Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (20 page)

She was excited by the fashionable atmosphere around us. “Look over there,” she said, “but don't be obvious about it. Isn't that a chic couple?”

I looked: it was young Garabetian in a white suit, razor-sharp shoulders, fist-sized knot in his tie, reflections in his Valentino hair, and accompanied by one of his enviably well designed high-class whores. He glanced over and smiled ironically as he murmured a few words to his lady, who burst out laughing; then he greeted me with a sarcastically exaggerated bow.

“Do you know him?” my black-and-white polka-dotted widow asked respectfully. I knew not only him but also the two men sitting a few tables farther on and watching us with equally great interest. It was the chief clerk and a department head from Aphrodite, with their Sudeten German spouses.

I had no desire to spoil her evening, but it was impossible for me to conceal my bad mood. While she chatted away, I poked around in my food, drinking too much wine too quickly and vehemently. Then she likewise fell silent. At first, the silence—hers timidly guilt-ridden, mine defiantly pouting—hung over us like a cloud that might drift past. But it expanded, entered us icily, eventually took full control; neither of us could break it. We left the restaurant as though we had just put a wreath on the grave of our love.

I drove her home in my Model T. When I saw her to her door, she unlocked it and went inside without a word but leaving the door open behind her. It would have meant breaking off totally if I had not followed her. For an instant, I wondered if I should let things reach that pass. But in defiance of my friend Garabetian's foppish son with his floozies, and of the clerks from Aphrodite and their fat-assed wives, I followed her into her house.

Inside, she received me in despair. “Forgive me, baby! I'll do anything you tell me to. From now on, we'll only go to places you like. Honestly, baby, I swear to you. But please, please, be nice again!”

She was more ecstatic than ever in my arms, and I caught myself observing her with almost scientific attention. I was on the alert for the change in her face, the increasing rapture, in which the boring mask of her ancestral tragedy dissolved to make room for the slight and mysterious smile of the
Inconnue de la Seine
, until passion broke open the lips and an eruption of happiness inundated her features. She drew out this moment now, keeping her eyes shut and letting her smile drift, filled with the inner happiness of the blind. And I had the crazy flash that if she opened her eyes, this blessed, soulful smile might take on a cunning aspect, like the Mona Lisa's, which, after all, were she to shut her eyes, would simply be a smile of voluptuous pleasure. A pang of wild jealousy cut through me at the thought of how basically questionable this ennoblement of a woman's face was, how little really I had to do with it, and how much more convincing that ennoblement must have been when my Andalusian was spellbound by her husband's incredible erotic aura. That same instant, I felt, to my horror, that I was ejaculating—before the point that was the rule in our well-coordinated lovemaking, that is, before her face turned to its ultimate and most beautiful state.

If she was disappointed, she tried to conceal it. She showered me with tenderness. “Don't worry, baby, it was beautiful for me too, really; it makes me happy because it shows that you love me despite everything.”

I was uncertain how to interpret this “despite everything.” I linked it, insanely enough, to my delusion that I had seen through to the trivial and selfish character of her ecstasies, and I said to myself, If you only knew…. Most likely I could not have supplied this seemingly stunning evidence of my love had I not been assisted by the image of her pleasure in her husband's arms ….

With a sudden insight into what I was doing and thinking, into the kind of home movie I was screening for myself, and how I imagined I was thereby regulating my feelings and bringing them to climaxes I could not otherwise reach, a choking horror at myself overwhelmed me. I should have felt a still greater horror at the thought of our abysmal solitudes. Cosmic spaces separated us while we believed we loved each other.

I pretended to be asleep when she went on calming me, stroking me, and whispering, “My little boy! My darling! My baby!” I wished she would stop calling me “baby.”

I had never gone along with her wish that I spend the night and wake up in her arms the next morning. Nor had I lost my fear of this typically Jewish luxury marriage bed with its profusion of down pillows in the Art Deco bedroom: it was a trap. Even the petit bourgeois house, in a district that was actually a ghetto, got on my nerves. It could just as easily have been a house in some shtetl under the evening sky toward Galicia. It had too much Chagallian poetry. In fact, I had avoided getting established in that house, preferring brief, passionate sex on the Biedermeier sofa in the shop's back room where we had first embraced. The fact that I had to be at the stables by five
A.M
. in order to get a mount had always been an effective excuse. This time, I did not even bother with my excuse. I left with no explanation after pretending to awake from my brief slumber.

But she kept her promise. The next time we went out to dine, we did it in
my
style.

I had always planned to take her to one of the countless little pubs at the outermost edge of Bucharest. This was where the market laborers ate their lunch and Gypsies fiddled in the evenings—not like the symphony-sized bands of operetta Gypsies who played in the supposedly chic city restaurants, but the genuine bands that you saw in the country: three or four men with a fiddle, a double bass, and shoulder-slung cymbals. And here we would not run into young Garabetian with his floozies or the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon executives of Aphrodite and their wives.

Actually, I picked a tavern that old Garabetian had recommended. “It's a decent place,” he had said. “I know the owner; he buys his garlic and peppers from me and he gets his meat from the butcher across the street. I've watched him there. In his place, you eat more simply than in the Capşa, but it's more nourishing and only one tenth the price.”

The tavern, not much more than a whitewashed, sheet-metal-covered clay hut with an open hearth in the huge main room and a charcoal grill for roasting meat in front of the door, was located way beyond the horse market and the factory grounds of the Aphrodite Company. It stood at the end of Shossea Moşilor, which abandoned its suburban character here and turned into one of the poplar-lined exit roads from Bucharest, fading into the vast, melancholy countryside. The customers ate outdoors at rough wooden tables and benches, under the towering foliage of gigantic old elms where orioles dwelled. From under the broad awning, quail in wooden cages were calling; they were long since accustomed to adjusting their ringing
pitt-palak
to the rhythm of the Gypsy fiddles. From the distant fields in the huge plain, their free brothers and sisters answered in amazement.

Since the tables under the awning were all densely crowded, we had to seat ourselves under the elms, even though I knew she found it unpleasant dining so close to the road, where a rattling truck left a five-mile wake of dust, a good portion of which settled upon us and our food. But I particularly enjoyed the view of the countryside from here. I relished the evening mood. Behind us the city pinned lights all over itself. Before us lay the plain, vaporizing in the rosy light of the waning day. In the haze, growing denser on the horizon, myriad frogs rang their changes in countless swampy ponds. Every sound—the frog croaks, the distant calling of the wild quail, the barking of a dog far, far away, the seemingly endless clatter of a farmer's wagon somewhere out there—every sound tried in vain to measure the immensity of the earth under the darkening sky. The tavernkeeper placed storm lamps on the tables.

I could hope only very timidly that my beloved would understand what I was feeling in this atmosphere. It would have been pointless to tell her how profoundly I felt the suspense in this encounter of two great solitudes—the encounter of two bleaknesses consuming one another: here the wasteland of the city with its encroaching horrors, its progress, which was decay, the mange of rust and mortar; and there the relentlessly misanthropic vastness and power of nature, against which no sky-storming walls, no denser and denser throngs of lost people, could grant permanent protection ….

My Jewess must have known this forlornness in the enormity of nature from her native shtetl. She was certainly familiar with the threat from the evening sky, its picture-postcard kitsch camouflaging all its disastrous forebodings. The gentle breeze that the sky sent us was sheer mockery; I quite understood how a woman from Galicia or Bessarabia might want to choose the city rather than sit in contemplation of that tragic beauty.

No, I could not ask her to understand why I preferred merciless nature, much less what pleasure I felt here, at the sight of the titanic struggle between the two wastelands. That view of beauty could only have inspired a painter of battles, not a defenseless Jewish widow who hid behind her mascara and her kitsch furniture. I tended to persuade myself that I was about to say farewell to my youth and its anacreontic poetry, and to exchange them for a more mature existence with a more refined poetic sensibility. But a secret unease warned me against the danger of delusion. I saw myself as old in my youth—at least a century older than this Jewish woman, whose race, despite two millennia of suffering, maintained unshakable faith in man's destiny as the child of God, while I looked down scientifically from cosmic distances at the planet and at myself and the likes of me, microscopic earthworms, tiny particles of an infestation that was soon to be swept away.

It annoyed me that she made no effort to conceal her discomfort. I imagined introducing her here to an audience of friends. I knew many of the people (almost all men) at the surrounding tables at least by sight: artisans and small tradesfolk from the area around the Aphrodite plant: the coal drayman, for instance, some of the horse dealers from the Thursday market, and the types that sat around in taverns there or watched the farces of Karaghios staged by itinerant comedians. I had not failed to notice the attention aroused by our entrance, for my lady friend's succulent ripeness had been generally acknowledged. In one of the faces turning to us, I had recognized Mr. Garabetian—the father, of course. I wanted to wave to him, but another head interposed itself, and I could not see him. We were sitting at an unfavorable angle, but still, I told myself, he was bound to see us, and I wanted her to make a good impression on him. “A decent business,” I thought I could hear him say. “An attractive, mature woman and obviously not penniless. No floozy like the sort my boy runs around with.”

But she was not relaxed. Now, granted, the bench was not exactly well carpentered or even particularly clean, but she perched on its edge as if that alone were already too great a concession to an environment which in no way matched her social standing and demands. The food, while primitive, was hearty and tasty, but she barely touched it, although she usually ate with gusto. Very delicately nauseated, she poked around in her salad to remove a bug that had dropped out of the elm tree; she barely sipped the wine; her responses to my—more and more artificial—expressions of well-being were chillingly monosyllabic.

At least, I thought to my relief, I had managed to prevent her from disguising herself as a
grande dame
. Her hair had a simple part and was combed back naturally, and she could have made a beautiful Gypsy with her fiery head and magnificent décolleté. But when I told her that and tried to slip a red carnation behind her ear (in my good mood, I had just bought the flower for my buttonhole), she struck my hand away, lapsed into offended silence, and then, when I kept urging her, finally squeezed out
sotto voce
that for her it was no compliment to be compared to a Gypsy.

“Not even an Andalusian Gypsy, for God's sake?” I asked.

“No, not even an Andalusian Gypsy. It's hard enough being Jewish,” she concluded, with a hateful expression on her face that I had never seen.

At this point, I began to seethe. She hasn't successfully disguised herself as a mock lady, I told myself bitterly, and inwardly her effort is even less successful. And now, here she's forced to realize that it's all useless. Here everyone is quite simply what he is, I thought grimly. But not she. She's too “elegant” for her own good. If only she finally accepted herself, if only she finally admitted that she's a middle-aged Jewish shopkeeper, and that's all! …

To prevent the silence from growing between us again, something I had been fearing since the last evening we had gone out together, I heedlessly started to chatter. Frivolously I talked of my intention—postponed, to be sure, but not canceled—someday to devote myself to the fine arts. I explained what welcome subject matter could be found in popular scenes, once painting came of age and freed itself of the constraints of devotional martyrdoms and kingly portraits: just recall the Dutch painters and certain realists, whose master in Lombardy was
il Pinochetto
, Ceruti, or the most delightful of all, Jean-Siméon Chardin ….

I might just as well have been speaking Chinese. Her eyes were as blank as mine must have been when,
à propos
her deceased husband's studies, she told me of the importance of the addenda of the Saburaim and Geonim in Talmudic learning. Only she, when doing so, had worn her primordially maternal owl-face, full of kindness, a happiness-gilded smile always ready in the depths, while I went on angrily, tormenting myself. Finally she said, “What are you straining yourself for? Why don't we just stop talking for a while?”

Then I saw a sudden terror in her eyes, and trembling lips, and I turned to see what she was staring at. A troupe of
lautari
had come by, itinerant players and jugglers, and they were about to put on a show. They had a tame bear on a chain. He waddled upright on short, crooked clown-legs with in-turned paws, sported a Turkish fez on his thick skull, and wore a leather muzzle on his face. On one of his long-clawed paws a tambourine was tied, and the other paw banged clumsily against the tambourine's bell-jingling hide.