At nineteen, life is a drama threatening to become a tragedy every fifteen minutes. The conflicts at home were unbearable. I disowned my parents, charged them with living in the past, with refusing to learn anything from the catastrophe of 1918, and I declared my independence from their notions of order and their values. I packed my belongings and moved from the provincial confinement of the Bukovina to the national metropolis: the Bucharest of 1933.
And here I was, doing everything but drawing and painting, and my dream of stamping my genius on the century was visibly fading. At nineteen, I had to regard myself as a failure. Even worse: I had gone in a direction that would probably exclude me forever from the world into which I was born and which had been presented to me as the only one fit for a human being to live in. I was an outcast. It had begun with my obsession with sex, or rather, the myth of sex.
My very first steps in Bucharest guided my destiny. I did not have any real plan, merely the aim, the wish, to stand on my own two feet—on the unconditional premise, of course, that I would do so through what had been so hurtfully doubted: my artistic gifts. I felt as vehement an urge to prove them as to demonstrate my virility. Yet I was so staunchly convinced of my artistic talents that for the time being, I wasted no thoughts on when, where, and in what manner I might apply them. The other thing was more pressing: to prove to myself that I could take, spellbind, hold, desert, and throw away women as I pleased. Wasn’t the one as important as the other? Conquering women, conquering the world—wasn’t it the same?
I tried not to count up how many months ago I had come to Bucharest. The day of my arrival was in any case fixed in my mind. I had brought some money with me, slipped to me by my mother, so I did not have to worry about food and lodging right away; I sent my baggage from the station to a hotel, and then, utterly carefree, I ambled out onto the street. The Calea Griviţei received me with all the shabby enchantment of the old Balkans.
I was intoxicated. I saw, I felt, I smelled the nearby Orient. A dimension of the world that had previously been a fairyland became a tangible presence—filtered, to be sure, through a garbagey modernity in which all the dubious aspects of technocratic civilization came to the fore, decaying and degenerating, but nevertheless swirling with life, color, adventure. This was a world in which a man could still prove he was a man. Here, sheer strength was what counted—especially since cunning laid snares and set traps for it everywhere.
The Calea Griviţei teemed with loafers, passersby, street vendors at their heels, beggars, strollers, sheep, chickens, trodden dogs, whip-cracking coachmen, knots of peasants on rattling carts, wildly honking automobiles—and out of this swarm, a young Gypsy girl came toward me. She was straight out of a picture book: fiery eyes, glittering teeth, flashing silver coins, raven-wing blackness. A slender bent arm, from which the full sleeve of her blouse had slipped, supported a huge flat basket of corncobs on her shining head. Her skin was as golden as the corn in her basket. Gazing into every pair of passing eyes with an unabashed smile, she sonorously called, “Papushoy!” But no one bought any.
As she approached, she had to sidestep a ruffian who almost knocked her down. A movement of her hip, which made the flower cup of her skirts whirl, brought her past him. But this caused her left breast to slide out of her deeply cut blouse; touchingly girlish, with the uneven seam of the rosy areola, it bobbed full and bare for all to see.
She was not the least bit embarrassed. With a casual motion of her free hand, she adjusted her décolleté so that the breast slipped back in; then, still laughing with her white teeth, she called “Papushoy!” at me.
I stopped her. “How much is your corn?” My heart was beating in my throat.
“One leu a cob. Five cobs for four lei.”
“How many do you have in your basket?”
“Seventy or eighty.”
“I’ll give you a hundred lei. But you have to come with me.” I swallowed. “I have nothing to carry them in,” I added awkwardly.
She had long since got my drift. “Let’s go, my handsome young man!” she said merrily. “But you’ll have to give me one pol more.”
A pol was twenty lei, but I did not want to act too docile. I ignored her request and walked ahead wordlessly—besides, I was embarrassed by the attention our commerce had aroused. A couple of Jews were standing in front of a shop. She followed me, and I heard laughter behind me and a few dirty cracks.
I could not be wrong in assuming that here, by the station, there would be some dubious hotel for traveling salesmen where a room might be rented by the hour. The hotel was sleazier than I had imagined. The unshaven fellow between the rickety table and the switchboard did not even have a shirt on, just an undershirt; the trousers hung from a belt under his belly. He was unusually powerful; his tremendous lower arms were matted with black hair. He demanded payment in advance, three hundred lei. At that time, so many counterfeit hundred-lei pieces were in circulation that businessmen tested the coins by throwing them on a flat stone and deciding on their genuineness by the ring of the impact. I was surprised that he did not do so, since the stone lay before him on the table. But I gave it no further thought. Above his head, from a nail in the keyboard, hung a small, light-blue tin box stamped with a Star of David—the box was a kupat kerem kayemet, for contributions to build the Promised Land of Israel. It was typical for such a seamy hotel of ill repute to be in Jewish hands.
Just as we were about to climb the stairway—or, rather, the ladderlike steps—to the rooms upstairs, the man behind the table snapped at the Gypsy girl: “The basket of corn stays here.”
“Let him have it,” I said to the girl. “If he doesn’t want to eat the stuff because it’s not kosher, he can sell it—for pig feed.”
I experienced all this in a kind of trance. This was not my first visit with some female to a bedbug-infested room, but this time it corresponded in every way to my notion of domineering virility and swift, casual adventure. The more disreputable the surroundings, the more authentic the adventure seemed.
I did not even look the room over; I pulled the door shut behind us and locked it.
The Gypsy girl stood before me. Her mute, sarcastically challenging laugh hinted that if I approached her, she would leap aside at the last moment and start a hatefully teasing game of tag, such as coy girls launch in order both to delay and to provoke the brutality of the sex act. But she stayed where she was, never stirring, nor changing her sarcastic look; all she did, when I was close to her, was to hold out her hollow palm. I put in a hundred lei piece. She remained motionless. I placed a twenty-lei coin upon it and then a second one. Quick as a flash, she pulled back her hand and spirited the money away.
She had not averted her eyes; as I stripped the blouse from her shoulders, she kept smiling and gazing into my eyes as if she knew I was doomed to fail. And for one instant, I was spellbound by her naked breasts, overpowered by a reality more precious than all daydreams. This was it: those breasts—two sturdy handfuls, warm, silky-smooth breasts, scented with almond milk and tipped by rose buds, which contracted, hard and wrinkled, when I touched them, these witnesses to a blissful thrill coursing through her body into the darkness of the womb; the crunchy-black funnel caught the thrill, leading it to the moist grottoes charily wedged between the thighs, which she now gently opened…. That was what I saw, most clearly and most excitingly, in my erotic fantasies; that was what tightened my throat in anticipation of delight; that was what sank sweetly, heavy with tenderness, into the pit of my stomach: the epitome of the feminine, the purest image of the essence of woman, that eternally alien, laughing, always elusive essence, which always slips out of reach, the creature whom I feared, scorned, and had to love, to my torment, to my damnation. Entering a woman’s womb was already something abstract, it made her image vanish, it snuffed her out: I was being received not by her but rather by the universe, the huge, dark hollow of the cosmos, swallowing me, snuffing me out too. But her breasts were life, blood-warm, living Being, sensory fact, r
eality …
When I raised my hands to take hold of her, there was a knock on the door. Startled, I pulled up the girl’s blouse, walked over, and opened. The man from downstairs stood in the doorway, holding out a coin: “This hundred-lei piece is phony.”
While he peered over my shoulder into the room, I fished another coin out of my pocket, gave it to him, and shut the door. The Gypsy girl was still standing there, mutely laughing. “C’mon!” I said, leading her to the ghastliness of sweat-yellowed linen, rachitic pillows, and a feltlike horse blanket—our wedding bed. She lay on her back without the least resistance. That too confused me. All the myths of vigorous malehood surrounded me like totem poles. All my fears and self-doubts fluttered around me in alarm and fanned out. I ordered myself not to listen to myself, for God’s sake, not to hear whether I would be able to respond to her readiness with my own. Slowly, I slipped one hand under her skirt and felt for her breast with the other. There was a second knock at the door. Once again, it was the fellow from downstairs; this time, decidedly insolent: “This hundred-lei piece is phony too!”
I gave him another one. “I do not wish to be disturbed any more,” I said, and instantly heard how ridiculously out of place this luxury-hotel formula sounded, not to mention the arrogant sharpness in my tone. He dawdled; he peered into the room and at the Gypsy girl lying on the bed, her skirt up to her groin and her breasts exposed. I slammed the door in his face, then ostentatiously turned the key in the lock twice and went back to my untouched beauty.
This time I kissed her, and she returned the kiss knowledgeably. With an unparalleled burst of happiness, I felt her putting her arm around me, drawing me over, grabbing my hair with one hand to hold my head and press it harder against her mouth. Her mouth was soft and sweet; I wanted to close my eyes to feel her lips more intimately, but I saw that her eyes were open; they seemed to be sparkling sarcastically, and I wanted to see her overwhelmed by pleasure and closing her eyes. There was a knock.
Now I was ready to ignore it, but the fellow was soon banging furiously against the door, and the girl in my arms laughed and said, “You’re really a sucker. Can’t you see he’s passing all his phony coins off on you?”
I could not let her believe I was a greenhorn, to be taken in by just anybody. I went and opened the door.
The guy held out his hand with a hundred-lei piece. “Is this one counterfeit too?” I asked hostilely. I saw the heavy muscles on his arms and shoulders.
“What else?” he snapped back, bringing his hand up.
“Du-te’n pizda mâti, jidanule!”—a popular Rumanian curse that could be heard all the time, which made it no less nasty: “Get into your mother’s cunt, you filthy kike!”
I had expected him to hit me, so his punch did not strike me squarely, but the force was so great that my ears hummed. It also knocked me to one side, so that my return punch barely grazed him—and I could not manage a second one; his fists were hailing down on me. Under a flood of curses, he beat me out of the room and into the corridor.
I do not know how I got down the steps to the lobby, but I waited for him below. I had grabbed the flat stone on which he tested coins and I hurled it into his face with all the strength I could muster. But even though he roared with pain and blindness, he kept on punching, beating me out into the street, where I started to run, just to save my bare life. I did not care if a swarm of street urchins were howling after me or a gang of men perhaps following them to catch me because I had knocked his eye out, or if someone was holding him back to prevent him from dashing after me and killing me.
I ran until I felt halfway safe. There was a stitch in my side, and I was bleeding. Trembling in fury and humiliation, with a roaring skull and aching teeth, ribs and ears, I trudged toward the center of Bucharest. I was ready to continue the fight with anyone who came along and in whose eyes I would read amazement and then prompt understanding: to think that this well-dressed young man, who doesn’t fit in with this disreputable neighborhood, could be walking around in broad daylight with a ripped-up shirt and blood-smeared jacket, his face all scratched and swollen—he must be coming from a very shady adventure that turned out badly for him.
But I would have my revenge. I would buy a pistol in the next gun shop, go back, and shoot the fellow down like a mangy dog. I knew, of course, that I would not do this, but I felt good imagining it. It soothed the burning of my humiliation, the indignation of my wounded ego, to picture him twisting under my lashing shots, sinking down, and dying on the ground like a cur. I would shoot him in his belly, heedless of the consequences. Perhaps his Jewish brethren would form a mob and lynch me, and the Rumanians around the Calea Griviţei would finally be fed up with the riffraff that sucked their blood, would rise up against them and murder them all, a pogrom would erupt throughout the land…. I felt good picturing it: the howling wives and children, the old crones with dangling breasts, wringing their hands and shrieking “Vai!” when the soldiers skewered their sons on bayonets…. Or it could even be just the Gypsy girl’s tribe who came in the night to beat the man black and blue. She had probably fallen in love with me, she had kissed me and run her fingers through my hair, she must have been as disappointed as I was by the sudden disruption of our amorous idyll…. Besides, the stone I had hurled into his kisser, his bestial roar—I hoped I had knocked out an eye, or his teeth—showed that I had at least smashed his nose ….
It did me good to think such thoughts, and to recall the details of the Gypsy girl’s kiss again, her hand in my hair, her adorable, precious breasts…. And this promptly unleashed my impotent rage again and my thirst for vengeance, the bitter humiliation of being thrashed by a Jew and not chastising him for the insolent way he had gawked at my girl’s exposed breasts, the disappointment, the distress that I had not kissed, not caressed these precious, adorable breasts, that I had not been able to chew them up in the unconsciousness of lust, that her sweet reality had become a lost phantom, a vision among so many other, similar visions.
The evening of that first day in Bucharest, I was covered with swellings and discolorations. Nevertheless, after more or less putting myself in order at my hotel, I picked up one of the prostitutes on Calea Victoriei. She was anything but beautiful; her face was hard, her hair was dyed a strawy blond, her speech was vulgar, and her voice was unspeakably common. When we entered her (frightfully expensive) room, she did not even want to undress; instead, she pulled up her skirt, pushed her panties down to her knees, cursed me for not being Johnny-on-the-spot, milked me impatiently, and then lay under me like a corpse. Luckily, I came almost immediately, after tormentingly pushing my way in, only half stiff ….
And the Gypsy girl’s breasts, which I forced myself to think of during the act, moved ever further away into the tantalizing kingdom of wishful thinking. I almost vomited.
Three days later, panic-stricken, I was leafing through the telephone book, looking for a specialist in skin and venereal diseases. In those days, two anxieties gave every amorous encounter a touch of imminent catastrophe and just deserts for sinning. The lesser anxiety concerned impregnation; and now the greater anxiety was brandishing its scourge over me. It was all the more ominous because I was stricken by a mysterious complaint with symptoms that no warning adviser had ever depicted to me.
The clap, I had been taught, could be recognized by a purulent discharge: “The first day, it burns. The second, it drips. The third, it runs.” Syphilis, on the other hand, had a different primary stage: crater-shaped, raspberry-colored, hard and insensitive symptoms; but they appeared only after several weeks; you could hardly ever be certain about whom you’d got it from and whom you might pass it on to. If you had a soft chancre, then something also hurt or swelled up; in case of doubt, it was the lymph gland or the head of the penis. In any event, it was not so bad as the other two stages, which were considered practically incurable. You could, of course, use Salvarsan to hold up the development of the second or third stage—the latter usually involved softening of the br
ain. But even with Salvarsan, traces of cerebral damage remained, as we had known at least since Nietzsche. And the spinal marrow was sometimes affected—everyone knew the bizarrely twitching, marionettelike walk, the occasional digressing sidesteps of elderly cavaliers who suffered from so-called tabes. This walk was a bit ridiculous, to be sure; but it was not without a certain elegance. And the clap, too, was actually something you kept all your life. Whenever you thought you had got a new dose, it was just the good old one you’d had originally. And what I had, this horrible multiplication of unbearably itching, reddish, yellow-crusted dots around the penis and on the thighs, could only be some dreadful disease—a Balkan specialty, no doubt, hence particularly malicious. And if not ultimately mortal, perhaps, then at least with destructive consequences at the level of my fly.
The physician I randomly picked and consulted was named Dr. Maurer, even though he was a thoroughbred Rumanian. “Where did you dig up these splendid specimens?” he asked after briefly inspecting my lower abdomen and upper thighs. I was crawling with crablice.
At this moment I paused to evoke the past few months in my memory. Supposing the girl in the wheelchair had really become my beloved and had been willing to hear the confession of my past. How, I wondered, could I have told her about such base incidents and circumstances? In reality, I could scarcely do so without embarrassing her or at least arousing her amazement, perhaps even abhorrence. She had looked protected and innocent, such as only a girl of good background, especially in her ailing condition, could appear. And yet she seemed intelligent and open-minded, and tested by her suffering—yes indeed, by her own suffering. That had to make her sympathetic toward something so bad, at least so humiliating, embarrassing. When all was said and done, this too was human.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 10
