Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Naturally, this resistance also excited me; her yielding excited me. I think I must have acted like a child begging its mother for repetitions of a favor, for instance a fairy tale retold over and over. For it was like a fairy tale, the changing of her face when she overcame her scruples and gave in to her passion. Everything I could insinuate onto the dark severity of the primordial owl-face or onto the golden brilliance that flooded it when she perished in desire — everything passed into mythology. I called her “Astarte” and “Gaia,” even “Gaia Kurotrophos,” the Child-Nourisher, and when she remarked, “The things that come from your meshuggeneh head, baby!” her smile seemed as sweet as the smile on the effigy of an archaic goddess.

These ecstasies were so intense that the plunges into sobriety were painful; and as our relationship got under way, I began to anticipate the descents with anxiety. Indeed, they multiplied as we got to know one another better. I would then hate the petit bourgeois Rumanian Jewess whose triviality ruined my raptures. Once, in the midst of the most passionate embrace, she rolled away from under me so violently that I was almost hurled out of bed. With a grimace, she grabbed a framed photograph from the Balkan-futuristic night table and concealed it in the drawer. “What the hell’s got into you?” I asked furiously.

She was so upset that at first she could not even answer. Then, with tears starting out of her eyes, she managed to say through her teeth, “He was watching!”

“Who?!”

Again it took a while for me to get it out of her: “My husband.”

“I thought he was dead!” I said heatedly. “I thought you Jews didn’t believe in life after death. When it’s over, it’s over, right? That’s why you people are so scared of death you start to shake the moment someone mentions it. And now, all of a sudden, some fellow is supposed to be watching from the beyond when his broad climbs into bed with another man, the sacred marriage bed! What was it like, anyway? Were you allowed to sleep in it with him? Or did you have to tease him and throw your marriage wig at him, and get permission to come to him only if he graciously held on to it instead of tossing it back?”

“Don’t talk like that, baby,” she pleaded. “You’re all worked up; you don’t know what you’re saying.”

I was beside myself. “If you feel you’re cheating on him even though he’s been dead for ten years, then maybe it would be better if I left. After all, it might occur to me that when I’m with you I’m cheating on someone who doesn’t even exist.”

“You don’t understand, baby,” she said, her face bathed in tears. “I love you. I love you more than myself. More than anything in the whole world.”

“More than the dead?”

“The dead!” she said with an ineffably scornful shrug. “Who cares about the dead! You just don’t understand, baby. Come, I’ll show you how much I care about the dead! I’ll burn the photo up. Look, I’ll dump it in the garbage!” She took the photo from the night-table drawer.

“Let me look at it, at least,” I said.

“What for? The dead are dead. Why awaken him?”

“Don’t talk such rubbish! I want to know what the man you married looked like.”

I took the photo from her hand. Her husband was in his fifties, dark-haired, graying, massive, with an intense look in his eyes that reminded me of someone I may have met earlier, but couldn’t tell when or where; so I kept studying that face, until she took the photo away from me. “That’s enough!” she said. “And now look what I’m gonna do with it. I want to keep the frame; it’s still good. But the picture — just look how much I care about it!” She took the picture out of the frame and ripped it up into little pieces. Her expression was so wild that it frightened me. The scene was stamped vividly in my mind, almost as an archetype, and I haven’t been able to think of it since without horror: the naked woman with the bushy pubic hair at her groin, standing in front of her equally naked boyish lover and tearing her dead husband’s picture to shreds.

Gradually, I learned the story of her marriage — that is to say, I got it out of her bit by bit. There had been no great intimacy between them — hatred, if anything, rather than love. He was a very strange man, with no head for business, which he pursued merely to earn money. In the end, he had left the shop entirely in her hands, while devoting every available moment to his two passions — or, if you will, his two vices: Jewish philosophy and women. Of course, my Andalusian added, they both amounted to the same thing for him, the ultimate philosophical problem.

I failed to understand. In what way?

Well, she said with a heavy sigh, it touched upon the crucial problem of all Jewish philosophy, namely — as much as she understood it — the incompatibility, or rather the sought-for compatibility, of rational knowledge and divine inspiration. This brought up the question of free will, and that was his existential conflict. He was extraordinarily, almost uncannily attractive to women — one might as well say he was cursed, it was his doom. So irresistible was his magical effect that he became its victim, he was defenseless against the women he fascinated. She said that ultimately he shook his fists at heaven in blasphemous despair because of yet another woman — or rather because he had fallen victim yet another time to the fascination he exerted on women. It killed him in the end. Finally, one day, he had been found, his head slumped over his book, his mouth foaming.

Not to her uncontrollable grief, she had to admit. During the years of her marriage, she had gone through all the torments of hell. Upon saying this, she embraced me desperately, as though it were my job to save her from the memory of that life.

“What a fabulous fool,” I observed.

“A fool, baby? How do you mean?” She had looked upon him as damned, she said. He knew he was possessed by an evil spirit. All he had to do was walk down the street, and some female was ready to give herself to him. And he had to take her; it was compulsive. She soon was forced to pity him; in the last years of their marriage, pity was all that bound her to him, pity plus respect for his earnest way of trying to deal with the problem philosophically.

“That’s exactly why I said: what a fabulous fool!” I was grumpy. I felt challenged. “There’s only one philosophical attitude toward that problem. Do you know the story of the man who had a gulash at Neugröschl’s Restaurant, a famous place in Vienna?”

She peered at me with that mixture of timidity and resistance, devotion and distrust, which emphasized all her racial characteristics.

“Don’t make that owlish face again,” I said. “This is the story. One day in Vienna, a man eats gulash in Neugröschl’s Restaurant, as he does every day. The instant he comes home, he makes his wife twice, his sister-in-law three times, and rapes the maid, and they only manage to capture him just as he is about to try it with his own daughter. The case is medically so interesting that a committee gets together, chaired by a world-famous professor. The family doctor reports that the man has not done anything unusual; he has merely been to Neugröschl’s to have a gulash. ‘What does the Herr Professor feel should be done?’ they ask the great scholar, all eyes on him. ‘I don’t know what you’ll be doing, gentlemen,’ says the professor. ‘But as for me, I’m going to Neugröschl’s to eat a gulash.’ ”

She slapped me tenderly — a teasing motion contrasting bizarrely with her tragic expression. “You’re being wicked, baby, honestly. I love you precisely because that’s not you. You don’t know how horrible it is to be afflicted by sex. At first, when I met him and was swept off my feet—” She hesitated, unwilling to frame it in words; then she shook her head and clutched me. “Ah, baby, that’s why I love you, because with you it’s different.”