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

  Why was any poem, why was this poem, so important to him, to us? It was simple on my side. As odd as this type of attention was, nonetheless it was a set amount of time’s worth, nightly, from a man whom I knew I was meant to accept as my new father. So memorize I did.

  It may have been simple on his side, too. The “Bell” may have been the one poem they’d dealt with in detail, in Munich, when he was working toward his belated Gymnasium exams. But any old poem, even if studied in preparation for a high school exam come late in life—he was thirty-six when he “graduated”—does not move a man to replicate it on the brain cells of his small daughter, evening after evening, after he has put ten hours of manual work behind him and before he sets out to find that night’s woman.

  By the time I started first grade I had learned all twenty-nine stanzas, the longest one consisting of fifty-six lines. Did he think he would vanish, imminently, abruptly? Was Das Lied von der Glocke the one legacy he could think of worth leaving to this first-born? Schiller uses the physical construction of a church bell as a frame. Within this frame he follows the course of human life from infancy to death as seen from his early-nineteenth-century point of view; as seen, in fact, from a point of view narrow, if understandable, even for the early nineteenth century—couched though it is, particularly as my father used to recite it, in the most rousing, romantic, and beautiful language I expect to know.

  Chapter 59

  Do you talk much in bed?” “When you’re in bed with someone, do you talk?” “Do you talk while you’re . . . ?” I cannot get the phrase right, and it must be right before I ask him. I am in a daze, smiling at him fixedly and clutching a paper plate holding an untouched sandwich. We’re at a reception at the Austrian Institute. He is speaking to me in German, with an Austrian accent so heady, so strong, so sweet, that I keep shivering in an overheated room. He may well be telling me where he buys his Daily News, all I hear is sounds.

  Sanity prevails. I remind myself that it is unwise to make blatant if obscure propositions five minutes into a conversation, and refrain from asking my question. But for weeks I fantasize about having my body adorned with dripping Austrian vowels, being thrilled to ecstasy by consonants left unpronounced. I am unable to recall what he looked like. I only remember the lilts and slurs and graceful loops, the arches and bays: Austrian.

  English, the language I have been using daily for nearly two decades, which I have taught my children and with which I earn my living, has always felt like one vast euphemism. “Shit” is what my friends and I say when we’ve run out of change in a pay phone, Scheisse shocks me. Only Tragödie sounds tragic; “tragedy” is made maudlin by its mushy g, weak by its brevity and lack of the long, heavy ö. “Hate,” rhyming as it does with “Kate” and “great,” is flaccid compared to Hass. “Longing” is nice, but sehnen . . . “Hail Victory,” or “Victory Hail,” either way, means nothing, is nothing. Sieg Heil rushes a chemical through my body, makes me react physically, and not only in disgust; it signals to an unencoded area. And there’s Jude.

  I look up “bigot” in the English-German section of my Cassell’s dictionary. Four entries are given: Frömmler, Eiferer, Fanatiker, blinder Anhänger.

  I look up each of these words in the German-English section of the same dictionary. A Frömmler is noted as a “hypocrite, devotee”; an Eiferer is a “zealot”; a Fanatiker is a “fanatic”; an Anhänger (blinder means “blind”) is a “partisan, adherent; disciple, supporter; hanger-on.” There’s no bigot to be found.

  A simple error in cross-referencing, possibly; but that is how irretrievably lost nuances get, not just minor ones either, all the time, in any translation.

  Chapter 60

  Until I started on this book, which has led me to the Austrian consulate and its branches, I made it a point not to have acquaintances who were born where I was born. And on my visits to Austria a series of sensations repeats itself as if on a loop of film.

  I am awash with sentimentality weeks before the trip, beside myself at the thought of going home, each time too excited to sleep on the plane. Then I’m there, Austria, Graz, where I belong. My surroundings are exquisite, the geraniums sheltering the sidewalk cafés are real, the food is beyond compare, I melt whenever I look at my brother, his family, my other relatives, my two or three remaining friends. Yet something is wrong. Either the place is wrong, or I am wrong, but something is tediously, odiously wrong. I get diarrhea, I speak only English to waiters and salespeople, I want everyone around me to be older than I am by the amount of years adults were older when I was growing up. People my own age scare me. Outside, I’m only comfortable at dawn, no one around. An old man washes down a sidewalk, then carefully sweeps excess water into the gutter. The sidewalk ends up clean enough to, well, to eat off.

  A few hours later I must do an errand. I’m on a nearly empty side street, walking behind a small boy who is holding his mother’s hand. For a moment he slips his hand out of hers, throws a candy wrapper into the gutter, reaches back up. The woman, she appears to be my age, slaps him. The boy looks to his right, his left, over his shoulder. He has blushed a bright red. He bends over quickly and retrieves the scrap of paper.

  I am transfixed, thought piling madly onto thought. I’ll run after them, I’ll strew the contents of my pack of cigarettes on the sidewalk, I’ll empty my handbag in front of the woman’s shoes, I’ll whisk off the boy, she will never see him again, first I’ll knock her sprawling. . . .

  “What are you making such a fuss over,” says my brother tranquilly that same evening. “You don’t know a thing about those two. They might have been shopping for three hours, both of them tired and cross. She may already have told him, nicely, six times in a row, not to throw trash on the ground, she may never have slapped him before, she may never slap him again, you’re getting worked up over nothing.”

  But I want to be home, on my corner, on my block, watching a great, big slob throw his McDonald’s wrapper on the sidewalk.

  Chapter 61

  While I long for Austria when I’m here (sometimes seeing myself as an Austrian held captive in New York against her will) and while I can barely wait to leave Austria once I’m there (immediately feeling like a New Yorker stranded in Graz) there is one constant. Austria’s language enchants me.

  Grazerisch barely has the distinction of a specific accent, let alone a dialect like Carinthian or Styrian. The Viennese tend to go on a bit about their accent, consider it synonymous with Austrian, and the way they talk does charm me. But there is an edge to how people in my hometown transform German that sets it apart from what you hear in any other town or area in Austria.

  How many Austrian dialects and accents are there—ten, twenty, forty, a hundred? Something to do with mountains separating valleys, people living in isolated villages for centuries, each valley, each village developing its own idiosyncrasies, and they continue to linger. All of them German, none of them German, all of them Austrian.

  There is more to language than how it is spoken, though the sound itself is, of course, by far the most important part. There is the maddening fact, familiar to anyone who uses as the language of daily life one not inculcated first: you keep running into words, whole fragments, that cannot be rendered in your current language, you keep running up against the impossibility of ever transmuting, you are stuck with translation.

  Sometimes you don’t even have access to that. It is impossible to express dein verliebter Mund in tolerable English. I tried once, it’s a phrase out of the “Lilli Marlen” song. The lyrics to that song exist in English, but not that phrase, and I like that phrase very much. I worked at it, a challenge, but to no avail. “What a lovely concept,” said my friend when I had finished trying to circumscribe the phrase by way of clumsy exposition. “It’s about this idea, how when you’re in love, your mouth—just by the way it looks—demonstrates to your lover that you are, in fact, in love. It means ‘your In-Love-Mouth.’ ” But such gyrations, at best, only add up to “a lovely concept.�
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  Chapter 62

  If English has always seemed to me like a collection of words somehow less strong, less specific, less direct, less moving than a second group of words, lately there has been a change. English is becoming a digital code; it serves.

  This change is a loss to me and I mourn it. I clearly remember loving English, truly loving fragments of a sentence, whole paragraphs, euphemism they may be, feel them shine! A long list of favorites, from Elizabeth Jane Howard calling cats “those artists of position,” to Yeats’s “the rag and bone shop of the heart.”

  German is turning into more than a means. German, transformed from polished brass into gold through the alchemy of tone, cadence, and melody, my German, Austrian, is turning into reality. Most meaning beyond information and all beauty are turning their back on English, taking up residence in my real language, beckoning me.

  I fight it. I didn’t just learn English to find my way around a foreign country, I had more at stake than that. Lose that accent, get that intonation! Working at a magazine, earning the reputation of being good at “line-by-line” editing, having the skill to manipulate small fragments of this foreign language, improving on a sentence written by a native, under the spell of the illusion that such a skill might, somehow, eventually, make me a native too.

  But I could not write about my parents or my childhood in German. My knight in shining armor, my saving-grace shield, is English.

  Chapter 63

  An eminent Jewish author is being interviewed on television. I have long admired this writer’s work. He is wearing a dark green suit that looks to be made of velvet, his handsome, sharp-featured face more like a Frenchman’s than a Central European’s. “How do you explain,” asks the interviewer off-camera, “I mean, how do you think it was possible that human beings could have committed such unspeakable crimes?”

  The man on whom the camera is focused thinks, and thinks some more, and the camera and I reverently watch him think. Finally he says, “I don’t understand the victims, and I don’t understand the killers. But the victims are my problem, and the killers are yours.”

  An ache bites into my brain, squarely at the back of my head. It is severe enough for me to be careful, for the moment, not to move. Being hit over the head, I think, that’s what that phrase means, it’s not figurative at all. By the time I find the bottle of aspirin, the television voices have receded into static. I drink some water from my toothbrush tumbler and think, An articulate man. One aspirin sticks in my throat. A truly articulate man. I gulp more water, then some milk. And he has a point, too. The aspirins do nothing for my head (not yet; a matter of waiting fifteen, twenty minutes) while thought—beyond “articulate” and “ . . . a point”—has deserted me. Only gradually do I become aware of something moving in me, a thing below thought, a thing uncoiling, hot and poison-bitter and beyond aspirin, confession, and general anesthesia alike: Ah, for such decisive, facile cutting adrift of the other side, such clear-cut division of who is whose problem. How determinedly, how slowly, with what sober finality he presented this conclusion of his, which clearly holds for him. And how I yearn to be able to say what he says, just turn it around, this thesis, this epigram, this pronouncement, grim as it sounds: “The victims are your problem. Only the killers are mine.” But this way around the epigram falls apart. Too much is left out, far too many are cut off.

  Then the headache is forgotten because the pain inside me swamps to the surface and there’s a shape to it, and this is it: All right, Eminent Jewish Author! Or rather: Thank you, Eminent Jewish Author! I’ll try it your way. What do I know about the victims, come to think of it, those legions who haunt me? Not a solitary thing beyond what I’ve read, and in this writer’s work and many others’, along with a few photographs of massed naked bodies, seen so often they have transmuted into icons.

  But the killers, the killers, the “killers”—those I haven’t just read about, some of those I know.

  And I know this: I’m not a killer.

  And I know this too, and just as well: Neither my father nor my mother was a killer, even if (here in my self-styled homeland Manhattan) among most of the people I know, my Nazi parents are lumped as such, by automatic implication, unselfconsciously, by common consensus, as a matter of course.

  So enough, then. Enough of that automatic breast-beating, this eternal leaning-over-backward, every thought of my childhood, my family, my country, my heritage warped forever. Except that taking this on—unsure even of what “this” is—scares and exhausts me into sleepless nights, into reckless experiments with oblivion, into relentless disgust with the effort not to just let it all be, to draw instead on what’s buried inside me, covered solidly as with damp earth, a forever-new grave under thin rain.

  Chapter 64

  I spent much of the last two years of the war on my grandparents’ farm. A few times my parents miscalculated the timing of one of my visits home, and Graz was bombed while I was in town. There were sirens, there was running, there were frightened adults, later dead bodies or parts of bodies, and walls that looked like the back wall of a dollhouse. You could tell where a room used to end and where another had once begun. Next to a patch of dark green would be a light blue one, a border of flowers near the top; or a whole square of gold arabesques; or a stretch painted white, not a smudge from the lick of a flame, dark roses on pink, pretty dollhouses four stories high.

  My parents had not succeeded in sheltering me so completely as they would have liked. There had been the smell and sight of the woman still alive, though burning brightly; two neighbors had tried to pull her out from under rubble, they had beaten at the flames and tugged hard, but they had not been able to move her in time. I had seen other such casualties, not many, but some. None had given me nightmares.

  Only now, though it was nearly summer and I could watch the shadows of clouds move across the valley below like ships, though my mother and baby brother were with me and all bombs had stopped, now I screamed at night.

  I knew, though no one had spoken a word of it to me, that something had come to an end. The turning point had been precise. I had been home for the first time in a very long while, all four of us had left Graz at once, there had been a boy.

  Chapter 65

  In early May 1945, my father abandoned his ledgers and stole a Jeep parked in front of police headquarters. Its tank, miraculously, was a quarter full, at a time when all of Greater Germany had been out of gasoline for weeks. He collected his wife and daughter at the apartment and his gravely ill son at the hospital, picking him up out of a crib over the mechanical protest of a sleepwalking nurse in charge of row after row of children. And he put his son on my mother’s lap. She sat next to her husband, and I sat in back next to a couple of suitcases, a cardboard box held together with string, and the wall clock my mother had bought a week after her wedding.

  He drove rapidly through the streets of Graz and then more slowly over country roads, amid people pushing loaded bicycles or pulling handcarts, all of them going in our direction. Even later we rode steeply uphill, the occasional hollows in the dirt road filled in with halved tree trunks, making the road passable for ox carts after heavy rain. The sky cut a swath into the pines that thickened, three rows deep at either side of us, into dense forest.

  We have seen no one for a while but now there is a boy, just ahead of us. He balances on one of the lengths of wood embedded in the ground and waves, holding something in his waving hand. My father brakes sharply and makes a convulsive movement with both arms, arching them above his head and toward the woods, shouting. The boy waves once more and then stops, his arm in midair. His right hand is gone. “Lucky kid,” a physician friend has said to me. “I would have thought a grenade could do more damage than just blowing off a hand.” The same friend has insisted that my memory deceives me. “It isn’t possible,” he said. “The blood spurts out a fraction of a second later. Imagine all those severed veins. . . .” But, possible or not, I see—arranged within the stump—the
circular ends of something like small, cut-off, white straws. That’s what I see first.

  My father takes one of the two blankets belonging to a Graz children’s hospital off his son on my mother’s lap and walks toward the boy who stands rigid and still, his right arm raised in what seems a familiar gesture. My father winds the blanket around the wrist, which the boy continues to hold at what is a convenient height for my father’s efforts. When he gets to the end of the blanket my father seems, for a moment, at a loss. As soon as he has tucked the fabric in place, it falls away again and begins to unwind. But he tears into the blanket with his teeth and produces strips of cloth, which he ties around the bulk of the blanket already in place on the boy’s forearm.

  “You’ll be all right now,” my father says, “you are coming with us.” The boy does not move. My father carries him to the Jeep, repeating what he has already said, slightly varying the sequence of words. “You’re okay,” “We’ve got plenty of room,” “You’ll be all right now; you’re coming with us.”

  My father asks me to get up, stacks the suitcases and the cardboard box on the floor, tells me to sit down again, and lays the clock on my lap. He has to force the boy’s legs at the knees to get him to sit down beside me. The boy is older than I am, maybe old enough to go to school, his hair is brown, his nose is white. He looks straight ahead. From the corner of my eyes I watch the pale gray blanket darken, an even seeping, fast and sly as magic.

  When my father tries to restart the Jeep it sputters, falters, makes one last, small jump. The boy turns his head toward and past me, abruptly faces forward again, jumps off his seat and runs into the woods. That’s when we all started walking. My father took the cardboard box under one arm and a suitcase in each hand, the clock stayed behind, and we saw neither clock nor Jeep again. My mother carried my brother, whose eyes were closed and who lay silent throughout the afternoon’s journey. Off and on, my mother stopped walking and held her ear close to the baby’s mouth.