Why in Donna Irma? I was born before the First World War. lf I may briefly cite Talleyrand, slightly varying his words: "They who did not live before the great revolution know not the sweetness of life." I was still in time to see the bright, full days when everyone could lay his plans a long time ahead. May I be forgiven for passing off the world's history as my own? Since the July days of 1914, wars have seized me, tossed me about, wounded me, and finally - not long after the Second World War-flung me out to the outermost edge of that cultural circle to which - seized, tossed, and wounded as I am - I nevertheless belong, because (I say so with pride) I have been anointed with the holy oil of printer's ink. I have published books of verse and scolarly works. One of the latter was actually listed in the Almanach de Gotha of the Western intellect. Yes, the holy and apostolic Roman Church put my book on the Index. Wars have decided my life. I remember the day in Budapest when the first one broke out. There was great flag-waving and rejoicing. A round tower of loaves for the soldiers stood on the street corner.... I believe that was the last happy day that mankind was ever to know. Then the monstrous horror seized us. We thought perhaps we were eluding its cruelty as we traveled, close to my father, first to Serbia and then to the southern Tyrol. Actually I know now, it was the war that swept us hither and yon. It swept my father to Turkey. Finally one night he returned home, bearded, after an endless trip on foot, bringing us two antique silver egg cups. His return meant the war had ended, but still it swept us down to Fiume, on the Adriatic Sea. The city, too, was dizzy from the wars; it had belonged to Austria, to Hungary, to Croatia; it became an Italian free port, passed to Yugoslavia.... When we were there it was the private kingdorn of the poet D'Annunzio, who played Blackshirt there, issued postage stamps bearing his picture, and made speeches. From Fiume, the storm blew us to Vienna. There I was enrolled in a boarding school founded two centuries before by the Empress Maria Theresa. It offered much patina, titled schoolmates, and scanty meals of black-frozen potatoes, thin tea, and clammy black bread. The beautiful school was as unreal as the poet's kingdom. Hunger and cold were the realities of the war that had supposedly ended two years before. I learned German or, more accurately, Austrian, because in those days Hungarian citizens considered that language important. Ever since then I have written poems in German, but even today I can read only Hungarian verse. We bought a little house not far from Vienna. There, in Klosterneuburg, were things the war had not touched - the River Donau and the silvery gray trees of the River Au. There was an ancient organ with baroque angels whose tone was as true and clear as on its first day. The postwar period merged gradually into the prewar period, as satiety after luncheon merges into hunger before dinner. In between, however, lies the peaceful hour of teatime. For Europe, those were the years frorn 1928 to 1937; for me, the first years of my university studies. I had long vacillated as to whether I should study pure philosophy, philology, or natural sciences. Enrollment in the university was a complicated official process and I had an acquaintance in the dean's office at the medical school who could quickly expedite such matters. I therefore chose medicine, with the thought that I could study the other disciplines later in the libraries. It was, as I said, the quiet teatime hour when one still made plans. There were madmen in Europe, about whom one sometimes heard - a Herr Weissenberg in Berlin healed the sick with cottage cheese; a humorless housepainter from Braunau with a comical Charlie Chaplin mustache wanted to establish the world dominion of the Aryans; a woman in Konnesreuth lived on water alone and played the Passion every Friday - but all this was unimportant. A Haydn Mass in the Burgkapelle on Sunday morning was important and after it the pilgrimage through the Museum of Art (one week through the Flemings and Dutch, the next through the early Italians). Dinner in the middle of the day, with Viennese specialties, Backhendeln and Sachertorte, was important. On Sunday afternoon music on two pianos, the trio sonatas of Bach, the Forellen quintet, were important. The theater in the Josephstadt and The Marriage of Figaro were important and Les Petits Riens of Mozart in the theater at Schoenbrunn Castle. Important were one's travels through the various languages and countries - through Sacha Guitry to Paris, through Aldous Huxley to London, through Holberg to Copenhagen. It was correct to have been in Istanbul. On the Acropolis, one ran into a colleague from the dissecting room. One was astonished at the many strange words one heard in Prague. Such was peacetime. Then the second of the lunatics mentioned above pounded his fist on the table, and the Second World War broke out. I had been a little too early in seeing it coming; my friends had regarded me as an unrealistic pessimist. "A war would mean the end of Europe," they pointed out. "There's no victor in modern warfare." "With today's weapons," the intelligent citizens opined, "a world war would last three days." And Prime Minister Chamberlain was just able to say quickly - before the first bomb fell-"Peace in our time." I saw the war coming and accommodated myself to it - I fled to Rome. That is, I thought I had fled. Actually the war had cast me out of my world, had swept me without money or a single acquaintance into a land whose language I did not even know. I made the acquaintance of suffering at the same time that I learned to know Michelangelo and Pirandello; I witnessed for the first time the Colosseum and the vast indifference of my contemporaries. One thing I knew, however: the dictators enslave their victims with chains of paper. I inscribed my name on no list and in no registry of tenants, took my expired passport to no consulate, and if I ate very little bread, I ate it without a breadration card. So as to know nothing more of the horror than a sympathetic contemporary must inevitably know, I read nothing printed since the French Revolution. Thus I became a medical historian, and sheltered and concealed by library walls, wrote studies on such subjects as Renaissaice research on the kidneys and hormone treatment in the ancient world. This temporary way of life became a regular one; the pattern imposed by necessity grew into a habit, and escape into music and painting became more and more essential to me. For a long while I starved in an artist's studio. German shells one day struck the weathercock of the church across the street. Then passive resistance was no longer sufficient and I joined the ranks of those who then seemed so few, and whose numbers grew so surprisingly after the war. The Gestapo was sloppy, the military police undependable, and I was not hanged. The Americans came, warily and slowly ... but one very beautiful day they were in Rome. They marched in long columns through the dusk of evening. Thereafter I continued to go hungry, but with the satisfying sense of being able to work in the Ieaflet section of the Psychological Warfare Branch. I then became official doctor of the United States Claims Service and examined the Italians to whom anything untoward bad happened at the hands of drunken drivers or gangsters in the army of occupation. The Army paid them in the year 1948 according to the scale of 1938; it was the only indemnification service in the world that ignored the war. After 1948 I served as chief anthropologist in the United States Graves Registration Service, washing, measuring, and cementing the bones of American dead. They represented that part of the Army which had not ignored the war. In the year 1951 tanks were again off-loaded in the port of Naples. The words "war criminal" were everywhere put in quotation marks. The German generals again went on full pension. It seemed once again to be time to look about in the world. The Hungarians offered me a university chair in the history of medicine, but I foresaw that I should not make a good Communist. The Americans invited me to Korea, but I had had all the bones I needed in the far more beautiful surroundings of Florence (between the vineyard of Machiavelli and the olive grove of Amerigo Vespucci). Brazil looked big and green on the map. I chose it. Still in operation at that time was the International Refugee Organization. It loaded old colliers full of miserable Europeans and landed them somewhere. Myself they landed in the bay of Rio de Janeiro, on the Ilha das Flores, the Isle of Flowers. There I sat for ten days waiting for the police to take my fingerprints. The police had no time because it was Carnival. So, hungry, thirsty, dirty, I was obliged to meditate patiently, and I discovered something -I had not eluded the third world war. It had simply cast me up on the coast of Brazil. From the island I went as "male nurse" to a lead mine on the way to Parana. The epitaphs of the workers who had contracted lead poisoning would illustrate that chapter of my autobiography, if there had been epitaphs on their graves. A year later I came to Sao Paulo. A goodhearted colleague took me on as his assistant. I treated varicose veins and translated reports from medical congresses. With the money I earned in that city I bought a tiny apothecary's business in the Valley of Donna Irma. I firmly believe that in this valley eternal peace thrives and blooms forever.

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