Ran off into the “great life.” Not, however, as a grande dame. Maud, the high-class courtesan, was presumably snubbed by the grandes dames of the epoch. But not humiliated. (Aunt Selma says that when Ilse-Maud was still a girl her mother, born a von Jaentsch and always careful to maintain social rank by speaking French to her daughters, had told her, “Si tu continueras comme ça, tu finiras dans un bordel.” To which Ilse-Maud replied, “Peut-être. Mais cela sera toujours un bordel de premier ordre.” (Notation in the margin: Caution! Cf. Abel.)
We weave the myth of the beautiful Ilse-Maud just as later, in the winter of 1940, Uncle Ferdinand would weave the myth of the “Middle Kingdom”. . .
. . . and so I too am resurrected from the pictures in the magic box, the princely son of a whore, soon to be the orphan boy in the misery of the Viennese starched-collar bourgeoisie, Stella’s gigolo, and finally a castaway in the land of the lotus-eaters, who never had a real fatherland but was a prince in a childhood realm, a gift from god, cuddled and kissed by everyone—and one day forgotten, abandoned to the world of the lowly and disinherited
S. points to a Kodak photograph. “Who’s this?”
“My mother on the Côte d’Azur.”
“And the huge old coxcomb next to her?”
“Uncle Ferdinand. A Romanian prince.” (Possibly my father. I don’t say it, Christa does, with a steely blue gaze into Schwab’s thick lenses.)
Undaunted, for decades I’ve been documenting myself with this box! It’s a well-known fact that the camera lens doesn’t lie. People expect me to perform my myth—and they get what they ask for:
“Here, this is a good portrait of my mother—beautiful, wasn’t she? Yes indeed, ravishingly beautiful, especially the shape of her eyes, so pleasantly un-Germanic, not at all aggressive and round as a bull’s-eye. The upper lid an arc soft as moonlight above the straight lashes below—as if the radiance shone anew each time she blinked. Max Factor turned out a whole generation of starry-eyed beauties in Hollywood with that trick. But in little Ilse Subicz, it was a natural gift, inherited from Bosnian mountain-farm women from the days when the Orient still ended at Europe’s threshold. Thence also the sly wit in her glance, her irony. . . Ah well . . . and the curly head in her lap is me, of course. I must not have been much older than a year when—cute baby, no?”
(Exchange of glances between S. and Christa: it could be any old baby; they all look the same at that age . . .)
“The farm woman holding me on her arm? Probably a Romanian nursemaid. It must have been at Uncle Ferdinand’s in Bessarabia in what’s now Russia—or rather, in what was then Romania . . . To tell you the truth, it gets boring to give your birthplace when you have to supply an entire outline of Eastern European geography and history along with it—at any rate, it was geographically somewhere between the Carpathians and the Kyrgyzstan steppes, temporally between two orgies of cataclysmic hate, World War I and World War II. Between different worlds and times, as they say. But as you can see, when I was a little boy, none of that left any traces on me. For the first seven years of my life I was very happy, well bred, and well fed, very spoiled, very cheerful, and unselfconscious . . .”
—my earliest memories? Light falling obliquely through a large window, slanting across a bright room, even brighter than the sunlight outside, all bundled together in the words “summer happiness”: it paints the four quadrants of the rectangular window onto the mirroring parquet, fragrant with floor wax, and sparkles in a hundred lights on the silver tea set—
On a console table, a big bouquet in a porcelain vase—
and outside, billows of lilac along the wall of the park—
the fragrance of freshly mown meadows—
and Mommy laughs and picks me up and kisses me—
the smell of Pears soap on me, dark as old beeswax; my skin is red from Miss Fern’s unforgiving scrub brush—
Excursion: the bobbing rumps of the coach horses, notched like a peach. The parabolas of their coarse tails lift and from the rosettes of their anuses, opening iris-like, emerge apple-round yellow tubers that plop between their sweat-flecked haunches while the mallow-colored rosettes close up again with beautiful efficiency—
—my mother doubled over with laughter and imitating Uncle Ferdinand. He gives a lordly wave to the tenants stepping back respectfully into the ditch as we drive past. “Bonjour, popor!” (popor means people . . .)
—in my memory, the bearskin caps of the boyars in the portraits of Uncle Ferdinand’s ancestors: I have declared them mine as well; I come from a princely house—
Miss Fern’s hateful index finger snapping the hat brim I’ve turned down at a jaunty angle back into the circular brim of a child’s hat—
—the viscous, dark blue sea beyond our garden gate on the Côte d’Azur, continued in the purple waves of the lavender beds; higher up, the clear contour of the coast, the hillsides crosshatched sepia and silvery olive-green, the cloud-blue mountains—
the swaying masts of the boats rocking gently along the pier, crossing one another in a symbolic fencing match: Japanese theater. Sky, sea, and coast all brutal spots of color: land of the Impressionists—
the coastal breeze rattles the palm fronds along the esplanade—
—white parasols, Panama hats, and blazers with gold buttons. We’re on the deck of Uncle Agop’s yacht. Uncle Agop lets me look through his telescope at a distant fishing cutter. I can see the red pompom on the fisherman’s cap . . .
“But look at those trees in the background—no, not those. Those are cypresses and they don’t grow in northern Bessarabia. There was a dense forest of them in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where we spent the winter with Uncle Agop the oil tycoon, we being my mother, Uncle Ferdinand, my nanny Miss Fern, and me. At home in Bessarabia we were very near the Russian border. Only the Dniester separated us from the evil Bolsheviks. At night shots often rang out from across the river. We didn’t think much of it. But we spent the winter on the Côte, and what I wanted to show you weren’t the trees there, but the ones in our park at home, as I called Uncle Ferdinand’s estate in Bessarabia. Here, take a look at these gigantic beeches—not those, those are plane trees. There were some of them in Saint-Jean too—or rather, in Antibes, in the garden of Uncle Bully Olivera’s villa; Bully made his fortune in Bolivian tin and was another of my mother’s devotees. She would easily confuse them, especially if you could see lions at the garden gates, because there were lions both here and there—I mean, in Antibes and also in Saint-Jean and at home in Bessarabia . . . I’m sorry I’m showing you all this in such disorder, but that’s also how memory functions—if it functions at all. The selection of images out of the thousands of impressions we’ve experienced is as random—or inexplicable—as whatever it is that guides my hand to take a particular photo out of the box. All of a sudden, one of the countless snapshots our five senses have stored up, called forth God only knows how and by what, assumes profound significance—for example, the lions at the gates of all the houses my mother and I lived in. Mommy had a real passion for those slightly bourgeois doorkeepers. Uncle Ferdinand called it one of her “quirks.” She had copies of Uncle Ferdinand’s park lions made and gave them to Uncle Agop and Uncle Bully for their villas on the Corniche, marvelous examples of kitschy outdoor accessories if I do say so, although not the banal kind with plaster ringlets you see at the garden gates of small-town mansions. No, these were medieval and fierce, dreamed up by a local stonecutter who’d never seen a real lion. They were a cross between a dog and a giant tomcat in a powdered wig and fetchingly curled up mustachios above snarling mouths. It’s a shame I don’t have a photo of them, but we were so used to their being wherever we stayed that no one ever thought they were anything special except Mommy, who named and constantly renamed them after her lovers. If you could see through these trees here, you would see where they stood: in Bessarabia on top of the pillars of the wrought-iron gate beyond the bridge over the deep, transparent, darkly flowing stream, sparkling gold in sunlig
ht and shaded by wondrously large coltsfoot leaves, water whose constant, strong current combed the yellowed swamp grass in its depths. It was as if they too were lined with gold, the bedroom of the beautiful Melusine. I would often watch the riverbank crabs crawling over it. In their armor they seemed like heraldic relatives of the lions, somehow connected to their passionate anger, the petrified fury with which those big cats sank their griffin claws into the blank shields they held before their wasp-waisted bodies . . . Yes, and then the stream emptied into the pond where my mother—but that’s another story. Here’s a picture of Uncle Agop’s yacht off Monte Carlo—”
(By the way, these are photos Stella collected for me, amused by the acquaintances and friends she and my mother had in common without knowing each other . . . Would mentioning that increase my credibility? It would for S., but what about Christa?)
Schwab’s rapt attention and Christa’s long-suffering skepticism: if she wanted to, she could counter my myth with one of her own, a less exotic one, of course, but all the more tangible. Its guarantors come to tea on a regular basis and it didn’t need to be documented picture by picture. Photographically it was already a new generation that shot its pictures from the hip, so to speak, in a habitual routine. That created a somewhat less emotional, less intoxicated background, which in Christa’s case was no less grand, not at all: East Prussian lake district, the light and air harsher but clearer above golden waves of grain, the views more expansive, setting out fresh for bright mornings on horseback. And the view down the long suites of rooms in the castle, their walls also lined with ancestral portraits (ancestors documented and not merely imagined!). There were uncles as well, genuine ones, and aunts, all from the same family and not plucked from hedges and fences like mine. Legitimate genealogies, no gaps even in the prewar period. Aristocratic grandparents and progenitors, white haired and bent under the weight of their dignities and duties . . . Here too a park with giant centuries-old oaks—“and they strung up Grandpapa from the thickest branch . . .”
“Our kind doesn’t make a big deal about it,” Christa would say, if she ever mentioned it. After all, it’s history and not some mythic land. Their flight before the Russian advance was interesting. They tried to get carried along in the retreating stream of Wehrmacht soldiers but couldn’t keep up. The German retreat was flowing faster than the refugees could flee and the Russian tide advancing even faster . . . “Naturally there were marauders among the half-Polack populace and you had to hide from the Gestapo too; they stayed behind on the lookout for traitors’ relatives—guilt by association, you know. So we traveled only at night in a wagon abandoned by the reserves, pulled by half-dead horses, and during the day we hid in the hayloft of any barn we could find. Uncle Heribert was terrified—he was well over eighty—and we made a joke out of frightening him: ‘Uncle Heribert, the Russians are here!’ And he peed in his pants every time! Lord, how we laughed . . .”
I concede that’s more believable and true to life. I run out of steam: “No, the man next to the baby carriage isn’t my father—why, do I look like him? because that’s what many people say. . . it’s probably just mimesis, a little boy’s simian imitation. No, it’s my uncle—all right, so-called uncle, on my mother’s side, so to speak—Uncle Bully Olivera, the tin magnate from Bolivia, as I said—or hang on for a second—no, my mistake, it’s Uncle Jean Fégonsac—sometimes I confuse the two of them; they look like twins in their polo togs . . .”
(S. and Christa exchange a look, S. visibly with a guilty conscience.)
And suddenly Christa makes a comment, which is rare. And even rarer, an ironic one. “There were a lot of them—the uncles, I mean—a disconcerting number.” (S. stares at the floor.)
“You can say that again.” I smile at Schwab. Little beads of sweat are shining on his upper lip, which trembles almost imperceptibly. “I have at least a dozen hypothetical fathers. For example, here’s Uncle John—I told you about him already. Christa met him, briefly, in Nuremberg. He at any rate was my protector there, and was also one of my mother’s friends, if you will. It was with his wife that I later—here she is: Stella—what a magnificent Semitic profile, eh? . . . in a dirndl, no less. For a while we were in fact living—adulterously—in the lake district near Salzburg—but that was already 1938 . . . what I’m really looking for . . . here it is: me in my pony cart, at home, I mean in Bessarabia. Hard to recognize me, however”—
(Christa bores her eyes into Schwab’s. He looks down like he’s been spanked.)
—and I revel in his embarrassment. What’s triggering it? Is it Christa’s severity, her unassailably unpoetical standpoint? Or is it envy of my audacious self-invention? . . .
“The stern person next to me is my nanny Miss Fern . . . Gloves, yes, one wore them back then, even as a child, and of course, especially when driving a carriage—it sounds funny to you, but Christa can confirm that, at least . . . You wear gloves to set yourself apart and at the same time, as in handling the reins of a carriage, to have a finer feel of control.—But can you make out the background in this photo? There on the left, beyond the birches, must have been the pond—we’ll find a photo of the entire thing soon. It plays an important role in the story of my childhood . . .”
“. . . and you don’t know if she did it herself . . . ?” Cousin Wolfgang’s whisper is oily with curiosity—childish curiosity, the kind of primal curiosity about creepy, spooky, gruesome things that trickles down your spine and raises the hairs on the back of your neck . . . and what does he know of my distress at not knowing what happened, not having any picture of her death, only the nothingness her disappearance left behind, the hole in the world into which I’ve fallen . . .
It’s black as pitch in our room—a servant’s room in earlier times when this floor of the run-down apartment building hadn’t yet been divided into flats for the lower middle class and they didn’t have to live like proles—Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma’s constant lament. Uncle Helmuth grimly accepts it. He himself was one of nine siblings, the children of a pastor in Thuringia, so he has no sense of the bitterness of being déclassé. As a university graduate, his prestige is assured. His engineering diploma ennobles his jacket’s threadbare elbows. Cousin Wolfgang has never known anything but this petit bourgeois fustiness. He was born in the General Hospital and was brought here almost as soon as the umbilical cord was cut. At least he had this room to himself for the first few years, the proud occupant of his own room until he was assigned me as a roommate, me, the bastard, the foundling in silk suits and high-button spats, an object of ridicule and contempt for the children of the back courtyards. I am the aura of pony rides through the estate park, of thés dansants aboard the yachts off the Côte d’Azur in which my mother, the beautiful and infamous Maud, was one of the brilliant queens . . . Me, bursting with fairy-tale stories I whisper in the dark to my fearful, philistine cousin. . .
It’s black as pitch in our cramped room. Only a single thread of dim light penetrates through a narrow slit in the shutters and cuts a straight line across the blackness into the blackened blood red of the linoleum floor before climbing up the shit-brown dresser and breaking off on its white marble top . . . It’s stuffy in our crypt-like bedroom, moldy as a grave: since it gives onto a light shaft it never gets properly aired out. We’ve inhaled the last bit of night air and lie in our beds under rumpled quilts, our eyes staring into black nothingness, all our senses focused on what we hear—
and so I can conjure with my whisper and banish Cousin Wolfgang and everything around him—Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, and Aunt Selma—into unreality, as if they were only a bad dream, and free myself from distress, the incomprehensible transformation of the world that snatched me from my bright, expansive, fresh, jovial, blissful former life and stuck me in this dull, narrow place—
can lend fate’s cruel triviality a note of something intended by a supernatural force—wasn’t my mother driven into the pond by a curse pronounced on her by higher powers that provoked horror in everyone.
Even Miss Fern, who until then had cared for me like the apple of her eye, shrank back from it, brought me here, and departed as though she had to flee from me . . .
“This picture here is from much later.” (The box isn’t empty yet.) “An adolescent already, in my school years in Vienna. That frumpy woman between us—that is, between me the orphan boy and this ur-German youth here, my cousin Wolfgang, who looks so much like you—is my Aunt Hertha, Wolfgang’s mother. What an impossible hat, don’t you think? If there’s such a thing as an unmistakable symbol of social status, then it’s the hats of middle-class ladies . . . No, of course it’s not India—very funny—it’s the Palm House in Schönbrunn. I often went walking there alone, even when I was young . . .”
—And here I can ride my hobbyhorse and conjure life from the banal snapshot of an adolescent who’s skipping school and wandering around gray Vienna, fleeing into the once feudal domain Uncle Helmuth calls “the Schönbrunn greenery.” It represents the topography of his mythical land: a park! An extensive park! The home of his yearning . . .
genuine life experience—not pieced together from clippings out of long-since-lapsed newspapers, not a dime-novel land no one else would think to call home—
—Truth, tangible reality: a pavilion in the formerly imperial and now nationalized park open to the public (documented history, adapted to the spirit of the times) and in front of it, the adolescent in question, gray of face and too quickly grown, skinny, a poorly dressed child of the present—
Abel and Cain Page 87