Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

His bile was in proportion to his disappointment, for he had loved her very much; there had been moments when he had knelt before her, for instance, when she told him about how she had been forced to hide during the war; this had not been possible in her small Thuringian home town, everyone knew her there, knew her background, her parents were already running around with the yellow star; and she would not have succeeded in going underground in one of the bigger cities, even if she had managed to cope with the problems of police registration and the necessary food-rationing card: she was too striking, too beautiful — people turned around to look at her in the street: she was splendidly tall and voluptuous, dazzling in the freedom of her laughter, in the radiance of her gray eyes, in the lush fall of her rust-red curls … wheedling a doctor to certify her as tubercular, she withdrew to a tiny sanatorium high up in the Allgäu mountains, the head doctor was in on the secret, for a few weeks she could rest from her pillar-to-post dashing from hideout to hideout — but only for a few weeks: one morning, she looked out of the window and saw a city of tents in the meadow, it was teeming with SS men, who had pitched camp there … panicking, she dashed down a back stairway, hoping to flee through the kitchen and the service entrance into the open, out to the forest, the mountains — but she was caught by a giant in a black uniform, the Kommandant of the echelon, he clutched her hand in an iron grip, pulled her out to his men, ordered them to fall in in a square, had a table placed in the center, lifted her upon it, and shouted, “Men. So you can see what a German girl should look like!”

he had worshiped her when she told him this — at such moments, he was ready to make any sacrifice for her. He understood how important it was to her for him to be “genuine” and “true.” But was what she meant indeed the truth of such reality?

When she finally overcame her resistance to marrying him (for the sake of the child whom she had not had the courage to abort), she had instantly done a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn: had expected the utmost spiritual rapport from their marriage, a total mutual devotion, an exclusive, unconditional dedication on both sides; the least misunder-standing, perhaps due simply to hearing something wrong, the slightest divergence in opinion, whether about the moral justification of the United States in the Korean War or the choice of curtain material, brought pain to her eyes as though he had hit her; once, she wept an entire day because he had failed to switch on the same evening radio concert when they were separated for two days—“But you promised me, and I thought of you at every note, I believed I could feel what you were feeling ….”—she set store by being able to trust him blindly, by relying on him no matter what; after what she had gone through during the twelve horrible years of her youth, now she could settle only for the absolute.

Naturally, she had had an affair with the SS man who had presented her to his men as the very model of a German girl, and when she then confessed to him that she was Jewish, he was crushed. He said he could not spend another minute with her, he must never see her again, never think of her again. His honor was troth, he had sworn total loyalty to his Führer, to his flag, to the Third Reich, allegiance to his Faith in the Purity of the German Race — it was his obvious duty to report her to the authorities, he said, but he could not, because of his hapless love for her — the tragedy, the catastrophe of this love — he writhed under it as under a disastrous stroke of fate, as under a curse. He might overlook the fact that his flesh could be so mistaken as to desire her, a Jewess, but that he had to love her, “genuinely and truly,” that he had to see her as “his female counterpart,” that he was “in spiritual bondage” to her — this drove him to despair. He drew the inevitable conclusion: volunteering for the front that very day, he hurled himself into the thick of battle and was dead within a few hours — but he had saved her life, obtaining papers for her, food, a secure hiding-place ….

The gray-haired man with the large box of marrons glacés under his arm (a box whose contents would suffice to kill a horse, if the horse tried to consume them at one swoop, not to mention a ninety-four-year-old woman) pulls up his coat collar: it is drizzling, he has no hat, headgear never suits him, under hats, caps, hoods, his face looks oddly asexual, his masculinity must be located in his forehead and in the short-cropped iron-gray hair above it, his mouth is effeminately soft with his mustache removed, even though the not-all-too-full lips have narrowed over the years. He knows it: it’s the mouth of an old crone. Not a pleasant face, he has to tell himself, even though he has been told there is a great deal of charm, a great seductiveness in the way he speaks, in his liveliness, alertness, and even at times lascivious malice—“your goddamned charm,” as his second, Jewish wife used to say, “your abominable, disreputable charm” …

yes, but behind this disreputable charm, which sometimes strikes even him as abominable, he sees an often astonishing naïveté—more distinct (because of the contrast) in the mustachioed lothario who sat here twenty years ago on the Via Veneto, elegant in the by no means unintended, not unflirtatiously selected, unconventional, vacationlike casualness of his clothing (as though the blue Mediterranean lay right behind the walls of papal Rome; as though the palms of Hammamet were growing right there), to all appearances blasé and urbane, a man who wasn’t born yesterday, who can do anything, and who throughout his checkered career has pretty much learned all the tricks of the trade — and yet a childlike, round-eyed believer in miracles like the one that you could change the world by filmmaking ….

that’s how he sees himself here, among all sorts of whores and pimps: ready to transfigure the surrounding world for himself, redreaming it into the world that was promised him in earlier stages of his existence — although promised only in his dreams, promised only as an eternal wish. Nevertheless he never tires of reinventing it for himself; he sits here, knowing he is surrounded by nothing but different varieties of prostitution: the straightforward, unadulterated prostitution of female flesh, of boys’ flesh, intellectual prostitution, the prostitution of talent, of ambition, of faith, of enthusiasm — he sees all this accurately, he has no delusions about it. In this respect, he only knows he will draw his nourishment from the wealth of images which he takes in like a whale taking in plankton, the pigment with which he can transfigure Rome—

for he is prepared to love this city, he has sought it out as a final refuge, as the last colorful nook in a leukemic Europe. All through his life he had felt alive only to the extent that the world around him seemed alive. And Rome in its ancient decay appears alive as a compost heap. This is the only legacy he has for his son, and he is determined to will it to him. The unhappy little bastard should at least become a European. In other respects, the boy resembles his father only in a shadowy, ghostly way. Then at least in this one respect there is to be semantic harmony. He is prepared to fight all the more energetically for this random son (still and all his only son!), now that the divorce has been granted and the child awarded to her. He wants to use any legal and, if necessary, illegal means to get him here, to Rome, into his custody. He even considers kidnapping him if all else fails—

for he wants to defend the child against her, against her restlessness, her insecurity and stupid insistence on the absolute, her (as he puts it, “not always housebroken”) fanaticism. Once, when they were making a halfway peaceful attempt to agree on the boy’s upbringing, she screamed at him, “I’m the mother!” and he himself lost his composure and screamed back, “That’s precisely the kind of lie I want to protect him from!”—whereupon, disarmed by her incomprehension, thrown back on his irony, he shrugged and turned away while she hurled back at him with a sonorous theatrical laugh and thespian gestures, “You?! You?! …”