Ellis Island & Other Stories (15 page)

Because there was little that Giuliano Debernardi, with his rigorous high education and his acceptance in ruling circles, could ever bring himself to say to a priest, he looked away in contempt when a small ancient cleric entered his compartment while the train was halted, steaming, before its northward passage through the Alps to Germany. But he was severely startled when the priest slammed a bottle of red wine down on the little folding table, and said, “Who are you that turns his head when a man of the cloth comes in?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You heard me. I’m eighty-six years old and I know I’m going to Heaven. I don’t mince words, especially with young intellectuals who imagine that their birth, position, or knowledge make them better than old men who are priests in unknown mountain towns.” He spoke in a hoarse, energetic voice, breathing hard and heavy after each declaration. Giuliano Debernardi was indeed a fop, but not a fool. In a show of courage and precision, he held to the position the priest had accurately divined.

“At your age, you should be a Cardinal. Why not the principal in a great academy? You are obviously a failure, and you are aggressive to boot. But I am more aggressive.”

The priest threw the bottle at him. It nearly struck him in his sternum. “Here, open this. It’s too difficult for me. I could have been a Cardinal. I could have risen very far in those directions. I chose not to. It was a decision of strength based on a momentous discovery. Give me the wine. Give it. Give it! I can see that you are lost in your own petty concerns. What are your small fears?”

“I am afraid that my German is not good enough,” Giuliano Debernardi said quite bluntly.

“Oh? Do you have a German?”

“Please. I am going to Berlin to work for
Zeitschrift fur Sozialwissenschaft.
I will have to write in German. I told them I was fluent. They believed me. I am not fluent.”

“That’s nothing.”

“I don’t think it’s nothing!”

“You have ignored the compression of the world for foolish concerns such as that. And it shows on your face,” he added quickly.

“I have ignored the what? What nonsense. I am part of the world. I see things quite deeply. Don’t think that I am superficial just because I don’t see with your two eyes. I have my own, you know.” He leaned over the table and said, quite fiercely, “A stupid assumption, from a provincial priest.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. I do.” This priest, thought Giuliano Debernardi, is one of those men who are lacking in power, one of those who cannot act decisively, or bring their wills to bear on others. The train began its climb into the snow-covered mountains.

The priest gestured out the window. He seemed hopelessly behind in the competition with Guiliano Debernardi, who began to pity him.

“Look. What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing! In that instant in which you saw nothing, I saw enough to speak about for a month. Do you remember what we passed? It was a view across a street in a little town near Feltre. In that blink of an eye were a hundred thousand things.”

“I saw nothing unusual—just some people walking, the mountains beyond, a wagon or two, an iron fence, I don’t know.”

“Did you see Emiglia pass?”

“I don’t know who Emiglia is.”

“In black, near the lip of the gorge. She is a widow. From the way she walked and held herself, you could extract certain details. In that one frame from which you took nothing, Emiglia walked by.”

“What of it? There are widows all over Italy. Here, they go by the thousands. I suppose, since the earthquake, years ago.”

“No. The young ones have remarried. Others have affairs, taking a man to bed, drawing from him guilty pleasure.”

“How do you know?”

“I have sinned.”

“I am not impressed.”

“I did not do it,” said the priest, with a smile, “to impress you.”

“Doesn’t this Emiglia have affairs, and take men to bed?”

“No, not Emiglia. It is a case somewhat beyond your wisdom—despite your tailored suit and your splendid briefcase. You did not even
see
her walking by the lip of the gorge, that I know. I did not become a Cardinal because…”

“Because you like to drink wine.”

“What do you know. Cardinals drink as if they were made of sponge. I did not become a Cardinal because… it was too thick near Feltre. There was too much. When you encompass affairs, and rule over things, you cannot even start the task.

“Take Emiglia. To you, she was just a flash of black. You did not even see her. She has no affairs. Her husband and six miners rode every day a mile into the mountain, through a tunnel, on bicycles.

“Their way was lit with miner’s lamps, and the air was thin and cold. At the tunnel’s end, they rose two thousand feet into the heart of the peak. There, they dug silver, under summit ice. With the earthquake, the town was leveled and no one thought of the miners. The mile-long tunnel was shut forever, trapping them in the high chamber.” He indicated the enormous mountain, standing astride the rest of the world.

“It isn’t that the mountain rides above the town… no… but,” he said slowly, “…
their futile movements within the chamber, for time unspecified.
It is difficult to be a young man who has lied to his employer. It is difficult to be an old man who each day just begins to see within an ever-expanding complexity rooted in simple things. It is difficult to be Emiglia, walking by the gorge alone. But none of these things is as difficult, you see, as trying to
draw air through the rock.”

The train dashed into a tunnel. In the darkness, Giuliano Debernardi struggled in panic to loosen his collar. He felt that there was no air. He could not breathe.

The priest was laughing. For there was, of course, no Emiglia, and his timing had been just right.

Before the War, in London, I was trying to arrange a system whereby the Jews of Germany and Austria could sell their paintings and other works of art without depressing demand. It was very serious business, for our primary aim was to require that twenty-five percent of each sale go into an escape fund to provide transport for those who could not make it on their own. We thought that we could exact this price if we managed to keep market values steady. But all of Europe was on edge about the political situation, and no one was in the mood to buy anything. And then, after
Kristallnacht,
every Jew in Germany came forward, wanting to sell precious objects.

At the time of our greatest hope, my job was to set up fronts for selling what we expected would be a flood of art coming in from Middle Europe. If it had appeared that English collectors were opening their storerooms to take advantage of a favorable market, the excitement might well have pushed values upward. So we tried to get the cooperation of those prominent collectors who had the foresight to see what was about to happen on the Continent and were in sympathy with our cause. Excepting a very few, these were Jews. The others simply were not interested, and, anyway, we did not want to divulge the plan in too many places.

Soon I found myself deeply involved in the high society of Jews in London and in their great houses throughout the countryside. My conviction was then, as it is now, that it is not possible for Jews to be in “society” but that their efforts to be so are (except when immoderate or in bad taste) courageous, for the mechanisms of high social status are encouragements of vulnerability, safe only for those who can afford to lose themselves in pursuits superficial and deep and not fear that their fundamental positions will drop out from under them as a result of their inattention. My attitude toward the Jewish peers and the Jewish upper class in general was mixed, and had complex roots. I admired their bravery while occasionally chafing at their blindness. I knew that, in spite of their learning and culture, they were isolated in such a way as to make me—a young man of thirty-two—far better a judge of certain things than were they. I had been in the ghetto in Warsaw not a month before, and the people there had confided to me that they felt the end was near. They said, “Tell them, in England, that in Poland they are killing Jews.” I had been in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Prague. I had passed through Jewish villages from Riga to Bucharest, where I had seen a temple about to fall. How misty and beautiful it was, that autumn. I cannot describe the quiet. It was as if the nineteenth century—indeed, all the past—were in hiding and feared to give itself away. The whole world of the Jews in Central Europe looked outward with the saddest eyes. What could
I
do? I tried my best. I was working for the Jewish Agency, and had just come from two years in Palestine, in the desert, and thought that my responsibility was to save the Jews of Europe. Like all young men, I was full of speeches that I could not deliver. Somehow, I imagined that the art scheme would be everything. I have since forgiven myself.

Visions of the Jews in the forests, in green pine valleys as sharp as chevrons, in villages marked by silent white ribbons of wood smoke, never left me as I undertook to master the intricacies of the London social season. I cannot remember when I have enjoyed myself more. Sometimes I became as lost and trusting as my hosts, and, even when I did not, the contrast between the Eastern European
Heimat
and the drawing rooms of modern London was incalculably enlivening. I was suspended between two dreamworlds.

Just before Christmas, that time in all capitals when the city flares most brightly, I was oppressed with invitations. I had a blue pad upon which I listed my engagements, and one terrible, lovely week it had sixteen entries. I met so many dukes, duchesses, M.P.s, industrialists, and academics that my eyes began to cross. But we had begun to succeed in hammering out a network for art sales, and I was confident and happy.

Then a magical power in the Jewish Agency must have decided that these several score dinners had made me into a diplomat, for I received an invitation to a dinner party on the twenty-first at the house of the most eminent Jew in all the British Empire. Only that summer, I had scrubbed pots, guarded at night, and lived in a tent, in a collective settlement in the Negev. Now I ballooned with pride. The entire seventeenth century could not have produced enough frills to clothe the heavy monster of my pomposity. Sure that all my troubles were over forever, I spent every bit of my money on the most beautiful three-piece suit in London. When the tailor—who was himself a knight—heard where I was going, he set his men to work, and they finished it in three days. London became, for me, the set of a joyous light opera.

On the night of the twentieth, just twenty-four hours before what I assumed would be my apotheosis (it was said that the Prime Minister would be there, and I imagined myself declaring to him a leaden diplomatic précis along the lines of the Magna Carta or the Treaty of Vienna), I had yet another engagement, this one at the house of a Jewish art dealer whom I had recently regarded as a big fish. I was so overconfident that I left my hotel without his address, thinking that I would manage to find it anyway, since I knew its approximate location in Chelsea.

I was due at six-thirty. For an hour and a half I rushed through Chelsea in this direction and that, trying to find the house. Everyone, it seemed, was having a dinner party, and all the buildings looked alike. When, finally, I arrived at the right square, I stood in a little park and stared at the house. It was five stories tall and it was lit like a theater. Through the sparkling windows came firelight, candlelight, and glimpses of enormous chandeliers—while the snow fell as if in time to sad and troubling music. Red and disheveled from running about, I stood in my splendid suit, frightened to go in. In that square, the coal smoke was coiling about like a great menagerie of airborne snakes, and occasionally it caught me and choked me in its unbearable fumes. But I remember it with fondness, because it was the smell of Europe in the winter; and, though it was devilish and foul, it seemed to say that, underneath everything, another world was at work, that the last century was alive in its clumsiness and warmth, signaling that all was well and that great contexts remained unbroken.

I was afraid to go in, because I was so late and because I knew what a fool I had been in judging these people according to the hierarchy in which they believed, and thus underrating them in comparison to the plutocrats of the next night. But I took hold of myself and rang their bell. I heard conversation stop. A servant came to the door. Each of his steps shot through the wood like an X-ray. I was taken upstairs to a magnificent room in which were five tables of well-dressed people completely motionless and silent, like a group of deer surprised by a hunter. Every eye was upon me. Though frightened of fainting, I remained upright and seemingly composed. My host stood to greet me. Then he took me about like a roast, and introduced me to each and every guest, all of whom had a particular smile that can be described only as simultaneously benevolent, sadistic, and amused. I don’t know why, but I broke into German, though my German was not the best. They must have been thinking, Who is this strange red-faced German who does not speak his own language well? Or perhaps they thought that I was confused as to my whereabouts. I suppose I was.

Then Herr Dennis, as I called him, took me by the arm and explained that, since they had readjusted the seating in my absence, I (who, the next day, would be waltzing with the Prime Minister) would have to sit at the children’s table. It was a very great blow, especially since the poor children were bunched up all by themselves in a little ell of the room that led to the kitchen. I was in no position to protest; in fact, I was, by that time, quite numb.

As he led me, in a daze, toward the children’s table, I imagined myself sitting with five or ten infants in bibs, staring down at them as if from a high tower, eating sullenly like a god exiled from Olympus. But when we rounded the corner of the ell, I discovered that the children were adolescents; and their charm arose to envelop me. First, there were four red-headed girl cousins, all in white. They were from thirteen to sixteen; they had between them several hundred million freckles; and they were so disturbed by my sudden arrival that they spent the next half hour swallowing, darting their eyes about, clearing their throats, and adjusting fallen locks of hair. They spoke as seriously as very old theologians, but ever so much more delicately; they pieced together their sentences with great care, the way new skaters skate, and when they finished they breathed in relief, not unlike students of a difficult Oriental language, who must recite in class. At the end of these ordeals, they looked at each other with the split-second glances common to people who are very familiar. Then, there was a boy with dark woolly hair and the peculiarly adolescent animal-lost-out-on-the-heath expression common to young men whose abilities greatly exceed their experience. At my appearance, he lowered his horns, knowing that he was going to spend the rest of the evening bashing himself against a castle wall. I admired his courage; I liked him; I remembered. Next to him was a fat boy who wanted to be an opera singer. He was only fourteen, and when he saw that the threat presented by the woolly-haired boy was neutralized, he went wild with excitement, blooming at the four cousins with a gregariousness of which he had probably never been aware.