the Emigrants (14 page)

Later that night, in my hotel room, I listened to the sound of the sea. I dreamt I was crossing the Atlantic in a
paquebot
whose deck superstructure looked exactly like the Hotel Normandy. I was standing at the rail as we entered Le Havre at dawn. The foghorn boomed three times and the immense ship trembled beneath my feet. From Le Havre to Deauville I took the train. In my compartment there was a woman wearing a feathered hat, with a large variety of hatboxes. She was smoking a large Havanna cigar, and gazed tauntingly across at me through the blue haze from time to time. But I did not know how to address her, and in my embarrassment I sat staring at the white kid gloves, with their many tiny buttons, that lay beside her on the upholstered seat. Once I had reached Deauville I took a fly to the Hotel des Roches Noires. The streets were inordinately busy: coaches and carriages of every kind, cars, handcarts, bicycles, errand boys, delivery men and
flàneurs
wove their seemingly aimless way. It was as if all pandemonium had broken loose. The hotel was hopelessly overbooked. Crowds of people were jostling at the reception desk. It was just before the start of the racing season, and everyone was determined to lodge at one of the best addresses, whatever the cost. Those who were staying at the Roches Noires hired sofas or armchairs to sleep on in the reading room or the salon; the staff were evacuated from their attic quarters to the cellar; the gentlemen ceded their beds to the ladies and lay where they could, in the foyer or the corridors, the window bays or landings, and on the billiard tables. By paying a horrendous bribe I secured a bunk in a lumber room, high on the wall like a luggage rack. Only when I was too fatigued to go on did I climb up into it and sleep for an hour or so. The rest of the time I was looking for Cosmo and Ambros night and day. Now and then I thought I saw them disappear into an entry or a lift or turn a street corner. Or else I really did see them, taking tea out in the courtyard, or in the hall leafing through the latest papers, which were brought early every morning at breakneck speed from Paris to Deauville by Gabriel the chauffeur. They were silent, as the dead usually are when they appear in our dreams, and seemed somewhat downcast and dejected. Generally, in fact, they behaved as if their altered condition, so to speak, were a terrible family secret not to be revealed under any circumstances. If I approached them, they dissolved before my very eyes, leaving behind them nothing but the vacant space they had occupied. Whenever I caught sight of them, I contented myself with observing them from a distance. "Wherever I happened upon them it was as if they constituted a point of stillness in the ceaseless bustle. It seemed as though the whole world had gathered there in Deauville for the summer of 1913. I saw the Comtesse de Montgomery, the Comtesse de Fitzjames, Baronne d'Erlanger and the Marquise de Massa, the Rothschilds, the Deutsch de la Meurthes, the Koechlins and Biirgels, the Peugeots, the Wormses and the Hennessys, the Isvolskys and the Orlovs, artistes of both sexes, fast women like Réjane and Reichenberg, Greek shipping tycoons, Mexican petroleum magnates and cotton planters from Louisiana. The
Trouville Gazette
reported that a veritable wave of the exotic had broken upon Deauville that year:
des musulmans moldo-valaques, des brahmanes hindous et toutes les variétés de Cafres, de Papous, de Niam-Niams et de Bachibouzouks importés en Europe avec leurs danses simiesques et leurs instruments sauvages.
Things were happening round the clock. At the first big race of the season, at La Touque hippodrome, I heard an English gossip columnist say: It actually seems as though people have learnt to sleep on the hoof. It's their glazed look that gives them away. Touch them, and they keel over. Dead tired myself, I stood on the grandstand of the hippodrome. The grass track around the polo field was bordered by long rows of poplars. Through my binoculars I could see their leaves turning in the breeze, silvery grey. The crowd was growing by the minute. Soon there was one vast sea of hats swelling below me, the white egret feathers cresting them like crowns of foam on waves that ebb darkly away. The loveliest of the young ladies appeared last of all, the yearlings of the season, as it were, wearing lace dresses through which their silken undergarments gleamed in Nile green, crevette, or absinthe blue. In no time at all they were surrounded by men in black, the most raffish of whom raised their top hats aloft on their canes. When the race was already due to have started, the Maharajah of Kashmir arrived in his Rolls, which was gold-plated within, and behind him a second limousine from which an incredibly obese lady alighted and was led to her seat by two ancient grooms. Immediately above her, I suddenly realized, were sitting Cosmo Solomon and Ambros. Ambros was wearing a buff linen suit and a black-lacquered Spanish straw hat on his head. But Cosmo was clad in a thick fleeced coat, despite the cloudless midsummer weather, and an aviator's cap from which his blond curls escaped. His right arm, resting on the back of Ambros's seat, was motionless, and motionless they both gazed into the distance. Otherwise, as I now recall, my dreams in Deauville were filled with constant whisperings of the rumours that were in circulation concerning Cosmo and Ambros. On one occasion I saw the two young men sitting late in the evening in the Normandy's vast dining hall at a small table of their own, placed especially for them in the centre of the room, apart from all the rest. On a silver platter between them, occasionally making slow movements, lay a lobster, gleaming a wonderful pink in the muted atmosphere. Ambros was steadily taking the lobster apart, with great skill, placing little morsels before Cosmo, who ate them like a well brought up child. The diners swayed as if there were a light swell, and only the women's glittering earrings and necklaces and the gentlemen's white shirt-fronts were to be seen. Nonetheless, I sensed that everyone kept their eyes on the two lobster eaters, whom I heard variously described as master and man, two friends, relatives, or even brothers. Endlessly the pros and cons of all these theories were advanced, and the discussions filled the hall with a low murmur, even long after the table for two had been cleared and the first light of dawn was at the windows. No doubt it was above all the eccentricity of Cosmo, combined with the impeccable manners of Ambros, that had aroused the curiosity of the Deauville summer guests. And their curiosity naturally grew, and the suspicions that were voiced waxed more audacious, the more the two friends contented themselves with each other's company, turning down the invitations that were extended to them daily. The astounding eloquence of Ambros, which contrasted so strikingly with Cosmo's seemingly total lack of words, also prompted speculation. Moreover, Cosmo's aerobatics and escapades on the polo field afforded a continual talking point, and the interest people took in the curious Americans reached its climax when Cosmo's unparalleled streak of luck began, in the
séparée
of the casino. Word of it spread through Deauville like wildfire. On top of the whispers already in circulation there was now added the rumour of fraud, or crooked dealing; and talk -on that evening in the dining room, too - never tired of suggesting that Ambros, who did not sit at the roulette table himself, but was always standing immediately behind Cosmo, possessed the mysterious powers of a
magnetiseur.
Indeed, he was so unfathomable that I felt that he could be compared only to the Austrian countess, a
femme au passé obscur
who held court in the somewhat remoter corners of my Deauville dream world. Exceptionally delicately built, and indeed almost transparent, she wore grey or brown moiré silk dresses, and would be besieged at any time of the day or night by a horde of admirers of either sex. No one knew her real name (there was no such person as Grafin Dembowski in Vienna), nor could anyone estimate her age or say if she were married or not, or a widow. I first noticed Grafin Dembowski when she did something that no woman had dared to do before her: she removed her white sun hat on the terrace of the casino and laid it on the balustrade beside her. And I saw her for the last time when, awakened from my Deauville dream, I went to the window of my hotel room. Morning was breaking. The beach still merged colourless into the sea, the sea into the sky. And there she was, in the pale but growing light of daybreak, on the deserted Promenade des Planches. Dressed in the most tasteless of styles and appallingly made up, there she came, with a white Angora rabbit lolloping along on a lead. She was also attended by a clubman in acid green livery, who would stoop down whenever the rabbit refused to go on and feed it a little of the enormous cauliflower he held in his crookd left arm.

On the desk in front of me is the agenda book that belonged to Ambros, which Aunt Fini gave me on my winter visit to Cedar Glen West. It is a pocket diary for the year 1913, bound in soft burgundy leather and measuring about twelve centimetres by eight. Ambros must have bought it in Milan, because that is where his entries begin, on the 20th of August: Palace H, 3 pm, Signora M. Evening, Teatro S. Martino, Corso V. Em.
I tre Emisferi.
Deciphering his tiny handwriting, which not infrequently moved to and fro between several

languages, was an arduous task, one I should probably never have accomplished if those words committed to paper almost eighty years before had not, as it were, opened up of their own accord. The entries gradually become more detailed, and it appears that, at the end of August, Ambros and Cosmo left from Venice for Greece and Constantinople, in a steam yacht. Early morning (it says), myself on deck for a long time, looking astern. The lights of the city receding into the distance under a veil of rain. The islands in the lagoon like shadows.
Mai du pays.
Le navigateur écrit son journal à la vue de la terre qui s'éloigne.
The following day he writes: Off the Croatian coast. Cosmo very restless. A beautiful sky. Treeless mountains. The clouds built high. As good as dark at three in the afternoon. Bad weather. We strike our sails. Seven in the evening, the storm full force. Waves breaking on the deck. The Austrian captain has lit an oil lamp before the picture of Our Lady in his cabin. He is kneeling on the floor, praying. In Italian, strange to say, for the poor lost seamen
sepolti in questo sacro mare.
The stormy night is followed by a windless day. Steam up, steadily southward. I put things back in order. In the failing light ahead, pearly grey on the line of the horizon, an island. Cosmo stands fore like a pilot. Calls the name Fano to a sailor. Sfsiorsf, the sailor shouts, and, pointing ahead, he repeats, louder: Fano! Fano! Later, low on the already darkened island, I see a fire. There are fishermen on the beach. One of them waves a burning piece of wood. We pass them, and a few hours later enter the harbour of Kassiopé on the north coast of Kérkyra. Next morning the most fearful racket on board. Repairing damage to the engine. Ashore with Cosmo. Up to the ruins of the fortifications. A holm oak growing right out of the castle. We lie beneath the canopy of leaves as in an arbour. Below, they are hammering away at the boiler. A day out of time. At night we sleep on deck. The singing of crickets. Woken by a breeze on my brow. Across the straits, beyond the blue-black mountains of Albania, day is breaking, its glowing flame blazing across the lightless world. And at the same time two white ocean-going yachts trailing white smoke cross the scene, so slowly it is as if they were being pulled across a stage inch by inch. One would hardly think they were moving, but at length they are gone, into the wings of Cape Varvara with its dark green forests, over which hangs the thin sickle of the crescent moon. - 6th September: From Kérkyra via Ithaca and Patras into the Gulf of Corinth. At Itéa decided to send the boat on ahead and travel overland to Athens. Now in the hills at Delphi, the night already very cool. We lay down to sleep two hours ago, wrapped in our coats. Our saddles serve as pillows. The horses stand heads bowed beneath the laurel tree, the leaves of which rustle softly like tiny sheets of metal. Above us the Milky Way (where the Gods pass, says Cosmo), so resplendent that I can write this by its light. If I look straight up I can see the Swan and Cassiopeia. They are the same stars I saw above the Alps as a child and later above the Japanese house in its lake, above the Pacific, and out over Long Island Sound. I can scarcely believe I am the same person, and in Greece. But now and then the fragrance of juniper wafts across to us, so it is surely so.

After these nocturnal entries, the next of any length was written on the day they arrived in Constantinople. Yesterday morning left Piraeus, Ambros recorded on the 15th of September. Somewhat the worse for wear, he wrote, after the laborious overland journey. Calm voyage. Resting for hours under the awning on deck. Never seen water as blue. Truly ultramarine. This morning through the Dardanelles. Great flocks of cormorants. In the early afternoon, far ahead, the capital of the Orient appeared, like a mirage at first, then the green of trees and the colourful jostling houses gradually becoming more distinct. The masts of ships, crowding and swaying gently in a breeze, and the minarets, seeming to sway a little as well. - The Trieste captain paid, we take rooms at the Pera Palas for the time being. We enter the lobby as afternoon tea is being served. Cosmo writes in the register:
Freres Solomon, New York, en route pour la Chine. Pera,
the reception clerk tells me when I enquire,
pera
means beyond. Beyond Stamboul. Mellow orchestral music drifts through the foyer. Behind the drawn tulle curtains of the ballroom glide the shadows of dancing couples.
Quand l'amour meurt,
sings a woman, her voice meandering eerily. The stairs and rooms magnificent. Carpeted landscapes beneath high ceilings. Immense tubs in the bathrooms. From the balcony, a view across the Golden Horn. Evening falls. We watch the dark descending from the outlying hills upon the low roofs, rising from the depths of the city atop the lead-grey cupolas of the mosques till at length it reaches to the tips of the minarets, which gleam especially brightly one last time before the light goes. - At this point, Ambros's entries continue regardless of the dates in his diary. No one, he writes, could conceive of such a city. So many different kinds of buildings, so many different greens. The crowns of pines high aloft. Acacias, cork oaks, sycamores, eucalypts, junipers, laurels, a paradise of trees, shady slopes and groves with tumbling streams and springs. Every walk full of surprises, and indeed of alarm. The prospects change like the scenes in a play. One street lined with palatial buildings ends at a ravine. You go to a theatre and a door in the foyer opens into a copse; another time, you turn down a gloomy back street that narrows and narrows till you think you are trapped, whereupon you take one last desperate turn round a corner and find yourself suddenly gazing from a vantage point across the vastest of panoramas. You climb a bare hillside forever and find yourself once more in a shady valley, enter a house gate and are in the street, drift with the bustle in the bazaar and are suddenly amidst gravestones. For, like Death itself, the cemeteries of Constantinople are in the midst of life. For every one who departs this life, they say, a cypress is planted. In their dense branches the turtle doves nest. When night falls they stop cooing and partake of the silence of the dead. Once the silence descends, the bats come out and flit along their ways. Cosmo claims he can hear every one of their cries. - Whole districts of the city built entirely of wood. Houses of brown and grey weatherworn boards and planks, with flat-topped saddleback roofs and balconies. The Jewish quarter is built the same way. Walking through it today, we turn a corner and unexpectedly have a distant view of a blue line of mountains and the snowy summit of Olympus. For one awful heartbeat I imagine myself in Switzerland or at home again…