The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Nikolaus followed in his father’s footsteps. Although he was named for his great-grandfather, the French revolutionary thinker Nicolas Spinoza, he was interested in almost nothing but numbers from a very early age. His siblings found mathematics boring and were hard put to understand his passion. After attending business school he got a job at the Rothschild bank. Despite his respect for his father and deference to him, he knew very well that their motivations were different. His father’s imagination was not stimulated by the prospect of making money but rather by the intellectual challenge of finding novel solutions to financial problems. For Nikolaus the work at the bank meant nothing in itself; he was obsessed by the desire to become a wealthy man. His results under his father’s tutelage were outstanding, and he took over the direction of the Vienna branch while still in his twenties. He was an elegant young man and well regarded, a man about town who found plenty of willing female companions in Vienna. He had no intention of giving up his bachelor life—until he met the youngest daughter of a Bohemian baron. Beatrice was an adorably plump eighteen-year-old with a slight limp because one leg was shorter than the other, but she had a bosom that would have put the nymphs of Olympus to shame. He immediately fell head over heels in love with her. The scent of her hair and her warm skin intoxicated him almost as much as her father’s wealth. Beatrice had no objection to his proposal of marriage. With a number of slick maneuvers Nikolaus duped his siblings and got his hands on the entire fortune left by their father. With those funds, supplemented with a hefty loan from his father-in-law, he bought a majority of the shares in the Rothschilds’ Österreichische Credit-Anstalt für Handel und Gewerbe. He shortened the name to Credit-Anstalt and within ten years was the proprietor of Europe’s leading financial institution. Nikolaus was given a noble title by Kaiser Franz Josef and regularly appeared in the most elegant circles of the double monarchy. He was a guest much sought after by the leading salons of Paris, London, and Berlin. So it was that after suffering so many disasters, our family enjoyed a brief cruise on the tide of success. Our name was spoken with respect by opinion-makers and decision-makers all across Europe. We had changed teams. No longer were we respected as philosophers and writers; instead, the achievements of Jakob and Nikolaus had converted the Spinozas into high priests of the temple of Mammon. Nikolaus, king of finance, eagerly invested in enormous industrial projects, even though very few were located within the borders of the double monarchy. Boundlessly optimistic about the future, he provided generous loans to the British White Star Lines and became personally involved in the shipping enterprise’s huge project to build three new passenger liners. The Titanic, the Olympic, and the Britannic would be the most impressive mechanical constructions of the age and would surpass all rivals in luxury and extravagance. When the Titanic made its maiden voyage, Nikolaus and his wife invited all their children and several important business acquaintances along for its debut crossing of the Atlantic. Spirits were high. Toasts were made with Cristal, Czar Alexander II’s favorite champagne, from the vintage year of 1876. The dinner featured an abundance of gastronomic excess, consisted of eleven courses, and lasted four hours. The guests’ bellies were hugely weighted down after the extravagant feast, so they sank in the cold sea like stones after the collision with the iceberg sent the unsinkable ship beneath the waves without a trace. None of Nikolaus’s guests survived. His body was eventually found, much later. In his suit pocket were fifty ten-thousand-dollar bills bearing the bleakly smiling portrait of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, along with the curiously well-preserved menu card describing the eleven-course meal.

  Claudia married young. She was only nine years old when she realized that Markus Frombichler, no one else, would be her husband. They were the same age, and their birthdays were only two weeks apart. They’d been playmates even before learning to walk and classmates in school after that. Markus’s father, a peasant, lived near them on the Biederstern estate. When the Spinoza family departed for Vienna, Claudia and Markus promised each other forever to be true. Seven years later he traveled to the capital city to locate her. A young, tongue-tied, hesitant, bashful suitor appeared before Jakob. This individual, by no means a man of the world, requested the hand in marriage of his only daughter. Only a blind man could fail to distinguish how deeply in love the two of them were. Jakob advised Claudia not to marry him, however, for he couldn’t imagine that she would ever be happy out in the countryside, married into a Catholic family and living among uneducated peasants. Furthermore, such a union would mean she would have to change her religion; Jewish faith and traditions, he emphasized, were not something you could trade for something else like a pair of gloves. Her mother’s eyes filled with tears, and she murmured that no Jewish mother could imagine having someone like Markus as a son-in-law. Nikolaus predicted that his sister’s life would be one of sorrow. Andreas laughed at her and said that those dumb peasants knew nothing about the real world. Claudia countered that her suitor Markus was no spoiled rich Jewish man’s son with delicate white hands like her brother the genius; he was a man used to hard work, a man who knew and accepted his duty. And so what if his father was a peasant? “The Frombichlers are simple people,” she said. “They’ve never solved any of the world’s problems, but they’ve always lived on their little piece of land, taken care of their children, and been content with their lot in life.” And as for religion, she declared, she had never believed in any God. Jewish or Catholic, for her there was no difference. Love was more important. The family heatedly debated the issue, and of course Jakob had the last word. I don’t know how long the discussions lasted, but no amount of persuasion or argument could change Claudia’s mind. She stood firm and married Markus. They had three children. Mathäus was the oldest, a difficult and ill-behaved child. When he was ten he tried to drown one of his young sisters in the well. As punishment he was sent off to live with his father’s cousin in Linz and learn a trade. The cousin was a corporal in the Imperial and Royal Army and had no children. The man’s wife was a poison-tongued old biddy whom Mathäus instantly despised. The only reason he didn’t run away from the loveless couple was that among the other apprentices he’d made a friend, Adi. His sisters, Isidora and Hedda, married and emigrated to America. All trace of them vanished after the stock market crash of 1929. Claudia’s marriage was a happy one and she felt content with her lot as a peasant wife. The only times that she felt a pang in her heart were when she thought of her siblings. They had turned their backs on her for marrying a non-Jew, and the family had disinherited her. Markus died a natural death in 1937. Five years later Karl Schneider, Markus’s best friend and the police chief in the district, invited Claudia to his office for a review of her birth certificate, a mere formality. She didn’t come home that afternoon. Or the next day. Her life came to an end two weeks later in Auschwitz. Hitler’s cook, whom so many had to thank for their lives, was not able to save his own mother.

  Andreas was the youngest child and the family clown. His brothers and sister called him “the carp,” because his lips quivered like those of the fish when he laughed at his own stories. He had a wonderful gift as a storyteller. In spite of all his untruthfulness, playful exaggerations, and elaborate mischief, people on the estate thought it great fun to listen to his elaborately convoluted tales. Much to his family’s horror, Andreas developed a fondness for firearms and an attachment to Bertold, the man who, like his father and grandfather before him, was the caretaker of the estate’s extensive store of hunting weapons. The city that awaited the youngster upon the family’s relocation to Vienna made him absolutely miserable. He hated bustling city life and missed nature, the forest, and the hunting preserves, everything about Burgenland’s calm country idyll. Andreas dreamed of studying physics at the Polytechnic Institute, but his application was turned down. After three tries he gave up and wrangled a position as an apprentice in the Austrian Arms Manufacturing Company, the firm that produced the country’s finest hunting rifles. Firearms of that time were stil
l slow and clumsy. Andreas applied his ingenuity to improving the accuracy of the guns and shortening the time required to load the ammunition. He was aware that in the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866 to establish hegemony over Germany, the Prussians had fired seven shots from a prone position with their breech-loading Dreyse rifles in the same time it took Franz Josef’s soldiers to load their weapons in a standing position and get off a single shot. At those odds it was easy to see who would come out on top. Andreas crafted a weapon that was rapid, accurate, and resistant to humidity. He roused a certain amount of interest when he presented his weapon to the military high command, but the bureaucratic mills of the double monarchy ground slowly. The matter was evaluated and discussed, reports sent out to various other departments prompted new questions that had to be answered, time passed, and Andreas grew tired of waiting. Disappointed, he crossed the border and called on the weapons manufacturer Paul Mauser in the little German city of Oberndorf am Neckar. Mauser immediately perceived the brilliance of Andreas’s system of rotating the barrels to load the ammunition and greeted it as a great achievement. No one had ever constructed a weapon that enabled the infantryman to fire fifteen shots in as many seconds, accurate to more than a thousand yards. Andreas signed a contract with the Mauser-Werke arms factory, and the improvements he had developed were immediately incorporated into Model 89, the new repeating firearm. The legendary infantry general Lothar von Trotha, preparing for his imminent expedition to East Africa, came to visit the factory to test the new weapon. He was more than satisfied. “With that superweapon we can carry out an absolute Vernichtung of the rebellious Africans,” remarked the general. “Vernichtung,” Andreas repeated after him, and commented that he liked the sound of the word—extermination. Shortly before meeting the general he’d happened to read a novel by H. Rider Haggard. The English writer’s romantic tale, highly charged with eroticism, fascinated him with its descriptions of white men dominating women in the colonies and conquering Africa’s treasures by virtue of their cultural and technological superiority. Enchanted with the tale, he asked for von Trotha’s permission to accompany him to East Africa to study the performance of the new weapon in the field. For two years he served on the general’s expeditionary staff. As villages were plundered and burned, a third of the population was murdered, and an equal number of the natives were maimed, Andreas sat in a comfortable military tent—tormented by insect bites, true, but well attended by two most obliging dark-skinned mistresses—and improved the weapon further by devising how to recapture the smoke and gas released as the shot was fired. The general’s merciless campaign and the incalculable suffering of the Africans bothered him as little as the shrieks of the monkeys and the roaring of wild animals around his tent. He’d always found it easy to repress unpleasant thoughts. Of course he knew that all human lives have the same value and all individuals have innate rights. His parents had taught him this at an early age. But none of that was relevant to Africa, where he shared the general’s view: The blacks were not to be viewed as human beings. Weren’t their simple lives, deep ignorance of the world, and primitive beliefs and rites sufficient evidence of that? He and von Trotha bonded closely. They sat for hours by the campfire in the jungle, telling their stories. After their return from East Africa, the general introduced Andreas to his niece, whom young Spinoza later married. Andreas subsequently went with von Trotha to southwest Africa to put down the Herero people’s rebellion against the colonial powers that treated them worse than dogs. His wife waved goodbye to him in Hamburg harbor. With a premonition he wouldn’t come home again, she burst into tears as the ship disappeared from sight. The German troops were self-confident and arrogant in their expectation of an easy victory, and the general didn’t plan for adequate supplies for his troops. The Namibian heat was unbearable. Herero fighters offered unexpected resistance and cannily exploited their knowledge of the terrain. After three months in the desert the colonial force’s supplies of food and water were exhausted. More Germans died of tropical diseases and exhaustion than from the bullets of the rebel forces. Andreas was one of them. Stressed by hardships, he had a fit of fever. His legs gave way, he collapsed and couldn’t move. A few hours later he was afflicted by diarrhea and bleeding. He despaired because he knew that his condition made it impossible for him to travel with von Trotha and his troops. He had a sinking feeling that he would never get out of the Omaheke desert. The general visited him. Andreas wanted to unburden his heart to the general but was unable to speak a word. Von Trotha thought about putting a bullet into his friend’s brain to end his suffering, but he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. They left Andreas behind in a tent along with his two mistresses from the Nama tribe. That night the women slipped out of the tent and disappeared. He lived four more days, alone and abandoned in the heat, and finally died of thirst and exhaustion. Meanwhile, despite significant losses the general refused to negotiate a cease-fire with Samuel Maharero, leader of the Herero people. He wanted to write himself into the history books by confirming that Germany ruled over vast expanses of Africa. Determined that the cowardly blacks had to be exterminated, he ordered his troops to massacre defenseless old people, women, and children. Then they shot all of the male Hereros, whether they had carried arms or not. The machine guns constructed by Andreas grew so hot from gunfire that the German soldiers could scarcely touch them. Nor did the Nama people escape. The stink of blood filled the air across all of Namibia. Von Trotha was hailed in Berlin as a hero upon his return home from the first—but far from last—genocide of the twentieth century. A few months later, however, he was put on trial, according to my great-uncle, and found guilty. Not for having killed more than eighty percent of the Herero people and fifty percent of the Namas; instead, it was for physical abuse of his mistress in Windhoek, a white woman who was the niece of the German Imperial Commissioner for Southwest Africa.

  NOW, WHERE WAS I? Oh, yes—with Ariadne and Bernhard. The young couple maintained a great distance between themselves and Bernhard’s family because they feared that Jakob would try to block their path to happiness. Contacts between them and the family in Vienna were infrequent, and Bernhard refused to accept any assistance from his father, who repeatedly tried to explain to him how terrible it was to be poor. The young couple was proud of their independence, and they often spoke of their delight to be living in Budapest, far from their parents, where no one could interfere and tell them what to do with their lives. It didn’t even occur to them to complain of the poverty that was their fate in Hungary.

  Five years after their arrival in Budapest they already had three boys: Moricz, Nathan (my future grandfather), and Kalman. They also had a daughter, Hanna, the youngest. She was brought into the world by cesarean section in the seventh month, far too early, and weighed less than four and a half pounds. Ariadne was stretched out on the operating table with her life hanging by a thread because she had lost a great deal of blood, but a young doctor saved her life. The chief physician at the hospital for the destitute informed them little Hanna had a complicated heart defect, and he described a complex operation essential to keep her alive. He asked for five thousand imperial crowns for his own fee and said that he would need to hire an additional physician and two experienced nurses to assist him, all of whom would have to be paid. When the chief physician saw Bernhard’s face turn pale, he added that at a private clinic such an operation would cost at least twice as much, perhaps more. At that instant, Bernhard would say many years later when he recalled the events, he understood the meaning of money in this world. He replied that he had no funds to pay the fees, but his daughter’s life had to be saved. He asked for a few weeks to take out loans until his father could send him the money. He promised to pay; as proof of his creditworthiness he explained that his father headed the Rothschild bank in Vienna and was a wealthy man. The chief physician responded with a skeptical smile. All he had to do was glance at the young man’s worn trousers and frayed shirt collar for conclusive evidence to the contrary. H
e told Bernhard that no one in Budapest would perform such an operation on credit. He expressed his condolences and vanished in the corridors of the hospital. Bernhard was close to tears. To hide this, he fixed his gaze on the cracks in the wall caused by the humidity. Two days later he buried little Hanna.

  Ariadne remained in the hospital for ten days. She was plunged into unbearable grief. Her sorrow changed her. After she returned home she became more and more despondent and couldn’t face the trials of daily life. She became quarrelsome—certainly a character trait she’d inherited from her father—and she perpetually found fault with Bernhard. She started in on him first thing in the morning before he went to work and picked up again in the evening as soon as he came home, in spite of the fact that Bernhard was taking care of everything. He was a real worker bee. He did the shopping, prepared the food, and made sure the house was clean and tidy. When the children were sick, he got up at night and took care of them. His fervid activity may have discouraged Ariadne from taking her share of responsibility for the household. She did nothing. Not only because she’d been blind from birth; she was indolent by nature and not particularly well organized. Bernhard took charge of everything and always treated her with affection, even when she least deserved it. He knew that her life, isolated all day with three small children in that miserable little apartment, was no bed of roses. She was subject to sharply changing moods. She would call Moricz a darling one second and then denounce him as wicked and vicious the next when he asked for something more to eat. Nathan, whom she scolded for his slow wits, suddenly became a genius when he played with Kalman in the afternoon so she could take a nap. Bernhard understood why she was so jealous. It wasn’t because of any infidelity on his part, for he had no such inclination; for him, there was no one but Ariadne. She was quite simply of a jealous temperament and regarded Bernhard as her possession. Her attitude was greatly influenced, no doubt, by the fact that she had no one other than Bernhard—they had neither relatives nor friends to support them.