Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  A growing awareness of how shaky my ego must always have been sometimes led to bright moments. I began to realize how much I had been lying to myself when I pretended I was doing something contrary to my taste, self-esteem, and social orientation solely because it might help me reach my real goal. Quite the opposite: I knew that my work was in fact estranging me from my vocation; and this was quite all right. With every day I lost at the Aphrodite Company, the dreams of my future as a world-famous painter grew thinner and thinner, but I also felt the same measure of relief. I was making excuses to give up all my ambitious goals of times gone by. What made me stick to my guns was no longer the hope that a stage of transition would grow into the fulfillment of grand wishes. Instead, an oddly fatalistic persistence kept me suspended, as it were, while my life drifted toward a different destination, as yet unknown. Clenching my teeth, I went through the weekly rotation of decorating as many shop windows in Bucharest as possible with the products of the Aphrodite Company, Inc.

  In the swarm of tiny shops on the outskirts of the city, my successes required less effort. The Mahalàs were sleazy, filthy, poverty-stricken, but life-swirling suburbs, which attracted me even though, or because, the milieu was similar to that of the Calea Griviţei, where I had had my inglorious adventure. Here, in the slums, the situation was clear-cut. A decorator was allowed to beautify the window if he cleaned off the dirt that had made the glass opaque. You had only to steal a march on the competition; then you could clean the panes and lay out your goods.

  At first, in order to convince myself that my activity was necessary, I tried to put something like a work ethos into the business of displaying toothpaste tubes. So, I was angered by the vile utilitarianism of these slum drugstores. But I soon got used to being welcomed with exuberant friendliness and treated to a cup of strong black coffee. After which, I was allowed to spend a few hours sweeping away dead flies from the display-window boxes, wiping away finger-thick dust, and cleaning the panes—to prepare for the actual decorating. Depending on whether lavender soap or lemon soap was to be displayed, the window was lined with lilac or yellow crêpe paper, each thumbtack meticulously camouflaged with a crêpe rosette and thus made part of the adornment. Next came the artistic construction of the powerfully fragrant products in a bed of artificial umbels, with individual items in packages of three or six. This edifice was encircled by a bold loop—an arc of Aphrodite products, from the shaving cream of the well-groomed gentleman to the toothpaste for the entire family to the soap flakes for the ladies’ fine lingerie. I was soon quite hardened to what happened next, after my completion of this work of art and dismissal amid renewed protestations of friendship: no sooner was I out in the street again than the display window filled up with nail files, douches, jars of leeches, packages of condoms, and, even worse, goods from our competitors.

  I appreciated the chats, the coffee, and the friendly, if sanctimonious, reception. I began liking these slum shop-keepers: careworn, arduously crawling through their petty existences, shrewdly callous or sagely resigned. We became friends. It was, if you will, my first real encounter with life—that is to say, the life of other people, of other species of human beings: a discovery of the world, often no less mysterious or wondrous than in childhood. I began combing through the Mahalàs of Bucharest with the same lust for adventure with which I had once combed through the garden of my childhood days. I peered with the same curiosity into the lives of these other species; I listened with the same devotion to the essence of the unknown. As a child, I had found I could not but be amazed at my life, and so again now: experiences lodged in me as “mood motifs,” and only after the mood had taken shape did they become clear images and recollections. The pitiable ugliness, the wretchedness, the meanness and brutality, of which I saw such a profusion in the slums of this Balkan metropolis, lost their repulsive immediacy, and were ordered into a complex picture, whose patterns and colors had no value per se but achieved real significance only in counterpoint with the rest.

  The factory of the Aphrodite Company was also located on the outskirts of the city, where the Calea Moşilor turned into a highway; broad and dusty, mournfully lined with poplars, it ran out into the vast countryside whose horizon melted far away into the haze of the Danube plain. The neighborhood around the factory, a settlement from the Turkish period, had coalesced with the exuberantly growing city. Every week, a horse market took place in a huge, empty square surrounded by two-storied houses made of either wooden boards or, back then already, characterless cement cubes. But over the flat rooftops loomed the notched, melon-shaped dome of an old hamam, the local steam bath; and the carvings on the hoary wood, the faded pink, ultramarine, and pistachio-green of the paint, the ancient motifs of tulips, cypresses, and pomegranate blossoms stamped into the plaster, contained all the poetry of the Orient.

  I did not see all this with the eyes of an archaeologist of his own lifetime, ever watchful for the “unspoiled world” of the past. I was utterly ingenuous in absorbing the anachronisms, the contrasts and contradictions, as a unity and a presentness. Everything was integrated as a matter of course into a picture of my world which I virtually inhaled, while in my imagination I dwelled in a future world of immeasurable promise that seemed to lie ahead of me.

  In the morning, I steered my already antediluvian Model-T Ford with its cargo of publicity material out of the factory gates. Halting, I was checked and at last politely given the go-ahead by a giant Bessarabian watchman who guarded the plant as if it were a seraglio. I then turned into the street to begin my daily calvary through the stations of nicely graduated humiliations in the elegant boutiques on the Boulevard Bratianu, on to the comfort of the down-to-earth humanity in the parti-colored stores in Văcăreşti, which carried not only cattle salt and copybooks but also laundry soap. My first stop was Mr. Garabetian’s bazaar.

  Mr. Garabetian was an Armenian of great embonpoint and charm. Day in, day out, from dawn to dusk, he sat like a Buddha, immobile, in front of his store: a chain of artfully carved apricot pits gliding playfully through his dark fingers tipped with rosy nails; the heavy lids half shut over the shiny almond-shaped eyes, which were like black olives preserved in oil; and a pea-shaped, aubergine-colored growth on the violet lower lip, under the Charlie Chaplin mustache.

  His store was spacious and inexhaustible. Like a real bazaar, it was laid out as a honeycomb of adjacent stalls, each containing a different commodity. Canopies were drawn over the sidewalk, above piles of sheepskins and sharp, dry cheeses, cooking utensils and cans of kerosene, sacks of cornmeal and boxes of American chewing gum, down pillows and hemp ropes. You could just as easily buy a whipcord here as a portable gramophone, donkey-meat sausages, pastrami, and Moldau wine as well as nonprescription remedies from aspirin to vermicide; and according to need and commercial consideration, you could purchase a pack of sewing needles or dispatch a load of Anatolian hazelnuts to London. Mr. Garabetian had several dozen employees, whom he supervised from a stool at an octagonal sidewalk-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl arabesques. He sat there, heedless of the yells of sheepherders, who drove their flocks past him, or the chirping of the sparrows that tussled over chaff in the horse manure on the roadway, undisturbed by the heavy clouds of dust trailing every passing motor vehicle. Using a folded gazette, whose news he had unflappably registered early in the morning, Mr. Garabetian indolently fanned away the flies from his pickle-shaped nose, smoked Macedonian cigarettes, and drank innumerable cups of Turkish coffee.

  Although naturally he carried every kind of cosmetic article, I had no professional dealings with him. After all, there was no display window to decorate. The wares lay open all the way into the street. Any shopper, even a window-shopper, could pass in and out of the convoluted stalls unimpeded, like the birds in the crown of a gigantic old elm tree that shaded all this. And Mr. Garabetian probably cared as little whether his goods were displayed agreeably as whether their quality was convincing. Anyone interested in checking them could pick them up, weigh t
hem, smell them, determine their solidity, their ripeness, and then either purchase or put them back. It made no difference whatsoever to Mr. Garabetian. He did reveal his Armenian preference for pink by the arrangement of silks, mineral pigments, roasted pistachios, and rahat lukum. But that was as far as his aesthetic sensibility went; any attempt to use a picture of a jubilant bathing beauty to inveigle a buyer into purchasing a shampoo would have struck him as ludicrous. Nevertheless, we had got humanly closer.

  It all started with my greeting him. I had begun doing so spontaneously because I was incapable of pretending not to know a person whom I passed several times a day. Thus, I had nodded at him with a smile, and he had responded with Oriental expressiveness. For a while, things went no further than this mimetic exchange of friendliness, in which Mr. Garabetian was always the more generous. I waved and smiled at him; and he clutched his chest with a gesture of surprised—nay, startled—and joyful recognition. His smile radiated dazzling white from the darknesses of his mustache, lips, and lip growth; then, scarcely hindered by his enormous belly, he leaned forward with closed eyes, casting out his arm and hand in a vast, flat curve, solemnly affirming unconditional submission.

  At some point or other, we exchanged a word or two, and he permitted himself to offer me a cup of coffee. Although three times as old as I and no doubt aware of what a low rank I had among the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon gentlemen in the hierarchy of the Aphrodite Company, Mr. Garabetian treated me as a person commanding respect; and, needless to say, I reciprocated his cordiality. He seemed to like this very much. The invitations to coffee were repeated, and eventually I got into the habit of dropping in on him. When the office was closed for the day, and I was done with my rounds as well as with the ensuing paperwork and the preparations for the next morning, I would go over to the bazaar. The gradually waning daylight would be growing thinner and clearer, while the turquoise sky was taking a step into the universe and igniting at its edges. At Mr. Garabetian’s side, I would sip mocha; the coffee grounds in the tiny cups curdled into Japanese ink-brush drawings, while the two of us waited to catch the twinkle of the first star and soon after that the blinking of the pale street lamps in the descending twilight.

  We were fairly monosyllabic at such times, like truly close friends. But perhaps the thing binding us in silence was chiefly our disparate solitudes: the afflicted loneliness of youth and the mellow loneliness of imminent old age. Once, he introduced me to his son, whom I had long known by sight. Garabetian junior was a few years older than I and a rather striking person: he was the beau not only of this suburban neighborhood but presumably of very different, far more fashionable districts of Bucharest. Even in the daytime, his hair, black as patent leather, seemed to reflect the neon frames of the nightclubs he frequented. Tall, slender-hipped, in dandyishly long, sharp-shouldered jackets, baggy trousers, and black-and-white shoes, he moved elastically on inch-thick rubber soles. He drove a Chrysler convertible and was always accompanied by breathtakingly beautiful, high-bosomed, cherry-eyed girls, such as I knew at most from the front pages of the yellow press.

  I complimented Mr. Garabetian on such a proud off-spring. He scornfully waved this off with his folded newspaper. After a while he said, “You come from a home in which it is not customary to do any sort of work—don’t ask how I know; I can tell. Nevertheless, you don’t consider yourself too good for it.”

  I held my tongue guiltily. Had I confessed my shameful scruples to Mr. Garabetian, his indolent eyes would have gone all agape.

  “He,” Mr. Garabetian continued, with a scornful snort through his nostrils and with his chin motioning in the direction in which his son had vanished, “he won’t have anything to do with his father’s work, much less any work of his own. Did you notice how hurriedly he said good-bye? He knows who you are, of course, and he’s too embarrassed to admit he’s my son.”

  I wanted to object, but Mr. Garabetian anticipated me, waving off my objection. “I see him twice a month. On the first, like today, when he comes for his allowance, and on the fifteenth, when he comes for an advance on next month’s allowance.”

  I could not reply to this either, unless I told Mr. Garabetian that until recently, my wish to go home to my parents had been equally cyclical and prompted by the same motives.

  Mr. Garabetian took a sip of coffee, lit a new cigarette, and inhaled the smoke, deeply filling his lungs as though trying to free his mind of wearisome thoughts and switch into a more philosophical gear. “What can you do,” he said. “That’s the way he is, that’s how he’s made—or rather, that’s how I made him. When I was a child, I was poor as a churchmouse. I wanted him to be spared that. What he has been spared is being considerate, being a decent person. I’ve spared him that and the ability to think about things in general. All he’s got on his mind, if anything, is women.”

  It was unsuitable, I felt, to add to Mr. Garabetian’s paternal grief with the disabusing news that he was nurturing illusions about me in this respect too. If anyone in the world had only women on his mind, it was I.

  But, alas, I had them only on my mind—that was what I wanted to tell my siren in the wheelchair. She was to know everything about me, even things I barely admitted to myself. I was filled with great tenderness for her as I pictured myself sitting close to her poor, blanket-wrapped legs, holding her hands warmly in my own, and explaining with a guilty smile that I was schizophrenically split. I ran around convinced that I was a lothario and an irresistible seducer, or at least acting as though I were, and I believed that other people believed I was too. But if ever I did get a chance at seduction, fear of my own clumsiness turned me into an oaf. But not just this fear, I wanted to tell her. Also a sense of the ideal. She had to believe me. Certainly, I was always on the make, as they put it; I wanted to omit nothing, miss none of the erotic possibilities—usually imaginary, alas—offered me at every step. But I did not want to give my heart away below my rank—my moral rank, of course. That was something she had to know.

  In any event, I had diminished my chances as a lover through another passion. I had told my parents only very vaguely what I was up to in Bucharest, and I had not revealed anything about my job and my—albeit modest—salary; as a result, my mother kept on sending me money. I accepted it without a thought, assuming that spiritual well-being is at least as important as physical well-being, and I applied the cash to my old and ardent passion for horses. Every morning at five, I was at the riding track and in the stables around Shossea Khisseleff and Shossea Jianu, where the thoroughbreds gathered for early workouts in the courtyards of old caravanserais. Being light and having a good hand, I almost regularly got a mount. At seven, I was at the Aphrodite Company, changing from the life of a riding-enthused gentleman to that of a window cleaner, loading up my Model T with publicity material. All day long, I worked—if one can apply the term “work” to enriching junk-shop windows with packages of soap. In the evening, after drinking my coffee with Mr. Garabetian, I ate my grătar—grilled meat—in some small surburban restaurant and went to bed, dog-tired—I did not know how. I had little opportunity to meet people of my own age, nor did I seek them out. For months, Mr. Garabetian was the only person I conversed with, beyond chitchat with my clients and a few banalities exchanged with colleagues at work.

  Naturally, there was the occasional erotic encounter; the girl in the wheelchair ought to know this too. A waitress in a restaurant where I sometimes ate my modest dinner would not be taken in by my superior airs; she dragged me up to her room. I owed a proud night to her experience, but there was no repeat. She might do for a casual adventure, but an out-and-out relationship with a waitress was, I felt, beneath my dignity—by which I meant, to my disgrace, my social dignity. There was a pretty salesgirl in a boutique in Cotroceni, a remote area where a residential district had grown around the palace of the Queen Mother Maria. I knew this salesgirl had a crush on me, and accordingly I treated her badly. One day, I asked her out to the movies, then to supper. She ref
used to come to my room; she was scared of God knows what, perhaps only of getting home late. So we finally did it on the park bench where we had been necking and squeezing each other for hours. The discomfort and constant fear of being discovered by a park watchman or late stroller made it so horrible that when I saw her again, on the occasion of a decoration change from Velvet soapflakes to mint toothpaste in the windows of the boutique she worked in, I acted as if nothing had ever gone on between us.

  For a couple of weeks, I was even in love, or at least fascinated—the focus of my attention being the extraordinary horsewomanship of the daughter of a trainer who now and again let me ride one of his horses. She was an impish creature with a pug face and tow-blond, curly hair; but to see what she did with a horse when she mounted it gave me such sensual pleasure that it turned into desire. She would have come to my room without further ado and would probably have soon installed herself there: a convenient long-term affair. But I carefully kept my early-morning role as a gentleman rider separate from my daytime role as a window decorator for the Aphrodite Company, and I revealed nothing of the circumstances under which I changed costumes from one role to the other to either my work colleagues or my riding colleagues. Even if I had been willing by some chance to let someone in the cosmetics world know where and how I lived, I refused to allow anyone in the riding world to find out anything about what I did for a living. Thus, she and I got together on bales of straw in the fodder room; the pungent odor of the girl’s body, especially her very wet vagina, prevailed so victoriously against the mare and cat urine that I felt almost sick. It was because of her that I consulted Dr. Maurer again, this time to get a prescription for potency pills, because, for a while, I was incapable of any repetition. Instead of potency pills, Dr. Maurer repeated his prescription for a tranquilizer. When I called upon the sharp-glanded horsewoman once again, I found I had long since been replaced by an English jockey.