The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  He gasped for breath, blinked, and tried to summon strength from within. He couldn’t understand how Marika could do such a thing. Couldn’t she see how low she’d sunk by betraying him with his own father? How could she live with such treachery? Or maybe it didn’t bother her conscience at all. Only then, as he asked himself these questions, did he begin to understand that Marika’s whole life was based on pleasing men, embracing them, letting strange men take possession of her. He vowed that he would blot her out of his life forever. He couldn’t imagine any treachery greater than his lover having sex with his father.

  As for his father, Nathan was furiously angry and deeply disappointed. Something burst inside him. His heart pounded, and his head spun at the thought of his father’s repugnant behavior. Behind all his high and mighty pronouncements about justice, his father was nothing but a horny old goat who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. The sultry air of pretense has been lifted, he said to himself. The behavior of his father and his beloved had reached such a level of insanity and monstrosity that he was forced to respond. He was completely beside himself. Ever since the day he’d been accused of stealing candy, he’d known that one day he would leave his father behind, that one day he would no longer feel any affection for his father. Now that day had come. It was time to take the step toward freedom and maturity, for this was something he could never forgive. What use was forgiveness? It couldn’t possibly undo the evil already committed. He realized in that bitter moment of defeat that he would never be able to look his father in the eye again. Suddenly he recalled the comment of a pimple-faced classmate whose family had thrown him out after he was caught stealing: “Anyone with the least sense of self-respect has to leave his father’s house before he turns twenty and set out to explore the world.”

  I REALIZE that I’m jumping ahead in time, but I think it’s appropriate at this point to mention that Nathan and his father never met again.

  Marika, on the other hand, did turn up again, quite unexpectedly. That was in July 1919 during the final days of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

  A year before this, Nathan had given free rein to his fantasies about the utopia under construction in faraway Russia. Socialism was no longer simply a theory; it was on its way to realization in that country. He experienced a rush of warmth as he thought of the proud Russian people carrying on their bold struggle for freedom and justice. In Lenin he discovered exactly what he’d been seeking for so long: a father figure to look up to, admire, and love.

  The appeal of the Russian Revolution immediately attracted him to the Republic of the Councils instituted by Béla Kun in Hungary. He joined the Communist Party and worked with all his might to support its agenda. For years after this Nathan fought against admitting that the imagined socialist paradise in the east had little in common with everyday life in Budapest. He assumed that Béla Kun was as infallible a leader as Lenin, so he defended Kun, whatever happened. He made all possible excuses for Kun’s repeated political mistakes, terrible judgments, and plans that ended in disaster. When it came to the monstrous atrocities allegedly ordered by the leader with an almost disdainful indifference—including the slaughter of whole ranks of his opponents—Nathan dismissed them as crazy accusations almost completely out of touch with reason and reality. He also insisted that the claims the country was in a deep economic depression were baseless, and he said any economic crisis in Hungary was entirely the fault of the bourgeois class.

  In the worst of the summer heat, Nathan was summoned as a member of the Federated Central Executive Committee to a meeting in the Executive Building to discuss the preparedness of the workers’ militia and the division of responsibilities. The party leadership had received reports from reliable sources that the reactionary regimes of neighboring countries were planning the imminent dispatch of foreign counterrevolutionary troops to crush the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

  To everyone’s surprise, Béla Kun attended the meeting in the company of his secretary and without his defense minister. The rumor was that the secretary—generally viewed as hopelessly incompetent—was really his longtime mistress. Even respectable party members who stoutly rejected these insinuations, along with other attempts to tarnish the leader’s reputation, found the whole thing a bit fishy: He supposedly had met her when she was a high-school student in their hometown of Kolozsvár and was working as a minor in a brothel, and now she was expecting his illegitimate child, even though he was married and had several children with his wife.

  Nathan had never met Béla Kun before this, so he studied Kun with interest from his seat in the back row of the hall. The leader of the Communist Party was a stubby little fellow, less imposing than Nathan had expected. Kun’s hair was cut short and his well-tailored dark suit could be that of an upper-class attorney. His bull neck and broad forehead, and especially his piercing gaze, reminded Nathan of a portrait of Robespierre he’d seen somewhere. The dark circles under Kun’s eyes betrayed his lack of sleep; the unshaven jowls showed that he hadn’t had the time to pay attention to his appearance. He looked like a peasant, and his Hungarian surname was in odd contrast with his Jewish origins. Nathan immediately noted Kun’s peculiar tendency to emphasize certain adjectives, expressions he employed often and enunciated in a declamatory style so that each individual letter of the word was articulated and the ends of his sentences sounded almost like chanting. Béla Kun’s eyes flashed and his voice thundered. He declared that he had no wish to make anyone’s burden heavier than it already was, but it was the clear duty of every communist to demonstrate his heroism and resist hardship, even to the extent of laying down his life if foreign soldiers attempted to overturn the workers’ revolution. He waved his arms dramatically; Nathan thought for a moment that Kun was about to pull a revolver out of his jacket and emphasize his message by firing a few shots at the bourgeois symbol suspended from the ceiling, a heavy crystal chandelier.

  Several burly fellows were standing in front of Nathan, partly blocking his view. That was why he did not initially catch sight of Béla Kun’s secretary. When he glimpsed her a couple of minutes later, he recognized her instantly, even though her face was more rounded and she had bleached her dark hair. It was Marika. He stared at her in astonishment. He was amazed that the delirium and pleasure she had given him so long ago remained so vivid that even now, although he thought he had forgotten her, his heart started racing and the member in his trousers rose at the memory of their playful lovemaking.

  The meeting ended. Nathan went outside with the others and took his place in the receiving line to shake hands with Béla Kun, who had obviously doused himself with strong eau de cologne. The sharp odor tickled Nathan’s nose and the closer he came to the leader, the more unpleasant it became. He managed to put up with the reek of it. He felt obliged to say something. An older party comrade had told him Béla Kun was particularly susceptible to flattery. “I was greatly impressed by your speech,” he heard himself say. The leader smiled and was in no hurry to answer him, as if he was expecting additional praise. After a moment Kun said, “My comrade can count on the decisive victory of the working class. I will tear apart both heaven and earth if need be. Many barons and members of the bourgeois class will lose sleep before I finish with them.” Nathan nodded in agreement. He wasn’t looking to engage Béla Kun in polite small talk. All he wanted was to get close to Marika, to take that opportunity to look at her and just for a moment hold her hand in his. She stood at the communist leader’s side. Nathan stepped toward her and suddenly saw she was pregnant. He looked deep into her eyes and extended his hand. He wasn’t expecting her to fall into his arms, but even so he was a bit disappointed at her reaction. She pretended not to recognize him. For a few instants she looked at him warily but finally she took his hand. “Our leader,” she said uncertainly, “is firmly decided … to eliminate all … types of injustice.”

  “Injustice,” repeated Nathan absently. “Of course.” Then he released her cold little hand and left the meeting.
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br />   GRANDFATHER HAD A YOUNGER BROTHER. I mentioned his name before: Kalman. He died young in tragic circumstances. Grandfather never spoke of him. When Sasha and I asked him about his little brother, Grandfather inevitably became annoyed and replied with scarcely concealed reluctance that he had no desire to dig into the past. We thought his refusal to say anything was because Kalman had been their father’s favorite, completely spoiled, and that was why Grandfather never liked him. Or perhaps, we imagined, he was fed up with Kalman because he’d grown up hearing that he was responsibile for taking care of his insufferable little brother, protecting him and defending him.

  A letter signed only with the letter K lay in the suitcase I inherited from Grandfather. It gave a different picture of their relationship. Kalman writes that they’d always been close, and for that reason his betrayal of Nathan was all the more painful. The betrayal, he confessed, was that he also was going to bed with Marika, even though he knew how deeply in love with her Nathan was. Kalman writes that he’d wanted to make a clean breast of it and confess his treachery, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so, because he didn’t want to hurt Nathan. Even so, he couldn’t keep away from Marika, because the lure of the flesh was stronger than the restraints of his conscience. The letter concludes with a fervent plea for forgiveness.

  In a postscript Kalman says their father surprised him and Marika in bed, and all hell broke loose. Very soon after that he was sent away to Fiume, the town from which the letter was written. He hoped Nathan would come to visit him someday.

  Nathan considered his own attraction to Marika entirely natural, but he thought the behavior of his brother and his father was disgusting. What pained him far more, however, was that they’d both done things behind his back. It felt doubly humiliating to him that they’d regularly belittled Marika in his presence—Nathan remembered how nonchalantly they had made disparaging remarks about her—and had given the impression that they disliked her simple nature. Obviously, that had been nothing but a subterfuge to hide their physical relationships with her.

  Nathan hated lies. That may have been partly because his brother Moricz never told the truth. Even when Nathan was a small child, lies would make him frantic. The most innocent white lie was enough to cause a rupture between him and the person who told it. That was why he vowed to say nothing about certain persons—his father, his young brother, and Marika—whom he had completely stricken out of his life.

  KALMAN WAS BORN with a tremendously large nose, inherited from his father, and a troublesome affliction of the skin, ichthyosis, which was a genetic inheritance from his mother’s side of the family. His body, especially his arms and legs, was covered with thick layers of skin crisscrossed with cracks prone to infections and bleeding.

  Moricz suffered from the same skin condition although in a milder form. He felt guilty every time the family doctor came to examine Kalman and treat him with various creams. He thought he was the cause of the violent itching that tormented Kalman because he must have infected his little brother. This created strong ties between the eldest and the youngest of the Spinoza brothers.

  Kalman was sent away to Fiume at the age of eighteen, in part because the dry inland climate of Budapest was the worst possible environment for a person with ichthyosis. Since Kalman’s suffering increased in his late teenage years—at times he was terribly tormented by itching open sores on his knees and elbows—the family doctor recommended that he move to the Adriatic shore, because the coastal climate with its cooler summers and milder winters, and especially the salt sea and moist air, would offer a more effective alleviation of intense itching than all of the moisturizing creams in the world; the location itself offered the best prospect of relief from ichthyosis. The doctor was of the opinion that Kalman would be well advised to go into some maritime line of work. He himself had a nephew living in Fiume who had studied at the famous Hungarian Royal Maritime Academy.

  Kalman’s greatest hero was Louis Blériot. The French engineer was one of the pioneers of flight. In July 1909 he flew across the English Channel in an airplane he had constructed himself, a so-called monoplane with a three-cylinder, twenty-three-horsepower Anzani motor. The plane was called Blériot XI because the cross-Channel machine was the eleventh that the Frenchman had constructed. The thirty-seven-minute flight brought Blériot not only the thousand pounds sterling offered by the Daily Mail in London as a prize to the first pilot who succeeded in flying between England and France but also worldwide fame. Blériot XI established the principles in manufacturing, design, and pilot training for the empire of the air.

  Kalman read about that pioneering French pilot in Magyar Estilap. The article fired Kalman’s imagination. He was, if possible, even more enthused by the photographs of Blériot surrounded by journalists and admiring onlookers after his successful Channel crossing. He dreamed of becoming a pilot. He imagined himself as the Flying Jew. He saw himself crossing the Mediterranean and landing at Rishon LeZion, the first Jewish settlement in the Holy Land. He saw his pioneering feat rewarded by the Daily Mail with a thousand pounds. He would use the money to build his own airplane, the Spinoza XI.

  FIUME WAS THE PROUD SITE of Hungary’s largest deep-water port and home to its most diverse collection of ethnic groups: Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Montenegrins, Gypsies, Jews, Greeks, and Albanians lived side by side with Hungarians.

  Kalman felt at home there, even though he hated the disgusting reek of fish from the canning factories close to his lodgings. Certain accounts maintain that he had a lengthy involvement with a Croatian girl named Silvia, the daughter of a foreman at the Ganz & Danubius shipyard. Bound as she was by every imaginable narrow-minded Catholic moral constraint, she is said to have been most unreceptive when he besieged her with his burning passion. She couldn’t imagine engaging in sexual relations before marriage, so Kalman was reduced to the pleasures of the sort provided by the Serbian sluts at the brothel.

  His studies at the Maritime Academy were a great success. He had the highest marks in every subject and stood at the head of his class. To supplement his allowance he would accept money from his classmates to help them with their homework. He wanted to save a lot of money, because he’d never abandoned his dream of constructing his own airplane. His generous nature got in the way, however, for he always volunteered to pick up the bar bill when he was out with friends.

  Kalman’s first thought every morning, when he was awakened by the piercing wails of the ship sirens in the harbor, was that he wanted to look down on Fiume from above, to glide through the air and observe the earth beneath him. His friends always laughed when he spoke of his dreams. They found them preposterous, wild fancies that obsessed him and made him lose his grip on reality, and they maintained that his prospects of ever flying were virtually zero. It would be smarter of him, they said, to give up the hope of conquering the skies and instead to devote himself with all his energy to assuring himself a brilliant maritime career. Whenever they pitied him for his unrealistic dreams, he merely raised an eyebrow as if hearing a lame joke. He replied emphatically that he had no doubts. He was as certain his destiny was tied to that of the celebrated Louis Blériot as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. He made no secret of the fact that he pitied his friends for failing to share the enthusiasm of people all over Europe for the greatest achievement of modern times, the creation of wings that enabled mankind to take flight. As for himself, he aspired to join those who dared to risk their lives for something they believed in.

  One of Kalman’s classmates read in the Italian-language daily Fiume della sera that on September 9, 1912, pilots from all of Europe would meet in Brescia for their fourth annual airshow at the airfield in Montechiari. Great feats of prowess were expected, and the principal attraction was the Frenchman Louis Blériot, who would be flying his three-seater dubbed the Blériot XII. The promoters were expecting thousands of attendees, some from as far away as England and America.

  As soon as Kalman he
ard that, he decided to make his way to Brescia. He declared that he was the happiest man in Fiume and tried to persuade four of his closest friends to accompany him. He described the perilous infancy of flight, the Wright brothers, Gustave Whitehead, Clément Ader, and other daring pilots who were competing to be the first to craft a fully perfected motor-driven airplane. His companions listened with interest. They were concerned, however, that the hotels and private apartments in Brescia might not be able to accommodate all the visitors, and prices would shoot up. In hopes of recruiting company for his trip, Kalman promised he would help pay for lodging. That was the determining factor that enticed two of his friends to declare their willingness to go with him. All three applied for a week’s leave from the Maritime Academy. When permission was denied, the two friends dropped out of his project. This was an unpleasant surprise for Kalman. Disappointed, he climbed aboard the train all alone the next morning.

  IF THE PATHS of fate were not inexplicable, so that none of us can actually see his destination but is permitted only an intuition of it, Kalman probably would have turned around as soon as he got to Brescia, even though it was already late in the evening. He was about to take a carriage to the hotel. The coachman demanded two lire, paid in advance. Kalman discovered at that moment that someone on the train had picked his pocket, extracting his wallet and travel documents from his jacket as he stood there blissfully unaware. Everything had disappeared. But he was not about to lose the chance to see Blériot fly, even though it meant he would have to sleep on a bench in one of the city parks and go without food for several days.