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41
ican club women immediately think of whenever "White Russians"
are mentioned. Life in those settlements was so full and intense that
these Russian
"intelligenty"
(a word that has more socially idealistic
and less highbrow connotations than "intellectuals" as used here) had
neither time nor reason to seek ties beyond their own circle. Today,
in a new and beloved world, where I have learned to feel at home
as easily as I have ceased barring my sevens, extroverts and cosmo–
politans to whom I happen to mention these past matters think I am
jesting, or accuse me of snobbery in reverse, when I maintain that
in the course of almost one-fifth of a century spent in western
Europe I have not had, among the sprinkling of Germans and
Frenchmen I knew (mostly landladies and literary people ), more than
two good friends all told.
Somehow, during my secluded years in Germany, I never came
across those gentle musicians of yore who, in Turgenev's novels, played
their rhapsodies far into the summer night; or that type of pottering,
old-fashioned butterfly-collector who was wont to pin his captures in
the straw of his hat; or simply the so-called wholesome and kindly
folks that during the last war homesick soldiers from the Middle West
seem to have so much preferred to the cagey French farmer and to
brisk Madelon
II.
On the contrary, the most vivid figure I find
when sorting out in memory the meager stack of my non-Russian
and non-Jewish acquaintances in the years between the two wars is
the image of a young German university student, well-bred, quiet,
bespectacled, whose hobby was capital punishment. At our second
meeting he showed me a collection of photographs among which was
a purchased series ((
Ein bischen retouchiert,"
he said, wrinkling his
freckled nose ) that depicted the successive stages of a routine execu–
tion in China; he commented, very expertly, on the splendor of the
lethal sword and on the spirit of perfect co-operation between
headsman and victim, which culminated in a veritable geyser of mist–
gray blood spouting from the very clearly photographed neck of the
decapitated party. Being pretty well off, this young collector could
afford to travel, and travel he did, in between the humanities he
smdied for his Ph.D. He complained, however, of continuous
ill
luck
and added that if he did not see something really good soon, he might
not stand the strain. He had attended a few passable hangings in
the Balkans and a well-advertised, although rather bleak and me-
