My power was woefully dissipated, however. Outside, a thawing wind blew through tree branches which, still bare and transparent, were spun into the silky gray of the sky. I could hear the blackbirds panicking at twilight, drops falling, mice rustling in the dry leaves around the underbrush—all the small noises that almost startle a hunter when he listens for a sign of his prey.… I sat in my room, in front of my schoolbooks, absorbing not a word of what I read, not the simplest question. Seeking a surrogate for the missing hunting ventures with my father, I had plunged into hunting literature with all the passion of a starved imagination; soon, without quite realizing it myself, I was able to read in the original the classic French book on hunting by Gaston de Foix. But this achievement had garnered me no praise or even recognition. On the contrary: it was now considered proven that sheer wickedness rather than genuine slow-wittedness made me unwilling to fulfill my duties. This, in turn, embittered me so deeply that I gave up deciphering old French texts and did nothing but run around in the open air, with skushno in my heart.
The dynamics of such pedagogical quarrels are well known. The case histories are all too similar, and I need not bother to narrate mine in greater detail. Soon salvation came from relatives—an elderly, childless couple who put an end to the lamentations about me for the time being. They offered to take in the problem child for the summer.
Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie had been told about me early on, and about the progress, or rather problems, I was making. My parents were not without an ulterior motive: legacy-angling, I suppose, for these kin had no closer family ties than us and they were well to do. They lived in the country—more precisely, they lived as feudal lord and lady in one of those out-of-the-way hamlets with tongue-twisting names which, on maps of the European southeast, make the riverine regions along the Prut or Dniester seem like civilized territories. One should not forget, of course, the immensity of that territory, as well as the quite discordant and not always deeply rooted kind of civilization one finds there. East and West meet there unchanged in architecture, language, and customs, even in the smallest village. But I was born and bred in that part of the world, so I did not expect a walled town rich in gables and oriels, with arched sandstone arcades around the Roland’s fountain in the town-hall square. And I knew that my uncle and aunt were not to be pictured as the baron and baroness of an ivy-covered stronghold towering over such a scene.
The townlet in which my relatives lived and where they were the most important employers was a settlement in the marches of colonial territory on the European continent—it had sprung up out of windblown cultural sand, as it were, and would melt away again. Especially at night, when you approached it from a distance, its forlornness under the starry sky touched you to the quick: a handful of lights scattered over a flat-topped hill at the bend of a river, tied to the world solely by the railroad tracks, which glistened in the goat’s milk of the moonlight. The firmament was as enormous as the huge mass of the earth, against whose heavy darkness these signals of human presence asserted themselves with a bravery that could scarcely be called reasonable. The sight was poignant in a sentimental way, like certain paintings of Chagall’s. With skushno in the heart, one could experience it as devastatingly beautiful.
During the day, the town was generally stripped of such poetry. It consisted of a rustic depot and a few zigzagging streets trodden into the loam and lined with plain houses, some with gardens, as in a village, and some stark by the roadside and covered with sheet metal to eye level. Thistles and scrubby camomile ran riot along the verge of open ditches; swarms of sparrows twittered in the hazel bushes along the fences and scuffled over the straw clusters in the stable dung that lay randomly at farm gates. Wheel tracks of heavy carts, often drawn by oxen, cut deep into the dust or mire, depending on the season. At the point where the tracks ran together, in a square of chestnut trees around a thinly graveled marketplace, a building presented itself to the main road, its façade plastered with posters and announcements from the front steps all the way up to the gutters under the roof. This town hall was a stereotypical municipal administration building; its gable bore a stumpy tower from whose skylight window a flag dangled on national holidays. Three shops lurked around the square, waiting for customers; on market days, a tavern with a bakery was packed with peasants, who had driven their cartloads of pigs, calves, poultry, and vegetables in from the countryside; the apothecary’s shop announced itself by way of a hanging lamp, in the form of a glass red cross, within a stone’s throw of the street urchins.
At the end of the main road, the vanishing point of its short perspective, lay a fenced-in plot; behind boxwood boskets, neglected for decades, where dozens of roving cats napped, loomed an edifice built of delicately assembled bright-red bricks. Startling, crazy—turreted, merloned, and orieled—it had a sheet-metal roof with edges serrated like a doily and dragon-head gargoyles at each eave, and it was richly decked out with pennons, halberds, and little weather vanes. This was the “villa” of the physician Dr. Goldmann. A showpiece of architectural romanticism from the 1890s, it was proffered as a curiosity by Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie to anyone visiting for the first time. Next to the down-to-earth toy-brick box of the Armenian Catholic church and the plain domical synagogue, the only other sight worth seeing was the lovely old onion-tower church of the Orthodox monastery, set in a grove of spruces on the gentle hilltop. All these buildings stood shamelessly, as it were, under a sky that, heedless of human vanity, stretched eastward to the Kirghiz Steppe and way beyond to Tibet. On weekdays, the place was almost lifeless, if we disregard the straggling gangs of lice-ridden Jewish children who romped among the sparrows in the dusty roads.
In the summer, the sun burned mercilessly upon the bare rooftops, and the air over them quivered blurrily. In winter, biting frost took the world into its white tongs, icicles barred the small windows of the houses, and in the river meadow the trees stood as if spun out of glass. At times—mostly unexpected—something picturesque erupted: a Jewish funeral, for instance, when, like dark, bizarre flowers, male shapes in long black caftans and red fox-fur caps suddenly emerged from the ground among the skew and sunken gravestones, under the pale birches and weeping willows of the small, out-of-the-way Jewish cemetery. Some of these figures were slightly hunched, with speech as soft and hoarse as if they were about to clear their throats, and they had long earlocks and white or chestnut beards; others had gaping eyes and heads thrown back, framed by the blazing fox-fur caps, and protruding abdomens and loud voices. Or, on the anniversary of the saint who lay in an embossed silver coffin at the Orthodox church, the monastery courtyard and the grove in front of it filled with male and female peasants wearing gaudily embroidered blouses, lambskin jackets, and laced sandals, with carnations behind their ears or in their strong white teeth. The polyphonic chanting of the monks alternated with the droning of the Talmud students at the synagogue.
Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie’s house lay like a baronial manor at the edge of the village. Although the entrance could be locked, the huge wrought-iron gate was usually open and the driveway lay free under huge old acacias. A spacious courtyard, framed by lindens, separated the house from the farm buildings and stables and a small brewery that was operated along with the farm. In back you could hear the rustling of the beeches and alders, the spruces, birches, and mountain ash of a spacious park that merged imperceptibly into the open countryside.
I had known this estate since childhood, and I felt as much at home here as in my parents’ house and garden in Czernowitz, or as in the Carpathian hunting lodge where I was no longer allowed to visit. I especially loved to stay with my relatives because I had been allowed to spend vacations here, sometimes even for several months when my mother’s physicians diagnosed her as needing rest—exceptional periods, in any case, which in childhood are always taken to be festive. For my relatives, my sporadic visits were just rare and brief enough for them to enjoy me. When the problems of my upbringing arose, Uncle Hubert and Aunt So
phie were downright astonished, not without a gentle suggestion that perhaps one should take into account a certain inadequacy in the educational methods, if not in the educators themselves: “Why, that’s absolutely incredible. The boy is so sweet and merry and well behaved with us, such a sensible child, so good-natured and obedient. This sort of thing could never happen in our home.”
No wonder, then, that for me, Aunt Sophie’s exceedingly ample bosom, tightly laced and covered by dependably sportive blouses and rough tweed jackets, signified warm maternalism far more than did my mother’s elegant and poetically sentimental, unfortunately all too high-strung, untouchability. And Uncle Hubert, too, represented in my early years something incomparably more stable, more focused on concrete things, hence more calming, than my father’s increasingly gloomy, increasingly disillusioned day-dreams, as he fled deeper and deeper into his monomaniacal passion for the hunt.
Of course, Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie themselves inhabited a disunited world. The remote spot in the eastern borderland of the former Habsburg—and hence ancient Roman—Empire where they played the role of virtual cultural viceroy was located at a meeting point (or chafing point, if you will) between two civilizations. One, the Western, had not endured long enough to bless the land and people with more than an infrastructure (as it would be called today) geared to technological colonization; it had then promptly girded itself to destroy what little there was of the indigenous culture. The other, likewise at the defenseless mercy of the steppe winds from the east, opposed the Western in the spirit of a fatalistic resignation to destiny; but along with that it had, alas, a propensity for letting things go, run to seed, degenerate into slovenliness. Still, both Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie were of a piece—prototypical provincial aristocrats such as can be found in Wales or the Auvergne, in Jutland or Lombardy: by no means narrow-minded, much less uneducated, in some respects even surprisingly enlightened; yet an easygoing life in secure circumstances and natural surroundings, a life of clear-cut duties and constantly reiterated tasks, gave their thoughts and emotions, their language and conduct, a simplicity that might easily strike a casual observer as simplemindedness. The very next look would suffice—at least in the case of my relatives—to ascertain a discreet warmheartedness and a deeply humane tact, which in more sophisticated types are not necessarily the rule.
It was taken for granted that not a single word would be spoken to remind me of my duty to cram for my makeup examination. My uncle and aunt tacitly assumed I would do this of my own accord, with my own common sense—and my own ambition. When and how was left entirely up to me. For the moment at least, I was officially on vacation; I could sleep as long as I liked and loaf about wherever I wished. I had been given permission to bring my dachshund Max, and Uncle Hubert spoke with such lively and joyous anticipation of the annual quail and snipe hunt to take place later in the summer that no doubts assailed me as to whether I would be allowed to go along. There was only one thing that I could take as a gentle admonition—and it only heightened my bliss: instead of putting me near Aunt Sophie’s bedroom, as they had in earlier years, they put me into the so-called tower with Max. “You’ll be more undisturbed here,” they said, without the least suggestion of a hint.
The tower, naturally, was no tower. This was the name for makeshift quarters located over the brewery office and accessible from the garden by way of a steep ladder. During the great winter hunts, out-of-town guests were housed here, especially Uncle Hubi’s most intimate bachelor friends: sportsmen who could drink anyone under the table. For the rest of the year, the tower normally remained empty. Its three garret rooms strung out under the eaves, where a dusty smell of disuse and infrequent ventilation lingered, enjoyed a legendary reputation. There was talk of events that were better merely hinted at in the presence of children, although, of course, everyone knew these were mostly humorous exaggerations. Yet they kept popping up over and over again, if only as jocosely cited proof of Aunt Sophie’s sympathetic and comradely tolerance and her model teamwork marriage with Uncle Hubert.
I felt as if I had grown one hand taller overnight. By moving into the tower, I had gone among the men. At last I had outgrown the tormenting solicitude of my mother, the apron strings of governesses and tutors, whose extension into a collective was what the hated discipline of boarding school had been for me. Here, in the tower, free men dwelled, sovereigns who forged their own destinies, who knew the science of weapons, the last heroes and warriors. I settled, I breathed my way, into their rugged world.
In the mustiness of the attic rooms, you could still sniff cigar butts, and it did not take much imagination to picture the rest: the darkness of winter mornings with a wood fire crackling, the early bustle in the house and the courtyard, the jittery whimpering of the hounds, and the fragrance of strong coffee and toast, bacon and fried eggs. They all announced the hunting day: a long day, eagerly lived, a day of self-oblivion and pulse-throbbing suspense, with surprises at any moment, minutes of the most thrilling expectation, swiftest decision, actions as sure as in a dream … tingling alternations of triumph and disappointment, the breath flying with the second hand, the hours that paint the heavens from the clear, light-budding mother-of-pearl rosiness of the rising morn to the bloodbath of the evening…. The hunt is over, the lungs burst with stinging fresh air, the blood courses keenly through the veins, the hunters are going home, the runners of their sleighs crunching beneath them: burning cold on your cheeks and your body, snugly warm in your weatherproof gear, the night throwing its black cloth over the beautiful world, filling the woods with darkness as they loom up mightily on either side of the road, the horses steaming along, lifting their tails as they trot, the unscrewed rosettes of their anuses dropping moist, warm, smoking balls that remain between the gliding marks of the runners as nourishment for famished birds: a mysterious world of starry, spatial coldness and muck-born life—your hand has sown death today, this makes you feel alive…. A rumbling return to the festively illuminated house, the mug of grog glowing in your fingers, a well-turned compliment to the gracious femininity of the lady of the house, a nimble grab at the parlor maid’s behind when she brings hot water, delicious unwinding of the limbs in the bath, the delight of fresh white linen, of the light shoes for the evening dress suit, the grand meal, the many wines, the bag of hundreds of murdered creatures: stiff, hairy, blood-encrusted plunder that was playing at life a bare few hours ago, a flitting shadow play, lusterless eyes, outflared by torchlight, the blares of the hunting horn fading away in the cold mist of the night, then cognac in snifters, the men talking, reliving their experiences, the jokes, the teasing, the booming laughter…. All these things were waiting for me; soon they would be my life, my being.
I was all the happier because this male world quite obviously had a playful streak, belying the claim that we rather pitiably grow out of the wonder-fraught life-dreams of childhood into the earnestness of momentous tasks and duties that make adulthood somber, burdening it with responsibilities. On the contrary: I felt as if I had suffered through the ordeals of youthful boredom, tormenting restraint, and incessant vexation, finally to reach a never-never land of liberty, of equality among equals, of lighthearted fraternity. In the tower was gathered anything that had become superfluous in the house or, for reasons of good taste, had been sifted out of the house. Everything around me—from the carved-buckhorn furniture to the cheerfully gaudy crazy-quilt carpet, from the ashtray, presenting a deceptive porcelain replica of a cigarette butt and a half-spread hand of cards, to the ivory skull functioning as a letter weight on the desk—all these things parodied the usual furnishings, as in artists’ studios and student digs. The huge bearskin before the fireplace with its lifelike stuffed head, the glass case suspended over the mantel with a collection of unwontedly huge tropical butterflies, the English beer pots in the shape of seated drinkers, the cast-iron clothes tree, were likewise ironically exaggerated in their purpose. The last, like a Roman general’s trophy, was an emblem clustering togethe
r all the paraphernalia of hunting—nets, horns, shotguns, game bags, bowie knives. To me, at least, the tower seemed to express the cheerfully lived-out play instinct, these adults’ true sense of life, the true essence of their existence. This essence was only flimsily camouflaged by gestures of earnest morality—duty-laden, charity-conscious—and it was always near the edge of danger, of death.
Previously, when I had had my room next to Aunt Sophie’s boudoir, the dramatics of existence, especially childhood existence, had been presented to me in sentimental engravings that illustrated Paul et Virginie. I had often acted out the individual scenes—but it was a literary dramatics. The adventures of Paul and Virginie were events I could picture vividly in my imagination but I knew would never happen to me in real life. Here in the tower, however, the walls were covered with prints of the legendary equestrian feats of Count Sàndor (no one ever failed to mention that he was the father of Princess Pauline, daughter-in-law of Chancellor Metternich). These feats could be immediately enacted: I could go into the stable, have a horse saddled, and try to emulate the count. The jeopardy was no less mortal than in the calvary of Paul and Virginie, but it was easily sought out and thereby spiritualized into playfulness. The daredevil count would make his horse climb to the window-sill and gracefully lean upon it with one hoof while the rider calmly chatted with the beautiful damsel leaning out the casement. The possibility of his breaking his neck was as great as during a leap over a hurdle with a loosened girth, so that the horse well-nigh sprang away from under him, while the rider, keeping his perfect posture, remained in the stirrups and saddle, like Baron von Münchhausen on the flying cannonball. This image tallied perfectly with the ubiquitous souvenirs of the Great War, the shell cases and grenade splinters and heavy sabers and Uncle Hubert’s Uhlan shako, which had been shot straight through during the fighting in Galicia. (This circumstance provided his friends with matter for endless joking, although the incident had been quite serious: one half centimeter lower and the bullet would have not just singed his hair and scalp but pierced his brain.)
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 3