An autodidact who had taught himself six languages (including Arabic and Spanish), Aaron Marcus was a music lover and copied scores for the Warsaw Opera House in his spare time. He also engaged—within bounds—in the study of alchemy. Out of the group of people Otto brought to the zoo beginning in 1940. Aaron Marcus was undoubtedly the most highly educated, as well as the most congenial. Awidower, the father of one child (Hezkel, Bella’s husband), for forty-five years he had been married to an embittered shrew whose grumbling wizened her into strange proportions. He adored her, though, and rarely spoke ill of her, while she constantly mocked his ineptness in money matters, disparaged his impractical scholarliness, and conspired against the alchemical equipment he accumulated in the apothecary shop. Marcus, born in a small town in Galicia, was the first apothecary in Warsaw to make and sell natural remedies (he himself was a vegetarian for reasons of conscience). He was a sensitive man, refined in appearance and fastidiously dressed. Before the war he always wore a carnation in his lapel. (There was a little clip sewn into the lapel which held a few drops of water for the flower.) After his wife’s death in 1930, he sold his shop and moved to a small apartment in the Zoliboz quarter. He gave his alchemical equipment away (charts, lists, “Mary’s crucible” for the preparation of sulfur water, or “divine water,” as it was called by the alchemists) to a Rosicrucian friend. At this time—and his personal motives for this are unknown—the retired apothecary began to conduct exhaustive experiments in the realm of human feelings. He commenced by drafting a chart of all known human feelings, breaking them down into categories, sifting out the synonymous feelings, dividing the list into feelings of the “mind” and feelings of the “heart,” “primary feelings” and “secondary feelings,” and then began to scrutinize himself and a few of his close friends with the aim of isolating the most “active” feelings in the human psyche. Wasserman: “Would you have imagined it possible, Herr Neigel, that we human beings, the crown of creation, make use of only twenty or thirty feelings in our entire life span? And in a regular and intensive way—ten or fifteen at most?” Neigel: “For me that’s plenty. I wish I had even fewer feelings. Listen, our instructors at military school were right: feelings are a civilian luxury. For softies. Two or three feelings would definitely be enough for me right now.” Wasserman: “For you, perhaps. But our Aaron Marcus rebelled against this hard-and-fast impoverishment … he longed to clear a way for himself into unknown territories, the abracadabra realms we feel inside which nobody dares to touch; oy, Herr Neigel, can you imagine what a shock it would be to our foundations if Marcus had succeeded in publishing his discovery of a single human feeling? A new one? Can you imagine how many great unnamed and formless things we would instantly discover within ourselves to fill the new vessel and become avital part of ourselves? What a primeval revolution! This with only one feeling, but just think—Two? Three?” “Hitler invented one,” answers Neigel, and explains, “Hitler gave us something new. Joy. Yes. The real joy of strength. I myself used to feel it, not so long ago. Before you began to poison me. Real joy, Wasserman, without any phony qualms of CONSCIENCE [q.v.], without regret, the joy of hating, yes, Wasserman, the joy of hating whomever you’re supposed to hate. These are things nobody before him ever dared to say out loud.” Wasserman: “Hmm, Herr Neigel, that is true, certainly. Only, you are wrong about one thing: do not say he ‘invented’ it but, rather, ‘exposed’ or ‘bared’ it. And look what it gave rise to. A boundless energy took on a name and an ideology, armaments and armies and laws and legislation, and a new fictitious history all its own! Only I must tell you, Herr Neigel, I suspect that if the little apothecary had discovered such a feeling, he would have kept it locked in his heart. Even so, in his own modest way, his achievements were truly remarkable.”
Aaron Marcus, a quiet, peaceful man (Wasserman: “Whose very heart was perhaps the philosopher’s stone he searched for all his life to change base metal into gold”), became a dangerous and determined fighter when he declared open war on the limitations of human feeling. It was clear to him from the start that the fault lay in language: that people were trained to feel only what they could name. That if they ever experienced a powerful new feeling, they would not know what to do with it and would either repress it or wrongfully assign it to an already familiar feeling with a designation of its own. And in this way—through laziness and negligence and fear as well, perhaps, they would deprive it of its original significance. Marcus: “And its beckoning call, its demands. Its subtleties of pleasure and its dangers.” And since he was also a linguist, he knew that people who speak only one language are unfamiliar with certain nuances of feeling well known to speakers of other languages. [Editorial comment: By way of explanation, the relatively new Hebrew word “frustration” provides an example. This word did not appear in the Hebrew vocabulary till the mid-seventies, and in fact, before it was absorbed into the language, people who spoke only Hebrew were never “frustrated.” They may have been “angry” or “disappointed,” or they may have experienced a sense of turmoil in certain situations, but the acute feeling of frustration itself was unknown to them until the word for it was translated from the English language.] The learned apothecary of Warsaw alsoclaimed that due to our severely limited linguistic capabilities, we are forced every minute to “make do” with one feeling, or two at most—blended into a
