The Emigrants

With long pauses, during which she often seemed very far away and lost, Aunt Fini told me, on my last day at Cedar Glen West, of the end of Cosmo Solomon and the later years of my Great-Uncle Ambros Adelwarth. Shortly after the two globetrotters returned from the Holy Land, as Aunt Fini put it, the war broke out in Europe. The more it raged, and the more we learnt of the extent of the devastation, the less Cosmo was able to regain a footing in the unchanged daily life of America. He became a stranger to his former friends, he abandoned his apartment in New York City, and even out on Long Island he soon withdrew entirely to his own quarters and at length to a secluded garden house known as the summer villa. Aunt Fini said that one of the Solomons' old gardeners once told her that in those days Cosmo would often be steeped in melancholy all day, and then at night would pace to and fro in the unheated summer villa, groaning softly. Wildly agitated, he would string out words that bore some relation to the fighting, and as he uttered these words of war he would apparently beat his forehead with his hand, as if he were vexed at his own incomprehension or were trying to learn what he said by heart. Frequently he would be so beside himself that he no longer even recognized Ambros. And yet he claimed that he could see clearly, in his own head, what was happening in Europe: the inferno, the dying, the rotting bodies lying in the sun in open fields. Once he even took to cudgelling the rats he saw running through the trenches. When the war ended, Cosmo's condition temporarily improved. He went back to designing flying machines, drew up a scheme for a tower house on the coast of Maine, took to playing the cello again, studied maps and ocean charts, and discussed with Ambros the various travels he planned. To the best of my knowledge, they made only one of these journeys, in the early summer of 1923, when the two of them went to Heliopolis. One or two pictures have survived from that visit to Egypt: one shows a kafeneion in Alexandria called the Paradeissos, one the San Stefano casino at Ramleh, and one the casino at Heliopolis. Their visit to Egypt seems to have

OASIS D HELIOPOLIS, CASINO

been made at rather short notice, said Aunt Fini, and from what Uncle Adelwarth told me it was an attempt to regain the past, an attempt that appears to have failed in every respect. The start of Cosmo's second serious nervous breakdown appears to have been connected with a German film about a gambler that was screened in New York at the time, which Cosmo described as a labyrinth devised to imprison him and drive him mad, with all its mirror reversals. He was particularly disturbed by an episode towards the end of the film in which a one-armed showman and hypnotist by the name of Sandor Weltmann induced a sort of collective hallucination in his audience. From the depths of the stage (as Cosmo repeatedly described it to Ambros) the mirage image of an oasis appeared. A caravan emerged onto the stage from a grove of palms, crossed the stage, went down into the auditorium, passed amongst the spectators, who were craning round in amazement, and vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. The terrible thing was (Cosmo insisted) that he himself had somehow gone from the hall together with the caravan, and now could no longer tell where he was. One day, not long after, Aunt Fini continued, Cosmo really did disappear. I do not know where they searched for him, or for how long, but know that Ambros finally found him two or three days later on the top floor of the house, in one of the nursery rooms that had been locked for years. He was standing on a stool, his arms hanging down motionless, staring out at the sea where every now and then, very slowly, steamers passed by, bound for Boston or Halifax. When Ambros asked why he had gone up there, Cosmo said he had wanted to see how his brother was. But he never did have a brother, according to Uncle Adelwarth. Soon after, when Cosmo's condition had improved to some extent, Ambros accompanied him to Banff in the Canadian Rockies, for

the good air, on the advice of the doctors. They spent the whole summer at the famous Banff Springs Hotel. Cosmo was then like a well-behaved child with no interest in anything and Ambros was fully occupied by his work and his increasing concern for his charge. In mid October the snows began. Cosmo spent many an hour looking out of the tower window at the vast pine forests all around and the snow swirling down from the impenetrable heights. He would hold his rolled-up handkerchief clenched in his fist and bite into it repeatedly out of desperation. When darkness fell he would lie down on the floor, draw his legs up to his chest and hide his face in his hands. It was in that state that Ambros had to take him home and, a week later, deliver him to the Samaria Sanatorium at Ithaca, New York, where that same year, without saying a word or moving a muscle, he faded away.