He struck a few measures, but paused, closed the lid, swung around on the revolving stool, and looked freely into Aunt Sophie’s eyes: “I smashed the windshield on your car.”
“I know,” said Aunt Sophie. “But first, stand up and say good day properly; then we can go on with our conversation.”
“Formalities,” said Wolf with a theatrical sigh, but he did get to his feet. And to my amazement, Aunt Sophie laughed and said, “You will have to learn them all the same. And now, answer my questions. How long have you been playing and whom are you studying with?”
I was subsequently to make the acquaintance of a new feeling I had never known before: jealousy born of envy. It was ugly, it inspired all sorts of nasty thoughts and wishes, and, if it did not piercingly drive me to self-torment, it left me with an empty soul which was again invaded by that hazy and urgent yearning: skushno.
Aunt Sophie developed a true passion for young Goldmann. He was in the house every day; no sooner had we finished our second breakfast than he was sitting at the grand piano in the salon, and he practiced all morning, during which time everyone—aside from myself—was busy elsewhere. At midday, he vanished but was back again in the early afternoon, and he played until Aunt Sophie had finished her daily rounds. Then, when she had changed for the evening and appeared in the salon with the glowing face of a woman happy in love, on went the stormy tumult of the notes. Occasionally she would intervene to demonstrate an interpretation of her own, but mostly she would drop her hands and say, “Of course, I’m completely out of practice!” It sounded pious, as if she were illuminated by the promise that this boy had outdistanced her in order to achieve far greater things than she could ever have done. Almost blushing, with the happy self-renunciation of a lover, she added, “I only wanted to show you how I’d heard Liszt play this when I was a girl.”
It was obvious even to me, a thirteen-year-old, that all the wishes, dreams, and hopes of her youth, buried for a lifetime, had gained new, tangible, blood-warm life in this red-haired boy. And when Uncle Hubi’s eyes met mine or mine his, they clearly mirrored his regret at losing the familial unity and intimacy of our stirring national song soirées—losing them to something with a loftier status than our heartfelt musical bungling but which left us out entirely. Beyond this, however, we were bound by manly agreement not to interfere with Aunt Sophie, indeed, to strengthen and assist her and perhaps at some point protect her from herself. And at such times, of course, we could read in the other’s gaze physical disgust at the Jewish brat, who had managed “insidiously” (as the ironical Stiassny was to put it), “by utilizing the blandishments of Aryan tonal art,” to throw off balance this exemplary, warmhearted, prudent woman who stood so solidly in life.
It was almost uncanny to sense Stiassny watching me, to sense all he seemed to know about my feelings—and not just Stiassny, either, but just about everyone in the house, with the old butler Geib in the lead, except for Aunt Sophie, who was blind to everything. Bizarre scenes, whose tension was virtually woven from the resonance of the events, kept everyone fascinated, yet not the two oblivious protagonists at the center, Aunt Sophie and Wolf Goldmann, “the lovers.”
Occasionally, for example, intense practice of a single passage would drag on even though Geib had long since announced dinner, and he would stand at the door to the dining room while Uncle Hubi tactfully inserted little coughs in the pauses during the tempest of sound, or ultimately almost whined, “Sophie, dinner’s been ready for almost half an hour.” But his efforts were in vain. All of us, even Stiassny, were under something like a spell, which weighted down our movements and gave each look so much meaning that no one dared glance at anyone else.
The mood would intensify until Aunt Sophie finally observed that it was enough for today; then she would turn to Geib and say impatiently, “Isn’t dinner ready yet?” And when Geib answered that it was probably being warmed up for the second time, she would rejoin, “Set a place for young Goldmann!”
Uncle Hubi ventured to ask casually one evening, “Wouldn’t it be easier if he just moved right in?” Predictably, he was supported by Aunt Sophie, though a bit absentmindedly and mechanically: “Well, that’s quite true, it would be simpler. Why, Hubi’s absolutely correct!” And we all stood and waited to see Aunt Sophie placing her arm around Wolf Goldmann’s frail shoulders and leading him into the dining room, while we, lowering our heads under the stag antlers along the walls, followed the woman and the boy, intensely aware of the symbolism and its justified ludicrousness.
Stiassny, of course, was in his element. His colorless eyes watched Geib pushing the chair under Aunt Sophie and promptly coming over to show me the same attention. Then, while serving, Geib saw to it that Aunt Sophie did not fill the plate for Wolf, who was sitting next to her—“I’ll serve him myself; it’s easier!”—which would have left me waiting at the lower end of the table. Instead, Geib made sure to serve all the others, and myself, with special care and a discreet nod to the juiciest piece, until it was finally the “little Jew” ’s turn. Stiassny’s beautiful lips then parted in his most ashen smile: “May I offer my congratulations. The loyal vassals have not all defected as yet. The ferment of decomposition has not yet eaten its way through.” He laughed, and Uncle Hubi shushed him, blurting out, “Stiassny, I find that rather distasteful!”
The old intimacy of kinfolk between Uncle Hubi and myself now grew into a friendship—the lucid and autumnally rich friendship of a boy and an old man, the kind that is cleansed of the passions between people of the same age and entirely given to perceptive kindness and unconditional trust. He took me on outings—inspections in the brewery and the nurseries—and the invitations were ostentatiously proffered whenever Aunt Sophie commented that it was our duty to do everything in our power to enable a genius like young Goldmann to have the best possible training. She declared that she agreed completely with his father, Dr. Goldmann, that it would be a crime to put the boy wonder, who was ready to perform, before an audience now; they should do all they could to foster his personal maturation as well as the development of his virtuoso abilities. To be sure, she did not go so far as to make contact with Dr. Goldmann himself, but used Stiassny to inform the father of her views, aims, and decisions regarding young Goldmann.
Aunt Sophie’s designs for educating a genius, which were occasionally communicated to us, too, with poignant eagerness, would prompt Uncle Hubi to turn to me pointedly and ask, “Are you coming out to the farm with me? I have to check something about the sheep. I think they’re driving them regularly into the new preserve by the river.” And then, quite uncharacteristically, he would address Aunt Sophie tangentially, so to speak, as she sat at the breakfast table, wrapped in thought and spreading honey on her roll. “I don’t think we’ll be back for lunch,” he said. “We’ll eat out with the steward. Stiassny will most likely say that we need have no illusions about the gap that we’ll be leaving—nicht wahr, Stiassny?”
I loved riding out to the farm, and not only because it was conducive to my training as Count Sàndor’s emulator. I would listen attentively to all of Uncle Hubi’s tips and pointers, which he would illustrate by anecdotes; having spent his life on horseback, and being an old cavalry officer, he had made riding an ideology, the metaphor of a way of life, and despite his pyknic constitution, he was an excellent horseman. But beyond all this, I was very satisfied when I said to myself that the sight of the two of us riding through the village must have made an impact on the street urchins, the boys who had been about to humiliate me when Haller, the blacksmith, saved me from them as from a swarm of flies. Now they had to be convinced of the power behind me, which someday I myself would represent and embody.
For it was more and more obvious that Uncle Hubi intended to make me his successor. He began systematically to integrate me into the circle of his chores, duties, and activities. And, needless to say, it was once again Stiassny who could not help putting this situation into words.
“I have recently seen a l
ittle color in one’s cheeks, which has caused me some worry about one’s honorable state of health,” he said. “Could this possibly come from one’s now growing seriously into one’s role of heir apparent? I mean, it appears no longer as a fiction, as a carefully considered possibility and hallucination, but instead has finally found the concrete relationship of function. One is learning one’s future métier, nicht wahr? One is being confirmed in one’s task, albeit for the moment only by holding the horses of one’s predecessor in the chain of inherited duties, and whisking away the flies from those selfsame horses with a leafy twig, while Herr Uncle has his hours of chitchat with the steward about the situation and how to improve it. But still and all, one is present, one does listen, one is initiated and instructed. Why, that must strengthen one’s self-esteem, mustn’t it? Or am I mistaken? But then who am I to know of such matters? Still, the groom will one day be a cavalier and landowner, just as the squire becomes a full-fledged knight. Perhaps one no longer feels so utterly rejected and excluded from the loftier status that attaches our honorable hostess to young Goldmann. One is strengthened by the notion of becoming something definite, however different from and less spectacular than what one’s more gifted friend is through his piano-playing. One must admit, of course, that what he is doing is quite extraordinary. But this very perfection, nicht wahr, this ruthless perfection that mercilessly excludes and degrades whatever is not equally consummate, making anything of middle rank a blasphemy—this very perfection has something cold and hard-hearted about it, something relentlessly and repulsively self-righteous. People talk so much about the demonic nature of the artist—yet that which strikes us as demonic is nothing else than this repulsiveness, the unconditional and absolute, together with the profound attraction exerted upon us by perfection. If I am expressing myself not altogether intelligibly (after all, as we know, I am considered a muddled orator in this house): that which one is to become and perhaps is already becoming, thanks to our Herr Uncle’s kindhearted intention, namely a good, solid husbandman, is certainly not of the same rank as an artist; but, by way of compensation, it is more human, more outgoing, more universal. One becomes something that previous generations have been—nothing out of the ordinary, to be sure, but with a self-conception and a self-confidence that are painfully lacking in the artist. Whereas one need only be what one is, upright and modest, he, the artist, is committed to self-realization at every instant. He must act in order to be what he is, and by thus acting he challenges and tests himself anew, risking his existence. His life is an incessant gamble—and most especially when, as one’s Frau Aunt maintains, he is a budding genius, an extraordinary individual; but, alas, he is these things in a wild isolation, which makes him an outsider to society. In contrast, it must be very agreeable—nay, downright inspiring—to know that one is unproblematically one of many similar beings in a safe, tried-and-true species, in the simple, unimpeachable existence of a farmer and—with a correspondingly venerable and traditional prosperity—an aristocrat.”
These words sounded comforting and eased my mind, since it was beyond me to figure out the provocation that Stiassny, with his wonted perfidy, must have inserted. For a while, I more calmly accepted Wolf Goldmann’s greater claim to my aunt’s attention and—I had reason to fear—affection. I forced myself to act toward him with that chivalrous generosity which guards the aristocrat against the ignominy of being resented; and I acted as though our friendship were not the least bit changed or even strained. Once, when I asked him to interrupt his morning practice briefly to come and see a nest of young owlets in the hayloft above the stables, he snapped: “Go tell your grandmother about your stupid owlets!” But when, with unassailable aristocratic equanimity, I rejoined that he had not practiced around the clock in earlier days, he said, “You just don’t know what it means, playing your Bösendorfer instead of the old crate at home!” (To my surprise, he used a clear and proper German before relapsing into his sloppily impudent yiddling.) “Maybe you can see it this way: it’s like getting off that old gray nag biting the dust out there, and then mounting one of the fiery mustangs from your cowboy-and-Indian stories. Ya see? You goyim have to have everything translated into zoology before you understand it. Like your uncle, when he explains your master brewer’s psychology in terms of a horse that’s been ridden to death. You goyim know more about animals than people.”
I could have hit him, I was so indignant. Showered with blessings by Aunt Sophie and taken into the house like her own child, he was still disdainfully labeling us “goyim,” undisguisedly expressing how stupid and clumsy he considered us all. He noticed my response and he gave me a brazen grin: “Your aunt would like it if I became one of you, right? She’s given me Rilke to read: ‘Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night …’ I should live so long. I’m reading Krafft-Ebing. Now, he could help you. He might explain what your uncle really wants when he keeps riding out with you, beyond the farm and deeper and deeper into the forest.”
Wolf himself eventually explained it to me. Not only was Uncle Hubert suspected of homosexuality, but people had ideas about him and his friends, the rough hunting buddies who moved into the tower during the winter, those “last heroes and warriors” of a free, virile, wind- and-weather-beaten world of peril and daring. It was generally accepted that his friendships were relationships of homoerotic love, and my friendly, good-natured, apple-cheeked kinsman was the laughingstock of the town, which viewed his well-rounded behind as the very symbol of sexual deviance. What about his model marriage with Aunt Sophie? Was I really so naïve as I seemed? exclaimed Wolf; didn’t I know what to make of Stiassny’s presence in the house for all these decades? What else was Aunt Sophie’s spiteful refusal to have anything to do with his father, Dr. Goldmann, but an act of revenge? There was an ever-festering memory that the doctor’s wife, my friend Wolf’s mother, had had an affair with Stiassny. “You goyim always try to act like you ain’t got no potz and your women ain’t got no cunt between their legs,” said Wolf.
I cannot describe the profound repugnance I felt during the next few weeks, not only toward Wolf Goldmann but toward just about everyone. Not even Haller, the blacksmith, was excluded, ever since Wolf had told me that Dr. Goldmann had once sewn up a serious injury on Haller’s penis, a wound obviously made by human teeth and hardly by a woman inept in such amorous practices but, rather, in a passionate action by a man upon the member of the disciple of Hephaestus and the German descendant of Wieland. I almost threw up the next time I went into the smithy to cast lead pellets for my slingshot. Holding out his callused palm with the pellets he had found in the garage, Haller winked and asked, “What do I get for keeping my mouth shut the other day?” Wolf Goldmann had explained that sexual perverts regard boys our age as downright tidbits.
I was homesick. I missed my mother. Her sickly, high-strung sentimentality might be disquieting; but her feelings were probably deeper and steadier than those of her older and more robust cousin, who, however, was obviously no less rapturous, no less susceptible. Although repelled by the thought, I told myself that an encounter between my mother and Stiassny would have led to an incomparably more passionate and more poetic relationship than—if I were willing to believe Wolf Goldmann—the one between Stiassny and Aunt Sophie. Nonetheless, everything in me rebelled against the idea that my mother could lie in Stiassny’s arms and that I could speak about her and her lover as unabashedly as Wolf did. Now my hotheaded father’s somber passion for hunting became the escapism of an absolutely pure and noble man who preferred the loneliness of the raw universe of mountains to the filth of the lowlands. I myself wanted to withdraw from the world’s dubious hustle and bustle. I spent a lot of time in the tower, working on the syllabus for my makeup examination.
For the sake of old friendship, which was going to end anyhow the day we went to different schools, I once more followed Wolf Goldmann to his home. His father was out for the day, making calls in nearby villages, so we had all the time we wanted to look
at his office undisturbed. Finally I had a chance to have a good look at the famous skeleton: it struck me as sinister because its bones were so shiny I couldn’t believe they had ever been hidden in a human body. But even more I was fascinated by an electrostatic machine, which was meant for nervous ailments. As Wolf explained, the patient was made to hold two metal rods in his hands. They were connected with the electric current, which could be regulated from low to very high voltage, giving him either a gentle tingling and prickling or a powerful shock.
Wolf wanted me to try it, but I was too cowardly to grasp the rods. “What’s wrong?” he asked derisively. “The goyish hero isn’t big enough for a little tickling?” He took the two metal rods into his hands and nodded at me to switch on the machine. “Push the little button forward—but slow!”
Later on, I was unable to tell what had driven me to push the switch not slowly but with a brutal thrust up to the highest degree. But at the moment, in any case, the effect was comical: Wolf reared up, twisted convulsively, kicked his legs without really managing to move them, and his red hair stood on end like a scarecrow’s. What delighted me most of all was his pleading look when he held out his hands with the metal rods, trying to get me to liberate them. All his smug self-confidence was gone and his ram-face was now the face of a sacrificial lamb—the face of the slaughterhouse cattle his grandfather had grown rich on.
Despite later accusations, I do not believe I hesitated long before pushing the switch back so that he could drop the rods. In any event, when I released him, he was on his knees, holding out the hands from which the metal grips had fallen, and piteously crying, “My hands! My hands!”
The summer was waning, while I was virtually suspended in my relatives’ home—or, in the parlance of the dueling fraternities, I was “under beer blackball.” That is to say: I lived in a generally shared awareness of having committed a transgression of which I most likely could not exonerate myself, no matter how hard I dueled. True, Uncle Hubi resolutely took my side, treating my delinquency as a bagatelle—which it was, when all was said and done, for after a few weeks Wolf Goldmann’s precious pianist-hands were as agile as ever. But Wolf’s insinuations about my uncle’s secret motives for his friendliness toward me made me suspicious, no matter how hard I tried not to think of them. Involuntarily I withdrew from Uncle Hubi, too. Aunt Sophie treated me with an even, cool matter-of-factness. She did not mourn her dream; she let everyone know that it had simply been a dream and she had awoken from it. For, needless to say, Wolf Goldmann no longer came to the house. His father treated his hands very carefully with special massages and baths, and then sent him back to his mother earlier than scheduled. Nor did Wolf come to say good-bye to Aunt Sophie, much less to me.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 8
