The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  SHORTLY AFTER the death of my mother I traveled to the United States. While I was changing planes in Chicago I happened to catch sight of an article in the city’s leading newspaper, The Morning Star:

  Inside a great mountain in the Rockies, east of Salt Lake City, Utah, there exists one of the most unusual collections of archives in our nation. The files are stored underground in tunnels cut into the mountain and connected by a labyrinth of corridors. The entrances are protected with steel doors and advanced security measures. Access to the hundreds of thousands of microfilms stored there is strictly limited. The temperature in the underground vaults is always 57 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity is controlled to between 40 and 50 percent. The air pumped in through the ventilation system is filtered to prevent chemical contamination of the vaults.

  Guarded within the mountain and available only to the initiated is a stock of information that could fill 90 million books of 300 pages each. This, however, is no secret military vault. Found here are the names of 18 billion people, living and dead, carefully recorded on 1.3 million rolls of microfilm purchased by the Genealogical Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a part of the Mormon Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.

  The names in that enormous archive have been collected from throughout the world, lifted from every imaginable registry. The work continues today. The goal of this enormous undertaking is to make a record on microfilm of all of humanity, living and dead.

  Genealogy is an important part of the Mormon religion. Thanks to that archive, every Mormon can examine his past, ascend his family tree, and have his ancestors baptized posthumously into the faith of the church.

  The article awakened my curiosity. I wrote to the Mormon Church and asked for a report from their archives. I enclosed a list of the names of my closest family members. One sunny day in early April almost three months after sending my letter, I received a notice to pick up a package at the post office. I scrutinized the U.S. stamps and studied the postmark, then slowly opened the package. Remain calm, I thought to myself. Be patient. Without patience one achieves nothing of importance. When I had finally removed the cord and carefully undone all the layers of wrapping paper, I found to my disappointment that instead of a summary of information about my relatives, it contained about nine pounds of printed material about the Genealogical Library. I paged through the brochures and realized that the Mormon faith must have adherents throughout the world studying graveyards and digging into people’s life histories—with great discretion, of course—so as to provide information to Salt Lake City.

  At the very bottom of the package I found a letter in response to my inquiry, along with a white envelope. The letter was signed by one of the supervisors of the archive, who regretted that only one of the names in my inquiry had been located in the registry.

  I slit open the white envelope. The first thing that met my eyes was the title, printed in bold: FRANZ SCHARF, ALSO KNOWN AS FERNANDO.

  I scanned the following lines. Here a whole life was summarized, some twenty-five thousand days and nights, in just fewer than ten closely written sheets of paper. Nothing was missing, nothing of any significance had been omitted, and every event in my great-uncle’s life and background was recorded. Most striking of all was the style of it—the dense style of a reference work with occasional phrases that came close to verse.

  I had to smile when I came to the end of the document. It read: Budapest, October 27, 1962.

  My great-uncle had no income other than his meager pension. His financial circumstances couldn’t have been any worse. But he never spoke of his troubles to anyone. Other than to my grandmother, that is. He owed her several thousand forints. When it came to money, Grandmother never scolded him for being unreliable. He always smiled at her with a little twinkle every month and explained that he was absolutely sure that before too long he would be receiving several hundred dollars from the United States. That was an enormous amount of money for that time. Then he asked to borrow fifty forints. She always peered at him sharply, as if to make sure that he had not lost too much weight since his last visit. That done, she gave him the money, because she suspected he hadn’t had anything to eat that day.

  We children thought our great-uncle was stingy because he never brought us any presents, not even for our birthdays. But from time to time he promised to grant our wishes to go to the pastry shop—as soon as he received payment for his writing.

  Shortly before Christmas of 1962 he arrived with gifts for all of us. Christmas holidays had just begun. Sasha and I raced madly around the house, simply because we had no idea what to do with our time off. So I was delighted with the Jules Verne novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that my great-uncle presented to me. But we were most pleased of all with the delicate, fragrant little pastries that he had brought with him from Café Gerbeaud, the finest konditorei in Budapest. Never before had we consumed such expensive delicacies. Out of our heads with excitement, we wolfed down the pastries. The taste of those sweets still lingers on the tip of my tongue.

  Grandmother seemed deeply concerned. She lowered her voice to a piercing whisper and asked anxiously where Fernando had gotten the money for them.

  “America,” he replied. “Now I’m a wealthy man. Now I can pay back all the money you loaned to me. I received five hundred dollars. It’s from the Mormons. I sold them my life story.”

  IF ONE CAN BELIEVE the Mormon archives, my great-uncle’s paternal grandfather, Andrej Scharf, was born in 1839 in the city of Smolensk, situated in western Russia on the Dnieper River. His father was a rabbi, a deeply pious man with a grizzled beard and dark earlocks. His mother was the daughter of a rabbi in Vitebsk. The family lived in one of the city’s poor neighborhoods where his father had set up a rabbinic court. People in Smolensk came to him for his good advice and for his decisions on arguments about the law of the Torah. He conducted marriages and granted divorces. Impoverished Jews came to him to pour out their woes. The rabbi led a busy life and had received few blessings.

  Andrej was ten years old when one day a neighbor told him of a commotion in Moscow. The streets had been full of revolutionaries demanding bread for the people. They dreamed of a state where no one was rich or poor. The revolutionaries wanted to do away with the czar. The police had attacked the demonstrators with drawn sabers. Someone had thrown a homemade bomb that killed two policemen. Fifty troublemakers had been arrested. Many were still in prison. A number of them were Jews.

  The rabbi shook his head in concern and declared that because the boy was present, he didn’t want to hear such things discussed. But Andrej’s curiosity had been aroused. He dreamed of becoming a revolutionary.

  One day—he was by then in his twenties—he happened to pass by a coal mine outside Smolensk, where he saw a foreman in a dirty uniform thrashing an eight-year-old with a whip because the boy hadn’t been able to hold out for the full fifteen-hour workday. Andrej couldn’t comprehend such heartlessness, let alone put it out of his mind. He sat deep in thought for three days. His dark musings led him to the conclusion that the man who had inflicted that cruel punishment was not a mere sadist or pervert but was in fact a typical agent of an unjust and thoroughly evil social system. He decided that he would support the effort to improve the lot of the vulnerable. He especially wanted to create better conditions for the peasant children who worked in the mine.

  He attended a number of meetings of revolutionaries where men and, to his surprise, even young women carried on lively discussions and schemed about violent ways to change the social and political system in Russia. Andrej spoke up only once: He suggested to his comrades that they should offer an attractive vision of life after the revolution. Unfortunately, a police spy was in the hall and denounced him; he was arrested that same night. Two days later he was sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor for conspiring to overthrow the government and sent to Magadan in eastern Siberia.

  There he met Mikhail Bakunin. The father of anarchism, whose
mere name made empires quake in their boots, had a nasal voice and a pleasing smile even though he had lost all of his teeth to scurvy. He looked deep into Andrej’s eyes and declared that when the burning resentment of the people turned into revolutionary fervor and the old order was overthrown, a new society without government would flourish in freedom and justice. Bakunin stressed the elements of struggle and conflict when he spoke of revolution. He envisioned a sort of collective dictatorship. Everything would be based upon voluntary participation, and men would be freed from all requirements to bear society’s yoke and uphold order. He gave the young man one of the books he had written.

  Rapt in his reading, Andrej forgot the ice-cold winter around him. When he put the book down, he knew that he wanted to follow Bakunin. He imagined himself playing an important future role as an agitator kindling the revolutionary fervor of the masses. Most of all he was fascinated by Bakunin’s opinion that men and women had exactly the same rights to enter freely into sexual unions and then to end them if their ardor cooled.

  Two years later, in June, when the snow had melted and temperatures remained above freezing, they escaped from the prison camp, together and on foot. They managed to elude their pursuers and survived in the desolate land on berries and roots. Before long they went different ways. Bakunin escaped east toward Japan and then on to the United States. Andrej made his way west and after many wrong turnings, in early February 1861 he arrived in Budapest on a damp morning gray with mist.

  ANDREJ NEVER CONFIDED to anyone the real reason that he left Russia, not even to his children or his closest friends. To the end of his days he refused to discuss his past, always maintaining, “I can never reveal it. Those memories are so far away now, and besides, no one would believe me.”

  Grandmother let on that she knew his secret. Once when she was exasperated with Fernando, she blurted it right out: “Old man Scharf and his friends robbed a stagecoach carrying valuables from Sevastopol and shot the coachman dead. That’s why he had to run away from Russia. Everyone in Budapest knows. When he was on his deathbed he confessed it to his mistress.”

  WHEN ANDREJ got to Hungary, carrying no more than his little bundle, he was only twenty-two years old. But his two years under the mentorship of Bakunin were not lost time. He had alertly inquisitive dark eyes, as overtly curious as those of a gossipy old woman. He knew no one in Budapest, but in his pocket he had a scrap of paper with the name of a Hungarian—a certain Imre Herskovics—who had by chance gotten to know Bakunin while visiting a Marienbad spa and had been enthused not only by the man but also by his notions of overturning the social order.

  Herskovics was drawn to the company of unusual and creative individuals. The idea of anarchism gave that severely gout-ridden Hungarian a feeling of exhilaration, and once back in his native Budapest he wanted with all his heart to foster a revolution. He had no intention of tearing down society, however; he simply wanted to organize dramatic events. He ran a theater in a remote suburb, assisted by a spinster daughter in her thirties.

  Herskovics was at his desk scribbling with a goose-feather pen when the young Russian turned up at his office. Andrej cleared his throat and pronounced the only Hungarian expression he knew—“Jó napot” (“Good day”)—but the portly theater owner didn’t reply. Andrej deposited his bundle on the floor and spoke again, this time louder. With his hands in his pockets he leaned nonchalantly against the doorframe and spoke in vaguely admiring terms of Herskovics, whom he had never met before, and told him that Bakunin had asked for his help. Herskovics, not understanding a word of Russian, was thunderstruck—not because the sight of a needy young man was anything remarkable but because of the magic sound of Bakunin’s name. The theater owner inspected his visitor. Russians had a confirmed reputation for eccentric behavior and Andrej appeared to be no exception. Herskovics found it entertaining to watch him talk. He knew that theatrical talent could turn up in the most unusual guises, and so he immediately offered Andrej a role as an extra, part of the crowd in an upcoming production.

  ———

  BY THE TIME three months had passed, Andrej had married Herskovics’s daughter and had been given the leading role in a new play, even though his Hungarian was still almost nonexistent. His wife was expecting a child. She was a woman capable of doing anything at all in her own unassuming fashion—except for finding a way to make her husband happy.

  Masculinity’s eternal impatience and longing for freedom was alive and well in Andrej. Already the day after the wedding he took a mistress to satisfy his lusts. Women would melt in his arms as he whispered adoring words in a language that seemed to them the speech of the angels. He was always pursuing several passionate affairs simultaneously, so he got himself into any number of complications. The more he lost himself in these shamelessly voluptuous experiences, the faster his political mentor faded from his thoughts.

  “Life is short,” he would say. “And Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin’s work is extremely long.”

  ONE DAY as Andrej was in the process of ejaculating into the mouth of a young pupil at the theater, he was caught in the act. His wife’s faith in him received its first setback. Soon afterward it became obvious that he had impregnated three of the company’s actresses. The upshot of this was that when he appeared for his first leading role, the audience greeted him with screams of laughter because his face bore long red marks where his wife had clawed his tender skin in an attack of hysterical jealousy. Andrej feared her violent fingers more than any Russian policeman. But they couldn’t keep him away from new illicit adventures for very long.

  Andrej and his wife had pledged to love each other forever. But the marriage ended after only a year, for she had gotten fed up with all the sacred promises and sworn vows he proved incapable of keeping.

  An ill-humored Herskovics threw his son-in-law out of the theater. Andrej tried his luck at the privately owned National Theater, but because he still spoke little Hungarian, no director was willing to give him work. For a young man with a love of the stage, the situation was extremely discouraging. So he found an alternative approach: As little troubled as ever by feelings of conscience, he seduced the theater-owner’s wife, a middle-aged woman of maternal sternness who kept her husband on a short leash. It wasn’t long before Andrej was the artistic director, constantly surrounded by a court of servile directors and willing actresses.

  ANDREJ HAD SO MANY children with so many women that he had to use all the fingers of both hands to count them. Only one of them was not illegitimate: Fernando’s father, Ervin.

  Ervin spent his childhood at the theater owned by his maternal grandfather and developed a strong passion for the acting profession. When he was nineteen he was offered the title role in Hamlet at the National Theater. Everyone knew—just as Ervin did—that his father was behind the offer. Theater life in Budapest was thick with nepotism and mutual admiration. That made no difference; he was overjoyed. His father dropped in during a rehearsal, stood there for five minutes, and offered a number of eloquent observations on the arts of direction and acting. But no matter how generous his father’s advice may have been, Ervin’s nerves were not up to criticism. He was never able to find the right tone to bring to life the anguish of the dream-haunted Danish prince. Audiences stayed away, and the critics were merciless. One reviewer wrote: “One would have to be the father of young Scharf to see anything sublime in the way Hamlet tangles himself up in his monologues like a cat with a ball of yarn.” As a result, it was suggested to Ervin, none too subtly, that despite his very tender age he should be looking for a future somewhere other than on the stage. He was disappointed and angry. He raged. He wept. His fiasco proved to him that he would always be a failure in the eyes of his father.

  “Having the last name of Scharf is not enough,” Andrej commented condescendingly. “One must also have some small measure of talent. Otherwise, the performance is simply tedious. Try to take it like a man.”

  But Erwin was not yet a man; he was an inexperienced boy.
He struggled to shake off the criticism, especially the harsh words of his father. He’d hoped for some comfort or, at the very least, some encouragement. For example, his father could have offered as advice his favorite expression, “Never give up—always try, try again.”

  Ervin’s soul seemed to be one great throbbing wound. He secretly turned to drink. Alcohol did nothing to improve his career prospects. The leading theaters refused to hire him. In Budapest both young and old actors vied shamelessly with one another, entreating theater owners to cast them in attractive roles. They vaunted their own merits and fawned on the directors. But Ervin couldn’t bring himself to kneel at someone’s feet and beg to be cast. He became tiresome even for Andrej, who took to avoiding him.

  ———

  ERVIN AND HIS WIFE, Annuskya, had a daughter and five sons. The ever-famished children witnessed their father’s steady decline. He took out life’s difficulties and the constant frustration of his ambitions by abusing his family. Only his daughter was spared from his tyrannical outbursts. The sons later remembered their childhood as a series of nightmares that stubbornly returned night after night.

  ANNUSKYA RADIATED motherly concern. She was generous, considerate, and tender; everyone in the family depended upon her. She often sang and the children listened in awe to the beauty of her simple songs. She supported the family with her earnings as a laundress and drew her strength from the piety of her orthodox Jewish faith. Hard work, endless quarrels, pretense, and violence overshadowed her existence. She faded, dried up, and wore out before her time. One late evening after Ervin had pummeled her and violently kicked her, she cried out to God and shrieked that she’d had enough. She could not endure this life any longer. She threw herself out the window.