Father was tired of always having a chief over him, so he switched to the consular service and was sent to Algiers. Thus it came about that we did not go to Italy or the Riviera that winter, but visited my parents in Algeria.
This was the first piece of the Orient that I got to see. It really began in Marseilles. We stayed there in an enormous hotel, which grandmother dubbed a caravansary. What a magnificent word that was! It made me think of long caravans winding across the golden desert, of endless lines of camels trudging heavily along, and of a tiny donkey going ahead as their leader.
This image of the donkey had been impressed on me by an anecdote, familiar in diplomatic circles, about a young man from the high aristocracy who was sent as attaché to a legation where the ambassador was socially his inferior and, in addition, had the reputation of being unusually stupid.
At a dinner one evening the ambassador insisted on giving the young man precedence, but the impudent little attaché waived the honour with the remark: “Excellency, your place is without question at the head of the caravan.” As the little episode took place in the Orient, even the ambassador understood the allusion.
All cities have a characteristic smell: Dresden smells of high, layered Baum-cakes, Munich of beer, Vienna of leather and bad tea, Lisbon of fish and pepper trees, Berlin of benzine and casually washed people, Frankfurt of bourgeois pride and democracy, but in Marseilles the smells of the West mingle with those of the East. Here one already gets that unique odour of the Orient – a mixture of attar of roses, morocco leather, camel dung and sun-baked filth. An exciting smell that sets the nerves a-tingle and presages all kinds of strange adventures.
The harbour already held out this promise; it was an adventure in itself with its multitude of large and small ships, strange figures of Arabs in white burnouses, Algerian soldiers, and sailors from all corners of the globe.
I had at that time been made a present of my first camera and took the most remarkable pictures (because I always forgot to insert a new film) – of houses upside down, ships running into each other, humans and animals monstrously melded together. In my head too everything was as on the pictures. For the first time I was unable to absorb the many new impressions crowding in on me; they took me by storm, pulled me hither and thither, so that pleasure was mixed with dizziness and exhaustion.
The first impression of Algiers is of blinding whiteness crowned by the glittering gold of the great church on a high hill: Notre Dame d’Afrique. I was enraptured. The overpowering spell of the Orient had seized hold of me. It has never let me go. The North, for me, remains to this day an ersatz of life, sad and colourless, with its ersatz sky, its ersatz sun, and its ersatz flowers.
My enthusiasm cooled somewhat when my parents told me that on the next day I would start attending the Sacré Coeur. I had secretly been hoping for a holiday. However, father softened the blow for me by presenting me with a little donkey, Bichette, on which I made the daily trip to the convent.
Ali, the Arab groom, trotted alongside me on foot.
The convent was situated in a big, old garden, quite shut off from the world. Here, in the midst of the sun-drenched Orient, the old traditions of the Sacré Coeur were maintained. The cool austerity of the convent filled the high-ceilinged rooms, and even on the hottest days, the nuns in their heavy black garments and veils never seemed to be warm.
It was a little difficult for me at first, being suddenly obliged to study all my subjects in French, though I soon got used to that. I loved the evenings most of all. My parents were of the opinion that parents should see as little of their children as possible; besides, they had a very active social life and had no time for me. So after I ate my solitary dinner, I was sent to father’s study and left to myself. Here, however, there were quantities of books, and I plunged in and indiscriminately read everything that fell into my hands. I recall especially an almost endless four-volume novel about the Thirty Years’ War; I read it sitting in an easychair by the window, before which stood a great orange tree. The oranges were just ripe then, and the air was heavy with their perfume; long afterwards whenever I read something about the Thirty Years’ War the scent of oranges would return to me.
Sometimes father came in and said: “Reading something? That’s right.”
And he would remove yellow-backed paper-bound French novels. Often he would say: “Read something worth while,” and would hand me works
by Kürenberger,* who was one of his favourite authors, or by Lamartine and Chateaubriand, on account of their good French style. I devoured with equal avidity Le Génie du Christianisme, Le Dernier des Abencérages, René, Atala, Voyages en Orient, the novels of Walter Scott – and the Thousand and
One Nights tales.
Sundays I spent with Sybil, an English friend. She was fifteen, a year older than myself, and it was she who introduced me to the sentimental side of life, of which, until then, I knew absolutely nothing. When I had come to know her better, she suddenly said, out of the blue:
“I’d like to talk to you about something. But I don’t know whether you might not find it shocking. Can’t you guess what it is? It begins with L.”
As I couldn’t guess, Sybil explained, blushing all over: “Love.”
Sybil’s big sister was engaged to be married, and Sybil herself had nothing in her head but love, love , and more love – sweet, pure, gentle love, such as one encounters in the old triple-decker English novels. She wanted to “play at love,” and I was to take the part of the man. At that time I was very much occupied with social issues, and I countered Sybil’s theme of “love” with my theme of “socialism.” But she would have none of it. Socialism bored her to tears. Finally we compromised. I was ready to pay court to her if I could be a socialist agitator, trying to convert a wealthy maiden to socialism. In this way I got my money’s worth out of the deal, for I was able to insert a long speech about socialism between two declarations of love, which I kept as short as possible.
Many years later – I was already married – I received a letter from Sybil, whom I had long since lost sight of and who had chanced upon my address.
At the very beginning of the letter she said: “I too am a socialist now.” I wonder if, back in that garden sloping steeply down to the blue sea, I did succeed in converting her after all?
Homecoming
In the spring grandmother and I went back to G. Perhaps that journey home after all the travelling was the most beautiful part of it all. As the train passed between two steep banks on which anemones peeked out like white stars through the dead leaves of autumn and liverwort gleamed blue, my heart began to thump with joy and impatience. Then followed the ride
from the station past the odd, green-covered hillocks, shrouded in mystery because, it was said, they were mass graves from the Peasant War, over the well-known streets of the little town, past familiar faces, the bath-house, and the riding school, up the steep hill, and through the big garden gate.
And there stood the beloved house; the garden was smiling in the spring;
and I was once more alone with grandmother. Life was beautiful.