And he laughed again, with that short, shaking, soundless laughter between mockery and benevolence; then he stopped laughing and only grinned behind his cloud of smoke, his shining eyes fixed on an immovable distance.
'MY SHARE IN ALL that is happening...' I think to myself as I lie under the friendly Arabian stars. 'I -this bundle of flesh and bone, of sensations and perceptions -have been placed within the orbit of Being, and am within all that is happening... "Danger" is only an illusion: never can it "overcome" me: for all that happens to me is part of the all-embracing stream of which I myself am a part. Could it be, perhaps, that danger and safety, death and joy, destiny and fulfilment, are but different aspects of this tiny, majestic bundle that is 11 What endless freedom, O God, hast Thou granted to man...'
I have to close my eyes, so sharp is the pain of happiness at this thought; and wings of freedom brush me silently from afar in the breath of the wind that passes over my face.
-6I FEEL STRONG ENOUGH to sit up now, and Zayd brings me one of our camel-saddles to lean upon. 'Make thyself comfortable, O my uncle. It gladdens my heart to see thee well after I had mourned thee for dead.'
'Thou hast been a good friend to me, Zayd. What would I have done without thee all these years if thou hadst not followed my call and come to me l'
'I have never regretted these years with thee, 0 my uncle. I still remember the day when I got thy letter, more than five years ago, calling me to Mecca... The thought of seeing thee again was dear to me, especially as in the meantime thou hadst been blessed with the blessing of Islam. But just then I had married a Muntafiq girl, a virgin, and her love pleased me exceedingly. Those Iraqi girls, they have narrow waists and hard breasts, like this' -and, smiling with remembrance, he presses his forefinger against the hard pommel of the saddle on which I am leaning 'and it is difficult to let their embraces go... So I told myself, "I will go, but not just now: let me wait for a few weeks." But the weeks passed, and the months, and although I soon divorced that woman -the daughter of a dog, she had been making eyes at her cousin -I could not make up my mind to forsake my job with the Iraqi agayl, and my friends, and the joys of Baghdad and Basra, and always told myself, "Not just now; after a little while...
"But one day I was riding away from our camp, where I had collected my monthly pay, and was thinking of spending the night in a friend's quarters, when suddenly thou camest to my mind and I remembered what thou hadst told me in thy letter of thy dear rafiqd s" death -may God have mercy on her and I thought of how lonely thou must be without her, and all at once I knew I had to go to thee. And there and then I pulled off the Iraqi star from my igal and threw it away; then, without even going to my house to collect my clothes, I turned my dromedary's head toward the Nufud, toward Najd, and started out, stopping only at the next village to buy a water skin and some provisions, and rode on and on until I met thee at Mecca, four weeks later. . .'
'And dost thou remember, Zayd, our firstjourney together into the interior of Arabia, southward to the palm orchards and wheat fields of Wadi Bisha, and thence into the sands of Ranya which had never before been trodden by a non-Arab?'
'And how well I remember it, O my uncle! Thou wert so keen on seeing the Empty Quarter, t where the jinns make the sands sing under the sun ... And what about those badu living on its rim, who had never yet seen glass in their lives and thought that thy eyeglasses were made of frozen water? They were like jinns themselves, reading tracks in the sand as other people read a book, and reading from the skies and from the air the coming of a sandstorm hours before it came... And dost thou recall, 0 my uncle, that guide we hired at Ranya -that devil of a badawi whom thou wantedst to shoot down when he was about to abandon us in the midst of the desert? How furious he was about the machine with which thou makest pictures!'
We both laugh at that adventure which lies so far behind us. But at the time we did not feel at all like laughing. We were about six or seven days' journey south of Riyadh when that guide, a fanatical beduin from the lkhwan settlement of Ar-Rayn, fell into a paroxysm of rage when I explained to him what my camera was for. He wanted to leave us there and then because such heathenish picture-making endangered his soul. I would not have minded getting rid of him had it not been that we were just then in a region with which neither Zayd nor I was familiar and where, left to ourselves, we would certainly have lost our way. At first I tried to reason with our 'devil of a beduin', but to no avail; he remained adamant and turned back his camel toward Ranya. I made it clear to him that it would cost him his life to leave us to almost certain death from thirst. When in spite of this warning he set his dromedary in motion, I aimed my rifle at him and threatened to fire -with every intention of doing so: and this, at last, seemed to outweigh our friend's concern about his soul. After some grumbling, he agreed to lead us to the next large settlement, about three days ahead, where we could place our dispute before the qadi for decision. Zayd and I disarmed him and took turns standing guard during the night to prevent him from slipping away. The qadi at Quwa'iyya, to whom we appealed a few days later, at first gave judgment in favor of our guide, 'for,' he said, 'it is shameful to make pictures of Jiving beings' (basing it on a wrong interpretation of a saying of the Prophet: for despite the belief -so prevalent among many Muslims to this day -that the depicting of living beings is forbidden, Islamic Law contains no injunction to this effect). Thereupon I showed the qadi the open letter from the King 'to all amirs of the land and everyone who may read this' -and the qadi's face grew longer and longer as he read: 'Muhammad Asad is our guest and friend and dear unto us, and everyone who shows him friendliness shows it to us, and everyone who is hostile to him will be deemed hostile to us...' Ibn Saud's words and seal had a magic effect on the severe qadi, and he ultimately decided that 'under certain circumstances' it might be permissible to make pictures... Nevertheless, we let our guide go and hired another to lead us to Riyadh.
'And dost thou remember those days in Riyadh, O my uncle, when we were guests of the King and thou wert so unhappy to see the old stables of the palace filled with shiny new motorcars. . . . And the King's graciousness toward thee...'
'And dost thou remember, Zayd, how he sent us out to explore the secrets behind the beduin rebellion, and how we journeyed through many nights, and stole into Kuwayt, and at last found out the truth about the cases of glittering new riyals and rifles that were coming to the rebels from across the sea...?
'And that other mission, 0 my uncle, when Sayyid Ahmad, may God lengthen his life, sent thee to Cyrenaica -and how we secretly crossed the sea to Egypt in a dhow-and how we made our way into the Jabal Akhdar, eluding the vigilance of those Italians, may God's curse be upon them, and joined the mujahidin under Umar al-Mukhtar ? Those were exciting days!'
And so we continue to remind each other of the many days, the innumerable days we have been together, and our 'Dost thou remember? Dost thou remember?' carries us far into the night, until the camp fire flickers lower and lower, and only a few pieces of wood remain glowing, and Zayd's face gradually recedes into the shadows and itself becomes like a memory to my heavy eyes.
In the starlit silence of the desert, with a tender, lukewarm wind rippling the sands, the images of past and present intertwine, separate again and call to one another with wondrous sounds of evocation, backward through the years, back to the beginning of my Arabian years, to my first pilgrimage to Mecca and the darkness that overshadowed those early days: to the death of the woman whom I loved as I have loved no woman since and who now lies buried under the soil of Mecca, under a simple stone without inscription that marks the end of her road and the beginning of a new one for me: an end and a beginning, a call and an echo, strangely intertwined in the rocky valley of Mecca...
'ZAYD, IS THERE some coffee left?'
'At thy command, O my uncle,' answers Zayd. He rises without haste, the tall, narrow brass coffeepot in his left hand and two minute, handle less cups clinking in his right -one for me and one for himself -pours a little coffee into the first cup and hands it to me. From under the shadow of the red-and-white checked kufiyya his eyes regard me with solemn intentness, as if this were a much more serious matter than a mere cup of coffee.
These eyes -deepset and long-lashed, austere and sad in repose but ever ready to Hash in sudden gaiety -speak of a hundred generations of life in steppes and freedom: the eyes of a man whose ancestors have never been exploited and have never exploited others. But the most beautiful in him are his movements: serene, aware of their own rhythm, never hurried and never hesitant: a precision and economy that reminds you of the interplay of instruments in a well-ordered symphony orchestra. You see such movements often among beduins; the sparseness of the desert is reflected in them. For, apart from the few towns and villages, life in Arabia has been so little molded by human hands that nature in her austerity as forced man to avoid all diffusion in behavior and to reduce all doing dictated by his will or by outward necessity to a few, very definite, basic forms, which have remained the same for countless generations and have in time acquired the smooth sharpness of crystals: and this inherited simplicity of action is now apparent in the true Arab's gestures as well as in his attitude toward life.
'Tell me, Zayd, where are we going tomorrow?' Zayd looks at me with a smile: 'Why, 0 my uncle, toward Tayma, of course...?' 'No, brother, I wanted to go to Tayma, but now I do not want it any more. We are going to Mecca...'
II
BEGINNING OF THE ROAD
IT IS NEARLY EVENING, a few days after my encounter with thirst, when Zayd and I arrive at a forlorn little oasis where we intend to stop for the night. Under the rays of the. setting sun the sand hills in the east shine like iridescent masses of agate with ever-changing pastel shadows and subdued light reflexes, so delicate in color that even the eye seems to do violence to them as it follows the barely perceptible flow of shadows toward the greyness of growing dusk. You can still see clearly the feathery crowns of the palms and, half hidden behind them, the lowly, mud-grey houses and garden walls; and the wooden wheels over the well are still singing.
We make the camels lie down at some distance from the village, below the palm orchards, unload our heavy saddlebags and remove the saddles from the animals' hot backs. A few urchins assemble around the strangers and one of them, a big-eyed little boy in a tattered tunic, offers to show Zayd a place where firewood is to be found; and while the two set out on their errand, I take the camels to the well. As I lower my leather bucket and draw it up filled, some women come from the village to fetch water in copper basins and earthenware pitchers, which they carry free on their heads with both arms outstretched sidewise and bent upward -so as to balance their loads better -holding the corners of their veils in uplifted hands like fluttering wings.
'Peace be with thee, O wayfarer,' they say. And I answer: 'And with you be peace and the grace of God.' Their garments are black, and their faces -as almost always with beduin and village women in this part of Arabia -uncovered, so that one can see their large black eyes. Although they have been settled in an oasis for many generations, they have not yet lost the earnest mien of their forefathers' nomad days. Their movements are clear and definite, and their reserve free of all shyness as they wordlessly take the bucket rope from my hands and draw water for my camels-just as, four thousand years ago, that woman at the well did to Abraham's servant when he came from Canaan to find for his master's son Isaac a wife from among their kinsfolk in Padan-Aram.
He made his camels kneel down without the city by a well of water at the time of the evening, the time that women go out to draw water.
And he said, 'O Lord God of my master Abraham, I pray Thee, send me good speed this day, and show kindness unto my master Abraham. Behold, I stand here by the well of water; and the daughters of the men of the city come out to draw water. Let it come to pass that the damsel to whom I shall say, "Let down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink,"-and she shall say, "Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also"; let the same be she that Thou hast appointed for Thy servant Isaac; and thereby shall I know that Thou hast showed kindness unto my master.'
And it came to pass, before he had done speaking, that, behold, Rebecca came out... with her pitcher upon her shoulder. And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her: and she went down to the well, and filled her pitcher, and came up.
And the servant ran to meet her, and said, 'Let me, I pray thee, drink a little water of thy pitcher.' And she said, 'Drink, my lord' and she hastened, and let down her pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink. And when she had done giving him drink, she said, 'I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done drinking.' And she hastened, and emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran again unto the well to draw water, and drew for all his camels. ..
This Biblical story floats through my mind as I stand with my two camels before the well of a little oasis amidst the sands of the Great Nufud and gaze at the women who have taken the bucket rope from my hands and now draw water for my animals.
Far away is the country of Padan-Aram and Abraham's time: but these women here, with the power of remembrance their stately gestures have evoked, obliterate all distance of space and make four thousand years appear as of no account in time.
'May God bless your hands, my sisters, and keep you secure.' 'And thou, too, remain under God's protection, O wayfarer,' they reply, and turn to their pitchers and basins to fill them with water for their homes.
ON MY RETURN to our camping place, I make the camels kneel down and hobble their forelegs to prevent them from straying at night. Zayd has already lit a fire and is busy making coffee. Water boils in a tall brass coffeepot with a long, curved spout; a smaller pot of a similar shape stands ready at Zayd's elbow. In his left hand he holds a huge, flat iron spoon with a handle two feet long, on which he is roasting a handful of coffee beans over the slow fire, for in Arabia coffee is freshly roasted for every pot. As soon as the beans are lightly tanned, he places them in a brass mortar and pounds them. Thereupon he pours some of the boiling water from the larger pot into the smaller empties the ground coffee into it and places the pot near the fire to let it slowly simmer. When the brew is almost ready, he adds a few cardamom seeds to make it bitterer, for, as the saying goes in Arabia, coffee, in order to be good, must be 'bitter like death and hot like love'.
But I am not yet ready to enjoy my coffee at leisure. Tired and sweaty after the long, hot hours in the saddle, with clothes clinging dirtily to my skin, I am longing for a bath; and so I stroll back to the well under the palms.
It is already dark. The palm orchards are deserted; only far away, where the houses stand, a dog barks. I throw off my clothes and climb down into the well, holding on with hands and feet to the ledges and clefts in the masonry and supporting myself by the ropes on which the water skins hang: down to the dark water and into it. It is cold and reaches to my chest. In the darkness by my side stand the drawing-ropes, vertically tautened by the weight of the large, now submerged, skins which in daytime are used to water the plantation. Under the soles of my feet I can feel the thin trickle of water seep upward from the underground spring that feeds the well in a slow, unceasing stream of eternal renewal.
Above me the wind hums over the rim of the well and makes its interior resound faintly like the inside of a sea shell held against the ear -a big, humming sea shell such as I loved to listen to in my father's house many, many years ago, a child just big enough to look over the table top. I pressed the shell against my ear and wondered whether the sound was always there or only when I held it to my ear. Was it something independent of me or did only my listening call it forth? Many times did I try to outsmart the shell by holding it away from me, so that the humming ceased, and then suddenly clapping it back to my ear: but there it was again -and I never found out whether it was going on when I did not listen.
I did not know then, of course, that I was being puzzled by a question that had puzzled much wiser heads than mine for countless ages: the question of whether there is such a thing as 'reality' apart from our minds, or whether our perception creates it. I did not know it then; but, looking back, it seems to me that this great riddle haunted me not only in my childhood but also in later years-as it probably has haunted at one time or another, consciously or unconsciously, every thinking human being: for, whatever the objective truth, to every one of us the world manifests itself only in the shape, and to the extent, of its reflection in our minds: and so each of us can perceive of 'reality' only in conjunction with his own existence. Herein perhaps may be found a valid explanation for man's persistent belief, since the earliest stirrings of his consciousness, in individual survival after death a belief too deep, too widely spread through all races and times to be easily dismissed as 'wishful thinking'. It would probably not be too much to say that it has been unavoidably necessitated by the very structure of the human mind. To think in abstract, theoretical terms of one's own death as ultimate extinction may not be difficult; but to visualize it, impossible: for this would mean no less than to be able to visualize the extinction of all reality as such -in other words, to imagine nothingness: something that no man's mind is able to do.
It was not the philosophers and prophets who taught us to believe in life after death; all they did was to give form and spiritual content to an instinctive perception as old as man himself.
I SMILE INWARDLY at the incongruity of speculating about such profound problems while engaged in the mundane process of washing away the grime and sweat of a long day's journey.
But, after all, is there always a clearly discernible borderline be, tween the mundane and the abstruse in life? Could there have been, for instance, anything more mundane than setting out in: search of a lost camel, and anything more abstruse, more difficult of comprehension, than almost dying of thirst?
Perhaps it was the shock of that experience that has sharpened my senses and brought forth the need to render some sort of account to myself: the need to comprehend, more fully than I have ever done before, the course of my own life. But, then, I remind myself, can anyone really comprehend the meaning of his own life as long as he is alive? We do know, of course, what has happened to us at this or that period of our lives; and we do sometimes understand why it happened; but our destination -our destiny-is not so easily espied: for destiny is the sum of all that has moved in us and moved us, past and present, and all that will move us and within us in the future -and so it can unfold itself only at the end of the way, and must always remain misunderstood or only half understood as long as we are treading the way.
How can I say, at the age of thirty-two, what my destiny was or is?
Sometimes it seems to me that I can almost see the lives of two men when I look back at my life. But, come to think of it, are those two parts of my life really so different from one another or was there perhaps, beneath all the outward differences of form and direction, always a unity of feeling and a purpose common to both?
I lift my head and see the round piece of sky over the rim of the well, and stars. As I stand very still, for a very long time, I seem to see how they slowly shift their positions, moving on and on, so that they might complete the rows upon rows of millions of years which never come to a close. And then, without willing it, J have to think of the little rows of years that have happened to me-all those dim years spent in the warm safety of childhood's rooms in a town where every nook and street was familiar to me; thereafter in other cities full of excitements and yearnings and hopes such as only early youth can know; then in a new world among people whose mien and bearing were outlandish at first but in time brought forth a new familiarity and a new feeling of being at home; then in stranger and ever stranger landscapes, in cities as old as the mind of man, in steppes without horizon, in mountains whose wildness reminded you of the wildness of the human heart, and in hot desert solitudes; and the slow growth of new truths -truths new to me -and that day in the snows of the Hindu-Kush when, after a long conversation, an Afghan friend exclaimed in astonishment: 'But you are a Muslim, only you do not know it yourself...!' And that other day, months later, when I did come to know it myself; and my first pilgrimage to Mecca; the death of my wife, and the despair that followed it; and these timeless times among the Arabs ever since: years of deep friendship with a royal man who with his ~word had carved for himself a state out of nothingness and stopped only one step short of real greatness; years of wandering through deserts and steppes; risky excursions amidst Arabian beduin warfare and into the Libyan fight for independence; long sojourns in Medina where I endeavored to round off my knowledge of Islam in the Prophet's Mosque; repeated pilgrimages to Mecca; marriages with beduin girls, and subsequent divorces; warm human relationships, and desolate days of loneliness; sophisticated discourses with cultured Muslims from all parts of the world, and journeys through unexplored regions: all these years of submergence in a world far removed from the thoughts and aims of Western existence.
What a long row of years...
All these sunken years now come up to the surface, uncover their faces once again and call me with many voices: and suddenly, in the startled jerk of my heart, I perceive, how long, how endless my way has been. 'You have always been only going and going,' I say to myself. 'You have never yet built your life into something that one could grasp with his hands, and never has there been an answer to the question "Whereto?" … You have been going on and on, a wanderer through many lands, a guest at many hearths, but the longing has never been stilled, and although you are a stranger no more, you have struck no root.'
Why is it that, even after finding my place among the people who believe in the things I myself have come to believe, I have struck no root1Two years ago, when I took an Arab wife in Medina, I wanted her to give me a son. Through this son, Talal, who was born to us a few months ago, I have begun to feel that the Arabs are my kin as well as my brethren in faith. I want him to have his roots deep in this land and to grow up in the consciousness of his great heritage of blood as well as culture.
This, one might think, should be enough to make a man desirous of settling down for good, of building for himself and his family a lasting home. Why is it, then, that my wanderings are not yet over and that I have still to continue on my way? Why is it that the life which I myself have chosen does not fully satisfy me? What is it that I find lacking in this environment? Certainly not the intellectual interests of Europe. I have left them behind me. I do not miss them. Indeed, I am so remote from them that it has become increasingly difficult for me to write for the European newspapers which provide me with my livelihood; every time I send off an article, it seems as if I were throwing a stone into a bottomless well: the stone disappears into the dark void and not even an echo comes up to tell me that is has reached its goal...
While I thus cogitate in disquiet and perplexity, half submerged in the dark waters of a well in an Arabian oasis, I suddenly hear a voice from the background of my memory, the voice of an old Kurdish nomad: If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings. Whereupon, as if by magic, all disquiet leaves me. I begin to look upon myself with distant eyes, as you might look at the pages of a book to read a story from them; and I begin to understand that my life could not have taken a different course. For when I ask myself, 'what is the sum total of my life?" something in me seems to answer. 'You have set out to exchange one world for another -to gain a new world for yourself in exchange for an old one which you never really possessed.' And I know with startling clarity that such an undertaking might indeed take an entire lifetime.
I CLIMB OUT of the well, put on the clean, long tunic which I brought with me, and go back to the fire and to Zayd and the camels; I drink the bitter coffee which Zayd offers me and then lie down, refreshed and warm, near the fire on the ground.
My ARMS ARE CROSSED under my neck and I am looking into this Arabian night which curves over me, black and starry. A
shooting star flies in a tremendous are, and there another, and yet another: arcs of light piercing the darkness. Are they only bits of broken-up planets, fragments of some cosmic disaster, now aimlessly flying through the vastness of the universe? Oh, no: ifyouaskZayd,hewilltellyouthatthesearethefieryjavelins with which angels drive away the devils that on certain nights stealthily ascend toward heaven to spy upon God's secrets ... Was it perhaps Iblis himself, the king of all devils, who has just received that mighty throw of flame there in the east. . . ?
The legends connected with this sky and its stars are more familiar to me than the home of my childhood ...
How could it be otherwise? Ever since I came to Arabia I have lived like an Arab, worn only Arab dress, spoken only Arabic, dreamed my dreams in Arabic; Arabian customs and imageries have almost imperceptibly shaped my thoughts; I have not been hampered by the many mental reservations which usually make it impossible for a foreigner -be he ever so well versed in the manners and the language of the country -to find a true approach to the feelings of its people and to make their world his own.
And suddenly I have to laugh aloud with the laughter of happiness and freedom -so loud that Zayd looks up in astonishment and my dromedary turns its head toward me with a slow, faintly supercilious movement: for now I see how simple and straight, in spite of all its length, my road has been -my road from a world which I did not possess to a world truly my own.
My coming to this land: was it not, in truth, a home-coming? Home-coming of the heart that has espied its old home backward over a curve of thousands of years and now recognizes this sky, my sky, with painful rejoicing? For this Arabian sky -so much darker, higher, more festive with its stars than any other sky -vaulted over the long trek of my ancestors, those wandering herdsmen-warriors, when, thousands of years ago, they set out in the power of their morning, obsessed by greed for land and booty, toward the fertile country of Chaldea and an unknown future: that small beduin tribe of Hebrews, forefathers of that man who was to be born in Ur of the Chaldees.
That man, Abraham, did not really belong in Ur, His was but one among many Arabian tribes which at one time or another had wound their way from the hungry deserts of the Peninsula toward the northern dreamlands that were said to be flowing with milk and honey -the settled lands of the Fertile Crescent, Syria and Mesopotamia.
Sometimes such tribes succeeded in overcoming the settlers they found there and established themselves as rulers in their place, gradually intermingling with the vanquished people and evolving, together with them, into a new nation -like the Assyrians and Babylonians, who erected their kingdoms on the ruins of the earlier Sumerian civilization, or the Chaldeans, who grew to power in Babylon, or the Amorites, who later came to be known as Canaanites in Palestine and as Phoenicians on the coasts of Syria. At other times the oncoming nomads were too weak to vanquish those who had arrived earlier and were absorbed by them; or, alternatively, the settlers pushed the nomads back into the desert, forcing them to find other pastures and perhaps other lands to conquer. The clan of Abraham -whose original name, according to the Book of Genesis, was Ab-Ram, which in ancient Arabic means 'He of the High Desire' -was evidently one of those weaker tribes; the Biblical story of their sojourn at Dr on the fringe of the desert relates to the time when they found that they could not win for themselves new homes in the land of the Twin Rivers and were about to move northwest along the Euphrates toward Haran and thence to Syria.
'He of the High Desire,' that early ancestor of mine whom God had driven toward unknown spaces and so to a discovery of his own self, would have well understood why I am here -for he also had to wander through many lands before he could build his life into something that you might grasp with your hands, and had to be guest at many strange hearths before he was allowed to strike root. To his awe-commanding experience my puny perplexity would have been no riddle. He would have known -as I know it now -that the meaning of all my wanderings lay in a hidden desire to meet myself by meeting a world whose approach to the innermost questions of life, to reality itself, was different from all I had been accustomed to in my childhood and youth.
WHAT A LONG WAY, from my childhood and youth in Central Europe to my present in Arabia; but what a pleasant way for remembrance to travel backward...
There were those early childhood years in the Polish city of Lw6w -then in Austrian possession -in a house that was as quiet and dignified as the street on which it stood: a long street of somewhat dusty elegance, bordered with chestnut trees and paved with wood blocks that muffled the beat of the horses' hooves and converted every hour of the day into a lazy afternoon. I loved that lovely street with a consciousness far beyond my childish years, and not merely because it was the street of my home: I loved it, I think, because of the air of noble self-possession with which it flowed from the gay center of that gayest of cities toward the stillness of the woods on the city's margin and the great cemetery that lay hidden in those woods. Beautiful carriages would sometimes fly past on silent wheels to the accompaniment of the brisk, rhythmic trap-trap of prancing hooves, or, if it happened to be winter and the street was blanketed with foot-deep snow, sledges would glide over it and steam would come in clouds from the horses' nostrils and their bells would tinkle through the frosty air: and if you yourself sat in the sledge and felt the frost rush by and bite your cheeks, your childish heart knew that the galloping horses were carrying you into a happiness that had neither beginning nor end.
And there were the summer months in the country, where my mother's father, a wealthy banker, maintained a large estate for his large family's pleasure. A sluggish little stream with willow trees along its banks; barns full of placid cows, a chiaroscuro mysteriously pregnant with the scent of animals and hay and the laughter of the Ruthenian peasant girls who were busy in the evenings with milking; you would drink the foaming warm milk straight from the pails -not because you were thirsty, but because it was exciting to drink something that was still so close to its animal source. .. Those hot August days spent in the fields with the farmhands who were cutting the wheat, and with the women who gathered and bound it in sheaves: young women, good to look at -heavy of body, full of breast, with hard, warm arms, the strength of which you could feel when they rolled you over playfully at noontime among the wheat stacks: but, of course, you were much too young then to draw further conclusions from those laughing embraces...
And there were journeys with my parents to Vienna and Berlin and the Alps and the Bohemian forests and the North Sea and the Baltic: places so distant that they almost seemed to be new worlds. Every time one set out on such a journey, the first whistle of the train engine and the first jolt of the wheels made one's heart stop beating in anticipation of the wonders that were now to unfold themselves. .. And there were playmates, boys and girls, a brother and a sister and many cousins; and glorious Sundays of freedom after the dullness -but not too oppressive a dullness -of weekdays in school: hikes through the countryside, and the first surreptitious meetings with lovely girls of one's own age, and the blush of a strange excitement from which one recovered only after hours and hours...
It was a happy childhood, satisfying even in retrospect. My parents lived in comfortable circumstances; and they lived mostly for their children. My mother's placidity and unruffled quiet may have had something to do with the ease with which in later years I was able to adapt myself to unfamiliar and, on occasion, most adverse conditions; while my father's inner restlessness is probably mirrored-in my own.
IF I HAD to describe my father, I would say that this lovely, slim, middle-sized man of dark complexion and dark, passionate eyes was not quite in tune with his surroundings. In his early youth he had dreamed of devoting himself to science, especially physics, but had never been able to realize this dream and had to content himself with being a barrister. Although quite successful in this profession, in which his keen mind must have found a welcome challenge, he never reconciled himself to it fully; and the air of loneliness that surrounded him may have been caused by an ever-present awareness that his true calling had eluded him.
His father had been an orthodox rabbi in Czernowitz, capital of the then Austrian province of Bukovina. I still remember him as a graceful old man with very delicate hands and a sensitive face framed in a long, white beard. Side by side with his deep interest in mathematics and astronomy -which he studied in his spare time throughout his life -he was one of the best chess players of the district. This was probably the basis of his longstanding friendship with the Greek-Orthodox archbishop, himself a chess player of note. The two would spend many an even ing together over the chessboard and would round off their sessions by discussing the metaphysical propositions of their respective religions, One might have presumed that, with such a bent of mind, my grandfather would have welcomed his son's my father's -inclination toward science, But apparently he had made up his mind from the very first that his eldest son would continue the rabbinical tradition which went back in the family for several generations, and refused even to consider any other career for my father. In this resolve he may have been strengthened by a disreputable skeleton in the family cupboard: the memory of an uncle of his -that is, a great-great-uncle of mine who had in the most unusual way 'betrayed' the family tradition and even turned away from the religion of his forefathers.
That almost mythical great-great-unc1e, whose name was never mentioned aloud, seems to have been brought up in the same strict family tradition. At a very young age he had become a full-fledged rabbi and been married off to a woman whom he apparently did not love, As the rabbinical profession did not bring sufficient remuneration in those days, he supplemented his income by trading in furs, which every year necessitated a journey to Europe's central fur market, Leipzig. One day, when he was about twenty-five years old, he set out by horse cart -it was in the first half of the nineteenth century -on one of these long journeys. In Leipzig he sold his furs as usual; but instead of returning to his home town as usual, he sold the cart and the horse as well, shaved off his beard and side locks and, forgetting his unloved wife, went to England. For a time he earned his living by menial work, studying astronomy and mathematics in the evening. Some patron seems to have recognized his mental gifts and enabled him to pursue his studies at Oxford, from where he emerged after a few years as a promising scholar and a convert to Christianity. Shortly after sending a letter of divorce to his Jewish wife, he married a girl from among the 'gentiles', not much was known to our family about his later life, except that he achieved considerable distinction as an astronomer and university teacher and ended his days as a knight.
This horrifying example seems to have persuaded my grandfather to take a very stern attitude regarding my father's inclination toward the study of 'gentile' sciences; he had to become a rabbi, and that was that. My father, however, was not prepared to give in so easily. While he studied the Talmud in daytime, he spent part of his nights in studying secretly, without the help of a teacher, the curriculum of a humanistic gymnasium. In time he confided in his mother. Although her son's surreptitious studies may have burdened her conscience, her generous nature made her realize that it would be cruel to deprive him of a chance to follow his heart's desire. At the age of twenty-two, after completing the eight years' course of a gymnasium within four years, my father presented himself for the baccalaureate examination and passed it with distinction. With the diploma in hand, he and his mother now dared to break the terrible news to my grandfather. I can imagine the dramatic scene that ensued; but the upshot of it was that my grandfather ultimately relented and agreed that my father should give up his rabbinical studies and attend the university instead. The financial circumstances of the family did not, however, allow him to go in for his beloved study of physics; he had to turn to a more lucrative profession -that of law and in time became a barrister. Some years later he settled in the city of Lw6w in eastern Galicia and married my mother, one of the four daughters of a rich local banker. There, in the summer of 1900, I was born as the second of three children.
My father's frustrated desire expressed itself in his wide reading on scientific subjects and perhaps also in his peculiar, though extremely reserved, predilection for his second son -myself who also seemed to be more interested in things not immediately connected with the making of money and a successful 'career'. Nevertheless, his hopes to make a scientist of me were destined to remain unfulfilled. Although not stupid, I was a very indifferent student. Mathematics and natural sciences were particularly boring to me; I found infinitely more pleasure in reading the stirring historical romances of Sienkiewicz, the fantasies of Jules Verne, Red Indian stories by James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May and, later, the verses of Rilke and the sonorous cadences of Also sprach Zarathustra. The mysteries of gravity and electricity, no less than Latin and Greek grammar, left me entirely cold with the result that I always got my promotions only by the skin of my teeth. This must have been a keen disappointment to my father, but he may have found some consolation in the fact that my teachers seemed to be very satisfied with my inclination toward literature -both Polish and German -as well as history.
In accordance with our family's tradition, I received, through private tutors at home, a thorough grounding in Hebrew religious lore. This was not due to any pronounced religiosity in my parents. They belonged to a generation which, while paying lip service to one or another of the religious faiths that had shaped the lives of its ancestors, never made the slightest endeavor to' conform its practical life or even its ethical thought to those teachings. In such a society the very concept of religion had been degraded to one of two things: the wooden ritual of those who clung by habit -and only by habit -to their religious heritage, or the cynical insouciance of the more 'liberal' ones, who considered religion as an outmoded superstition to which one might, on occasion, outwardly conform but of which one was secretly ashamed, as of something intellectually indefensible. To all appearances, my own parents belonged to the former category; but at times I have a faint suspicion that my father, at least, inclined toward the latter.
Nevertheless, in. deference to both his father and his father-in-law, he insisted on my spending long hours over the sacred scriptures. Thus, by the age of thirteen, I not only could read Hebrew with great fluency but also spoke it freely and had, in addition, a fair acquaintance with Aramaic (which may possibly account for the ease with which I picked up Arabic in later years). I studied the Old Testament in the original; the Mishna and Gemara -that is, the text and the commentaries of the Talmud -became familiar to me; I could discuss with a good deal of self-assurance the differences between the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds; and I immersed myself in the intricacies of Biblical exegesis, called Targum, just as if I had been destined for a rabbinical career.
In spite of all this budding religious wisdom, or maybe because of it, I soon developed a supercilious feeling toward many of the premises of the Jewish faith. To be sure, I did not disagree with the teaching of moral righteousness so strongly emphasized throughout the Jewish scriptures, nor with the sublime God consciousness of the Hebrew Prophets -but it seemed to me that the God of the Old Testament and the Talmud was unduly concerned with the ritual by means of which His worshippers were supposed to worship Him. It also occurred to me that this God was strangely preoccupied with the destinies of one particular nation, the Hebrews. The very build-up of the Old Testament as a history of the descendants of Abraham tended to make God appear not as the creator and sustainer of all mankind but, rather, as a tribal deity adjusting all creation to the requirements of a 'chosen people': rewarding them with conquests if they were righteous, and making them suffer at the hands of nonbelievers whenever they strayed from the prescribed path. Viewed against these fundamental shortcomings, even the ethical fervor of the later Prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, seemed to be barren of a universal message.
But although the effect of those early studies of mine was the opposite of what had been intended -leading me away from, rather than closer to, the religion of my forefathers -I often think that in later years they helped me to understand the fundamental purpose of religion as such, whatever its form. At that time, however, my disappointment with Judaism did not lead me to a search for spiritual truths in other directions. Under the influence of an agnostic environment, I drifted, like so many boys of my age, into a matter-of-fact rejection of all institutional religion; and since my religion had never meant much more to me than a series of restrictive regulations, I felt none the worse for having drifted away from it. Theological and philosophical ideas did not yet really concern me; what I was looking forward to be not much different from the expectations of most other boys: action, adventure, excitement.
Toward the end of 1914, when the Great War was already raging, the first big chance to fulfil my boyish dreams seemed to come within grasp. At the age of fourteen I made my escape from school and joined the Austrian army under a false name. I was very tall for my years and easily passed for eighteen, the minimum age for recruitment. But apparently I did not carry a marshal's baton in my knapsack. After a week or so, my poor father succeeded in tracing me with the help of the police, and I was ignominiously escorted back to Vienna, where my family had settled some time earlier. Nearly four years later I was actually, and legitimately, drafted into the Austrian army; but by then I had ceased to dream of military glory and was searching for other avenues to self-fulfillment. In any case, a few weeks after my induction the revolution broke out, the Austrian Empire collapsed, and the war was over. FOR ABOUT TWO YEARS after the end of the Great War I studied, in a somewhat desultory fashion, history of art and philosophy at the University of Vienna. My heart was not in those studies. A quiet academic career did not attract me. I felt a yearning to come into more intimate grips with life, to enter it without any of those carefully contrived, artificial defenses which security-minded people love to build up around themselves; and I wanted to find by myself an approach to the spiritual order of things which, I knew, must exist but which I could not yet discern.
It is not easy to explain in so many words what I meant in those days by a 'spiritual order' it certainly did not occur to me to conceive of the problem in conventional religious terms or, for that matter, in any precise terms whatsoever. My vagueness, to be fair to myself, was not of my own making. It was the vagueness of an entire generation.
The opening decades of the twentieth century stood in the sign of a spiritual vacuum. All the ethical valuations to which Europe have been accustomed for so many centuries had become amorphous under the terrible impact of what had happened between 1914 and 1918, and no new set of values was yet anywhere in sight. A feeling of brittleness and insecurity was in the air -a presentiment of social and intellectual upheavals that made one doubt whether there could ever again be any permanency in man's thoughts and endeavors. Everything seemed to be flowing in a formless flood, and the spiritual restlessness of youth could nowhere find a foothold. In the absence of any reliable standards of morality, nobody could give us young people satisfactory answers to the many questions that perplexed us. Science said, 'Cognition is everything' -and forgot that cognition without an ethical goal can lead only to chaos. The social reformers, the revolutionaries, the communists -all of whom undoubtedly wanted to build a better, happier world-were thinking only in terms of outward, social and economic, circumstances; and to bridge that defect, they had raised their 'materialistic conception of history' to a kind of new, anti-metaphysical metaphysics. The traditionally religious people, on the other hand, knew nothing better than to attribute to their God qualities derived from their own habits of thought, which had long since become rigid and meaningless: and when we young people saw that these alleged divine qualities often stood in sharp contrast with what was happening in the world around us, we told ourselves: 'The moving forces of destiny are evidently different from the qualities which are ascribed to God; therefore -there is no God.' And it occurred to only very few of us that the cause of all this confusion might lie perhaps in the arbitrariness of the self-righteous guardians of faith who claimed to have the right to 'define' God and, by clothing Him with their own garments, separated Him from man and his destiny.
In the individual, this ethical liability could lead either to complete moral chaos and cynicism or, alternatively, to a search for a creative, personal approach to what might constitute the good life.
This instinctive realization may have been, indirectly, the reason for my choice of history of art as my main subject at the university. It was the true function of art, I suspected, to evoke a vision of the coherent, unifying pattern that must underlie the fragmentary picture of happenings which our consciousness reveals to us and which, it seemed to me, could be only inadequately formulated through conceptual thought. However, the courses which I attended did not satisfy me. My professors -some of them, like Strzygowski and Dvorak, outstanding in their particular fields of study -appeared to be more concerned with discovering the aesthetic laws that govern artistic creation than with baring its innermost spiritual impulses: in other words, their approach to art was, to my mind, too narrowly confined to the question of the forms in which it expressed itself.
The conclusions of psychoanalysis, to which I was introduced in those days of youthful perplexity, left me equally, if for somewhat different reasons, unsatisfied. No doubt, psychoanalysis was at that time an intellectual revolution of the first magnitude, and one felt in one's bones that this flinging-open of new, hitherto barred doors of cognition was bound to affect deeply -and perhaps change entirely -man's thinking about himself and his society. The discovery of the role which unconscious urges play in the formation of the human personality opened, beyond any question, avenues to a more penetrating self-understanding than had been offered to us by the psychological theories of earlier times. All this I was ready to concede. Indeed, the stimulus of Freudian ideas was as intoxicating to my young mind as potent wine, and many were the evenings I spent in Vienna's cafes listening to exciting discussions between some of the early pioneers of psychoanalysis, such as Alfred Adler, Hermann Steck! and Otto Gross. But while I certainly did not dispute the validity of its analytical principles, I was disturbed by the intellectual arrogance of the new science, which tried to reduce all mysteries of man's Self to a series of neurogenic reactions. The philosophical 'conclusions' arrived at by its founder and its devotees somehow appeared to me too pat, too cocksure and over-simplified to come anywhere within the neighborhood of ultimate truths; and they certainly did not point any new way to the good life.
But although such problems often occupied my mind, they did not really trouble me. I was never given much too metaphysical speculation or to a conscious quest for abstract 'truths'.
My interests lay more in the direction of things seen and felt: people, activities and relationships. And it was just then that I was beginning to discover relationships with women.
In the general process of dissolution of established social mores that followed the Great War, many restraints between the sexes had been loosened. What happened was, I think, not so much a revolt against the strait-lacedness of the nineteenth century as, rather, a passive rebound from a state of affairs in which certain moral standards had been deemed eternal and unquestionable to a social condition in which everything was questionable: a swinging of the pendulum from yesterday's comforting belief in the continuity of man's upward progress to the bitter disillusionment of Spengler, to Nietzsche's moral relativism, and to the spiritual nihilism fostered by psychoanalysis. Looking backward on those early postwar years, I feel that the young men and women who spoke and wrote with so much enthusiasm about 'the body's freedom' were very far indeed from the ebullient spirit of Pan they so often invoked: their raptures were too self-conscious to be exuberant, and too easy-going to be revolutionary. Their sexual relations had, as a rule, something casual about them -a certain matter-of-fact blandness which often led to promiscuity.
Even if 1had felt myself bound by the remnants of conventional morality, it would have been extremely difficult to avoid being drawn into a trend that had become so widespread; as it was, I rather gloried, like so many others of my generation, in what was considered a 'rebellion against the hollow conventions.' Flirtations grew easily into affairs, and some of the affairs into passions. I do not think, however, that 1was a libertine; for in all those youthful loves of mine, however flimsy and short lived, there was always the lilt of a hope, vague but insistent, that the frightful isolation -which so obviously separated man from man might be broken by the coalescence of one man and one woman.
My RESTLESSNESS GREW and made it increasingly difficult for me to pursue my university studies. At last 1 decided to give them up for good and to try my hand at journalism. My father, with probably more justification than 1 was then willing to concede, strongly objected to such a course, maintaining that before 1 decided to make writing my career 1 should at least prove to myself that 1 could write; 'and, in any case,' he concluded after one of our stormy discussions, 'a Ph.D. degree has never yet prevented a man from becoming a successful writer.' His reasoning was sound; but I was very young, very hopeful and very restless. When 1 realized that he would not change his mind, there seemed nothing left but to start life on my own. Without telling anyone of my intentions, 1said good-bye to Vienna one summer day in 1920 and boarded a train for Prague.
All1possessed, apart from my personal belongings, was a diamond ring which my mother, who had died a year earlier, had left me. This 1 sold through the good offices of a waiter in Prague's main literary cafe. Most probably 1 was thoroughly gypped in the transaction, but the sum of money which 1 received appeared like a fortune. With this fortune in my pocket 1 proceeded to Berlin, where some Viennese friends introduced me to the magic circle of litterateurs and artists at the old Cafe' des Westerns.
1 knew that henceforth 1 would have to make my way unaided; 1 would never again expect or accept financial help from my family. Some weeks later, when my father's anger had abated he wrote to me: 'I can already see you ending one day as 'a tramp in a roadside ditch' to which 1 replied: 'No roadside ditch for me -1willcome out on top.' How 1would come out on
top was not in the least clear to me; but I knew that I wanted to Write and was, of course, convinced that the world of letters was waiting for me with arms wide open.
After a few months my cash ran out and I began to cast about for a job. To a young man with journalistic aspirations, one of the great dailies was the obvious choice; but I found out that I was no 'choice' to them. I did not find it out all at once. It took me weeks of tiresome tramping over the pavements of Berlin for even a subway or streetcar fare had by then become a problem -and an endless number of humiliating interviews with editors-in-chief and news editors and sub-editors, to realize that, barring a miracle, a fledgling without a single printed line to his credit had not the slightest chance of being admitted to the sacred precincts of a newspaper. No miracle came my way. Instead, I became acquainted with hunger and spent several weeks subsisting almost entirely on the tea and the two rolls which my landlady served me in the morning. My literary friends at the Cafe des Westerns could not do much for a raw and inexperienced 'would-be' moreover, most of them lived in circumstances not much different from my own, hovering from day to day on the brink of nothingness and struggling hard to keep their chins above water. Sometimes, in the flush of affluence produced by a luckily placed article or a picture sold, one or another of them would throw a party with beer and frankfurters and would ask me to partake of the sudden bounty; or a rich snob would invite a group of us strange intellectual gypsies to supper in his flat, and would gaze at us with awe while we gorged our empty stomachs with caviar canapés and champagne, repaying our host's munificence with clever talk and an 'insight into bohemian life.' But such treats were only exceptions. The rule of my days was stark hunger -and in the nights my sleep was filled with dreams of steaks and sausages and thick slices of buttered bread. Several times I was tempted to write to my father and beg him for help, which he surely would not have refused; but every time my pride stepped in and I wrote to him instead of the wonderful job and the good salary I had...
At last a lucky break came. I was introduced to F. W. Murnau, who just then was rising to fame as a film director (this was a few years before Hollywood drew him to still greater fame and to an untimely, tragic death); and Murnau, with that whimsical impulsiveness which endeared him to all his friends, at once took a fancy to the young man who was looking so eagerly, and with so much hope in the face of adversity, toward the future. He asked me if I would not like to work under him on a new film he was about to begin: and although the job was to be only temporary, I saw the gates of heaven opening before me as I stammered, 'Yes, I would ...'
For two glorious months, free of all financial worries and entirely absorbed by a host of glittering experiences unlike anything I had ever known, I worked as Murnau's assistant. My self-confidence grew tremendously; and it was certainly not diminished by the fact that the leading lady of the film -a wellknown and very beautiful actress -did not prove averse to a flirtation with the director's young assistant. When the film was finished and Mumau had to go abroad for a new assignment, I took leave of him with the conviction that my worst days were over.
Shortly afterward, my good friend Anton Kuh -a Viennese journalist who had recently come to prominence in Berlin as a theatre critic -invited me to collaborate with him on a film scenario which he had been commissioned to write. I accepted the idea with enthusiasm and put, I believe, much work into the script; at any rate, the producer who had commissioned it gladly paid the sum agreed upon, which Anton and I divided fifty-fifty. In order to celebrate our 'entry into the world of films,' we gave a party in one of the most fashionable restaurants in Berlin; and when we received the bill, we found that practically our entire earnings had gone up in lobster, caviar and French wines. But our lack held out. We immediately sat down to writing another scenario -a fantasy woven around the figure of Balzac and a bizarre, entirely imaginary experience of his -and found a buyer on the very day it was completed. This time, however, I refused to 'celebrate' our success, and went instead on a several weeks' holiday to the Bavarian lakes.
After another year full of adventurous ups and downs in various cities of Central Europe, involving all manner of short-lived jobs, I succeeded at last in breaking into the world of journalism.
THIS BREAK-THROUGH took place in the autumn of 1921, after another period of financial low. One afternoon, while I was sitting in the Cafe des Westerns, tired and disconsolate, a friend of mine sat down at my table. When I recounted my troubles to him, he suggested:
. 'There might be a chance for you. Dammert is starting a news agency of his own in co-operation with the United Press of America. It will be called the United Telegraph. I am sure that he will need a large number of sub-editors. I'll introduce you to him, if you like.'
Dr. Dammert was a well-known figure in the political circles of Berlin in the twenties. Prominent in the ranks of the Catholic Centre Party, and a wealthy man in his own right, he enjoyed an excellent reputation; and the idea of working under him appealed to me.
. Next day my friend took me to Dr. Dammert's office. The elegant, middle-aged man was suave and friendly as he invited us to be seated.
'Mr. Fingal' (that was my friend's name) 'has spoken to me about you. Have you ever worked before as a journalist?'
'No, sir,' I replied, 'but I have had plenty of other experience. Ii am something of an expert on Eastern European countries and know several of the languages.' (In fact, the only Eastern European language I could speak was Polish, and I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on in that part of the world; but I was resolved not to let my chance be spoiled by undue modesty.)
'Oh, that is interesting,' remarked Dr. Dammert with a half-smile. 'I have a penchant for experts. But, unfortunately, I can't use an expert on Eastern European affairs just now.'
He must have seen the disappointment in my face, for he quickly continued: 'Still, I may have an opening for you although it may be somewhat beneath your standing, I wonder...'
'What is the opening, sir?' I enquired eagerly, thinking of my unpaid rent.
'Well ... I need several more telephonists... Oh, no, no, don't worry, not at a switchboard: I mean telephonists to transmit news to the provincial newspapers ...'
This was indeed a comedown from my high expectations. I looked at Dr. Dammert and he looked at me; and when I saw the tightening of the humorous creases around his eyes, I knew that my boastful game was up.
…
Mohtadeen.Com
