Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

This tiresome necessity was due to my own neglect; I knew from experience and acquaintances’ repeated warnings that for some reason the Bucharesters were given to changing their dwelling places with astonishing regularity and that the dates of transmigration were fixed as irrevocably as the advent of spring or fall: in May, on St. George’s Day, and in October, on St. Demetrius’s. On those two days not a single van was to be had in the whole city; the streets were choked with carts and wagons precariously loaded with everything including the kitchen sink. I’d heard it said that neighbors on the same floor would rather swap flats than face another half year in the old one; those who did not have the foresight to get extension clauses in their leases past these dates were liable to be evicted without ceremony. It happened to me. With the dawn of St. Demetrius’s Day, the new tenants stood puffing at my door, and I had no choice but to gather my few belongings and descend to the street. By luck I soon found lodgings at a place called Löwinger’s Rooming House.

This establishment was run by a family consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Löwinger, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law. Mr. Löwinger, who looked like a prematurely aged rabbinic student, was a peace-loving gentleman pampered in every conceivable way by his womenfolk. By way of profession he sold lacquered pens — cheap, brightly colored wooden pens used mostly by schoolchildren; the colored lacquers on the shafts had a pleasant marbleized look but the disadvantage — or advantage, for Mr. Löwinger — of chipping and flaking easily, so that the pens frequently had to be renewed. Nevertheless, Mr. Löwinger’s profit was slim enough. He also ran a line in carved imitation-ivory pens in whose holders lenses showed the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome or the Eiffel Tower in Paris, tiny, but in minute detail, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. But these more expensive items had nothing like the turnover of the wooden ones.

Mr. Löwinger augmented his income by gambling, playing games that demand intelligence rather than those that depend on Fortuna’s smile. At chess, dominoes, and all advanced card games he was more than a match for most of the players who sat waiting to try their luck in the cafés, although, by his own admission, he was a dilettante compared to his father, who had lived on his source of income alone, never done a stroke of work in his life. One advantage he had had, Mr. Löwinger said ruefully, was that the cafés were full of suckers in those days.

Mr. Löwinger Junior was a mite of a man, a fact he himself never ceased to marvel at, since his father had stood at six feet four and weighed nigh on three hundred pounds. Minute again in comparison to her husband was Mrs. Löwinger, whereas her mother and sister were positively Amazonian; the old lady with iron-gray hair reminded one of a fairground crystal-ball gazer; the sister, Iolanthe, was similar in type, with Oriental features and pronounced physical charms. When I moved in, Mrs. Löwinger was four months pregnant. The long-term lodgers informed me that this was regularly the case with Mrs. Löwinger at intervals of five to six months, and that the next miscarriage was surely imminent. Only once had one of her pregnancies gone the distance, but the resulting infant had been so small and feeble that the lodgers had laid bets on its chances to survive. One coarse gentleman remarked that the only one to make a killing had been the infant itself; it had died within the hour.

This initial conversation characterized the general tone of Löwinger’s Rooming House. With one exception, a lady of whom I shall relate in due course, the boarders were exclusively male: traveling salesmen, students living in Bucharest for the term, a starving Russian sculptor, a man with radical political views who’d started professional life as the rear end of a horse in a circus, a journalist down on his luck. Regularly and for months on end the house was peopled by the members of a wrestling troupe, the glorious gladiators of what they themselves called “Luptele Greco-Romane.”

Largely on their account the meals served at Löwinger’s were gargantuan. The Löwingers were Hungarian Jews who came from the region of Temeshvar, where Hungarian, Rumanian, Austrian, and Jewish culinary arts mingled in happy harmony. Both the mother-in-law and Iolanthe cooked exquisitely. The whole community ate at a single table d’hôte , all except the Russian sculptor, that is; he was too poor to participate and preferred to starve in his garret alone. When the wrestlers were present, extra portions of noodles and other pasta were added to the already sumptuous dishes, since with men like Haarmin Vichtonen, the Finnish world champion, and Costa Popowitsch, his Bulgarian counterpart, or the Nameless One with the Black Mask, who always mysteriously and decisively made his appearance toward the end of the tournaments, it was not merely a matter of keeping up the muscle tone but of keeping up their weight as well; the very walls quaked when they entered the room. Outside the ring they were mild as lambs, at times quite timorous. Duday Ferencz — whose task it was as Hungarian world champion to play the savage Philistine in Rumania with no regard for fair play and so incense the Rumanian spectators to outbursts of scorn and hatred (in Hungary this lot fell to Radu Protopopescu, a Rumanian) — Duday Ferencz once complained that the public had stormed the box office and made off with the night’s take. In answer to our question as to why they, the mightiest men in the world, hadn’t intervened, they looked at one another wide-eyed and said simply, “But that might have led to violence.”

The wrestlers traveled a lot between their sojourns at Löwinger’s Rooming House and had a tale or two to tell; the mealtimes grew longer by the day. The students, whose families apparently feared their offspring would come to grief on their meager allowances in the big city, were bombarded with packages from home, from the contents of which the boys readily distributed what they were incapable of eating themselves. Rumania was a rich land in those days; sausage and ham, pastries and pies, flowed into the house in vast quantities. When the point came where the mere mention of food turned our stomachs, someone would invariably have the brainstorm: “Cherkunof’s starving!” meaning the poverty-stricken Russian sculptor upstairs.

Cherkunof was a rather unpleasant man who hardly ever deigned to show himself: some maintained this was because he had no shirt to his name, and indeed, if one did happen to run into him on the landing, he would clutch his threadbare jacket over his naked breast and mutter something that might as well have been an apology as a request to go to hell; even the Löwingers, who hadn’t received a penny in rent from him for years and allowed him to stay on out of sheer brotherly love, did everything they could to avoid him. Iolanthe had made attempts to draw him into the family circle but had been sent packing, although one vitriolic tongue at the dining-room table implied that Cherkunof’s reaction had been prompted not so much by the victuals she’d offered him as by the libidinous favors she’d expected in return: poor Iolanthe was no spring chicken, and she badly wanted a man. Be that as it may; after weeks of solitary confinement, during which he might well have died and been well into the process of decomposition for all the other Löwinger inhabitants could have cared, Cherkunof would suddenly find himself confronted with a string of well-wishers bearing whole salamis, liverwursts, apple strudel, and chocolate cake. Again, and perhaps understandably, his response was anything but thankful. With livid, hate-filled eyes he would stare first at the untimely offerings, then at their bearers, among whom, to top it all off, the rear end of the horse was prancing — a man whom Cherkunof as a White Russian loathed with all his being because of the man’s Bolshevik convictions.