“Isn’t that something!” he said, once the boy had left. “Our people don’t say thank you — more the opposite. They are proud people, the Galician Jews — my Galician Jews! They live in the belief that distinctions are theirs as of right. They respond to grace and favour with the same wonderful equanimity with which they receive abuse and stones. All other people wax indignant when they are abused, and bow and scrape when they receive a favour. My Polish Jews are equally immune to abuse and to kindness. In their own way, they are aristocrats. For the mark of an aristocrat above all is equanimity; and never have I seen greater equanimity than in my Polish Jews!”
My Polish Jews, he said, in the same tone as he had so often spoken to me of “my estates,” “my Impressionists,” “my musical instrument collection.” I had a distinct sense that part of the reason he so admired the Jews was that he saw them as his property. It was as though they hadn’t seen the light of the world in Galicia because of God’s will, but because he personally had ordered them from the Almighty, just as he ordered Persian carpets from the noted seller Pollitzer, and parrots from the Italian birdseller Scapini, and rare old musical instruments from the violin maker Grossauer. And with the same attention to detail, the same circumspect nobility with which he treated his carpets and birds and instruments, so he encountered his Jews, so that he took it for his self-evident duty to write the good coachman Manes, the father of that arrogant boy, a letter congratulating him on Ephraim’s acceptance in the conservatory. Chojnicki was afraid the coachman Manes might thank him first.
But the coachman Manes Reisiger, far from writing a letter of thanks, and wholly unable to see the smile of fortune that had brought him and his son into the proximity of Count Chojnicki and myself, rather assuming that his son Ephraim was so inordinately talented that a Viennese conservatory must count itself lucky to have someone like his son, visited me two days later, and began as follows: “If anyone can do anything in this world, then it is my son Ephraim. I always said so to him. And so it came to pass. He is my only son. His violin playing is extraordinary. You should ask him to play for you one day. But he is proud. Who knows if he will!” It was as though it was for me to thank the coachman Manes for giving me the opportunity to procure his son a place in the conservatory. “I have no more business in Vienna,” so he continued, “I am going home tomorrow.”
“You must call on Count Chojnicki, and thank him,” I told him.
“A fine Count!” said Manes, appreciatively. “I will bid him adieu. Has he heard my Ephraim play?”
“No,” I said, “you should ask him.”
The train of the coachman Manes Reisiger was leaving at eleven at night. At eight he came to me, asking, if not ordering, me to take him to Chojnicki’s hotel.
Very well, I took him there. Chojnicki was grateful, almost delighted. Yes, he was even moved. “How wonderful that he should come to me and thank me,” he said. “I told you right away this is what our Jews are like!”
By the end, he was thanking the coachman Manes for giving him the opportunity of having preserved a genius for the world. It sounded as though for the last decade or more, Chojnicki had been waiting for nothing more than that the son of Manes Reisiger should come to him, and that now a long held and deeply desired wish was finally being fulfilled. In his gratitude, he even offered Manes Reisiger the fare for his return journey. This the coachman Manes declined, but he invited us both to visit him. He had a house, he told us, with three rooms and a kitchen, a stable for his horse, and a garden where he parked his carriage and his sleigh. He wasn’t a poor coachman by any manner of means. He earned as much as fifty crowns a month. And if we visited him, we would have a wonderful time. He would certainly see to it that we lacked for nothing.
Nor did he forget to remind Chojnicki and me that it was positively our duty to look after his son Ephraim. “A genius like that must be looked after!” he said, in leaving. Chojnicki promised to do just that; and also that we would visit him in Zlotogrod next summer, without fail.
VII
At this point, it behoves me to speak of an important matter that I had hoped, as I began writing this book, to avoid. What is at issue is religion.
Like my friends, like all my friends, I had no faith. I never attended Mass. I would accompany my mother as far as the church door, my mother who herself may not have had faith, but who was, as people say, “practicing.” At that time I had a positive hatred of the church. Today, now that I am a believer, I no longer know why I hated it so. It was, so to speak, the “fashion.”
I would have felt ashamed to tell my friends that I had been to church. They were not really opposed to religion as such; it was more that there was a type of arrogance in them towards the tradition in which they had grown up. They didn’t want to renounce the essence of the tradition, but they — and since I went along with them, we — rebelled against the forms, because we didn’t know that true form is inseparable from essence, and that it was childish to try to separate them. It was childish, but as I say, we were children in those days. Death was already crossing his bony hands over the bumpers from which we drank in our childish merriment. We were unaware of him. We were unaware of him because we were unaware of God. Of our number, it was only Count Chojnicki who still observed the forms of religion, not so much from faith, as from a sort of noblesse oblige. The rest of us who disdained them were little better than anarchists in his view. “The Church of Rome,” so he would harangue us, “is the only brace in this rotten world. The only giver and maintainer of form. By enshrining the traditional element ‘handed down’ in its dogmas, as in an icy palace, it obtains and bestows upon its children the licence to play round about this icy palace, which has spacious grounds, to indulge irresponsibility, even to pardon the forbidden, or to enact it. By instituting sin, it forgives sins. It sees that there is no man without flaw: that is the wonderfully humane thing about it. Its flawless children become saints. By that alone, it concedes the flawed nature of mankind. It concedes sinfulness to such a degree even that it refuses to see beings as human if they are not sinfuclass="underline" they will be sainted or holy. In so doing the Church of Rome shows its most exalted tendency, namely to forgive. There is no nobler tendency than forgiveness. And by the same token, there is none more vulgar than to seek revenge. There is no nobility without generosity, just as there is no vengefulness without vulgarity.”
Count Chojnicki was the oldest and wisest of us, but we were too young and foolish to give his superiority the attention it merited. We listened to him, complaisantly, and even imagined we were doing him a favour. To us, so-called young people, he was an elderly gentleman. Only later, in the War, did we come to see how much younger he truly was than we were.
It was only afterwards, and far too late, that we grasped that we were not younger than him, but quite simply ageless: unnatural, if you will, without age. While he, of course, in keeping with his years, was authentic and blessed.
VIII
A few months later, I received the following letter from the coachman Manes Reisiger:
Dear Sir,
After the great honour and service you did me, I humbly permit myself to inform you that I am very, very grateful to you. My son writes to tell me he is doing well at the conservatory, and I owe you thanks for his genius. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. At the same time, I humbly permit myself to ask you to do me the great kindness of paying me a visit. Your cousin, the chestnut roaster Trotta, always — which is to say, for the past ten years — stays with me in the autumn. I imagine that you too might find pleasure in staying with me. My house is poor, but spacious.