“I have a friend who runs the publicity office in a cosmetics firm,” said Dr. Maurer. “I know he has trouble finding window decorators. I can’t judge whether this has much to do with your art. But if you’re interested, I’d be glad to recommend you to him.”
It had nothing to do with the art of drawing and painting at all. When I presented myself as an applicant at the address he gave me, I found myself trying out for the position by constructing an agreeable pyramid of empty cold-cream jars with gaudy festoons of crêpe paper wound around them. The man to whom Dr. Maurer recommended me, my future boss and ruler of the publicity department of the Aphrodite Company, Inc., seemed to find utility in my clumsiness. He hired me. And that was what made the final schism within my soul.
My crippled beloved (if she had become my beloved) would certainly have been able to understand the dichotomy. On the one hand, I was puffed up with pride, a world conqueror who had taken his first step toward triumph. I was earning a salary — modest, but indisputably mine. In other words, I was independent; from now on, I could make my own decisions. Of course, what I was doing temporarily was in no way what I wanted to do, not even what I had imagined I might have to do, but I felt I had started out on the road toward that destination. The Aphrodite Company was one of those concerns that are now called “multinational.” Even in those days, achievement could lead to promotion and quite possibly even a transfer to a more important country with better training possibilities or even to the central office. The latter employed world-famous commercial artists, including Cassandre, whose work I tremendously admired. Such first-rate people would discover my talent sooner or later and guide it to its true vocation. The huge advertising division of the central office, which supplied us with posters, packaging, and other publicity material, obviously had a dearth of men of my stamp. In short, the future lay before me. My triumph over those who had not believed in me was only a question of time. On the other hand, I gnashed my teeth under the humiliations I had to endure in the here and now.
The Aphrodite Company both distributed and manufactured many things: from laundry soap to shaving cream, from toothpaste to shampoo, pretty much anything that could serve cleanliness and beauty hygiene on a soapy basis. It was the task of the window decorator to bring all these items into the windows of the Bucharest drugstores and cosmetics shops and to display them, cyclically featuring one or the other article, as eye-catchingly and as temptingly as possible. In those days, the city of Bucharest had more than two hundred such places. A few elegant boutiques in the center, around the royal palace and the Calea Victoriei; several large places with a big turnover in the commercial sections around the Boulevard Elisabeta and the Lipscani; and the swarm of tiny shops in the farther peripheries and suburbs, making the area around the Calea Griviţei where I had suffered my misadventure seem metropolitan by comparison. This gradation determined my experiences, albeit in a reverse hierarchy.
My duties appeared simple. I set up a model decoration, as flexible as possible to fit into various types and sizes of display windows. Then, taking along the materials, I systematically traipsed from client to client of Aphrodite. Unfortunately, the shops also patronized other firms, competitors that used the same method to catch the consumer’s eye. With all the offers of free displays, the shopkeepers were spoiled — indeed, fed up. I and the rival decorators took the doorknobs out of one another’s hands. It came to out-and-out races between us as to who could arrive first at a potential victim and get the order.
This might have been fun, had it not been for the scorn with which we were treated. In the elegant downtown boutiques, my requests to beautify the windows with pyramids of cold-cream jars and garlands of crêpe paper were usually rejected with an arrogance that sent the blood rushing to my face each time. Back home, no Jewish ragpicker would have been dealt with so rudely. And if I entered such an establishment as a customer to purchase a bar of soap or a bottle of cologne, or, even more, if I escorted my mother, whose use of cosmetic articles was considerable, I was treated with melting eagerness. So the arrogance, in contrast, made my downfall all the more painful, and I was further embittered by the humiliating need to go on acting friendly and officious to the proprietors and their staff — all of whom disposed of a repulsive gamut of expressions from bootlicking to baseness.
In the large stores with the big turnover around the Boulevards Elisabeta and Lipscani, the rejections were no fewer but more businesslike. Here, however, now and again, if the competition had not outraced me, a store manager was willing to grant one corner of window to Aphrodite products, and that meant I had to get down to work on the spot. I despised this work, which I did clumsily. Erecting pyramids of toothpaste tubes, setting out bars of soap, adding an artistic touch to a spread of shampoo containers — these struck me as the classic occupation of shop assistants, and I suffered torments because to a certain extent I was on display myself; anyone passing in the street could see me doing this silly and hardly presentable work. I was tortured by the fear that some acquaintance of mine or my parents might come along and halt, to stare incredulously through the panes, watching me crawl around tacking coils of crêpe paper around soap boxes or garlanding them over cartons of detergent. With a small cluster of other rubbernecks gathering about him, the acquaintance might tap on the glass, and then, shaking his head and expressing astonishment with gestures and grimaces, he would let me know he was wondering what on earth I was doing here. Even if I had been willing to explain this merely unusual, perhaps, but still courageous step toward world renown as a draftsman and painter, I could not have concealed my shame.
Naturally, I was also ashamed of these feelings of inferiority, and that made the whole matter even worse. I had to ask myself, what was my pride made of that it could be injured so easily? I soon acknowledged that the sensibilities of a mama’s boy with a highly dubious self-confidence caused me this anguish. After all, people were beginning to accept the notion that work was not necessarily shameful — something my family still found hard to fathom. Of course, it very much depended on what kind of work it was. Commerce per se was embarrassing, but if the trade was in weapons, hunting gear, or riding equipment, then it could pass. Likewise, commerce in luxury items like wine, caviar, and pâté de foie gras, taken up by many ex-officers, was excused when it occurred as a necessity brought on, alas, by the times; and it did not occasion any loss of fashionable friendships. But anything connected with selling in a store was below social acceptance. This was a privilege of the Jews, and no one cared to dispute their right — at least, no one with any self-respect. I had been brought up to behave as though I did not consider myself anyone special and yet secretly to have a very high opinion of what I was. Under no circumstances would it have occurred to me to put myself on the same level as Jews. Yet I was now being placed there by the kind of wares I helped to peddle. Soap, toothpaste, and shampoo — who else should hawk them if not a Jewish shop assistant? The awareness of my being a kind of hod carrier, an out-and-out menial, for mostly Jewish shopkeepers cut sharply into my richly prejudiced self-esteem.