She was packing a bag with things she’d decided to keep. I had persuaded her to take a large writing case in red, gold-embossed leather with an Armenian inscription we’d been unable to decipher. She looked up and handed it to me: “I should like you to accept it as a souvenir and a modest token of my gratitude,” she said simply.
I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, sensed her start and draw back. I took her hand, bent and kissed it also. Her lips were trembling. She quickly turned away and closed her bag.
When I got back to Löwinger’s, I lay down on the sofa in my room and was filled with the realization that nothing had changed since my days on the roof above the Biserică Albă; I was in the same melancholic state I’d been in then. The release from the plaster cast hadn’t meant rebirth after all; I was being born back into my old wayward self again. There appeared to be no way out, only a flight forward, through enemy lines, the same route Miss Alvaro’s aunt had taken to escape the specters of the past: making myths of them.
Olschansky knocked and opened my door before I could open my mouth. As he reached for my cigarettes, he noticed the writing case on my desk. “A trophy?” he asked, with his perfidious grin.
“In a manner of speaking,” I answered.
“So it worked out?”
“What?”
“Don’t act so stupid; you bloody well know what I mean.”
“A lot more happened than you think,” I said.
“So, come on, give; did you screw her or not?”
“What? Today? Oh yes, yes, today as well.” I didn’t lie. In a literary sense it had as good as happened. “Lots of times recently, several times a day ….” Reality had undergone transfiguration and become fiction.
He looked at me quizzically. “Are her tits as good as I reckoned them to be?”
“Oh, much better. Go away now; leave me in peace.”
“I understand: Monsieur wants to savor his memories. Very well, and congratulations. But I think it was unfriendly of you to keep it to yourself for so long. After all, we belong to the same club, don’t we?”
I couldn’t sleep that night either, partly because the little dog yapped out in the passage for hours until someone — Cherkunof, presumably — opened his door and let him in. I was wide awake. I decided to write my mother a letter, and got up. The case Miss Alvaro had given me was already filled with my notepaper. The blotting paper on the inside covers was crisscrossed with the impressions of handwriting, and on one of them the lines of a letter showed up clearly; judging by the fine, sloping hand, I guessed that Miss Alvaro’s uncle must have written them. I turned the blotting paper over, saw, as I’d hoped, that the reverse side was even clearer, fetched my shaving mirror, and read:
… I beg Your Eminence to restrain our good Father Agop from taking these steps. My wife has proved herself a worthy Christian over so many years — and Father Agop, her confessor and my own, can testify to this — that I venture to suggest to Your Eminence that she couldn’t have been a better one had she received the holy blessings of baptism and confirmation as a child. I admit to my sinful comportment in not having confessed to knowing of her origin and uncleansed condition. One of the reasons why I did not do so was that, as an Armenian, I saw in my Jewish wife a sister in suffering. She too belongs to a people that, like ours, was a victim of violence throughout the millennia. Pray let this speak to my favor when I ask Your Eminence’s forgiveness. May I appeal to Your Eminence’s spiritual understanding that no word of this be divulged to her. Should Your Eminence see your way clear to baptizing her without my knowledge, behind my back, so to speak …
I could hardly wait to run to Miss Alvaro and tell her of my discovery the next morning. I knocked on her door several times before she finally opened it. She looked at me with an expression of loathing that took my breath away. “I never want to set eyes on you again. Never.” Her packed suitcases were lying on the bed behind her. “I shall do everything in my power to erase you from my memory as quickly as possible, and I shall succeed, don’t worry. We Jews have had excellent training in this.” Then she slammed the door in my face.
A dreadful suspicion overcame me. I went to Olschansky’s room, got no answer, searched the whole house, and finally found him in the bathroom we were allowed to use on a rotation system worked out with astronomical precision. He was standing naked under the shower with his back toward me, and I saw the ugly, festering, earth-filled pits all over it.
“You said something to Miss Alvaro,” I hissed at him.
He had his face stretched up to the nozzle with his eyes screwed up and his lips sucked in between his teeth. “I took the liberty, yes,” he spluttered through the cascading water. “If I’d waited for your permission, she’d still be a virgin.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tell me you have done this to her!” I was ready to jump on him.
He turned his face toward me, opened his eyes wide, and, with the most perfidious smile I’d ever seen, said, “I did, yes. But it was a great help that you claimed to have done so. The argument that good friends and members of the same club must share and share alike was difficult for a school mistress to reject.”
I grabbed his throat. He seemed to think I was joking. He laughed as he tried to struggle away from me, spluttered water and soap suds, and groaned. “Don’t get so excited, you moron. What’s the problem? Are you going to let some Jewish broad interfere in our friendship?” I let go of him.
Miss Alvaro moved out of Löwinger’s Rooming House that same day; I followed suit some weeks later. It was November 1937. After nearly four years of the Balkans I’d had my fill and felt homesick for Vienna. I arrived there just in time for March 1938.
I never saw Olschansky again. In the flush of my twenty-three years, I often did battle with him in my thoughts, of course, and reproached myself equally often. What shocked me most about the story was that in telling it to Olschansky, I had unwittingly predetermined the only logical, literary conclusion. But soon, far more shocking events put it from my mind completely, and by the time I came to take my strolls along the banks of the lake at Spitzingsee, twenty years later, in 1957, it was very far away. But it was still as clear as the pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Castel Sant’ Angelo one could see through the little lenses inserted in the holders of Mr. Löwinger’s more expensive pens.
Troth
The big something falling from the floor above my grandmother’s apartment cast a sudden shadow on the window before it bumped on the cobblestones, and my grandmother’s gouty claw reached for the little bell beyond the flowery field of playing cards she had laid out on the table for her game of patience and shook it violently. Decades of strained impatience made her movement awkward, and the thin silver sound seemed to mock her intention to reach the deaf ears of old Marie. Nevertheless, as in a vaudeville gag, the door opened instantly and old Marie appeared, trembling with age and the suppressed contradictions of nearly fifty years of service to a most complicated family.
“Yes, please?”
My grandmother majestically stretched her tortoise neck as if it still were encircled by half a dozen rows of pearls and turned her head toward the window. “Something fell down from the upper floor. The Jews must have put their featherbeds in the windows to air or something of that kind. Go and have a look.”
Old Marie pushed her head out of the window and then brought it back into the room. “Please,” she said triumphantly. “That’s no featherbed. It is the young Raubitschek girl.”
I spent part of my youth in this apartment house, which was in a drowsy residential section of Vienna. When I met the “old Raubitscheks” on the stairs, I greeted them with the same polite reserve they used in saluting my grandmother, whose recognition was a delightful mixture of joviality and distance. Never a word was exchanged. They were educated people, though. Papa Raubitschek being a professor at the University of Vienna, famous artists came to their apartment, and every Wednesday evening the remote sounds of chamber music reached my grandmother’s apartment and would make her — she was very sensitive to noise — say contemptuously, “They are playing Beethoven’s ‘Allergique’ again or something equally horrid.” Because so many Jews were successful in musical endeavors, my grandmother no longer quite considered it one of the fine arts.