The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  PESTER LLOYD was the flagship of the German-language press in the Hungarian capital, a sober daily paper devoted to the issues of the day. Its finances were assured principally by the support of the liberal banker Siegmund Kornfeld, who in his youth had been Jakob’s protégé in Vienna and at the age of twenty-six had been appointed by Albert Rothschild as head of the Ungarische Creditanstalt in Budapest. The newspaper’s editorial offices and printshop were housed in a building in the northern section of the fashionable Lipótváros district. The editor in chief, the legendary Miksa Falk, moved with great ease in distinctly different social circles. He was Empress Elisabeth’s confidant, and even Franz Josef would lend him an ear. Falk had a unique ability to hold many threads together at the same time, and he did all that he could to persuade his colleagues to share his adventures, instead of following the far more common approach of the time of dazzling others with one’s knowledge and seeking to become the fair-haired boy of the newspaper. Falk always listened to others and inspired those around him with his ideas and suggestions. He was lavish with his praise and carefully moderate in his criticism. He couldn’t tolerate florid style or the use of too many adjectives. “Fear of the adjective,” he used to say, “is the beginning of style.” All of his colleagues knew what he expected of them, so he never had to lecture them. The sharply downturned ends of his mustache gave him a rough, stern appearance, but he had a fundamentally friendly nature. Only those on the staff who were smug and excessively sure of themselves needed to fear the cutting remarks he used to deflate them.

  Bernhard got a job as an errand boy at Pester Lloyd soon after arriving in Budapest. His wages were minimal, scarcely enough to cover room and board for his family. He was no stranger to hard work; he ran errands all day long with the same enthusiasm he applied to shifting heavy bales of newsprint. He was happy in the seductively feverish bustle in all departments of the newspaper. He loved the smell of printer’s ink and felt a boyish excitement in using the paternoster elevator, a continuously moving succession of cages that linked editorial offices on different floors of the building. It gave him unheard-of satisfaction every day to be among educated men and women who selflessly devoted themselves to the less privileged sectors of society. He began to dream of seeing his own name on the front page of the newspaper. One day—in what he himself found to be a moment of pretentiousness—he wrote an article about the difficulties of the blind in the city of Budapest. He knew that the likelihood of the article being accepted was about the same as that of Ariadne suddenly gaining her sight, but he turned in his piece to the head of shift at the city desk. Several weeks passed and he had almost forgotten it, so he was surprised one morning to be called into the office of the editor in chief. For a moment he thought that he was going to be reprimanded or lose his job for some mistake. Instead, Falk greeted him courteously and apologized for having taken so long to read the article. He asked if Bernhard had published anything before, since if not, he would be making his journalistic debut the following Sunday on Pester Lloyd’s front page. His article not only met the newspaper’s high standards but was also important because it threw light on a problem that—as far as he could recall from his many years in the newspaper business—no journalist had ever raised before. He asked how Bernhard happened to know so much about the difficulties of the blind. He couldn’t believe his ears when he heard that the young man’s wife was born blind. “Your wife!” exclaimed the editor in chief. He found it hard to believe that a mere youngster like Bernhard was already married. He was even more astounded when Bernhard explained that he was in no way a “mere youngster”; he was a full nineteen years old and already the father of two sons. “In that case,” Falk replied, “a modest honorarium would be a welcome addition to the family finances.” He offered the prospect to Bernhard of having a good number of articles published, provided they were as well written and insightful as his piece about the visually impaired, and provided his other work at the paper didn’t suffer. Bernhard was deeply grateful.

  Sunday arrived, and Bernhard’s disappointment knew no bounds when he held the newspaper before him. The article was indeed there on the front page, but his name was misspelled. Instead of Bernhard Spinoza, a “Bernhard Spiritosa” was credited in the byline. He knew that Pester Lloyd was reputed never to make editorial mistakes, so he assumed that someone on the editorial staff had changed the spelling of his name out of pure spite. On Monday he went to the editor in chief and asked for a correction; he was directed to the chief typesetter. There he was informed that the typographer who had set up the article early that Sunday morning had dropped the line of lead type with Bernhard’s name, and when he reassembled it in a rush he mixed up some of the letters. “It could have been worse,” the chief typesetter commented laconically. Bernard couldn’t understand the grizzled technician’s failure to appreciate the awful fact that he had to swallow the indignity of seeing his first published article appear with a byline that misspelled his last name.

  The misspelled name—the very first such disaster of its kind in the history of the newspaper—was the principal topic of discussion at the editorial conference on Monday morning. One bright journalist commented with a smirk that there must be some hidden meaning in all of this. He offered his own opinion—unaware, of course, of Bernhard’s family relationship with Bento and Benjamin—that the last name of Spiritosa was a good one for a young man who was always smiling, and at any rate it was certainly better than Spinoza, which brought to mind that dour old killjoy of a philosopher.

  From that day on everyone at the newspaper referred to Bernhard by the nickname of “Spiritosa,” an expression in Italian meaning humorous, witty, and spiritual.

  A month later Bernhard received a letter from his mother that caused him even greater disappointment, if that was possible. She congratulated him on the publication of his first article. At the same time she expressed her joy that she had at last succeeded in convincing her husband, long a skeptic, to ask his former protégé, Pester Lloyd’s most important financial supporter Siegmund Kornfeld, to pull a few strings to get her son a promotion at the newspaper. He was crushed.

  ARIADNE HAD BEEN in a foul humor for a long time. In the normal course of things, even when she was most ill-tempered, after a few days she would allow herself to be awakened by Bernhard’s delicate caresses and pat him on the head as a sign that the joys of the marriage bed could commence; when they got out of bed they were friends again. Several weeks had gone by since their most recent physical reconciliation, and that morning had been the worst yet. Ariadne had awakened in a more quarrelsome mood than usual. She bemoaned her fate and called him and the boys all sorts of insulting names. The boys began to cry, and she responded by smashing plates against the wall and breaking a windowpane. It took almost an hour for her to calm down enough for Bernhard to go to work.

  Later that morning chaos erupted in the newsroom. People were shouting, women were weeping, and men were rushing around. Bernhard, who by then had worked for a couple of years as an assistant editor in the advertising office, was appalled at the commotion. The hubbub was everywhere, in all the editorial offices. Bernhard really had no desire to deal with any more problems that day, but his curiosity got the better of him. He got up from his desk and was just on the way out the door when the editor in chief appeared. Falk was deathly pale. His voice shook and his hands were trembling. He asked Bernhard to sit down. Bernhard had a premonition that something terrible had happened. Falk told him what had occurred, and Bernhard’s life came to a sudden standstill. The body of a young woman had been discovered in the mechanism of the paternoster elevator. She must have stepped out of the open cage between two floors or lost her balance; in any case, she had fallen and been killed by the mechanism. Her head had been chopped off. As far as they could tell, the young woman must have been blind. They had reason to believe that she was Bernhard’s wife.

  Ariadne was Bernhard’s whole life. He’d never had anyone else; he knew no other love. We shou
ld thank divine providence that Bernhard had three sons, for otherwise he would have simply given up after Ariadne’s death. But though Ariadne was never out of his thoughts for a second, he knew he had to take care of the children.

  Inside the battered suitcase that I inherited from my grandfather, in the thick jumble of letters, diaries from across the centuries, birth certificates, wills, and other papers documenting the history of the Spinoza family, I also came across a yellowing photograph, probably taken before the Second World War, with the image of a black granite gravestone inscribed in gilded letters: Ariadne—my princess—you saw the world with different eyes. You are eternally missed.

  On the back of the photo my grandfather had written in tiny characters, My only memory of Mama.

  Shortly after the funeral Bernhard received a summary of the autopsy. Ariadne had been pregnant. His eyes filled with tears. He realized that Ariadne, who almost never left home because of her blindness and had never visited the newspaper, must have been coming to ask his forgiveness for her behavior and to tell him she was expecting a baby.

  “LABOR OMNIA VINCIT. The quotation is from the great Roman poet Virgil,” the editor in chief told him, “and it means: Work conquers all.” Falk regarded Bernhard with the austere sympathy one offers to someone who has just suffered a catastrophe.

  “I must be frank with you,” he said. “You cannot go around here all day long at the newspaper thinking of nothing but your late wife. That’s of no use either to you or to anyone else. You can’t get her back again; she’s dead. You have to accept that fact. The only appropriate way for you to honor her memory is by writing. The best cure for profound grief is work. Apply yourself to your writing again, and you’ll see how your soul and spirit will rise once more. You’ll gain a bit more courage every time you remove a worn-out word from your text and replace it with another that’s less trite; you’ll find a moment of pleasure when you discern just the right path through the endless galaxies of language.”

  The editor in chief said that Bernhard’s article about the blind was the most vivid description he had ever read about the situation of the afflicted in Budapest. That text in itself was evidence that Bernhard was among those very few individuals born to write, he said emphatically, and therefore Bernhard had only one purpose in life: to take up his pen to battle to improve the lot of mankind. Falk explained that he himself came from a poor Jewish family, and his fundamental motivation was to advance the cause of social justice, for all too many people in Hungarian society bristled in opposition to his principles, summarized in the motto of the French Revolution: Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, words first joined and proclaimed by Nicolas Spinoza. Bernhard’s mouth twitched in a weak smile. He nodded.

  “Your true inheritance is from your old grandfather Nicolas,” Falk said. “It’s your ability to see familiar things with new eyes and to describe them. The man who writes becomes a witness in the court of public opinion. Your words give others strength to lift themselves above their ordinary destinies.”

  The editor in chief taught Bernhard more than just how to manipulate language, hammer out sentences, and struggle with words. Falk was a master teacher, no mere mentor in journalism. He oriented Bernhard in Hungarian history and opened for him a tradition of humanism rooted in the writings of Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca. He urged him to read Erasmus of Rotterdam and Michel de Montaigne. He exercised Bernhard’s debating skills with lively discussions of economics and politics. He helped him make allies of some of the greatest contemporary authors and embrace the delights of the many destinies described in classic works of poetry. He taught him to breathe the atmosphere of books.

  THEY’D AGREED to meet at the Café du Matignon in the elegant Faubourg Saint-Germain. Herzl had chosen the place. He’d been the correspondent in Paris of the Viennese newspaper Die Neue Freie Presse for four years, and so he knew the city well, especially the arrondissement where Alfred Dreyfus had lived and worked before his arrest. Herzl had followed the trial of the Jewish captain with great interest and had wholeheartedly backed the campaign in France to give justice to Dreyfus.

  There was nothing Herzl looked forward to more eagerly than meeting Bernhard in person. Rivals and equally influential opinion-makers for the subjects of the double monarchy, they had followed each other’s writing and careers with admiration for ten years. One was from Budapest and had moved at the age of seventeen to Vienna; the other broke away at the same age from an estate not far from Vienna and had settled in Budapest. They were twinned in some unusual way and constantly involved in similar issues and controversies. Perhaps it was for that reason that Herzl was sometimes called a kind of Bernhard Spinoza in Vienna, while Bernhard would hear himself referred to as a sort of Theodor Herzl in Budapest. Both were known for their prodigious productivity and exalted conceptions of the mission of the journalist. They were aware of their critical influence as shapers of opinion. Almost no other writers provoked such intense debates, demanded such radical political changes, and wounded and harassed the authorities as much as these two. It was hardly surprising that each had an important place in the consciousness of his readers.

  Herzl and Bernhard had carried on a lively correspondence for many years, but they had never met. Herzl took the initiative and proposed the meeting in Paris. He was working on a book he was calling The Jewish State, in which, as a reaction to the anti-Semitism spreading in Europe in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, he argued that the Jews should establish their own nation-state. He had sent an outline of it to a handful of influential Jewish cultural leaders in the German-speaking countries. Their reactions were overwhelmingly positive. The only negative reaction and counterargument came from Bernhard. Herzl was eager to discuss the issues further with him, for he was sure that the encounter would be of great benefit to his work.

  Bernhard arrived at the Gare du Nord on a bright and sunny morning in early May. He had hardly enough time to deposit his luggage at the nearby Hôtel de l’Europe on the boulevard de Magenta before setting off toward the Left Bank of the Seine where the meeting was scheduled to take place. He was pleased by the prospect of meeting Herzl. He recognized him as soon as he stepped into the Café du Matignon, even though Herzl’s appearance was not quite as Bernhard had imagined. Herzl was taller and thinner. He had recently turned thirty-five, Bernhard knew, but he looked older. His long dark beard gave him the air of an Old Testament prophet. They embraced instead of shaking hands.

  After a number of pleasantries Bernhard asked Herzl how he was getting along in the French capital. “Paris is the center of the universe,” Herzl replied. He described his love for the beauties of the city but commented that the French were not always easy to deal with. They were arrogant, stubborn, fascinating both in their rigidity and their elegance, at times extremely spiritual, but even more often downright stupid. But the women of Paris were wonderful, splendid, and flirtatious. He confessed with a smile that he always fell mildly and hopelessly in love with every Frenchwoman he met, but they were unattainable, so the only brief moments of pleasure he experienced were those he purchased. “O là là, cher ami,” he said, “I could tell you amazing things about those establishments they call maisons de tolérance here in France.” He noticed that Bernhard, who had vigorously decried the reduction of erotic experience to crude commerce and had demanded the closure of the brothels of Budapest, was moderately disconcerted by this topic. Herzl quickly changed the subject to French cuisine, which he considered to be without peer anywhere. A beef bourguignon, he argued earnestly, provides a thousand times more nourishment than a dry Wiener schnitzel. “A good Parisian cook,” he declared, “is your best physician.” They shared a pleased laugh and went on to discuss more serious matters.

  What did they discuss during the ensuing hours? The persecution of Jews and the way to remedy it. Herzl said that for two thousand years the Jews had been living in constant fear. They had been persecuted, discriminated against, humiliated, maimed, and murdered. Why? Because they were fore
igners everywhere in the world and therefore seen as a different type of human being, people who could be mistreated without a second thought. They had no country of their own to protect them and no flag to feel proud of. But once the Jewish nation-state was established, the situation of Jews everywhere would improve.

  Bernhard replied that there were two Jewish traditions, each of them centuries old. The first he called “Masada” after the impregnable fortress on the shore of the Dead Sea where Jews offered heroic resistance against the far larger Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 BCE. The Jewish rebels defended their last remaining lands for seven years. When all hope was gone, they committed collective suicide, dying as free men instead of living as slaves. The alternative he called “Javne” after the tiny village where the pragmatic Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai founded a school at about the same time. That was where Judaism changed from a religion tied to a specific land with historic sites and holy places to a movable faith enshrined in a few books, a faith that could exist even beyond Israel, since one carried it along wherever one went. The hallmarks of the Javne model, he said, were knowledge, teaching, pragmatism, and peaceful coexistence—the only things that could guarantee the survival of the Jews over the long term.