Yente, who is everywhere, now takes a look at Samuel, son of Gitla and Asher, or Gertruda and Rudolf Ascherbach, who have an optician’s shop on Alte Schmiedegasse in Vienna. This thin, pimply young man, a law student, stands with his friends and watches the rich open carriage passing by. In the carriage sits a man in a high hat, and next to him a young, beautiful woman. The woman has an olive-hued complexion and enormous dark eyes. Her entire outfit is light celadon, and even the feathers in her hat are that same color—it looks as though she’s casting a glimmering, underwater light. She is petite but perfectly built, narrow-waisted and curvy. Her ample décolletage is covered by a snow-white lace handkerchief. The carriage stops, and servants help the pair get out.
The boys watch, curious, and from the excited whispers of passersby, Samuel learns that this is some sort of Polish prophet with his daughter. They disappear into an expensive candy store. That’s it. The boys move on to their own affairs.
Samuel can sometimes be a bit vulgar, though at this age, such things are forgivable.
“I’d run her up the flagpole, that pretty little Polish thing,” he says.
His companions guffaw.
“Not a meal for a heel, Ascherbach. She’s an important lady.”
“It’s only the important ones I’d run up the flagpole.”
In fact, that celadon beauty has made an enormous impression on Samuel. In the evening, he thinks of her when he masturbates. Her full, firm breasts pop out of her dress, and among the foamy petticoats, Samuel finds that hot, wet point that swallows him up and floods him with pleasure.
28.
Asher in a Viennese café, or: Was ist Aufkl?rung? 1784
Tea from China, coffee from Turkey, chocolate from America: they have everything here. The little tables are packed together, with shapely bentwood chairs that stand on one leg. Asher and Gitla Gertruda like to come here, and with their coffee they order a piece of cake that they eat with a teaspoon, slowly, relishing every bite. The chocolate unleashes such sensory pleasure that the street outside becomes blurry; the coffee, meanwhile, restores the sharpness of their sight. They wind down this war of the elements waged within the human mouth in silence, watching the colorful crowd rolling along under Saint Stephen’s Cathedral.
On the shelf by the entrance there are newspapers, a recent fashion people say has been imported from Germany and England. You take a newspaper and sit down at your little table—if possible, close to the window, where it’s brighter, since otherwise you have to read by candlelight, which tires the eyes. Numerous paintings line the walls, but it is difficult to make them out in the semidarkness, even by day. Oftentimes the customers go up to them with candlesticks and admire the landscapes and portraits in that fragile, flickering glow.
Add to that the pleasure of reading. At first, he’d read the paper from cover to cover, hungry for the printed word. Now he knows where he will find something that interests him. He regrets that his knowledge of French is so poor, he has to remedy that, because they also import French journals here. He is getting up in years, nearly sixty, but his mind is agile and energetic.
“Either the real or the intelligible universe has infinite points of view from which it can be represented, and the possible systems of human knowledge are as numerous as those points of view,” he reads in German translation. They are the words of a man called Diderot. With rapt delight, Asher has recently looked over his Encyclopédie.
Asher Rubin has done well in life. When, after leaving Lwów, they found themselves here, in Vienna, Asher had his last name, Ascherbach, entered into the official register. He took the names Rudolf and Joseph, the latter no doubt after the young emperor, whose scientific impetus impresses him so much and whom he admires more generally; Gitla, meanwhile, became Gertruda Anna. The Ascherbach family now resides in a respectable tenement house on Alte Schmiedegasse. As an optician, Ascherbach treated local Jews at first, but his clientele grew quickly. He treats cataracts and prepares glasses. They also have a small optical store, which is run by Gitla-Gertruda. The girls are taught at home, they have a tutor, while Samuel is studying law. Asher, meanwhile, collects books, which is his most fervent passion; he hopes that someday Samuel will take over his library.
Asher-Ascherbach’s first purchase was the sixty-eight volumes of the Universal Lexicon by Johann Heinrich Zedler, on which he spent the very first money he earned. He quickly earned it over again. The patients appear one after the next—everyone recommends him.
At first Gitla grumbled over this purchase, but one day when Asher came home from the hospital, he saw her leaning over one of the volumes and closely examining an article. Lately, she had been interested in the shapes of shells. Gertruda wears glasses she ground herself. The lens is complex and allows her to look through the very same glasses at things that are far away and also at whatever she is reading.
Along with their large apartment, they have rented a workshop in the outbuilding. Rudolf Ascherbach employed an old man, almost blind now, to grind the glass and make the lenses according to Ascherbach’s specifications. Gertruda would sit in the workshop and watch the old man craft those lenses with such precision. She didn’t even notice when she started to do it herself. She sat at the table, pulling her dress up over her knees so that it would be comfortable for her to press against the pedal that drove the grinding mechanism. And now it is she who makes the glasses.
They often argue, and just as often reconcile. Once she threw a cabbage at him. Now she rarely goes into the kitchen—they have a cook and a girl who lights the stoves and cleans. A laundress comes once a week, and a seamstress once a month.