Elias Canetti - The Torch in My Ear

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I absorbed the changing locations of my earlier life without resistance. Never have I regretted that as a child I was exposed to such powerful and contrasting impressions. Every new place, no matter how exotic it seemed at first, won me over with its particular effect on me and its unforeseeable ramifications.

There was only one thing I felt bitter about: I never got over leaving Zurich. I was sixteen and I felt so deeply attached to the people and places, the school, the land, the literature, even Swiss German (which I had acquired despite my mothers tenacious resistance), that I never wanted to leave. After just five years in Zurich, I felt, at my tender age, that I should never go anywhere else, that I should spend the rest of my life here, in greater and greater intellectual well-being.

The break was violent, and any arguments I had put forward to my mother about remaining had been derided. After our devastating conversation, which decided my fate, I stood there, ridiculous and pusillanimous, a coward who refused to look life in the face because of mere books, an arrogant fool stuffed with false and useless knowledge, a narrow-minded, self-complaisant parasite, a pensioner, an old man who hadnt proved himself in any way, shape, or form.

The new environment had been chosen under circumstances that I was left in the dark about, and I had two reactions to the brutality of the change. One reaction was home-sickness; this was a natural ailment of the people in whose land I had lived, and by experiencing it so vehemently, I felt as if I belonged to them. My other reaction was a critical attitude toward my new milieu. Gone was the time of unhindered influx of all the unknown things. I tried to close myself off to the new environment, because it had been forced on me. However, I wasnt capable of total and indiscriminate rejection: my character had become too receptive. And thus began a period of testing and of sharper and sharper satire. Anything that was different from what I knew seemed exaggerated and comical. Also, very many things were presented to me at the same time.

We had moved to Frankfurt; and since conditions were precarious and we didnt know how long wed be staying, we lived in a boardinghouse. Here, we were rather crowded in two rooms, much closer to other people than ever before. We felt like a family, but we ate downstairs with other roomers at a long boardinghouse table. In the Pension Charlotte, we got to know all sorts of people, whom I saw every day during the main meal, and who were replaced only gradually. Some remained throughout the two years that I ultimately spent in the boardinghouse; some merely for one year, or even just six months. They were very different from one another; all of them are etched in my memory. But I had to pay close attention to understand what they were talking about. My brothers, eleven and thirteen years old, were the youngest, and I, at seventeen, was the third youngest.

The boarders didnt always gather downstairs. Frulein Rahm, a young, slender fashion model, very blond, the stylish beauty of the Pension, had only a few meals. She ate very little because she had to watch her figure; but people talked about her all the more. There was no man who didnt ogle her, no man who didnt lust after her. Everyone knew that, besides her steady beau, a haberdasher who didnt live in the boardinghouse, she had other gentleman callers; and thus many of the men thought of her and viewed her with the kind of delight one feels at something that one is entitled to and that one might someday acquire. The women ran her down behind her back. The men, among themselves or risking it in front of their wives, put in a good word for her, especially for her elegant figure. She was so tall and slender that your eyes could climb up and down her without gaining a foothold anywhere.

At the head of the dining table sat Frau Kupfer, a brown-haired woman, haggard with worry, a war widow, who operated the boardinghouse in order to make ends meet for herself and her son. She was very orderly, precise, and always aware of the difficulties of this period, which could be expressed in numbers; her most frequent phrase was: I cant afford it. Her son Oskar, a thickset boy with bushy eyebrows and a low forehead, sat at her right. At her left sat Herr Rebhuhn, an elderly gentleman, asthmatic, a bank official. Although exceedingly friendly, he would scowl and get nasty whenever the conversation turned to the outcome of the war. He was Jewish, but very much a German nationalist; and if anyone disagreed with him at such times, he would quickly start carrying on about the knife in the back, contrary to his usual easygoing ways. He grew so agitated that hed get an asthma attack and have to be taken out by his sister, Frulein Rebhuhn, who lived with him in the boardinghouse. Since the others knew about this peculiarity of his and also about how terribly he suffered from asthma, they generally avoided this touchy political subject, so that he seldom had a fit.

Only Herr Schuttwhose war injury was in no way less critical than Herr Rebhuhns asthma and who walked on crutches, suffered awful pains, and looked very pale (he had to take morphine for his pains)never minced his words. He hated the war and regretted that it hadnt ended before he got his serious wound; he stressed that he had foreseen it and had always regarded the Kaiser as a menace to society, he professed to being a follower of the Independent Party, and, he said, had he been a member of Parliament, he would have unhesitatingly voted against the military loans. It was really quite awkward that the two of them, Herr Rebhuhn and Herr Schutt, sat so near one another, separated only by Herr Rebhuhns oldish sister. Whenever danger threatened, she would turn left to her neighbor, purse her sweetish old-maid lips, put her forefinger on them, and send Herr Schutt a long, pleading look, while cautiously pointing the forefinger of her right hand at an angle toward her brother. Herr Schutt, otherwise so bitter, understood and nearly always broke off, usually in midsentence; besides, he spoke so low that you had to listen very hard to catch anything. Thus, the situation was saved by Frulein Rebhuhn, who always heeded Herr Schutts words very alertly. Herr Rebhuhn hadnt yet noticed anything; he himself never began. He was the gentlest and most peaceful of men: it was only if someone brought up the outcome of the war and approved of the ensuing rebellions that the knife came over him like lightning and he blindly threw himself into battle.

However, it would be all wrong to think that this was what meals were generally like here. This military conflict was the only one I can recall; and I might have forgotten it if it hadnt grown so bad that, a year later, both opponents had to be led from the table, Herr Rebhuhn as always on his sisters arm, Herr Schutt far more arduously on his crutches, with the help of Frulein Kndig, a teacher, who had been living in the Pension for a long time. She had become his lady friend, and actually married him later on, so as to provide a home for him and take better care of him.