He spent the following days in the kitchen, passing the time by composing a bitter farewell letter to Sara with a mixture of passion and desperation. But he never sent it because he was never satisfied with it, even though he had exhausted all the eloquent possibilities of speech. His sister watched over him day and night because he had threatened to slash his wrists.
After further reflection, he decided he was not yet ready to die, for that would allow Sara to escape the consequences of her betrayal too easily. In his humiliation he went from one extreme to the other. Instead of ending his life, he decided that he would revenge himself on his love—and what better punishment could there be than immediately marrying the girl whom Sara despised more than any other on earth? Blinded by his disappointment and burning with the ardent desire to avenge himself and cause anguish to Sara, he relished the sweet prospect of revenge.
ELSA WAS TALL for a woman and as flat-chested as a man. She had an expressionless face, short-clipped black hair, bushy eyebrows that looked like two mustaches, pale skin, and bad breath. She was habitually silent and relatively timid. She found it difficult to get to know people. Her desire to be alone, obvious to everyone, may in fact have been nothing but a deep-rooted fear of change.
The truth is that she was not at all my great-uncle’s type. He knew that it was insane of him to marry her and to father her children. Elsa had so many things wrong with her, such comical features, a fairly large number of shortcomings, and an unprepossessing appearance. But he took comfort in the fact that she did not suffer from the appalling feeling of frustrated desire, and she was not in the least untrustworthy—rather the opposite, for her simplicity concealed no guile. Most important of all, she was Sara’s cousin and the two had never been able to stand each other. That fact alone decided it for him.
He made it clear to Elsa that he had erased his earlier life from his memory and now he wanted nothing but someone to love, someone who could love him. At first she thought he was making fun of her. He vowed, hand on heart, that he was in earnest. She decided to trust him, since after the war there was a general sense in the air that young people wanted to start families and new lives for themselves. Her face lit up with pleasure. Then they embraced and kissed like any couple in love. He came away with a bitter taste in his mouth, the sting of gall. But by then he had already given Elsa his pledge that he would forever take care of her.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE the wedding my great-uncle was strolling idly through Budapest’s exclusive Váci Street on the way to Café Gerbeaud to have a cup of coffee and watch the elegant folk sitting at the tables outside under large umbrellas. They looked as if they’d been taken from a novel by Kálmán Mikszáth, the great chronicler of the common folk and the upper middle class. They chattered incessantly, read newspapers, and observed the passing crowd. When a handsome young woman passed by, the men’s eyes lit up lasciviously as if they hadn’t been intimate with a woman for years. Their hungry looks said more than a thousand words. The ladies at the tables, most of them wearing elegant hats and carrying fans, also inspected the women passing by and made all sorts of spiteful comments: that one’s hips were too broad; the other’s clothes were tasteless; the third one’s legs were too thick.
Writers and journalists often gathered at the Café Gerbeaud. As a teenager my great-uncle had cherished certain illusions about writers. He read their books and was captivated by their ability to put so many thoughts and feelings on the page, often expressing the most secret thoughts and emotions of the human heart. He recognized the famous writers Géza Gárdonyi and Gyula Krúdy sitting among the café’s clientele. But as they sat there, their faces expressed the same greed, superficiality, and conceit as those of all the rest. They perked up just as much as anyone when a young woman came by, rolling her hips. It took no particular perspicacity, my great-uncle thought, to see that those men had the same illusions, the same desires, and the same dreams of elusive happiness as all the rest.
He happened to fall into conversation with a distinguished middle-aged baron who offered him a glass of white wine and asked in a friendly tone why he had such a woeful appearance. Thus prompted, my great-uncle detailed his life’s thwarted ambitions, describing how his beloved had betrayed him while he was a prisoner. He declared how much he missed her. He explained that hardest of all for him was to be deprived of the scent of her, not to hear her voice, not to be able to share his dreams with her. He felt sorry for himself and was close to tears.
“Who can relieve the agony in a young man’s heart when he has been afflicted by the problems of love? An older, experienced man can do so. An older, experienced man with sharp eyes knows that a young man needs protection, that every life depends on strength and security,” the baron assured him.
With that, the baron spontaneously offered a great deal of interesting information in an attempt to lighten the mood. He stemmed from a well-known family of aristocrats and was thoroughly informed about prominent writers and politicians, their doings and activities, their private lives and even their innermost desires. He lowered his voice and said that Gyula Krúdy, sitting there just two tables away, would rather fight duels than write books. Krúdy had always gotten sexually excited in the company of younger women and enjoyed going to bed with two women at the same time—preferably domestic servants, as his own mother had been. The baron also recounted anecdotes about traditions, hunting, morality, and the toppled communist leaders—of whom he had little good to relate. He had an exquisite way of expressing himself; his words were crafted with the silkiest, smoothest turns of the language. He returned again and again to the theme that there was no way for a young man to get ahead all alone in Budapest, that without good connections and a patron one could achieve nothing, that one absolutely had to belong to the right circle and know the right persons of power and influence.
“Might is the same as right here in Hungary,” he emphasized. “If one is of severely limited economic means it is immeasurably useful to have a wealthy protector with good contacts. Nothing can smooth an assiduous young man’s way into the sacred precincts of power more effectively than a sponsor and protector.”
The baron carefully caressed my great-uncle on the inside of his thigh. He offered to use his influence to promote his young friend’s career if they established a more intimate relationship. The furtive touch of the baron’s fingers came as a shock; it was disquieting and humiliating. My great-uncle did not know what to do. Should he get up and leave? Or should he stay there and pretend not to care?
He looked directly at the baron and summoned all his strength and resolution. With feigned bravado he said loudly, “Keep your manicured fingers off my leg! You’re nothing but a swine.” He rose abruptly and left.
After that he wandered aimlessly through the inner city for several hours, some of that time in drizzling rain. It seemed to him that he had lost his foothold, that his life was crushed and empty. An inner voice told him that he had to close the books on the past. It wasn’t the future that was dark; instead, it was the past. It is not possible, the voice said, for a man scarcely twenty years of age to feel that his unhappy love life makes him less alive than the corpses in the crevices of the Doberdòs mountains.
He searched for something he could believe in. Phrenology. That might offer him a refuge from his grief. But he would have to move to Vienna. He thought that destiny must have arranged his encounter with the baron who had touched him so lustfully, for the incident gave him a strong distaste for life in the decadence of Budapest.
That night he came to the decision to abandon his native city.
IT WAS NO easy matter to persuade Elsa to move to Vienna. She felt anxious and had no desire to leave the home where she had lived all her life or her mother and grandmother and four siblings, as well as Aunt Miriam and her daughter, Sara. My great-uncle explained calmly to her without becoming in the least emotional that he would never be able to feel comfortable in that tiny apartment, a room and a half measuring only a bit more than three
hundred square feet in all, constantly under the vigilance of seven other people.
It wasn’t difficult to see what my great-uncle feared most of all, even though he spared Elsa the details. The mere thought of meeting Sara one day and having to see her swelling belly struck him with deep apprehension. Granted, she and her husband had established a home in a distant working-class neighborhood, but he foresaw that eventually she would come to visit her mother in the apartment.
UNEXPECTEDLY, ELSA’S MOTHER, Luiza, supported the idea. She saw her daughter’s anguish and made a mental count of all the girls her age who were already married. Many were mothers now, and some had several children. Didn’t Elsa want to get married?
“You’ll turn out to be an ugly old spinster, my dear, if you’re afraid to move away from home,” she said disapprovingly. “No man wants to get me and grandmother and Aunt Miriam as your dowry or to live in this hovel with all of us old women.”
Luiza didn’t limit herself to words; she took direct action. She collected all of her daughter’s possessions, packed them in a little valise, and placed it next to the front door. Then she offered the following advice: “There is only one way to make sure that a man stays home, and that’s with the drug of sex. Franci is like every other man in the world; he has simple needs. His senses have to be tickled and his body needs caresses; he has to be dealt with like a big child. Give him confirmation of his manhood. If you’re clever and you flatter him, you can keep him from dipping his wick in some other woman’s grotto.”
It was a hasty departure and they set out only a few minutes later. The pair of newlyweds, with their little valise in hand, took the tram to the railway station on the west of the city to start the trip to Vienna. Pleased and expectant, my great-uncle heard the train wheels rattle across the railway bridge over the Danube and saw Budapest disappear behind them toward the horizon. A couple of hours later he sensed the locomotive slowing down, and through the grimy windows of the second-class carriage he could make out the distant shape of his new hometown.
THE COUPLE TOOK a one-room apartment in one of the most run-down sectors of the working-class neighborhood of Meidling. They furnished the apartment as best they could. Once everything was in place, my great-uncle sat down at the kitchen table and heaved a great sigh. He could scarcely believe his eyes. So this was his home. He looked at his hand, adorned now with a ring. He was married and had a wife—granted, not the woman he loved, but anyhow—and now he was in Vienna. At least he had the possibility of pursuing one of his two ambitions. He told himself that he could alleviate the pangs of his lost love by studying phrenology with the renowned Tancred Hauswolff. It was a wholly new field of knowledge that demonstrated conclusively that intellect, instinct, and perceptions are attributes linked to the cortex of the brain, and they can be touched, inspected, and measured.
AS SOON as he could, my great-uncle called on Tancred Hauswolff. With pounding heart and trembling hand he rang the bell. The servant, a bulky woman in early middle age, opened the door to him. She stared vacantly in front of her and told him to remove his shoes immediately because she didn’t want any marks on the parquet floor. She exuded authority and power. My great-uncle politely bent over in reluctant acknowledgment of his submission and obeyed her injunction. He stiffened in embarrassment when he discovered that the big toe of his left foot was peeking out of a gaping hole in his sock.
The servant shook her head resignedly and showed him into the famous psychoanalyst’s reception area, a luxurious room packed with furniture upholstered in dark leather and dimly lit aquariums of colorful fish. On the walls hung erotic etchings and a huge map of the southern Austrian province of Kärnten. Hauswolff, a man with pale slicked-back hair and thick spectacles, sat behind an enormous desk and accorded him a chilly look.
“But you are a Jew, young man. Don’t attempt to hide the fact. I know Jews. I have studied them for decades. I can see from the shape of your head and the dimensions of your cranium that you are a Jew. I’m a learned man, a scientist. I can tell with a glance, even from a distance, that you’re a Jew.”
My great-uncle was disconcerted, but he knew that this opportunity would never present itself again. He smiled amiably and quickly spoke of his zeal to become Hauswolff’s pupil. The psychoanalyst listened with a distracted air but noted his visitor’s evident youthful energy, passion, striking intellect, and personal warmth. But no matter how attractive the young man was, the doctor could not overlook the fact that he was a Jew.
“Can you pay for your studies? Do you have any money?” asked Hauswolff.
“About five hundred shillings.”
“Don’t joke with me! My patients pay me three times as much for a half-hour consultation. You Jews are so avaricious. You know, young man, the love of you Jews for money is infantile. It all goes back to the child playing with his own excrement, his fascination with shit.” He stressed the word: “Scheiss.”
Hauswolff lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and got up from his desk. He turned his back to his visitor and looked through the open window at the summer sky. Only then did my great-uncle notice how short the famous psychoanalyst was. The man was high strung, about forty years old, tiny, pot-bellied, and well-dressed. He sported a black bow tie.
“Nevertheless, you are intelligent,” commented Hauswolff, “and endowed with a rich imagination. And in any case, you Jews are brilliant teachers. I studied for a time under the personal tutelage of Freud. Do you recognize the name? I was deeply impressed by his intelligence. But for him everything came down to sexuality, to one or another form of sexual guilt. Such notions are pure perversion. As if only sexual neuroses stimulated the mysterious forces of the unconscious! Such Jewish filth is disgusting to an Aryan mentality. The Jewish school of psychoanalysis is absolutely unacceptable. Psychoanalysis should be an Aryan science. We men of science have responsibilities. For that reason I can’t take just anyone as my pupil. I will take three days to think it over.”
Then, still standing at the window, Hauswolff went off on a long, involved lecture on the psyche, using jargon that my great-uncle could hardly follow and commenting on the analysis of irregularities of the cranium to evaluate human consciousness. He spoke with impressive passion in a torrent of words.
When my great-uncle later came back to learn whether Hauswolff would accept him as a pupil, a small crowd stood outside the house. An extremely fat neighbor woman told anyone who would listen that the police had come to arrest the renowned psychoanalyst because he’d given in to his own strong sexual urgings. He’d been caressing his female patients’ bosoms more often than their skulls.
One day he was caught with his hands in a patient’s underwear. Rachel Abrahamowicz, daughter of the wealthy Jewish furrier, was an extremely beautiful twenty-year-old who suffered from hysteria and had suicidal impulses. She proved not to be an ideal subject for hypnosis. She relaxed completely on the doctor’s sofa but felt no desire to enter a trance. Hauswolff thought that the young woman was sleeping deeply, so he slipped his hand under her skirt and began to stroke her between the legs. Rachel gave him a stinging slap on the left cheek. She immediately threw a hysterical fit and ran home in tears to her father, a close friend of the chief of police.
The scandal shook Viennese society. For several days the newspapers seemed to write of nothing else. Insinuations and unconfirmed accusations filled column after column. Sensationalist reporters dug up every tiny detail of Hauswolff’s life and character. He was accused of raping several women under hypnosis. Someone claimed that he had forced a rich baroness to turn over her diamonds to him for safekeeping; he was alleged to have sold them to a jeweler in Kohlmarkt. It turned out that he had never completed his studies or passed any academic exam. His certificates and diplomas were crude forgeries. Previously respectful colleagues washed their hands of him. Freud commented that he had always known that Tancred Hauswolff was a money-grubbing charlatan obsessed with seducing upper-class women. The phrenologist’s charade recalled the f
able of the emperor’s new clothes.
On the morning set for the court hearing, Hauswolff was discovered dead in his cell. He had taken the contents of a cyanide capsule hidden in his spectacle case.
MY GREAT-UNCLE had little success in his search for work, since he was entirely uneducated and had no particular skills. One disappointment followed another. Every time, a job prospect eventually went to someone else. Finally he had no choice but to work as a porter in the railway station. The work was hard and the unusually cold winter made it even more strenuous. In that Vienna winter, during a prolonged period of biting cold, pigeons and sparrows froze to death and fell out of the trees. My great-uncle was exhausted by the time spring arrived. He lost his job because severe back pains kept him at home in bed.
Their lack of money and shabby existence cast him into ever deeper gloom. He could feel the future slipping away from him. Everything reminded him of his melancholy childhood, and those dismal memories just made the problem with his back even worse. He saw himself as a failure locked in a narrow prison cell, and he yearned for Sara. Each night he mused miserably over what she and her love had meant to him, and he wept without ceasing. Dark circles appeared under his eyes. Watching him furtively, Elsa saw him becoming more despondent with every passing day.
The Elixir of Immortality Page 17