At that time, Elisabeth was beautiful, soft, tender, and unquestionably devoted to me. The smallest, the least of her actions and gestures moved me deeply, because I felt that every movement of her hand, every nod of her head, every swing of her foot, the smoothing of her skirt, the gentle raising of her veil, the touch of her lip on a cup of coffee, a particular flower in her corsage, the way she pulled off a glove, all carried a clear and immediate message for me — and for me alone. Yes, from various signs that might then have been accounted “forward,” I thought I was entitled to conclude that the tenderness with which she eyed me, an impetuous or ostensibly accidental touch on my hand or my shoulder were in the nature of binding promises of great and delicious tendernesses to come, if I liked. The eves of celebrations whose calendrical certainty was beyond questioning. Her voice was low and soft (I dislike shrill soprano voices). Her speaking put me in mind of a stifled, tamed, chaste and yet suggestive cooing, the purling of underground streams, the rumbling of distant trains that one sometimes hears on sleepless nights, and each of her words, however trite, because of the timbre of her speech, acquired the portentousness and gravitas of some far-off, maybe not readily understandable, but clearly intuited lost ur-language once maybe heard in dreams.
When I left her to return to the society of my friends, I felt tempted to tell them all about Elisabeth, yes, even to rave to them about her. But at the sight of their tired, slack and cynical faces, their palpable and even obtrusive mockery, that I not only didn’t care to have levelled at me, but was keen to participate in as a regular contributor, I first lapsed into a dull and sheepish silence, and then, within a few minutes, fell in with that arrogant “décadence” whose lost and proud sons we all were.
Such was my foolish cleft stick, and I honestly didn’t know where to find comfort. I occasionally thought about taking my mother into my confidence. But at that time, while I was still young, I thought her incapable of understanding my concerns. My relationship with my mother was not honest and authentic, but rather the pathetic effort to imitate those that my friends had with their mothers. To them, they weren’t mothers, but a sort of hatchery to which they owed life and maturity, or, at best, a sort of domestic setting in which they happened to have come into the world, and to which they owed nothing more than a respectful acknowledgment. I, though, felt an almost holy awe for my mother all my life; only I chose to suppress it. I ate lunch at home. We sat silently opposite each other at the big table in the spacious dining room. My father’s old place at the head of the table was kept vacant, and every day in accordance with my mother’s wishes, a setting was put out for the permanent absentee. You could say my mother sat at the right hand of the departed, and I on his left. She drank a golden muscadet, and I a half bottle of Vöslauer. (I didn’t like it. I would have preferred Burgundy. But my mother had decreed it so.) Our old servant Jacques waited on us, with his trembling old man’s hands in snow-white gloves. His thick hair was almost equally white. My mother ate small portions, quickly but with dignity. As soon as I raised my eyes to her, she lowered hers to her plate — even though just a moment before, I had sensed her looking at me. Oh, I could feel that she had many things she wanted to ask me, and only bit them back to save herself the shame of being lied to by her only child. She carefully folded up her napkin. Those were the only moments I could look closely at her broad, slightly puffy face, with the slack cheeks, and the creased heavy lids. I looked down at her lap where she was folding the napkin, and I thought reverently but also reproachfully that it was from there that my life had taken its inception, that warm lap, the most motherly part of my mother, and I felt some astonishment that I could sit there so silently, so truculently, yes, so obtusely, and that she, my own mother, could find no words to say to me, and that obviously she felt just as ashamed of her grown-up, too rapidly grown up son, as I did of her, my aged, too rapidly aged progenetrix. How I wished I could have been able to talk to her about my cleft stick, my double life between Elisabeth and my friends. But she clearly didn’t want to hear anything of what she sensed, so as not to have to condemn aloud what she disapproved of in quiet. Perhaps, probably in fact, she had come to terms with the terrible law of nature that compels sons quickly to forget their origins; to see their mothers as old ladies; no longer to think of the breasts at which they first sucked — an unyielding law, that also compels the mothers to see the fruit of their womb grow bigger and taller and stranger and more remote; initially with pain, then with bitterness, and finally with resignation. I felt my mother spoke to me so little because she didn’t want me to say things for which she would have had to chide me. But if I had felt myself at liberty to talk with her about Elisabeth, and my love for that girl, then I would probably have dishonoured her, my mother, and so to speak myself as well. Sometimes I did want to talk about my love. But then I thought about my friends. Their relationships with their mothers. I had the childlike feeling that by confessing I would betray myself. As if keeping silent about something to my mother wasn’t a betrayal of myself, and moreover a betrayal of my mother. When my friends spoke about their mothers, I felt triply ashamed: for my friends, my mother, and myself. They spoke of their mothers almost the way they spoke of their “liaisons” that they had stood up or left behind, as if they were prematurely aged mistresses, and worse, as if the mothers were undeserving of such sons.
So it was my friends who kept me from hearing the voice of nature and common sense, and from giving free expression either to my feeling for my dear Elisabeth or to my filial love of my mother.
But it was to become apparent that the sins with which my friends and I burdened our souls were not personal to ourselves, but only the feeble, barely discernible signs of the coming devastation I will tell you about shortly.
VI
Before the great devastation began, it was given to me to meet the Jew Manes Reisiger, who has a part to play in this story later. He came from Zlotogrod in Galicia. A little later, I got to see Zlotogrod for myself, so I can describe it to you here. It matters to me so much because it no longer exists, no more than Sipolje does. It was destroyed in the course of the war. It used to be a town once: a small town, but still a town. Today it is an expanse of meadow. Clover grows there in the summer, crickets shrill in the tall grasses, earthworms thrive in plump coils, and the larks come with jabbing beaks to gobble them up.
The Jew Manes Reisiger came to see me one day in October, just as early in the morning as his friend, my cousin Branco, had come to see me a couple of months before. He came, in fact, on the recommendation of my cousin Branco. “Young master” — thus Jacques — “a Jew would like to speak to you.” I knew a few Jews at the time, Viennese Jews admittedly. I didn’t hate them by any means, because at that time the virulent anti-Semitism of the nobility and the circles in which I moved had become fashionable with janitors, with the lower middle classes, with chimney sweeps and housepainters. This change reflected the democratizing drift of fashion, whereby the daughter of a court usher wore exactly the same veil on her Sunday hat as a Trautmannsdorf or a Szechenyi had worn three years before, on a weekday. And just as no Szechenyi could possibly wear the same veil that graced the hat of an usher’s daughter, so the high society of which I counted myself a member could not possibly turn up their noses at a Jew — simply because my janitor already did.