Collected Stories (97 page)

As soon as he had gone, the questions started about my vegetarianism: Was it on account of my health? Out of principle? Did it have anything to do with being kosher? I was accustomed to justifying myself, not only to strangers but even to people who had known me for years. When I told Mrs. Metalon that I didn’t belong to any synagogue, she asked the question for which I could never find the answer—what did my Jewishness consist of?

According to the way the waiter had reacted, I assumed that I’d leave the table hungry, but he brought me a plateful of cooked vegetables and a mushroom omelette as well as fruit and cheese. Mother and son both tasted my dishes, and Mark said, “Mother, I want to become a vegetarian.”

“Not as long as you’re living with me,” Mrs. Metalon replied.

“I don’t want to remain in England, and certainly not in Turkey. I’ve decided to become an American,” Mark said. “I like American literature, American sincerity, democracy, and the American business sense. In England there are no opportunities for anyone who wasn’t born there. I want to marry an American girl. Sir, what kind of documents are needed to get a visa to the United States? I have a Turkish passport, not an English one. Would you, sir, send me an affidavit?”

“Yes, with pleasure.”

“Mark, what’s wrong with you? You meet a gentleman for the first time and at once you make demands of him.”

“What do I demand? An affidavit is only a piece of paper and a signature. I want to study at Harvard University or at the University of Princeton. Sir, which of these two universities has the better business school?”

“I really wouldn’t know.”

“Oh, he has already decided everything for himself,” Mrs. Metalon said. “A child of fourteen but with an old head. In that sense, he takes after his father. He always planned down to the last detail and years in advance. My husband was forty years older than I, but we had a happy life together.” She took out a lace-edged handkerchief and dabbed at an invisible tear.

The bus routine required that each day passengers exchanged seats. It gave everyone a chance to sit up front. Most couples stayed together, but individuals kept changing their partners. On the third day, the driver placed me next to the banker from Zurich, who was apparently determined not to sit with his wife.

He introduced himself to me: Dr. Rudolf Weyerhofer. The bus had left Bordeaux, where we had spent the night, and was approaching the Spanish border. At first neither of us spoke; then Dr. Weyerhofer began to talk of Spain, France, the situation in Europe. He questioned me about America, and when I told him that I was a staff member of a Yiddish newspaper his talk turned to Jews and Judaism. Wasn’t it odd that a people should have retained its identity through two thousand years of wandering across the countries of the world and after all that time returned to the land and language of its ancestors? The only such instance in the history of mankind. Dr. Weyerhofer told me he had read Graetz’s
History of the Jews
and even something of Dubnow’s. He knew the works of Martin Buber and Klausner’s
Jesus of Nazareth.
But for all that, the essence of the Jew was far from clear to him. He asked about the Talmud, the Zohar, the Hasidim, and I answered as best I could. I felt certain that shortly he would begin talking about his wife.

Mrs. Weyerhofer had already managed to irritate the other passengers. Both in Lyons and in Bordeaux the bus had been forced to wait for her—for a half hour in Lyons and for over an hour in Bordeaux. The delays played havoc with the travel schedule. She had gone off shopping and had returned loaded down with bundles. From the way she had described her husband to me as a miser who begrudged her a crust of bread, I couldn’t understand where she got the money to buy so many things. Both times she apologized and said that her watch had stopped, but the Swiss women claimed that she had purposely turned back the hands of her gold wristwatch. By her behavior Celina Weyerhofer humiliated not only her husband, who accused her in public of lying, but also me, for it was obvious to everyone on the bus that she, like me, was a Jew from Poland.

I no longer recall how it came about but Dr. Weyerhofer began to unburden himself to me. He said, “My wife accuses me of anti-Semitism, but what kind of anti-Semite am I if I married a Jewish woman just out of concentration camp? I want you to know that this marriage has caused me enormous difficulties. At that time many people in financial circles were infected with the Nazi poison, and I lost important connections. I was seriously considering emigrating to your America or even to South Africa, since I had practically been excommunicated from the Christian business community. How is this called by your people … cherem? My blessed parents were still living then and they were both devout Christians. You could write a thick book about what I went through.

“Though my wife became converted, she did it in such a way that the whole thing became a farce. This woman makes enemies wherever she goes, but her worst enemy is her own mouth. She has a talent for antagonizing everyone she meets. She tried to establish a connection with the Jewish community in Zurich, but she said such shocking things and carried on so that the members would have nothing to do with her. She’d go to a rabbi and represent herself as an atheist; she’d launch a debate with him about religion and call him a hypocrite. While she accuses everyone of anti-Semitism, she herself says things about Jews you’d expect from a Goebbels. She plays the role of a rabid feminist and joins protests against the Swiss government for refusing to give women the vote, yet at the same time she castigates women in the most violent fashion.

“I noticed her talking to you when you were sitting together and I know she told you how mean I am with money. But the woman has a buying mania. She buys things that will never be used. I have a large apartment she’s crowded with so much furniture, so many knickknacks and idiotic pictures that you can barely turn around. No maid will work for us. We eat in restaurants even though I hate not eating at home. I must have been mad to agree to go on this trip with her. But it looks as if we won’t last out the twelve days. While I sit talking here with you, my mind is on forfeiting my money and leaving the bus before we even get to Spain. I know I shouldn’t be confiding my personal problems like this, but since you are a writer maybe they can be of use to you. I tell myself that the camps and wanderings totally destroyed her nerves, but I’ve met other women who survived the whole Hitler hell, and they are calm, civilized, pleasant people.”

“How is it that you didn’t see this before?” I asked.

“Eh? A good question. I ask myself the same thing. The very fact that I’m telling you all this is a mystery to me, since we Swiss are reticent. Apparently ten years of living with this woman have altered my character. She is the one who allegedly converted, but I seem to have turned into almost a Polish Jew. I read all the Jewish news, particularly any dealing with the Jewish state. I often criticize the Jewish leaders, but not as a stranger—rather as an insider.”

The bus stopped. We had come to the Spanish frontier. The driver went with our passports to the border station and lingered there a long time.

Dr. Weyerhofer began talking quietly, in almost a mumble, “I want to be truthful. One good trait she did have—she could attract a man. Sexually, she was amazingly strong. I don’t believe myself that I am speaking of these things—in my circles, talk of sex is taboo. But why? Man thinks of it from cradle to grave. She has a powerful imagination, a perverse fantasy. I’ve had experience with women and I know. She has said things to me that drove me to frenzy. She has more stories in her than Scheherazade. Our days were cursed, but the nights were wild. She wore me out until I could no longer do my work. Is this characteristic of Jewish women in Eastern Europe? The Swiss Jewish women aren’t much more interesting than the Christian.”

“You know, Doctor, it is impossible to generalize.”

“I have the feeling that many Jewish women in Poland are of this type. I see it in their eyes. I made a business trip to the Jewish state and even met Ben-Gurion, along with other Israeli leaders. We did business with the Bank Leumi. I have a theory that the Jewish woman of today wants to make up for all the centuries in the ghetto. Besides, the Jews are a people of imagination, even though in modern literature they haven’t yet created any great works. I’ve read Jakob Wassermann, Stefan Zweig, Peter Altenberg, and Arthur Schnitzler, but they disappointed me. I expected something better from Jews. Are there interesting writers in Yiddish or Hebrew?”

“Interesting writers are rare among all peoples.”

“Here is our driver with the passports.”

We crossed the border, and an hour later the bus stopped and we went to have lunch at a Spanish restaurant.

In the entrance, Mrs. Weyerhofer came up to me and said, “You sat with my husband this morning and I know that the whole time he talked about me. I can read lips like a deaf-mute. You should know that he’s a pathological liar. Not one word of truth leaves his lips.”

“It so happens he praised you.”

Celina Weyerhofer tensed. “What did he say?”

“That you are unusually interesting as a woman.”

“Is that what he said? It can’t be. He has been impotent several years, and being next to him has made me frigid. Physically and spiritually he has made me sick.”

“He praised your imagination.”

“Nothing is left me except my imagination. He drained my blood like a vampire. He isn’t sexually normal. He is a latent homosexual—not so latent—although when I tell him this he denies it vehemently. He only wants to be with men, and when we still shared a bedroom he spent whole nights questioning me about my relationships with other men. I had to invent affairs to satisfy him. Later, he threw these imaginary sins up to me and called me filthy names. He forced me to confess that I had relations with a Nazi, even though God knows I would sooner have let them skin me alive. Maybe we can find a table together?”

“I promised to eat with some woman and her son.”

“The one I saw you with yesterday in the dining room? Her son is a beauty, but she is too fat and when she gets older she’ll go to pieces. Did you notice how many diamonds she wears? A jewelry store—tasteless, disgusting. In Lyons and Bordeaux none of us had a bathroom, but she got one. Since she is so rich, why does she ride in a bus? They don’t give her a plain room but a suite. Is she Jewish?”

“Her late husband was a Jew.”

“A widow, eh? She’s probably looking for a match. The diamonds are more than likely imitations. What is she, French?”

“Armenian.”

“Foolish men kill themselves and leave such bitches huge estates. Where does she live?”

“In Turkey.”

“Be careful. One glance was enough to tell me this is a spider. But men are blind.”

I couldn’t believe it, but I began to see that Mark was trying to arrange a match between his mother and myself. Strangely, the mother played as passive a role in the situation as some old-time maiden for whom the parents were trying to find a husband. I told myself that it was all my imagination. What would a rich widow, an Armenian living in Turkey, want with a Yiddish writer? What kind of future could she see in this? True, I was an American citizen, but it wouldn’t have been difficult for Mrs. Metalon to obtain a visa to America without me. I concluded that her fourteen-year-old son had hypnotized his mother—that he dominated her as his father had probably done before him. I also toyed with the notion that her husband’s soul had entered into Mark and that he, the dead Sephardi, wanted his wife to marry a fellow Jew. I tried to avoid eating with the pair, but each time Mark found me and said, “Sir, my mother is waiting for you.”

His words implied a command. When it was my turn to order my vegetarian dishes, Mark took over and told the waiter or waitress exactly what to bring me. He knew Spanish because his father had had a partner with whom he had conversed in Ladino. I wasn’t accustomed to drinking wine with my meals, but Mark ordered it without consulting me. When we came to a city, he always managed that his mother and I were left alone to shop for bargains and souvenirs. On these occasions he warned me sternly not to spend any money on his mother, and if I had already done so he demanded to know how much and told his mother to pay me back. When I objected, he arched his brows. “Sir, we don’t need gifts. A Yiddish writer can’t be rich.” He opened his mother’s pocketbook and counted out whatever the amount had been.

Mrs. Metalon smiled sheepishly at this and added, half in jest, half in earnest, that Mark treated her as if she were his daughter. But she had obviously accepted the relationship.

Is she so weak? I wondered. Or is there some scheme behind this?

The situation struck me as particularly strange because the mother and son were together only during vacations. The rest of the year she remained in Ankara while he studied in London. As far as I could determine, Mark was dependent on his mother; when he needed something he had to ask for money.

At first, the two of them sat in the bus together, but one day after lunch Mark told me that I was to sit with his mother. He himself sat down next to Celina Weyerhofer. He had arranged all this without the driver’s permission, and I doubted if he had discussed it with his mother.

I had been sitting next to a woman from Holland, and this changing of seats provoked whispering among the passengers. From that day on, I became Mrs. Metalon’s partner not only in the dining room but in the bus as well. People began to wink, make remarks, leer. Much of the time I looked out of the window. We drove through regions that reminded me of the desert and the land of Israel. Peasants rode on asses. We passed an area where gypsies lived in caves. Girls balanced water jugs on their heads. Grandmothers toted bundles of wood and herbs wrapped in linen sheets over their shoulders. We passed ancient olive trees and trees that resembled umbrellas. Sheep browsed among cracked clods of earth on the half-burned plain. A horse circled a well. The sky, pale blue, radiated a fiery heat. Something Biblical hovered over the landscape. Passages of the Pentateuch flashed across my memory. It seemed to me that I was somewhere in the plains of Mamre, where presently would materialize Abraham’s tent, and the angel would bring Sarah tidings that she would be blessed with a male child at the age of ninety. My head whirled with stories of Sodom, of the sacrifice of Isaac, of Ishmael and Hagar. The stacks of grain in the harvested fields brought Joseph’s dreams to mind. One morning we passed a horse fair. The horses and the men stood still, congealed in silence like phantoms of a fair from a vanished time. It was hard to believe that in this very land, some fifteen years before, a civil war had raged and Stalinists had shot Trotskyites.