The Elixir of Immortality Page 2

  Then the voice added, “The girls are busy reading Captain Nemo’s adventures. But they send their greetings to their father. I am Shoshana Spinoza. If the young ladies’ papa wishes to know more about their existence on the other side, I will be happy to answer his questions at our next meeting.”

  My great-uncle’s jaw dropped and he sat there gaping. This was extraordinary. More than just extraordinary. This could not possibly be a deception. He saw that his distrust of spiritualism had been unjustified, for no one in that room knew the girls’ names or the fact that his last birthday present to them had been Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The evidence was clear and unmistakable. This was really a contact with the other side.

  After the séance with Ad Astra, Fernando went home. The clock struck midnight just as he stepped into his small apartment. He sat on his unmade bed and couldn’t stop thinking of Shoshana Spinoza and her report from the spirit world. After a while he leaned over to take off his shoes and noticed a newspaper lying under the bed. He picked it up and a sudden chill went through him. This was incredible. The article on the page before him was describing the American atomic submarine Nautilus and its maiden voyage beneath the North Pole. It was written by a journalist named Hannah Sós-Szipoa. It was immediately evident to my great-uncle that Hannah Sós-Szipoa was an anagram of Shoshana Spinoza. He felt the newspaper slip from his hands and then heard someone breathing heavily behind him. For a moment he was startled. His whole body began to tremble and he didn’t dare turn around—not because he feared evil consequences or harm inflicted from someone standing behind him but because he was seized by the fear that he was going mad. Then, just as quickly, he realized that this was not madness but rather the awareness that a new world had opened itself, a world beyond this one, a world that his reason had long resisted, a world where he would become a different person. That didn’t mean a new being was about to come creeping out from within him like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, but rather in order to understand the workings of that new world he would have to see his life and existence in a new light.

  That was how mysticism came into Fernando’s life. He was so influenced by that evening’s experiences that he, the born skeptic who was familiar with the Iliad of dialectical materialism, surrendered to a belief in the immortality of the soul and the inexplicable ability of human beings to communicate after death. And everywhere he went—not just at home with us but out in the park where people were playing chess, on buses and trains, in Dr. Kisházy’s waiting room, everywhere—my great-uncle found willing victims upon whom to inflict his passionate and eloquent descriptions of life on the other side of the grave.

  SHOSHANA RELATED much more to him about our extended family, about our ancestors, and even about my great-uncle’s daughters. She also revealed to Fernando astonishing things about the origins of the universe and the gods present at the beginning of it all. She spoke of the times when the earth was still an empty wasteland and described in great detail all six of the worlds that had perished before the making of the seventh—our own, the last, perfect creation. She also explained to him the number seven, the holiest and most secret of all numbers, as well as its mystic influence upon this seventh creation. In our own universe, she told him, everything is ordered according to the principle of seven: days of the week, colors, celestial spheres, angels, and affections of the heart.

  Our great-uncle’s accounts of Shoshana’s revelations were not always consistent and in fact were often contradictory. Once, after Grandmother had cornered him on that score, he told us that those inconsistencies arose because he was not permitted to reveal everything he knew. He had taken a sort of vow of silence in the company of spiritualists. That mattered little to us. All of the stories about our distant relative Shoshana Spinoza enchanted us, no matter how enigmatic they were at times.

  MY VERY FIRST mystical experience was linked to Shoshana Spinoza. One Wednesday evening when I was six years old, just seven days before Christmas—or perhaps I was seven and there were six days left before we got our Christmas presents, I’m not sure which—in any case, one Wednesday evening during the séance Shoshana Spinoza explained to my great-uncle the mystery of eternal return. He could hardly contain his excitement. The very next afternoon he revealed the mystery to us. He was enormously pleased to describe it. Everyone but Grandmother was captivated by his account. Her attention was perfunctory at best. I was just as fascinated as the others, even though I was too small to understand very much of it, particularly since my German wasn’t very good. My great-uncle often would break into German in his more emotional moments. But I didn’t ask any questions. I just smiled and pretended to be as excited as everyone else.

  We would hear his account of that great mystery many more times. My great-uncle loved to describe it, always with as much enthusiasm as if he were talking about it for the very first time.

  And what, exactly, is the eternal mystery of return?

  “Nietzsche was wrong,” Fernando explained to us, “because he thought that one day everything would repeat itself just as we lived through it before, and the cycle would continue perpetually. This would mean that Hitler and Stalin would return to the scene again and again, and for all eternity they would be murdering the innocent. But Shoshana puts the mystery of eternal return in a completely different light. She says that in a fully realized universe, a human being will always have the possibility of a new life, a life he can shape not according to the events of his former life but as it should have played out. That’s why individuals return to this earth, time after time, and they always have the possibility of a full new life, one time in a given physical body and the next time in another. In other words, everyone lives many different human lives.”

  Did I believe that?

  Of course I did. I certainly didn’t have the faintest idea who “Nietzsche” was or what he had claimed. But every word from my great-uncle’s lips was pure truth for me. It never occurred to me to challenge even the slightest detail of what he told us. After all, he was the male role model who provided me with the most valuable lessons and insights of my early childhood.

  And besides, who can prove that Nietzsche was correct and that the mystery of eternal return isn’t the same as the principle of reincarnation?

  AFTER REVEALING THE MYSTERY of eternal return, my great-uncle turned to me and placed his hand on my forehead. His voice was warm with excitement as he told me Shoshana Spinoza had mentioned that in an earlier life I had been our ancestor Baruch. My brother, Sasha, listened intently. I saw at once that he was jealous. Sasha was always envious of me when we were little. Even though we were twins, as alike as peas in a pod, we were completely different. Because of our differences we were torments to each other from the first, and later on we were real dangers to each other.

  Fernando might simply have been making it up. But the conviction of his expression and the approving tone of his voice gave me a delightfully agreeable feeling. My knees began to tremble and my spirit was flooded with the mystery of it. I suddenly felt weightless and it was as if Baruch was present in my tissues, in my blood, and in my heart.

  IN A DREAM later that night I was our ancestor Baruch, lifting King Afonso Henrique’s heavy sword high over the battlefield of Galicia. I terrified the enemy soldiers; they knelt trembling before me, begging for mercy. Proud Portuguese knights stood in awe of my strength, and I relished the sweet taste of triumphant victory. A wave of warmth flooded over me.

  I opened my eyes and realized I had wet the bed. My heart began to pound and I was ashamed and aghast. Sasha woke up right away. He turned on the light and saw that the bed was wet. He got furiously angry and called me “piss-Baruch,” a son of a bitch, a filthy pig, and an asshole. Then he spat right in my face. As the gob of white slime went gliding down my left cheek, Sasha threatened to beat me for getting his part of the bed wet. He said he would tell everyone he knew that I had pissed all over myself. All of my friends would be disgusted and no one
would ever want to play with me again. I was completely humiliated.

  That moment remains forever engraved in my memory. Sasha’s tongue-lashing still resounds in my ears. I can hear every word and see the scorn and mockery in his face. My brother never knew how much power his words had over me. For years afterward I was tormented by the terrifying thought that Sasha would talk about it, hurting me, condemning me, and scorning me so I would lose all my friends and wind up an outcast, doomed for all time to a life of isolation.

  Even now, just putting it down on paper, I still shudder at that prospect.

  MY PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER was always harassing my grandfather with her questions. Most of the time she wanted to know whether he was listening and paying attention to what she was telling him. Grandfather disliked Grandmother. He had disliked her throughout their forty-five years of joyless marriage. As far as he was concerned, they were two prisoners sentenced to be chained together in purgatory as long as they lived. He brooded from time to time over the brief, irrepressible intoxication of passionate love. What might have happened if only he hadn’t met that beautiful young woman in the red polka-dot dress on a cruise up the Danube on a warm summer Sunday in 1918? He was sure that things would have been far better for him. He would have been spared from so many miserable quarrels, so many sorrowful looks, and so many insults. But now it was too late. That’s why he always replied, sullen as a scullery maid, that he wasn’t the least interested in anything she had to say. Grandmother, for her part, wouldn’t take that for an answer. Since she came from tough old stock, folks whom it was useless to contradict, she always doggedly repeated her question. Her gabbling got on his nerves. Grandmother was a daily source of annoyance and irritation to Grandfather.

  WHERE WERE YOU when Kennedy was assassinated? Almost everyone who was at least ten years old in November 1963 can tell you today what he was doing when he heard the news about the death of the American president.

  I was in the bedroom, sitting on a chair next to my grandfather. He was bedridden because he was having chest pains. We were listening to the radio. The Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Willi Boskovsky was playing Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. The program was suddenly interrupted by the dramatic news from Dallas.

  I attached no importance to the assassination of the American president. But Grandfather had a surprised and obviously frightened look in his eyes. He clasped his chest.

  “Is something wrong, Grandfather?” I said. “What hurts?”

  “Life,” he replied without hesitation. “Life hurts.”

  A COUPLE OF MONTHS later I discussed that moment with my great-uncle. He dismissed the notion that Grandfather had been affected by Kennedy’s death. After all, they didn’t know each other.

  Instead he gave me an inspired, knowledgeable, and fascinating lecture on how a reading of the life lines on a person’s hand can reveal his fate as well as that of his family, since everything is written plainly on the palm of the hand. There was a whole science to it, he asserted; its significance and the prospects of predicting the future were getting greater with every passing day.

  He concluded, therefore, that at the very moment that Grandfather heard the news on the radio about Kennedy’s assassination, he had glimpsed in his palm the very day and hour of his own death.

  “But it wasn’t his own approaching death, or the prospect of it, that depressed him so much,” Fernando explained. “Instead, he was affected by the horrible notion that life is meaningless if the death of the fragile physical body also means the obliteration of the past, the present, and the future, consciousness and intuition, in sum, everything that constitutes the most intimate essence of a man’s being.”

  GRANDFATHER WAS NOT SATISFIED with his life, but he wasn’t in the habit of complaining about it. Of course, his views about life were anything but optimistic. Behind his words sometimes one could glimpse a view of the world as pitch-black and fear-ridden as the perspectives of Kafka and Beckett.

  “The most beautiful utopias,” he would say, summing up the experience of a lifetime, “should be left on the drawing boards. Any attempt to construct them in the real world, unfortunately, tends to transform itself quickly into the immediate opposite.”

  But Grandfather found it unbecoming to pity himself. “Any idiot at all is capable of feeling that his life has been a disaster,” he would often say.

  The only time I ever heard him complain about his own circumstances was after hearing that on that chilly November day Kennedy’s brains had wound up all over Jackie’s dress. The radio went back to its broadcast of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. Grandfather climbed out of bed, adjusted his truss, went to the wardrobe, and took out a battered suitcase full of handwritten notes and old documents. He said in an offhand manner that he hoped I would read them someday. I interpreted that to mean sometime after his death. Affecting an indifferent tone to conceal his unhappiness, Grandfather added that he regretted many of the choices he had made in life, but his only real disappointment was that he had not inherited his own grandfather’s enormous nose.

  IN OUR FAMILY the potential of inheriting an unusually large nose is written in our genes. This inherited trait has usually revealed itself in one person of every generation. Although the nose is frankly grotesque, the child born with it is considered to be destiny’s favored child. These children have always been unusually fortunate and successful in whatever they undertook. The nose brought luck to those who possessed it. Curiously enough, however, they have all died in tragic circumstances.

  A WEEK AFTER Grandfather died, the whole family assembled in our house for the reading of his will. It was the first time in many years that they had seen one another. My father and his sister, Aunt Ilona, had long been feuding, and she had put a huge distance between herself and the rest of the family. His brother, Uncle Carlo, had fled Hungary during the people’s uprising of 1956—when for a couple of days armed gangs had ruled the streets, hunting down communists, and violence and blood-letting were everyday events within the walls of Budapest—because he was afraid that someone in the crowd would recognize him and a vengeful mob would lynch him because he had been with the State Protection Authority, the AVH. In fact, more than that—he had been a senior official of the secret police and had tortured and executed with his bare hands people whom the Rákosi regime had labeled as fascists and war criminals.

  ———

  THE MOOD was expectant. It was more like a christening than a memorial service for a beloved family member. My mother served coffee and pastries from Gerbeaud’s.

  Everyone was pleased at the treat of being able to consume those delicate, expensive baked goods during a time of shortages.

  That day the pastry chef must have outdone himself, for Uncle Carlo, who lived in Vienna and could enjoy the real thing at Sacher’s, declared with the certainty of a self-proclaimed connoisseur that he was convinced that Gerbeaud produced the best Sacher tort in the world. And he added that he took consolation in the fact that the communists, who had effectively laid waste to the country, had not succeeded in ruining the renowned Hungarian tradition of superb pastry making. Everyone laughed, except for Grandmother, who had never appreciated her youngest son’s sense of humor. We children joined in, even though we had never known anything else. We rarely had sweets in our home. That was only the second time in my life that I had been fortunate enough to taste the divine goodness of Gerbeaud’s pastries, for they were prohibitively expensive.

  The lighthearted atmosphere turned suddenly tense when the time came to attend to Grandfather’s last wishes. Everyone stared at my father, who in his newly assumed role as patriarch of the clan slowly opened the envelope containing the will. Aunt Ilona and Uncle Carlo occasionally turned to glance furtively at Grandmother where she was sitting at the back of the assembly. She seemed ill at ease. She responded with a disdainful sniff to everything and openly showed her dissatisfaction with the gathering. The circumstances had probably disconcerted her, above all the fact
Grandfather had never let her know that he had left a will in my father’s safekeeping.

  It was all there, written out on a yellowing sheet of paper: who would inherit what from Grandfather’s meager possessions, along with his desires concerning his burial. The will consisted of six lines and a short postscript in which he asked our forgiveness for having left so little.

  His clothes and shoes were to be burned. His wrist-watch, the only item of value in his possession, went to my brother, Sasha. He left to me the worn little suitcase stuffed with all sorts of papers. He wrote that he had often wanted to give his wedding band back to Grandmother and now she could finally have it. Last but not least, he stressed his wish not to end up in the Jewish cemetery. He no longer wanted to be a Jew once he was dead.