We sat down at the table, and ate our borsch with wooden spoons. Then we cut up the meat with our bayonets. We drank slivovitz from tea-glasses and canteens. My atheistical friend Rainacher stretched comfortably on the chair, flung wide his arms and sang: Gloria in excelsis deo. He wasn’t blaspheming. At three in the morning, we kissed the widow and the twins, gave them our four parcels, and went off to sleep. You take the bed tonight, Rainacher told me, I’ll go on the floor. It’s my present to you. And that’s how it was. We were roused at six with marching orders.
Das Neue Tage-Buch (Paris), 23 September 1939
Coda
64. Cradle
My earliest memory goes back a very long way. It is separated from a subsequent almost uninterrupted chain of memories commencing from my seventh year by a gap of several years, so that this earliest experience seems to stand all alone, like a brightly lit scene surrounded by darkness, and therefore all the more luminous. It is a sad memory, or at any rate, one that made me sad, for the first time in my life; and the scene, which, as I say, has remained very close to me, still radiates a sort of groundless melancholy, and therefore a true melancholy. The way a memory can remain so distinctly preserved under a layer of forgetting seems to heighten the importance of this early experience; there is almost something symbolic about it. It was a clear winter’s day. I still seem to see, in the small room that was mine at the time, a blue reflection of a cloudless sky, a thick, crystalline layer of snow on the windowsill and a few intricate ice flowers on the right-hand window. An old woman with a longish, grey brown shawl over her head and shoulders enters the room. My mother takes the bedding out of my cradle item by item, and lays it on a brown padded armchair. Then the woman in the shawl, who is not tall, steps up to my cradle, says something, picks up the cradle with a surprising turn of speed, holds it to her chest, as though it were a thing of no particular weight or dimensions, speaks for a long time, flashes her long yellow teeth, and leaves our house. I am left feeling sad, inconsolably helpless and sad. I seem to understand that I have lost something irrecoverable. I have been in a certain sense robbed. I start to cry, and am taken to a large white bed, which is my mother’s. There I fall asleep.
At this point the memory ends. The next four years are shrouded in shadow, in the thick shadow of forgetting. Later on, it transpires that my mother has no recollection of this day. Ten years later, she was unable to tell me when and to whom she had given my cradle. I wasn’t surprised, nor was I upset with her. She had merely missed the first grief of my life. She had no idea. The thing that upsets me is that she no longer knew whether it was summer or winter. By chance I was able to establish later who took the cradle and when. I must have been three years old at the time. I have the feeling that on that day, in that hour I became a grown-up — only briefly perhaps, but long enough to be sad, as sad as a grown-up, and perhaps for a better reason.
Die Literarische Welt, 17 December 1931
Index
Académie Française, 250
aeroplanes, 220–221
agents-provocateurs, 64
Albania
European visitors, 143–145
hospitality, 147
literature, 148
love of music, 137–138
parliament, 132
telegraph wires, 135
vendettas, 129n, 138–139, 146–147, 149–150
women, 138–139, 149, 151
Albanian army, 136, 140–142
Albanian language, 147–148
Alcázar, battle of, 250
alcohol, 115
Alexander III, Czar, 103
Ankara, 132
“Annette, Madame”, 175–180
anti-semitism, 22n, 32–33, 103, 114
Apfel, Alfred, 239
Aranitas, General Jemal, 136
Astrakhan, 108, 110, 115, 117–120
Avalov-Bermont, Count, 48
Azerbaijan, 124
Baabe, 21–22
Baku, 71, 118, 121
balalaikas, 101–102, 109
Baltic coast resorts, 19–22
Bäder-Antisemitismus, 22n
Baumbach, Rudolf, 200
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 241, 250
Berlin, 47, 56, 146, 249
anti-semitism in, 33
Berlin Tiergarten, 103
Berlin University, 33
bezprizorniy (homeless children), 122
bicycles, 31
Binz, 21
Bismarck, Otto von, 244
“black shame”, 43
Boryslav, 71–72, 75, 123
Bremen, 18
Bruck-Kiralyhida, 63–65
Bruckner, Anton, 250
Budapest, 3–4, 15, 103, 132
burlaki, 114–115
cafés, 65, 82, 84, 103, 116, 197, 204–207
Astrakhan, 117–119
Kruja, 149
cafés, cont’d
Magdeburg, 34–35
Sarajevo, 85–86
Tirana, 137–138
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 245, 250
canaries, 200
castanets, 245
castor oil, 145
Catherine the Great, Empress, 104
caviar, 117–118, 120
Chaplin, Charlie, 145
Charles I (Karl), Emperor, 249
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 248n, 249–250
Chemnitz, 31
Chuvaish, 112
Cimetière Parisien de Thiais, 129n
citizens “of ill repute”, 83–84
collectivism, 112
commercial travellers, 78–79
Constantinople, 103, 249
Cossacks, stage, 101–102
couleurs, 41
Counter-Reformation, 245
curfew hours, 37
Częstochowa, 119
dachas, 123
Dekobra, Maurice, 86
Denikin, Anton, 103
Dinter, Artur, 43, 45
dogs, 7–8, 32, 222
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 101
Dresden, 32
Dreyfus, Alfred, 76, 145
Drohobycz, 123
droshkies, 111, 113, 118, 123
Dual Monarchy, 63, 91n, 137
dual-occupancy rooms, 78
Durazzo, 130, 135
Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von, 200
Elbasan, 148–149
Elvestad, Sven, 43
emigrants, 13–16
émigrés, Russian, 101–104
Erasmus, Desiderius, 244
exhibition spaces, 37
fairs, 79
feuilletons, xi — xii, 3–4, 221
films, “socially conscious”, 179–180
Franz Joseph I, Emperor, 67, 91–97
fraternity students, 41–42
Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia, 243–244
French Revolution, 244, 249
Freytag-Loringhoven, Professor, 41, 45
Galicia, 66–70
oil industry, 71–76, 123
Gargas, Josefova, 257–260
Gentschow, Rose, 51–53
Germany
anti-semitism, 22n, 32–33, 103
hunger, 18, 32
nationalist propaganda, 17–18, 22
press under Nazis, 234–236
railways, 29–30
unemployment, 17–18, 28, 31