Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I might just as well have been speaking Chinese. Her eyes were as blank as mine must have been when, à propos her deceased husband’s studies, she told me of the importance of the addenda of the Saburaim and Geonim in Talmudic learning. Only she, when doing so, had worn her primordially maternal owl-face, full of kindness, a happiness-gilded smile always ready in the depths, while I went on angrily, tormenting myself. Finally she said, “What are you straining yourself for? Why don’t we just stop talking for a while?”

Then I saw a sudden terror in her eyes, and trembling lips, and I turned to see what she was staring at. A troupe of lautari had come by, itinerant players and jugglers, and they were about to put on a show. They had a tame bear on a chain. He waddled upright on short, crooked clown-legs with in-turned paws, sported a Turkish fez on his thick skull, and wore a leather muzzle on his face. On one of his long-clawed paws a tambourine was tied, and the other paw banged clumsily against the tambourine’s bell-jingling hide.

I knew these dancing bears; they had been the delight of my childhood. Most of them were trained to kiss the hand that tossed a few coins into the tambourine, and I could never forget the fearful, blissful tickle in the pit of my stomach the first time the muzzled jaws, one bite of which could have mashed my hand into a bloody pulp, sent the long lilac-colored tongue slithering out like a serpent to lick my fingers, while the bear’s trainer raked in the coins from the tambourine with a magician’s skill. I called out to the man who led the bear to bring him near me.

I had not reckoned with my lady friend’s panic. She leaped up, incapable of uttering a sound, her eyes widening in mortal horror, her fingers clawing at her teeth. I found this terror so overexaggerated that I could not help laughing. Her behavior was too childish — after all, the bear was muzzled, and a powerful man was holding him on a thick chain. I felt I was about to lose my temper. I said, “C’mon, stop acting so silly; he only wants to kiss your hand nicely!” And I took her hand and tried to bring it to the bear’s moist nose. But she resisted vigorously, and now I really did lose my temper and pulled her hand to the bear’s nose. She whimpered like a child. Then, with a final desperate exertion, she wrenched her hand free. For an instant, I totally forgot myself and slapped her face.

It was like a stroke of black lightning. For one split second, the pain brought forth the look of her ecstasy. But instead of ending in transfiguration, it slowly changed to bedazzlement. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her face was lifeless; it revealed no intelligible expression. Yet it was marked; it bore an invisible sign, the blemish of something beyond comprehension whose overpowering reality must be accepted. No personal sorrow could mark a face in that way. What I saw was no longer a face; it was humanity facing the inevitable character of suffering beyond all notion of despair. I had seen this lack of expression in the face of a thief who had been caught in the act and then captured after a wild chase.

I must add here that all these reflections came retrospectively. At the moment, I had no time to think: someone had grabbed my shoulder and was pulling me around. I stood nose to nose with four or five of the men who had been sitting at the nearby tables. One of them, whom I knew from the factory, a carpenter with whom I had often joked around when we met, was clutching my shoulder and hissing into my face: “Take it easy, punk, if you don’ wan’ us to beatcha outta your jacket! In dis place, you don’ hit a woman ‘cause she’s scared of a bear, unnerstan’, you piss-elegant dude! In this place, ya don’ force no body to play wit’ wild animals. We’ll teach you to act like a boyar !”

My urge to punch him, no matter how badly it would turn out, was paralyzed by amazement. These men, whom I had all liked, whom I had considered my friends, were standing around me as enemies. They had not just become hostile after my faux pas, which I regretted already. No: they had always been hostile to me; they had never considered me as one of their own, never taken me seriously. I had always been fundamentally different for them, someone of a different race. And they despised this different race to which I belonged, and I probably repelled them all the more for trying to ingratiate myself by acting like one of them ….

This reflection too I must have had only later on, even if I felt it fully at that moment. I had no chance to think, for Mr. Garabetian interceded. “Let’s not have a riot here, fellows!” he said with a compelling authority in his indolent voice. He took me aside, and the circle of my opponents disbanded.

“If you hit a woman, it has to come from the heart,” said Mr. Garabetian as he walked me to my Model T, signaling the tavernkeeper not to worry about my check. “Otherwise, you show them that you’re afraid of them.” And after a tiny pause: “We”—I knew he did not mean the community of slum dwellers but rather the members of a very advanced and fragile state of civilization, where he was probably quite lonely—“we do not hit. We stopped hitting long ago ….” It was up to me to glean from this humiliating rebuke that he rather regretted having spared the rod with his son or that other fathers had spared it with their sons.

The Black Widow was waiting mutely at the car. During the drive home, she said not a word. I held my tongue, too. There may have been a lot to say; perhaps something could have been made good again. But nothing could be restored to what it once had been.

When we came to her house, she got out, unlocked the door, and walked in. This time, she did not leave the door open, but pulled it to: without dramatics, without the arrogance of the offended lady, without any éclat , but firmly and definitively. I never saw her again. Through the district salesman, she informed the Aphrodite Company that she no longer wished to be inconvenienced by visits from the display-window decorators of the firm. This made little difference to me as I soon left the company anyway.

I could only be grateful for my departure from Aphrodite, for how would I have felt if I had encountered the girl in the wheelchair as I crept out of a drugstore window with a pile of soap boxes and shampoos under my arm? Now that I no longer had to fear being caught at such an embarrassing occupation, I looked back with some ironic aloofness to my anxieties in this respect; ultimately, my excursion into the world of shop assistants could be taken as good fun. Yet even now, at the sight of the girl in the wheelchair, I involuntarily whirled around as though trying to conceal myself; and this threw me back once again into the spiritual ordeals and the muddled conflicts of that time.

Something must have happened to me. Something basic in me had shifted, had broken and crumbled — and it was the ground under my feet. No longer did I feel I belonged to a caste enjoying authority by dint of universal respect. Rather, it was a caste that blemished me, as though I were Jewish. And no matter what I did, I could no more change my nature than a Jew could. The most painful humiliation of all was how I had been rebuffed by the men I had tried to ingratiate myself with. That would never happen again, I promised myself. It was worse than when a Jewish woman running a dumpy shop put on ladylike airs.

A lot of things that Mr. Garabetian had said whirled through my mind. Was it really true? Was I afraid of women? The girl in the wheelchair — but she was a phantom: I had walked past her, turning away as if not really noticing her, as if my attention had been caught by something else. Then I was cowardly, too! Frightened in this, too! … She had probably not even noticed me; I could not have meant anything whatsoever to her, a passerby, a pedestrian among hundreds of other pedestrians. Any possibility of her becoming my mistress and ideal beloved was sheer fantasy. And yet I was answerable to her.