Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

“Keep doing that carefully,” he said, “come back tomorrow for a massage, and we’ll show you a couple of exercises which will help as well. The doctor will want to see you too, so come without the Semitic caravan, if possible.”

Outside in the corridor my Semitic caravan welcomed me with unrestrained joy; all three Löwinger ladies had tears in their eyes, and Iolanthe threatened with a kiss.

“Be careful, for the love of God!” Mrs. Löwinger cried. Her mother took me by the hand and led me to a chair. “Slowly does it now, boy, take it easy, one step at a time.”

I felt like a peeled egg: “Like the baby in Philipp Otto Runge’s Morning ,” I said to Pepi Olschansky.

He smiled his perfidious smile. “Iolanthe will be only too glad to change your diapers,” he answered.

The rear end of the horse shook his wild gray revolutionary’s mane. “I trust for your sake that you regard the occasion as one of rebirth. With that shell of plaster, shake off the shackles of the useless and asocial life you’ve led till now, and apply your energy to a more worthy cause!”

This was not the immediate case. That night, after an evening of revelry and mirth at Löwinger’s table — the Greco-Romans showed me all manner of tricks and exercises to strengthen my atrophied muscles — I sat up with Pepi. “I feel weary and very content,” I said. “Why on earth shouldn’t I complete the pleasure and allow Iolanthe to rock me to sleep? She’s really eminently beddable and would certainly show her gratitude.”

Pepi reached across and selected a cigarette from my case. “The same thought has often crossed my mind,” he replied. “Generally speaking, I’ve nothing at all against Jewesses, but with Iolanthe it would somehow seem like a betrayal of one’s race and creed. I don’t understand why it should be so, but everyone here feels the same, even Cherkunof.”

“I think I know what you mean,” I said, in a flash of inspiration. “Committing a sin, like sleeping with one’s mother.”

He looked up in surprise, then laughed aloud. “You’re dead right, that’s it exactly. A strange thought, the taboo in a nutshell. Have you ever thought of writing?”

The thought was alien to me and I somewhat asininely asked, “Writing what?”

“Stories,” he said, “perhaps a novel, who knows? You’re extraordinarily observant.”

I laughed and right away dismissed it from my mind.

I was more preoccupied with another incident. One evening the conversation had — once again — turned to Mr. Löwinger’s amazing knack for any kind of game. Olschansky had expressed his doubts. I murmured to him, “Be careful! I’ve watched him winning money from sly old foxes in various coffeehouses.”

“Yes,” jeered Olschansky, “at dominoes, or tarot, or poker! But not at games of real skill.”

I myself had once tried to hold my own against Mr. Löwinger in morris, which had been a forte of mine in my boyhood. But here too I had lost miserably. Olschansky waved me off with a sneer. He insisted on challenging Mr. Löwinger to a game of chess.

“Now you watch out,” he muttered back at me. “At the military academy, I used to beat people who wound up on the general staff.” Nevertheless, he lost the match after a dozen moves. “One game doesn’t mean anything!” he cried, running his hand nervously through his hair. “Would you like to see who wins two out of three?”

“Gladly!” said Mr. Löwinger timidly, peering up at his women, who sat around him with immobile faces. We all formed a thick ring around the two opponents: they had long since stopped being players; a duel was being fought.

It was soon decided. Olschansky lost the second game within a bare quarter hour; insisted on playing the third one and lost it so fast that he leaped up, furiously knocking over the chess board, and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

“Not that I’m normally a poor loser,” he later told me. “But I couldn’t stand that nasty lurking and finally that triumph in the faces of those Jewish harpies. Did you see the way they sat there, to the left and the right of that little Yid? That unkempt crone, that lecherous Iolanthe, that screechy anemic bitch with that eternal bun in her oven, those witches, all three of them so greedy to see me humiliated that I couldn’t even think about any moves. I had to keep fighting the puke rising in me.”

“That’s known as psychological warfare, isn’t it?” I asked, a bit maliciously. “Didn’t they prepare you for that at military school?”

Olschansky ignored my baiting. “You know, I really believe they’re capable of certain kinds of witchcraft,” he said. “Being lucky in a game isn’t sheer chance. A man is lucky if he has a certain rapport with the world, the time, the place he’s playing in—”

“Yes, but not in chess,” I broke in. “A chess player, as the popular adage so nicely puts it, has the law of action in his hand!”

“What do you really have in your hand?” he said, passionately earnest. “You get to recognize that in war. During the first few years in Galicia, I saw a whole lot of Jews. You can experience all kinds of things with them.”

“What?” I asked. “Don’t keep me in suspense! Do they really slaughter Christian children to enrich their Passover matzos with protein?”

“No, but they believe in one God!” he blurted out, downright fanatically.

“So do my aunts,” I said. “One of them goes to Mass every morning.”

“It’s different, it’s different!” He was working himself up. “They’ve got their God in their blood. They can’t get rid of him ….” He suddenly threw up his hand as though to shoo a fly away from his nose. “But what nonsense I’m talking, don’t you think? Tell me about betting on horses. You say I can bet on win, place, and draw?”

I’m no longer sure whether this conversation took place before or after the Löwingers took in the new female lodger. It caused quite a stir when it was announced one evening that a young lady had moved into room number eight and would be joining us for meals. Mr. Löwinger, who in spite of his scrawniness had undeniable authority—“the dignity of a microbe” was Pepi’s definition — appealed to the male assembly in a few well-chosen words to exercise restraint in the lady’s presence, at least for the first few days: she was not only a pure country maid but a schoolteacher to boot.

The suspense that built up as we awaited her entrance became so great that even Cleopatra would have had her work cut out for her, and Miss Bianca Alvaro was no Queen of the Nile. She wasn’t exactly nondescript, not unsympathetic, but decidedly not winning either; neither pretty nor downright ugly, more on the small side than on the large, more blonde than brunette. Neither her name nor her physiognomy gave any clue as to where she came from. She might have been Jewish, but then again perhaps not. At a rough guess she was in her mid-twenties. She had been studying German language and literature at the University of Jena, and was preparing for a state examination in order to teach German at the local Gymnasium . “The only thing one can say about her with any certainty,” Pepi remarked, “is that she has luscious tits. She can try and flatten them as much as she pleases, but a connoisseur will spot them a mile off. They’re high-slung with a prominent sideways jut; the nipples probably tickle her armpits, a sure sign of quality. There’s not much more than a good handful apiece, but they’re as firm and juicy as young melons. One will be better able to judge in summer when she wears lighter dresses.”

Mr. Löwinger’s appeal proved unnecessary, as things turned out. Miss Alvaro’s mere presence sufficed to quell all appetite for discussing sex. The change in the tenor of our talk was so marked that one day when she excused herself and left the table earlier than usual, everyone else, including the three Löwinger ladies, remained seated as if by secret arrangement and simultaneously launched into a heated discussion. The first attempt to explain the phenomenon was offered by Iolanthe, and coming from her, in the form of a mournful sigh, it sounded overwhelming: “That’s the difference when you’re a lady,” she moaned, looked across to her mother for confirmation, realized what she’d said, and lowered her eyes in panic.