Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

She drew herself up slowly till she was looking into my face. Then she took it in both her hands, as she had done when I first came to her flat, and kissed me. “You know, my darling Brommy,” she said, “that you are the dearest person on earth to me. I could never have felt closer to a brother, if I’d had one. You are a bastard, it’s true, but I am more fond of you than of anybody else. Just kiss me, once — and kiss me tenderly.” Her mouth was as beautiful as ever, and I could even feel more than the tenderness I would have felt for a sister. In that moment, it appeared to me that if she had not been a Jew, I could have loved her even in the same way, or perhaps more than, I loved the one I had lost. Still, I felt a twinge of bad conscience, as if I were being a traitor to my flag.

“All right,” she said. “That’s that. And now don’t be afraid that I’ll say yes to your kind offer. I couldn’t possibly marry you. Apart from the fact that it would hurt your parents and that you love somebody else — we could certainly get an immediate divorce, but that is not the point — I would not want to marry you, if you understand what I mean. Because of certain goyish qualities of your soul. But still, you are the dearest to me. Come, let’s see how the party is getting on.”

A few days later, she got her affidavit, and within a fortnight she had sold her things, even Professor Raubitschek’s carved-wood bookcases, and gone to London.

There I saw her once more, in the year 1947. God knows how she had found out where I was living — near Hamburg at that time. Anyway, I got a letter from her saying that she was all right, and married to a man — not a Jew, by the way — who had left Austria in 1938 and who was as sweet and decent as could be, a professor of philology and a great admirer of Karl Kraus. They were about to emigrate to America, and she would very much like to see me once more. She enclosed in the letter a ticket to London and all the papers necessary to get me, as a former Rumanian, a visa for Great Britain. I accepted all this more than gratefully. I was as penniless, as starved, as miserable as any displaced person could be in the rubble of Germany in early 1947. As she had known how — and where — to trace me, she must also have known that my father had fired his last shot into his temple when the Russians took the Bukovina in 1940, and that, two years later, my grandmother had died in Vienna. I had not had a chance to build up a life or settle in a place for all those years.

There was only one difficulty: I had no valid passport. But Minka had even thought of that. A friend who was with the British Military Government arranged to get me a travel document. It defined me as an “individual of doubtful nationality” but brought me to England, all right. Her husband fetched me at Victoria Station, took a closer look at me, and said, “Let us go to have lunch first. She doesn’t know that you are arriving today. I have not told her, in order not to excite her too much.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is there anything wrong with her?”

“That trouble with her hip seems to have affected her spine. She is in great pain, and you will have to be very patient with her.”

They lived in a nice house in Cadogan Square. Minka’s husband showed me in, fixed me a drink, and then called up the stairwell, “Oh, Minka, would you mind coming down? There is a friend of yours.” She came down the stairs, a middle-aged woman with gray hair, bent and torn by the atrocious pains of cancer of the bone. “Who is it?” she asked sharply. Then she saw me. “Brommy!” she said, and covered her face with her hands, her poor, tortured body shaken by her sobbing.

On the evening before their departure for America, all of our old friends who had managed to emigrate to Britain came to their house to bid them good-bye. Even though they had been told I would be there, they marveled at seeing me, as if I were a creature from another star. They could not stop asking about Vienna during the war, and how it had looked when I last saw it. They remembered things I had long since forgotten. Had Oskar survived? Oh, he had been hanged in Poland? Poor chap. And Guru Malik, the spiritualist I had told so many funny stories about? No! Had he really been dematerialized by a bomb? Great success, that one. Every one of the guests had brought me a gift, things I badly needed at that time — mostly secondhand clothes. And when, at the end of the evening, I had kissed Minka good-bye — forever, as we both knew — and had shaken hands with everybody, I went back to my hotel carrying two large suitcases full of old clothes that I hoped to sell in Hamburg like a handalé , to make enough money to follow Minka to America.

She died there a few months later.

“As if he were lost among the lotus eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland.…” What was this? Where did it come from? It had the rhapsodic intonation of memory, but he was not sure whether it was his memory, although grammatically it sounded as if it were: even his memories could no longer be narrated simply in the murmuring imperfect tense, they required the resolutely indicated “as if,” the subjunctive, the mood of possibility, in any case the shift into the indefinite; even if occurrences had occurred from occurrences, the chain of motifs reached so deep into the past, reached back to the beginning of recorded time, the dawn of history, the golden haze of myth where everything was open, any possibility. Only one thing was certain: time was passing, had passed even if occurrences had not assumed a visible shape, time had slipped, kept slipping through the grip of memory, a great, great deal of time — and he had lived from the fullness of days as if they were inexhaustible, he especially: for it was not just one life which, these days, formed and would go on forming (not for much longer, he told himself, perhaps for ten more years, at best fifteen), but a half dozen different lives, lived in different eras, in different countries, in different languages, among totally different people; his name had had a different ring, had been pronounced in different ways, his costume had changed with his tailors and barbers, with the fashion of his environment, people he had met frequently twenty years ago could not for the life of them recall having made his acquaintance, he certainly looked different at sixty from what he had looked like at forty, at twenty, a man with totally different characteristics: in the south, his gestures were livelier than they had been in the north, there he had smoked a pipe, here cigarillos, there he had drunk whiskey, here wine, there a woman’s shiny black hair had electrified him, here it was the fragrant mane of a blonde.…

to be sure, through all this, he had unshakably said “I” to himself, he had never felt any doubt as to his identity. He raised his eyebrows ironically whenever he heard or read the phrase that someone was “seeking his identity” like some lost or never possessed object that was rightfully his; it gave him a sardonic pleasure, when someone expressed perplexity or unfulfillment or disconnectedness, to ask that person in the broadest American accent, “You’re lookin’ for your lost iden’ity, aren’tcha?”—even though he himself could scarcely have indicated what constituted his own identity—:

what did this properly dressed, gray-haired man, walking along a deserted Via Veneto on a drizzly winter morning, with a large box of marrons glacés under his arm, on his way to pay his respects to a Russian great-aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife — a regular visit he had been paying once a week for years now — what did he have to do with the boy who, fifty years ago (half a century — and what a century!), had lain in the grass on a hilltop somewhere in the forest Carpathians, dreaming up a life in Jack London style: a prosperous farmer in East Africa, the bougainvillea around the farmhouse reaching into luxuriant plantations, the plantations into the Masai Plain, ostriches and vast zebra herds, thousands of antelope, sometimes the blacks running up to get the bwana with the unerring elephant rifle because a lion has broken into the ox kraal … such dreams were not at all extravagant or impossible back then; the reality they evoked truly existed, as late as yesterday even; today they are anachronistic, purely romantic, even as a mere boy you make a fool of yourself with such daydreams, you place yourself in the category of those who live in the golden haze of myth.…