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

  My father, who had made good on his word not to speak to me, held firm. There was no response from him to my telegram telling him about the death of his grandson. Seven months later my mother died of cancer; my father, four months after that, of a heart attack.

  Chapter 13

  I am reading Adolf Hitler by John Toland. It’s my very first effort at tackling this massive subgenre of literature, this Hitler-market fodder, and the going is tedious. Every step, every half step, every two-inch shuffle of history is set forth with equally loving patience. I am on page 307, alternately squeezing my eyes shut and opening them wide, in an effort to stay awake: “ . . . far beyond the required two-thirds majority with 441 for the bill, 94 against—the National Socialists leaped to their feet cheering . . . then with hands outstretched they sang the ‘Horst Wessel Song’:

  “Raise high the flags! Stand rank and rank together,

  Storm troopers march with steady, quiet tread. . . .”

  Jesus, I think, bored and irritated, what a harebrained song—that must have been quite a melody to go with “rank and rank” and “steady tread”—but in mid-thought my forehead breaks out in sweat. “Die Fahnen hoch,” someone croons, “die Reihen fest geschlossen . . .” words devoid of meaning, a familiar succession of vowels and softly smudged Austrian consonants, “SA marschiert . . .” intensely, powerfully moving. There’s no need for me to wonder about the melody. I know the melody, “ . . . mit ruhigem, festen Schritt,” a lovely melody, simple as the folk songs my mother used to hum while peeling potatoes.

  So did she hum this one, too? I sit up straight and try to read some more and can’t. I dial the first two digits of a friend’s number, then remember it’s three in the morning and spitefully drop the receiver into its cradle from a height of two feet, watch it jump, listen to it clatter. I rotate my head, brushing each shoulder with my chin and cheeks in turn. The maneuvers don’t work. I am shaken as one is shaken when a brick lands on a sidewalk, missing one’s head by a hundredth of a second, by a tenth of an inch. I am helplessly beside myself, enraged: What the hell is going on, where the hell did this come from, who the hell sang this song to me and when, when, when?

  Nobody in Austria sang the “Horst Wessel Lied” after 1945. So it must have been before then. Was I one and a half? Two? Three? How can a song pop up like that, words and melody complete, and not just any song, either! What is all this junk mired in my brain, hovering, and why can’t it come out, finally, all in one lump, or stay away from me, leave me alone, leave me? “SA marschiert. . . .” Who lulled me to sleep with songs about marching storm troopers, before the age of four?

  Chapter 14

  I don’t remember how old I was when I first became aware of having an Uncle Eduard. Trying to recall what words were used to describe him (“he is out of our lives,” “we don’t mention his name,” “that unspeakable, that no-good bum”) I realize I am merely fabricating phrases.

  There was, at any rate, an uncle who owned a bakery in a village near the one in which he had been born. He had gone to America as a young man and had promised his favorite younger brother that he would send for him. Eduard had not “kept his word.” My betrayed father died true to his word, not to speak to his older brother again.

  In August 1977, during one of my visits to Austria, my brother and I sent him a card: We are your niece and nephew and would like to visit you next Sunday.

  We had no idea whether Uncle Eduard would even let us into his house. There had been no answer to the card. Our visit was a lark to us, a minor adventure. My brother driving too fast, telling jokes during the ride through the countryside: vineyards, tobacco fields, potato patches, the farmhouses closing in upon themselves, built around a central courtyard, scrabbling chickens and women hanging up laundry hidden from outsiders.

  He must have done all right. In the tradition of his village those who did all right in America returned to Austria. Those who did not stayed away, abandoned their families, vanished. Without admitting it to myself I expected an aged pirate, a grizzly renegade, the only family member besides myself to brave the New World. Had he traveled widely? Had he had a high time? Had he been to California, Alaska, New York? Conceivably he had fathered cousins of mine (a woman with my nose and chin, a man with my brother’s eyebrows) who now lived unbeknownst to me in Manhattan, around the corner, up the street.

  It was a sweltering afternoon, the village lay deserted, the shutters were closed on the bakery with his last name on a large sign. It thrilled me—extraordinarily, excessively—to see it spelled out like this, in public, my name too for half my life. And there he was, a fragile old man who cried throughout nearly our entire visit in his narrow, low-ceilinged kitchen.

  A distant relative, settling an old debt, had paid his passage. “What a stroke of luck, a great stroke of luck, America!” He had been homesick on his first day and during the ensuing weeks and months, but had assumed that the gnawing pain would disappear or at least lessen with time. It did not. After two years as a baker’s assistant in a town in New York State he gave up and went home. “I couldn’t eat. The homesickness made my body ache during the day and at night I couldn’t sleep.” After a few months at home he recovered his health, spent his American savings on yet another crossing, and worked in the same bakery for three more years until, again, he was too ill to continue. He went home, recovered, and returned to Binghamton, New York, to bake more bread, rolls, cakes, and doughnuts. After eight years and three starts he had saved enough money to buy into a small bakery at home. He had understood no English when he arrived in America and spoke very little when he left for good. He had scrimped miserably for eight years, he had made no friends. “It was the worst time of my life.” During the first few years he had been unable to scrape together the money for my father’s fare; later he had become determined that no one in his family should know how poorly he lived.

  Chapter 15

  Either/or, yes/no, black/white. Though I know such reactions well, finally, at the age of thirty-eight, all too often I cannot react differently.

  This slavery held my father captive all his life. No adjusting, no reconsidering, no slow disillusioning, no flexibility possible. A brother makes a promise and does not keep it—the reason is beside the point—is never to be spoken to again. A daughter who does not respond to her father’s demand to continue her marriage is no longer a daughter, and no matter what happens in her life, an undaughter stays dead. Former Nazi cops, dismissed along with my father in 1945, who are financially wise and politically astute and who possibly regret having been National Socialists, return a decade later to a police force that is ready to pardon and reinstate them. They are no longer among my father’s acquaintances, he himself declines the invitation to return to the force. Not because he still sees himself as a Nazi, not out of disregard for the police of Austria’s Second Republic, or for financial gain—he would have been far better paid as a cop—but from the conviction that a man of worth upholds only one Weltanschauung per life. Should this one creed go, as his did, a search for a new one was out of the question; all that remained was making do without a creed.

  For a lifetime my father lived as if driven by a machine with only an on/off switch governing emotion and brain, a switch, moreover, that worked only once for any human being or idea. There is a beloved brother, and then he is not. And he is not from then on—for one decade, for five, still not spoken to by a man of sixty-six because of a disappointment suffered half a century before. An inability to see any matter from another person’s point of view, not a refusal, an inability. An extreme world, none of the nuances of a more evolved manner of dealing with one’s life’s events, no shades of gray or mauve. Clear-cut, and the crippling cost in pain accepted as inevitable. All depths of disappointment can be suffered, all measures of loneliness endured, a man keeps his word. That’s what he died with, all those kept words.

  Chapter 16

  My son’s death could not break my father’s silence and I watched my u
ncle cry, an old man recounting how a lifelong separation had come about. Both times, so it seems to me, my father was clearly and hurtfully “in the wrong.” Yet the clarity of my response becomes muddled when I look at the social equivalents to his private rigidities. His refusal, for instance, to reenter the police force after the prescribed decade of repentance, a police force that had, of course, proclaimed the absolute evil of the police force it replaced. His refusal to announce, if only by implication, “What I stood for was all wrong.” Something in me cannot but say, good for him. No matter what else he was, that man never lied, he stuck to his guns.

  “Sticking to one’s guns”—no wonder a military expression is apt. How asinine, asinine! But there is this thrill in me, nonetheless, this satisfaction: He never lied. Would it not have been the greater courage by far to repent, to renounce having been a Nazi? Yes, says my brain, of course. They all should have deeply repented, including my father. (And a snide little side-thought sidles up to my moral conviction: It was certainly wiser to repent, publicly of course, or at any rate to lie, if one intended to continue to live and work in Austria.)

  But what if you were heartsick with all that had eventually turned up, repelled and heartsick to the core with what it had all turned into, but convinced that how you had originally seen it yourself, that what you had believed in yourself, had been fine and honorable? Are you heartsick but proclaim, at the same time, that you have never been a part of it? What do you do, in such a case?

  What most of them did was to crawl on their bellies and lie. Most of those millions of Nazis crossed their hearts six times a day and bleated, “I was never one of them,” “I saw through it from the start,” “I was against it all along,” “They made me join.” Like the man in our neighborhood, formerly an important Nazi, who made a smooth transition in 1945, enabling him to advance in rank and be a policeman again, immediately, under the new regime. “The Herr Major,” Mrs. Lehmann says to my mother under her breath, turning down one corner of her mouth. “Watch my words, when the Chinese and the Swedes get together and occupy Austria he’ll prove to us all how he fought in the Swedish-Chinese underground as a tot, and he’ll be Herr General for them.” My mother glances at me and says nothing.

  Chapter 17

  The Polizeisiedlung—police settlement—was one of the building projects with which Hitler intended to revive Austria’s economy. When the war was over, half of the cops, who had been given apartments in those brand-new buildings, were ordered to vacate half the rooms in their apartments so that the remaining half of former cops’ families could be moved in with them. The buildings freed in this manner were taken over by occupation forces.

  By 1955, when those occupation forces left, English families had lived a couple of apartment buildings away from mine for two-thirds of my life, and my classmates and I had studied English three times a week for four years. Not once did it occur to us to connect these studies with the fact that native speakers of the language abounded in town.

  Except for taunts, shouted from behind laundry posts, there was no connection possible. Austrian children did not play with English children, Austrian mothers did not speak to English mothers, Austrian fathers ignored English fathers. There was nothing directly reminiscent of the war in the occupation of our neighborhood except, of course, for the foreign uniforms. The troops were stationed in barracks clear across town, there were no tanks lumbering down the streets of our project. English officers and their families lived in apartment buildings in which Austrians had lived before them and with which all of us were familiar. All buildings in the project were constructed alike, identical rooms laid out identically, the same narrow wooden balconies, the same staircases. When the English tenants moved in they must have seen the basements still outfitted as they commonly were before they made the sudden transition from being the most essential part of any building back again to being merely useful: crude wooden bunk beds, assorted gas masks, water buckets, the furnishings of emergency air-raid shelters for families unable to reach the fortified public bunkers in time. When the English dismantled these basements to make room for prams and folded lawn chairs and tool kits and spare bicycle tires, did they relish an image of cowering Austrians awaiting English bombers? Or did they recall huddling in similarly equipped shelters awaiting German Stukas? Did they compare blackout measures, emergency exits? Did they keep a Wehrmacht gas mask as a souvenir?

  For ten years they lived next door, yet they did not exist. My chewing-gum episode was my one contact with the occupation forces. The English children weren’t children, less popular or more so, kids to be wooed or liked or tolerated or communally castigated. They were our height and size and width but they were not there, one averted one’s eyes. No, one looked straight ahead.

  “I don’t believe it,” says Mrs. Lehmann. She is at our kitchen window, her elbows on the solid, sausage-shaped pillow covered in gray-and-white-striped mattress ticking that slumps along the length of our windowsill to keep out drafts. She beckons to my mother with a yellow forefinger. My mother completes the row on her knitting machine, carefully lays the ball of yarn that has been on her lap onto the kitchen table, and joins Mrs. Lehmann. I sidle up behind them.

  It is an icy January afternoon. Below, two boys (one behind the other, their heads bent) walk past our building through fine snow that is being slashed into giants’ sheets by a fierce wind. “Look at their knees,” says Mrs. Lehmann and lets out a clucking sound and a slow whistle accompanied by a shake of the head.

  The boys hurry down my street wearing gray caps, not knitted but made of fabric and leaving their ears exposed, foreign caps. And jackets and long socks. Their gray trousers stop directly above the knees.

  “Blue!” says Mrs. Lehmann. “Their scrawny little knees are blue! They can’t even dress their kids. How can a mother, even if she’s English, let a ten-year-old out of the house like that in this cold, how stupid can you be.”

  “They won the war,” says my mother, turning back to her knitting. “They can’t all be stupid.”

  Chapter 18

  A small group has gathered around one editor’s desk. We are drinking white wine out of Styrofoam cups, engaged in our favorite topic—how swamped we are with work. The “host” editor, half-buried behind wire baskets piled to the toppling point, declares that she will not, will not, come into the office again this weekend. “And another thing,” she says. “I just read three manuscripts in a row about growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. We’ve been buying too much Jewish stuff lately. I bet it doesn’t even reflect our readership. Besides, it’s getting to be a drag.”

  The speaker is highly accomplished at her craft, sharply intelligent, efficient, classically WASP attractive, one of the two or three most respected editors at the magazine. Her tone and demeanor have been as unselfconscious as if she had just announced that the front of the book needs to be cut by three and a half pages.

  “So-and-so’s piece wasn’t that hot anyway, let’s kill it. Is there any more wine?” says the woman to my right and drains her cup.

  “No, that was it,” says another, winding her watch. “Let’s not order from that place again, it took them an hour to get one bottle up here. And who wants to reflect a readership, anyway? Does anybody want to share a cab?”

  “Aw, you’re all full of shit,” yawns a third. “When was the last Jewish anything we ran? I bet you can’t even remember. I’m ordering some more, I’ve got to stay and do boards, and it’s Friday night.”

  I, too, have read those three manuscripts. The articles happen to overlap in content, message, tone, and style. When manuscripts nearly duplicate one another, it is an editor’s sometimes difficult job to choose the best of the lot, and her always unpleasant responsibility to reject the rest. Yet I could no more make such a selection in this case, or even voice an opinion on this matter—an editorial matter—than I could will myself to become left-handed overnight. Nor would this Austrian Nazi’s daughter comment on an alleged disproportionate number of m
anuscripts addressed to, or written by, Jews. “Disproportionate” as compared to what, compared to whom? How does a Nazi’s daughter address a matter of “proportions” when Jews are involved, whatever the case, instance, specific topic? This particular Austrian Nazi’s daughter loses any editorial judgment she may generally have at her command when faced with a matter involving “proportions” and “Jews.” She feels she has forfeited the right to objectivity in such a matter, forfeited the right to any opinion whatever on such a matter, forfeited by virtue of parentage.

  All of this, of course, was my perspective, mine alone. Not once during my four years at that magazine did I broach such topics with any of my colleagues. For all I know, some of them might have happily disabused me of the notion that they considered me, foremost, a Nazi’s daughter. For all I know, some, or many, or most of my Jewish colleagues were far too busy, or just as self-absorbed as I was, to take the time to give any thought to what they knew of my background. I have no idea. No one at the magazine mentioned my country to me, except possibly in terms of the Salzburg Festspiele, skiing conditions, having once, as a college sophomore, camped near Innsbruck. I have no idea if, and if so to what degree, my colleagues thought of me as the offspring of a Nazi—a term commonly used in our office as a synonym for “murderer,” “killer,” “slaughterer of children,” “evil incarnate.” I do not know what either my Jewish or my Christian colleagues thought of my heritage, because they did not venture, and I refrained from soliciting, an opinion.

  On that particular Friday night I crimped a fluted design into the rim of my cup, waiting for my face to cool, hoping to remain unnoticed until I could regain my composure. I was deeply envious. Just like that, I thought; she can come out with such a comment just like that.