The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Wilhelm quickly won my trust and devotion. He was something astounding and novel for me. And the exact opposite of my parents—stylish, courteous, full of zest for life, very wealthy, and astonishingly candid. He made no secret of his sexual proclivities. That was the first time anyone had spoken to me of physical love between men as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He also helped me see why the wisest thing for us would be to stay in Norway, start life over again, and make a new future for ourselves. He shared my father’s view that life in the Eastern Europe of true socialism had become too precarious. Of course he’d read everything written on the subject and was astounded at the depth of my ignorance about the world around me. He explained that yet again the Jews had been made scapegoats and persecuted, this time in Poland. That type of behavior could easily spread to other socialist countries. I’d known nothing of all this.

  We’d never have made it without Wilhelm. He helped my parents get a residence permit and a place to live, and he made sure that they got real jobs. He accompanied me to the session where educators considered whether I could be admitted to secondary school. They found the young mute completely unqualified. I was deeply shamed and felt like some mangy dog. After some searching, Wilhelm found an appropriate job for me.

  Wilhelm was God’s gift to us in our new country, but we didn’t have him for long. He died in an avalanche in the Alps shortly before the following Easter. His death seemed to be a warning, a grim, tolling bell for the whole Spinoza family. We couldn’t laugh anymore or take pleasure in anything. After more than eight long centuries full of grief and gladness, after undergoing so many trials and still surviving, we felt the future slipping out of our hands.

  WE COULD ALWAYS PREDICT the mood of the woman who was our concierge in Budapest. Madame Lakatos was forever morose and contrary, and she had a surly phrase or a bitter comment for everyone who entered our building. Nothing happened in the neighborhood of my childhood without her getting involved. No one dared to say anything or complain, because we were all scared of her, even though she was tiny and frail. We knew she informed the police of everything going on in the neighborhood. Her assignment as an informant gave her the power to spew her gall all over her neighbors and any passersby.

  Madame Lakatos despised everyone, with the single exception of my grandmother. I can’t really explain why that was. Grandmother had a generous spirit, even if in her later days she tended not to favor her immediate family with it. She was the only person on our street who would regularly help the concierge, who had more important things to do than shop for food and clean an apartment filled with all sorts of bric-a-brac and permeated by the foul odor of bad tobacco.

  Some months after our arrival in Norway we were surprised to receive a letter from Madame Lakatos. Perhaps it’s rude of me to reveal it, but the concierge was only just barely literate. The letter was full of misspellings and grammar errors, written in preposterously formal language with mistaken phraseology that introduced unintentionally comic errors into the text. We would’ve laughed out loud if the news she was communicating hadn’t been so terrible. She reported that shortly after we left the country, Grandmother had been reluctantly persuaded to allow Mr. Fernando to move into the apartment. There was nothing scandalous to this per se, the concierge stressed in her letter, since as everyone in the neighborhood knew, Madame Spinoza and Mr. Fernando had been fiancés before the First World War and had always adored each other. Rarely had anyone seen a pair so well suited. They started the day by quarreling, then they had lunch and an afternoon nap, and the sun had hardly set before they were back at their amicable bickering, right up until they went to bed, where they devoted themselves to renewing memories of old times before going to sleep. This could have gone on for many years. But one day after lunch, the concierge wrote, Madame Spinoza prepared potato soup with dumplings for dinner. Something must have distracted her, for she left the soup on the stove while they were taking their nap. Not long after they went to sleep, the soup boiled over and extinguished the flame, but the gas from the stove continued to seep into the room. Only many hours later that evening did the neighbors notice the strong odor of gas coming out of the apartment. They rang the bell, and when no one came, they called the police, who forced their way in. They turned off the gas and opened all the windows wide. The old couple was discovered in the bedroom, lying peacefully, embracing each other in bed. The all-knowing concierge reported that Fernando’s lips were formed into a blissful smile.

  Of course my great-uncle was smiling. He was happy that the woman he had madly adored was his—if not for life, at least in death.

  MY MOTHER BEGGED ME just before she died to tell the world that during the war the Nazis had brutally murdered a pious young man, a certain Lipot, who along with several other young Jewish men had concealed himself in her parents’ house. She wanted me to ask how God could allow such a thing. Guilt-ridden at having neglected my mother and impressed by the seriousness of the moment, I promised her that someday I would do so.

  Ten years later, when the doctor told me right out that I’d been attacked by an aggressive cancer and he would have to cut out my larynx at once, I suddenly recalled the day my mother passed away. My heart began pounding and all my senses suddenly became more acute. I could see my mother on her deathbed muttering her last words and me promising that someday I would describe the isolated little universe that was our home on earth. Only at that moment did I become aware how many years had passed and realize that I hadn’t fulfilled my pledge to her or done anything of any significance with my life.

  I’d long been accustomed to a general feeling of dissatisfaction with my life. Bothered by that oppressive middle-age heaviness that nothing can alleviate—neither adventurous trips abroad nor the relative peace of everyday life—I silently grumbled a great deal, and from time to time I had sudden fits of anger. I cursed both God, who was always so remote, and my dead parents, who had never been close. But most of all I bitterly accused myself for failing to achieve anything worthwhile.

  I WAS EMPLOYED at a book warehouse in Oslo from the age of seventeen right up until I fell ill. Uncle Wilhelm had gotten me the job. I drove a warehouse hoist for them for more than thirty years, every workday from eight in the morning until four-thirty in the afternoon, moving pallets loaded with cartons of books, positioning them or taking them down from the tall shelves that various publishing firms rented from the warehouse. It was a simple, boring job that required no effort on my part. It was perfect for me, for I’d never exerted myself in search of the fruits of success. I was lazy and didn’t ever try to better myself in any way.

  I’ve lived with the smell of books for all my life. Reading them, on the other hand, has never interested me. My parents were great readers. They eagerly scooped up every new book published in Hungary. That was their way of seeking out some few crumbs of truth in a country where everything in public life was rotten with lies. All the shelves and niches in our house were stacked with novels and poetry collections. I never opened a single one; I was satisfied just to look at the covers and rub my fingertips along the spines. Perhaps that was a sort of protest against my mother and father, my reaction to the perception that they spent more time on literature than they did on me and were always preaching about the virtues of reading. I preferred a thousand times over to listen to my great-uncle’s stories than to open some dusty old book, even though my parents regularly warned Sasha and me that Fernando was fooling us.

  My lack of interest in books was mostly due to the fact that reading required patience, a virtue I’ve never had much of. During my years in the book warehouse I did become accustomed to leafing through novels early in the morning, especially books by authors whose names I recognized. I picked up this habit after attending a party where I met an attractive young woman. She assumed that since I worked with books—I didn’t explain that I was a hoist operator in a book warehouse—I’d certainly read A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. For a m
oment I thought of confessing that, on principle, I’d always avoided books; but I felt a twinge of shame. Judging from the title, I thought the book she mentioned might well have some implications for my own life and certainly I should have read it. So I smiled and scribbled on a scrap of paper that I’d enjoyed it a great deal, especially the parts about Central Europe, because they brought back my own experiences and I was pleased to recognize my own world. My great-uncle used to say that it’s easier to catch up with a liar than with a lame dog. The truth of his proverb was demonstrated to me that evening. The young woman unfortunately made no secret of the fact that I had not been telling the truth. That was when I decided I would start actually looking into the books in the warehouse, so I could avoid the humiliation of being exposed as a liar with a nonexistent education.

  It was enough for me to page aimlessly through a book for a few minutes to get an idea of its contents. This was usually sufficient to set my imagination working. Driving a hoist is a lonesome job; one wears ear protection all day long to muffle the noise and block out the rest of the world. Even at lunchtime I would sit there alone. The other workers dismissed me as stupid and simple because I couldn’t speak, and they rarely sought my company. After holding a book in my hands, I would give free rein to my imagination to go anywhere it wished. This made the mindless work much easier to bear. It became a habit after a while. As soon as I got up in the morning, my imagination went racing off on some giddy adventure that went on and on, right up until I fell asleep that evening. I could always find some new book with a scenario to explore. For example, one time a couple of days after picking up Franz Kafka’s The Trial and skimming the back cover, I became a dazzlingly talented attorney—modeled after Perry Mason from the television program—and my eloquence saved the innocent Josef K. from a death sentence. Another time I stumbled upon a volume of Marcel Proust’s series In Search of Lost Time, and for a whole week I envisioned the breathtakingly beautiful Countess of Guermantes lying in my arms and begging me to make love to her one more time. Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot made me dream that I was Dr. Freud and had developed a miraculous treatment that could cure the mentally ill of the world. Finding Joseph Conrad’s slim little book The Heart of Darkness just at the time that Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize stimulated me to fantasize that I was saving the children of Africa from deadly diseases and starvation.

  MY DAYDREAMS were different every day, but they had generally the same theme: I was a special individual whose achievements astounded the world. It never occurred to me that I was daydreaming in order to hold my sad reality at a distance. The truth is that my life in Norway has been miserable and lonely.

  I never succeeded in becoming a member of any community in my new country. I never made any friends. I lived without a goal. I closed my eyes to affection, to pleasure, and to the temptations of life. I led a life of pure escapism and in my thoughts I was always on the way to somewhere else. My great mistake was never joining, never trying to blend in by being and behaving like everyone else. Choosing to go one’s own way is a punishment in itself. People who live in isolation soon shipwreck themselves on the reefs of reality. I lived for myself alone, lonely, with no purpose and no ideals. My life was reduced to nothing but a way to pass the time.

  It’s a solemn but proud moment when one is struck by the revelation that one has thrown one’s life away, the only life one will ever have. Even minor reverses used to leave me downcast for weeks on end, and when I was in a dismal mood, as I often was, I would fixate upon my misfortune, plunge into depression, and let myself slide down into the black depths. But not this time. I wasn’t dismayed by my insomnia or my difficulty in swallowing or even by the ominous diagnosis of cancer of the larynx. On the contrary. I accepted without protest the knowledge that I was going to die soon, and strangely enough, death freed me from my fear of living. Death gave me the right to be myself and to break the contract forced upon me in my earlier life. I had nothing more to expect from life, so I might just as well do something astonishing that would defy the boring routine of my humdrum existence.

  But what could that be?

  No matter how frantically I sought the answer, I always got lost in distractions and trivialities.

  THE OPERATION changed my life. Because of it, I underwent an odd transformation. I suddenly abandoned my daydreams and forgot my constant dissatisfaction with life. I woke up each morning with a feeling of gratitude and joy, just to be alive.

  My inability to speak still tormented me. I’ve been mute for more than thirty years, of course, and I long ago got used to communicating by writing things on scraps of paper. But somewhere deep inside me a little hope had lingered, a hope that someday I might recover my voice. The surgeon’s knife put an end to that hope. I tried to console myself with the thought that, after all, I’d probably never have found someone willing to listen. In all these years in Norway, you see, I never met a single person—except for Uncle Wilhelm—who was ready to embrace me without reservation and listen to the story of my life, so I could just forget about that. And now, as the past began to well up inside me, now that hope was gone, I was seized by the desire to tell stories about life’s pitiless treatment of all those generations of my family.

  I WAS BORN in a world where the past had more meaning than the future. The shining promise offered to others by the new day meant nothing to us. Our golden age lay behind us and was wrapped in deep silence. Oddly enough, no one in the family talked about the fates of our many family members, either because no one could bear to relive the past or simply because everyone wanted to shield us children from the suffering of the Spinozas throughout the ages.

  We’d been struck by so many misfortunes. We’d been dogged by disaster as far back as anyone could remember. Almost everything that happened in the world turned out to be disastrous for us. The Middle Ages. The Enlightenment. The French Revolution. Emancipation. World wars. Catholicism. Nazism. Communism. Liberalism.

  Life in our family was based on principles that had never offered us security in the past and might always be subject to attack in the future. We were secular Jews who’d lost contact with traditional concepts of our faith and customs, Jews who never put down roots wherever we were living. That’s why we were forever excluded from the benefits of joining any other community.

  If it hadn’t been for my great-uncle, a man who actually had no blood ties to us, Sasha and I would have grown up in that tyranny of silence. But Fernando knew how to conjure up our hidden legends and all the events and history that lay concealed deep within our genes, and he brought our heritage to life for us with his epic talent for storytelling. I’m convinced he understood what our family’s willful suppression of our story was doing to us children, and he wanted to infuse us with vital force and courage by giving my twin brother and me something to be proud of: strong roots. That was why he taught us that the events themselves were to blame. None of it was our fault.

  Nothing seemed more natural to Sasha and me than drifting off in our great-uncle’s stories about those many things that happened long ago. His tales were sources of delight for us. He effortlessly created for us a whole world of yesteryear, painted with a sort of melancholy but happy exaltation that made Sasha and me a bit giddy.

  Quite suddenly, then, those stories popped into my mind. Without warning they simply gushed out from the darkness within me. I realized that I was carrying an endless store of anecdotes, and I couldn’t push away the powerful and ever more insistent need to communicate everything I had stored inside me. But how can one possibly tell stories without a voice?