Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I turned around to her.

“It is very indiscreet of me,” she said, flushing slightly with embarrassment. “But I would very much like to find out — I mean, it would help me—”

“Please ask,” I said with a throbbing heart. I waited to see how she would ask if I had felt the same feelings as she in these past few days.

“Do you believe in anything?” she asked instead, and now looked me full in the face. “Do you believe in God or something of that sort?”

There we have it, I thought to myself. The crucial question. That’s all I needed!

But she wouldn’t even let me answer; she went right on: “It’s been constantly on my mind these past few days. All the aspects of this legacy must have made you aware of how deeply religious my uncle and aunt were and how strongly the bond between them was forged by their religious feelings. And I cannot help wondering whether my aunt, who denied the faith she was born to and brought up in — our family was extremely Orthodox; it was the only thing that gave them a sense of self and a motive for their existence, an identity and, even more, a raison d’être —I cannot help wondering whether my aunt really forgot all that and traded it for something else. How could she have given herself over to a different faith with the same ardor?”

“Isn’t that possible only if you have faith in the first place?” I retorted — partly because I noticed that she was less interested in a response from me than in speaking her own mind, partly because I could thereby avoid answering, which would have been difficult for me. “Besides, she did it out of love,” I added clumsily.

“Yes, of course, of course,” said Miss Alvaro, almost irritated, as though not to be diverted. “That is what they try to comfort us with when true faith begins to dissolve. The fragments of the old, strict commandments float about in a whey of general love feelings — that’s a condition in which I, too, was led into temptation. Love as a basic religious feeling and as the highest ethical value to strive for — these are Enlightenment notions. I wonder whether I am naïve enough for that — no, whether I am not already too enlightened. Perhaps you’re right, and my aunt succeeded in getting at the very essence of faith — and that is not the tidings of love! — simply because she believed. But I believed too. I was eight when I was torn from my Jewish milieu and thrust into the Armenian convent. At eight one is truly God-fearing — I mean, in a fundamentalist way. Nevertheless, I was more than ready and willing to find my God in the new Word that was proclaimed to me. After all, it was taken from the Old Text and enriched by the Gospels — expanded by the dimension of love. And, listen — I have to say something dreadful now. Precisely because I often felt that dimension of love to the point of ecstasy when I was eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve — the grand, universal love for God’s creation and all creatures therein, for mankind and every individual — that was the very reason why I learned that this was the decisive step to the dissolution of faith. I understood why the Jews crucified Jesus — do you grasp what I mean?”

She gazed at me almost in despair: “You must not think that faith is taught with any less fundamentalism in an Armenian convent than in a yeshiva. My schoolmates took every litany verbatim. They had an almost physical need for all the religious exercises — from matins to evensong and finally the prayers at bedtime. But none of this had anything to do with faith. They were marionettes on the strings of their rite. And whenever they truly believed that they believed, they stumbled once again into the lukewarm liquid of love, divine love, brotherly love, the love for God’s creatures, for the universe — the love for everything and anything. And at that point,” said Miss Alvaro with a dismal smile, “the strength of my faith dissolved. At least, that was how it happened to me.”

“And what would have become of your relatives without love?” I asked tactlessly.

“Oh, please don’t misunderstand. My aunt’s love was a Jewish love; selfish, jealous, wrathful, greedy, not stopping at anything — not even evil, not even denial, deceit, lies. In that way, she remained unalterably Jewish — far more than I ….” She had paled, and seemed embarrassed again. “I’m probably still Jewish only insofar as I long for my God, whom I seek like Jacob, after wrestling with his angels. It’s useless. I know that he does not exist, my God — or at least no longer exists for me — the severe, demanding, wrathful, greedy, and jealous God. The God of love may exist. He is an earthly God — an idol, to use another word. But He, the severe God of the Commandments, He no longer exists.”

“Doesn’t what we’ve found in your relatives’ things prove that he can be resurrected by love?”

All the blood shot back into her face. She vehemently shook her head. For the first time, I saw how rich and fine her hair was. “We didn’t just find devotional pictures, did we?” she said, staring right into my eyes. “I know it sounds paradoxical, but the love of my kinfolk would soon have become squalid without their bigotry. Their piety prohibited them from interpreting the tidings of salvation through love as if sexuality were the great, venerable motor of creation and thus the crown of all beauty. Were it not for their piety, they would have joined the followers of Saint D. H. Lawrence, if you get what I mean by that: stigmatized barbarians. But their religion demanded that they view sexual love as something ugly, despicable, something to be concealed — in short, as something sinful. If you remember that, dear friend, then this happy union of what cannot be unified acquires a macabre touch.” Her shoulders drooped. “That’s exactly what disheartens me so.”

“Then you still believe in your severe God of shalts and shalt nots!” I cried in foolish triumph. “He just happens to be named Jehovah!”

“No,” she said with no trace of bombast. “I believe in the devil.”

“You can’t believe in the devil without believing in God.”

“Yes,” she then said, half turning from me. “I know. That’s logical. And if I were occasionally overcome by poetic impulses, like Nietzsche, I would reply, ‘But God has grown old and no longer has the strength to stand firm against the devil.’ But I’m afraid even the devil has grown senile — or is banality his last and most dangerous disguise?” She shrugged her shoulders and turned away.

She was packing a bag with things she’d decided to keep. I had persuaded her to take a large writing case in red, gold-embossed leather with an Armenian inscription we’d been unable to decipher. She looked up and handed it to me: “I should like you to accept it as a souvenir and a modest token of my gratitude,” she said simply.

I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, sensed her start and draw back. I took her hand, bent and kissed it also. Her lips were trembling. She quickly turned away and closed her bag.

When I got back to Löwinger’s, I lay down on the sofa in my room and was filled with the realization that nothing had changed since my days on the roof above the Biserică Albă; I was in the same melancholic state I’d been in then. The release from the plaster cast hadn’t meant rebirth after all; I was being born back into my old wayward self again. There appeared to be no way out, only a flight forward, through enemy lines, the same route Miss Alvaro’s aunt had taken to escape the specters of the past: making myths of them.

Olschansky knocked and opened my door before I could open my mouth. As he reached for my cigarettes, he noticed the writing case on my desk. “A trophy?” he asked, with his perfidious grin.