Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Soon after this episode, I was flabbergasted when Miss Alvaro stopped me in the passageway, looked over her shoulder in order to make sure that nobody was watching us, and then whispered that she would like to meet me at the Café Corso the next day. She was there before me when I arrived at the appointed time.

  “May I invite you to have a drink or something today?” she asked. “I shall be very upset if you refuse.”

  I accepted and, rather evilly thinking of Olschansky, asked for a marghiloman, or what the Italians call a caffè corretto—a small cup of mocha coffee with a shot of cognac.

  “Do you recommend it?” Miss Alvaro asked. “The thing is, I’m going to ask another favor of you.” She smiled shyly, but the smile had a great deal of charm, for she was obviously sure of her ground. “First I must tell you a story,” she continued. “The ring you were good enough to help me have valued belonged to an uncle of mine. No blood relative …” She hesitated, then went on bravely. “He became critically ill a short time ago, and for this reason I returned from Jena—too late, unfortunately. We had been very close; he had been like a father to me ever since I was a small child. It was because of him that I was brought up an Armenian Christian.”

  She paused a moment, as though thinking over something she was reluctant to say. “He was Armenian by birth, from a great family in Constantinople. When the persecution of the Armenians began in the twenties, he emigrated here. Of course he had to leave behind the greater part of his estate and arrived with very little, by his standards. But for my aunt, whom he met almost right away, what he had left was a vast fortune; I told you once, did I not, that I came from a very humble family?

  “Would you like a little more brandy in your coffee? Or a brandy all by itself? I know I should.” She again smiled her small, shy smile. “I never drink, as you surely guessed, but I find myself unable to tell my story without a lift of some sort. I’ve never told it before, by the way ….

  “My uncle first met my aunt when he was ordering new spectacles at an oculist’s; she was working there. We’re not Eastern Jews at all, not Ashkenazim, but Sephardim, as my name implies, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you when my ancestors moved to Bessarabia. Well, as you probably know, among Spanish and Portuguese Jews, especially those who came to Central Europe via Holland, there’s a long tradition in oculism, and one of my relatives had continued the practice. This gentleman wasn’t exactly a Spinoza, but he seemed to believe in the sovereign rights of the strong over the weak, for he used my poor aunt, who was still very young, quite shamelessly. When she and the Armenian met, it must have been love at first sight. He was probably well aware of her humble origins; he was a man of the world, not only on account of his wealth but through a long family history of intermarriage with the French and Italian aristocracy. However, that she might be Jewish most likely never occurred to him; as I said, their love was spontaneous and unqualified.

  “My aunt gave up her job and moved in with him. She was a resourceful housewife and knew how to make life very comfortable, even on their limited means. They became completely self-sufficient and lived happily in splendid isolation for a number of years. Then, when quite unexpectedly both my parents died and there was no one else to look after me, they married in order to fulfill their roles as stepparents respectably.

  “I must tell you that my aunt never found the courage to tell him she was Jewish. She knew of the Armenians’ general hatred of the Jews, not so much a matter of racial hatred—which would be quite absurd, of course—as a religious rivalry, though none the less fanatical for this. My aunt loved her husband so deeply that she would have done far more than just renounce her faith in order to keep him.

  “When I joined them—I was not quite eight years old—she immediately instructed me never, ever to breathe a word that might betray our heritage. I was not with them long before I was sent to an Armenian convent; there, just as had been the case with my aunt vis-à-vis my uncle, my physical appearance aroused no curiosity or comment. Each of the Armenian nuns and the other girls—as indeed my uncle, too—had some facial feature or other that looked just as Semitic to the untrained eye as mine. The only sticky moment was when the teachers found out how ignorant I was in religious matters; they were appalled, but I worked hard and soon caught up with the others. Just as my aunt had done on meeting my uncle.

  “I well remember the discussions she had with the priests who came to visit my uncle. They debated for hours the different doctrines of the Monophysites and the Nestorians with regard to the single, double, or composite natures of Christ, or the connection between the vows made for one at baptism and one’s own reassertion of them at confirmation. Armenians are extremely devout, and my uncle—who belonged to the United Armenians, the so-called Mechitarists, by the way—positively doted on his church. Can you imagine, he presented his father confessor with a complete first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopedia because the priest had maintained he daren’t possess it since it was on the Index?”

  Miss Alvaro took a sip of cognac and then coughed discreetly. “My goodness, that’s strong. And I’m not used to it, although I must say I had opportunity enough to get accustomed to it at my uncle’s house. He was anything but frugal in that way, loved his food and drink. You know, of course, that Lucullus played an important part in Armenia’s history? My uncle jokingly used to say that it was every Armenian’s sacred duty to revere his cuisine and his wine cellar, and my aunt used all her considerable guile to make him forget that he could no longer afford to have his salmon sent from Scotland or his wine from Bordeaux…. I believe also that their sexual tastes were particularly compatible ….

  “It broke him when she died last year; he had no desire to continue living without her. Naturally, as a practicing Christian, he did not think of suicide, but there was in any case no need to do so. Only a few months later, although just seventy and in robust health till then, he followed her. His heart simply stopped beating.”

  She looked at me. “I want to ask another favor of you. As the sole heiress, I inherited not only the ring you saw but the complete contents of my stepparents’ apartment. Everything else my uncle possessed—a modest bank account, a few securities, a share in a house, in a word, the remnants of a great fortune, he left to the Armenian Church. I’m very happy; it would have embarrassed me to receive a penny of it. Just the fact that he paid for my education at the convent and later in Germany—quite apart from countless other tokens of generosity—always made me feel, under the covert circumstances, something of a fraud. I have always had a bad conscience that my family concealed our Jewish faith from him. Naturally my aunt made no attempt to have me baptized; she simply let it be assumed that I was a Christian. And perhaps we were in our hearts, but not by right. I often found the conflict hard to bear and was more than once on the point of confessing everything to my priest, then suffered all the more afterward for not having done so. I saw myself as a criminal, not so much before God and my new faith, you understand, but before this wonderful, noble man, to whom I had so much to be grateful for, whom I loved as a father.

  “Now to my request: can you understand that I cannot go alone to the apartment? There are the usual things to be done—go through the possessions, make an inventory, pack things up. To be honest, I feel unable to manage alone and know of no one else I might ask. Because of the years I spent in Germany I have grown away from the few friends I made here in my childhood, and of my present acquaintances you are the only one I dare impose on.”

  Again I was tempted to ask her why, but it hardly seemed the right moment. “May I now buy you a cognac?” I said instead. “From what you tell me, I’m sure we shall find all manner of exquisite beverages in your uncle’s flat. We’d better get in training.”

  The apartment was in a high-rise building not far from Biserică Albă. “How strange,” I remarked. “I lived round the corner until not very long ago, up there, on one of the roofs. I probably passed your uncle and aunt on the street many times without kn
owing that sad circumstances would bring us together one day. By the way, there must be a Russian garden restaurant around here somewhere, with a girls’ chorus that starts caterwauling every evening on the stroke of nine.”

  She didn’t know it. “My stepparents moved here only a few years ago,” she said. “These buildings are quite new. I wasn’t here often—not because they kept me away or anything but they were so happy together that I always was a little shy. I felt I might intrude. They were like the lovers in David Teniers’ painting, sitting on top of the hay wagon gazing into each other’s eyes, oblivious of the emperors and popes being crushed to death under the wheels below; the Weltgeist itself spun a cocoon around their love.”

  As she said this, Miss Alvaro smiled the little smile that was so becoming to her. I could well imagine her as the prim pupil of the Armenian sisters. The line of her neck was simple and lovely, expressing a modest but defiant pride.

  The apartment was on the sixth floor of a building that conceded nothing in hideous barrenness to the one I had lived in myself. We went up in the lift, and Miss Alvaro said, “It’s a wonder it’s working. I’m afraid this too had something to do with my uncle’s premature death: nine times out of ten he had to walk up.”

  We got out, and again she dipped into her blouse to extract the bunch of keys; I turned my head to hide my smile, as I wondered that her uncle hadn’t guessed the origin of his womenfolk from such characteristically careful traits, but then again, as with their physiognomy, perhaps Armenian girls had this in common with Jewish girls also.

  She opened the door and we stepped in. It was a typical immigrants’ flat: a mixture of old and new junk, purely decorative, impractical pieces salvaged from the ruins of former prosperity standing side by side with the banal indispensables of day-to-day life in incongruous equality, creating that atmosphere of improvised coziness which one suffers gladly only in the comforting knowledge that it’s temporary. I had seen the same combinations in the dwellings of Russians who escaped the Revolution with nothing but what they could carry in their two hands. At second glance, I realized that many of the objects here were of some value, however, even though everything was either faded or chipped, and some pieces ruined completely. The modern, practical articles and gadgets had been chosen carefully from the middle-price range, not quite top quality but not quite rubbish either; the housewife’s dream—but a nightmare in taste. It was obvious whose hand had sought these out. Miss Alvaro’s aunt must have found in them a perfect outlet for her domestic zeal, and the noble old Armenian had obviously given her her head. Everything was clean and pedantically neat; nevertheless, as we stood there for a moment, I became aware of the odors of dust and musty materials, of biscuits moldering in hidden tins.

  All the doors stood open: hallway, living room, bedroom, kitchen. One couldn’t see much, for the shutters were closed and the windows covered with heavily embroidered but decrepit curtains. Miss Alvaro crossed and opened a French window facing to the west, and raised the shutters. The sun had just set. I recognized my lavender-blue sky, paler now, colder, less sentimental. It had been late summer when I lived in the neighborhood. Now it was late autumn. Golden leaves fluttered down from the trees along the Boulevard Bratianu. Miss Alvaro trembled slightly. And for a few moments we both stood there looking out, breathing deeply, rather like divers, I thought, before braving the deep; but then the city below had much in common with the mausoleum behind us, much the same mixture of modern supertransience and flea-market curiosities. For all its Art Nouveau villas and futuristic glass-and-concrete buildings, Bucharest was as Oriental as Smyrna. The Occident, with its many-splendored towered citadels, was far away, there where the sun, dipping in, blood red, from the swamps and steppes and scrawny settlements of the east, would now only be prewarming the slate and copper roofs before melting them with its farewell blaze.

  Miss Alvaro squared her shoulders and turned to her inheritance. “My aunt always spoke of their possessions, especially the furniture and glass and china, as though they were priceless. I’m afraid I’m no judge,” she said. “I only want to keep a few things for myself, things that are easily transportable. I’ve no intention of setting up house in the near future.”

  On closer inspection it appeared to me that her aunt hadn’t boasted; there was a French baroque chest of drawers, an early English grandfather clock, a pair of octagonal Turkish tables with superb inlays of mother-of-pearl, silver and tortoiseshell. The rest was run-of-the-mill stuff: mahogany cupboards; a cumbersome fin-de-siècle bedroom suite, expensive at the time, no doubt; hanging flower baskets; a portable phonograph; a radio. Brocades, gold-thread embroideries, and cashmere shawls were spread everywhere, giving the impression of Oriental luxury. Everywhere too there was evidence of former opulence, surfeit: several solid-silver but aggravatingly incomplete sets of cutlery, dishes and bowls and trays of chipped enamel, fragmentary cloisonné, French and Viennese porcelain sideboard pieces, Bohemian cut glass, but each piece minus a spout, a lid, a handle, with the edges serrated, traces of glue.

  I took down one of four leatherbound books with gold stamping that were standing squashed in between pulp novels and department-store catalogues on a bookshelf; it was an edition of Choderlos de Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses, early enough still to be signed only “C. de L.” Between the pages were a number of religious bookmarks; “Holy Brigitte, Holy Anthony of Padua, pray for us … ”—tokens of penance for disregarding the Index, most likely.

  “The best way to go about it will be to do as we did with the ring,” I suggested. “You choose the things you want to keep, then we’ll invite three antique dealers to come and make estimates, first separately, then free for all, and may the best man win.”

  “I hope that one day I shall have the opportunity to show my gratitude,” Miss Alvaro replied. “There’s just one thing—” She hesitated. “No, I’m sure it’s not necessary to remind you again not to mention this business at the boarding house.”

  I managed not to for about a week. Then Olschansky confronted me: “You’re fraternizing with the Alvaro filly. Don’t bother to deny it; my information is irrefutable. You meet her in town; you’ve been observed several times. Why should you deny it? She’s not that ugly, no cause for shame. Or do you want to shut me out? That’s not very nice between friends.”

  I was obliged to tell him the truth, if only to avoid compromising Miss Alvaro, although I knew immediately that this was but a welcome excuse: I was only too glad for the chance to talk about it.

  “You can’t imagine what it’s like,” I said. “We’re as complete strangers now as we ever were; apart from what she tells me in connection with her dead relatives, I know nothing about her whatsoever. And she nothing of me, since I’ve had no call to tell her anything. We still act with the same polite formality as we did on the day she first spoke to me, still keep our distance, partly on purpose and partly because we no longer have any choice. Just think of it: never a personal word, no confidences, and of course, God forbid, no intimacies. It would never occur to either of us to ask the other where or how we were going to spend the evening when we part at the door; our private lives could take place in two different worlds. In reality we simply take separate routes and come straight back here to be under the same roof, sit at the same table twice a day, and watch carefully that no one gets a hint of our relationship, the secret we share—like partners in crime. Then, when we meet at the apartment the next day, we again negate our other life at Löwinger’s, never mention it. As a result, instead of becoming easier with each other, the tension builds. The sense of intimacy I feel with her—and she with me, I’m sure of it—grows stronger by the day, our hearts are continually in our mouths, so to speak, and all generated by a purely vicarious experience, by the exploration of two other, dead people’s lives. What we find there grows into a monstrous secret between us.

  “I say ‘monstrous’ because no one should be allowed to delve into another’s life in the way we’re doing, into the rem
otest nooks and crannies of intimacy. Each one of us has something we prefer to keep hidden, from ourselves just as much as from others; we shut it away and pretend it’s not there. But here we are, Miss Alvaro and I, digging out every last morsel and examining it minutely. We know the lives of these two superb, consummate lovers to the last detail, down to their underwear and toilet articles, their hairbrushes, their soap and eaux de cologne, the racy magazines and jam recipes they read as they reclined on the sofa digesting a good dinner, the dentures they popped into a tumbler beside the bed when they went into their lovemaking routine, less and less passionately over the years, possibly, after decades of experience and experiment, but still with heavenly appeasement; the suppositories they needed to ease the passage of their sumptuous fare, probably giggling and thrusting them up each other’s flabby backsides—each day we unearth some new dimension that again adds a new dimension to the intimacy between us. We sold their whole wardrobe, complete with everything from his bedroom slippers to his tails and white ties, from her corsets to a moth-eaten mink stole—his Christmas present in 1927—to a secondhand dealer, so that little chapter’s over and done with, thank God. Sorting out their clothes gave us an indelible impression of their physiques. We came to know their collar and hip sizes, the shapes of their feet, their body odors, the peculiarities of the stains their sweat left, the irksome sphincter and bladder weaknesses of the people who wore these shirts and pants, shoes and jackets, dresses, overcoats, dressing gowns and nighties, and pressed the contours of their bodies into them ….