Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Page 4
Chapter 19
So there was Austria’s Second Republic, the government put together after the war, awash with citizens who had never had anything to do with the Nazis. Where had they all disappeared to, those 99.75 percent of Austrians who had voted for the Anschluss, for Hitler? Granted all the reasons advanced for voting “yes” while hating Nazis—envelopes containing the votes were stacked neatly on the desks of election officials and it might have been possible to trace names to specific votes—one did not vote “no” because one feared retaliation; or one voted “yes,” hoping to appease the Germans in order to prevent the worst; or the Anschluss was already a fact, one’s single vote would not have changed reality. . . . But 99.75 percent?
And after the war there were enough people to set up shop again, to take over not just cabinet posts but a full-scale network of government jobs, held not merely by repentant Nazis or not-any-more Nazis but, most of them, by a brand-new stereotype: the never-having-been-a-Nazi politician, judge, policeman, teacher, clerk, streetcar conductor.
There is a difference between saying, It turned into a monstrous crime, I have changed my heart and mind and want to pick up the pieces and start a new and different life, and saying, It was dreadful, wasn’t it? Criminal! Luckily, I was never part of it, look here, I couldn’t stand him all along, I was one of those 0.25 percent who voted “no” way back then, neatly stacked envelopes never bothered me.
Not once did my father say, “I had nothing to do with it.” How things had come about was beyond his grasp, but it was clear that what he had believed in had turned vile, vile to him as well as to the world. That he was unable, even in retrospect, to explain to himself exactly what had happened, rendered him politically speechless. From 1945 on, any comment about parties, movements, or politicians was cut short by my father with the sentence, “They are all alike.” (There was one exception. In 1956 or 1957, one evening after dinner, my mother announced to the table at large that she had voted for the Socialists that day. “I’ve thought a lot about it,” she said, “and the Reds do more . . .” here she lifted her chin in her husband’s direction, “ . . . for him than the others do,” and then she blushed. It may have touched him that she so clearly felt she had behaved adventurously. He greeted her announcement with a mock widening of the eyes and a smile, swallowed his last sip of coffee, patted her arm, and said, “I’m going to the Grund now, I’ll be home by ten.”)
But in the summer of 1945 he hid in the countryside and then took up, at the age of thirty-nine, where he had left off as an adolescent, working for a locksmith. And abruptly—desperately, indiscriminately—began to sleep with as many women as would have him, causing his ill wife deep grief. And bathed his ill wife daily, tending her with rare devotion. And scrubbed the public staircase in our apartment building when it was our family’s turn, because it was of great importance to his bedridden wife not to have “any talk” about how the Seilers did not pull their weight in this communal mania for immaculate stairs, though he knew that this amounted, among the men in the building, to his irreparable loss of face. And went on to organize and conduct a factory band and a factory orchestra at night, alternately rehearsing the two groups for concerts held before family members of the factory musicians, after working as a laborer during the day. And worked to numbing exhaustion daily, skimping, skimping, no more than one beer a month allowed, until he was able to buy, by dint of extreme self-denial, the cheapest and weediest lot on the outskirts of Graz.
And worked every night from then on, on that lot, abandoning affairs and factory orchestras, having settled on a house for his children as the core of his remaining life. And did not once mention to his children, as other fathers did, casually, that National Socialism had, after all, one mustn’t forget, in those early years, of course, had its good points. He renounced his obsession in his heart. But he was neither mercurial enough to renounce it publicly nor flexible or wise enough to renounce it to his children. And he was too proud to claim those mitigating circumstances of time, economy, and place, which he might have cited as well as the millions who made such a point of citing them. He made no excuses, he never lied, and his arrogance cows and thrills me.
I lie often and easily. Faced with a friend’s work that I find mediocre I murmur, “This is really something,” and whenever I don’t want to see someone I say, “I would love to, but unfortunately I’ve already . . .” I lie to myself about why I lie to others, refusing the clarity of cowardice as motive, calling lies a form of tact instead. I have to start over on nearly every page I write because the urge to improve on facts is strong and ever present. And I lie to myself when I am afraid to live with a truth. Wearing a new dress and high heels in a taxi on my way to a restaurant and in a good mood, I tell myself, You are finally over Mark’s death. My brain is a pushover for lies; only my body insists on the truth. Out of the corner of my eyes I see a small boy running down the sidewalk, one sneaker has come untied and he has light hair; a fist plunges into my stomach, I lay my forehead on my knees and crouch on the plastic seat, and for the next few days I dare not deceive myself. But a week later there is that thought again, it flits from brain cell to brain cell . . . behind you . . . over.
Chapter 20
But what was there to be done? Once the war was over, Austrians and occupiers alike knew that few of those strident claims of noninvolvement could be anywhere near the truth. Yet what was there to be done about it? Some Nazis were shot. Others were first tried and then shot, or tried and hanged. Others were imprisoned, fined, barred from holding jobs. That left—how many? And if they’d all been shot or imprisoned, who was going to run either the country or the streetcars? There was chaos. Graz, as a typical Austrian city, had had 42 percent of its housing destroyed by bombs; cadavers, human and animal, lay rotting in the streets. Only the fortunate were living on seven hundred calories a day; in cities rations had sunk to eighty calories. Thousands starved. Somebody would have to work, a lot of somebodies would have to work, and others would have to tell them where to start and what to do.
The Communists were ready to rule. They had earned their laurels as foes of Fascism and did indeed get a third of the posts doled out to them in the provisional postwar government. They lost them again, miserably, six months later, as a result of the first elections. Women voted heavily in those elections, and the particular brutality with which the Russian army had occupied its sector of Austria was remembered at the polls: row upon row of women in front of every Vienna clinic, awaiting first aid after having been raped, others lying motionless on hallway cots in wretchedly crowded hospitals; a couple of months later, ecclesiastical dispensations granted, women waiting once more in dreary lines, this time for abortions. Missing in those lines were raped nuns, required by the Church to bear their children.
After those elections, the Russians, who had eagerly helped establish the provisional government, fought this very government point for point, step by step. Originally it had been the Americans’ turn to be chagrined. Their idea of a new Austrian government was not one established in Vienna during the weeks when the Russians were sole occupiers of that city; the West was becoming familiar with the political makeup of governments set up under the supervision of Russian tanks.
It was the beginning of a fierce and extraordinarily tedious struggle between the superpowers, occasioned by Austria’s misfortune of position, lying on the middle of a line that divides Europe’s East from Europe’s West, from the Baltic to the Adriatic; which is why I lived from the age of five to the age of fifteen in a tiny country occupied by its former enemies, who claimed to be friends, but who needed to stick around, in uniform, over and over again discussing Austria’s fate around Austrian dining-room tables, unable to rouse themselves and go home. It took ten years to settle the score, with Austria the pawn. The Russians fought with trucks of grain, ideology, and the promise of terror. The Americans fought with money and won.
But that was later. In December 1945 there were, aside from the Commu
nists, quickly reduced again to an insignificant fraction, some leftover Conservatives—who, for a start, changed their organization’s name from the Christian Social Party to the Austrian People’s Party—and there were some Socialists, too. Dr. Karl Renner, for instance, who had been the first chancellor of the First Austrian Republic after the First World War, a man in his seventies who had been living peacefully and comfortably by virtue of the fact that his own brand of Socialism was so right wing that the Nazis had had no qualms about him. “Is that old traitor still alive? He’s just the man we need,” Stalin is supposed to have said. Counting on this white-haired patriarch as a symbol of reassurance to a people who had just been through the collapse of its Fascist regime and was about to be governed by a regime as Communist as the presence of the Soviet army could guarantee, the Russians had plucked Dr. Renner from retirement and had made him chancellor of the new, Second, Republic. What the Russians wanted from this chancellor was what they wanted from figureheads they had installed in provisional governments all over Eastern Europe: that he should tire easily, look dignified, and keep his mouth shut.
Chapter 21
Dr. Renner did look dignified. I remember him, if vaguely, because he presided over my elementary school rooms. A dusty black-and-white photograph, hung very high, too high for a seated child to distinguish features clearly, hung too high and next to the obligatory cross, equally dusty, equally remote. “We lost the war,” says a teacher, “and now the enemy occupies our defeated country.” “Occupy?” “To use.” “Who is the country?” “All of us.” “I am not a defeated country,” says one girl. “My name is Liselotte Gerber, and I live on Bayernstrasse.” “Bayernstrasse is in Graz and Graz is in Austria.” “But, but . . .” says the girl, “I’ll fight.” “The war is over. Those soldiers carrying guns? They are the victors.” “I wasn’t in the war,” says the girl, and another one blurts out, “My father was a brave soldier and he used to have a gun.” “Mine, too,” says a third. “Mine too, mine too,” say a fourth and a fifth. “Yes, well,” says the teacher, “not anymore.”
Dr. Renner wore a neat white beard and his dusty face under glass was framed in black, like the photographs next to obituary notices in Austrian newspapers. When the sun shone into the room at a particular angle, the reflection obliterated him and only the shapes were left, a black cross and a rectangle framing nothing.
Under Dr. Renner’s beard we studied from books that had blank labels glued across the lower part of the front page. Forbidden to touch those labels, we picked and picked at them nonetheless. Long before the end of the first month of school, many of our labels were no longer securely affixed. Between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next, someone pasted fresh blanks into all the books.
I wonder who actually did the work—our hapless teachers? Sitting in an empty classroom, flies buzzing in the summer heat, a pot of glue before you and around you piles of books; replacing frazzled labels with crisp, white ones, hoping to hide the swastika imprints from yet another batch of six-year-olds.
Our adults, those creatures unlike us, those creatures who knew what to do, who had led us safely into bomb shelters, and who were now teaching us to read, those adults had made a mistake. What’s more, it was a mistake they did not want us to know about. So they blanked it out, year after year after year, until a book was tattered and gray except for its bright-white sticker up front, a drop of glue congealed in one corner, ooze arrested in mid-escape. Our adults were adamant about their stickers. Yet the rule against picking was enforced by a flat scolding—an apathetic scolding compared, for example, to the kind of scolding expected by a pupil who talked while the teacher talked, or stood up too slowly when the principal entered the room. It was a rule, no whimsy, but there was something halfhearted about it just the same, and something muggy. The sight of a small, purple-ink cross, four little legs bent at right angles, chased our adults into speaking rapidly and in a tight voice: “They were stamps of another government, we now have a new government, we will now learn the names of the rivers and streams of East Styria.”
Chapter 22
Das schwartze Mädchen” occurs in a manuscript. To verify the spelling a researcher comes to me, the magazine’s authority on German. “‘Schwartze’ is wrong,” I say. “There’s no t.” “Oh, really?” is the reply. “Actually, I just wanted to check the dots on ‘Mädchen.’ So-and-so knows Yiddish, and she already said ‘schwartze’ is okay.” “Maybe in Yiddish it is,” I say, slowly and pedantically. “But in German it’s ‘schwarze,’ and since the scene takes place in Stuttgart and the remark is made by a Stuttgarter pointing out a black girl, I assume we are dealing with German.” “Okay, then,” says the woman from research cheerfully. “As long as you’re sure, that’s good enough for me,” and leaves. Yiddish, something hisses inside me, seething, ferocious. How I detest it, pidgin German, a sickening bastardization of my beautiful-beautiful-language-my-home-my-language-my-beautiful-beautiful—and catch myself, terrified. I have, once again, been sitting at my desk, over an unseen manuscript, on the eleventh floor above Lexington and Forty-first, spinning off.
Chapter 23
When I first moved into my current one-room apartment I pretended that this was my living room, and that my closet door opened onto a hallway, at the end of which any number of spacious rooms might await my perusal. This conceit demands the camouflage of one’s bed so as to make it appear, if not an essential part of a living room, at least not too obvious a piece of bedroom furniture. A fold-out sofa, of course, is ideal. But even without such a sofa, various friends of mine in their equally small apartments manage to conceal what they sleep on. I never could. No matter how I placed my twin-size cot, coffee table and arm chairs obstinately grouped themselves around this obvious . . . bed.
Then a friend offered me a king-size, four-poster extravaganza. I got rid of what furniture there was except for a desk and a chair and accepted her offer.
Since a king-size bed is impossible to conceal in a twelve-by-seventeen-foot room, it made sense to acknowledge that my apartment was now a bedroom. Over the ensuing months and years I added wallpaper and curtains and dark blue carpeting, a dark blue blanket, ruffled pillow shams, and gilt frames around photographs of my family and friends.
Now I wake up each day with a start: What does any of this have to do with me?
A bulletin board covers one wall, stretching in sections across the closet door to the cubicle that is the kitchen. I have tacked up labeled cards, beginning with 1906, my father’s birth, continuing, one label per year, until 1955, where I ran out of space. This rhinoceros of a board needs to be on my wall so that I may get even a minimal grasp on my parents’ lives. I can’t, simply cannot, make myself remember how old my parents were in any given year, or where they were, or what they were doing, always in relation to what was happening at large in a country that was a caldron: swirling its people up or under, drowning them or having them ride a red-hot crest, leaving no one undisturbed.
The great gift that the country I now live in dispenses as a matter of course—the luxury of being allowed to choose a private life—was not available to my parents’ generation. Ah, spare me their fate. Let me just do my work and love my daughter and a few friends, let me live out my life in this lush state of grace, not to be involved. Let the topic of morning conversations be the weather or the Yankees, not where the city was hit during the night, my mother dragging me past rubble, air thick with smoke and the odor of charred flesh; let not one of the foreign voices I hear for the rest of my life be that of a soldier of an enemy army; let the idea of victors and vanquished apply to Democrats and Republicans or vice versa, let politics be pedestrian and useful, let those with aspirations to greatness rub themselves raw in New York’s art world and be barred from all politics; if they had admitted ambitious Adolf into their precious Academy of Arts he might have been just another architect, Vienna could have put up with any number of pompous-ass buildings. . . .
Chapter 24
My blue-and-white bedroom is unrecognizable. The dark blue blanket, the dark blue rug, all my surfaces are covered with red, red-on-black, black-on-red, art directors who design the covers of Hitler books like red and black. My sanctuary invaded, swastikas everywhere. On book jackets, on forty-year-old newspapers, on record covers and official documents, precise lightning gashes zigzag around me.
I’ll make covers for all the books, I think, one morning at four, brown-shopping-bag covers like those I loved making in grade school. But I have not made such a cover in nearly thirty years, I no longer protect my books, I underline in ink, scrawl into margins in ball-point, immediately break their backs with a crack when I get them home from the store to make them lie flat from the start. I turn down pages, I do every last thing to my books that my Austrian upbringing should make me abhor. Eselsohren we were taught to call a dog-ear. A turned-down corner was not merely something that looked like an ear—a dog’s or a donkey’s—but Esel applied to anyone who turned down pages, too: uncouth as an ass.
Lots of Eselsohren in my books and no covers to protect them or me, I am stuck with this violence in my room, on my bed, on my dark blue rug. When I am ready to go to sleep I edge under the covers and feebly push at the mountain of books, nudge them to the side a few inches, the blanket of swastikas shares my bed with me.
When I wake up, there it all is again. The monster board with its labels, the scrawled note, Feb. 6, 1940, Mutti pregnant? above the clipping, February 12: First deportation of Jews from Germany, April 9: Invasion of Denmark and Norway, May 10: German invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. When my mother was four months pregnant with me, Declaration of war by Italy on Great Britain and France. President Roosevelt calls this a stab in the back. In her ninth month, First draft in the United States, 16.4 million men registered, and Deportation of Jews from Baden, the Saar, and Alsace-Lorraine. Nov. 6, 1940, me, has no historic correlative, but pinned next to the date on which my mother was up and around again, nursing me—“You were finicky at first, but then you really took to it”—the snippet says, Warsaw Ghetto sealed.