Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  But she kept her promise. The next time we went out to dine, we did it in my style.

  I had always planned to take her to one of the countless little pubs at the outermost edge of Bucharest. This was where the market laborers ate their lunch and Gypsies fiddled in the evenings—not like the symphony-sized bands of operetta Gypsies who played in the supposedly chic city restaurants, but the genuine bands that you saw in the country: three or four men with a fiddle, a double bass, and shoulder-slung cymbals. And here we would not run into young Garabetian with his floozies or the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon executives of Aphrodite and their wives.

  Actually, I picked a tavern that old Garabetian had recommended. “It’s a decent place,” he had said. “I know the owner; he buys his garlic and peppers from me and he gets his meat from the butcher across the street. I’ve watched him there. In his place, you eat more simply than in the Capşa, but it’s more nourishing and only one tenth the price.”

  The tavern, not much more than a whitewashed, sheet-metal-covered clay hut with an open hearth in the huge main room and a charcoal grill for roasting meat in front of the door, was located way beyond the horse market and the factory grounds of the Aphrodite Company. It stood at the end of Shossea Moşilor, which abandoned its suburban character here and turned into one of the poplar-lined exit roads from Bucharest, fading into the vast, melancholy countryside. The customers ate outdoors at rough wooden tables and benches, under the towering foliage of gigantic old elms where orioles dwelled. From under the broad awning, quail in wooden cages were calling; they were long since accustomed to adjusting their ringing pitt-palak to the rhythm of the Gypsy fiddles. From the distant fields in the huge plain, their free brothers and sisters answered in amazement.

  Since the tables under the awning were all densely crowded, we had to seat ourselves under the elms, even though I knew she found it unpleasant dining so close to the road, where a rattling truck left a five-mile wake of dust, a good portion of which settled upon us and our food. But I particularly enjoyed the view of the countryside from here. I relished the evening mood. Behind us the city pinned lights all over itself. Before us lay the plain, vaporizing in the rosy light of the waning day. In the haze, growing denser on the horizon, myriad frogs rang their changes in countless swampy ponds. Every sound—the frog croaks, the distant calling of the wild quail, the barking of a dog far, far away, the seemingly endless clatter of a farmer’s wagon somewhere out there—every sound tried in vain to measure the immensity of the earth under the darkening sky. The tavernkeeper placed storm lamps on the tables.

  I could hope only very timidly that my beloved would understand what I was feeling in this atmosphere. It would have been pointless to tell her how profoundly I felt the suspense in this encounter of two great solitudes—the encounter of two bleaknesses consuming one another: here the wasteland of the city with its encroaching horrors, its progress, which was decay, the mange of rust and mortar; and there the relentlessly misanthropic vastness and power of nature, against which no sky-storming walls, no denser and denser throngs of lost people, could grant permanent protection ….

  My Jewess must have known this forlornness in the enormity of nature from her native shtetl. She was certainly familiar with the threat from the evening sky, its picture-postcard kitsch camouflaging all its disastrous forebodings. The gentle breeze that the sky sent us was sheer mockery; I quite understood how a woman from Galicia or Bessarabia might want to choose the city rather than sit in contemplation of that tragic beauty.

  No, I could not ask her to understand why I preferred merciless nature, much less what pleasure I felt here, at the sight of the titanic struggle between the two wastelands. That view of beauty could only have inspired a painter of battles, not a defenseless Jewish widow who hid behind her mascara and her kitsch furniture. I tended to persuade myself that I was about to say farewell to my youth and its anacreontic poetry, and to exchange them for a more mature existence with a more refined poetic sensibility. But a secret unease warned me against the danger of delusion. I saw myself as old in my youth—at least a century older than this Jewish woman, whose race, despite two millennia of suffering, maintained unshakable faith in man’s destiny as the child of God, while I looked down scientifically from cosmic distances at the planet and at myself and the likes of me, microscopic earthworms, tiny particles of an infestation that was soon to be swept away.

  It annoyed me that she made no effort to conceal her discomfort. I imagined introducing her here to an audience of friends. I knew many of the people (almost all men) at the surrounding tables at least by sight: artisans and small tradesfolk from the area around the Aphrodite plant: the coal drayman, for instance, some of the horse dealers from the Thursday market, and the types that sat around in taverns there or watched the farces of Karaghios staged by itinerant comedians. I had not failed to notice the attention aroused by our entrance, for my lady friend’s succulent ripeness had been generally acknowledged. In one of the faces turning to us, I had recognized Mr. Garabetian—the father, of course. I wanted to wave to him, but another head interposed itself, and I could not see him. We were sitting at an unfavorable angle, but still, I told myself, he was bound to see us, and I wanted her to make a good impression on him. “A decent business,” I thought I could hear him say. “An attractive, mature woman and obviously not penniless. No floozy like the sort my boy runs around with.”

  But she was not relaxed. Now, granted, the bench was not exactly well carpentered or even particularly clean, but she perched on its edge as if that alone were already too great a concession to an environment which in no way matched her social standing and demands. The food, while primitive, was hearty and tasty, but she barely touched it, although she usually ate with gusto. Very delicately nauseated, she poked around in her salad to remove a bug that had dropped out of the elm tree; she barely sipped the wine; her responses to my—more and more artificial—expressions of well-being were chillingly monosyllabic.

  At least, I thought to my relief, I had managed to prevent her from disguising herself as a grande dame. Her hair had a simple part and was combed back naturally, and she could have made a beautiful Gypsy with her fiery head and magnificent décolleté. But when I told her that and tried to slip a red carnation behind her ear (in my good mood, I had just bought the flower for my buttonhole), she struck my hand away, lapsed into offended silence, and then, when I kept urging her, finally squeezed out sotto voce that for her it was no compliment to be compared to a Gypsy.

  “Not even an Andalusian Gypsy, for God’s sake?” I asked.

  “No, not even an Andalusian Gypsy. It’s hard enough being Jewish,” she concluded, with a hateful expression on her face that I had never seen.

  At this point, I began to seethe. She hasn’t successfully disguised herself as a mock lady, I told myself bitterly, and inwardly her effort is even less successful. And now, here she’s forced to realize that it’s all useless. Here everyone is quite simply what he is, I thought grimly. But not she. She’s too “elegant” for her own good. If only she finally accepted herself, if only she finally admitted that she’s a middle-aged Jewish shopkeeper, and that’s all! …

  To prevent the silence from growing between us again, something I had been fearing since the last evening we had gone out together, I heedlessly started to chatter. Frivolously I talked of my intention—postponed, to be sure, but not canceled—someday to devote myself to the fine arts. I explained what welcome subject matter could be found in popular scenes, once painting came of age and freed itself of the constraints of devotional martyrdoms and kingly portraits: just recall the Dutch painters and certain realists, whose master in Lombardy was il Pinochetto, Ceruti, or the most delightful of all, Jean-Siméon Chardin ….

  I might just as well have been speaking Chinese. Her eyes were as blank as mine must have been when, à propos her deceased husband’s studies, she told me of the importance of the addenda of the Saburaim and Geonim in Talmudic learning. On
ly she, when doing so, had worn her primordially maternal owl-face, full of kindness, a happiness-gilded smile always ready in the depths, while I went on angrily, tormenting myself. Finally she said, “What are you straining yourself for? Why don’t we just stop talking for a while?”

  Then I saw a sudden terror in her eyes, and trembling lips, and I turned to see what she was staring at. A troupe of lautari had come by, itinerant players and jugglers, and they were about to put on a show. They had a tame bear on a chain. He waddled upright on short, crooked clown-legs with in-turned paws, sported a Turkish fez on his thick skull, and wore a leather muzzle on his face. On one of his long-clawed paws a tambourine was tied, and the other paw banged clumsily against the tambourine’s bell-jingling hide.

  I knew these dancing bears; they had been the delight of my childhood. Most of them were trained to kiss the hand that tossed a few coins into the tambourine, and I could never forget the fearful, blissful tickle in the pit of my stomach the first time the muzzled jaws, one bite of which could have mashed my hand into a bloody pulp, sent the long lilac-colored tongue slithering out like a serpent to lick my fingers, while the bear’s trainer raked in the coins from the tambourine with a magician’s skill. I called out to the man who led the bear to bring him near me.

  I had not reckoned with my lady friend’s panic. She leaped up, incapable of uttering a sound, her eyes widening in mortal horror, her fingers clawing at her teeth. I found this terror so overexaggerated that I could not help laughing. Her behavior was too childish—after all, the bear was muzzled, and a powerful man was holding him on a thick chain. I felt I was about to lose my temper. I said, “C’mon, stop acting so silly; he only wants to kiss your hand nicely!” And I took her hand and tried to bring it to the bear’s moist nose. But she resisted vigorously, and now I really did lose my temper and pulled her hand to the bear’s nose. She whimpered like a child. Then, with a final desperate exertion, she wrenched her hand free. For an instant, I totally forgot myself and slapped her face.

  It was like a stroke of black lightning. For one split second, the pain brought forth the look of her ecstasy. But instead of ending in transfiguration, it slowly changed to bedazzlement. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her face was lifeless; it revealed no intelligible expression. Yet it was marked; it bore an invisible sign, the blemish of something beyond comprehension whose overpowering reality must be accepted. No personal sorrow could mark a face in that way. What I saw was no longer a face; it was humanity facing the inevitable character of suffering beyond all notion of despair. I had seen this lack of expression in the face of a thief who had been caught in the act and then captured after a wild chase.

  I must add here that all these reflections came retrospectively. At the moment, I had no time to think: someone had grabbed my shoulder and was pulling me around. I stood nose to nose with four or five of the men who had been sitting at the nearby tables. One of them, whom I knew from the factory, a carpenter with whom I had often joked around when we met, was clutching my shoulder and hissing into my face: “Take it easy, punk, if you don’ wan’ us to beatcha outta your jacket! In dis place, you don’ hit a woman ‘cause she’s scared of a bear, unnerstan’, you piss-elegant dude! In this place, ya don’ force no body to play wit’ wild animals. We’ll teach you to act like a boyar!”

  My urge to punch him, no matter how badly it would turn out, was paralyzed by amazement. These men, whom I had all liked, whom I had considered my friends, were standing around me as enemies. They had not just become hostile after my faux pas, which I regretted already. No: they had always been hostile to me; they had never considered me as one of their own, never taken me seriously. I had always been fundamentally different for them, someone of a different race. And they despised this different race to which I belonged, and I probably repelled them all the more for trying to ingratiate myself by acting like one of them ….

  This reflection too I must have had only later on, even if I felt it fully at that moment. I had no chance to think, for Mr. Garabetian interceded. “Let’s not have a riot here, fellows!” he said with a compelling authority in his indolent voice. He took me aside, and the circle of my opponents disbanded.

  “If you hit a woman, it has to come from the heart,” said Mr. Garabetian as he walked me to my Model T, signaling the tavernkeeper not to worry about my check. “Otherwise, you show them that you’re afraid of them.” And after a tiny pause: “We”—I knew he did not mean the community of slum dwellers but rather the members of a very advanced and fragile state of civilization, where he was probably quite lonely—“we do not hit. We stopped hitting long ago ….” It was up to me to glean from this humiliating rebuke that he rather regretted having spared the rod with his son or that other fathers had spared it with their sons.

  The Black Widow was waiting mutely at the car. During the drive home, she said not a word. I held my tongue, too. There may have been a lot to say; perhaps something could have been made good again. But nothing could be restored to what it once had been.

  When we came to her house, she got out, unlocked the door, and walked in. This time, she did not leave the door open, but pulled it to: without dramatics, without the arrogance of the offended lady, without any éclat, but firmly and definitively. I never saw her again. Through the district salesman, she informed the Aphrodite Company that she no longer wished to be inconvenienced by visits from the display-window decorators of the firm. This made little difference to me as I soon left the company anyway.

  I could only be grateful for my departure from Aphrodite, for how would I have felt if I had encountered the girl in the wheelchair as I crept out of a drugstore window with a pile of soap boxes and shampoos under my arm? Now that I no longer had to fear being caught at such an embarrassing occupation, I looked back with some ironic aloofness to my anxieties in this respect; ultimately, my excursion into the world of shop assistants could be taken as good fun. Yet even now, at the sight of the girl in the wheelchair, I involuntarily whirled around as though trying to conceal myself; and this threw me back once again into the spiritual ordeals and the muddled conflicts of that time.

  Something must have happened to me. Something basic in me had shifted, had broken and crumbled—and it was the ground under my feet. No longer did I feel I belonged to a caste enjoying authority by dint of universal respect. Rather, it was a caste that blemished me, as though I were Jewish. And no matter what I did, I could no more change my nature than a Jew could. The most painful humiliation of all was how I had been rebuffed by the men I had tried to ingratiate myself with. That would never happen again, I promised myself. It was worse than when a Jewish woman running a dumpy shop put on ladylike airs.

  A lot of things that Mr. Garabetian had said whirled through my mind. Was it really true? Was I afraid of women? The girl in the wheelchair—but she was a phantom: I had walked past her, turning away as if not really noticing her, as if my attention had been caught by something else. Then I was cowardly, too! Frightened in this, too! … She had probably not even noticed me; I could not have meant anything whatsoever to her, a passerby, a pedestrian among hundreds of other pedestrians. Any possibility of her becoming my mistress and ideal beloved was sheer fantasy. And yet I was answerable to her.

  Very well, I had been charmed by her being so well taken care of, by the aura of the child from a good background. The mama’s boy in me was homesick. That was all. No doubt, the sight of her passed so spectacularly into my gonads because of my involuntary notion that she, being crippled, could hardly defend herself if I attacked her. Jews, too, challenged you with defenselessness, especially Jewish women, and particularly Jewish widows ….

  So perhaps Mr. Garabetian was right, and I would never tell him so, now that I did not drop in on him every day. But if he wasn’t right, he wasn’t wrong either: I did fear women. And whenever I might believe I did not need to fear a woman, then a shaft instantly grew in my trousers—and aimed into nothingness.

  Löwinger�
�s Rooming House

  In 1957, for reasons and under circumstances I won’t go into now, I stayed for a few days at a place called Spitzingsee, in upper Bavaria. As I had to spend the greater part of my time there waiting, I often went for walks. On one such excursion I discovered a place to hire boats at the lakeside.

  I am not a dedicated oarsman; on the contrary, a traumatic experience in early adolescence put me off rowing forever, and I still tend to regard it as a vulgar and in no way exhilarating pastime.

  The instigator of this aversion was a relative of mine, my senior by many years, a man who was recommended to me as a paragon in every sense. He was what one calls a Feschak in Vienna: an Uhlan squadron leader who had returned from the Great War safely and in one piece, he had adapted to civilian life easily and become a successful businessman, was handsome, elegant, a sports- and ladies’ man. He used to spend his Sundays at a rowing club on the Danube, and since it was hoped that his company and the fresh air would influence my frail character and wan state of health beneficially, I was often encouraged to accompany him there. I transferred all my carefully nurtured hatred from him to the club he frequented.