Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Meanwhile, my imagination blazed away. If just once I could call one of them my own—one of those long-legged, high-bosomed creatures with curls tumbling luxuriously on their shoulders, the kind of woman that Mr. Garabetian’s son drove around in his Chrysler! If just once I could sway with one of them, nestling body to body in a dancing-bar to the rhythms of nostalgic blues, feel her breasts, her lap pressed snugly against my thighs, my lips in her hair. When the bittersweet voices of the saxophones had died out, I would wander with her somnambulistically into the starry night, hand in hand, lead her to my bed, strip her clothes off piece by piece while she threw her head back, cover her bare body with my kisses while she moaned, unite with her tenderly yet mightily, almost drunkenly ….

  I did not envy young Mr. Garabetian for his beauties. I merely took them as the basis of departure for my dreams, although, of course, I realized what kind of shady tarts and floozies they were. The imagination is flexible, as we know; my fantasy beloved, as I saw her, was physically as exciting as those others, and also much sweeter, softer, finer, better bred—less vulgar, to be blunt. She was a lady from head to toe, and she had a wonderful soul. Needless to say, she was an excellent horsewoman and she loved country life—horses, sheep, dogs. In a word, she was perfect. All too frequently, her image inserted itself between me and the real women, who could not hold a candle to her but who were willing to make at least the erotic part of my wishful thinking come true.

  She, of course, the girl in the wheelchair, fitted my ideal image almost perfectly, even though there would probably be a hitch in regard to country life. She could have as many dogs and sheep as she liked, but there would probably be no question of her riding. The rest was exactly what I wished for, especially her breasts: I thought of them with inexhaustible delight; I pictured them vividly in my mind. Nor was there any doubt as to the depth of her soul; her gaze had revealed it to me fully. I wanted her to know that I treasured this soul of hers far more than the charms of her body, which, maimed in the lower extremities, was probably all the more manageable above the waist.

  Despite my fiery thoughts about sensory joys, I cared more about her mind, her empathy, her education, her good breeding, her ladylike qualities—everything I awaited from a lifetime partner. That was what I desired more than anything: to have someone I could love constantly, all my life. That was what had spirited the hard-on when I saw her: the delight, the divine joy of encountering a human being whom I could love all my life because her soul was congenial with mine and her rank equal to mine.

  And that was why I had to tell her about my true fall from grace, about how I had betrayed her by giving my heart away. Betrayed not only her, but my ability to love, betrayed them shamefully below my dignity: with a widow, an aging widow, and a Jewess, to boot. Whether I could ever regain the purity of my feeling, and thereby of my dignity, depended on her forgiveness.

  It was not all that long before, a few weeks at the most. My itinerary included the cosmetics stores of Văcăreşti, Bucharest’s Jewish quarter. A nearby district was called Crucea de Piatră—the Stone Cross. The one-story petit bourgeois houses, with gabled ends facing the street and narrow longitudinal courtyards in between, were all brothels. These courtyards teemed with girls; they swarmed through the streets in an eternal, plundering Mardi Gras, which—odd as it may sound—fitted in with one of the mood elements of my childhood. For this carnival made something obvious: the fundamental erotics in Surrealism, whose origin, I thought, could be traced back to some fanciful artists of the Jugendstil. There were mouths with black lipstick, and green eyelids under powdered rococo periwigs, such as I knew from illustrations in some of my mother’s books; thin, supple riding crops and fans, corsets and tutus; one girl had a toreador jacket on and was naked underneath down to her pirate boots; another wore wide Turkish pantaloons of transparent muslin with her bushy pubic hair sticking through; another had enormous breasts dangling naked out of a tangle of necklaces that constricted her body like shackles—Beardsley characters. Still another was entwined in a black feather boa like a serpent; her skinny naked body, which stilted along on towering high heels through the throng of musketeers, veil dancers, sailors, dragonflies, looked as if it had been drawn by Beyros. Sphinxes lay in the windows, corseted trunks like that of the “trunk lady” in sideshows, putto heads with gigantic ostrich plumes, flowing Mary Magdalene hair, fiery red wigs around pre-Raphaelitic angel faces, rachitic adolescents, matrons, crones, fatties ….

  I spent as much time here as I could. At first, when I was still feverishly longing to become a world-famous artist, I would go there to draw. I saw myself as a new Pascin. But my efforts got me into hot water. When the girls realized what I was up to, they alerted a couple of goons, who made it clear to me, short and plain, that their charges were plying an earnest trade and did not wish to be viewed as curiosities and committed to paper. I speedily packed up my drawing pad and watercolor box.

  Strangely enough, however, my urge for self-expression with a pencil and a brush waned. My dream of world fame as an artist was suffering from consumption; the drawing pad and the paint box remained untouched for longer and longer periods. It was as if the world I was discovering day by day were too vivid, life too immediate, too powerful, for me to capture it. I first had to shape myself according to this world. I was too confused, too self-tormented, far too self-absorbed, to be a mirror of things; I had to take things in, stow them away, store them up, let them take effect and mellow before I could hand them on. I went through a time of looking, of observing, or storing, of not doing.

  Here, too, in the red-light district, I did nothing but look. As the most favorable vantage point, I picked a table outside a small tavern at an intersection; sitting there over a black coffee and a glass of raki, I could gape in all four directions of the compass. Diagonally across, in one of the courtyards where the erotic carnival was frolicking, two lemon saplings in green tubs flanked a plaster column with a teasing amoretto; in front of the column stood a crib, and in the crib lay something like a Mardi Gras queen, the madam of the house: an excessively fat dwarf in a wide, transparent directoire gown and a black-velvet ribbon around the sweaty throat, which was wedged between the double chin and the bosom, and a second velvet ribbon knotted around the forehead under the severe, ballerina hairdo. With her cheeks painted peony red and the doll-like gaze of eyes in coal-black circles, she looked highly artificial. I did not need my pad; I sketched her into my memory—or rather, into my soul—along with the fat cat wearing a brass bell on a blood-red velvet ribbon around her neck. The dwarf queen leisurely stroked the feline, like a black panther in her lap, while an old crone renewed the water in a glass every fifteen minutes. After inserting a spoonful of jam from a jar into her tiny, cherry mouth, the dwarf would very delicately take a few sips from the glass, elongating her little finger, which sparkled with the diamonds of countless rings.

  One day, the afternoon light was growing dimmer and finally became abstractly transparent; I suddenly realized I had sat there too long. It was late, and I had not filled my quota. I had just enough time left to beautify a single display with fresh crêpe paper and soap bars, and the window I chose was the one closest by. Unfortunately, the proprietress was the most difficult.

  Normally, it was pleasant working in Văcăreşti. The usually Jewish shopkeepers were kind and mellow people so long as the two-thousand-year-old panic did not flare up, which made them hysterically vehement, and they never gave me much trouble when I arrived with my motley jumble. But this one woman, the owner of a store called Parfumeria Flora, had always been a ticklish case in the itinerary of the decoration campaign.

  She was all on her own—a widow, it was said—and in the trade, even among the salesmen, she had a bad reputation for being harsh and disagreeable. This was not, incidentally, the only reason why she was talked about so much; she had a solid place in the salesmen’s erotic gossip. No sooner did her name come up in a discussion at the Aphrodite Company than several voices evok
ed her with the husky undertones of desire: the embodiment of the raven-haired Jewess, whose succulent ripeness contrasted sexily with her coldness. Probably only the oldest representatives knew her real name; she was generally called the Black Widow. And it was also generally felt that sinning in her company may have been good business, for her shop was doing well and she seemed to have money on the side. Unfortunately, they said, she was a block of ice, and you could freeze off practically any part of yourself.

  The Black Widow treated me with an insulting arrogance that was not outdone by the owners of the elegant boutiques around the Hotel Athenée-Palace. But while I had gradually developed a thick skin against their insolence, her impertinence here, in the humble Jewish district, around the whorehouses of Crucea de Piatră, made me livid. This time, too, she received me like a bothersome shnorrer. And had it not been too late to drive to other drugstores and try my luck there, I would have wordlessly turned my back and gone my way. But then, perhaps out of sheer weariness, she abruptly, albeit still very ungraciously, condescended to allow me to remove a dusty arrangement made by our bitterest rival (world famous for their lanolin cream) and to replace it with one of our artworks publicizing lily-of-the-valley soap.

  The day was now swiftly drawing to its end. Along with the twilight, something tormentingly uncertain descended into the world. I was struck—I can still feel it today—by a mournfulness, as though I were utterly orphaned. Like an abrupt pain, I felt homesickness: for home, for the Bukovina, where I had loved this hour just before darkness so much that I had always run out of the house and into the countryside, into that abstract, lilac-colored light. Its lower part would be awhirr with flitting bats and smoky with the dust of darkness, while the night wind wafted the fragrance of hay from distant meadows into my face; and before me the enormous source of night, where, toward Galicia, the flat earth fanned out to melt cosmically into the heavens. I had always been bewildered by the forlornness of the settlements in this landscape under this deeply nocturnal sky, the frailty of the blinking lights, those poor man’s stars behind the battered sheet-metal blinds. The light bulbs ruthlessly exposed the stark walls and crooked eaves of the sad little petit bourgeois houses, pulled them out of the swelling and thickening darkness, deprived them of mystery and thrust them into reality, while the surrounding world subsided into the dramatics of creation myths. Few things touched my heart so keenly as the desperate intimacy of a window shining golden yellow in the hard, bluish, whitewashed wall of a Jewish shack at the entrance of such a village.

  Now, here, the eternal carnival of the red-light streets in Văcăreşti was still churning away; it kept going on all the more spookily, just a few blocks away, under the radiant street lamps—I still had the tumult at the bottom of my eyes. And now the same forlornness as outside, in the flat land, was descending upon the Jewish district all around me. The city and its hurly-burly, the evening swarm of people into the streets and avenues, the strings of light, the tumbles of light, the cascades of light overhead—all these things were meaningless; they were only a haunted world, a carnival of the bereft and desperate, lost under the enormous sky that was giving birth to the night.

  I felt and thought all this while doing my job with an anger turned against myself. I had only barely cleaned the display window—it was still filthy—and now I was putting together the publicity material for Aphrodite, no doubt deploying more awkwardness than artistry. I was furious at this woman, this Jew, this huckster of notions; forlorn and bereft in her stony widowhood, she belonged in one of those Galician shtetls. Her arrogance, too, would have been more appropriate there than here. I owed it to my own stupidity that I was doing such low donkey’s work for someone like her and being treated like a peddler.

  Scornfully imitating an artist who steps away from his easel to check his masterpiece, I backed off after setting up the last carton of soap—and suddenly blacked out. When I came to an instant later, I found myself in darkness between sacks of coal and oil drums. I had failed to notice an open cellar trapdoor behind me, and my artist’s step had led me into the void and plunged me into the depths.

  I was quickly on my feet again, checking as a matter of course that nothing was broken and that my fall had not been too hard. And then I looked up. A ladder had softened the impact, and I scrambled up the rungs. Arriving at the top, I still felt a bit numb, but just for a moment. I needed only to make sure that my clothes had not been messed up.

  I was absolutely amazed to find the Black Widow in a panic bustling around me, touching me, feeling me up, knocking the dust off my jacket and stammering unintelligibly as though she were the one who had tumbled into the cellar and not I. Laughing, I calmed her down. A minor, trivial accident, a clumsy action on my part, at the very moment when I had been thinking what a stupid person I was—funny, wasn’t it—she didn’t have to worry; nothing had really happened ….

  But she was beside herself with fear and terror. She was probably afraid of being sued for negligence—I couldn’t think of any other reason for her being in such a state. It was well known that the Rumanian authorities were not exactly merciful with Jews who got on the wrong side of the law; normally, the mere mention of the police was enough to make a Jew’s face turn gray. What if I had broken something, for instance my back, and were still lying down there, dead? Or if, although uninjured, I thought of bringing charges against her? They always expected some calamity, these Jews.

  Still, her excitement was peculiar. She babbled away and kept feeling me up to see if any part of me was harmed. Finally, she found a smudge on my jacket and demanded that I take it off so that she could clean it instantly. Then she thought of more important necessities, and, even though I staunchly protested and tried in every way to calm her down, she forced me into a back room, where I had to stretch out on a sofa. She ran off—to get a glass of water or a cognac or even smelling salts.

  I must have suffered at least a minor shock, or perhaps I had drunk too much raki and black coffee on an empty stomach earlier in the afternoon. In those days, I ate next to nothing, in order to keep my weight down; I was investing as many lunacies in the dream of becoming a riding champion as I had in the old one of becoming a great artist. Be that as it may—by the time the Black Widow returned, I must have dropped off into a temporary stupor, for I was just coming to when I felt her stroking my cheek; she seemed almost unconscious with fear, kneeling by the sofa, holding my head, her fingers in my hair, caressing me and stammering, “My little boy! My darling! My baby!”

  When I put my arms around her, I did it almost instinctively; I had no choice: there was such ardent motherliness in her face, such total identification of her existence with mine, her essence with mine, that it pulled me into her. She was no longer a near stranger whom I barely knew by sight, a notoriously inhibited woman, a pathologically callous person who, just a few minutes before, had made her contempt for me crystal clear (which had been so insolent, downright provocative, when one thought of who and what she really was, with her dumpy Jewish shop next to the hooker district of Văcăreşti). No, at the moment she was the human embodiment of feminine goodness and warmth, the materialization of pure understanding, such as only women can produce, because they alone are capable of giving birth to another human being, creating another human creature through their bodies, flesh of their flesh, blood of their blood, spirit of their spirit. That was why she was the great absolver, the mother of mankind, the cosmic birth-giver, the womb of all life, in which the tormented living creature found its way from its loneliness into being one with the other ….

  When I put my arms around her to draw her to me, her eyes widened in horror, as though she had beheld the depth and core of all evil. She made an involuntary movement to repel me. But then I witnessed a surprising change; I could only guess at what it was: the marvelous fulfillment of a dream she would never have expected to come true, the sudden transformation of an age-old fear into joy…. In any case, it was very beautiful: her dramatic face, the “Andalusi
an face,” as I was to call it later in tender moments, was flooded with happiness more blissful than all desire—and so powerful that it tore a moan out of her.

  I know that this change in her face was what made me love her. Subsequently, I did all I could to conjure it up, over and over again, this melting of harshness, nastiness, anxiety, banality, this lovely fading of the bad signs of life under the intensely happy surge of erupting love. I succeeded—at least for a while—in recharging my love in hers. For even though I loved her—and often so passionately that the thought of her was like a punch in my solar plexus; sometimes indeed quite simply, relaxed and happy and always with sincere gratitude for her love—I was tormented by the sense that through her I was deceiving “love” itself: the love I wanted to hold in readiness for the girl whom I could love all my life.

  It is mortifying to admit, but she in no way matched my image of this ideal beloved, and I fought a losing battle against this wishful-thinking affliction. The ideal had been stamped into me so early and so thoroughly that I could not rid myself of it. I felt like someone who makes a daily resolution to stop smoking and then greedily reaches for the first cigarette every morning.

  Yet I had to tell myself that this ideal of a curly-blond, long-legged horsewoman surrounded by playful greyhounds, a woman with whom I intended to spend my life in a whirlwind of Grand Prix races, operas, masquerades, at ski lodges, seaside resorts, and on the upper decks of ocean liners—I had to own that this ideal was utterly banal and downright embarrassing, truly the clichéd dream image of every shop assistant. In contrast, my Black Widow—or rather, my Andalusian, as I now tenderly called her—was of a different caliber in every respect but one: she was, alas, a petit bourgeois Jewish woman and almost twice as old as I. Our liaison could remain, must remain, but an episode.