Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

This time I kissed her, and she returned the kiss knowledgeably. With an unparalleled burst of happiness, I felt her putting her arm around me, drawing me over, grabbing my hair with one hand to hold my head and press it harder against her mouth. Her mouth was soft and sweet; I wanted to close my eyes to feel her lips more intimately, but I saw that her eyes were open; they seemed to be sparkling sarcastically, and I wanted to see her overwhelmed by pleasure and closing her eyes. There was a knock.

Now I was ready to ignore it, but the fellow was soon banging furiously against the door, and the girl in my arms laughed and said, “You’re really a sucker. Can’t you see he’s passing all his phony coins off on you?”

I could not let her believe I was a greenhorn, to be taken in by just anybody. I went and opened the door.

The guy held out his hand with a hundred-lei piece. “Is this one counterfeit too?” I asked hostilely. I saw the heavy muscles on his arms and shoulders.

“What else?” he snapped back, bringing his hand up.

“ Du-te’n pizda mâti, jidanule! ”—a popular Rumanian curse that could be heard all the time, which made it no less nasty: “Get into your mother’s cunt, you filthy kike!”

I had expected him to hit me, so his punch did not strike me squarely, but the force was so great that my ears hummed. It also knocked me to one side, so that my return punch barely grazed him — and I could not manage a second one; his fists were hailing down on me. Under a flood of curses, he beat me out of the room and into the corridor.

I do not know how I got down the steps to the lobby, but I waited for him below. I had grabbed the flat stone on which he tested coins and I hurled it into his face with all the strength I could muster. But even though he roared with pain and blindness, he kept on punching, beating me out into the street, where I started to run, just to save my bare life. I did not care if a swarm of street urchins were howling after me or a gang of men perhaps following them to catch me because I had knocked his eye out, or if someone was holding him back to prevent him from dashing after me and killing me.

I ran until I felt halfway safe. There was a stitch in my side, and I was bleeding. Trembling in fury and humiliation, with a roaring skull and aching teeth, ribs and ears, I trudged toward the center of Bucharest. I was ready to continue the fight with anyone who came along and in whose eyes I would read amazement and then prompt understanding: to think that this well-dressed young man, who doesn’t fit in with this disreputable neighborhood, could be walking around in broad daylight with a ripped-up shirt and blood-smeared jacket, his face all scratched and swollen — he must be coming from a very shady adventure that turned out badly for him.

But I would have my revenge. I would buy a pistol in the next gun shop, go back, and shoot the fellow down like a mangy dog. I knew, of course, that I would not do this, but I felt good imagining it. It soothed the burning of my humiliation, the indignation of my wounded ego, to picture him twisting under my lashing shots, sinking down, and dying on the ground like a cur. I would shoot him in his belly, heedless of the consequences. Perhaps his Jewish brethren would form a mob and lynch me, and the Rumanians around the Calea Griviţei would finally be fed up with the riffraff that sucked their blood, would rise up against them and murder them all, a pogrom would erupt throughout the land…. I felt good picturing it: the howling wives and children, the old crones with dangling breasts, wringing their hands and shrieking “ Vai! ” when the soldiers skewered their sons on bayonets…. Or it could even be just the Gypsy girl’s tribe who came in the night to beat the man black and blue. She had probably fallen in love with me, she had kissed me and run her fingers through my hair, she must have been as disappointed as I was by the sudden disruption of our amorous idyll…. Besides, the stone I had hurled into his kisser, his bestial roar — I hoped I had knocked out an eye, or his teeth — showed that I had at least smashed his nose ….

It did me good to think such thoughts, and to recall the details of the Gypsy girl’s kiss again, her hand in my hair, her adorable, precious breasts…. And this promptly unleashed my impotent rage again and my thirst for vengeance, the bitter humiliation of being thrashed by a Jew and not chastising him for the insolent way he had gawked at my girl’s exposed breasts, the disappointment, the distress that I had not kissed, not caressed these precious, adorable breasts, that I had not been able to chew them up in the unconsciousness of lust, that her sweet reality had become a lost phantom, a vision among so many other, similar visions.

The evening of that first day in Bucharest, I was covered with swellings and discolorations. Nevertheless, after more or less putting myself in order at my hotel, I picked up one of the prostitutes on Calea Victoriei. She was anything but beautiful; her face was hard, her hair was dyed a strawy blond, her speech was vulgar, and her voice was unspeakably common. When we entered her (frightfully expensive) room, she did not even want to undress; instead, she pulled up her skirt, pushed her panties down to her knees, cursed me for not being Johnny-on-the-spot, milked me impatiently, and then lay under me like a corpse. Luckily, I came almost immediately, after tormentingly pushing my way in, only half stiff ….

And the Gypsy girl’s breasts, which I forced myself to think of during the act, moved ever further away into the tantalizing kingdom of wishful thinking. I almost vomited.

Three days later, panic-stricken, I was leafing through the telephone book, looking for a specialist in skin and venereal diseases. In those days, two anxieties gave every amorous encounter a touch of imminent catastrophe and just deserts for sinning. The lesser anxiety concerned impregnation; and now the greater anxiety was brandishing its scourge over me. It was all the more ominous because I was stricken by a mysterious complaint with symptoms that no warning adviser had ever depicted to me.

The clap, I had been taught, could be recognized by a purulent discharge: “The first day, it burns. The second, it drips. The third, it runs.” Syphilis, on the other hand, had a different primary stage: crater-shaped, raspberry-colored, hard and insensitive symptoms; but they appeared only after several weeks; you could hardly ever be certain about whom you’d got it from and whom you might pass it on to. If you had a soft chancre, then something also hurt or swelled up; in case of doubt, it was the lymph gland or the head of the penis. In any event, it was not so bad as the other two stages, which were considered practically incurable. You could, of course, use Salvarsan to hold up the development of the second or third stage — the latter usually involved softening of the brain. But even with Salvarsan, traces of cerebral damage remained, as we had known at least since Nietzsche. And the spinal marrow was sometimes affected — everyone knew the bizarrely twitching, marionettelike walk, the occasional digressing sidesteps of elderly cavaliers who suffered from so-called tabes. This walk was a bit ridiculous, to be sure; but it was not without a certain elegance. And the clap, too, was actually something you kept all your life. Whenever you thought you had got a new dose, it was just the good old one you’d had originally. And what I had, this horrible multiplication of unbearably itching, reddish, yellow-crusted dots around the penis and on the thighs, could only be some dreadful disease — a Balkan specialty, no doubt, hence particularly malicious. And if not ultimately mortal, perhaps, then at least with destructive consequences at the level of my fly.