The Prince of West End Avenue Read online

  No, I had not forgotten Magda Damrosch. All that autumn and into the following winter I combed Zurich looking for her, her image ever before me. Through jostling streets and lonely alleys, in the marketplaces, the shops and tearooms, in the theaters and concert halls I searched, and searched in vain. I filled my empty nights with thoughts of her, ran through my mind again and again the words we had spoken to one another, now magical in memory, and tossed on my narrow bed in lustful imaginings: "Magda, Magda." By the end of February 1916 I had given up hope of ever finding her. My wanderings through Zurich were now habitual, not purposeful. For all I knew, she had long since left Switzerland.

  And then I met Lenin. It was late afternoon, already dark outside. I was sitting in the overheated reading room of the cantonal library, plowing my way, with heavy lids, through yet another of those vast (and vastly dreary) tomes required by my studies, when Lenin appeared beside me. Of course, I did not know who he was, though I had seen him often before in the library. Neither he nor I nor anyone else knew yet what he would become. There is no need to describe him; all the world knows what he looked like. Still, there was nothing there of the fiery zealot who is the central figure of countless historical scenes painted in the tiresome school of Soviet socialist realism, nothing of the awesome, brooding face with its piercing eyes that hangs on giant banners in Red Square on May Day, along with the faces of Karl Marx and whoever rules the Kremlin at the moment. What I saw was a balding, middle-aged man of middle height, sweating slightly in a heavy, worn suit of some dull brown stuff. He looked like a petit bourgeois down on his luck, a minor civil servant who had recently been given the sack, someone battered by circumstances but gamely not complaining, though perhaps a little bewildered.

  He asked if he might have temporary use of the journals

  stacked at my elbow, since I did not seem to be needing them at the moment. I told him he was welcome to them (not mentioning that in fact they were not mine), and supposed that was that. But when, an hour or so later, weary beyond reckoning, I got up to leave, he scampered after me into the hall. His name, he said, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. He hoped he had not interfered too severely with my studies. Not in the least, I assured him. Dare he invite me, he asked, to a lecture he was to give at the Volkhaus the following evening? In view of my youth and my evident interests, I might find it worthwhile. After the lecture perhaps we would have a drink together. I thanked him and said I hoped I would be able to attend. A mildly ironic smile played on his lips. Perhaps he knew I had no intention of going to hear him.

  I went, of course. (There is a universally acknowledged truth enshrined in the proverbs of the folk: Man proposes, but God disposes.) It was an evening of bone-chilling damp. The Volkhaus is a pseudo-Gothic building, then the headquarters of the Swiss Socialist party, ill lighted and drafry. On the other side of the street paced a portly policeman flapping his arms across his chest to keep warm. The lecture was sparsely attended; only about thirty-five or forty seats in the cavernous hall were taken, a polite audience of young Swiss workers. Lenin spoke of the lessons to be learned from the revolution of 1905. He spoke fluently and softly, only occasionally glancing at his notes. The Russian revolution of 1905, he said, was to be regarded as a dress rehearsal for the European revolution that still lay years in the future. He did not expect to witness it; he spoke, rather, as one who was ready to hand on the torch to the next generation, which might, with luck and determination, live to see the victory of socialism in Europe. There was scattered applause.

  I met him afterward, in the lobby, and congratulated him on an interesting lecture. The same ironic smile played on his

  lips. We would have our drink at the Cafe Odeon, he said; it was on his way home.

  What did we talk about, Lenin and I? Not about political economy or the rights of the proletariat. You will scarcely believe me if I tell you that we spoke of love—or, rather, that I spoke of it. What possessed me I cannot say, but I poured out all my youthful longing into the ears of this unlikely father-confessor, this middle-aged and disappointed little socialist revolutionary with the unsightly nicotine stains on his teeth. (Of course, I knew nothing then of the illicit and intensely passionate affair he had conducted with the beautiful Inessa Armand in Paris some years before; in some ways, he was uniquely qualified to hear my confession.) Even when we left the warmth of the cafe and hurried along the narrow stone streets, the cold wind numbing our ears and bringing tears to our eyes, still I talked on. He must have thought he would never be rid of me. We were in Niederdorf, a somewhat seedy quarter. We stopped before Spiegelgasse 14, an old stone building with a low lintel over a peeling door.

  "I would like to invite you up for some tea," said Lenin, "but the hour is late, and I'm afraid my wife may be asleep. We have only one room"

  I apologized for having bored him with my problems. Utter hypocrisy: I imagined that anyone would be fascinated by what I had to say.

  "You have been frank with me. Let me be frank with you," said Lenin. "There is important work in the world for a young man like you, work that your studies should well prepare you for. Take my advice, Mr. Korner: go over there"—he pointed diagonally across Spiegelgasse to a Bierstube called Meierei, which boasted the Cabaret Voltaire; one could hear the tinny tinkling of a piano and the distant sound of laughter—"go over there and find yourself a pretty girl. There you will find your cure. And then, only then, you will be able to divert your

  abundant energies outward into the world, where—who knows?—you may do some good. Good night, Mr. Korner."

  The insult was like a slap across the face. It left me speechless. But since Lenin had by now disappeared into the house, that scarcely mattered. More than anything else, I felt a fool. And I suddenly became aware of the bitter cold. Before the long walk home, I thought, I had better fortify myself with a hot drink. It was in the Cabaret Voltaire, of course, that I found Magda Damrosch again.

  Do I suppose that Lenin was in Zurich solely to point out to me the Cabaret Voltaire? Of course not. He was to serve the Greater Purpose on the world-historical stage. But how can I doubt that at that moment our separate purposes were interlinked? "Find yourself a pretty girl," said Lenin, not knowing the Purpose; and I, not knowing the Purpose, entered the Cabaret Voltaire.

  Allow me to illustrate the point in another way. One evening some months later I was dining with Magda in the Restaurant zum Weissen Kreuz. The evening was not going well. She had found many things to complain of: my punctiliousness, my devotion to order. Even my suit was not to her taste: her grandfather might have worn it. That was how she used to torment me. Our attention was diverted to another table, where sat a group of men in jolly camaraderie, laughing, telling jokes in French, Italian, German, and Latin, singing songs, and all at a pitch inconsiderate of the other diners, or so it seemed to me. One in particular I took to be the "ringleader," and certainly he was the loudest: a cadaverous man about ten years my senior, with a long, half-moon face, wearing thick glasses and a mustache. None of the languages was native to him, but he spoke them all fluently and with a single, unidentifiable lilt. When he laughed, as he did often, he threw back his head and opened his mouth wide. There was something of the down-at-heels dandy about him, as if he were a gigolo at a

  lower-class holiday resort. He sat with his thin legs elegantly crossed, and I could clearly see the large hole in the sole of his shoe. At one point he sang, to much laughter, a risque French song in a pleasant, if rather thin, voice. True, there were no ladies at his table, but there were ladies elsewhere in the restaurant. No one else seemed to mind, however, least of all my Magda, who laughed shamelessly and even lifted her glass to toast him. I thought him an unmannered oaf.

  A lifetime later, leafing through the photographs in Ell-man's classic biography, I discovered to my surprise and embarrassment that this "unmannered oaf" had been the great Irish writer James Joyce, even then, in 1916, at work on his incomparable Ulysses. Considerations of Magda Damrosch aside, would I not
greatly have preferred to meet James Joyce than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov? To have numbered in Joyce s circle in Zurich! A genius may be permitted his idiosyncracies. But obviously—alas!—there was no Purpose in our meeting.

  '7

  eJSSB ISTENING TO MOZART earlier this evening, the "Linz" symphony, I was reminded quite suddenly of the Con-tessa. To be precise, it was during the slow movement, with its bittersweet flavor and beautiful precision, that she popped into my head, or, rather, not she but a clear image of the small urn that contains her ashes. Not so strange perhaps: I had been thinking of the circumstances of the work's composition, Mozart's reception by young Count Thun in Linz, a moment in joyous contrast to the misery of his recent visit to Salzburg. There he had failed yet again to win his father's approval of his marriage to Constanze Weber. My chain of associations is clear enough: "Linz"-Mozart-Salzburg-Constanze-Contessa. The similarity of the ladies' names explains all.

  After the unfortunate contretemps in the Versailles, the Contessa and I returned to New York and West Eighty-second Street, taking up a life in keeping with our age and circumstances. At first she had wanted us to move to her apartment in Flushing, which, she claimed, was much more spacious than mine. She needed air to breathe, room to move about in. Hers was a restless spirit not to be confined. Besides, the West Side was on a downhill skid, filling up with "undesirables," drug addicts, who knew what? One scarcely could see a white face anymore, "let alone a Jew." It was dangerous to walk the streets. But I explained to her that Flushing was out of the question for me: my way of life was bound to the city. Had not she herself

  remarked on the great inconvenience of commuting? Was it not to avoid that very travail that we had married? No, if we went to Flushing, we would stay there: it was a bourn from which no traveler returned. Accordingly, she moved her belongings to West Eighty-second Street—as many of them, that is, as would fit into my already crowded apartment.

  We made for ourselves, I think, a good life, comfortable, relaxed, companionable, our days filled with small matters, a rhythm that pleased us. Of course, we never referred to our "honeymoon"; that frenzy had left her. I became accustomed to her body beside me in the bed, began even to be glad of it as a source of warmth and quiet friendliness. At the beginning of each December, after a pro forma pleading with me to accompany her, she would fly south alone to Florida, leaving me a bachelor again until the end of the following February. She telephoned me daily, as soon as the cheaper evening rates went into effect, to "fill me in" on her activities and those of her friends, to inquire after my doings and ask whether I was looking after myself. By the end of February I was always glad of her return, my "half-life" at an end. Were we happy? Yes, I would say so. But I would also have to say that since our marriage and the Versailles, the Contessa had lost some of her earlier ebullience. She had become a trifle subdued, sometimes a trifle wistful.

  As I have told you before, the Contessa was claustrophobic. This was often a great inconvenience for her. For example, she would trudge up the stairs to our apartment with a full load of groceries in her arms, rather than take the building's small elevator; she would not get on a crowded bus, and would get off one that had become crowded, no matter how far from her destination or how inclement the weather; never mind what Paris dictated, she could not wear a dress or a blouse that closed at the throat. All that was bad enough. But v/hile still

  among the living, she carried her phobia with her in thought into the Next World. She could not bear to think of being sealed in a coffin and buried beneath the earth. The very idea of it terrified her. She had the most frightful imaginings: what if it should turn out that she was not dead after all, God forbid? What if she should awaken in that confined space, that airless darkness where one could not even move the elbows, scarcely a pinkie, the lid an inch above the nose, where one's screams would go unheard? Such things had happened, God forbid.

  "When?" I asked.

  They had happened. Oy, oy, oy, the thought alone could drive a person mad. She wanted me to promise her, honest Injun, on my word of honor, that I would have her cremated.

  "Jews mustn't be cremated," I told her, adding, after a moment, "not voluntarily."

  In contrast to my tenuous hold, the Contessa grasped her own Judaism with talons of steel: she was, after all, the daughter of a kosher butcher, the widow of a ritual circumciser and onetime world-class Talmudic student. But she was also resourceful. She always took her questions of ritual and observance to a rabbi, either Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform, depending on what kind of answer she wanted. On the question of cremation she had already gone to Rabbi Millard Matlaw, Reform spiritual leader of Congregation Beit Sefer ha-Adom ha-Katan in Greenwich Village. His credentials aside, he was a humane man, a mensch, who felt along his own nerves another Jew's anguish. "This is the twentieth century," he told her, "and we're into a different kind of bag. Go with whatever makes you feel good."

  Would I, therefore, promise? Very well, I would promise.

  "You mean it?" 1 mean it.

  Her gratitude was poignant, touching. How else to de-

  scribe it? For a little while the old Contessa reappeared. "Let's celebrate!" she said, and she put a noodle pudding on the coffee table, with cups and plates and forks. Her eyes sparkled. "How about some whipped cream? How long since dinner?" And then she went and dug out of the trunk that contained her personal items her urn. "What do you think of it?" she asked, holding it up triumphantly. I had never seen an urn like it, and I said so. It was in the shape of a Torah scroll, molded in copper. She demonstrated how it opened, unscrewed, on the tops of the opposite sides. "Half of me here, half of me here," she explained gaily. "Here, have some whipped cream on the pudding. Don't worry, enough time has passed." She raised her coffee cup to me. "Here's to us," she said. "L'chayim."

  But then a cloud appeared on her horizon, appeared and grew.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Tell me," she said, biting her lip. "Will you want the ashes?"

  How does one answer such a question? Of course I didn't want the ashes. Who wants ashes? On the other hand, would it not seem callous, would I not seem indifferent to her memory, if I refused them, if I did not say, unequivocally and firmly, that I wanted them with me always? I tried diplomacy: "What I want is that you should live long and be well. Why should we talk of ashes? Besides, I will be gone long before you. You'll see, you'll have to make other arrangements."

  The cloud was not dissipated; the sun did not shine. "No," she said, "I've had a premonition. You know my premonitions."

  True, I did. In the time I had known her she had batted a thousand. It was uncanny.

  "Of course, I don't want to offend you," she said. "Natu-rally^ you have a claim on the ashes, my husband, after all, my

  second." She raised her head and took a deep breath. "It's like this. When poor sainted Meurice died, I didn't expect to marry again. Who could have known? Such luck, to meet a person like you, who could have expected? So I designed for him a stone, not too showy, but respectable: he was, after all, a circumciser of the first rank and, besides, a good Jew, a loving husband, a good provider. And in this stone, this monument, is a niche. And in this niche is a Torah scroll, just exactly like this, a twin, you couldn't tell them apart. My idea was, when I died, and, please God, I should happen to be cremated, that Torah scroll, in the niche, should be unscrewed, and this Torah scroll, with me in it, should be screwed in instead. That way Meurice and I, without having to go through Central Inquiry in the Next World, would easily find one another. That was my idea. And Rabbi Matlaw, the direct descendent of the 16th Century Sage of Prague, he okayed my idea. 'Listen,' he said, 'who knows? And if that's what turns you on, well, hey.' So that's how it stands. But now I have a new husband. You have a claim, no question, and it's only fair I should hear from you on this."

  Naturally, I told her, I would want her ashes, but I recognized—anyone would—that Meurice had a prior claim. Rabbi Matlaw would tell us that this was a funda
mental principle of Jewish law. She need not worry, I would see to it that her Torah scroll would find eternal rest in the predetermined niche, united once more with her first husband: if the direct lineal descendant of the Sage of Prague had approved such a course, who was I to object?

  We were married for almost ten years. One day she complained of a blinding headache; the next, she was in the hospital. Why go into the details: a blood clot in the brain. Mercifully, her suffering did not last long. Her last words to me were, "Remember, you promised. Best avoid trouble, go there at lunchtime when nobody's around. It's an Orthodox ceme-

  tery, there might be problems otherwise. Besides, who knows what the legalities are? Take a screwdriver." She sighed, weak and wan, but managed to smile. "Thanks, Otto."

  And so, in fact, in spite of myself, I went to Florida again. It all went off without a hitch. I remembered the screwdriver.

  I missed her, the Contessa. Ah, you will say, but did you love her? I missed her. I miss her still.

  AND SO, YOU SEE, long before Lipschitz and La Dawidowicz, mysteriously interpreting the wishes of poor dead Sinsheimer, stripped me of the role of Ghost and assigned me that of Gravedigger, I had already had some practical experience in cemeteries. Nevertheless, the changes in roles seemed at first a demotion. I was thinking, naively, in sociological terms. A king and a gravedigger may both "crawl 'twixt earth and heaven," but the gravedigger, it goes without saying, has his belly in the dirt. Besides, I would lose considerable stage exposure in the first act, as well as all of the Ghosts long, magnificent speeches. My rendering of one line in particular—"O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!"—I immodestly admit was especially effective; Sinsheimer had managed to get out of me the most soul-racking sob, a vocal tremor that shook the stage and hushed the watchers in the wings.