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

  Chapter 76

  I detested and adored my father while he was alive and I still do, I feared, admired, envied, and loved him and I still do, though the maggots must surely be done with him by now. I miss and only miss my mother.

  I’m in the bomb shelter, my mother has disappeared, a woman I do not know holds my hand, she speaks in a cheerful voice, “ . . . strewed bread crumbs, wasn’t that clever?” But I already know that birds will eat the crumbs. I should also know that Hänsel and Gretel live happily ever after, but now I cannot remember how the story ends. I only know that they are lost, alone in the woods, in the dark, Mutti, Mutti, Mutti. . . . “You just can’t see her right now, because of the crowd,” says the woman at my side. “Listen to the story, you’ll never guess what happens next.” But the stranger’s kindness only warms my hand.

  “She never talked about herself” is true. Also true is that I asked no questions. I was consumed with myself—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—after all, she had grown up in the sticks, how could she understand what my friends and I thought important, what did she know?

  Once I blurted out to her, “James Dean is the greatest actor in the world.” She looked up from her knitting machine and said, “When I was young, two different people told me that I looked like Ingrid Bergman . . . a little.” Then she finished the interrupted row.

  At least she was spared the expression on my face. I looked at her thickening neck—it was mottled; she was blushing—at her heavy body in its housedress and apron, at her gray hair tucked out of the way with no design in mind, a bobby pin about to come loose. Ingrid Berman, I thought, how deluded can one poor woman get?

  Another time I decided to treat her to a rousing synopsis of the movie just then holding my friends and me in thrall. I had barely sketched a few scenes when she said, “I think I am getting confused.” A little while later she smiled. “You really like this movie, don’t you?” I nodded, impatient and annoyed, and went on. Before I was halfway through she said, “What a complicated story.”

  I said, “I’ll do my homework at Ilse’s house,” and left.

  Most of our discussions of this movie took place during religious education class. Our professor taught Gymnasium pupils during the day and courses at the university at night; half an hour into a class, and continuing to sit straight-necked behind his desk, he would close his eyes. Though we knew that to raise our voices above a whisper was a waste of precious time—he would blink his puffy lids then and read a parable out loud before resuming his nap—this particular discussion awoke our priest for weeks. One group insisted that its hero was sensitively handsome, truly romantic, a poet of the heart; the others would hiss, “But he’s such a creep! God, all I ever want out of life is Rhett!”

  Twenty years later, watching the very same Rhett on television in New York, I keep thinking how much I’d rather listen to Mammy scold Scarlett in German.

  Chapter 77

  I decide to “do my face.” It is a break in my routine, no more, no less, since once again no one will see me except the doorman, when I go downstairs to get the mail. I wash my face with a special, overpriced soap, after oiling it with a special, overpriced oil. Fourteen, fifteen, maybe she watched children. I spread a special, overpriced cream on my oiled and washed face, then remove the cream with a liquid that, by the looks of it, might be water. Always liked school, but she hired herself out as a Saudirn. I put rouge on my cheeks, I push my hair off my forehead, she used to do that, it was the closest she came to caressing me.

  This is how genes work, at their simplest and most predictable: my father had black hair, my mother was blond, here I am, mine’s brown. Except that my brother inherited my mother’s coloring undiluted by my father’s, and he devotes his life to music.

  “Not guitar,” my father said to him, early on. “Any instruments you want, just not guitar.” But Ernsti was unlike me and undaunted by my father. Much later, he ran off to London with a female colleague, another musician. He was married by then and lived upstairs in my parents’ house with his wife and two children. After a few weeks he came back. My father stood in the doorway, greeting him with the words, “You will not enter my house again.” I would have turned on my heel. But my brother said, “What are you talking about? I live here,” and walked past my father through the door and down the hallway.

  To me, the astonished onlooker, Ernest-Werner Seiler had always seemed able to bypass our father. As a boy he practiced the violin at home but plucked on a friend’s guitar, in friends’ basements, for hours, for months. He learned to play the guitar as my father had learned to play French horn and tuba and whatever else, on borrowed instruments. Eventually he swapped something—bicycle parts?—for a guitar of his own, practicing often and never at home. When he had taught himself what he considered enough for the purpose, he began to give lessons, charging money to be spent on a better guitar, then a better one yet. Failing one subject in school this year, a different one the year after, yet another Gymnasium throwing him out, the reason always the same: “insubordination.”

  At nineteen he took a teaching job in a country school. I have a photograph of him posing with his class, he looks sixteen, there are nearly forty children. Smiling country girls wearing Dirndl outfits or aprons over their round-collared blouses, a few of the boys mug for the camera. He stuck it out for a couple of years, then went on the road with a band, singing American rock lyrics, playing Beatle songs on the guitar, good money. In off hours he practiced sixteenth-century rondos, flamenco. Later yet he began, on weekdays, to amass the courses and exams that would allow him to teach music at a university, financing his studies through weekend rock band excursions—“Groupies, it was fun.”

  Now, in addition to teaching music full-time, he is working toward the exams that will make him a conductor. Officially, that is; he’s had years of unofficial experience conducting various student orchestras. Being able to play the piano is, so he explains to me, one of the skills required of a conductor, and he fears the piano exam. My father (who regretted that he had never mastered the piano himself) was furious at my brother’s refusal to play the piano, but he could only pressure his daughter into taking lessons on this particular instrument. At the time, the official violin and the secret guitar were enough for my brother, the piano seemed useless. “It’s hard,” he says now. “I started in my late twenties, there’s no catching up on a piano, the others started as kids, it’s a shame. . . .”

  Still, my brother has inherited and taken on the best in his father, along with the light hair, the flexibility, the cliché “Austrian” temperament of our mother. He is an easygoing man who enjoys a hearty meal with a gusto foreign to me, he is choosy about wines, he drinks good brandy in small amounts, he shuns affiliation with political parties, he is happy in Austria and intends to stay there. A handsome, big man who takes just the right pause before the punch line in the jokes he loves to tell and who exuberantly fingers the dashboard of his new car, aglitter with knobs, “What a toy, what a gorgeous toy.”

  My brother’s passions, though they sometimes conflict, are well defined: music, his family, comfort, Austria. The larger half of his inheritance was spent on the apartment in which he and his family now live, but part of it immediately went into a plot of land, not large but very pretty. Half an hour’s driving distance from Graz, it slopes down a hill, improbably and overwhelmingly giving the illusion of undiscovered territory, bright with wild flowers among high grass.

  My share has gone to pay off debts—no small matter that. It had come to a point where I could no longer manage, here in New York. My brother pleaded with me to come home, an untenable solution for me. So he sold the house. It grieved him, though he denied it to me at the time and still does. What was left after the debts were paid went into wallpaper for my room, having a flaking bathroom painted glossy white. There is a sum put away for my daughter; by the time she will need it for college tuition it may not cover a semester’s worth of study. And for a few months there was a high t
hree-figure amount in my checking account—luxury.

  That’s where it went, Seiler’s Bunker, the house he built brick by brick. That’s where it went after the fixtures and plumbing of the second kitchen had been torn out, an extra kitchen being an impediment to a sale, an additional bedroom representing yet one more plus. While he put all those thousands and thousands of bricks onto wet mortar, did my father see us there, the two of us—the two of them dead as they are now—my brother and me, one of us living downstairs using the downstairs kitchen, the other one a flight above, using the second one? A fortress to cement his family together, intended for our protection, impenetrable; grandchildren under the apple trees he planted, safe behind a high fence, a locked gate? Now his son lives in a comfortable apartment on the other side of town, though he devotes his life to music as his father might have wished to do, and he does own a plot of land, which might be of consolation to both his parents. The other one is a stranger to Austria, has no creditors for the time being, and rents a room in New York. The fortress came to little in the end.

  Chapter 78

  I put a dusting of overpriced powder on my forehead and nose, always liked school, eyebrow pencil, lipstick. She was alone in Vienna at fourteen, and he rolled off a set of tracks and ran. But the army liked him for his versatility as a musician, and one of his children, at least, has stepped into those footsteps, though his daughter is unable to pick out a tune on the piano he made her take lessons on for three years. I hum along with the radio, by myself, and I loved singing nursery songs to my children, they did not care how far off pitch I was. My claim on music is a worn satchel filled with fragments. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the shiny star of the lot, nudges up against “I can’t get no, I can’t get no . . .” The schlockiest parts of Die Fledermaus jostle Beethoven’s Für Elise, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong crooning “A foggy day . . .” and “Stars fell on Alabama . . . ,” a little David Bowie, Randy Newman. (The relief of walking out of Lincoln Center in the middle of the first act of a Wagner thing, to the dismay of a friend who had reserved our tickets months in advance and then would not stop telling me how gloriously the Rhine swamps the stage in the third act.) A pop song lilts at the bottom. My mother sang it in the forties and long into the fifties, when it had not been on the radio for more than a decade.

  Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei,

  Auf jeden Dezember folgt wieder ein Mai . . .

  something like, “Everything passes, everything comes to an end, each December is followed by another May.” Soldiers listened to it on field radios and hummed it, dug first into frozen mud, then deeply into snow, before Stalingrad. Women sang it on assembly lines in munitions factories and while concocting birthday cakes for their children according to newspaper recipes telling them how to shape mashed potatoes into icing. That song, equally banal in lyrics and melody, comforts me, as does my mother’s most Carinthian of folksongs, its lyrics improbable as balm, “Forsaken, forsaken, I’m as forsaken as a pebble in the middle of the road.” But the words mean as little as those of that other song, “Raise high the flags.” And the first few bars of my father’s favorite march, played by the Americans in 1955, at the ceremony dreamed up by the four occupiers, when they were ready to leave us after all. The three other military bands had played their own anthems, but the Americans had played the “Star-Spangled Banner” and then Strauss’s “Radetzky March,” “a nice touch,” the newspapers called it. The bottom of my satchel is reserved for the waltz whose Austrian name proved too long for an impatient translator, its full name, as given by its composer, being “An der schönen, blauen Donau.”

  Chapter 79

  W hat will I wear, is my first thought. Andy has invited me to his Bar Mitzvah. Two days before the event I call his mother. She tells me she has bought a special dress, but that anything short of jeans will do for me.

  Though the synagogue is only a block away, I leave fifteen minutes early, get there in three, and am late after all. Something is clearly in progress. A man at the far end of a long room is chanting. Andy and his family are sitting up front, a few other people are sprinkled here and there. Confused, I tiptoe to a chair in the middle of the last row.

  As soon as I am seated, an elderly man who has been standing near the doorway walks down my row, nods, smiles, and hands me an open book. I nod and smile in return and bend my head over the pages. But while the text is printed in both Hebrew and English, the chanting is only in Hebrew. I read the English passages and turn to a different page as soon as its number is announced. I am clumsy at finding a new section, and, maddeningly, not just the first time around. The page numbers run backward. Soon I would rather look around. I lay the book on my lap and let the next page change go by. At once, a different gray-haired man makes his way down my row and finds my page for me. Flustered, a first-grader caught daydreaming, I manage to hold the book open at the correct place, stealthily looking up between page calls. Andy is wearing a black-and-gold yarmulke.

  More people file in, now there are a few in almost every row. The rows consist of metal chairs upholstered in red vinyl, the carpet running down the center aisle is equally red, the walls are bare. The man up front continues to sing. I am unable to pick out a melody or progression. It is a foreign fantasy tune, reminiscent of what my children sometimes sang themselves to sleep with, forlorn cadences going nowhere.

  I settle deeper into my chair which is, vinyl or not, more comfortable than a wooden pew. The behavior of this congregation is mysterious to someone used to a body of worshipers moving, in fact, as one body. (Before our wedding, the groom had reassured a nervous, and Baptist, matron of honor that she would have no difficulties at all; she should simply imitate the best man at her side. When her neighbor’s left leg happened to go to sleep during a long period of kneeling, the matron of honor had reproduced each of his attempts at arising, each little thump back down, the grasping of a knee in both hands, the massaging of a calf, each surreptitious shake of a leg. They had been at the altar rail up front, in full view of a congregation marveling in silence.)

  This group has no truck with uniform responses. Are individual people intoning the same text as the cantor, but trailing him by a couple of words so that the overlap makes it sound as if they are chanting a different passage? Or are they chanting a different passage? Or are they really reciting elaborate rejoinders? There is an informality about this intoning, a randomness, none of the orderly alternation of priest-people, priest-priest, and people-priest. A man who has been standing and chanting emphatically sits down, crosses his legs, closes his book. A second one stands, reading silently. A seated woman now and then says a few words to herself in a low voice. Amazing, I think, Christians behave like sheep in comparison. Well, that is what we’re supposed to be, “The Lord is my . . .” What these worshipers seem to be doing, as observed by an uninitiate, is improvising rituals on the spot; it strikes me as inviting, at least in principle, though this whole thing does go on a bit, what has it been now, an hour?

  But now Andy is standing up front, he begins his chant. I know this boy’s voice well, and what it sounds like in a range of moods, but I have not heard this voice before. It is far stronger than I have expected, deeper than usual, utterly self-assured. He’s great, I think, the kid’s great, and after all his fretting, “The easy part’s in big print, would you believe it, and the hard part’s in little print. . . .” There is a tap on my shoulder. A round-faced, middle-aged woman says, and not in a whisper at all, “I wish somebody’d push his hair out of his eyes, don’t you?” Just then, a man in the row ahead of me picks up his book, leafs through it noisily, and begins to read out loud, lagging a syllable or so behind Andy, producing an infuriating, rumbling echo. Some nerve, I think, as a second man begins to intone as well and a third. All this time they’ve refused to do anything in unison; now that it’s his big moment they feel compelled to join in? But Andy does not seem to hear them. He neither wavers nor stumbles once, no wonder he was nervous, I think, this
thing is endless.

  His speech comes next.

  “I thank this congregation for being here. I am glad to be Bar Mitzvahed. I am happy to be a Jew. Thank you.”

  This is the greatest speech I’ve ever heard, I think, and deeply bend my head, for some minutes unable to suppress my smile.

  Half a dozen sentences into the rabbi’s sermon I am impressed and touched. It is a sermon tailor-made for Andy. Sci-fi stuff, astronauts, lunar visions, the triumphs of technology, Sarah the center of a moon cult, Abraham embracing monotheism, astronauts again, Andy is leaning forward in his chair. Conscious, suddenly, of feeling not a shred of animosity within me, I try to dredge some up. No success. I quickly squelch my surprise. You’re on a field trip here, remember? This is not real life. A pleasant exercise in “contrast and compare,” complete with the dilettante anthropologist’s edge of benign superiority, aren’t the natives’ customs quaint? The sermon is longer than Andy’s chant. I crave a cigarette.

  Now there is something like a hymn after all, sung loudly and communally. For the first time since the beginning of this service I am aware of the absence of organ music. Fine, I think, a sign of good taste, it’s a toss-up between organs and bagpipes for most obnoxious instrument. But incense, come to think of it, I could do with some of that, the sweep of a censer on thin, gold chains, gray-blue smoke blurring the altar, making you squint, filling your nostrils with its heavy, voluptuous smell. All at once I am weary of sitting in such a brightly lit room, no shadowy recesses anywhere, no dark, wooden confessionals, nooks for competing saints painted in faded colors and gilt, the opulent gleam of brocade and gold chalices, dust particles afloat in muted shafts of light tinted by stained glass, convoluted crossbeams of stone way up high; lighting a votive candle on tiptoes, “Holy Mary, please, if you . . . I’ll never talk back to my mother again.”