Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The factory of the Aphrodite Company was also located on the outskirts of the city, where the Calea Moşilor turned into a highway; broad and dusty, mournfully lined with poplars, it ran out into the vast countryside whose horizon melted far away into the haze of the Danube plain. The neighborhood around the factory, a settlement from the Turkish period, had coalesced with the exuberantly growing city. Every week, a horse market took place in a huge, empty square surrounded by two-storied houses made of either wooden boards or, back then already, characterless cement cubes. But over the flat rooftops loomed the notched, melon-shaped dome of an old hamam , the local steam bath; and the carvings on the hoary wood, the faded pink, ultramarine, and pistachio-green of the paint, the ancient motifs of tulips, cypresses, and pomegranate blossoms stamped into the plaster, contained all the poetry of the Orient.

I did not see all this with the eyes of an archaeologist of his own lifetime, ever watchful for the “unspoiled world” of the past. I was utterly ingenuous in absorbing the anachronisms, the contrasts and contradictions, as a unity and a presentness. Everything was integrated as a matter of course into a picture of my world which I virtually inhaled, while in my imagination I dwelled in a future world of immeasurable promise that seemed to lie ahead of me.

In the morning, I steered my already antediluvian Model-T Ford with its cargo of publicity material out of the factory gates. Halting, I was checked and at last politely given the go-ahead by a giant Bessarabian watchman who guarded the plant as if it were a seraglio. I then turned into the street to begin my daily calvary through the stations of nicely graduated humiliations in the elegant boutiques on the Boulevard Bratianu, on to the comfort of the down-to-earth humanity in the parti-colored stores in Văcăreşti, which carried not only cattle salt and copybooks but also laundry soap. My first stop was Mr. Garabetian’s bazaar.

Mr. Garabetian was an Armenian of great embonpoint and charm. Day in, day out, from dawn to dusk, he sat like a Buddha, immobile, in front of his store: a chain of artfully carved apricot pits gliding playfully through his dark fingers tipped with rosy nails; the heavy lids half shut over the shiny almond-shaped eyes, which were like black olives preserved in oil; and a pea-shaped, aubergine-colored growth on the violet lower lip, under the Charlie Chaplin mustache.

His store was spacious and inexhaustible. Like a real bazaar, it was laid out as a honeycomb of adjacent stalls, each containing a different commodity. Canopies were drawn over the sidewalk, above piles of sheepskins and sharp, dry cheeses, cooking utensils and cans of kerosene, sacks of cornmeal and boxes of American chewing gum, down pillows and hemp ropes. You could just as easily buy a whipcord here as a portable gramophone, donkey-meat sausages, pastrami, and Moldau wine as well as nonprescription remedies from aspirin to vermicide; and according to need and commercial consideration, you could purchase a pack of sewing needles or dispatch a load of Anatolian hazelnuts to London. Mr. Garabetian had several dozen employees, whom he supervised from a stool at an octagonal sidewalk-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl arabesques. He sat there, heedless of the yells of sheepherders, who drove their flocks past him, or the chirping of the sparrows that tussled over chaff in the horse manure on the roadway, undisturbed by the heavy clouds of dust trailing every passing motor vehicle. Using a folded gazette, whose news he had unflappably registered early in the morning, Mr. Garabetian indolently fanned away the flies from his pickle-shaped nose, smoked Macedonian cigarettes, and drank innumerable cups of Turkish coffee.

Although naturally he carried every kind of cosmetic article, I had no professional dealings with him. After all, there was no display window to decorate. The wares lay open all the way into the street. Any shopper, even a window-shopper, could pass in and out of the convoluted stalls unimpeded, like the birds in the crown of a gigantic old elm tree that shaded all this. And Mr. Garabetian probably cared as little whether his goods were displayed agreeably as whether their quality was convincing. Anyone interested in checking them could pick them up, weigh them, smell them, determine their solidity, their ripeness, and then either purchase or put them back. It made no difference whatsoever to Mr. Garabetian. He did reveal his Armenian preference for pink by the arrangement of silks, mineral pigments, roasted pistachios, and rahat lukum . But that was as far as his aesthetic sensibility went; any attempt to use a picture of a jubilant bathing beauty to inveigle a buyer into purchasing a shampoo would have struck him as ludicrous. Nevertheless, we had got humanly closer.

It all started with my greeting him. I had begun doing so spontaneously because I was incapable of pretending not to know a person whom I passed several times a day. Thus, I had nodded at him with a smile, and he had responded with Oriental expressiveness. For a while, things went no further than this mimetic exchange of friendliness, in which Mr. Garabetian was always the more generous. I waved and smiled at him; and he clutched his chest with a gesture of surprised — nay, startled — and joyful recognition. His smile radiated dazzling white from the darknesses of his mustache, lips, and lip growth; then, scarcely hindered by his enormous belly, he leaned forward with closed eyes, casting out his arm and hand in a vast, flat curve, solemnly affirming unconditional submission.

At some point or other, we exchanged a word or two, and he permitted himself to offer me a cup of coffee. Although three times as old as I and no doubt aware of what a low rank I had among the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon gentlemen in the hierarchy of the Aphrodite Company, Mr. Garabetian treated me as a person commanding respect; and, needless to say, I reciprocated his cordiality. He seemed to like this very much. The invitations to coffee were repeated, and eventually I got into the habit of dropping in on him. When the office was closed for the day, and I was done with my rounds as well as with the ensuing paperwork and the preparations for the next morning, I would go over to the bazaar. The gradually waning daylight would be growing thinner and clearer, while the turquoise sky was taking a step into the universe and igniting at its edges. At Mr. Garabetian’s side, I would sip mocha; the coffee grounds in the tiny cups curdled into Japanese ink-brush drawings, while the two of us waited to catch the twinkle of the first star and soon after that the blinking of the pale street lamps in the descending twilight.

We were fairly monosyllabic at such times, like truly close friends. But perhaps the thing binding us in silence was chiefly our disparate solitudes: the afflicted loneliness of youth and the mellow loneliness of imminent old age. Once, he introduced me to his son, whom I had long known by sight. Garabetian junior was a few years older than I and a rather striking person: he was the beau not only of this suburban neighborhood but presumably of very different, far more fashionable districts of Bucharest. Even in the daytime, his hair, black as patent leather, seemed to reflect the neon frames of the nightclubs he frequented. Tall, slender-hipped, in dandyishly long, sharp-shouldered jackets, baggy trousers, and black-and-white shoes, he moved elastically on inch-thick rubber soles. He drove a Chrysler convertible and was always accompanied by breathtakingly beautiful, high-bosomed, cherry-eyed girls, such as I knew at most from the front pages of the yellow press.

I complimented Mr. Garabetian on such a proud off-spring. He scornfully waved this off with his folded newspaper. After a while he said, “You come from a home in which it is not customary to do any sort of work — don’t ask how I know; I can tell. Nevertheless, you don’t consider yourself too good for it.”