The crux of it was Pilate’s question, he thought ironically: “What is truth?” It wouldn’t really have been worth more than a shrug, if he hadn’t felt that it “represented itself,” that beyond the motives, the arguments, the logic and logic-chopping of their disagreement, there was a fundamental conflict that virtually lifted their fight about the theme of “Truth” into a different dimension and gave it metaphysical weight: as a question of spiritual, moral existence, the decision between damnation and salvation. Even today, when he knew and saw so much more than in the past (he was more judicious in his judgment both of her and of himself, purged of passions), even now he still could not quite discern the meaning of their struggle, only suspect it, sense the momentous “beyondness,” the way one senses the ocean beyond the dunes of a coastal landscape, the way he, as a child at home in the Bukovina, had sensed something vast and menacing beyond the woodland on the horizon: Russia and, beyond it, Asia.
Nevertheless, it fills him with a ridiculously vain little satisfaction, which he registers ironically. He can say to himself, it was not just the banal story of a swiftly abortive marriage, it was a theme for classical tragedy. He tried to see it with the eyes of others. The fighting with her soon became unbearable for everyone and poisoned five years of his life, driving him into a different country, a different city. For oddly enough, the people around him seemed to have sensed the transcendent quality of the conflict: his friends, his acquaintances, her friends, her acquaintances, took passionate part in it, took sides, split into camps. Suddenly he found himself being snubbed by previous well-wishers because they had allegedly discovered that he was a confidence man, his name was not what he claimed it was, he was probably Jewish himself and, typically, anti-Semitic toward his charming wife; then again, others came to him privately to confide that everyone knew she could not be regarded as normal, she had been in psychotherapy for years, had spent long periods in sanatoriums, and would probably soon wind up in an asylum. This horribly embarrassing, shameful quarreling that could not be hushed up and, naturally, called the stupidest people into action took place at the expense of their child and within its bewildered soul, and it probably killed the boy in the end. But at least it was not just about something personal and private. It was fought out for something general, crucial. One could define it by asking the same simple question twice with a different meaning each time: is it possible for two human beings to communicate? Fine: as far as the spiritual needs of Jane Smith and John Doe might be concerned, it’s merely a question of semantics, of the similarity of social background, of intellectual level, emotional harmony; but put in a general context, the question whether it is possible for two human beings to communicate strikes at the foundations of human existence.
One thing was certain: between him and his quondam second, Jewish wife communication had unfortunately become impossible; and the more he pondered how it had come to this after their initial, frequently stupendous rapport on every directly human issue, the more incomprehensible it seemed to him that the cause of their estrangement and ultimately their hate-filled opposition should have been theological — yes, indeed, to put it bluntly, a theological argument. They had never lacked rapport about plainly human issues; at times, this rapport had reached a state of ecstatic connivance. He remembered holding her in his arms and cradling her like a child when, trembling, she told him how her father had been arrested: friends had hidden the father in a country house, strictly impressing upon him that he was never, never to leave a certain room, because they wanted to show that he was not in the house; but he had panicked and crept into a different room that struck him as a more effective hiding-place, and indeed it probably was; when his friends, in order to show that even a room so obviously suitable as a hiding-place was empty, brought his pursuers, whom they wanted to lead astray, to the door and opened it — he was crouching inside ….
trembling, she had told him this, and he had caressed her, waiting for her to calm down and to say what he must not say, and she had said it finally: she had looked up at him and asked, “Do you think my father was very stupid? Even my mother, who almost went crazy because of that, even she said he died because he was always such a stupid second-guesser. And of course, the friends who wanted to save him, they perished too ….”
Thus had the rapport between them reached a dangerous level, and he wanted to understand how it could have been destroyed by an abstract disagreement that was in no way supported by anything concrete, a disagreement about two different conceptions of “Truth,” moral alternatives that neither of them had thought of as relevant — and naturally he had been unable to push away the thought of race, as a normal person feels morally obliged to do nowadays, after Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Why deny it? After all, he believed in the possibility of a mental legacy in the blood: a psychological heritage specific to the race and passed on from generation to generation — why, if crooked or pug noses are inheritable, if dark or light eyes or dark or light hair keep recurring, stubbornly following Mendel’s laws in bigger and bigger chess-knight leaps — his little boy, for instance, had much lighter hair than he himself as a child, and yet also those amazingly shiny, pitch-black eyes, melancholic in their childlike expectancy, even though, as far back as he could remember, his own family had always had dark hair and bright-blue eyes; and she too, the little boy’s mother, as Jewish as she may have been to all intents and purposes, had two radiant, clear eyes — what utterly mournful Talmudic student in her gallery of ancestors had shone through? … why — in the face of such disagreeable facts, one could, after all, ask with impunity — why should not spiritual and psychological structures, or at least a disposition to them, also be inheritable? Environment and education are not everything that forms a human being; it was nonsense to deny this, even if, thanks to the Nazis, it was now taboo to say so: in fact, because of those asses, one could no longer think about the Jewish problem in any halfway reasonable manner, one had to act as if there were no such thing; yet he was convinced that it would have to be possible to make characteristic distinctions quite unpolemically, altogether scientifically, between Jewish and non-Jewish mentalities, as detached as possible from the sociological conditions that normally shape them, determine them psychologically … especially here in Rome, where one has all the test material at hand, from the finest biblical scholar to the most knowledgeable Talmudist, it would have to be possible to draw the information from the purest source — but who would go to the trouble of being so thorough: the closer one lives to the sources, the more indifferently one lets them bubble — an old experience, alas — how often had he gone to La Scala when living in Milan? How often to the Louvre in his Paris days? …
besides, that would have been irrelevant in the case of his (former, second, Jewish) wife, for she was not typically Jewish in any respect, quite the contrary: truly the most goyish shikseh he had ever encountered: no Jewish upbringing whatsoever, of course, being the child of emancipated parents; as her father was an art historian, she had been surrounded from the start by reproductions of religious works of art, imbued with Catholic culture; she, in contrast to him, her husband, the alleged anti-Semite, had never seen the inside of a synagogue, had not the foggiest notion of Hebrew ritual; the mother was once a member of the Laban dance group and needless to say a devotee of some freethinking nature cult, sandals her religious belief, so to speak; she knew about Moses and David only because of Michelangelo; long before being made conscious of belonging to the Chosen People, she could reckon herself among the chosen few for whom the mosaics of Ravenna and the Baroque jubilation of Ottobeuren were as natural as shoe polish and toothpaste for other people; then, of course, she was made conscious of the other chosenness so emphatically that unconsciously she scorned it. In her schooldays, a teacher had summoned her to the front of the class and exclaimed, “Just have a good look at little Ruth, she belongs to the nation that crucified our Savior!”—of course without mentioning how much Christian art owed to that event. Unfortunately the Aryan self-awareness of the Third Reich was not exactly conducive to the creation of Jewish national pride; even with the hatred for her Aryan classmates which she inevitably developed, she could not help resenting being different from the others, to wish she too would be one of those blond grain-harvesters in trim white blouses, laborers participating in Germany’s renewal, marching along with them when they sang their dear songs; she herself, after all, as the Allgäu incident proved just a few years later, had perfect physical requirements, not to mention the willingness of conviction; and it was no coincidence that in her rebellion against his own lax relationship to truth, she fully concorded with his first, East Prussian wife, who could have been accused of anything but not being Aryan, having the purest Pruzzian blood ….