of Austria’s most ancient noble families, he could not bear the thought of his daughter marrying a Jew and giving birth to Jewish children. He was incensed with Jakob, even though the man had saved him from ruin, made the estate bloom, and taken charge of Ariadne. Dark images made Rudolf’s head spin. He told himself that Jakob had schemed to steal his daughter. He ordered one of the servants to go the cellar to fetch a bottle of ancient vintage cognac; he emptied it in one long swig. Ariadne was a whore, he proclaimed, just like her mother, that heartless female who had lured him and played with him and exploited his generosity. He called for more cognac. He drank and carried on like a wild beast, he screamed and generally laid waste to everything and everyone in the castle. But he refused to receive Jakob, who was importuning him for a meeting to discuss the matter. Reeking of cognac, he swore at Jakob at the top of his voice. He cursed him and by turns called him a Jewish swine and a piece of rotten filth. He blurted out his adamant conviction that Jakob had been planning all along to get his hands on everything he owned by stealing away his daughter, locking her in his house, and setting her to copulate with his son. Rudolf’s ranting voice echoed through the splendid halls of the castle. Dusk was coming on as he staggered onto the balcony and screamed for everyone to hear that he was not flattered in the least to have a Jewish son-in-law, and he knew what was behind this vulgar spectacle. He would by God make sure that Ariadne was no good catch; he would disinherit her so the Jews couldn’t take over Biederhof after he died. In the middle of the night he had a public notary called in and dictated a new last will and testament. After he passed away, everything would go to his cousin Ludwig von Thurn und Taxis, the natural heir, since Ludwig with his blue blood was the only man on earth who could be trusted. He drank even more and went out on the balcony again. He bellowed that now his spirit could be at peace because he had changed his will and cut off that whore Ariadne. For a moment he stood there straight and tall, fumbling for the words to express his emotions. Blinded in the following instant by the first piercing beams of the morning sun, he lost his balance, fell over the railing, and crashed to the ground.
The funeral took place a week later. But by then Jakob and his family had already left the estate and fled to Vienna.
JAKOB HAD FOUR CHILDREN. Despite their occasionally serious flaws and errors, each had inherited some characteristic of their father: Nikolaus had his financial genius; Claudia had his good heart; and Andreas had his ingenuity. But none of the children was blessed with all of Jakob’s qualities. I’m no psychologist and so I won’t try to compare them. But I know that only one of the children achieved the same human and intellectual heights that Jakob had reached: Bernhard, who had his sense of ethics, his authority, and his brain power. The fact that I concentrate mostly on Bernhard here shouldn’t surprise anybody. He was my grandfather’s father and he inherited not only the gigantic Spinoza nose; as eldest son he also received the family’s secret treasure, The Elixir of Immortality, and in his own way carried on our unusual tradition.
But it’s only fitting that I account for the other siblings who grew up in that tight-knit family but were so markedly different from one another. As adults they wound up widely separated, living in different worlds, not only because of the differences in their characters, ambitions, and talents, but also because rapid developments in those years caused kaleidoscopic changes in society and produced a spectacle of constantly shifting patterns that affected human relationships. But I think that the outcome was also related to an unusual attitude characteristic of the Spinozas since time out of mind. Family ties have always been important to us but only provided rules of appropriate behavior are strictly observed. The reaction to anyone who gets involved in irregularities or scandal, abandons the true faith, or enters into an unsuitable marriage is straightforward: The other family members shut their mouths, turn their backs to the offender, and exclude him from the community as if he’d never existed.
To give full justice to Nikolaus, Claudia, and Andreas, I would have to tell you about their daily lives, play back their conversations and arguments, describe the relationships between them and other people, and relate the events that affected their lives and determined their fates—childish quarrels, love affairs and marriages, births of children, illnesses and deaths. But unfortunately I have neither the time nor enough of the facts, let alone the talent with the written word that that would require. The only thing I can do is pass along what my great-uncle told us and hope the past will provide a glimpse of what really happened.
The Elixir of Immortality Page 54
