Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Read online

  From then on she uses her son’s knapsack to carry money to the store and eventually, of course, the inflation ends.

  I tell my Austrian friend that I prefer the appended version and he says, “I never tell that one to Americans.”

  “No?”

  “They’re too sentimental,” he says, “always carrying on about the ‘human element’ in a story, that’s how they put it when I was over there last. A perplexing phrase. Is it still being bandied about?”

  “Sentimental!” I say. “And coming from you!”

  “Look,” he says, “of course we’re sentimental too. But we’re sentimental in such a different way.”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about,” I say, as the image of the Empire State Building rises before me, atrociously lit, gloriously beautiful. I suppress my vision.

  “You’ve been over there a long time,” he says, “but you haven’t shaken it yet.”

  “What a pity,” I say. “Tell me, what haven’t I managed to shake?”

  “And you won’t, either,” he says. “It’s in you. It doesn’t matter where your body lives out its life. A wicker basket you can set down, and it may or may not disappear, but you haven’t been to a church in years, right?”

  “Right,” I say, mystified now.

  “But Catholicism lives on inside you, nonetheless.”

  “What a pleasant theory,” I say and laugh. “Faith-as-gallstone-at-rest. Where did I ever get the idea that the belief business was such a time-consuming affair, shifts around the clock and all that?”

  He smiles indulgently.

  “You’ve been an American citizen for how long now?”

  “Ten years, twelve.”

  “The former Ingeborg Seiler of Graz, Austria, has been a certified citizen—”

  “Naturalized,” I say, surprised by the petty edge to my voice. “A naturalized citizen of the United States.”

  “I am glad this pleases you,” he says, and his voice is warm and devoid of sarcasm. “Listen to me,” he says, and puts his hand on mine. “I worry about it. There is this streak of yours, how you throw your arm around a choice you’ve made and hug it to you, which has served you well. But at times you don’t just hold on, you close your eyes, too.”

  “Oh, dear,” I say and reach for my glass. “And just when I thought I was beginning to mend my ways. But if that’s all you’re worried about, there’s reason to celebrate as well, isn’t there? Think of how far I’ve come, and so grievously handicapped, too.”

  “I am afraid for you,” he says. “You will keep right on making yourself unhappy until you come to a peace about the . . . fact, that you will always be, first and foremost, an Austrian.”

  “But you are so wrong,” I say. “I am not, not anymore, I haven’t been an Austrian for—”

  “Please,” he says, “please. It isn’t up to you, don’t you see? Over there, all you own is a piece of paper which proves, to you and anyone else who cares, that you are entitled to vote and requested to pay taxes in a country you picked. But Austria picked you first. To fight this fact, or to treasure it, or to ignore it, well, that’s up to you. Austria doesn’t care, and the Church doesn’t either.”

  What does he want from me? I think, tired now and cross, the kind of mood that prompted Mark, at the age of three or four, to kick at table legs in passing, I’d give up both countries to have him back and every last church in the world; you’ve had too much wine, I tell myself, and yesterday that wretched flight, how will I get a cab at this hour?

  Out loud I say, “You still haven’t told me why Americans don’t deserve to hear the second version of your basket story.”

  He says nothing. I look at my hands, at his, the taxi question nags; will I wander around town, trying to find one of their quaint little pastures, five pompous, black Mercedes hanging out in a chummy row and not one cruising the streets, what an inane system, typical, why on earth do I keep coming back? see my lazy brother? in twenty years he’s managed to write me four times, and does he ever come and see me? take a streetcar then, you do like those, how small schoolgirls wave their passes at the conductor, never a pause in their giggly talk like little splashes of water; but it’s different late at night, rumbling through dead streets, halting at a deserted stop, doors opening, doors open, doors open, doors still open, what can this fool of a driver be waiting for? the ritual repeated at every godforsaken stop, though I am the lone passenger and ensconced as if for the night, and though the driver sees each desolate stop well in advance; we cater to an invisible rush-hour crowd, standing room only, halfhearted jostling, a brightly lit car full of weary and patient ghosts; those two at the door are familiar to me, and the one to my right as well, faces solid as flesh and dearer to me than my own, Jesus, a Checker, let me flag down a Checker, let me scrunch down in the dark and be safe from all ghosts for as long as I keep my eyes on the dirty sign, keep feet off jump seats. . . .

  “ . . . finally turned eighty last month,” he is saying in a low voice. “And for me, the essence of being Austrian is graceful resignation. The basket woman knew that. She scrambled her two eggs that night, and stretched them with water and powdered milk, and poured the sauce on pieces of bread.”

  “You know this story very well,” I say slowly. “Obnoxiously well, to be precise. Far too well. If I were you, I’d put all this nonsense in a nice, juicy novel, lard-on-thighs, that sort of thing.”

  “I had an affair with her,” he says. “Not an affair, a love. Years after the basket thing. Her husband left her, but then he came back.”

  I didn’t mean a word I said, my dear friend, forgive me, I thought. But I did not say it out loud, and now he is dead too.

  “My father would have scoffed at the word ‘graceful,’ ” I said instead. “And he would have hated the word ‘resignation.’ ”

  “He may well have,” said my friend. “As you know, I never met him. But we can only go through so many earthquakes. There comes a point when there is finally too much rubble around to bother with. You stop trying to erect ethereal constructions, you build a shelter instead. He went on, did he not? He concentrated on what was left, and he lived by that. Once we’ve been made to realize that illusions are a comfort like any other, it behooves us to take their loss in stride, and without pretending that the loss is temporary.”

  “You’ve got him all wrong,” I said.

  “Very well,” he said. “After all, I never knew him. But the basket woman I knew well, and not in a hundred years would it have occurred to this woman to point out the ‘human element’ in any story. Tell me, what else is there?”

  “Oh, all right then,” I said. “So you’ve made up your mind about Americans. I suppose they’ll somehow manage to live with that.”

  “I know only a few and none of them well,” he said. “And the half dozen or so to whom I’ve told it seemed to enjoy the story. Money dumped on a sidewalk, they like that, they laugh. But when the chuckles die down the questions start, always the same questions. Instead of taking the trouble to leave the money behind, wouldn’t it have made more sense just to pick up the basket and run? Did not the thief increase his risk, fiddling at the woman’s feet, needlessly drawing attention to himself? And if the money could buy any groceries at all, even a few, why would the thief . . . You see, that is their practical side; it saves them from drowning in sentimentality. But there isn’t an Austrian alive who would ask a single one of those questions. And if somebody doesn’t understand the thief of the story, what is the point of talking about the woman?”

  Chapter 50

  Americans tend to lump Austrians and Germans into a single group. One period among many that make this practice seem inappropriate is that of the 1930s. In Germany, Hitler took power in 1933; the five years that passed before he annexed Austria were very different for Germans than for their neighbors to the south.

  “A year after Hitler took over, out there, as we used to say, Austrian workers went to the barricades,�
� recalls a man who knew my father. “The Reds gave it a valiant try. Between the inflation, and unemployment having hit bottom, it just came to a boiling point. So they sent the workers out in the streets, Go and yell your heads off, protest! It was easy sending them in the streets, they had nothing else to do anyway. Getting them to go home again was harder. We had a cozy little civil war on our hands.

  “Our inspiring Socialist leaders, Adler, Deutsch, you name them, all of them Jews, they got a hold of the party’s cash box and hopped on a train for France. The minor officials, Christians, they were hanged or shot. And the rank-and-file Red, the unemployed laborer who had dreamed of a Socialist revolution and a Socialist state, he sat in jail and fingered his bloody bandages. ‘What do you think our Socialist leaders are doing right now?’ was the first line of a joke going around. ‘They are hard at work, sitting in Paris cafés, writing new revolutionary tracts.’

  “Some Austrian Nazis gave it a try, too, but their silly little Putsch was over even faster; and along it came, our glorious Austro-Fascism. I was fourteen, fifteen. These days, thank God, boys that age talk about girls and soccer, not that we didn’t. But we talked about other things too, under our breath, of course, and always in the far corner of the schoolyard.

  “The Clericals, the Conservatives, they’d taken over, the government was ‘Black.’ ‘Christian Socials’ they called themselves. Our report cards had a new category, ‘Attendance at Mass.’ You missed Mass once, you stayed after school. You missed it a second time, you tried to find a different school. I’d been put in an orphanage run by the Lutherans, and before my father died he’d been with the railroads, they were notorious Reds, so teachers kept bringing up my father’s job or asked if I’d turned Lutheran yet, and being a Lutheran, well, that was only half a step away from being a heretic, only our Church was Christian.

  “The worst of them was the priest who taught Religion, that subject was more important for your academic standing than Chemistry or German. He called me up front once for an exam, that was six months before the Anschluss. He asks me a question, something about Kant and Nietzsche, he liked tearing those two apart, heretics they were and idiots. But before I can open my mouth he says, ‘How dare you stand like that in my presence, you have the posture of a streetcar conductor, go back to your seat.’ Because I hadn’t clicked my heels. I got an F in Religion on my report card, that was a death sentence for a Gymnasium student at the time. Half a year later, when the German troops ‘liberated’ us, well, they really did liberate me. And to get any sort of work, you had to show up with your confession paper. . . .”

  Reds and Blacks and Adler and Deutsch I had read about in numerous books and theses. These sources had, as a rule, presented the historical events embroiling these parties and leaders from a perspective radically unlike the one with which I am confronted now, on an azure-sky Austrian summer afternoon, only months away from the 1980s. There was no point in interrupting this particular man to ask, “If you had been the leader of a revolution that failed, would you have stuck around, waiting for the regime’s executioners? And since the party had fallen apart, would you have left its cash box behind, for your enemies to gloat over?” Now I interrupt him after all: confession papers, described from whatever perspective, are new to me.

  “Oh, you know, a scrap of paper signed by the priest after you’d made your confession. If you missed one Saturday night’s absolution, you were no upstanding member of the Christian Social Party, you didn’t deserve a job. And there were very few around. Some family men with children to feed would have killed for a job, given half a chance.

  “My older brother earned his title of Diplomingenieur in ’36, the year our mother died, he had to put off the final exams because of the funeral. There was no job for him, no unemployment, no welfare. At God-knows-what sacrifice our mother had put him through five years at the university after eight years at the Gymnasium and nobody so much as let him split wood in a backyard.

  “Times like these, you find out how resourceful you are. Anybody who fancied himself musically inclined became a street singer. Housewives would open a window facing the tenement courtyard, listen to a song, applaud a little, maybe throw a groschen at the singer five floors down. Street-singing was illegal, but neighborhoods looked out for those paupers, anybody who still had a job thought, Tomorrow I could be down there, scratching pennies. So people’d yell, ‘Cop’s halfway up the block, you’ve got a minute and a half.’

  “Your father was the most closed-mouthed man I’ve ever met, but he told me a detail from that period. Maybe it came up when I mentioned to him that my brother had tried it as a street singer, he didn’t make it though, he never could carry a tune. Your father’s precinct, like every other precinct, was overrun by street singers. One day a cop—your father didn’t mention names—got mad. He called together as many guys as were around and said, ‘The hell with this garbage. I’m not hauling in one more skin-and-bone hooker who’s just sold her ass for a cup of coffee, and when I hear another nightingale caterwauling in some alley, I swear I’ll stick my fists in my ears.’

  “Word got around, the precinct got a small fund together. Each hooker and street singer too obvious to be ignored by the cop on the beat, every out-of-work carpenter, stenographer, and Diplomingenieur, got taken to the station and fed a bowl of goulash and a roll. When they were done eating the sergeant would say, ‘On your mother’s life, don’t let me catch sight of you in this precinct again.’ That’s what times were like, flat out, flat out on the floor.

  “And every year we heard new and more amazing stories about what the Germans were up to. All through the twenties they’d been in the same mess we’d been in, except now we were worse off than ever, while all of a sudden they were working, they were eating, they were taking vacations, we couldn’t even believe it. Factory workers and their wives and kids cruising down some river, who’d ever heard of anything like that before?”

  Chapter 51

  Between 1934 and 1938, the structure of Austria’s First Republic was simple. No elections, government by decree, a one-party state—and all without help from Adolf Hitler. I have thanked God and luck that the world at large was not interested in Austria’s form of government during those years, and I am grateful that Austria’s spokesmen after the Second World War managed to convey to our occupiers a fantasy version of Austria’s pre-Hitler government: unfortunate little Austria, Europe’s first democracy to be slugged to the ground by the treacherous Nazi Huns from the north. Had this ruse not been accepted, how would its occupiers have dealt with the country of my birth?

  Gratefulness acknowledged, I believe that truth was not an issue. There seems little merit to an interpretation of the Anschluss in terms of a brute-force occupation. What appears more accurate is an interpretation in terms of an agreeable union on one level and, on another, the exchange of a corrupt, wretchedly inept, and totalitarian government for a government that was totalitarian, corrupt, and eminently successful.

  The sham of a helpless democracy threatened by Panzer tanks about to flatten the Alps served Austria and its postwar occupiers equally well. Austrians were able to tell themselves and the world, “The Germans invaded us.” Occupiers, East and West alike, were happy enough to accept minor alterations of history in view of Austria’s strategic position in a very important and brand-new War, the Cold one.

  It was under their Christian Social government that Austrians first became acquainted with concentration camps, whose prisoners spanned the political spectrum considered disruptive by Austria’s First Republic. Rabble-rousing (or potentially rabble-rousing) Communists, National Socialists, and Socialists, who had not managed to avoid the attention of the state, were referred to, in guards’ parlance—adjectives chosen according to a strictly democratic notion of vocabulary—as those goddamn Commies, those goddamn Nazis, those goddamn Reds.

  Chapter 52

  The building I live in has a basement laundry room, its walls cluttered with advertisements for dine
tte sets, “cheap, moving this month,” and similar notices. This one caught my attention: “12-year-old boy wants to run errands; reliable; good dog-walker; 50¢ a trip.”

  That’s how I met Andy, who is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, memorizing Hebrew and worrying about a speech he is expected to prepare. He has become dear to me over these months of seeing hardly anyone else, and he knows I am writing, “something to do with the Second World War.” One day he asks me, “Are you an Aryan?” I laugh and say, “Oh, Lord! Where on earth did you pick up that word?” He says, “Well, I don’t really know much about that war, but I’ve heard that the Christians sort of got away, and the Jews got killed, and the Aryans were the ones who killed them.”

  I say, trying to feel my way, slowly, “Actually, the Christians and the Aryans were mostly the same people.” And he says, “Are you an Aryan, then?” And I say, “Well, it’s such a silly way of categorizing people . . . yes. By birth, yes.” And he says, “Yeah, but your parents weren’t Nazis!” I say nothing. He looks at me and leans forward in my typing chair and then says again, this time haltingly, “But your parents weren’t Nazis, were they?” And I say, “Oh, Andy, look, this is all so . . . yes. They were.” And as removed in time and tone his question has been from when it was asked of me for that very first time, as a sixteen-year-old exchange student, and as often as I have answered it since then, my heart contracts and I look past him as he says, in a low voice and with dismay, “Oh, no.”

  Always, I think, it will always be like that, as long as I live there will always be an equivalent of this bright and lovely twelve-year-old who has come to like me, who stands in line at the post office for me and at the photocopier’s, who is enthralled by science fiction, draws elaborate and darkly funny cartoons, and keeps me up-to-date on which rock group is his favorite this month. There will always be someone like him, who will be aghast, saddened.