The suspense that built up as we awaited her entrance became so great that even Cleopatra would have had her work cut out for her, and Miss Bianca Alvaro was no Queen of the Nile. She wasn’t exactly nondescript, not unsympathetic, but decidedly not winning either; neither pretty nor downright ugly, more on the small side than on the large, more blonde than brunette. Neither her name nor her physiognomy gave any clue as to where she came from. She might have been Jewish, but then again perhaps not. At a rough guess she was in her mid-twenties. She had been studying German language and literature at the University of Jena, and was preparing for a state examination in order to teach German at the local Gymnasium. “The only thing one can say about her with any certainty,” Pepi remarked, “is that she has luscious tits. She can try and flatten them as much as she pleases, but a connoisseur will spot them a mile off. They’re high-slung with a prominent sideways jut; the nipples probably tickle her armpits, a sure sign of quality. There’s not much more than a good handful apiece, but they’re as firm and juicy as young melons. One will be better able to judge in summer when she wears lighter dresses.”
Mr. Löwinger’s appeal proved unnecessary, as things turned out. Miss Alvaro’s mere presence sufficed to quell all appetite for discussing sex. The change in the tenor of our talk was so marked that one day when she excused herself and left the table earlier than usual, everyone else, including the three Löwinger ladies, remained seated as if by secret arrangement and simultaneously launched into a heated discussion. The first attempt to explain the phenomenon was offered by Iolanthe, and coming from her, in the form of a mournful sigh, it sounded overwhelming: “That’s the difference when you’re a lady,” she moaned, looked across to her mother for confirmation, realized what she’d said, and lowered her eyes in panic.
“Bullshit!” Pepi Olschansky spluttered, “lady … lady … she’s nothing but a bum-beater, that’s all. I’ve never seen anyone better equipped to become a schoolteacher. She has a way of looking at a man that’s more sobering than castration. I’m always expecting her to chide us about our dirty fingernails or the way we hold our forks. If Duday Ferencz were to go up to her and say in his beguiling Hungarian way, ‘Miz Alvaro, eet would geeve me great pleasure to screw the ass of you,’ she’d simply look up and answer, ‘Dear Mr. Duday, you surely mean you’d like to screw the ass off me, at least I hope you do; you’re mixing up your prepositions and adverbs again, and in so doing you completely alter the meaning of the phrase and express a desire to perform an act of sodomy on my person which is generally confined to pederastic relationships. So if, as I trust, the heterosexual method is more to your taste, I suggest that until such time as you have grasped the finer points of our language you’d do better to avoid risking embarrassing misunderstandings and stick to straightforward, basic phrases such as “Miss”—not Miz—“Miss Alvaro, how about a fuck?” ’ ” We all burst out laughing, and the matter was settled for the time being.
A few days later Miss Alvaro was to cross my path directly. Pepi and I passed through Cismigiù park on the way back from our walk one morning and stopped by the chestnut tree in front of our temporary home; its fruit was thumping to the ground. I stooped and picked one up, peeled off the knobby skin; the nut was shiny and immaculate—“Rather like me when they took off my cast,” I remarked to Pepi.
“It doesn’t stay that way, unfortunately.”
The Löwinger house, which dated from the mid-nineteenth century, was distinctly rural in style, one-storied with a tin roof. It stood facing the road, a narrow courtyard alongside.
Just as Pepi and I entered the yard, Miss Alvaro emerged from the front door and the little brown dog scampered out between her legs, spotted us, and shot forward, yapping furiously, recognized Pepi, gave a howl, and shot back again. For fun I threw the chestnut at him. I hadn’t actually intended to hit him, had thrown the nut high, but the dog must have seen the movement of my arm, for he accelerated wildly and ran straight into the missile’s trajectory, taking the blow squarely in his exposed rectum. He was even more surprised than we were and let out a scream as though Lucifer himself had raped him. Pepi and I roared with laughter.
Miss Alvaro marched up and planted herself in front of us, glared at me with her big brown eyes, shook her head slowly and incredulously, and said, “You? How could you do such a thing? I would not have thought it of you.”
I was very embarrassed. Olschansky came to the rescue: “That’s his hunter’s blood coming out,” he said maliciously. “Didn’t you recognize it from the precision of the trajectory?”
“Nonsense,” I said. “It was pure chance; I didn’t aim at him. I’m very sorry.” And, although I had no liking for the dog, it was sincere.
Miss Alvaro said no more and was just about to turn and go when we heard Iolanthe’s voice through the open kitchen door: “Oh, do stop laughing, you silly goose,” and out tumbled the servant girl Marioară, doubled up with laughter, her hands to her face, wiping away the tears. When she looked up and saw me, she controlled herself long enough to say, “I’ll never forget that for the rest of my days, never, never,” and doubled up again. Her beauty surpassed the superb autumn day, and as she drew a deep breath, straightened up, and gazed at me again, I knew that her door would not be locked that night. Pepi knew it too. He said “Two birds with one stone.”
With which Miss Bianca Alvaro also got the message. She turned on her heel and left.
So I was all the more surprised when two days later she spoke to me. “I should like to ask something of you. Will you come to my room for a moment?”
We were alone. She dipped her hand inside her blouse, pulled out a bunch of tiny keys hanging from the chain about her neck, opened a valise, and took out a case wrapped in silk paper. When she’d finally unwrapped and opened it, she held it out to me. “I should be very grateful if you were to tell me whether this ring is valuable or not. I inherited it, but have no knowledge of jewelry. I come from a very poor family. I’ve heard of such things only in fairy tales.”
It was an unostentatious piece, no more than a setting for a single stone. The stone, however, was huge and green; if it were a genuine emerald, it would be worth a little fortune.
“I know nothing of jewelry either,” I said. “The best thing to do is to go to a jeweler and then double the price he names you. He’ll think you want to sell it and start the bidding low.”
“Would you do me the favor of coming with me?” she asked. “I’m from the provinces, a village near Kishinev, and I don’t know another soul here in Bucharest I could ask.”
I went with her not to one but three different jewelers. The values they quoted varied only slightly and were much higher than I had calculated. This seemed to confuse Miss Alvaro greatly, but she remained reticent. “Thank you very much,” she said, as we parted in town—she had already made it clear to me that morning that she didn’t want Löwinger’s to know about our undertaking, for she had asked that we leave the house separately—“thank you very much, you were as friendly and cooperative as I expected of you.”
This drove me to the brink of forgetting my manners. What on earth gave Miss Bianca Alvaro the right to “expect” anything of me at all? What standards had she applied to me and my character, what yardstick of behavior was I obliged to live up to? I for my part gave her no second thoughts whatsoever. By now, I had summed her up and knew which pigeonhole to pop her in. Iolanthe had not been wrong in calling her a lady, but the veneer of her acquired graces couldn’t hide her background from me: a drab little Jewish girl from a village near Kishinev—that she was indeed Jewish now seemed fairly certain; Pepi had been prepared to bet on it from the beginning. I couldn’t have cared less one way or the other—at all events, I knew her sort. They were a dime a dozen on every village street, all over Rumania; they spent their childhood skipping among mounds of horse dung and flocks of gay sparrows, warbling Hebraic words of wisdom in Jewish schools, chewing Mr. Löwinger’s marbled pens and poking their ears and noses wit
h ink-stained fingers, disappearing then to the next town. They returned gangling, cheeky, precocious, and self-confident a couple of years later, unfurled little red flags, and chanted socialistic marching songs; then they went off again. The next time they came back they were unrecognizable—polished, poised, coiffed, and manicured, lugging doctorates on their proud shoulders; they dug themselves in and became dentists, high-school teachers, professors of music, and God only knows what other intellectuals, married similar solid burghers and produced streams of progeny, teaching them to speak refinedly through their noses, packing them off to the Sorbonne to get equipped the better to meddle with the course of the history of civilization. I had witnessed pretty near every stage of these developments in the Carpathian village where I came from, and surmised that Kishinev could not be so very different. And whereas Miss Alvaro no doubt regarded me as the epitome of a smarmy, once-velveteen-suited, governess-tutored youth, cutely twittering away in French, when the time came, my undivided attention to horses and hunting restricting my vocabulary to a fund of some three hundred words—but not hesitating to entrust me with her priceless heirloom!—I on the other hand couldn’t help seeing in her the snotty-nosed Jewish guttersnipe we were always in danger of running over when driving through the dusty village streets. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her she could think, say, or “expect” what the hell she liked of me for all I cared as long as she left me in peace.
I was even more reserved toward her in the days that followed. Besides, I didn’t see much of her. Under Pepi’s guidance I had begun to read more systematically and selectively, so my time was taken up, added to which the weather broke at last as the crivetz, a wind from the steppes, howled across the open marshlands surrounding Bucharest and hit the city, whistled remorselessly through its streets and alleyways, presaging the bitter Balkan winter, discouraging all desire to set foot outside the house. I holed up.
Miss Alvaro wasn’t so fortunate; she had to go to her class early each morning, came home then for lunch and disappeared again right afterward, spent her afternoons in some library studying, most probably; and at the dinner table she usually sat with an absent look on her face, seldom spoke, and retired as soon as she finished coffee.
Only once did she take part in a conversation, and that quite heatedly. We were discussing the political situation in Germany. The wrestling troupe had had to cancel a tour in southern Germany and Saxony at the last minute, for the Third Reich authorities had questioned their right to the world championships they claimed, the Nameless One with the Black Mask had been unable to furnish proof of Aryan descent, etc., etc.—the usual story of petty difficulties and preposterous formalities, hardly conducive to showing the “new” Germany in a favorable light. Pepi Olschansky defended the Germans vehemently and ended up by calling the wrestlers “a bunch of loudmouthed fairground barkers,” which wounded Haarmin Vichtonen, the Finnish world champion, so cruelly that tears came brimming to his eyes. Radu Protopopescu rushed to his mighty brother’s aid and boomed that the Rumanians’ sorely tried patience would soon be exhausted if the current megalomania of the “Fatherland” were to increase the already insufferable pretentiousness of its stepchildren living here in their country.
This was just the beginning; the discussion really got under way when Dreher, the putative circus-horse backside, began to question the sincerity of the Nazis’ clarion calls in the cause of socialism.
“Do you consider Russian socialism more social?” Olschansky asked.
“That’s not the point!” the backside bellowed. “I am debating socialism in principle!”
“Without principle would be nearer the mark,” Olschansky answered viciously. “Professing to stamp out poverty but only doing away with the fruits of free enterprise, above all those of the mind. Sacrificing life for an abstract theory. Reducing everything to the lowest possible denominator.”
“You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” scoffed Dreher grandly.
Olschansky grinned. “Well, up till now I’ve always kidded myself that my field of vision at least stretched as far as Sidoli’s circus ring.”
“What do you mean by that?” Dreher snorted.
“I was attempting to compare our limits of horizon.” Olschansky grinned provocatively.
“Explain yourself!” Dreher demanded.
“Oh, do I have to?” Olschansky sighed, looking round at the others. “I don’t really think anyone here needs an explanation.”
“Well, I do,” Dreher barked, and his gray forelock bobbed dangerously in front of his eyes, which looked daggers at Olschansky.
“Since you insist,” Olschansky spat back, equally venomously, “I’ll put it to you straight: I meant that when one has spent half one’s life with one’s nose up the ass of the man in front, it’s hardly surprising that one thinks as you do.”
“Slander!” Dreher screamed. “I know you all believe this ridiculous story that I was once part of a circus number. It’s all Cherkunof’s doing: he invented it. I shall go to him this minute and demand that he come down and own up right away!”
We had to restrain him from dashing upstairs to get the unwitting sculptor. “Leave him alone!” Iolanthe begged in the midst of the melee. “Dear Mr. Dreher, all these years we’ve thought of you as a horse’s ass and loved you none the less for it. What difference does it make if you’re a professor?”
But Dreher was a difficult man to quieten down.
“I will bring proof of my claim,” he said, threatening Olschansky. “I will force you to corroborate my evidence and make a public announcement reinstating my honor!”
“If only you knew how little I cared,” replied Olschansky wearily. “You could be Lenin himself as far as I’m concerned. You’ll convince only fools and small children that that which is taking place in Germany is not an attempt to do something of decisive importance for the history of man. The salvation of the individual within a socialist structure—no more and no less. If you opened your eyes and exercised your brain instead of letting your emotions run amok, even you would be bound to see it.”
“You really don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” Miss Alvaro suddenly commented.
Olschansky fixed her with a stare. “Do you perhaps know more?” he demanded.
“I’ve just come from there. I was studying in Jena until two weeks ago,” she answered.
“They allowed you to study in Germany even though you’re Jewish?” Olschansky asked incredulously.
“You are mistaken. I’m an Armenian Christian,” she replied, then blushed and bit her lip. After a moment’s obvious unease, she raised her head proudly and said, “I won’t deny that my parents were Jewish, but the fact remained undetected in Jena. And it has nothing to do with the point in hand.”
“In one aspect it certainly does,” Olschansky insisted, “in that one identifies Nazism with the Jewish question. One uses it to divert public attention from the very real revolutionary steps being taken in Germany.”
“It’s my belief—or rather my conviction, based on personal experience—that exactly the opposite is the case. The Nazis are using the so-called Jewish question to cover up far more questionable issues.”
Olschansky grinned his provocative grin again; the points of his nose and chin trembled toward each other; he looked for all the world like a demoniacal Punch. “You mention the so-called Jewish question and more questionable issues in the same breath; an admirable play on words, to be sure. But tell me, do you regard the question itself as a mere red herring, or as being indeed in need of a resolution?”
“The question is of valid importance inasmuch as a small, harmless religious minority is now being held responsible for a thousand years’ faulty German policy. And, as though that weren’t enough, the Nazis pretend that the golden future they promise their countrymen depends solely on the question’s being solved.”
“With our extermination,” Mr. Löwinger added softly.
“Exactly!”
exclaimed Dreher, the professor and former horse impersonator. “That’s what’s so deplorably retrogressive, so abysmally medieval about their whole ideology: it leads to religious fanaticism; it encourages the insane belief that one has only to exorcise the devil for heaven on earth to set in.”
“For God’s sake don’t you start preaching,” Olschansky retorted. “If on the one hand you advocate simple rationalism as the new way ahead—you’re a democrat, aren’t you? Then you believe in the people’s right to self-government? Well, then, won’t you concede the Germans the right to remove a few Jews from their ranks if the overwhelming majority are convinced they’ll be able to manage their affairs better without them?”
Their futile bantering got on my nerves. I knew Olschansky’s devious tricks and maneuvers all too well and wanted to put an end to them. The surest method had always been to cite one of my celebrated quotations, so I cried, “Give the masses what they want! Fifty million coprophile flies can’t be wrong: eat shit!”
It made a palpable hit, and nearly everyone laughed; even Dreher made a half-grudging, half-acknowledging gesture toward me. Miss Alvaro was the only one who looked at me in outrage; she was at the point of getting up and leaving. Her place at the table was such, however, that an exit to the right would have entailed asking the whole wrestling troupe to get up and let her out, whereas to the left the frail Mrs. Löwinger had collapsed in a heap. Mrs. Löwinger shook, moaned, and gulped, then grabbed Miss Alvaro’s arm and dug her fingers into it.
“What’s wrong, for heaven’s sake?” Miss Alvaro cried.
Iolanthe sprang to her feet. “God Almighty, she’s losing the baby!”
Unfortunately she was right. Mrs. Löwinger was rushed off to hospital, and the next day her mother, red-eyed, told us that all hopes of an addition to the Löwinger family could be buried. When I went to say a few words of compassion to Mr. Löwinger, he looked at me with chill pride in his eyes and said, “I have no regrets; members of our race have no business bringing children into this world.”
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 19
