Divorcing

be shot in the previous year, 1920. The list comprised former members of the Galilei Club who, being liberal but not Marxist, were the first to be eliminated if order was to be established. This list had been submitted to a high communist official who had frequented the Galilei Club in his student days, and had lain in his desk drawer awaiting his signature. The high official, as it turned out, did not get around to signing this piece of paper. Nobody was pressing for the signature and executions were being conducted in such mass and haste that a half a dozen missing corpses easily went unnoticed. The list that included Rudolf’s name remained in the high official’s drawer; perhaps he was simply putting it off for tomorrow or the next day, or telling himself that he was only putting it off; he had enjoyed some pleasant evenings at the Galilei Club with Rudolf Landsmann; they had played soccer together, in fact they had been friends; still, he was a high official in the new communist regime. The story told to Rudolf years later in Vienna by the former high official was that he couldn’t do it; the day he received the slip he folded it with no intention of ever signing it, and laid it in his desk drawer. There it remained even after the regime fell and he fled to Vienna; there the police of the new government found it in 1921. It was fortunate for Rudolf Landsmann that he had been on the blacklist of the communist party in 1920. As a former member of the Galilei Club, he was politically undesirable; but the fact that the communists had wanted to get rid of him made the authorities reconsider. And besides, there was a shortage of doctors. At the time he was called in for questioning, Rudolf Landsmann worked at two hospitals during the day besides six hours every night in the clinic. How did he do it? He had to. It was the time of the Great Depression. The brewer went bankrupt and moved to a sorry little flat which he and his wife now shared with his daughter Kamilla and her husband who paid the rent. Rudolf was lucky to have three jobs.

In the depression of 1922 he lost two of his jobs. His father was ill, his mother complained, his father-in-law went insane, Hermann, the one brother he loved, emigrated to Canada, his marriage wasn’t working out. One morning in 1922 he went to the American consulate and signed up for a visa. And having nothing else to do till noon, he went to seven other consulates and applied for visas to Egypt, Australia, Palestine, Canada, Argentina, Honduras, and Tanganyika.

When, four weeks later, he received a letter from the U.S. consulate informing him that he had been granted an immigration visa, valid for two months from the day of issue, everything was up in the air. He had a half dozen private patients, he was being considered for a part-time post at the city insane asylum, he was completing a book which he believed would win him recognition, and his wife seemed more reasonable after a fortnight’s stay with her sister. Furthermore, she informed him that she was pregnant. It was not the moment to pick up and go—and under the circumstances, with everything up in the air, two months was simply not enough time to make such an important decision. The day he applied for a visa to America he thought of leaving everything behind. He intended to go alone. He didn’t imagine going with a wife, let alone a pregnant wife. He put the letter from the consulate in a drawer and continued working on his book, which as he anticipated won him immediate recognition. Soon he moved to an apartment where he could have his own office and in another two years he had a ten-room apartment in one of the finest parts of Pest a few streets from the Parliament.

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To the Landsmann family, Rudolf’s marriage to one of the “Ripper girls” (and the lesser, at that), a girl who was a divorcée at the time of the marriage, who they suspected was schmatte; this was a great disappointment. The years following the end of the war brought many disappointments to the family; and worse than disappointment, shame and grief brought on by a son who stole money and ran away, another who turned into a good-for-nothing (a football player), a third who killed himself. The shame and grief over these and other sons and daughters known to live unhappy, insufficient lives was acknowledged in silence. There was no helping the death of a son, or the unhappiness of a daughter married to an orthodox rabbi with two children. Rudolf’s marriage, however, they could not accept. This misfortune was unnecessary. He was not happy; his wife made difficulties for him and she did not give him a child.

Kamilla, taking all rumors into account, seems to have divided her time between consulting the best practitioners of the new science to cure her of her follies, and abandoning herself to them. Her follies included carrying on nineteenth-century-style romances (in the Austrian corruption of the Russian manner) mostly with military men; displaying herself in public in the most extreme, provocative and bare fashions of the day; and catastrophic ventures in the worlds of finance and the arts.

Madame Landsmann’s affairs were objectionable to her husband and to her in-laws on diverse grounds. That the wife of Rudolf Landsmann should be unfaithful was so shocking more need not be said, his mother and sisters felt. As Olga Landsmann, Rudolf’s more worldly sister-in-law, told the story later, Kamilla’s lack of discretion was offensive. In short, she was stupid. “The point is not what Kamilla does,” Olga had tried to argue with Rudolf, “but why do I have to hear about it? And why does it have to come to the ears of your poor mother?” Rudolf agreed