Some win my affection at a glance. A true fellow-countryman is sent to one as a sign of grace from heaven. If he should also be born on my native soil: à la bonheur. But that is accident, the other is Fate.’ He raised his glass and cried ‘Long live my countrymen, my countrymen from every country on earth!’

Two days later I brought the fiaker, Manes Reisiger, to him, to Hotel Kremser. Manes sat perched on the edge of his seat, motionless, a dark colossus. It looked as if someone else had accidentally perched him there, and that he himself was in no mood to occupy the whole seat. Apart from two phrases which he constantly repeated—‘If you please, gentlemen’ and ‘Many thanks, gentlemen’—he said nothing and seemed to take in very little. It was Chojnicki who described to Manes Reisiger of Zlotogrod what Zlotogrod looked like; because Chojnicki knew every place in Galicia.

‘Well, then. Tomorrow at eleven we will go and deal with this matter,’ he said.

‘Many thanks, gentlemen,’ said Manes. In one hand he waved his cloth hat, with the other he fanned his little cap. He bowed once again at the door and smiled gratefully and happily at the porter who held it open.

As it turned out, young Ephraim Reisiger did join the Konservatorium a couple of weeks later. The young fellow called on Chojnicki to thank him. I, too, was in Chojnicki’s hotel.Young Ephraim Reisiger looked almost sinister, and as he expressed his thanks he gave the impression of a gangster wishing to make a complaint. He spoke Polish and I, on account of my Slovenian, could only make out one word in three. But I gathered from Chojnicki’s glances and his general demeanour that the reproachful and even arrogant conduct of his young visitor appealed to him.

‘That is something!’ he said after the boy had gone. ‘In our part of the world people don’t even say thank you; the opposite, rather. These Galician Jews, my Galician Jews, are proud folk! They live under the impression that all advantages must by right belong to them. They accept favour and privilege with the same splendid indifference as stoning and persecution. Everyone else becomes furious under persecution and servile when someone does them a good turn. Only my Polish Jews are unmoved by privilege or persecution. In their own way they are aristocrats, because the mark of an aristocrat is, above all, his indifference; and nowhere have I seen more indifference than among my Polish Jews!’

He said ‘my Polish Jews’ in the same tone of voice as he had so often said to me: my estates, my Van Goghs, my collection of musical instruments. I received the clear impression that part of his love for the Jews came from the conviction that they were a part of his possessions. It was as if they had not come into this world in Galicia by the will of God, but because he had personally ordered them from the Almighty, just as he ordered Persian carpets from Pollitzer, the well-known dealer, parrots from the Italian bird-dealer Scapini, and all his rare musical instruments from the violin-maker Grossauer. And with the same careful tact with which he handled carpets, birds and musical instruments, he approached his Jew; so much so that he felt it was his natural duty to write to the worthy fiaker Manes, father of this rather arrogant boy, to congratulate him on Ephraim’s acceptance into the Konservatorium. For Chojnicki feared that Manes might write him a letter of thanks.

The fiaker Manes Reisiger, however, was far from thinking of writing a letter of thanks and quite incapable of grasping the fortunate stroke of Fate which had brought him and his son into touch with Count Chojnicki and myself. He was much more inclined to feel that his son Ephraim’s talent was so overwhelmingly great that a Konservatorium in Vienna must be enchanted to house such a son as his. He called on me two days later, and began like this: ‘If anyone has talent in this world, he will become something. I have always said this to my son Ephraim. And so it has come about. He is my only son. He plays the violin magnificently.