Back then we didn’t realize what made these craftily unfolding cautionary tales so perfidious, and at the same time so great — though very bad reading for children — at least when viewed in the light of intellectual refraction: namely, that in the world of Wilhelm Busch it is people — and petty, dumb, and vengeful people at that — who punish the wrongdoers, whereas in the more innocent moral fairy tales, the higher power of good always sends out an avenging angel, albeit often in foolish disproportion to the incident at hand. But we did feel the strange impotence of hatred that seeks to still itself in humor, thereby robbing both of any claim to purity. We felt the meanness of the souls that he created and had made to act so true to life that they were indelibly etched in our memory, equipping us with the dubious pleasures of boorish situational comedy as well as a cynical, worldly-wise attitude — the worst bastard offspring of a casually smirking worldview. A little later we were led into the morass of scornful tolerance, which attempts to placate all the indignation of a wounded sense of justice with the logic: “What do you expect? That’s the way the world is. You can’t change it. And would it be any better if you could? It’s smarter to laugh than to cry your heart out about it.” But in those early days we suffered from our inability to excuse the baseness, especially as we wanted so much to see everything resolved in pure cheerfulness — for instance in the story of the two dogs Plisch and Plum, which was utterly ruined for us because of the ending: we despised the converted boys who, like the dogs, had had their good behavior beaten into them, and their only reward was to look on happily as their beloved dogs were sold off to the eccentric Englishman.
And then there was the malicious laughter with which Herr Kunzelmann accompanied his quotations, his menacing index finger with its horny and permanently dirty nail, the bad German he spoke when making pronouncements such as “But the children start to plan again more and worse shenanigans” or “The best is written here in stone: leave what’s well enough alone” in order to jokingly dissuade us from pranks we neither intended nor ever committed; and, finally, his compulsive bad habit of expanding each verse with nonsense syllables and thereby ruining it, occasionally to the point that it took us hours to reconstruct the original form — that was enough to elicit a strange antipathy mixed of disgust and attraction, both for Wilhelm Busch and his dreadful interpreter. But the unfathomable tastelessness that Herr Kunzelmann committed by showing us the hide of our dead horse, which he crowned with the concluding citation “No matter what you think or say, death is always in your way!” whereupon he once again gave the reins a lively jiggle to bring our Kobiela into motion, and drove away laughing — we considered that a desecration, and it upset and depressed us for days.
It’s worth noting that years later, and ever since, I was to absolve Herr Kunzelmann of blame, thanks to a certain gesture of my sister Tanya, which freed us from any psychological burden his action might have imposed on us — if, contrary to the custom in Czernopol, we were to consider the man’s lowliness a fault. This absolution was rendered without any intent on Tanya’s part, simply as a result of her grace and its liberating power. I am speaking of the absolute politeness with which Tanya once took an apple from Herr Kunzelmann. It was an apple of choice beauty, an early variety we called “paper apples” because of their tender-brittle linden-colored skin. One day Herr Kunzelmann, whom we had avoided for a long time, surprised us while we were deeply engrossed in one of our games. There he was, apple in hand, out of the blue, looking us over one after the other, as if he were Paris and had to decide who deserved the apple. Finally he handed it to Tanya. And while the rest of us waited for Tanya to politely decline, she took it, completely unchallenged, her eyes focused on its immaculate beauty, then curtsied politely and turned back to us, expecting us to continue our game. She had gently crossed her legs in a pose we would later develop more thoroughly during ballet instruction at Madame Aritonovich’s institute, and her slender body, already quite tall, supported her childish head with its abundance of brown hair the way the smooth stems of parrot tulips carry their full and richly feathered blossoms. In her simple play-dress she seemed as sexless as an angel. I can’t say I was aware of the grace of this image back then, but I held on to it, and it returns every time I think about the majesty of a child. Such was the power of Tanya’s grace that even Herr Kunzelmann lost his crude compulsion to utter something shallow; he stepped away without a word, his leather gaiters cautiously departing our field of vision. Tanya held the apple for a while, then ate it up without a glance. From that day on we no longer avoided Herr Kunzelmann. And yet even without agreeing to do so, from then on we called him, with the thin edge of our earliest derogatory irony, Schmunzelmann, or “the smirking Kunzelmann.”
But now to the incident with Herr Adamowski. The sight of the ill-matched couple he formed with Professor Feuer—“a horse and a cow on the same shaft,” was how our coachman put it — always brought us to the garden fence when Strindberg’s doppelgänger and the hobbling journalist passed down the street around noontime. Moreover, by nodding and blinking and baring his teeth at us, Herr Adamowski had given us to understand that he well knew the cause of our curiosity. Then he would exaggerate his laborious gait, rolling his eyes and puffing out his cheeks when he rose up on his healthy leg, powerful yet still woefully short next to the tree-sized Professor Feuer, and shaking his head and letting it sink to his shoulders in distress when he then went back down on his short, crippled leg. He would look straight at us and laugh by baring his sawlike teeth and squinting through his flashing monocle. His grimaces were so sudden and darting, his expression so full of mystery and expectation, that we had the impression we were looking into a whirling wheel of fortune, from which the thick red winning number would jump out at any moment. He raised his rubber-tipped cane to his beret and lowered it again as if saluting with a sword. As with the Wilhelm Busch illustrations, we were at once fascinated and repulsed. Out of politeness we soon managed to return his greeting, which he acknowledged with a broad, obliging smile, which strangely reminded us of Widow Morar’s golden mouth. But we never greeted him out loud; we bowed or curtsied in silence, out of fear that he otherwise might say something to us.
For his part, Herr Adamowski didn’t seem bound by conventions that even the pushiest Jewish peddler immediately understood and respected — because no matter how bald and direct most dealings were in Czernopol, a traditional sensitivity regarding distance had survived, even if it expressed itself rather maliciously in most cases. But we still didn’t understand that very well; we had spent most of our young lives in the country, where the people showed an almost holy respect for those of higher station, which is the kind of distance that we, incapable of understanding irony, thought we were experiencing in the city. Herr Kunzelmann was the first one who had blatantly disregarded that. The second was Herr Adamowski.