Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I had no opinion about whether or not I might expect my imaginary beloved to understand what had been done to me by my training in unquestioning respect for fixed rules and institutions. Not only did this obeisance make me shiver about whether I could fill my assigned quota; it also exposed me openly to the pecking order at the Aphrodite Company. Try not to as I might, I shuddered at a frown from the publicity chief when I handed him my lacunary decoration list. If the head of sales said something appreciative about my display of cold-cream jars, I was no less delighted than any other wage earner would have been in similar circumstances, even though socially I regarded such a wage earner as a petty philistine. My response was all the more intense since most of my superiors, or rather the higher-ups, were much older men — that is, “adults,” toward whom I, a young pipsqueak, was accustomed to behaving in a zealously complaisant and officious way.

Then again, there were moments when I pictured how pridefully I would gaze back at this difficult beginning time, once I had made my breakthrough. The big boss from the central office abroad would arrive, see one of my bath-soap decorations, and exclaim, “Who has done this? Why, this shows an extraordinary artistic talent! What is this man doing here? Send him out for further training at once — the company will pay. Why, this boy is a genius. We probably don’t even have the right to keep him. He belongs to the world. It will be more useful to our firm if we show that we realize our obligation to mankind than if we selfishly think of our own advantage.”

I knew such fantasies were pipe dreams, as remote from any reality as the likelihood that my getting punched on the Calea Griviţei would unleash a pogrom to wipe out all the Jews in Rumania. Still, I felt deeply that it would have to come somehow or other, that it would come just as I imagined. For a few days, I would hold my head higher than I had before — until some Jewboy kicked me out of a shop, and all my wild hopes suffocated in rage and shame.

Thus I lived in a constant interplay between humiliation and impotent rebellion, between the craziest faith in auspicious promise and dreadful doubts about myself and everything I was doing. Occasionally I was struck by the dreadful thought that all these experiences assaulting me and arousing such contradictory sensations were characteristic and normal only to those for whom I had been taught since childhood to feel contempt: Jews. That was probably why they were so unstable and jittery. After all, wholesaling and retailing were pretty much the only turf that was granted them. Traditionally involved in the so-called business world, they were assigned this livelihood — an existence disfigured by the compulsive notion of success, by competition against the ups and downs of the economy. Their hereditary milieu was the world of open possibilities, in which a man could just as easily become a Midas as get stuck in the lowliest form of donkey work. In the discrepancy between reward and performance, between pushy supply and manipulated demand, it was no wonder that their feelings were torn as incessantly as mine. I now understood their restlessness, their anxieties, their messianic expectations, the abrupt change from immeasurable arrogance to shamefaced self-debasement. I even understood the source of their often presumptuous insolence and repulsive bootlicking. I began apologizing to them for my previous contempt. Still, I hardly found it edifying to comprehend their behavior in terms of my own emotions. My ego thus received its final rude setback.

A growing awareness of how shaky my ego must always have been sometimes led to bright moments. I began to realize how much I had been lying to myself when I pretended I was doing something contrary to my taste, self-esteem, and social orientation solely because it might help me reach my real goal. Quite the opposite: I knew that my work was in fact estranging me from my vocation; and this was quite all right. With every day I lost at the Aphrodite Company, the dreams of my future as a world-famous painter grew thinner and thinner, but I also felt the same measure of relief. I was making excuses to give up all my ambitious goals of times gone by. What made me stick to my guns was no longer the hope that a stage of transition would grow into the fulfillment of grand wishes. Instead, an oddly fatalistic persistence kept me suspended, as it were, while my life drifted toward a different destination, as yet unknown. Clenching my teeth, I went through the weekly rotation of decorating as many shop windows in Bucharest as possible with the products of the Aphrodite Company, Inc.

In the swarm of tiny shops on the outskirts of the city, my successes required less effort. The Mahalàs were sleazy, filthy, poverty-stricken, but life-swirling suburbs, which attracted me even though, or because, the milieu was similar to that of the Calea Griviţei, where I had had my inglorious adventure. Here, in the slums, the situation was clear-cut. A decorator was allowed to beautify the window if he cleaned off the dirt that had made the glass opaque. You had only to steal a march on the competition; then you could clean the panes and lay out your goods.

At first, in order to convince myself that my activity was necessary, I tried to put something like a work ethos into the business of displaying toothpaste tubes. So, I was angered by the vile utilitarianism of these slum drugstores. But I soon got used to being welcomed with exuberant friendliness and treated to a cup of strong black coffee. After which, I was allowed to spend a few hours sweeping away dead flies from the display-window boxes, wiping away finger-thick dust, and cleaning the panes — to prepare for the actual decorating. Depending on whether lavender soap or lemon soap was to be displayed, the window was lined with lilac or yellow crêpe paper, each thumbtack meticulously camouflaged with a crêpe rosette and thus made part of the adornment. Next came the artistic construction of the powerfully fragrant products in a bed of artificial umbels, with individual items in packages of three or six. This edifice was encircled by a bold loop — an arc of Aphrodite products, from the shaving cream of the well-groomed gentleman to the toothpaste for the entire family to the soap flakes for the ladies’ fine lingerie. I was soon quite hardened to what happened next, after my completion of this work of art and dismissal amid renewed protestations of friendship: no sooner was I out in the street again than the display window filled up with nail files, douches, jars of leeches, packages of condoms, and, even worse, goods from our competitors.

I appreciated the chats, the coffee, and the friendly, if sanctimonious, reception. I began liking these slum shop-keepers: careworn, arduously crawling through their petty existences, shrewdly callous or sagely resigned. We became friends. It was, if you will, my first real encounter with life — that is to say, the life of other people, of other species of human beings: a discovery of the world, often no less mysterious or wondrous than in childhood. I began combing through the Mahalàs of Bucharest with the same lust for adventure with which I had once combed through the garden of my childhood days. I peered with the same curiosity into the lives of these other species; I listened with the same devotion to the essence of the unknown. As a child, I had found I could not but be amazed at my life, and so again now: experiences lodged in me as “mood motifs,” and only after the mood had taken shape did they become clear images and recollections. The pitiable ugliness, the wretchedness, the meanness and brutality, of which I saw such a profusion in the slums of this Balkan metropolis, lost their repulsive immediacy, and were ordered into a complex picture, whose patterns and colors had no value per se but achieved real significance only in counterpoint with the rest.