The World as I Found It (26 page)

Wittgenstein could still feel that dog clutching, dancing so close sometimes that he imagined he could feel the nails of Hans's soul scraping his face. Downstairs later, his mother would play for them on her piano, sometimes even singing in a wavering contralto.
Und hier, und hier
, would come Herr Passarelli's monotonous voice as the boy fumbled along, holding the sweaty hand and sweatier back of some equally nervous girl. And even then he would see the Blocker loitering by the french doors, slyly nodding, as if to say,
I
know with whom you wish to dance,
Liebchen
, oh, yes, I know …

The Blocker was still with him that night as he stood with his parents at the threshold of the great room before the glowing tree and the rustling fire. More palpably there was also the person of his father, slick as a whiskered seal in his white tie and tails. Showing his son how these things were done, Karl Wittgenstein was insufferably charming, especially to Fräulein Ketteler, a comely redhead with a long, dramatic throat and hazel eyes. Wittgenstein could feel her excited expectancy, slightly tremulous as he made his little bow and wanly took her hand. And later, by the fire while his father carried on like a one-man band, he saw her snitch looks at him, the promised, as he inwardly asked her,
What's wrong with you? … Don't you know what I am? … Don't you
know
yet?

Supper was interminable. Yet here again Fräulein Ketteler, sitting opposite him, seemed to be drawn to him almost in direct proportion to his own aloofness as he answered, with mounting irritation, her parents' excruciatingly correct questions. And why was he studying logic? And why, of all places, in England?

Why were they even asking these questions? he wondered. If Fräulein Ketteler herself didn't see, didn't
they
? And after England? asked Herr Ketteler, making Wittgenstein feel like a piece of meat that was not only to be consumed but was expected to attest to its own wholesomeness. But it was Karl Wittgenstein who acted as his son's advocate, wisely saying to Herr Ketteler, Well, we
change
in youth, don't we? The strong suggestion being that this philosophy nonsense would soon run its course. Why, to hear him, his son was still a chrysalis with foggy eyes; with several years and a good woman, he would come around. He had the blood. The brains, too. Yes, with time, Karl Wittgenstein suggested, he would become a stout man of affairs, just like his father.

Well, as I say, added Karl Wittgenstein, it never pays to fish behind another man's nets.

It was not clear from the context what his father meant, nor did Herr Ketteler seem to know himself. But this did not prevent these two successful older men from exchanging as a countersign that hearty, knowing smile which is its own benediction, as Herr Ketteler chimed in, So true. And so do we learn not to fire one arrow vainly after another.

Here, here. Tut, tut. And so again the two fathers, wine warmed, enjoyed another pregnant moment while the stewing suitor flushed crimson over his own, specially bland soup.

And then came the part Wittgenstein dreaded most, when he and Fräulein Ketteler — “the young folk” — were nervously ushered like stud and mare into the library, there ostensibly to talk their young talk while the old people waited, wondering if their blood would take. Wittgenstein might as well have blundered once more into the powder room for all the competence he felt here, sitting with his knees clasped together, mired in his own impossibility. And again, imagining himself as a kind of fact betrayed by its own self-evidence, he thought,
Doesn't she see?
Yet to judge by Fräulein Ketteler's talk about opera and museums,
Die Fackel
and the latest novels — broad hints about shared interests and things they might do together — clearly Fräulein Ketteler did not
see
at all. But if not, he thought, wasn't it possible that he might see her? Surely, life could evolve. It wasn't just Fräulein Ketteler or respectability he craved, it was being propelled into new life — being freed of the imprisoning form of the old. And a push, a mere push was all he needed. After all, he told himself, there was no need to plunge straight to the bottom; like cold water, intimacy with a woman could be entered slowly. She would be patient. Over a few years, he might get on, might even marry and father children — might, in short, be a credit and not an encumbrance to his family, perpetuating their name. Fräulein Ketteler was not a life prowling the Prater meadows; Fräulein Ketteler was a chance. But here again, these fantasies were broken by an image of a slender figure standing by the french doors. It was the Blocker, and he was nodding, smiling in the knowledge that by taking his own life he had stolen forever another life, which he still dangled before his little brother like his own nose.

C
HRISTMAS PASSED
. Fräulein Ketteler passed. Further notes from his father passed, but this feeling of failure, this seeming interdict on his life, did not pass. And then, not long before Wittgenstein returned to England, Gretl took him out again, this time to a play.

It was Gretl's idea, and he was immediately suspicious when she told him the play was to be a surprise. Still, Wittgenstein went along, until Gretl's driver, who had been heading northeast around the Ring, crossed the Danube Canal into the heart of the Leopoldstadt. This was Vienna's main Jewish district, once the old ghetto, and it was near no theaters that Wittgenstein knew of. Still, Gretl managed to quiet him until they reached the Hotel Stefanie, a worn-out place on the Taborstrasse with a dark façade of glazed block and narrow, smeary windows hung with tessellated curtains.

What is this? he asked, looking at the crude billboard with its clotted Hebrew lettering. Along the sidewalk, people were gathered under the dangling light globes that lined the hotel's façade like an old string of beads, some dully aglow, some missing.

This is my surprise, said Gretl. It's the Jüdisches-Theater Variété — Yiddish theater. Tonight they're hosting a production of
The Golem of Prague
.

Wittgenstein felt betrayed: he thought Gretl was deliberately trying to trap him. Tell me, he demanded. Why did you bring me here?

Why do you think? she retorted. Already, her voice was getting squeaky. I thought you might
enjoy
it. Then accusingly, Are you going to spoil the evening?

It's already spoiled. Shaking his head. A jargon play.

Gretl made a face. Don't use that word. And you can follow the Yiddish, you can. She laid her hand on his arm. Ludi, would I bring you here just to antagonize you?

He softened at this sisterly appeal. And he was tired, so tired. He did not want to fight with Gretl, but neither did he want to go in and be enveloped with these people who conjured images of fever, overcooked cabbage and quibbling. Here with their wives in their lumpy furs were more assimilated Jews, solid burghers in their Homburgs and cravats. And here, too, were the
shtetl
Jews, bearded peddlers and traders fresh from Galicia, Bukovina and Moravia, in their black felt hats and long frock coats. The men stood in a huddle, talking animatedly while their round wives, wrapped in shawls and bunchy coats, stood off at a respectful distance. Now all these people were casting glances at the long black car with its gleaming grille and bulbous tires. Already he could feel them staring at him, fingering their mossy beards. Looking away, he said:

Gretl … Gretl, honestly I'm not —

Oh, stop it! Do you ever listen to yourself? Ever since you've been home you've been like this.

His eyes were swimming, he was so furious. Why do you think I wanted to stay in England? Did it ever occur to you — to any of you — that I might have known what was best? I was fine in England.

Stop! You were not fine in England. You were not fine last summer.

What do you know? You just can't imagine I'd be fine for long away from them.
Or
you.

Or
me — You know, she said, shaking her finger at him, you know, I resent being implicated in your absurd, imaginary scourges. All of us against you! All of us guilty! What were you looking for when you went into the ladies' toilet? Oh, I realize it's not abstract and complicated enough for your mind. Of course it's easier to think about logic than about your life — it's certainly much safer, don't you think,
ummm?
You know, she said scathingly, in his own inimitable and wrongheaded way, I think Father's basically right about you.

Oh, I know! he said, taking an involuntary hop in his seat. And of course it's so easy, now that you've sold your soul to the doctors. Yes, do lure little brother to a jargon play so he can wallow in
your
fears and
your
preoccupations.
Ummmmm?
This is your misery, your Menorah — not mine. He turned away. Go light your own candles.

Fine! In her fury, Gretl's eyes fluttered as she seized the speaking tube and told the driver to take them around the block.

Not a word as the car crept through the ghetto quarters, past the darkened shops with their rolled awnings and signs in jagged Hebrew. Gretl was content to leave, but then, spitefully, he was insisting that he wanted to go. No! Gretl said. Absolutely not. But still he persisted, so cocksure that it became a kind of mutual dare, one following the other into this haunted house to prove there was no such thing as ghosts.

But the ghosts were real. Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating — everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.

Can't we sit down? he asked suddenly.

If you wish. Gretl faced him. You're all right?

This was his chance, but as they entered the little theater, his pride prevented him from admitting that he felt ill. Doubling as a hall for weddings, brisses and bar mitzvahs, it was a dusty little place that had the feeling and smell of a gutted pumpkin, what with the peeling paint and tattered wall coverings. On the stage, behind an open halfhearted curtain, was a crudely painted backdrop of a ghetto scene — listing huts and stoops, a fence.

Gretl, incorrigible guide, was saying: The play is based on the legend — you've heard it, the legend of the golem of Prague? It has a factual basis. In Prague in the 1700s, the Jews were being blood-libeled by Christians. It happened quite routinely. A Christian might swear a Jew had stolen his child to use the blood to make matzos. There would be a pogrom or the Jew might be burned at the stake —

Yes, yes, he said suddenly. You needn't rehearse this for me.

Fine! Gretl swung around.

Sorry for his rudeness, he said, I didn't mean to be short with you. Striving for a more conciliatory tone, he said, The golem — it's a kind of beast or something, isn't it?

But Gretl wouldn't answer, and he sat there, feeling impossible even to himself while trying to graciously decline some sort of seed cake that an agreeable but insistent old man was pushing at him. Then, in the din of the outer hall, a man could be heard shouting — the play was about to start. The crowd flooded through the doors. People were squeezing in around them, when Wittgenstein suddenly realized he was much too close to the coal stove, which a man had just stoked, giving the grate a good rattle as he spat and clamped it shut. The room was packed. Wittgenstein didn't think he'd be able to stand this heat pulsing along his back as the lights dimmed and the play began. Lumbering across the stage, bent low, a black-bearded butcher with a bloody smock was hauling over his back the papier-mâché carcass of a slaughtered pig. Already Wittgenstein was hating it, feeling a hot constriction. Beast! cried someone in the front row. The audience hissed. Muttering his foul plans, the villainous butcher stole into the graveyard, where he stuffed the body of a Christian child into the pig's carcass, then left it where one of his henchmen would claim to find it — the bloody work of the Jew.

The play was bad, but the schtick acting was even worse, as false and buffoonish as the actors' puttied noses, horsehair beards and gestures heavenward at the least provocation. No art here. This was no play, and this was not the famed Vilna Troupe. These actors were only people cut from the herd to act out the fears of the herd huddled here to be told of their humiliations, disasters and small triumphs between disasters. Listing and crooked, billowing with every draft, even the slapdash huts of that ghetto backdrop took on an unintended nightmarishness to Wittgenstein, in whose mind the play paradoxically carried more weight than even the playwright knew, let alone these actors. Unable to take refuge behind critical judgments, Wittgenstein now found himself naked before the legend, the heat licking up his back as Rabbi Loew, known as the
Maharal
, dreamed of creating a golem who would destroy the butcher, the sorcerer-priest Thaddeus and all the enemies of Israel.

Resisting the onslaught of this stealthy dream, Wittgenstein closed then opened his eyes, felt his hands tingle and the blood slowly drain from his head while the rabbi and his cohorts met in the darkness to create their golem. Sweeping a pile of dust into the form of a man, they walked seven times around the mound, circling from left to right while reciting cabalistic incantations. When the spotlight went out, a woman in the audience let out an involuntary cry; then in the audience there was a nervous buzzing and rattling of paper as onstage, under a growing stain of light, the dust pile began to move.