I came back to Vienna in the summer of 1937 as Gregor, sporting an enormous Phanariot mustache. I hurried upstairs to embrace Minka and break the news that I was in love. It was not a very happy love story, though, for the lady in question was married, and, to make matters worse, I liked her husband very much. Minka, as usual, was full of understanding, comfort, and good advice. We passed a few gay days together, but no night. I had outgrown my teddy-bear stage and, besides, would have considered it treason to my love to sleep soundly in another woman’s bed instead of lying alone, sighing for her. I was going to meet her shortly in Salzburg, where she wanted to attend the festival. Minka took me to the station. Looking up at me while I looked down at her from the open window of my compartment in the train, she saw my excited happiness. Her eyes shone tenderly, with a strange, more profound tenderness than ever. “If you were wise,” she said, “you would now get off this train and never see that girl again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything you have had with her so far is beautiful — all promise and expectation. Now come the troubles.”
“Oh, don’t talk rot. We are going to be very happy.”
“I do hope so,” she said. “I am very, very fond of you, you know.”
The train started up, and I sat back in my seat in a state of bewilderment. It could not be that Minka was in love with me, could it? No, that was impossible. Yet the thought flattered my vanity, and, rather the prouder for it, I looked forward to meeting my adored one.
Minka was right. Things became frightfully complicated, and Salzburg in the summer of 1937 was just awful. It was overrun with Jews. The worst of them had come from Germany as refugees and, in spite of their luggage-laden Mercedes cars, behaved as if they were the victims of a cruel persecution and therefore had the right to hang around in hundreds at the Café Mozart, criticize everything, and get whatever they wanted faster and cheaper — if not for nothing — than anybody else. They spoke with that particular Berlin snottiness that so got on the nerves of anyone brought up in Austria, and my sharp ears could all too easily detect the background of Jewish slang. My Turkish blood revolted. I could have slaughtered them all. I fled to Styria, for a visit to my old boarding school, and then followed my ladylove back to Rumania.
When I came back to Vienna again, it was February 1938, and what I found was chaos. Minka had come to fetch me at the station. She merely said, “Poor boy, I am afraid that your aunts’ guru is right and the Weingrubers and Schicklgrubers and Schweingrubers will soon potentialize the world.” Most of her friends — Bobby among them — had already gone to Switzerland, she said, or England, or France, or were preparing to leave Austria even at the price of their material existence.
“Oh, don’t exaggerate,” I said. “You Jews are always making a fuss about something. What in the world is going on, anyway?”
“Poldi will explain it to you. We’re having dinner with him. You just listen to what he has to say.”
Poldi was the fat journalist from Prague, who, as a theater critic, went regularly not only to Vienna but also to Berlin. He had lost a lot of weight and was not half so amusing as he used to be. What irritated me most of all was the self-complacent way he treated me — and I could not rise to the occasion, because he resolutely kept aiming at my cultural gaps. “I understand that we have sworn off allegiance to the ancestor of the Carolingians,” he greeted me, “even though the mustache is downright Merovingian.” And when I shook my head uncomprehendingly, he went on, “I mean, we are no longer calling ourselves Arnulf, now, but Gregor. Good, very good. Gregory the Great, as we all know, was a protector of the Jews.”
I dryly answered that this was certainly not the reason I had been given this name, and he threw in, “Very well, let’s stay with the Carolingians. We are then not far from Bishop Agobard, and we can look forward to a new De insolentia Judaeorum or, even worse, a new De Judaicis superstitionibus with a few blood libels. Today, you see, there are two schools of thought — two camps, I must involuntarily say: one outside and one inside the concentration camps. And uncomfortable as the latter may be, it is, still and all, the only one for decent people.”
“And I would rather end up there myself than let Brommy get in,” said Minka. “But just tell him seriously how things look politically. He’s straight out of the Middle Ages, you know. That’s where his father lives, in the Carpathians.”
Now I realized that Poldi’s irony was put on in order to conceal an enormous fear. Most of the things he told us, in a whisper, looking around to make sure he wasn’t overheard, did not make much sense to me. In the landscape of my mind, politics had not figured prominently. As a subject of Rumania — that is, of His Majesty King Carol II–I knew, and was expected to know, that he was the sovereign of a constitutional monarchy, and that in Bucharest there was a parliament where deputies represented the party of the peasants and the party of the liberals and whatnot, and that they were a bunch of crooks who did nothing but steal the money of the state. There were also some Jews, who were Communists, and therefore, rightly, were treated as such — that is, as Russian spies and agents provocateurs. But fortunately there were also some young Rumanians who, under their leader, a certain Mr. Cuza — which was a good and noble name, though only adopted by that gentleman — beat up those Jews from time to time, thus keeping them in a hell of a fright, and preventing them from spreading more Communist propaganda and provocation. I knew, too, that in Austria there were many socialists, called Reds, who were beaten up by or beat up the Heimwehr, which was a national guard defending the ethical values — such as the cleanliness of mind guaranteed by the fresh mountain air, and the love for shooting goats and plucking edelweiss — of Styria, Tirol, Carinthia, and others of the old Austrian lands. With the help of the Heimwehr, Chancellor Dollfuss had cannonaded the Reds, only to be shot down later by a Nazi. Nazis, in Austria, were rowdies who dynamited telephone booths, but that was not necessarily true of German Nazis, who, after all, had done very well. They had built up a state of order, and justice, and genuine social welfare, in spite of the fact that Adolf Hitler was a frightful proletarian, as my father said, and looked exactly like a Bohemian footman my grandmother had once employed, against his advice. The footman turned out to be a thief and stole my father’s cuff links and some other items, including a very nice hunting knife. Only people like my mother’s family could be wrong about somebody with such a face, my father said.
The Reds were bad because they were proletarians and wanted to do away with people of our kind, as had happened in Russia. Jews had a fatal inclination for Reds; therefore they ought to be kept in a hell of a fright, so they would keep quiet. Nazis were also proletarians, but they had some very sound ideas, like the theory of breeding, and some exemplary laws about hunting only in season, which gave the game the chance to regenerate and even improve in number as well as in size. And on the whole they were against Jews and Reds, so it was quite obvious that we had to stick with them. I really did not think there was much more to the subject, and I got rather bored with Poldi’s Cassandra-like whispering, so I proposed that we go to the Kärntnerbar for a whiskey. If, as Poldi said, the Germans wanted to conquer Austria, so much the better. The German-speaking peoples would be united again, as they had been in the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. And if the Jews were frightened, it served them right. It would keep them from becoming Russian spies and propagandists of Communism and also make them behave a little more decently at the Salzburg Festival. As for the reaction of the English and French and so on, they should mind their own business. I did not see any reason to start a war just because the German-speaking peoples did what the Czechs and Poles and Rumanians had been encouraged to do by the very same French and English. Of course, I did not say any of this to Poldi and Minka, because they were friends and it would have hurt their feelings. So we went to the Kärntnerbar.