“They’re ghosts, and because they’re ghosts, they take possession of us, enter us like astral bodies. We politely shake hands and take leave of each other every evening, Miss Alvaro and I, but even if the one lies in bed in room number eight and the other in room number twelve at Löwinger’s Rooming House, we are in fact lying together in that big double bed near the Biserică Albă, holding each other, making love, taking a sip of camomile tea, then embracing again, lulling ourselves to sleep. We no longer know which is the real existence: that of ardently united lovers, acting as if they are superficial acquaintances who happen to live in the same rooming house; or that of people who are briefly drawn together by chance and who pretend not to realize they are lovers for life. And the next day we crawl a little deeper into the souls of our phantom matchmakers ….
“At the moment we’re going through all the drawers in the living room. Piles of documents, letters, diplomas, invitations to all manner of festivities, stacks of photos, all dating from Uncle’s glorious Constantinople days, of course, before he met the little Jewish girl from Bessarabia. I have a thorough knowledge of the financial status of this Armenian from the Golden Horn, right down to the last sou, both before and after the momentous day of Mussadegh. He must have been immensely rich, but the way he ran his business affairs is of a naïveté that would make a bookkeeper weep. Even after he had to emigrate, he should have been in a position to live a life of considerable comfort, but he allowed crooked little lawyers to take him for a ride. The deeper one goes into his papers, the more his innocence touches one’s heart, the more one is warmed by his open-handed generosity and his love for the woman who meant more to him than anything he’d lost or still might lose. And all the more intensely, almost violently, does the woman herself take possession of us with her total, heartrending, never-despairing humanity ….
“I hope you know me well enough by now to believe me when I say that I’m not normally given to sentimentality. Normally the story of a Jewish woman from the sticks who lives in dread of losing the man who raised her to a certain affluence and security, who gave her a vestige of elegance and social prestige—her efforts to make herself indispensable with her sickly-sweet attentivenesses, his slippers toasting by the fireside, the goose crackling in the oven—wouldn’t touch me in the least, nor Miss Alvaro, I think. But the passion this woman invested in her sole raison d’être is of such force that one can’t help being bowled over by it; she haunts us with her dedication to the goal of becoming everything for her husband, to replace what he’d lost and possibly still mourned. All these impressions and feelings are transmitted to us by ghosts; she’s no longer alive, he’s no longer alive, they’re both dead, and still their love lives on; you can read it in every trace: her recipes, with footnotes underlined in red—‘Aram adores this!’ ‘Special favorite of Aram’s!’ Or in the lists of presents he made for birthdays and Christmases to come, with shaky handwritten notes in the margin toting up his bank balance or the yield of his paltry shares. It’s so powerful, it so transcends death, that we feel their presence physically every time we open a drawer.
“What must the woman have felt when she went through his papers or sorted his photographs? What did she think when she saw this evidence of a world that must have seemed like fairyland? Wouldn’t you think she’d despair of ever filling the gap when she looked at the pictures of his paradise lost, the thousand and one nights’ extravaganza, the complacent indulgence of immeasurable wealth? Tea parties at exquisitely timbered villas on the Bosporus, the guests gliding directly into the reception rooms in their boats; next to the visiting Sultan of Morocco we see Her Majesty the Queen’s ambassador half hidden by the duchess of Lusignan’s enormous picture hat, the duchess and the hostess vaguely related by marriage since the days of the Rubenides’ regency over Cyprus; another photo shows the same illustrious party at a sumptuous picnic in Anatolia—the gentlemen in Shantung suits and ladies in white linen draped between chunks of the ruined pillars of Ephesus, lying on piles of rugs and heaps of cushions; some have come on horseback, a few of the younger women already emancipated, sitting boldly astride their mounts; to one side a spindle-wheeled Daimler, caked with dust, its demon driver and his heavily veiled passenger posing playfully beside a camel bearing the whole Kurd family, father, mother, four children, grandmother with a baby goat and two chickens on her lap; yet another view of the same slim gentlemen in gray walking dress, with sloe eyes and tapering noses, mustaches weighing heavily on their drooping mouths, tarbooshes perched pertly on their delicate heads; here again the ladies, in diaphanous Neo-Renaissance gowns, diamonds highlighting their hair, shimmering from their fingers, stout ropes of pearls trussed around their breasts ….
“Just think of her, little Myra from Kishinev, who’d been nothing much to write home about in her prime and was now slowly coming apart at the seams—mustn’t she have known it was hopeless to wish to appear desirable and elegant in the eyes of the prince charming who had descended to her world? No, her love is too serene, too humble in its pride. It never occurs to her to compare herself to anything connected with him; she no longer thinks of herself at all—solely of him; she has identified herself with him totally. The instinct of her love shows her how to make an incense of adoration from the ghost of his great past; she builds it into a myth and wafts it around him like a golden aura. For his part, he’d have probably thrown all the claptrap out long ago, the now-tawdry brocades, gold-thread embroideries and bibelots, the frayed, smashed, worn-out fragments of former luxuries, the photos of persons reported missing and never found again, the letters and invitations, birth and baptism announcements of people long since dead, superfluous documents, worthless deeds of holding—it’s she who dotes on them like an archaeologist sifting through the dust of a pharaoh’s tomb; she documents each photograph according to his identification of the people in them and specifies their relationship to him—‘Aimee-Doudou, a cousin of his nephew Dschoudshouoglou-Pasha’—arranges them in chronological order, divides them into annual bundles, wraps them in silk tissue and ties them with silver thread; goes on and does the same with the invitation cards, the stock certificates of Nakhichevanian mining companies that collapsed twenty years ago. She gathers all the tiny splinters of a shattered rose-quartz hookah mouthpiece and beds them on cotton wool in an old cigar box, places one velvet-lined but empty jewel case on top of the other to make a tidy pile ….
“But all that may well have been due to some retarded, infantile romanticism of hers; turning a faded world into her dream world. No, I tell you, it’s something else. She’s building her myth, and she doesn’t want it for herself. Far more convincing is the way she made a cult of his Armenian bigotry, the evidence of her studies, her notes on Moses of Khorene and Gregory the Enlightener, the devout little pictures and bookmarkers, the umpteen crosses and rosaries all over the place. And there between the Bibles and Lives of the Saints you find hardcore pornographic literature and ooh-la-la pictures from Paris, beside a heap of rosaries in his night table we hit on an arsenal of connoisseur condoms, with roosters’ combs on the spunk bags, or harlequin heads with baubled jesters’ collars. He must have been a dirty old man, this noble camel driver, and there’s not a shadow of doubt that she kept her end up in his respect—on top of all the other specters in the house, the image of a lusty devotion to sex bobs up everywhere, culminating in the beckoning presence of the great, musty, freshly made bed. And there we stand beside it, Miss Alvaro and I, coolly sorting the wheat from the chaff amid death’s odors of decay ….”
Olschansky seemed to have stopped breathing. “Jesus Christ!” he suddenly hollered, “that’s it! I told you you should write, and you stupidly asked me what. This is it. Exactly as you just told it, word for word! It’s the erotic situation par excellence! It must make the blood rush to your heads, this walk through the no-man’s-land between the realities; you must both be literally itching for each other in that incubator of a tomb. Just think of the moment when you can’t stand the suspense any longe
r, when you fall on each other like cannibals—”
“I think of very little else,” I admitted.
“She too, of course ….”
“Very likely. Most probably. She gives no sign, of course…. It would have to happen spontaneously, if it’s going to happen at all. Any attempt to force it would ruin everything.”
Olschansky grinned. “Still a lot to do?” he asked.
“Hardly anything. We’ll be finished tomorrow; the dealer she’s decided on is coming the day after. He’s taking the things she’s chosen for herself into storage as well.”
“So happy hunting tomorrow, then,” Olschansky said.
I lay awake for hours that night. To begin with, I had a guilty conscience for having betrayed Miss Alvaro’s secret. But, then, what was there for her to be so secretive about, after all? At worst our cloak-and-dagger behavior. Still, I felt I had sullied something that had been pure and should have stayed that way; I was ashamed not so much on her account as on that of her Armenian uncle as I had come to imagine him, and my sense of guilt grew to the extent that I superstitiously began to believe he would reach back and punish me. On top of which I felt I’d perhaps laid it on a bit thick; perhaps the suspense I’d described existed only in my imagination. If Olschansky was so enthusiastic about its literary merits, it probably meant that the reality had already undergone a kind of poetic transfiguration and become pure fiction, all due of course to that powerful imagination of mine. The thought that I could so easily fall for my own hokum made me squirm with discomfort; I pictured myself leering lewdly at her at the supposed right moment and her jumping like a startled rabbit, then withering me with a look of total disgust. My embarrassment would be a fitting punishment for my indiscretion.
I realized too that my feelings for Miss Alvaro had indeed undergone some change, and I analyzed them. I was not in love with her, far from it, but I certainly did want her—especially now, after having described the lurid sparks we threw off—but probably not so much her as a person as the role she played in my little melodrama; any other actress would have done as well, just as any understudy could have stepped in for me. One thing was clear, however: the petite Christian Jewess engendered a mixture of respect and fondness I’d never before experienced with anyone of my own age, only with wise, benign older people. Iolanthe had been right: she was a lady, by no means the simple prim schoolteacher Olschansky saw her as. Her authority stemmed from her noblesse. I resolved to tell him as much: “You once told me about Queen Maria’s dignity,” I would say. “Try to regard Miss Alvaro as having similar qualities.”
This resolution made it easier for me to go with her to the apartment on the final day. Even so, I went reluctantly, as I was convinced that whatever might happen between us was bound to be a disappointment; the tension surely wouldn’t build, let alone erupt, to the irrevocable moment of truth, the cannibals’ feast; if I hadn’t just imagined it and she was really awaiting the onslaught as eagerly as I, we still would have invested too much promise in the fantasy, and the reality could never match it in strength.
We worked silently and swiftly as always, even more resolutely now that the end was in sight. Apart from islands of stacked, covered furniture and overflowing baskets and garbage cans, the apartment was empty.
The love nest was abandoned. We had exorcised the ghosts. The noble old Armenian and his Jewish spouse were dead at last.
I was overcome by a feeling of hollowness, more tormenting than any grief. I stepped over to the window again to look out at the city, over which a gray winter sky merged into twilight. Inadvertently, I peered into the chasm of the street between the building fronts, trying to spot the colorfully lit garden restaurant. Here, during my lonesome, lavender-blue summer evenings, the chorus of girlish voices had risen up to me at the stroke of nine: at precise intervals between then and midnight, they had reeled off song after song, the entire repertoire of Russian evergreens.
Behind me, Miss Alvaro’s voice softly asked, “Would you mind answering a very personal question?”
I turned around to her.
“It is very indiscreet of me,” she said, flushing slightly with embarrassment. “But I would very much like to find out—I mean, it would help me—”
“Please ask,” I said with a throbbing heart. I waited to see how she would ask if I had felt the same feelings as she in these past few days.
“Do you believe in anything?” she asked instead, and now looked me full in the face. “Do you believe in God or something of that sort?”
There we have it, I thought to myself. The crucial question. That’s all I needed!
But she wouldn’t even let me answer; she went right on: “It’s been constantly on my mind these past few days. All the aspects of this legacy must have made you aware of how deeply religious my uncle and aunt were and how strongly the bond between them was forged by their religious feelings. And I cannot help wondering whether my aunt, who denied the faith she was born to and brought up in—our family was extremely Orthodox; it was the only thing that gave them a sense of self and a motive for their existence, an identity and, even more, a raison d’être—I cannot help wondering whether my aunt really forgot all that and traded it for something else. How could she have given herself over to a different faith with the same ardor?”
“Isn’t that possible only if you have faith in the first place?” I retorted—partly because I noticed that she was less interested in a response from me than in speaking her own mind, partly because I could thereby avoid answering, which would have been difficult for me. “Besides, she did it out of love,” I added clumsily.
“Yes, of course, of course,” said Miss Alvaro, almost irritated, as though not to be diverted. “That is what they try to comfort us with when true faith begins to dissolve. The fragments of the old, strict commandments float about in a whey of general love feelings—that’s a condition in which I, too, was led into temptation. Love as a basic religious feeling and as the highest ethical value to strive for—these are Enlightenment notions. I wonder whether I am naïve enough for that—no, whether I am not already too enlightened. Perhaps you’re right, and my aunt succeeded in getting at the very essence of faith—and that is not the tidings of love!—simply because she believed. But I believed too. I was eight when I was torn from my Jewish milieu and thrust into the Armenian convent. At eight one is truly God-fearing—I mean, in a fundamentalist way. Nevertheless, I was more than ready and willing to find my God in the new Word that was proclaimed to me. After all, it was taken from the Old Text and enriched by the Gospels—expanded by the dimension of love. And, listen—I have to say something dreadful now. Precisely because I often felt that dimension of love to the point of ecstasy when I was eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve—the grand, universal love for God’s creation and all creatures therein, for mankind and every individual—that was the very reason why I learned that this was the decisive step to the dissolution of faith. I understood why the Jews crucified Jesus—do you grasp what I mean?”
She gazed at me almost in despair: “You must not think that faith is taught with any less fundamentalism in an Armenian convent than in a yeshiva. My schoolmates took every litany verbatim. They had an almost physical need for all the religious exercises—from matins to evensong and finally the prayers at bedtime. But none of this had anything to do with faith. They were marionettes on the strings of their rite. And whenever they truly believed that they believed, they stumbled once again into the lukewarm liquid of love, divine love, brotherly love, the love for God’s creatures, for the universe—the love for everything and anything. And at that point,” said Miss Alvaro with a dismal smile, “the strength of my faith dissolved. At least, that was how it happened to me.”
“And what would have become of your relatives without love?” I asked tactlessly.
“Oh, please don’t misunderstand. My aunt’s love was a Jewish love; selfish, jealous, wrathful, greedy, not stopping at anything—not even evil, not even de
nial, deceit, lies. In that way, she remained unalterably Jewish—far more than I ….” She had paled, and seemed embarrassed again. “I’m probably still Jewish only insofar as I long for my God, whom I seek like Jacob, after wrestling with his angels. It’s useless. I know that he does not exist, my God—or at least no longer exists for me—the severe, demanding, wrathful, greedy, and jealous God. The God of love may exist. He is an earthly God—an idol, to use another word. But He, the severe God of the Commandments, He no longer exists.”
“Doesn’t what we’ve found in your relatives’ things prove that he can be resurrected by love?”
All the blood shot back into her face. She vehemently shook her head. For the first time, I saw how rich and fine her hair was. “We didn’t just find devotional pictures, did we?” she said, staring right into my eyes. “I know it sounds paradoxical, but the love of my kinfolk would soon have become squalid without their bigotry. Their piety prohibited them from interpreting the tidings of salvation through love as if sexuality were the great, venerable motor of creation and thus the crown of all beauty. Were it not for their piety, they would have joined the followers of Saint D. H. Lawrence, if you get what I mean by that: stigmatized barbarians. But their religion demanded that they view sexual love as something ugly, despicable, something to be concealed—in short, as something sinful. If you remember that, dear friend, then this happy union of what cannot be unified acquires a macabre touch.” Her shoulders drooped. “That’s exactly what disheartens me so.”
“Then you still believe in your severe God of shalts and shalt nots!” I cried in foolish triumph. “He just happens to be named Jehovah!”
“No,” she said with no trace of bombast. “I believe in the devil.”
“You can’t believe in the devil without believing in God.”
“Yes,” she then said, half turning from me. “I know. That’s logical. And if I were occasionally overcome by poetic impulses, like Nietzsche, I would reply, ‘But God has grown old and no longer has the strength to stand firm against the devil.’ But I’m afraid even the devil has grown senile—or is banality his last and most dangerous disguise?” She shrugged her shoulders and turned away.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 21
