Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Page 15

  Something startled him later, it was almost dark, and he grabbed his rifle and helmet and ran down the steps outside the house and down the path between the fields.

  It turned out that a Russian regiment had passed through, much farther south, and a few soldiers had become separated from the rest on their long march through the woods. There was little to laugh at that summer, and the lost Russian became a joke on farms as far away as the next province.

  Chapter 68

  My father had disappeared, “in the countryside,” as my mother put it. She would light the oil lamp and hold my hand, but neither she nor anyone else asked me why I screamed, night after night. Whatever had occurred remained nameless. Just as none of the adults around me had discussed the war during its duration—not, at any rate, in front of me—none of them bothered to mention that it was over. If they spoke at all, they might briefly remark on the waning health of a cow, or comment on which one among them would be missed least during the next day’s work; someone had to walk the two hours to the village to buy salt, the one item that kept the farm from being self-sufficient. When I asked my grandmother whether my father was dead and would the rest of us die too, she replied, “I’m beginning to think that the brown-speckled hen has switched to laying at the far end of the hayloft,” the longest sentence I have ever heard her say.

  Chapter 69

  By the autumn of 1945 we were back in Graz, my brother was well, and a man who passed himself off as my father—not a policeman but a locksmith whom, it seemed, I could please by learning a poem—was part of our lives.

  Since we returned to live in our old apartment (not by ourselves, of course, there were the Lehmanns; still, our address, available to anyone who might have cared, continued to be Polizeisiedlung 56) and since no one ever interrogated or pursued my father, I have wondered why he bothered to hide at all. It is only from relatives’ guarded references that I have come to assume that the manner—whatever it was—in which he spent much of the summer of 1945 may not have been prompted by internal reasons, known only to him, alone.

  “Armed bands were roving the streets, things were in flux,” says an aunt.

  “If the cop in the apartment next door had been keeping his radio on ‘high,’ ” says one of my uncles, “well, now you had a chance to get even. Denouncing an SS man was easy.” The edge in his calm voice—topic closed; over and out—is as familiar to me as the slant of my hipbone.

  A different uncle smiles, lights yet another Camel, and says, “Maybe he just didn’t want to talk to anybody for a while.”

  “Why Camels?” I ask.

  He tells me he came to like them as a prisoner of war. “The Americans weren’t brutes, you understand, there just wasn’t any food, some shipments had gone wrong, the guards were short on rations themselves. But thanks to an American Ladies’ Club, the camp was knee-deep in Camels. Until the food started trickling in, they let us chain-smoke all day long.”

  Chapter 70

  All around us that fall, two families were settling into one apartment. The identical layout of these apartments prompted dozens of families to divide the available space identically, in the manner that made most sense for all concerned.

  The front door opened onto a narrow, L-shaped hallway, ending at the toilet door. To the left of the toilet was a bathroom, containing a sink and tub. Also off the short arm of the L was a small room; my brother and I had slept in that. First off the long arm of the L had been my parents’ bedroom, next to it my father’s study; last—or first, as you came in the front door—was the living room, across from that the kitchen.

  All around us, then, families decided to split the number of bedrooms between them, and to use such facilities as did not lend themselves to division—kitchen, bath, toilet—communally.

  My father, granting up front that there was nothing to be done about the toilet, proceeded to tell the astonished Lehmanns that two families, forced to cook and eat in a single kitchen, would slay one another, and soon. He was short with words, black with grime, grim-faced. The Lehmanns saw his point. My father converted the bathroom into a makeshift kitchen and gave them a choice. Did they want to take the larger kitchen and walk through our side each time they went to the toilet? Or would they prefer to have the toilet on their side, make do with the smaller kitchen, and be obliged to walk through our half of the apartment when going out or coming home? They wisely chose to stick close to the toilet.

  My father built a crude but solid door and installed it across the hallway. All eight of us—the two Lehmann boys paralleled my brother’s age and mine—washed at our respective kitchen sinks. I soon remembered the original apartment only dimly.

  Chapter 71

  It was early in the morning, nearly dawn, a year ago now, almost spring, I had worked thirty-two hours in a row, one day sliding into the next, I was utterly exhausted, I needed to go to sleep.

  But not yet.

  I had discovered that if I exhausted myself beyond a limit (its location in time was always elusive and unpredictable, yet precise once I had transgressed it) I could enter a landscape of sensation unlike any I knew.

  There was emptiness. But there was also clarity, a fierceness of vision, the white of a piece of paper and the black of my typewriter engaged in so luminous a contrast that the page before me appeared as if rimmed by a halo.

  There was the urge to sleep, which translated into the kind of ache associated with an ordinary flu. But what mattered was only what I was able to tell myself, then, and that I was able to convert what I was able to tell myself, then, into pitch-black letters on paper so bright it dazzled. There was no “thinking.” All I did was feel. Full-time. Soon I’d be asleep. But before falling asleep, and for a short while only, I was afforded a glimpse worth staying awake for, beyond sense and reason. All other times my censors were far too efficient. They stomped out danger before it had the chance even to throw its shadow around a corner of my brain.

  I felt: The legacy of the Holocaust has destroyed my father. I felt: The legacy of the Holocaust has irreparably damaged my mother’s life. I felt: The legacy of the Holocaust has tarnished me beyond all methods of cleansing. I felt: I hate the guts of every Jew alive.

  There was a typing error in each word by then, but I could not quite yet give in and lie down and drop off. When I’d wake up, I would, once again, disavow every word of this, possibly it would all be illegible, I had already done one paragraph with each of my fingers shifted over by one key. But I had to write about this then, while all my defenses had folded up their tents, while my ever-present censors had nodded off ahead of me, then, while the computer had shifted into downtime. What was awake and ablaze was a moonscape unsullied by logic, fairness, civilization.

  I knew all about my conflicting feelings then, my anti-Semitism, and this was it: “The memory of . . . no, they can’t take that away from me.”

  It was simple. If I detested anti-Semitism with my brain and soul, I had to distance myself from my parents to a degree unbearable for me. So I detested anti-Semitism with my brain alone.

  In a crib-shaped recess within me, a child so small that it had yet to cross over into the kingdom of language had aligned itself with its almighty, adored parents; aligned itself with, and taken in, all whispers and shapes, all tastes, all silences, hums and glances, all colors, melodies, gestures and scents, lavished by these parents on their child; had taken them in, and on. A child holding hands, having its hands held; one small hand encircled by the large, warm hand of one parent, a second small hand enfolded in the large, warm hand of the other parent. A permanent allegiance, the most primitive holding-on—detestable, horrendous, pick the synonym of your choice—which linked me to my dead parents, to their dead parents, to their dead grandparents.

  Had I no better links than this? Yes, and many. But anti-Semitism was one.

  “It’s up to you,” I said, out loud. “If you want to be free of all that, you’d be free of your parents, too.” But I did not want to be free of m
y parents. I did not. I did not, please, not that, I did not. Had I not observed every decency anyone, myself included, could possibly expect of me? Not a trace of an anti-Semitic slur out of me, ever, I neither spoke evil nor did I tolerate hearing it, my secret ballast hurt no one but me, it had become impossible to type, it was time to go to bed.

  Chapter 72

  From the summer of 1947 through the autumn of 1950 my mother was confined to bed with a chronic kidney infection. At first, different relatives took in my brother and me. But I was no longer the amenable toddler who had seemed, on the whole, unscathed by new surroundings. Now, being away from home made me relentlessly weepy, a bother. Ernsti was as cheerful as I was sour, a little charmer, all were agreed on that. But he was extraordinarily curious as well, mischievous, reckless, and impossible to keep track of. Soon, both of us ended up back home. My father bought groceries during his lunch break, cooked for us all at night, and washed clothes and staircases. After some months it became too much for him. From then on, and until my mother was well, my parents employed a series of maids.

  This idea had at first been rejected, not because of a maid’s salary (which barely bought the stamps for her letters home) but because a maid needed room and board. “Board” was difficult, “room” seemed impossible. My brother and I had been sleeping in what had once been my father’s study, my parents in the adjoining former living room, now my mother’s sickroom as well.

  What had once been my father’s study, and more recently my brother’s room and mine, now became the maid’s. Ernsti’s crib was pushed up against the footboards of my parents’ double beds. I, at least in theory, slept between my parents, on a blanket that had been stuffed into the narrow gap separating their mattresses. In practice, this blanket formed a slight ridge, causing me to roll down into one or the other of the two beds just before I fell asleep. I liked alternating between my two valleys.

  The maids were seventeen or eighteen, girls off a farm, their first time away from home. They had, of course, done housework for years, but they had not washed dishes under running water or cooked with electricity. My supine mother, who had once been such a girl herself, taught them how to make beds with mattresses instead of straw sacks, how to do the laundry, what to look for while selecting the daily groceries, and how to prepare those groceries to her specifications. She was sometimes in severe pain and always uncomfortable, she was bitterly unhappy over her enforced and seemingly endless immobility, she was in her midthirties and had not been ill before.

  Every few weeks or months I watched my mother cry, a maid leave, a new one arrive, and my mother cry, and that maid leave. One, with brown hair and dark eyes, broke a plate. My mother scolded her. The girl took the money she had in an envelope, what was left of the train fare she had been given to get to our house, and bought—perhaps defiantly—the most beautiful plate she could find, small roses along a gold-rimmed border. My mother scolded her again, probably out of helplessness. She surely knew long before I did that her husband was sleeping with this one, too. The maid cried.

  Chapter 73

  I am about to walk into the kitchen in my stocking feet. The door is only leaning against the frame, it opens quietly. Without crossing the threshold I can see the coat rack against the wall, three hooks at the top for hats, a mirror below the hooks, and a small drawer at the height of adults’ waists that holds our family’s odds and ends: bobby pins, thumbtacks, a crumpled bank note with many zeros, shoestrings. The maid stands before the mirror, her cheeks are wet and puffy, she is combing her hair. My father stands behind her. His left hand is on her shoulder, close to her neck, his right hand touches her hand that holds the comb. Its pointed teeth are poised in midair.

  I was unable to go to sleep that night. My father, who most often went out, had stayed at home. He was reading the paper in the kitchen. I turned off the bedroom light, said good night to my mother, and settled down on my ridge. After some time there was the sound of the kitchen door being opened and closed, his five steps down the hallway—no tiptoes—and the opening and closing of the maid’s-room door. My brother let out a small cry in his sleep, and my mother and I started in unison. I remembered what I had learned playing hide-and-seek. When the child who is looking for you has ventured close to your hiding place, and the thrill of the game makes a deafening, rushing-water noise in your ears, you breathe through your mouth; this makes your own breath inaudible, clears your head of inner noise, and sharpens your hearing. As soon as I began to breathe this way, I realized that my mother was doing the same. Together we listened to the sounds made by my father, the maid, and their bed.

  Until my mother was well (the maids, if not yet my father’s affairs, came to an end; their room and bed became mine), I stayed awake until he had gone to sleep. That he always returned to his bed for this purpose is cause for gratitude; had he made a habit of staying out all night, I might have slept through third and fourth grade.

  I did not roll down my ridge into his bed again, and I refused to eat in the kitchen with my brother, the maid, and him. Furious that a child would pass up food he worked very hard to provide, he had me sit before untouched meals long into the night. I had the advantages of being anemic and of having a mother who cried at my refusal to eat. After three weeks he gave in. I ate at her nightstand instead. Until my divorce, this instance would remain the one time I disobeyed him.

  But as soon as he visited each new maid, I began to imitate her gestures, voice, and walk; sometimes, staring at his back, I felt my heart knock loudly in my throat.

  Chapter 74

  I am ten, my mother and I are on our way back from the grocery store, shopping with her is still a treat for me, she has only recently been well enough to leave the house. She interrupts a recital of what she would like to buy at the butcher if given a choice, and what we would, in fact, be able to afford, to say under her breath, between a whisper and a hiss, “Across the street. Don’t stare. She’s the latest one.”

  It is a young woman with black hair. She wears fragile high heels on a winter afternoon, there are mud flecks on slender, stockinged ankles, the curve of white cheek nestled in fur. No hat, snowflakes on glossy black.

  Never before have my mother and I exchanged so much as a glance, acknowledging to one another what both of us knew. Now I pretend not to have heard her.

  “The latest” was the last. My father found a job in a factory, joined a handful of laborers who “got together after work, pretending to be a brass band,” multiplied the number of musicians, started a second group, and ended up with a large and raucously cheerful band as well as an orchestra of respectable size before buying his plot of land. Then he put conducting aside, too.

  Chapter 75

  M eine grosse Liebe,” she tells me—my great love. I am in Austria on a visit, married, two children. “Now, now, Mutti,” I say and smile and think, Schmalz, the stuff of magazine stories for women of her time. But she repeats, “He was my great love, and he is, and he will always be my great love.”

  The last part of her sentence silenced me, even then, at a time when I still saw myself as happily married. Now I think, To say that and to mean it is a statement of sweep; who among my friends would speak in such terms about a husband, a wife, a lover? “We’ve been lucky until now.” “Let’s hope for the best.” “Knock on wood.” “So far, so good.” My friends and I substitute one of these cautious formulas for the last item on my mother’s trinity, we stay away from theological language, absolutist language, conviction, faith.

  “Come on,” I said back then. “Think about who you’re talking to. I was around, remember? Don’t tell me it was all roses, you must have hated him, too. Didn’t you? Never? Just temporarily? After all, if even I knew about his . . . women.”

  “You don’t know,” she said, and then, “What do you know?”

  “I wasn’t blind,” I said. “And my hearing was fine, too.”

  “You don’t know how he cared for me during—”

  “Oh, you’re w
rong,” I said. “I do know all that, washing you and whatever, but what does that have to do with it?”

  “You know so little,” she said. “And all the wrong things. I urinated into a mason jar, and he held it against the light, morning and night, nearly three years. He saved my life more than once. He got so good at it, he came to know two days in advance when things were turning bad again, he’d run to the doctor with the jar in a paper bag, holding it as if it were his own blood. Just because of a different shade, a change of smell. It meant nothing to me or a doctor—they needed lab tests first—but he could tell. The doctors were amazed by him, they told me so. Whenever I had to go back to the hospital it was only for a few days, he always caught a flare-up of the infection before it got to be a disaster. Washing your wife is one thing, and even that gets to be a dreary business. But what man do you know who checks his sick wife’s urine every day?”

  She waited for an answer. “His women—” My mother, who gestured rarely, lifted her right forearm into the air, the sleeve of her housedress fell back, she bent her wrist just barely, as if she meant to wave aside a small fly. “He stood by me and took care of me, a tedious and unappetizing sickness, not picturesque like a case of consumption or pneumonia, over in three weeks or months. Would your husband do it for you?”

  She waited again. “Besides, all you know about his affairs is that they happened. All you know is the obvious. There is more to people than that.”