Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (24 page)

“Yes,” jeered Olschansky, “at dominoes, or tarot, or poker! But not at games of real skill.”

I myself had once tried to hold my own against Mr. Löwinger in morris, which had been a forte of mine in my boyhood. But here too I had lost miserably. Olschansky waved me off with a sneer. He insisted on challenging Mr. Löwinger to a game of chess.

“Now
you
watch out,” he muttered back at me. “At the military academy, I used to beat people who wound up on the general staff.” Nevertheless, he lost the match after a dozen moves. “One game doesn't mean anything!” he cried, running his hand nervously through his hair. “Would you like to see who wins two out of three?”

“Gladly!” said Mr. Löwinger timidly, peering up at his women, who sat around him with immobile faces. We all formed a thick ring around the two opponents: they had long since stopped being players; a duel was being fought.

It was soon decided. Olschansky lost the second game within a bare quarter hour; insisted on playing the third one and lost it so fast that he leaped up, furiously knocking over the chess board, and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

“Not that I'm normally a poor loser,” he later told me. “But I couldn't stand that nasty lurking and finally that triumph in the faces of those Jewish harpies. Did you see the way they sat there, to the left and the right of that little Yid? That unkempt crone, that lecherous Iolanthe, that screechy anemic bitch with that eternal bun in her oven, those witches, all three of them so greedy to see me humiliated that I couldn't even think about any moves. I had to keep fighting the puke rising in me.”

“That's known as psychological warfare, isn't it?” I asked, a bit maliciously. “Didn't they prepare you for that at military school?”

Olschansky ignored my baiting. “You know, I really believe they're capable of certain kinds of witchcraft,” he said. “Being lucky in a game isn't sheer chance. A man is lucky if he has a certain rapport with the world, the time, the place he's playing in—”

“Yes, but not in chess,” I broke in. “A chess player, as the popular adage so nicely puts it, has the law of action in his hand!”

“What do you really have in your hand?” he said, passionately earnest. “You get to recognize that in war. During the first few years in Galicia, I saw a whole lot of Jews. You can experience all kinds of things with them.”

“What?” I asked. “Don't keep me in suspense! Do they really slaughter Christian children to enrich their Passover matzos with protein?”

“No, but they believe in one God!” he blurted out, downright fanatically.

“So do my aunts,” I said. “One of them goes to Mass every morning.”

“It's different, it's different!” He was working himself up. “They've got their God in their blood. They can't get rid of him ….” He suddenly threw up his hand as though to shoo a fly away from his nose. “But what nonsense I'm talking, don't you think? Tell me about betting on horses. You say I can bet on win, place, and draw?”

I'm no longer sure whether this conversation took place before or after the Löwingers took in the new female lodger. It caused quite a stir when it was announced one evening that a young lady had moved into room number eight and would be joining us for meals. Mr. Löwinger, who in spite of his scrawniness had undeniable authority—“the dignity of a microbe” was Pepi's definition—appealed to the male assembly in a few well-chosen words to exercise restraint in the lady's presence, at least for the first few days: she was not only a pure country maid but a schoolteacher to boot.

The suspense that built up as we awaited her entrance became so great that even Cleopatra would have had her work cut out for her, and Miss Bianca Alvaro was no Queen of the Nile. She wasn't exactly nondescript, not unsympathetic, but decidedly not winning either; neither pretty nor downright ugly, more on the small side than on the large, more blonde than brunette. Neither her name nor her physiognomy gave any clue as to where she came from. She might have been Jewish, but then again perhaps not. At a rough guess she was in her mid-twenties. She had been studying German language and literature at the University of Jena, and was preparing for a state examination in order to teach German at the local
Gymnasium
. “The only thing one can say about her with any certainty,” Pepi remarked, “is that she has luscious tits. She can try and flatten them as much as she pleases, but a connoisseur will spot them a mile off. They're high-slung with a prominent sideways jut; the nipples probably tickle her armpits, a sure sign of quality. There's not much more than a good handful apiece, but they're as firm and juicy as young melons. One will be better able to judge in summer when she wears lighter dresses.”

Mr. Löwinger's appeal proved unnecessary, as things turned out. Miss Alvaro's mere presence sufficed to quell all appetite for discussing sex. The change in the tenor of our talk was so marked that one day when she excused herself and left the table earlier than usual, everyone else, including the three Löwinger ladies, remained seated as if by secret arrangement and simultaneously launched into a heated discussion. The first attempt to explain the phenomenon was offered by Iolanthe, and coming from her, in the form of a mournful sigh, it sounded overwhelming: “That's the difference when you're a lady,” she moaned, looked across to her mother for confirmation, realized what she'd said, and lowered her eyes in panic.

“Bullshit!” Pepi Olschansky spluttered, “lady … lady … she's nothing but a bum-beater, that's all. I've never seen anyone better equipped to become a schoolteacher. She has a way of looking at a man that's more sobering than castration. I'm always expecting her to chide us about our dirty fingernails or the way we hold our forks. If Duday Ferencz were to go up to her and say in his beguiling Hungarian way, ‘Miz Alvaro, eet would geeve me great pleasure to screw the ass of you,' she'd simply look up and answer, ‘Dear Mr. Duday, you surely mean you'd like to screw the ass
off
me, at least I hope you do; you're mixing up your prepositions and adverbs again, and in so doing you completely alter the meaning of the phrase and express a desire to perform an act of sodomy on my person which is generally confined to pederastic relationships. So if, as I trust, the heterosexual method is more to your taste, I suggest that until such time as you have grasped the finer points of our language you'd do better to avoid risking embarrassing misunderstandings and stick to straightforward, basic phrases such as “
Miss
”—not
Miz—“Miss
Alvaro, how about a fuck?” ' ” We all burst out laughing, and the matter was settled for the time being.

A few days later Miss Alvaro was to cross my path directly. Pepi and I passed through Cismigiù park on the way back from our walk one morning and stopped by the chestnut tree in front of our temporary home; its fruit was thumping to the ground. I stooped and picked one up, peeled off the knobby skin; the nut was shiny and immaculate—“Rather like me when they took off my cast,” I remarked to Pepi.

“It doesn't stay that way, unfortunately.”

The Löwinger house, which dated from the mid-nineteenth century, was distinctly rural in style, one-storied with a tin roof. It stood facing the road, a narrow courtyard alongside.

Just as Pepi and I entered the yard, Miss Alvaro emerged from the front door and the little brown dog scampered out between her legs, spotted us, and shot forward, yapping furiously, recognized Pepi, gave a howl, and shot back again. For fun I threw the chestnut at him. I hadn't actually intended to hit him, had thrown the nut high, but the dog must have seen the movement of my arm, for he accelerated wildly and ran straight into the missile's trajectory, taking the blow squarely in his exposed rectum. He was even more surprised than we were and let out a scream as though Lucifer himself had raped him. Pepi and I roared with laughter.

Miss Alvaro marched up and planted herself in front of us, glared at me with her big brown eyes, shook her head slowly and incredulously, and said, “
You?
How could you do such a thing? I would not have thought it of you.”

I was very embarrassed. Olschansky came to the rescue: “That's his hunter's blood coming out,” he said maliciously. “Didn't you recognize it from the precision of the trajectory?”

“Nonsense,” I said. “It was pure chance; I didn't aim at him. I'm very sorry.” And, although I had no liking for the dog, it was sincere.

Miss Alvaro said no more and was just about to turn and go when we heard Iolanthe's voice through the open kitchen door: “Oh, do stop laughing, you silly goose,” and out tumbled the servant girl Marioară, doubled up with laughter, her hands to her face, wiping away the tears. When she looked up and saw me, she controlled herself long enough to say, “I'll never forget that for the rest of my days, never, never,” and doubled up again. Her beauty surpassed the superb autumn day, and as she drew a deep breath, straightened up, and gazed at me again, I knew that her door would not be locked that night. Pepi knew it too. He said “Two birds with one stone.”

With which Miss Bianca Alvaro also got the message. She turned on her heel and left.

So I was all the more surprised when two days later she spoke to me. “I should like to ask something of you. Will you come to my room for a moment?”

We were alone. She dipped her hand inside her blouse, pulled out a bunch of tiny keys hanging from the chain about her neck, opened a valise, and took out a case wrapped in silk paper. When she'd finally unwrapped and opened it, she held it out to me. “I should be very grateful if you were to tell me whether this ring is valuable or not. I inherited it, but have no knowledge of jewelry. I come from a very poor family. I've heard of such things only in fairy tales.”

It was an unostentatious piece, no more than a setting for a single stone. The stone, however, was huge and green; if it were a genuine emerald, it would be worth a little fortune.

“I know nothing of jewelry either,” I said. “The best thing to do is to go to a jeweler and then double the price he names you. He'll think you want to sell it and start the bidding low.”

“Would you do me the favor of coming with me?” she asked. “I'm from the provinces, a village near Kishinev, and I don't know another soul here in Bucharest I could ask.”

I went with her not to one but three different jewelers. The values they quoted varied only slightly and were much higher than I had calculated. This seemed to confuse Miss Alvaro greatly, but she remained reticent. “Thank you very much,” she said, as we parted in town—she had already made it clear to me that morning that she didn't want Löwinger's to know about our undertaking, for she had asked that we leave the house separately—“thank you very much, you were as friendly and cooperative as I expected of you.”

This drove me to the brink of forgetting my manners. What on earth gave Miss Bianca Alvaro the right to “expect” anything of me at all? What standards had she applied to me and my character, what yardstick of behavior was I obliged to live up to? I for my part gave her no second thoughts whatsoever. By now, I had summed her up and knew which pigeonhole to pop her in. Iolanthe had not been wrong in calling her a lady, but the veneer of her acquired graces couldn't hide her background from me: a drab little Jewish girl from a village near Kishinev—that she was indeed Jewish now seemed fairly certain; Pepi had been prepared to bet on it from the beginning. I couldn't have cared less one way or the other—at all events, I knew her sort. They were a dime a dozen on every village street, all over Rumania; they spent their childhood skipping among mounds of horse dung and flocks of gay sparrows, warbling Hebraic words of wisdom in Jewish schools, chewing Mr. Löwinger's marbled pens and poking their ears and noses with ink-stained fingers, disappearing then to the next town. They returned gangling, cheeky, precocious, and self-confident a couple of years later, unfurled little red flags, and chanted socialistic marching songs; then they went off again. The next time they came back they were unrecognizable—polished, poised, coiffed, and manicured, lugging doctorates on their proud shoulders; they dug themselves in and became dentists, high-school teachers, professors of music, and God only knows what other intellectuals, married similar solid burghers and produced streams of progeny, teaching them to speak refinedly through their noses, packing them off to the Sorbonne to get equipped the better to meddle with the course of the history of civilization. I had witnessed pretty near every stage of these developments in the Carpathian village where I came from, and surmised that Kishinev could not be so very different. And whereas Miss Alvaro no doubt regarded me as the epitome of a smarmy, once-velveteen-suited, governess-tutored youth, cutely twittering away in French, when the time came, my undivided attention to horses and hunting restricting my vocabulary to a fund of some three hundred words—but not hesitating to entrust me with her priceless heirloom!—I on the other hand couldn't help seeing in her the snotty-nosed Jewish guttersnipe we were always in danger of running over when driving through the dusty village streets. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her she could think, say, or “expect” what the hell she liked of me for all I cared as long as she left me in peace.

I was even more reserved toward her in the days that followed. Besides, I didn't see much of her. Under Pepi's guidance I had begun to read more systematically and selectively, so my time was taken up, added to which the weather broke at last as the
crivetz
, a wind from the steppes, howled across the open marshlands surrounding Bucharest and hit the city, whistled remorselessly through its streets and alleyways, presaging the bitter Balkan winter, discouraging all desire to set foot outside the house. I holed up.

Miss Alvaro wasn't so fortunate; she had to go to her class early each morning, came home then for lunch and disappeared again right afterward, spent her afternoons in some library studying, most probably; and at the dinner table she usually sat with an absent look on her face, seldom spoke, and retired as soon as she finished coffee.