and she would probably smile now and repeat what she would have hissed back then: “You’re always right when you talk. But the instant you leave the room, nothing is true anymore!”
Exactly. As when you put down a book. As when the curtain falls in the theater ….
Never will he forget the pain in his little boy’s eyes when he was told “Papa’s lying.” “Perhaps,” he would say to his wife, “it was even more than pain; it was fear. And it lingered in our darling boy’s eyes, for it might have been the fear that Papa could seek truth — for instance in those huge belladonna-black eyes of our little boy the Talmud student, and in the susceptibility of the eternally sickly child, the Jewish shack in which his mother’s ancestors had lain in the same bed by the dozens, coughing tubercles at one another …” but that would have been too cruel to tell her: cynicism, even as an act of self-defense, has its limits — he suffers, he feels sick at the thought of what an unbearable intellectual snob the boy would most likely have become under his mother’s pretentious, exalted bluestocking ways. And how he must have suffered from her cruelty. The cruelty of the really stupid: once, when she tried to be ironical, asking him whether he had invented himself in his earlier phases as so fine, so good, so courageous only to set an example for their little boy, and he had nodded, she shouted scornfully, “He’ll respect you more if you confess what you really are! …”
“What?” he then asked, “an anti-Semite?”
No, it was good that the boy had died early, they would have mangled him in their mutual mangling; he, the father, would have turned him into a psychopath with demands in which the boy would have caught not even unconscious, inadequately concealed expectations and she, the mother, would have openly given him the hidden meaning; the poor little brat would only have needed to prolong the sentences: “Don’t tell me you’re scared to jump off this little wall” (it won’t make your little Jew-legs crooked); or: “You don’t like ham? Since way back, or did your mother talk you into it?” (not because she’d like you to be kosher but because her intellectuality yearns for vegetarian purity); or: “That kind of thinking, my boy, is not our kind of thinking” (back home in the Bukovina, at least, only junk-shop Jews think like that — not the rabbis, mind you, I have nothing but respect for the rabbis, hats off to the rabbis — no, that’s wrong too: hats on to the rabbis — whatever you do, it’s wrong for those bloody Jews) ….
his little son would have prolonged any sentence like that compulsively — assuming, of course, that along with the keen, nimble, distrustful mind of the Talmudic students he had also inherited the self-destructive proclivities of the fallen angels … from her the Jewish woman he had doubtless inherited his beauty: a stub-nosed Aryan beauty despite the belladonna eyes, like a Raphael infant Jesus (although here too one can hardly speak of a pure Aryan background) … that was poignant, no doubt, but it was questionable whether it would have persisted beyond puberty: he does not care to think how the Raphaelite infant Jesus might have developed into a Maoist—
for that must be what they dream about, the now twenty-to-twenty-five-year-olds: another absolute truth, socialism come true, the world revolution that shall bring about God’s kingdom on earth — that is what they identify with, that is why they kill one another and others who believe in the relativity of things; they would like to invent this reality for themselves the way, in his time, a generation wanted to invent the reality of the resurrected Holy Empire for themselves, with the same fanatical will for the absolute, with the same unconditional quest for the great life-fulfilling love of the great, ultimate truth for which one dies, for which one kills, especially those who ask whether it is really the only truth ….
No, he would rather think of the small, anemic boy with the tremendous dark eyes, eyes that grew bigger and bigger the closer the poor suffering thing approached his early death: he would rather think of the idolatrous love with which the boy clung to him, his papa: never will he forget how they walked through a park one winter, and the little boy held out his hand to have the father lead him along; he gave him his forefinger, and even today, he can still feel the little fist closing around it and clutching it—
and even today he can still feel it: once, in Berlin, in the year 1943, in a trolley car, he gave his finger to an elderly man, well beyond his fifties, he had been struck by the man’s intimidated behavior — wearing a knapsack, the man had asked for Tiergarten Station several times, and when he made an awkward move, he knocked aside his lapel and exposed a yellow Jewish star he had tried to conceal; he had understood that this was one of the poor devils who had to gather at Tiergarten Station to be sent “to the East”; he had rolled up a fifty-mark bill and stealthily passed it to the man, and the man had held his finger, all the way, until Tiergarten Station ….
that, my son, was my good deed: I can book it to my credit. You can believe me: it is the truth ….
Even though Pontius Pilate most likely treated that question in the only possible form — philosophical challenge. Should the ninety-four-year-old aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife have a lucid moment today, he would talk to her about it: in regard to memory; his focusing more and more pointedly on his childhood, washing up more and more flotsam of a distantly lived life — and this focus had made him feel he was preparing to return home; in the past, he had dreamed ahead, now he dreamed himself back — and he had actually returned home.
One day — just a few days ago — he had taken a plane and flown to Bucharest: home. Not really his home, for his home no longer existed there, but the moment the airplane landed, he knew he had come home; even though the landscape around the airfield did not look at all like what he remembered — it was much flatter, much more elementary: when he had lived here, had he not perceived how sober, how unromantic and unpicturesque, how unemphatic the countryside was? Only the vastness was impressive, but he had expected that…. And although the soldiers all over the place — wearing thick earflaps on their Muscovite fur caps, automatic rifles at the ready, as they stood guard when the plane discharged its passengers — in no way recalled the uniformed red-cheeked peasant boys whom he had commanded as an operetta lieutenant during one happy peace-time summer more then forty years ago, nevertheless, he knew: I’m home.
He knew it also because everything went as a matter of course. He was not the least bit excited. He thought, it’s been forty years since I was last here. No doubt a couple of things must have changed, but he was afflicted neither by expectation nor by curiosity. He now knew, he had three days to convince himself of the truth of his memories. And that had happened the very instant he set foot on the ground.
Bucharest — yes indeed, there was the Shossea Khisseleff, fairly unchanged. Only instead of the racetrack where he had ridden there stood a gigantic building in Stalinist style. Downtown: more space had been cleared around the old royal palace, the Café Corso was gone, the palace was confronted by a newer, mightier one (in proper Stalinist style): the seat of the Party. Biserică Albă was unchanged; the house he had lived in just a bit shabbier.
“That was the truth behind my dreams of forty years,” he wanted to tell the ninety-four-year-old woman. “Vous comprenez, ma chère: it was all so overwhelmingly banal. Certainly, the colors of the past are missing. Do you know why they deploy their strength to industrialize a rich country of farmers, an agricultural land? Not to manufacture consumer goods but in order to create a proletariat. Rumania, my farmland of the past, has become a country of class-conscious proletarians. Naturally, this changes the picture a few shades. But the land is unchanged — the land I was born in, lived in, loved, and have dreamed about for forty years — unchanged in essence, I mean to say, and therefore, to me, of an overwhelming banality. Oh, you should thank the Creator that He has not brought you back to St. Petersburg ….”