And yet at the same time my prejudices angered me. I rebelled against the people who had ingrained them in me. The thought of what my father might say if he found out what I was doing here sent a hot feeling of shame through me which instantly turned to rage — but, alas, impotent rage. I knew I basically thought the way he did. I hung in the threads of my background and upbringing like a fly in a spiderweb.
How could I ever get rid of experiences like, for example, the following one: when I was fifteen, my father had taken me along on one of the big shoots that were the prestigious high spots of the hunters’ season; only the very best guns took part. For me this was the climax of an exceptionally successful year. For once, I had studied well and passed my exams without the usual difficulties. I had therefore been allowed, in the summer, to join the local tennis club. My father didn’t know that the club’s newly chosen president was a Jew, a wealthy banker, elegant, soft-mannered, ambitious. He had accepted me as a young member with extreme politeness, as if it were an honor for the club as well as for him personally that I join. All summer he had shown me his friendliness. Now, upon our arrival at the meeting point for the first of the great winter shoots, he was the first person my father saw as we approached the group of hunters who had already arrived. My father stopped abruptly. “We must be mistaken,” he said in a loud, purposeful voice. “I thought I had been invited to a shooting party, but obviously we have come to the stock exchange.” He turned on his heels and went back to the car.
Before I could follow him, the banker came forward and held his hand out to me. “Good morning,” he said with a kind smile. “What a pleasure to realize that we are hunting mates as well as tennis partners.”
I hesitated for just a split second. I knew my father was expecting me to turn my back on the pretentious Jew and follow him. But the drill I had been given to behave politely with everybody, no matter who, was too strong. I took the banker’s hand and shook it, mumbling a banal phrase of conventional politeness, then quickly followed my father. My father did not speak a word to me all the way home. The punishment he inflicted on me was the cruelest one: for the rest of the season I was not allowed to join him for a single shoot. My humiliation was the more effective as, at the same time, my studies deteriorated. I did not have the moral right to nourish rebellious feelings. I had shown that I lacked character in every way. I was a shame to my family, my class, and myself — not only because I had failed to behave as my father expected me to do; even more so because of my cowardice in not standing up for what I myself thought was right.
So here, years later in Bucharest, I waxed defiant. The sense of dishonor intensified; and with almost masochistic readiness, I exposed myself to the humiliations that my activity as a publicist for soap and toothpaste afforded to the squeamish.
To be sure, I didn’t have much choice if I cared about keeping my job. Aphrodite was a company managed by Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Saxons, and thus it cultivated a ponderous work discipline that resolutely opposed Balkan dawdling. I had a fixed daily itinerary of drugstores and cosmetics shops to drop in on at least, where I cordially offered a window decoration whether it was desired or not. I could not report too many failures. It was up to my persuasiveness, my cajolery, my charm — any method would do. And if I was rejected, the fault was mine. There were no excuses. Nor was there any chance of claiming I had decorated a window when that was not the case. The job was verified by the salesmen, who made the rounds with their offers.
Thus, I was, so to speak, among commercial travelers — if my father had only known! And yet my artistic abilities (on which, of course, insultingly minor demands were made) were not all that was called upon. I was expected to have diabolical diplomatic skills, an irresistible manner, a flattering yet compelling way of getting what I was after. In short, my bosses needed something kittenish that would inveigle every boutique proprietor or manager to place his window at my disposal without further delay, allowing me to remove the competing wares and replace them with the alluring commodities of the Aphrodite Company. Such conduct was the very opposite of what I was gifted in or had been made capable of by my upbringing. I had been taught restraint and discretion, not “dash.” I had so little dash that I was actually unable to find a simple way out of my dilemma by turning my back on the Aphrodite Company. I stayed with my job not out of ambition or defiance—“I’ll show them!”—but rather because of drilled-in cowardice, an unconditional obedience that was typical of my class and based on something that had been hammered into me since childhood: self-contempt. The girl in the wheelchair would be bound to understand this. In a certain sense we were both cripples: she physically, I spiritually. If I claimed I did not have what it took to be a successful shop assistant, I was merely evading the secret knowledge that I had even less of what it took for something better. I lacked clarity, solidity, and authority.
I had no opinion about whether or not I might expect my imaginary beloved to understand what had been done to me by my training in unquestioning respect for fixed rules and institutions. Not only did this obeisance make me shiver about whether I could fill my assigned quota; it also exposed me openly to the pecking order at the Aphrodite Company. Try not to as I might, I shuddered at a frown from the publicity chief when I handed him my lacunary decoration list. If the head of sales said something appreciative about my display of cold-cream jars, I was no less delighted than any other wage earner would have been in similar circumstances, even though socially I regarded such a wage earner as a petty philistine. My response was all the more intense since most of my superiors, or rather the higher-ups, were much older men — that is, “adults,” toward whom I, a young pipsqueak, was accustomed to behaving in a zealously complaisant and officious way.
Then again, there were moments when I pictured how pridefully I would gaze back at this difficult beginning time, once I had made my breakthrough. The big boss from the central office abroad would arrive, see one of my bath-soap decorations, and exclaim, “Who has done this? Why, this shows an extraordinary artistic talent! What is this man doing here? Send him out for further training at once — the company will pay. Why, this boy is a genius. We probably don’t even have the right to keep him. He belongs to the world. It will be more useful to our firm if we show that we realize our obligation to mankind than if we selfishly think of our own advantage.”
I knew such fantasies were pipe dreams, as remote from any reality as the likelihood that my getting punched on the Calea Griviţei would unleash a pogrom to wipe out all the Jews in Rumania. Still, I felt deeply that it would have to come somehow or other, that it would come just as I imagined. For a few days, I would hold my head higher than I had before — until some Jewboy kicked me out of a shop, and all my wild hopes suffocated in rage and shame.
Thus I lived in a constant interplay between humiliation and impotent rebellion, between the craziest faith in auspicious promise and dreadful doubts about myself and everything I was doing. Occasionally I was struck by the dreadful thought that all these experiences assaulting me and arousing such contradictory sensations were characteristic and normal only to those for whom I had been taught since childhood to feel contempt: Jews. That was probably why they were so unstable and jittery. After all, wholesaling and retailing were pretty much the only turf that was granted them. Traditionally involved in the so-called business world, they were assigned this livelihood — an existence disfigured by the compulsive notion of success, by competition against the ups and downs of the economy. Their hereditary milieu was the world of open possibilities, in which a man could just as easily become a Midas as get stuck in the lowliest form of donkey work. In the discrepancy between reward and performance, between pushy supply and manipulated demand, it was no wonder that their feelings were torn as incessantly as mine. I now understood their restlessness, their anxieties, their messianic expectations, the abrupt change from immeasurable arrogance to shamefaced self-debasement. I even understood the source of their often presumptuous insolence and repulsive bootlicking. I began apologizing to them for my previous contempt. Still, I hardly found it edifying to comprehend their behavior in terms of my own emotions. My ego thus received its final rude setback.