Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Page 14

  As soon as we were within sight of my grandparents’ farm, my father set down box and suitcases and started back downhill. My mother and brother and I were safe. As my mother told me later that evening, it was considered unlikely that any army would climb our mountain in order to conquer isolated farms one by one.

  My father walked for a few hours—it was dark by then—until he came upon a horse in a field just off the road. For the next eight hours he rode this horse across Styria, avoiding towns and villages, always in the direction of artillery fire, which was also the direction in which his mother’s village lay. I assume he had at least a policeman’s pistol (did police accountants routinely carry guns?) since I cannot imagine how else he thought he would defend himself or anyone else against the soldiers of an enemy army. I do know he was wearing civilian clothes, the first time I remember seeing him out of uniform. (Reality was different; as a photograph of him in civilian clothes with me on his lap clearly proves.)

  He stayed up for what was left of the night and the next day, while his mother and sisters hid. But the Russians did not, after all, come directly through the village in which he grew up. They went through Judenburg instead, not far away. The father of the girl who eventually married my brother was killed there, one day before the end of the war.

  Chapter 66

  I do not remember a doctor ever visiting the farm, or that my sick brother was taken down to the village. My grandmother made teas for him out of herbs she had spread to dry on the attic floors, but his fever continued.

  During the day I was fine. I was used to being by myself among adults who got up at five and went to bed at midnight. Since both sons had been drafted, and since the man I called Grandfather was old and tired easily, the farm was run by Aunt Zenzi and my grandmother, assisted by two fieldhands exempted from military service. Hans was unstable and twice a week drunk, the other one a retarded midget whose eyes skipped helplessly from side to side.

  There were cows to be fed and milked, there was a horse, there were pigs and sheep, there was a vegetable garden, there were the fields, too steep for machinery. The men sowed in wide sweeps, later on they mowed in the same motion. When they stopped to sharpen their blades, and if the sun hit the metal just right, the scythes seared the air as half-moons of lightning. The women tied sheaves of rye into bundles and piled them onto ox carts and drove them up the steep incline to the farm. They smoked the meat from home-slaughtered animals, baked all the bread, cooked all the meals, washed everyone’s laundry at the well. My aunt skimmed each day’s milk of cream until there was enough to pour into a wooden drum on legs, a peg on one side of the drum serving as the handle with which to keep the drum in motion. I turned the wheel.

  You hold on to the handle and pull it up, letting gravity make it fall, pulling it up again, down. When your arm is numb you switch arms, when your other arm is numb you switch back. Inside the drum the cream makes a rhythmic, sloshing noise. When you have given up hope, this noise stops, you hear a triumphant thump instead, you have made liquid into a firm clump of butter, beads of moisture clinging to its surface, a marvel for all to see.

  Water was carried in from the well. Slivovitz was home brewed, the bottles guarded against Hans in Grandfather’s special cellar. The women planted and harvested flax and spun it into thread and wove it into linen and sewed that into sheets and curtains and shirts and towels. They sheared sheep, washed the wool, spread it on grass to bleach in the sun, spun it, and knitted it into sweaters and underwear and scarves and heavy caps.

  Cooking was done on a wood-burning stove. Two men at either end of a saw cut down trees and spent weeks hacking them into pieces, one hatchet to a man. The kitchen stove was the farm’s one source of heat. Electricity was installed in 1977. Now there is a freezer to keep meat fresh without salt, no television yet but a radio.

  Aunt Zenzi’s husband shows me around. He points out the new purchase for the stable: upon receiving a small electric shock, the cows keep clear of the shallow trough just below their hind ends. Water, channeled from the well outside, gushes through the trough.

  My aunt looks pleased while her husband demonstrates the new system. This man has made her happy, though she had child after child in the middle of winter, when neither doctor nor midwife could get through the snow. The last one had presented complications. Weeks after the delivery Zenzi was brought to Graz, deathly ill; after surgery she recovered with us. She had been the most-sought-after woman of the region in her youth, traces of her beauty are still unmistakable. Now she looks at her husband with a hint of amusement while he explains, “It was indoor plumbing this year or the irrigation system. The girls complained, but what do they know? All those years I’ve spent cleaning out manure with a shovel and my two hands. Next year, I tell them, it’ll be indoor plumbing next year.”

  Back then, when I wasn’t a “visitor from America” but a four-year-old native, a bunch of wasps once built a nest in the outhouse. Their buzz sounded like a thousand threats to me, I dared not move when stray ones settled on my hair. Only one of the adults noticed that I began to bypass the outhouse to take short walks in the forest behind the farm.

  The man I called Grandfather talked even less than the others. It seems improbable to me now that he should have said nothing, year in, year out, beyond his version of “Our Father” (only the first two words and the Amen intelligible, the rest a quick and soothing blur), but I do not remember him saying anything else. That the old man had preferred hunting to farming all his life may have given him an edge on observation. One afternoon he motioned me to follow him to the outhouse, then to stay back at a distance. He wore the net bonnet he used when tending to his stock of bees, and flailed his hand-carved walking stick.

  Having the outhouse back was solid comfort. For one thing, its door could be shut with a sliding bolt. For another, there was a wood bench to sit on, high for me, but preferable to squatting on pine needles, ants crawling over my bare toes. Happy to be back in this small, secure place (now only thick with flies; old Church bulletins torn into squares and stacked neatly in a corner), happy and at my most daring, I stuck my head into the round hole. I wanted to see how far down it went, what it looked like down there, and what it might be like to be down there.

  Earlier that day I had asked my mother why we prayed before meals here; we did not pray in Graz. “It reminds us to be good,” she had said. “If we forget to be good we go to Hell, far, far below.” And though I continue to be grateful to the man I called Grandfather, his thoughtfulness and my resulting research did saddle me with a theological reference peculiarly my own, which was to haunt me for years.

  Rousting the wasps was not his only gift to me. One morning he beckoned with a forefinger and went outside. He led the way across the yard and stopped where the hayloft and stable adjoin at a right angle, forming an open niche covered by a wooden roof. He grinned below his drooping mustache, patterned after the one worn by the later Emperor, and pointed to a contraption not seen on the farm before. A set of ropes hung from the roof; a hole had been drilled into each end of a board. I had only recently learned the name of this wood from Hans. He had been at the talkative, not yet the violent stage, and had recited the names of woods for me: birch and walnut, linden and willow, and something called Sandelholz, which a sailor friend had described to him, a kind of wood Hans did not expect but longed to see. This board was pine, its surface sanded to satin. The ropes had been threaded through the holes; sturdy knots supported the board at just the right height for me to sit on. He gave me the gentlest little push.

  My mother’s real mother, the woman who had abandoned her daughter and had not reclaimed her, did not talk much either; except for Hans, twice weekly, the adults around me went through their days nearly mute. All those years ago, had that been her decision? Letting the past rest, moving to a different province, starting a new life? Or had the decision been Grandfather’s, a condition, a choice to be made. “Will you hang on to your bastard, who is being taken care of a
lready, or will you marry me, have my children?”

  Except for the times when she clucked at her chickens, my grandmother seemed remote to me and cold. This changed, and because of an enemy soldier. She let me feed the chickens with her from then on, sometimes she patted my head.

  Chapter 67

  In their scramble for the cave they left my grandmother and me behind. My grandmother had stayed by choice. She was bent over from decades of farmwork and her face was no less weather-beaten than it would be twenty years later; anyone not from a farm like hers would assume her to be a frail old woman, and she felt safe behind her misleading appearance.

  They did not find me in time to take me along. A four-year-old on a farm could be playing in a dozen different places, and it was crucial for the two younger women—my mother and Aunt Zenzi, who carried my brother—to reach the cave. The fieldhands trotted behind them, and Grandfather followed last, carrying his two most reliable rifles. The men hid because they expected an approaching enemy army to take even old and half-witted men prisoner. The women hid as women of a defeated country hide at the approach of a victorious army. Years later my mother told me how they had assured each other that I was cautious enough not to allow myself to be seen by uninvited strangers, which was true, and young enough (just as my grandmother considered herself old enough) to be of no interest to enemy soldiers, which was less true, as Austrians were to find out. The civilian population of those European countries taken over by the Russians for keeps would find out, in addition, that men can remain alive for two days while being roasted on a spit over an open fire, while death comes more slowly to naked women nailed through their palms to the side of a barn. But at the time, one did not yet conceive of such occurrences.

  It was a clear day. From the kitchen window my grandmother saw what her husband had seen from a lookout point above the farm, earlier. The Russians were coming, there was the first one. My grandmother watched him trudge up the steep path, plod through the yard, stop at the water trough, and yank off his helmet. When he tilted his head and held his open mouth under the stream of water, she saw that he was at most eighteen, the age her youngest had been five years ago, the boy who had gone from being a shy and graceless child to being a shy and graceless recruit to being blown into pieces two weeks and one day into the war. The same hair, a dull blond that turns muddy gray when dirty and translucent gray when wet, only to brighten again into a flat yellow without a hint of gloss.

  When he looked up from the well he saw her. He pulled the helmet down over his wet forehead and walked up the stone steps like a man twice his age and bulk. The dog barked but did not impede the soldier’s progress, marking it instead, jumping up at him once on every step, its front paws on the young man’s chest, gleeful.

  He motioned my grandmother aside with his rifle and preceded her into the kitchen, speaking in what seemed an official tone. She shook her head. He unleashed a row of growls and she shrugged and shook her head again.

  His rifle at the ready he searched the house. A lunge into the grandparents’ bedroom and a running leap into the room holding sacks of grain, spinning wheels, and a loom seemed to reassure him; he mounted the staircase at the end of the hallway almost leisurely. Upstairs, he can only have taken a glance at the small bedrooms and the open area where old tools stood against sloping walls and the fieldhand straw sacks lay on the floor in each of the far corners. He lumbered downstairs again and did not notice me, cowering underneath the staircase against the stone wall, next to an exhausted cat giving birth to the last of a litter of seven.

  Back in the kitchen he leaned his rifle against the wall, dropped his backpack onto the floor, and threw his helmet on the large, scrubbed-white wooden table with a clatter. He shaped his left hand into a shallow bowl, held it below his mouth, and made spooning motions with his right. His eyes, their lower halves white, were raised at the woman standing across from him, while his neck was bent forward sharply at the angle of a dog’s. Neither of the adults noticed me. I had crept from under the stairwell toward the kitchen and crouched, concealed behind a stack of wood, next to the stove.

  My grandmother took an egg from a basket at her feet. I had collected them earlier; there had been thirteen. She held up the egg and the soldier nodded and thrust up both hands, fingers spread into fans. “Ten!” said my grandmother sharply. “Nobody eats ten eggs in my house, not even a Russian.” She took a second egg from the basket and held both aloft, then three, next four, two each poised precariously in either palm. The soldier stood with his legs spread wide, splayed fingers above his head, grinning broadly.

  When she continued to display only four eggs while shaking her head, he dropped his arms. With three steps he was at her side, plucked at the basket, strode back to the table. A fawn-brown ivory-speckled egg, a slender piece of straw stuck to its side, wobbled gently on the tabletop. Snatching up his rifle and walking rapidly backward, the soldier put as much distance between himself and the table as the room allowed before aiming briefly, crouched low.

  The effect of the blast was mystery. No fragments of shell were to be seen, no oozing yolk, no smears of transparent white anywhere, the egg had vanished. The soldier advanced on my grandmother, who laid the four eggs she had been holding into a pan at the back of the stove and covered her face with her arms. But he slung the rifle over his shoulder, merely picked up the basket of eggs, gathered the hem of her apron into his fist and carefully set eight eggs into the hollow. He dropped the empty basket, retrieved two more eggs from the pan, added them to the eight others, curled my grandmother’s right hand around the gathered folds of fabric, and, grinning, repeated his gesture of one cupped hand below his chin, the other shoveling rapidly.

  My grandmother knelt down before him. Without looking up, she transferred the eggs in her apron back into the basket. The soldier took the rifle off his shoulder once more and aimed at my grandmother’s forehead. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, drew one corner of her mouth far into the cheek beside it, and laid one hand flat on top of the unheated stove—now at the height of her chin—while pointing at the wood stacked next to the stove with the other.

  He failed to grasp her meaning. He took one more step, so that the gun touched the skin between my grandmother’s eyes. She thwacked the stovetop with her flat hand, then tapped a sharp forefinger to her temple twice, before pointing at him. The soldier looked from the cold stove to the old woman, back to the stove, and then at the wood. He broke into guffaws, returned to the table, carelessly dropped his rifle and sat down on a bench, his legs stretched into the room.

  My grandmother stoked the stove and lit the kindling. Then she dragged a chair across the floor and sat down, a distance from the intruder. They both watched the stove while I watched them. I knew that my grandmother had seen me while preparing the fire and I felt calmed by this knowledge.

  Not much later she set a frying pan onto the stove, slid lard off a knife into the pan, and broke ten eggs into the melted lard, setting the shells aside in a neat row. After some stirring she heaped the contents of the pan into a bowl, which she set onto the table along with the heel of a loaf of bread, a jug of home-pressed cider, and an enameled tin mug.

  The soldier’s face, a ridge from the helmet still embedded in his forehead, looked tired, but he pivoted sharply on his seat, set his boots down loudly under the table, and bent over the bowl. My grandmother sat down on the far end of the same bench, with her back to the table. She faced in the direction of my hiding place while watching the soldier out of the corner of her eyes.

  When he was halfway through his meal she took her youngest son’s induction photograph off the wall at arm’s reach to her right, and held it toward the boy. He looked up, nodded, and drank the rest of his cider. She refilled his mug and pointed at the photograph, at the cider-drinking soldier, at his gun on the floor. Then she cocked one arm and stretched out the other, pretending to hold a rifle herself, and imitated gunshot sounds. They were louder than any noise I had heard my grandmoth
er make.

  The volley ended abruptly. She threw up her arms and fell back, her head hitting the table with a thud, her eyes shut, her mouth open. An instant later she jumped up again, her arms positioned once more as if holding a gun, her throat breaking into explosions, arms flailing, the collapse against the table more vehement than before. I covered my mouth. When my grandmother began to shoot a third time, the soldier, who had been watching her poses openmouthed, looked over his shoulder and once all around the room and then put his hand on my grandmother’s arm. She sat up immediately and calmly pointed once more at the soldier, at his gun, and at the photograph of my dead uncle.

  This time he studied the photograph at length before looking up at her and nodding several times. He watched her turn away from him and hang the picture on its nail, quickly and askew. Then he bent down again over his meal and finished the second mug of cider. Eventually he pushed away the bowl, still one-quarter full, and put his arms onto the table and his head down on his arms.

  As soon as he had begun to breathe regularly, my grandmother motioned in my direction. Together we ate the lukewarm eggs. “Such a waste,” she whispered, “wasting food like this.” We wiped the bowl clean with crusts of bread, and I crept back to the woodpile without having to be told.

  After what seemed a long time, my grandmother edged down the bench toward the sleeping soldier until they sat side by side. The boy shifted his weight several times, his face nearly touched her arm. My grandmother continued to look across his head at the windowless wall behind the stove. The dog, stretched flat beneath the table, twitched its tail at circling flies, the soldier snoring faintly now, his hair dry again and a flat yellow.