I failed to understand. In what way?
Well, she said with a heavy sigh, it touched upon the crucial problem of all Jewish philosophy, namely—as much as she understood it—the incompatibility, or rather the sought-for compatibility, of rational knowledge and divine inspiration. This brought up the question of free will, and that was his existential conflict. He was extraordinarily, almost uncannily attractive to women—one might as well say he was cursed, it was his doom. So irresistible was his magical effect that he became its victim, he was defenseless against the women he fascinated. She said that ultimately he shook his fists at heaven in blasphemous despair because of yet another woman—or rather because he had fallen victim yet another time to the fascination he exerted on women. It killed him in the end. Finally, one day, he had been found, his head slumped over his book, his mouth foaming.
Not to her uncontrollable grief, she had to admit. During the years of her marriage, she had gone through all the torments of hell. Upon saying this, she embraced me desperately, as though it were my job to save her from the memory of that life.
“What a fabulous fool,” I observed.
“A fool, baby? How do you mean?” She had looked upon him as damned, she said. He knew he was possessed by an evil spirit. All he had to do was walk down the street, and some female was ready to give herself to him. And he had to take her; it was compulsive. She soon was forced to pity him; in the last years of their marriage, pity was all that bound her to him, pity plus respect for his earnest way of trying to deal with the problem philosophically.
“That’s exactly why I said: what a fabulous fool!” I was grumpy. I felt challenged. “There’s only one philosophical attitude toward that problem. Do you know the story of the man who had a gulash at Neugröschl’s Restaurant, a famous place in Vienna?”
She peered at me with that mixture of timidity and resistance, devotion and distrust, which emphasized all her racial characteristics.
“Don’t make that owlish face again,” I said. “This is the story. One day in Vienna, a man eats gulash in Neugröschl’s Restaurant, as he does every day. The instant he comes home, he makes his wife twice, his sister-in-law three times, and rapes the maid, and they only manage to capture him just as he is about to try it with his own daughter. The case is medically so interesting that a committee gets together, chaired by a world-famous professor. The family doctor reports that the man has not done anything unusual; he has merely been to Neugröschl’s to have a gulash. ‘What does the Herr Professor feel should be done?’ they ask the great scholar, all eyes on him. ‘I don’t know what you’ll be doing, gentlemen,’ says the professor. ‘But as for me, I’m going to Neugröschl’s to eat a gulash.’ ”
She slapped me tenderly—a teasing motion contrasting bizarrely with her tragic expression. “You’re being wicked, baby, honestly. I love you precisely because that’s not you. You don’t know how horrible it is to be afflicted by sex. At first, when I met him and was swept off my feet—” She hesitated, unwilling to frame it in words; then she shook her head and clutched me. “Ah, baby, that’s why I love you, because with you it’s different.”
That made it all the worse for me. Now the thorn of jealousy was in me. I gave her no peace. What had been the secret of his attraction? Was he so potent, so powerful? Did he have such great endurance, such amorous skill? All the myths of sex reared their heads again in my imagination and plagued me with scoffing challenges to measure myself against the competition. I was very sorry that she had ripped up his photograph. From his face, I might have been able to glean something of the essence of his supernatural virility and learn what it came from. The face had reminded me of someone I knew, and I finally decided he looked like the man in the sleazy hotel on Calea Griviţei, the one who had cheated me and beaten me up when I tried to make love with the Gypsy girl there. This delusion entrenched itself firmly in my mind, and confused me.
This thug was not only an irresistible ladies’ man, he was also a philosopher?! Scornfully I asked just what “Jewish philosophy” was, anyway. I instantly felt as if I had started a rockslide over my head. All my embarrassing ignorance became obvious. Not only had there been a specifically Jewish philosophy in Alexandria during pre-Christian times, reaching its initial high point in Philo Judaeus, but also in the early Middle Ages, Jewish philosophy had flourished under the aegis of the Arabs, mainly in Andalusia, with the Kalamists, the Jewish Neoplatonics, Aristotelians, and Anti-Rationalists. I was cascaded with names like Judah Halevi, ibn-Daud, Maimonides, Gersonides—names I was hearing for the first time and did not know what to make of. I was chagrined about my defective education; I felt barbaric and presumptuous. She, however, my Andalusian, seemed to enjoy telling me about it all. She would assume her owl-face, the “eternal” face of a not just physical but spiritual motherhood. It was, indubitably, her love that inspired her to tell me about her forebears, as she would have told a child about them; nothing was further from her mind than to show me up in my ignorance. Nonetheless, a suspicion crept over me: obviously she had taken great interest in the spiritual potency of her deceased husband just as, in the beginning of their marriage, she had taken active part in his sexual potency, and I went so far in my self-torment as to suspect her of letting me know this in order to fire my performance in bed. Never before had my not very stable ego been so shaken.
Oddly, that did not diminish my love for her. On the contrary: so long as jealousy tortured me and the feeling of inadequacy humbled me, I was in bondage to her. But no sooner did I feel superior to her than my criticism of her began—shameful as this was, I had to admit it to myself, and thereby to the girl in the wheelchair. I was enraged by the idea that even my blond, long-legged anima might fall victim to the irresistible erotic attraction of this Jew.
What drove us apart in the end was even more shameful. The girl in the wheelchair would understand this. It began with my Andalusian’s pride in me, her desire to flaunt me before the world, as though for her, a widow in the prime of life, I was a desirable catch and an enviable erotic property, in any case an achievement for which she could take embellishing credit. “You just want to show off with me,” I rebelled. “If you had your way, you’d get all dolled up like a Yiddish mama on shabbes and promenade through town with me on your arm and bask in the delight of the passersby at your boychik, isn’t that so?” She wanted to mold me according to her ideas; she smeared brilliantine in my hair and wanted me to wear certain suits—the very best, needless to say—and she gave me the most dreadful neckties.
I shuddered at the thought. I was horrified that the district representative of the Aphrodite Company would inevitably get wind of our affair. I could foresee the wave of gossip that would sweep through the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon gentlemen in management. Although not quite able to suppress my pride at having succeeded in “melting the iceberg,” I told her that it could have very disagreeable consequences for me professionally if anyone found out about our affair. Of course, it was hard to explain why, especially to her. Since we had begun seeing each other regularly, I had had a free hand at the Parfumeria Flora. Soon, the displays were showing nothing but Aphrodite products, different ones each week. If I did not decorate the window, because it struck me as too conspicuous, then she did it, as a favor for me, behind my back. “It would be simplest if you just stuck me between the toothpastes and the soaps. If possible with the legend ‘Not so good in bed as my late husband, but still …’ Only that wouldn’t be what Aphrodite is aiming for,” I said venomously. “After all, they’re paying me to publicize their products, not to have their products publicize me.”
Only later on, after we broke up, did it sometimes cross my mind that there was something that might have helped me understand her vanity better, namely an element of defiance in her pride. No doubt her neighbors, all Jewish, did not fail to perceive what our regular get-togethers were about. Once, an elderly man had spoken to me: smiling into the evening, as it were, very amiably, very kindly, wi
th discreetly closed eyes, he had asked me whether I did not care to come to prayers now and again, and I had replied, more gruffly than intended, that I was not Jewish. This must have got around. Ridiculous as the prejudice against the admissibility of our relationship might seem to me in an enlightened world, chances were that the bias existed. I ought to have been touched by the courage with which she stood by me.
But the very opposite was the case. When she suggested our dining in one of Bucharest’s large, well-frequented downtown restaurants, I suspected her of using me for an attempt at social climbing. “That’s all phony,” I tried to explain to her. “All the people you see there are nothing but philistines trying to put on the dog. The truly elegant people eat at home or in a few exclusive places like the Capşa, not in a dump like that.”
She looked at me blankly. “Do you want to eat in the Capşa, baby? Even if it’s more expensive, that’s all right.”
Yet I had been doing my best to show her something of my world—or at least that tiny bit of it which I took part in during the riding half of my double life. For I was still riding every morning, and indeed spent more and more of my free time in the stables and at the track. But her encounter with the fashionable milieu of the turf ended catastrophically. “That’s supposed to be fun?” she wailed. “Me, a hardworking woman, I’m supposed to get up at four in the morning and watch someone plopping onto a wild horse and galloping off like he’s crazy or something? Baby, please, you’re gonna break your neck! Just look at how skinny you are, all because you won’t eat anything to keep fit for such a stupid, boring thing. And that stench in those stables—it can’t be healthy. How can anyone feel normal that way? No wonder that old bag who talked to you for hours on end behaved so strangely with me. She didn’t even shake hands. With all that horseshit in her lungs, she lost her good manners. What did you say she was? Lady-in-waiting to the queen? She can be the queen herself, for all I care. If she feels all right in the horse manure, well, let her. She must know what she gets out of it; she lets the stableboy grab her tushy whenever he lifts her up on her nag—I saw it with my very own eyes—yet she must be sixty-plus if she’s a day. But you, baby, you don’t need that stuff. If you like, I’ll buy you a little buggy; a horse you can get cheap. There’s a market every Thursday out by your factory; you’re sure to find something suitable, and we can put it right here in the back yard; I’ll just give notice to the people keeping goats there now; well, and a little hay and oats—how much can that cost? And a little buggy won’t ruin us either; we can go riding every Sunday on Shossea Khisseleff. What else do you want from the nags except to have fun? You don’t wanna become like that gonif of a trainer who thinks he can milk those dumb rich people dry, and those fellows do the biggest business with those poor devils who bet away their last penny ….” She looked at me with tender solicitude. “You’re no shmegegge, baby, are you? Why do you want it?” It took her weeks to calm down.
I had even less success trying to open her eyes to what excited me about the seamy life of the suburbs: my snobbish passions, such as the turf, were bad enough, but this was truly unintelligible to her. “What’s so wonderful about the desperate face of a thief who’s been caught stealing? His despair? Do you know what despair really is?” she asked, shaking her head. “Honestly, baby, I just don’t understand you. First you go to pieces telling me about some dog that’s been run over and his master can’t stand seeing him suffer so he cries and kills him with a club. And then, when I ask you to come along to my neighbor’s funeral, you tell me it’s none of your business. First you tell me that I should throw away the stone I check the hundred-lei pieces with, because the riffraff bring so many phony coins into the shop, and that it’s hardhearted because they’ve been fooled themselves, and vulgar, too, not suitable for me, you say. And then you want me, a decent woman, to go with you to Crucea de Piatră and look at the hookers. You can watch them baking bread there for hours, with the cockroaches strolling all over the dough, but when I rub in my mascara with a little spit, you hit the roof. Has anybody ever seen so much contradiction? If you knew the Mahalà as well as I did—always scared of someone sticking a knife into your ribs—you wouldn’t say that life was more honest here than in the quarters where the rich people live ….”
I hated her when she talked such rubbish. I felt she was committing treason against herself. I could have beaten her for such petit bourgeois narrow-mindedness, for it snuffed out the face that made me love her whenever tenderness overwhelmed her.
But one day, even the sight of her happiness turned dull for me. We had gone out again one evening, for God’s sake, just to the kind of place she loved: a garden restaurant. Blue, yellow, and red light bulbs in chestnut leaves, a Gypsy band playing, and a singer singing with eyebrows raised like circumflexes. She was wearing an unspeakably awful dress, a kind of elflike, innocent version of a Pierrot costume in white, with gigantic black polka dots and a silly ruff. All she needed to do was let her breasts hang out and don a gauze cap with two huge feelers to play a splendid black-and-white ladybug in the masquerade teeming around Crucea de Piatră. But no, she had had some hair stylist in Văcăreşti bake one of her horsehair cakes again, and she had stuck in a celluloid Spanish comb with rhinestones—it just about turned my stomach.
She was excited by the fashionable atmosphere around us. “Look over there,” she said, “but don’t be obvious about it. Isn’t that a chic couple?”
I looked: it was young Garabetian in a white suit, razor-sharp shoulders, fist-sized knot in his tie, reflections in his Valentino hair, and accompanied by one of his enviably well designed high-class whores. He glanced over and smiled ironically as he murmured a few words to his lady, who burst out laughing; then he greeted me with a sarcastically exaggerated bow.
“Do you know him?” my black-and-white polka-dotted widow asked respectfully. I knew not only him but also the two men sitting a few tables farther on and watching us with equally great interest. It was the chief clerk and a department head from Aphrodite, with their Sudeten German spouses.
I had no desire to spoil her evening, but it was impossible for me to conceal my bad mood. While she chatted away, I poked around in my food, drinking too much wine too quickly and vehemently. Then she likewise fell silent. At first, the silence—hers timidly guilt-ridden, mine defiantly pouting—hung over us like a cloud that might drift past. But it expanded, entered us icily, eventually took full control; neither of us could break it. We left the restaurant as though we had just put a wreath on the grave of our love.
I drove her home in my Model T. When I saw her to her door, she unlocked it and went inside without a word but leaving the door open behind her. It would have meant breaking off totally if I had not followed her. For an instant, I wondered if I should let things reach that pass. But in defiance of my friend Garabetian’s foppish son with his floozies, and of the clerks from Aphrodite and their fat-assed wives, I followed her into her house.
Inside, she received me in despair. “Forgive me, baby! I’ll do anything you tell me to. From now on, we’ll only go to places you like. Honestly, baby, I swear to you. But please, please, be nice again!”
She was more ecstatic than ever in my arms, and I caught myself observing her with almost scientific attention. I was on the alert for the change in her face, the increasing rapture, in which the boring mask of her ancestral tragedy dissolved to make room for the slight and mysterious smile of the Inconnue de la Seine, until passion broke open the lips and an eruption of happiness inundated her features. She drew out this moment now, keeping her eyes shut and letting her smile drift, filled with the inner happiness of the blind. And I had the crazy flash that if she opened her eyes, this blessed, soulful smile might take on a cunning aspect, like the Mona Lisa’s, which, after all, were she to shut her eyes, would simply be a smile of voluptuous pleasure. A pang of wild jealousy cut through me at the thought of how basically questionable this ennoblement of a woman’s face was, how little really I had to do with
it, and how much more convincing that ennoblement must have been when my Andalusian was spellbound by her husband’s incredible erotic aura. That same instant, I felt, to my horror, that I was ejaculating—before the point that was the rule in our well-coordinated lovemaking, that is, before her face turned to its ultimate and most beautiful state.
If she was disappointed, she tried to conceal it. She showered me with tenderness. “Don’t worry, baby, it was beautiful for me too, really; it makes me happy because it shows that you love me despite everything.”
I was uncertain how to interpret this “despite everything.” I linked it, insanely enough, to my delusion that I had seen through to the trivial and selfish character of her ecstasies, and I said to myself, If you only knew…. Most likely I could not have supplied this seemingly stunning evidence of my love had I not been assisted by the image of her pleasure in her husband’s arms ….
With a sudden insight into what I was doing and thinking, into the kind of home movie I was screening for myself, and how I imagined I was thereby regulating my feelings and bringing them to climaxes I could not otherwise reach, a choking horror at myself overwhelmed me. I should have felt a still greater horror at the thought of our abysmal solitudes. Cosmic spaces separated us while we believed we loved each other.
I pretended to be asleep when she went on calming me, stroking me, and whispering, “My little boy! My darling! My baby!” I wished she would stop calling me “baby.”
I had never gone along with her wish that I spend the night and wake up in her arms the next morning. Nor had I lost my fear of this typically Jewish luxury marriage bed with its profusion of down pillows in the Art Deco bedroom: it was a trap. Even the petit bourgeois house, in a district that was actually a ghetto, got on my nerves. It could just as easily have been a house in some shtetl under the evening sky toward Galicia. It had too much Chagallian poetry. In fact, I had avoided getting established in that house, preferring brief, passionate sex on the Biedermeier sofa in the shop’s back room where we had first embraced. The fact that I had to be at the stables by five A.M. in order to get a mount had always been an effective excuse. This time, I did not even bother with my excuse. I left with no explanation after pretending to awake from my brief slumber.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 15
