The turmoil stopped almost at once. Then a resounding clap drove the gang apart. Haller, the blacksmith, was coming from the brewery on his way home for lunch. When he merely struck his horny hands together, it sounded like gunshots. The street was instantly empty. Haller gave me an encouraging nod and went on. Only the red-headed boy remained. He had my dachshund in his arm. Max tenderly wagged his tail, trying to lick the boy’s face. “Just look at the cute little puppy!” said the boy, scratching Max’s creased forehead.
I was about to say, “He’s a miserable coward!” But I did not care to denigrate my dog in front of the Jewish scamp. I said, “He’s still too young to be fierce.”
“Because he didn’t wanna face odds of ten to one?” asked the red-headed boy. “He’d have to be as dumb as a goy — as you, maybe.” He curled his upper lip, and his tongue tested the solidity of his front teeth. He looked even more fire-dazzled than before. “I think you knocked a tooth loose,” he said. “If it falls out, you’ll have to pay for a new one in gold. They don’t grow back twice!”
“Put the dog down,” I said. “He’s not supposed to become a lapdog.”
He gently placed the dachshund on the ground, but Max jumped up again, demanding to be petted some more. The boy fondled Max’s head. “Well, what is he supposed to become?”
“A hunting dog.”
“To hunt what? Butterflies?”
“Sure, butterflies,” I said. “I could show you what he’s already caught.” I was thinking of the glass-covered case in the tower with the collection of extraordinarily beautiful tropical butterflies.
“Why don’t you?” he asked. “Are you afraid I’ll bring lice into your home? I am the son of Dr. Goldmann.” He pointed at the neo-Gothic villa. “You can come to my house even if your butterfly hunter has fleas.”
This was the start of a friendship that unfortunately was not to last very long; but it made that summer, in which so much happened, unforgettable in many ways.
First, I had to decide whether I should take the liberty of bringing Dr. Goldmann’s son into my relatives’ house. The problem was not so much that he was Jewish, but rather the social gap that separated Uncle Hubi and Aunt Sophie from the other residents of the village. I had particularly sensed their distinct reserve toward Dr. Goldmann. Normally, landowners were on friendly terms with the local physician: Uncle Hubi and Aunt Sophie did send their servants and employees to consult Dr. Goldmann about more serious illnesses, but in lighter cases, they tried to get along without him. Aunt Sophie treated these lighter cases herself, with advice from the local apothecary, a Pole, by whom she set great store. But Aunt Sophie and Uncle Hubi would not let Dr. Goldmann tend themselves, and their ironical way of presenting his house as a curiosity to new visitors indicated that there was some special reason for keeping their distance.
Whatever this reason might be or have been, I could tell myself that my kinfolk would have long since entered into social intercourse with Dr. Goldmann had they attached any importance to it. As for using my own discretion to interfere with such abeyant relationships, I knew the social structure of our provincial world was too delicate for that.
For example, I had once heard Stiassny say something that I took literally and no doubt more seriously than he might have meant it: another guest had remarked that Uncle Hubi, who had after all attended a university and finished his studies (albeit without gaining a degree), ought to be considered an academic; to which Stiassny had said, “It is part of the national tragedy of the Germans that their elite is divided into so-called academics and so-called intellectuals.” It was clear that these were two hostile camps. Uncle Hubi had confirmed this himself when, flying into a passion at Stiassny, he exclaimed, “What annoys me most about these intellectuals is that they never come right out and say what they mean. It’s like the artillery: they never aim directly at what they want to hit but instead aim somewhere else so that they’ll hit the place they think they should. Just like Jews.” And Aunt Sophie, as usual endorsing and interpreting what Uncle Hubert said, added (although Stiassny was her declared protégé), “Well, of course Hubi doesn’t mean that all artillerists in the war were Jews, though if a Jew didn’t find refuge in the medical service or the war office, he probably was in the artillery. But Hubi is right: you have to watch what Stiassny means when he carries on like that. And yet he’s good-natured and also very poor.”
In any event, the heroes and warriors of the tower, Uncle Hubi’s good friends from the great hunting days, were indubitably of a different stripe. They had a respectful but decisive reserve even toward academics who were, they said, “professionally trained people such as physicians and lawyers and similar cerebral workers who are forced to live on the fruits of their thinking, not men who just playfully ventured into the boundless realms of knowledge,” by which they meant amateurs like Uncle Hubi. And if someone was not only wildly different because an intellectual but on top of it also a Jew — and this was not rarely the case — then bridging the social gap was beyond all possibility. It was an established fact that Dr. Goldmann was a Jew and an intellectual. It even turned out that he maintained a lively intellectual exchange with Stiassny.
Nevertheless, I was bold enough to tell myself that the tower had been assigned to me as virtually unassailable digs, where I could entertain whomever I wished. So I told Dr. Goldmann’s red-headed son that he could come and look at the butterfly collection. “By the way, what’s your name?” I asked him.
He was called Wolf. My reaction to this name was mixed. On the one hand, I was glad that my new friend had a name that did not have to be embarrassing, like Moishe or Yossel. On the other hand, it did not strike me as quite proper for his name to be like that of a knight in a German heroic saga. He did, however, explain to me that Wolf was a rather common name among Orthodox Jews; his father’s name was Bear. Bear Goldmann … I had to laugh. What was my name? my new friend Wolf asked. I had to admit that I was called Bubi. He began to giggle, as stupidly as the chambermaid Florica had giggled when she first saw me in my getup. “If you had a sister, would her name be Girlie?” Probably, I had to admit. “And your parents would be Manny and Wifey?” It took him a while to regain his composure.
He had a similar reaction to the tower when I proudly led him into it. “Why is this a tower?” he asked on the steps. And when we were upstairs: “This is a tower? Lemme show you a real tower.” He pointed out the window, where the merloned roof of Dr. Goldmann’s villa could be seen above the treetops. And, indeed, a beflagged turret loomed up. I had to admit to myself that I had often gazed at it, fretting at how much better the romanticism of that neo-Gothic house matched my German mood than the garret that had aroused it.
“Is your room in the tower?” I asked a bit apologetically.
“I’m gonna be dumb enough to shlep up the stairs?” Wolf retorted. “What do you think I am? A goy?”
It embittered me that he used the Yiddish word for “Gentile” to designate clumsy stupidity per se. I told myself it was probably normal usage in his world, and I was glad he felt relaxed enough with me to speak as though he were among his own. If he wanted to, he could speak proper German very well (he was attending school in Vienna), but he spoke it like something carefully rehearsed. He used his mixture of bad German with Yiddish and Polish — in a word, he “yiddled”—because this linguistic carelessness, rich in astute, colorful, and witty expressions, was more in keeping with his character, his swift, supple mind, and his unimpeachable self-confidence. I, for my part, had been trained in a rigorously correct speech, despite all the Austriacisms of my family, who among themselves spoke a kind of unbuttoned German; but they could also speak crystal-clear High German if they liked, and theirs did not sound rehearsed. I listened with amused attention to my new friend Wolf, gauging him linguistically.