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  For Georges Canetti

  1911–1971

  Part One

  RUSCHUK

  1905–1911

  My Earliest Memory

  My earliest memory is dipped in red. I come out of a door on the arm of a maid, the floor in front of me is red, and to the left a staircase goes down, equally red. Across from us, at the same height, a door opens, and a smiling man steps forth, walking towards me in a friendly way. He steps right up close to me, halts, and says: “Show me your tongue.” I stick out my tongue, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a jackknife, opens it, and brings the blade all the way to my tongue. He says: “Now we’ll cut off his tongue.” I don’t dare pull back my tongue, he comes closer and closer, the blade will touch me any second. In the last moment, he pulls back the knife, saying: “Not today, tomorrow.” He snaps the knife shut again and puts it back in his pocket.

  Every morning, we step out of the door and into the red hallway, the door opens, and the smiling man appears. I know what he’s going to say and I wait for the command to show my tongue. I know he’s going to cut it off, and I get more and more scared each time. That’s how the day starts, and it happens very often.

  * * *

  I kept it to myself and asked my mother about it only much later. She could tell by the ubiquitous red that it was the guesthouse in Carlsbad, where she had spent the summer of 1907 with my father and me. To take care of the two-year-old baby, she had brought along a nanny from Bulgaria, a girl who wasn’t even fifteen. Every morning at the crack of dawn, the girl went out holding the child on her arm; she spoke only Bulgarian, but got along fine in the lively town, and was always back punctually with the child. Once, she was seen on the street with an unknown young man, she couldn’t say anything about him, a chance acquaintance. A few weeks later, it turned out that the young man lived in the room right across from us, on the other side of the corridor. At night, the girl sometimes went to his room quickly. My parents felt responsible for her and sent her back to Bulgaria immediately.

  Both of them, the maid and the young man, had always left the house very early in the morning, that’s how they must have met, that’s the way it must have started. The threat with the knife worked, the child quite literally held his tongue for ten years.

  Family Pride

  Ruschuk, on the lower Danube, where I came into the world, was a marvelous city for a child, and if I say that Ruschuk is in Bulgaria, then I am giving an inadequate picture of it. For people of the most varied backgrounds lived there, on any one day you could hear seven or eight languages. Aside from the Bulgarians, who often came from the countryside, there were many Turks, who lived in their own neighborhood, and next to it was the neighborhood of the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews—our neighborhood. There were Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Gypsies. From the opposite side of the Danube came Rumanians; my wetnurse, whom I no longer remember, was Rumanian. There were also Russians here and there.

  As a child, I had no real grasp of this variety, but I never stopped feeling its effects. Some people have stuck in my memory only because they belonged to a particular ethnic group and wore a different costume from the others. Among the servants that we had in our home during the course of six years, there was once a Circassian and later on an Armenian. My mother’s best friend was Olga, a Russian woman. Once every week, Gypsies came into our courtyard, so many that they seemed like an entire nation; the terrors they struck in me will be discussed below.

  Ruschuk was an old port on the Danube, which made it fairly significant. As a port, it had attracted people from all over, and the Danube was a constant topic of discussion. There were stories about the extraordinary years when the Danube froze over; about sleigh rides all the way across the ice to Rumania; aboqt starving wolves at the heels of the sleigh horses.

  Wolves were the first wild animals I heard about. In the fairy tales that the Bulgarian peasant girls told me, there were werewolves, and one night, my father terrorized me with a wolf mask on his face.

  It would be hard to give a full picture of the colorful time of those early years in Ruschuk, the passions and the terrors. Anything I subsequently experienced had already happened in Ruschuk. There, the rest of the world was known as “Europe,” and if someone sailed up the Danube to Vienna, people said he was going to Europe. Europe began where the Turkish Empire had once ended. Most of the Sephardim were still Turkish subjects. Life had always been good for them under the Turks, better than for the Christian Slavs in the Balkans. But since many Sephardim were well-to-do merchants, the new Bulgarian regime maintained good relations with them, and King Ferdinand, who ruled for a long time, was said to be a friend of the Jews.

  The loyalties of the Sephardim were fairly complicated. They were pious Jews, for whom the life of their religious community was rather important. But they considered themselves a special brand of Jews, and that was because of their Spanish background. Through the centuries since their expulsion from Spain, the Spanish they spoke with one another had changed little. A few Turkish words had been absorbed, but they were recognizable as Turkish, and there were nearly always Spanish words for them. The first children’s songs I heard were Spanish, I heard old Spanish romances; but the thing that was most powerful, and irresistible for a child, was a Spanish attitude. With naive arrogance, the Sephardim looked down on other Jews; a word always charged with scorn was Todesco, meaning a German or Ashkenazi Jew. It would have been unthinkable to marry a Todesca, a Jewish woman of that background, and among the many families that I heard about or knew as a child in Ruschuk, I cannot recall a single case of such a mixed marriage. I wasn’t even six years old when my grandfather warned me against such a misalliance in the future. But this general discrimination wasn’t all. Among the Sephardim themselves, there were the “good families,” which meant the ones that had been rich since way back. The proudest words one could hear about a person were: “Es de buena famiglia—he’s from a good family.” How often and ad nauseam did I hear that from my mother. When she enthused about the Viennese Burgtheater and read Shakespeare with me, even later on, when she spoke about Strindberg, who became her favorite author, she had no scruples whatsoever about telling that she came from a good family, there was no better family around. Although the literatures of the civilized languages she knew became the true substance of her life, she never felt any contradiction between this passionate universality and the haughty family pride that she never stopped nourishing.

  Even back in the period when I was utterly her thrall (she opened all the doors of the intellect for me, and I followed her, blind and enthusiastic), I nevertheless noticed this contradiction, which tormented and bewildered me, and in countless conversations during that time of my adolescence I discussed the matter with her and reproached her, but it didn’t make the slightest impression. Her pride had found its channels at an early point, moving through them steadfastly; but while I was still quite
young, that narrowmindedness, which I never understood in her, biased me against any arrogance of background. I cannot take people seriously if they have any sort of caste pride, I regard them as exotic but rather ludicrous animals. I catch myself having reverse prejudices against people who plume themselves on their lofty origin. The few times that I was friendly with aristocrats, I had to overlook their talking about it, and had they sensed what efforts this cost me, they would have forgone my friendship. All prejudices are caused by other prejudices, and the most frequent are those deriving from their opposites.

  Furthermore, the caste in which my mother ranked herself was a caste of Spanish descent and also of money. In my family, and especially in hers, I saw what money does to people. I felt that those who were most willingly devoted to money were the worst. I got to know all the shades, from money-grubbing to paranoia. I saw brothers whose greed had led them to destroy one another in years of litigation, and who kept on litigating when there was no money left. They came from the same “good” family that my mother was so proud of. She witnessed all those things too, we often spoke about it. Her mind was penetrating; her knowledge of human nature had been schooled in the great works of world literature as well as in the experiences of her own life. She recognized the motives of the lunatic self-butchery her family was involved in; she could easily have penned a novel about it; but her pride in this same family remained unshaken. Had it been love, I could have readily understood it. But she didn’t even love many of the protagonists, she was indignant at some, she had scorn for others, yet for the family as a whole, she felt nothing but pride.

  Much later, I came to realize that I, translated to the greater dimensions of mankind, am exactly as she was. I have spent the best part of my life figuring out the wiles of man as he appears in the historical civilizations. I have examined and analyzed power as ruthlessly as my mother her family’s litigations. There is almost nothing bad that I couldn’t say about humans and humankind. And yet my pride in them is so great that there is only one thing I really hate: their enemy, death.

  Kako la Gallinica Wolves and Werewolves

  An eager and yet tender word that I often heard was la butica. That was what they called the store, the business, where my grandfather and his sons usually spent the day. I was rarely taken there because I was too little. The store was located on a steep road running from the height of the wealthier districts of Ruschuk straight down to the harbor. All the major stores were on this street; my grandfather’s butica was in a three-story building that struck me as high and stately because the residential houses up on the rise had only one story. The butica dealt in wholesale groceries, it was a roomy place and it smelled wonderful. Huge, open sacks stood on the floor, containing various kinds of cereals, there was millet, barley, and rice. If my hands were clean, I was allowed to reach into the sacks and touch the grains. That was a pleasant sensation, I filled my hand, lifted it up, smelled the grains, and let them slowly run back down again; I did this often, and though there were many other strange things in the store, I liked doing that best, and it was hard to get me away from the sacks. There was tea and coffee and especially chocolate. There were huge quantities of everything, and it was always beautifully packed, it wasn’t sold in small amounts as in ordinary shops. I also especially liked the open sacks on the floor because they weren’t too high for me and because when I reached in, I could feel the many grains, which meant so much to me.

  Most of the things in the store were edible, but not all. There were matches, soaps, and candles. There were also knives, scissors, whetstones, sickles, and scythes. The peasants who came from the villages to shop used to stand in front of the instruments for a long time, testing the keenness with their fingers. I watched them, curious and a bit fearful; I was not allowed to touch the blades. Once, a peasant, who was probably amused by my face, took hold of my thumb, put it next to his, and showed me how hard his skin was. But I never received a gift of chocolate; my grandfather, who sat in an office in the back, ruled with an iron hand, and everything was wholesale. At home, he showed me his love because I had his full name, even his first name. But he didn’t much care to see me in the store, and I wasn’t allowed to stay long. When he gave an order, the employee who got the order dashed off, and sometimes an employee would leave the butica with packages. My favorite was a skinny, poorly dressed, middle-aged man, who always smiled absently. He had indefinite movements and jumped when my grandfather said anything. He appeared to be dreaming and was altogether different from the other people I saw in the store. He always had a friendly word for me; he spoke so vaguely that I could never understand him, but I sensed that he was well disposed towards me. His name was Chelebon, and since he was a poor and hopelessly incapable relative, my grandfather hired him out of pity. My grandfather always called to Chelebon as if he were a servant; that was how I remembered him, and I found out only much later that he was a brother of my grandfather’s.

  * * *

  The street running past the huge gate of our courtyard was dusty and drowsy. If it rained hard, the street turned into mud, and the droshkeys left deep tracks. I wasn’t allowed to play in the street, there was more than enough room in our big courtyard, and it was safe. But sometimes I heard a violent clucking from outside, it would get louder and louder and more excited. Then, before long, a man in black, tattered clothes, clucking and trembling in fear, would burst through the gate, fleeing the street children. They were all after him, shouting “Kako! Kako!” and clucking like hens. He was afraid of chickens, and that was why they harrassed him. He was a few steps ahead of them and, right before my eyes, he changed into a hen. He clucked violently, but in desperate fear, and made fluttering motions with his arms. He breathlessly dashed up the steps to my grandfather’s house, but never dared to enter; he jumped down on the other side and remained lying motionless. The children halted at the gate, clucking, they weren’t allowed into the courtyard. When he lay there as if dead, they were a bit scared and ran away. But then they promptly launched into their victory chant: “Kako la gallinica! Kako la gallinica!—Kako the chicken! Kako the chicken!” No sooner were they out of earshot than he got to his feet, felt himself all over, peered about cautiously, listened anxiously for a while, and then stole out of the courtyard, hunched, but utterly silent. Now he was no longer a chicken, he didn’t flutter or cluck, and he was once again the exhausted neighborhood idiot.

  Sometimes, if the children were lurking not too far away in the street, the sinister game started all over again. Usually, it moved to another street, and I couldn’t see anything more. Maybe I felt sorry for Kako, I was always scared when he jumped, but what I couldn’t get enough of, what I always watched in the same excitement, was his metamorphosis into a gigantic black hen. I couldn’t understand why the children ran after him, and when he lay motionless on the ground after his leap, I was afraid he would never get up again and turn into a chicken again.

  The Danube is very wide in its Bulgarian lower reaches. Giurgiu, the city on the other bank, was Rumanian. From there, I was told, my wetnurse came, my wetnurse, who fed me her milk. She had supposedly been a strong, healthy peasant woman and also nursed her own baby, whom she brought along. I always heard her praises, and even though I can’t remember her, the word “Rumanian” has always had a warm sound for me because of her.

  In rare winters, the Danube froze over, and people told exciting stories about it. In her youth, Mother had often ridden a sleigh all the way over to Rumania, she showed me the warm furs she had been bundled in. When it was very cold, wolves came down from the mountains and ravenously pounced on the horses in front of the sleighs. The coachman tried to drive them away with his whip, but it was useless, and someone had to fire at them. Once, during such a sleigh ride, it turned out that they hadn’t taken anything to shoot with. An armed Circassian, who lived in the house as a servant, was supposed to come along, but he had been gone, and the coachman had started without him. They had a terrible time keeping the wolves at bay
and were in great danger. If a sleigh with two men hadn’t happened to come along from the opposite direction, things might have ended very badly, but the two men shot and killed one wolf and drove the others away. My mother had been terribly afraid; she described the red tongues of the wolves, which had come so close that she still dreamt about them in later years.

  I often begged her to tell me this story, and she enjoyed telling it to me. Thus wolves became the first wild beasts to fill my imagination. My terror of them was nourished by the fairy tales I heard from the Bulgarian peasant girls. Five or six of them always lived in our home. They were quite young, perhaps ten or twelve years old, and had been brought by their families from the villages to the city, where they were hired out as serving maids in middle-class homes. They ran around barefoot in the house and were always in a high mettle; they didn’t have much to do, they did everything together, and they became my earliest playmates.

  In the evening, when my parents went out, I stayed at home with the girls. Low Turkish divans ran all the way along the walls of the huge living room. Aside from the carpets everywhere and a few small tables, they were the only constant furnishing that I can remember in that room. When it grew dark, the girls got scared. We all huddled together on one of the divans, right by the window; they took me into their midst, and now they began their stories about werewolves and vampires. No sooner was one story finished than they began the next; it was scary, and yet, squeezing against the girls on all sides, I felt good. We were so frightened that no one dared to stand up, and when my parents came home, they found us all wobbling in a heap.