Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Nor did he lie to others. He had indifferently left it up to his (present, third, Italian) wife to fathom why he regularly visited her almost ninety-four-year-old Russian great-aunt every Wednesday afternoon. It was not pure pleasure. For years now, she had been bedridden, surrounded by dusty, tattered, worn-out junk. She was shapelessly, inordinately fat, with a tiny turban on her bald head — the ephemeral crown on a pear-shaped face with enormous jowls, the eyes of a bloodhound puppy and the thin white mustache of an old Mandarin. And he did not care to picture what was wobbling under the ruff of her nightgown, what was running riot and to seed. Ninety-four-year-olds have a more indisputable commitment to their bodies than younger oldsters, whose decay often seems almost unethical; beyond the biblical age the body becomes sovereign — after all, we are then dealing with a corpse that has been virtually whisked away from death, with all the paraphernalia, the fermenting, flatulence, wetness, degeneracy; a corpse is an object of reverence even in its putrefaction … nevertheless, her corpse still very clearly put forward the demands of living matter: there was something mystical about the greed with which she grabbed the box of marrons glacés , tore open the wrapping, snatched out the kidney-shaped, sugar-frosted balls, stuffing one after another into the munching mouth under the Chinese mustache, claiming while she munched that she had never had much of a sweet tooth — something mystical, the feeding of a primordial toad. Then, she usually drowsed off. Less and less often did she tell him about St. Petersburg and Tiflis or Paris and London before the turn of the century. But this did occur now and again, and that was the reason he visited her: she too had lived half a dozen lives, some of them in grand brilliance — as a girl, at the court of the tsar; as the wife of a diplomat at posts in the capitals of the picture-book-happy world before the Great War; as an impoverished émigré in Paris of the twenties; as an ironical observer of Roman society before and after Mussolini. She presented him with the colorful plunder of her memories, with which he could then garnish his own memories more vividly, like someone adding an imaginative touch to his home with objects purchased at the flea market.

Thus the memory of his childhood, his adolescence in Rumania, his isolation in Berlin, his misery in the ice-rubble cities after 1945, gained new dimensions. His biography gained historical perspective. Each phase of his metamorphoses was enriched by anecdotes, descriptions, observations, ways of thinking, and turns of expression which this model White Russian bequeathed him. Thanks to her, his own life story became more complete, livelier, more credible, more true — the biography of a model White European, so to say: moth-eaten survivor of a bygone splendid world.

When, in depicting an Easter celebration in the Bukovina or a ball in Vienna of the thirties, he used some decorative detail that his (present, third, Italian) wife recognized as usurped, it did not matter when she broke in: “You got that from my Aunt Olga!” Why not? He had a rightful claim to such details, for they belonged truly to his world, a world he shared with Aunt Olga, a world that had sunk into oblivion anyway: Imperial Russia and the folkloric gaudiness of the shepherd of the Carpathians both had long since passed into the twilight of myth and fairy tale. So if he was describing an Easter festival in a village in the Carpathians a half century ago (which had created a much larger historical distance than several earlier full centuries), then it was proper if this description took in something of the gold of Resurrection Masses and the floweriness of the spring mood at Tsarskoye Selo; the Opernball in Vienna 1937 (the first and only one he had attended) resembled a rout in an English peer’s house in 1911 that Aunt Olga had described to him. Details were metaphors anyhow — on the one hand ermine, diadems, braided uniforms, on the other embroidered blouses and lambskins, crocuses and primroses. After all, his aim was not to color in the preciousness of his personal background but rather to enhance the hallowed mood of an exotic religious act; here in a chapel, there in a ballroom. He borrowed a little pigment for his palette and, shoulder-shrugging, ignored anyone who regarded this as sheer embellishment or even flim-flam. Such a reaction struck him as not only seriously philistine but also quite simply stupid.

And that was it. That was one more thing — among several — that he could not forgive his former, second, Jewish wife. Already the previous, first, East Prussian wife had soon discerned his habit of incorporating other people’s memories into his own when they were suitable and colorful enough; but she had held her tongue, just as she had held her tongue about everything, especially about her contempt for him: for she had loved him and been disappointed; and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, she had to keep his defects in mind. But the second, Jewish wife (whom he viewed as a mere intermezzo between the first, East Prussian, and the third, Italian wife: the marriage had not even lasted a year, had been entered into only because she was pregnant and refused to abort the chance product; two days before the delivery, they had finally gone to the justice of the peace, an utterly ridiculous, disgraceful act; then they had spent another four years fighting over the divorce and the unfortunate child) — his Jewish wife attacked him from the very start for his heedless outlook on biographical property, and she was so rabid about it that he was offended. At first, he could not understand the vehemence with which she championed authenticity, documentary truth for every autobiographical detail. (“Even at the expense of vividness?” he had once asked her ironically, and she had answered fanatically, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”) This trait of hers clashed with her passion for art, her fanatical devotion to art, any kind of art: she would tiptoe up to a Pollock drip painting as worshipfully as to Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s; she would listen to an atonal tone poem with her forehead lowered as devoutly as to a symphony of Beethoven’s; she would follow a play of Beckett’s with the same breathless suspense as a deadly performance of Schiller’s Wallenstein ; a poem of T. S. Eliot’s would throw her into the same ecstasies as the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake ; and in between, she devoured any number of novels, Grass as greedily as Canetti, Bellow as ardently as Muriel Spark. “You get drunk on the stuff the way other people get drunk on beer,” he would say, to bait her, and she promptly fell for it and gave him, the lowbrow, a lecture on the novel from La Princesse de Clèves to Robbe-Grillet; and he listened to the end in order to say, “You consume all this: it is your drogue. I invent myself in my own novels: that’s my way of escaping an unbearable reality. And as for what you tell me about the necessity of identifying with the hero or, more recently, the antihero, I manage to do that effortlessly: I am my own protagonist from the very start.”

He had loved her and been disappointed, and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, he had to keep her defects in mind: she was quite simply stupid. That was it. Beautiful and stupid. And a pseudointellectual in the bargain. He hated the Beckmesserish nitpicking, the fundamentalism, the blind obedience to rules in her “intellectual interests.” Needless to say, one of these interests was depth psychology; she had mastered its rules the way a convent schoolgirl learns catechism. Only her belief was more ardent, and never for a moment did she hesitate to form an everlasting judgment by means of the Freudian grid. He would not even listen to what she had to say about his loose relationship to “Truth”: “Leave me in peace. I’m my own best lunatic-keeper. And you can’t expect too much of me: a child of sleepwalkers — growing up in a dreamed world, sometimes nightmarish — I was predestined to lose every kind of reality by all the things that happened around me before and certainly during my lifetime; realities like the Viennese Opernball and Treblinka are incompatible with what you mean by ‘Truth’—they can only happen in a surrealistic dimension; you of all people ought to see that, as a Jew — but you are the most goyish Jew I know. Still, I’m not going to let you talk me into a psychosis like yours by abandoning my need for delusions and hallucinations about myself, even though that need is certainly libidinous in origin — I was a master masturbator before I met you to do the job — and marked by trauma, like meeting with idiots who believe in reality.”