You must ask him sometime to play something for you. And he is proud. Who knows if he really will?’ It was as though I should be thanking Manes the coachman that I had been vouchsafed the chance of obtaining a place for his son in the Konservatorium. ‘I have nothing further to attend to in Vienna,’ he continued, ‘so tomorrow I shall go home.’

‘You still have to call on Count Chojnicki, to thank him,’ I said.

‘A fine Count,’ said Manes, appreciatively. ‘I shall say goodbye to him. Has he heard my Ephraim play yet?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but you should ask him to.’

Manes Reisiger’s train left about eleven at night. Towards eight he came to my house and asked me—ordered me, almost, that is—to escort him to Count Chojnicki’s hotel.

Well and good; I took him there. Chojnicki was grateful; enchanted, almost.Yes, he was genuinely touched. ‘How splendid’, he said, ‘that he should come and thank me. I told you at once. This is how our Jews are!’

In the end it was he who thanked Manes the fiaker for the opportunity of preserving a genius for the world. It sounded as if Chojnicki had been waiting ten or twenty years for nothing else but Manes Reisiger’s son, as if at last a long-cherished and lovingly cultivated wish had been fulfilled. Out of pure gratitude he even offered Manes Reisiger money for his return fare. Manes the fiaker declined it, but invited us both to stay with him. He had a house with three rooms and a kitchen, he said, with a stable for his horse and a garden where his cart and his sleigh stood. He was no poor coachman, far from it. He earned as much as fifty crowns a month, and if we came to visit him we should have a wonderful time. He would make quite certain that we lacked nothing.

He remembered, too, to remind Chojnicki and me that it was our duty to look after his son Ephraim. ‘A genius like that has to be cosseted!’ he said as he left us. Chojnicki promised to do so; also that we would without fail come to Zlotogrod the following summer.

[VII]

AT THIS STAGE I have to mention an important matter which, when I began to write this book, I had hoped to be able to avoid. It concerns religion, no less.

I, like my friends, all my friends, was not a believer. I never went to Mass. I did, however, make a habit of escorting my mother to the church door. She, too, may not have been a believer, but she was a practising Catholic, as the saying goes. At that time I really detested the Church. Today, being a believer, I no longer really know why I did. It was, so to speak, the fashion.

I would have been ashamed to admit to my friends that I had been to church. They bore no real enmity towards religion; indeed, it was almost a matter of pride with them to recognise the tradition in which they had been raised. They certainly had no wish to abandon the essence of this tradition, but they rebelled, we rebelled—for I belonged among them—against the forms of this tradition, because we did not know that true form is identical with this essence, and that it was childish to separate one from the other. It was childish, as I say: but in those days we were indeed childish.