Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

“Thank you.”

“I wish I had a little more money, so I could buy you things you like. I have always longed for a little brother to spoil. What is your name?”

“Arnulf.”

“What?” she cried, with an outburst of her delightful laughter. “It can’t be true. Arnulf! Who ever thought of such a dreadful name?”

“My father,” I said, smiling against my will. “It comes from his mother’s family; they’re Bavarians. I think he thought it would oblige me to behave like a good knight.” I sighed. Yet I was very much amused myself.

“But you can’t possibly expect me to call you Arnulf,” she said.

“Well, I have a few more Christian names. I have about half a dozen. Other people I know have up to fifteen.”

“Don’t tell me. I expect your other names are even worse. No, I shall call you Brommy — that fits you very well.”

“Why, and how?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It simply fits you.”

“Did you have a pet dog with that name?”

“No. I don’t know where I got it from — there was an admiral, I think.”

“What have I to do with an admiral?”

“Lots. You are very much like a young cadet who will become an admiral someday. And you don’t want me to call you Wilhelm von Tegetthoff.”

I laughed. The totally illogical jump was typically Jewish. It sounded like one of the surrealistic jokes that were told in the Bukovina about the merry rabbis of the Hasidim and their shrewdly twisted logic. I could not help feeling very much at home with Minka.

“Now, come,” she said. “Be a good boy and let’s get some sleep.”

She did not send me away. She simply put her arms around me and curled close to me, and instantly fell into a deep and innocent sleep, smelling of well-groomed feminine hair and skin, good perfume, and a little whiskey. I lay for a while with open eyes, listening to the fading sounds of “Star Dust,” which was now mine, and thinking how funny it was that at the very moment you got mixed up with Jews you changed your name. Soon I, too, fell asleep, my arms around her.

I have often wondered since whether I had an affair with Minka. Whatever it was, it did not interfere in the slightest with her amorous life, and though it altered my life completely, there seemed not the faintest tie that would have given me the impression that I couldn’t do whatever I pleased. From that first morning — when I woke in her arms and watched her face, so fresh and well rested, and she opened her dark eyes and, with joyful laughter, said, “Now, who are you? Surely not the boy from downstairs?”—we were together day and night. “I am getting so accustomed to having him in my bed,” she would explain to her friends — among whom some were even a little more than friends. “Like a child with its teddy bear. He doesn’t kick or snore. He’s just sweet and appetizing.” And, turning to the nearest female in the circle, “If you really want a good night’s sleep, I’ll lend him to you.”

Of course, there were also moments when she said to me, “Listen, my dear Brommy, there is a certain gentleman who is arriving from Paris, so would you do me a great favor and go skiing with Bobby? He’s treating, so you needn’t spend your pocket money on that. And please don’t show up around here before next Friday.”

Bobby was her official lover — the fair, athletic chap who skied and played ice hockey and swam and rode horseback. We had become great friends. “You know, my boy,” he would explain to me, “if it were any other girl, you’d become jealous. But not with Minka. First, it would be pointless. Second, she wouldn’t let you. She makes it quite clear to you that it’s not you who possess her, it’s she who possesses you. Now, since she is not jealous of you, what right have you to be jealous of her? It’s as simple as that.”

There was no use trying to explain to him, or anybody else, that our relationship was, in fact, relatively — and even in great proportion — innocent. When Minka and I went to bed together, it was mainly to curl up in one another’s arms and fall asleep. It gave her comfort to have someone near. I have sometimes thought that it may have been an atavism or, let us say, a tradition that she had inherited, like the passion for hunting and shooting among our kind. After all, many of her ancestors must have slept six in one bed, like most of the poor Jews in Galicia and in the Bukovina. But certainly such an explanation would not have helped my grandmother or aunts to understand my affection for Minka; in their eyes it would have made things even worse. In fact, it was all rather scandalous, and I was afraid my father would hear about it — particularly as neither my grandmother nor my aunts gave the slightest sign of knowing what was going on. That they knew perfectly well I could detect from old Marie’s trembling resentment whenever I went up to Minka’s flat or came down from it, and the resentment increased when the hours I spent downstairs in my room became short intervals between the sojourns upstairs at Minka’s. I could only pray to God that the hatred of my mother’s relatives for my father would not allow them to give him the satisfaction of saying that it was not surprising I got involved with Jews while staying in their house. He had always warned my mother against her own family, and he would no doubt say that it was her fault for letting me go to Vienna, instead of — as he had wished — sending me to Graz, the capital of Styria, where there were fewer Jews.

There is an old saying that when you change your life you also change your ideas. This is not necessarily so. You can very well change your life and in the meantime send your ideas, so to speak, on a holiday. My life had changed entirely, and though I kept right on disliking Jews, I lived among them — for most of Minka’s friends were Jews — from then on. One of them, a monstrously fat and ugly yet highly amusing journalist from Prague, who regularly came to Vienna as a theater critic, gave me the password. Once, after a brief encounter with a well-known actor who was not a Jew and who had treated him with special friendliness, he turned toward me and said, “My mother used to say, ‘More than of an anti-Semite, my boy, beware of people who just love Jews.’” Right she was, I thought, laughing heartily. For disliking Jews was not something you could change. It was an inborn reaction that did not hinder you from even liking them in a certain way. I liked Minka tremendously, and if she hadn’t been a Jewess, I would have fallen madly in love with her and, in spite of my eighteen years (and to her utter amusement, I presume), probably have asked her to marry me. But even when she woke up in my arms and I in hers, after an innocent night’s sleep, there was a taboo that controlled my feelings and made everything even more delightful. I felt so free and unburdened with her. As she said, she liked having me around. She could not take me seriously as a lover. I was her toy, and everything was light and nice and uncomplicated. She could summon me and send me away whenever she wanted. I asked no questions, and she could tell me everything. We would both laugh at our particular adventures and misfortunes, share our joys, our money, our problems. Her girl friends were sweet and of a charming libertinage. I can’t remember a time in my life since when I have had such pleasures. She was the queen of a little kingdom that for a while became my universe, and I served her as a page. The day began with her morning bath and toilet, and I either came up to her flat for it or was already there, ready to wait on her. She was severe and not at all patient. Very soon I learned everything a young man can be taught about a lady’s boudoir. I accompanied her to her dressmaker, her hairdresser, her shopping, her brief luncheon at the Café Rebhuhn, where the artists and intellectuals who had chosen it for their headquarters were great friends of hers. She took me to museums, to concerts, to the theater, to dinner parties, and to the Heurigen —the tasting of the new wine in the vineyards of the nearby village of Grinzing. That little kingdom of hers, which became my universe, was composed of all that was best in Vienna in the early 1930s, the most intellectual and most amusing. Her friends came to her home as birds fly in and out of the foliage of a tree. Among them was Karl Kraus, who at that time was considered merely a satirist but whose life stands as an example of moral uprightness and courage which should be put before anyone who writes, in no matter what language. Thanks to Minka, I had, at the age of eighteen, the privilege of listening to his conversation and watching his face, lit up by the pale fire of his fanatic love for the miracle of the German language and by his holy hatred for those who used it badly. There was also a young man, not a Jew, who was a gifted musician. “Come on, Herbert,” Minka would say, “play something on the piano.” Many years later, I remembered that his name was von Karajan.