Promise at Dawn, Page 7

  I was destined to see a great deal of Ivan Mosjoukine in the years to come. Our meetings usually took place in Nice, on the terrace of the Grande Bleue overlooking the sea, where he would frequently treat me to a coffee. He was a great star of the silent screen. When the “talkies” came, the strong Russian accent of his speech gradually put an end to his career, and he soon hit upon difficult times. He used to get me small jobs as an extra whenever he made a picture in Nice, my last appearance on the screen dating back to 1935 or 1936 in a story in which he played the lead—a gun runner, who meets his end in a cloud of smoke when his ship is gunned and sunk by Harry Baur. The picture was called Nitchevo, and I was paid fifty francs a day—a real fortune for me. All I was asked to do was to lean on the ship’s rail and look at the sea. I tried to find out from the director what I was supposed to be expressing in that scene but he didn’t seem to care. It was the greatest part I was ever called upon to play.

  Mosjoukine died shortly after the end of the war, forgotten and impoverished. Up to the very end, the pale, savage and piercing light kept burning in his eyes, and his air of physical dignity, discreet and yet slightly arrogant, ironical and detached, never left him. I liked him.

  I often arrange for a showing of his old movies at film societies. He always plays the part of romantic heroes and noble adventurers; he conquers empires single-handed; reigns supreme with sword and pistol; gallops under the eyes of lovely ladies in the white uniform of a guards officer; carries off beautiful captives thrown across the saddle of his horse; endures the most appalling tortures in the service of the Tsar, and always, always, women die of love at his feet. . . . I leave the theatre deeply conscious of all that my mother expected of me, and I dutifully perform my physical exercises every morning to keep myself in shape, just in case.

  Our impressive guest left us that evening, though not without making a generous and exciting gesture. For a whole week the canary-colored Packard and the liveried chauffeur were put at our disposal. The weather was lovely and it would have been delightful to leave the town for a drive in the Lithuanian forest.

  But my mother was not a woman to lose her head under the intoxicating caress of spring. She knew what was important to her; she also had a taste for revenge and would have gone to any length to confound her enemies. It was for this purpose, and for this purpose alone, that the car was employed. Each morning about eleven o’clock I was made to put on my most eccentric clothes—she herself always dressed with discreet good taste—the chauffeur, cap in hand, held the door open, we stepped in and for the next two hours the open car paraded slowly through the town, taking us to all the favorite haunts of the local “best society,” to the Café Rudnicki, to the Botanical Gardens, while my mother nodded with the most condescending smile to all those who had treated her badly, who had been rude to her, or had closed the door in her face, in the days when she went from house to house with her hatboxes.

  To children of seven or eight who have reached this point in my story, and who, like myself, may have lived their greatest love too early and never ever recovered from it, I wish to give some practical advice. I am assuming that they all suffer, as I do, from a chronic longing for warmth, and spend long hours in the sun in a vain attempt to recapture something that always eludes them. I agree that a blazing fire is not to be despised, and I suppose that alcohol can be of some assistance, and there is always the solution devised by a little friend of mine, who is now the ambassador of his country somewhere in the world, and who sleeps in electrically heated pajamas under an electric blanket on a mattress that is electrically warmed. It may well be worth trying, but my advice to all the little boys is quite firm: stop trying. There is a lot of sunlight on earth, and many a pair of warm lovely arms, but I tell you, stop trying. You’ve had it. You’ve had it—and you’ll never have it again.

  I feel the moment has also come for me to raise a rather delicate point, and to make a frank confession, at the risk of shocking and disappointing some of my readers, and being perhaps regarded as an unnatural son by the fervent disciples of the great Freud: I have never had incestuous leanings toward my mother.

  I fully realize that this naive refusal to face facts will bring a knowing smile to the lips of the well-informed, and also that no one can vouch for one’s unconscious mind. I also hasten to assure them that even a barbarian like myself regards the Oedipus complex with the greatest admiration and respect; I consider that its discovery does high honor to our Western civilization, and should encourage us to go on digging for the benefit of all; with the recent finding of oil in the Sahara it ranks unquestionably among the most fruitful explorations of our underground resources. Nor is that all. Painfully aware of my Asiatic origins, and in order to show myself worthy of the truly civilized and progressive Western community which has so graciously accepted me, I have frequently and determinedly tried to evoke the image of my mother in the proper libidinous light, not only to free myself from my complex, of which I have been so painfully and embarrassingly unaware, but also to show my deep respect for our spiritual values, and to prove that Western civilization, in all its noble and progressive endeavors, could rely on me to the end. But try as I may, I somehow always failed to strike in myself even the most modest spark of libido. And yet, there must have been among my Tartar ancestors many a savage horseman who, if their reputation is at all founded, never hesitated before rape, incest, or any other form of indulgence in our earth-shaking taboos. Here again, without in any way looking for excuses for my total lack of enthusiasm for incest, I think I can present my defense.

  Though it is perfectly true that I have never felt any physical desire for my mother, the reason was not so much, I feel, in the blood relationship existing between us, but simply because she was a person advanced in age, and for me, for some reason or other, the sexual act has always been linked with a certain degree of youth and physical freshness. I must even say that my oriental blood has always made me peculiarly sensitive to the tender attractions of youth and I am sorry to add that this tendency has grown stronger in me as I grow older—an almost general rule, I am told, among the satraps of Asia. I feel, therefore, free to say that I have never had for my mother, whom I never knew, or even remembered, as a young woman, any other impulse than those dictated by the most natural and affectionate feelings. I know that this sort of naïve statement will be immediately interpreted according to the rules of the book, that is, upside down, by those wriggling little suckers of the human soul, otherwise called psychoanalysts, presently engaged in bleeding it white at the rate of fifty dollars an hour, who always remind me, except for their size, of sharks feeding on refuse underwater. Some of the most outspoken among them have explained to me with that great subtlety and calm, realistic assurance which, so often, go with arrogant idiocy that if, for example, you are excessively fond of women, it is because you are really a panic-stricken homosexual, who desperately tries to escape from his obsession. If the idea of an accidental physical contact with a male body is repulsive to you—may I be allowed to confess that this is exactly the case with me—it is really because you are just a teeny-weeny little bit queerish and tempted; and, to go to the extreme of this splendid psychoanalytical logic, as I told one of those gentlemen on some television panel, if the contact with a corpse in the morgue revolts you and repels you utterly, the explanation, I suppose, lies in the fact that, in your unconscious, you are a teeny-weeny little bit necrophiliac and deliciously attracted, both as a male and a female, by the sight of all that splendid rigidity.

  Psychoanalysis today, like most of our ideas, has assumed a totalitarian form; it irresistibly tends to imprison us in the strait jacket of its own excesses and perversions. It has occupied the ground left vacant by the retreat of superstition; its dialectics, brilliantly and almost artistically developed, assume more and more toward the human soul the approach of Communism toward the individual; the clientele is largely recruited through a subtle, scientific form of intimidation and psychological blackmail, mu
ch as Chicago racketeers used to impose their protection. There are some honest and true artists among psychoanalysts, but they know where to stop, what to respect; and they do not view human nature as a sickness in itself. But a great many of the so-called therapists are nothing more than charlatans, operating on Dr. Knock’s famous dictum that health is something that bodes no good to those who are temporarily stricken with it.

  I therefore leave to the demagogues who hold the upper hand today in so many fields the freedom to see in my love for my mother the sign of some pathological puffiness in my soul. If we consider what liberty, fraternity and so many of the noblest aspirations of mankind have become in their hands, I see no reason why the simplicity of filial love should escape unscathed the distorting process of their twisted minds.

  If it pleases them to throw the dark mantle of Oedipus over my shoulders and to shake their heads knowingly at my naïveté, I welcome them. Anyway, I have never regarded incest in that glare of eternal damnation and hair-raising horror which our so-called morality casts on a form of sexual aberration occupying, it seems to me, a rather modest place on the monumental scale of our degradations. All the frenzies of incest strike me as infinitely more acceptable than those of Hiroshima, of Buchenwald, of firing squads, of police torture, of forced-labor camps and starving millions; I see a thousand times less evil in the insanity of incest than in the nuclear pursuits of our inspired scientists, who have taken over from syphilis the task of poisoning the genes of the unborn. No one will ever persuade me that sexual behavior is the ultimate criterion of good and evil. That sinister countenance, the sudden sight of which may well be fatal to pregnant women, of one of the most demoniac fathers of the hydrogen bomb, clamoring in favor of more and better nuclear explosions, is to me infinitely more sickening and odious than the very unpalatable idea of a son having a physical relationship with his mother. Compared with the intellectual, scientific and political aberrations of the present century, all the sexual ones appear to me utterly unimportant, since, after all, they only shake the bed and not the world. The unfortunate prostitute who obliges her customer is, in my eyes, a very innocent soul, a provider of daily bread, when one compares her humble venality with the prostitution of our great scientists, always willing to gratify the appetite of authority and to help in the preparation of genetic poisoning or atomic terror. Compared with the perversion of the mind, spirit, and ideal to which these traitors to our species are lending themselves, all our pathetic sexual frenzies, venal or not, incestuous or not, confer on our three lowly sphincters all the angelic innocence of an infant’s smile.

  Finally, to complete this vicious circle, let me say again that I am quite aware that this way of minimizing incest may be cleverly interpreted as a defense mechanism of the unconscious, and that all my indignation and reasoning can be easily presented as an attempt to exorcise in myself an obscure feeling of guilt—and having thus made my polite bows to all our fashionable fetishes, and danced dutifully to the tune of that dear old Viennese waltz, I shall now return to my humble and innocent love.

  For I scarcely need say that what prompts me to tell my story is the fraternal, universal, and recognizable nature of my love: there was nothing new, nothing different, nothing exceptional in my feelings—I loved my mother no more, no less than you loved yours. The only difference, perhaps, is that my juvenile attempt to accomplish everything she expected from me and to lay the world at her feet was, to a very great extent, impersonal, and prompted by an almost mystical longing to discover some inner, humane and triumphant logic in life. Whatever the nature of the link which bound us so deeply and often so painfully to one another—and each of you will have to decide this for himself—one thing, at least, appears quite clear to me today, as I cast a last look at what has been my life: in my attempt, I was driven far more by a fierce determination to cast a light of dignity and justice over the hidden face of the universe, to tear down its mask of absurdity and chaos, than by the mere wish to see a smile of happiness on my mother’s face.

  CHAPTER 11

  I was already nearly nine when I was sucked down, hook, line and sinker, by a passion so violent and so absorbing that it completely poisoned my existence, and almost cost me my life.

  She was eight years old, her name was Valentine and she was lovely. Her hair was dark, her eyes light, her figure was admirable, she was wearing a white dress and she carried a ball in her hand. She appeared before me near the woodshed, where the field nettles began, and I cannot describe the violence of the feelings this sudden vision of beauty stirred in me: all I know is that my knees began to shake, blood rushed to my head, my sight became blurred and I raised, rather obviously, my hand to my heart, in my mother’s best romantic manner. Determined to win her then and there forever, so that there would never be room in her life for another man, I immediately threw in my trump card and, leaning negligently against the woodpile, raised my eyes to the light. But Valentine refused to be impressed. There I stood, gazing into the sun until the tears rolled down my cheeks, but the heartless creature went on playing with her ball. My eyes were bulging and almost bursting, the world around me turned to fire and flame, and yet Valentine did not so much as give me a glance. Completely put out by this indifference, so unexpected after everything my mother had told me, I made one more desperate attempt to keep the blue of my eyes exposed to the light; then, having so to speak exhausted all my ammunition, I wiped away my tears, and, in a gesture of unconditional surrender, held out to her the three green apples I had just stolen from the orchard next door. She accepted my surrender as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, and announced:

  “Janek ate his whole sump collection for me.”

  Such was the beginning of my long martyrdom. In the course of the next few days I ate for Valentine several handfuls of earthworms, her father’s collection of rare butterflies, a mouse, a good many decaying leaves and, as a crowning achievement, I can say that at nine years of age—far more precociously than Casanova—I took my place among the greatest lovers of all time and accomplished a deed of amorous prowess no man, to the best of my knowledge, has ever equaled. I ate for my lady one of my rubber galoshes.

  Here I feel compelled to open a parenthesis.

  I am well aware that men are rather too apt to boast about their amorous exploits. To hear them, one would believe that their virile accomplishments know no limits, and they are always willing to indulge in statistics, without sparing you a single detail.

  I do not, therefore, expect anyone to believe me when I say that, for my well-beloved, after a few pounds of cherries—Valentine was kind enough to lighten my task by eating the flesh and handing me the stones—I also consumed a Japanese fan, ten yards of cotton thread, a complete paperback novel called Nat Pinkerton and three goldfish we stole from her music teacher’s aquarium.

  God knows what women have made me swallow in the course of my life, but I have never known anybody so insatiable. After my experiences with her, there was nothing left for me to learn about love. My education was completed. I knew.

  My adorable Messalina with the freckled nose was only eight, but her physical demands went beyond anything I have ever read about. She would run ahead of me in the yard, pointing out some interesting object for me to swallow—sometimes a rotting piece of lace, sometimes a couple of old corks, or just a mere handful of earth, and I eagerly acquitted myself of my man’s task—always only too willing to provide satisfaction. Once she started to gather a bouquet of daisies—with apprehension I watched it grow bigger in her hand—but I ate the daisies too, under her very watchful eyes—she knew already that men tend to cheat at games of that sort.

  In those days, children were taught nothing about the mysteries of sex, and as I swallowed one thing after another, I was convinced—quite rightly, as a matter of fact—that this was the way people made love.

  It was in vain that I looked for the slightest flicker of esteem in her eyes. Scarcely had I finished swallowing the daisies than sh
e casually observed: “Janek ate ten spiders for me, and then stopped only because Mother called us in for tea.”

  I trembled. No sooner was my back turned than she was being unfaithful to me with my best friend. But I swallowed that too. That was what love was about, after all.

  “May I kiss you?”

  “Yes. But you mustn’t wet my cheek. I don’t like it.”

  I kissed her, doing my best not to wet her cheek. We were kneeling behind the nettles and I kissed her again and again, while she twiddled her hoop around her finger with an indifferent look: the story of my life.

  “How many times have you kissed me?”

  “Eighty-seven. May I go up to a thousand?”

  “How many is a thousand?”

  “I don’t know. May I kiss you on the shoulder too?”

  “Yes.”

  I kissed her shoulder. But no, that wasn’t it. Something was missing. Something essential: but I didn’t have the slightest idea what it could possibly be. My heart was beating very hard, and I kissed her nose, her hair, her neck—but no, I was still off the mark, something else was required, something else was expected from me. I kissed her on the ear, and on the neck, but some deep, obscure impulse was pushing me further, much further, I didn’t know where and, finally, crazed by love, and at the very peak of my erotic frenzy, I sat down and took off one of my rubber galoshes.

  “I’ll eat this for you, if you wish me to.”

  If she wished me to! Ha! Of course, she wished me to. She was a true little woman. As I took out my penknife and cut into the rubber, I thought I at last saw a gleam of admiration in her eyes. I asked for nothing more. She laid her hoop on the ground and watched closely.