Needless to say, I knew I had lost her for good. I could not turn around, retrace my steps, and speak to her or her attendant on a pretext, or follow them to find out where she lived and then try to become acquainted somehow — I was too craven, too timid, too well trained in reticence, too thin-blooded, too sluggish. But it was pleasant, indeed soothing, to imagine myself telling her about what afflicted me — telling her all about myself and my fall from grace, my great ambitions, my disappointments, the world I came from, my childhood, my home and parents, the homesick years at boarding school, the time wasted at the University of Vienna, the two or three experiences that seemed crucial to me: in short, my life story, oppressively uneventful and then again turbulent and for me exciting. I would tell her these things in one of those passionate confessions that young lovers exchange to prove to each other that they have put an end to a life of confusion and are beginning a new life, one of bliss, virtue, and clarity in each other’s arms.
Actually, I was in Bucharest as a refugee or even an exile. I felt alternately like one and then the other. What had really cast me away here was defiance. At least, that was the best interpretation I could come up with. I had been at the point of being inducted into the army; I had dropped out of school — not for that reason, of course; I did not want to go back to school after the army; I wanted to pursue my dominant passion, which at the time (if we leave out for a moment the constant preoccupation with love) was drawing and painting. I was determined to become a world-famous painter. This had inevitably led to a conflict with my parents, whose views and goals were unyieldingly conventional — and in those days, that meant far more than it does today. Certainly they had to admit I had a talent for drawing and painting, but I lacked training, and even if belatedly I had got some, my father would not have changed his mind. Granted, drawing and painting were welcome pastimes; like a gift for occasional poetry, they could become valued social virtues. Portraitists like Laszlo or, long ago, Ferdinand von Raissky, landscapists like Rudolf von Alt and even Max Liebermann (albeit a Jew), were highly respected, as were, needless to say, geniuses like Botticelli, Raphael, Adolf von Menzel. But these were giants; and did my untutored gift assure my achieving such a rank? My father dreamed of having his unfulfilled ambitions come true in me: if not the obvious goal of forest management, then zoology or simply biology, the science of the future.
At nineteen, life is a drama threatening to become a tragedy every fifteen minutes. The conflicts at home were unbearable. I disowned my parents, charged them with living in the past, with refusing to learn anything from the catastrophe of 1918, and I declared my independence from their notions of order and their values. I packed my belongings and moved from the provincial confinement of the Bukovina to the national metropolis: the Bucharest of 1933.
And here I was, doing everything but drawing and painting, and my dream of stamping my genius on the century was visibly fading. At nineteen, I had to regard myself as a failure. Even worse: I had gone in a direction that would probably exclude me forever from the world into which I was born and which had been presented to me as the only one fit for a human being to live in. I was an outcast. It had begun with my obsession with sex, or rather, the myth of sex.
My very first steps in Bucharest guided my destiny. I did not have any real plan, merely the aim, the wish, to stand on my own two feet — on the unconditional premise, of course, that I would do so through what had been so hurtfully doubted: my artistic gifts. I felt as vehement an urge to prove them as to demonstrate my virility. Yet I was so staunchly convinced of my artistic talents that for the time being, I wasted no thoughts on when, where, and in what manner I might apply them. The other thing was more pressing: to prove to myself that I could take, spellbind, hold, desert, and throw away women as I pleased. Wasn’t the one as important as the other? Conquering women, conquering the world — wasn’t it the same?
I tried not to count up how many months ago I had come to Bucharest. The day of my arrival was in any case fixed in my mind. I had brought some money with me, slipped to me by my mother, so I did not have to worry about food and lodging right away; I sent my baggage from the station to a hotel, and then, utterly carefree, I ambled out onto the street. The Calea Griviţei received me with all the shabby enchantment of the old Balkans.
I was intoxicated. I saw, I felt, I smelled the nearby Orient. A dimension of the world that had previously been a fairyland became a tangible presence — filtered, to be sure, through a garbagey modernity in which all the dubious aspects of technocratic civilization came to the fore, decaying and degenerating, but nevertheless swirling with life, color, adventure. This was a world in which a man could still prove he was a man. Here, sheer strength was what counted — especially since cunning laid snares and set traps for it everywhere.
The Calea Griviţei teemed with loafers, passersby, street vendors at their heels, beggars, strollers, sheep, chickens, trodden dogs, whip-cracking coachmen, knots of peasants on rattling carts, wildly honking automobiles — and out of this swarm, a young Gypsy girl came toward me. She was straight out of a picture book: fiery eyes, glittering teeth, flashing silver coins, raven-wing blackness. A slender bent arm, from which the full sleeve of her blouse had slipped, supported a huge flat basket of corncobs on her shining head. Her skin was as golden as the corn in her basket. Gazing into every pair of passing eyes with an unabashed smile, she sonorously called, “Papushoy!” But no one bought any.
As she approached, she had to sidestep a ruffian who almost knocked her down. A movement of her hip, which made the flower cup of her skirts whirl, brought her past him. But this caused her left breast to slide out of her deeply cut blouse; touchingly girlish, with the uneven seam of the rosy areola, it bobbed full and bare for all to see.
She was not the least bit embarrassed. With a casual motion of her free hand, she adjusted her décolleté so that the breast slipped back in; then, still laughing with her white teeth, she called “Papushoy!” at me.
I stopped her. “How much is your corn?” My heart was beating in my throat.
“One leu a cob. Five cobs for four lei.”
“How many do you have in your basket?”
“Seventy or eighty.”
“I’ll give you a hundred lei. But you have to come with me.” I swallowed. “I have nothing to carry them in,” I added awkwardly.
She had long since got my drift. “Let’s go, my handsome young man!” she said merrily. “But you’ll have to give me one pol more.”
A pol was twenty lei, but I did not want to act too docile. I ignored her request and walked ahead wordlessly — besides, I was embarrassed by the attention our commerce had aroused. A couple of Jews were standing in front of a shop. She followed me, and I heard laughter behind me and a few dirty cracks.
I could not be wrong in assuming that here, by the station, there would be some dubious hotel for traveling salesmen where a room might be rented by the hour. The hotel was sleazier than I had imagined. The unshaven fellow between the rickety table and the switchboard did not even have a shirt on, just an undershirt; the trousers hung from a belt under his belly. He was unusually powerful; his tremendous lower arms were matted with black hair. He demanded payment in advance, three hundred lei. At that time, so many counterfeit hundred-lei pieces were in circulation that businessmen tested the coins by throwing them on a flat stone and deciding on their genuineness by the ring of the impact. I was surprised that he did not do so, since the stone lay before him on the table. But I gave it no further thought. Above his head, from a nail in the keyboard, hung a small, light-blue tin box stamped with a Star of David — the box was a kupat kerem kayemet, for contributions to build the Promised Land of Israel. It was typical for such a seamy hotel of ill repute to be in Jewish hands.