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

  It seems to me that historians, when they enumerate the factors that might have contributed to this “threatened” feeling, sometimes fail to make clear that people were not “threatened by inflation” one day, “feared a Bolshevik takeover” a month later, or worried about “a scarcity of food and coal” every other Tuesday. A reader finds out about such factors one at a time, consecutively. But to the people involved, whose lives had been drastically changed for the worse, these were not separate, alternate, or even consecutive “factors.” They were calamities, and people were overwhelmed by all of them, and at the same time.

  It’s enough to put someone in shock. Of course, none of the peasants or small shopkeepers or artisans I know suddenly wandered aimlessly into the nearest field, unseeing eyes fixed on the horizon. People carried on. They worked harder than ever, made do, and lived—as one does in any dreadful, interim, emergency situation—one day at a time. But I would be surprised if a great many Austrians of that period were not—collectively—in a state of shock.

  Chapter 34

  Beginning in 1920, once the Allies lifted their postwar blockade, food and coal became available again. Unfortunately, the mere availability of food did not mean that everyone was able to afford it.

  “Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen my father nearly starved” is a tempting phrase but would not apply, since he was, once again, not threatened by starvation as such. “Continually hungry” wouldn’t be quite right either. For three years, between 1920 and 1923, two or three times a month, my grandmother traveled by train, third class, from Burgau (her village in the province of Styria) to Mödling (a small town near Vienna in the province of Lower Austria) to bring her son food. I assume that my father was able to eat until he was full on those occasions, and that he had enough food left over to last him another couple of days. Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen then, my father, who was a slight and wiry boy, grew by a number of centimeters and lost a number of kilograms. I wish I knew both numbers, but I don’t.

  Mödling was where my grandmother had found an apprenticeship for her son Ernst. An apprenticeship, like education of any kind after the elementary grades, cost money. My grandmother could not afford to pay for three years’ worth of Ernst’s apprenticeship, not with the younger children still at home, not after already having paid for apprenticeships for the two older boys. But she asked all the people she knew to ask everyone they knew if anyone had heard of a “free” apprenticeship. A tradesman who needed but could not afford another worker would sometimes take on an apprentice instead. It was understood that such a freeloading apprentice would work especially hard.

  Someone did hear of a free post, though situated farther away than expected. My grandmother took some cotton out of her store, a neighbor sewed two new shirts for my father, and at the age of fourteen he left for Mödling to become a locksmith.

  He was unhappy at the thought of entering this particular trade. But his mother encouraged him to take pride in the fact that—through a fluke, without even trying—he was going to learn the same trade that his father and grandfather had learned, an honorable trade. She also reminded him that the trade a boy like him might learn was not a matter of choice. His older brother Eduard had become a baker because there had been an inexpensive apprenticeship available in a local bakery. It was important only that a boy learned some trade, any trade, since a man without a trade was destined to be a hired hand for life. There was no catching up later.

  What had not been made clear by the locksmith in Mödling was this: while he would not ask for the customary fee, and while he desperately needed an extra man for his shop because he had a bad back, that shop barely supported him and his family. There was not enough money to feed yet one more body.

  My father was given coffee before work, again during the midmorning break, and soup at noon and at night. He worked twelve hours a day, slept on a bench in the workshop, was allowed a day off at Christmas and Easter, and lived for those Sundays when his mother would bring him hardboiled eggs and homemade potato strudel. At the end of three years he was a journeyman locksmith.

  It was 1923. In faraway Germany, a thirty-four-year-old Adolf Hitler attempted a Putsch and was brought to trial. Nearer to home, inflation had reached its peak, there was widespread unemployment and the constant threat of civil war. The Social Democrats had recently organized their own paramilitary organization, the Schutzbund (protection corps), in order to combat the Heimwehr (home defense). In Vienna, Heimwehr units had been organized to put down the Communist revolution. In Styria, farmers and former soldiers had banded together to fight Yugoslav units advancing across the border immediately after the war. Once the Yugoslavs had been rebuffed, the Heimwehr continued to parade and prepare. Now that the Social Democrats had their own units, clashes were inevitable. These were not street fights occurring in isolated cities but battles between groups of armed men, and they occurred all over the country, again and again, in the largest cities as well as the smallest villages, straight through the 1920s.

  But in 1923, uppermost in my now-seventeen-year-old father’s mind was finding a job. He looked first in his own village, then in nearby villages, then in villages farther away. There were no locksmith jobs to be had. Numerous former soldiers, back from the war five years, were still unemployed, work was hard to find. Since it was intolerable for a boy his age to live at home without contributing to the family, since it was difficult enough for his mother to support herself and the girls and the youngest boy, Ernst was soon ready to take any job, anywhere. Besides, whatever he might do would not be for long. Eduard was going to America—where people owned cars and made money they did not need to spend on food alone—and he had promised to send for him soon.

  He felt lucky, therefore, when he eventually found work in a coal mine. It meant moving into a boardinghouse, but this time he was, if nowhere near home, at least within his own province. The work consisted of loading chunks of rock, which had previously been blasted from the mountain, onto a cart, pushing the cart along a stretch of tracks, unloading it, and pushing it back again, empty. There were four workers to a cart. For each heaped cart, unloaded at the far end of the tracks, a foreman noted a point for that particular group. At the end of the week each man received, for each cart produced by the team, one fourth of a set amount of money.

  If these groups of four worked together smoothly; if they ran instead of walked on their way back with the empty cart; if, above all, they worked without stopping, they could fill and empty enough carts to earn a subsistence wage.

  The three men with whom my father was assigned were experienced laborers with large families to support. My father had been undernourished when he began his apprenticeship and was more so now. He couldn’t lift half the rocks. If he did manage to lift one, he couldn’t carry it to the cart. If he could get some to the cart, he had trouble pushing his corner.

  On the second day he fainted. On the fourth, his colleagues beat him up. He came back the next morning. On the tenth day they beat him up again. This time he stayed in bed for two days before going back to work. Two weeks later he fainted again. The day after that he stumbled and fell on the tracks, ten or so yards away from the cart, and an infuriated coworker strained to push the cart toward him. A second one saw what the first was doing, dropped his rock, and came to the first one’s aid.

  My father managed to roll off the tracks in time to avoid the cart barreling toward him. He crawled a few paces on all fours, got up on his feet, ran all the way to the lodging house, collected his clothes, walked to the nearest village large enough to have a recruiting center, lied about his age, and enlisted in the army. He was a few months short of eighteen.

  Chapter 35

  Our mother cried and cried,” says my Aunt Pepi, my father’s younger sister. “The army had a very bad reputation back then. Here he’d stuck it out through those hard years in Mödling, and then he ups and does that.”

  When they were done with all the routine questions, t
he sergeant asked Ernst Seiler if he played an instrument. He played the violin, as a matter of fact, though that was of little interest to the sergeant. But thanks to a grade-school teacher who had encouraged Ernst, he also played the trumpet, trombone, French horn, and tuba, and could get away with a tune on a clarinet as well. They put him into the music division of the 9. Alpenjägerregiment.

  The army gave him enough money to enable him to send a small amount home every month, which thrilled him out of proportion to the help it could possibly have been to his mother. He did not need to run for his life, no one begrudged him his bowl of goulash. Moreover, what had been a useless hobby at home, involving borrowed instruments, ungainly noise, and time taken away from work, now brought him instant recognition.

  As a boy, he had been in no way remarkable for strength, or school grades, or cleanliness, or eagerness to do more than whatever he couldn’t get away without. He had been, though surely loved, one of six children his mother supported under nearly insurmountable difficulties.

  Now his accomplishments were valued. Not only could he hold his own with the instrument assigned to him, but he could be switched around, he could take other musicians’ places if they were sick or on leave. And he wasn’t in the band merely in order to avoid a regular unit. He was grateful to be out of the coal mine, he was happy not to have to be a locksmith, he loved playing the marches and polkas and occasional waltzes, he had an infectious laugh and a good time, he made friends.

  My father stayed in the army for five years. At some point during that time, between the ages of not-quite-eighteen and twenty-three, he became a National Socialist.

  Chapter 36

  A friend gives me a record: “The Blue Danube,” “The Emperor Waltz,” overtures to The Gypsy Baron and Fledermaus, standard father & sons, Johann and Josef stuff, conducted by Austria’s temperamental national treasure, the very von Karajan. Coincidentally, a different friend has presented me with a set of earphones. The story behind the need for earphones is dreary, its villain my upstairs neighbor who claimed that the bass from my stereo made life unbearable for him. Because I respect full-fledged passion, I have been keeping his plight in mind ever since he swung an industrial broom from his window above, three feet of wood beam crashing into my newly washed windowpane.

  It’s Monday morning, drizzling, dismal, and I decide to put off work for another half hour: I’ll try out the Strauss family and my earphones at the same time. I grimace at the sentimental cover, the hyperbolic jacket copy, at myself, and (along with the appropriate twinge of guilt over my ingratitude) at my friend for giving his Austrian friend a record of Austrian waltzes.

  “The Blue Danube” laps into motion, civilized and sedate on the perpetual #2 on my Richter scale of volume possibilities. Da, da, da, da, da, DADA, DADA . . . nice. So familiar as to be ritualized—gelatinized—out of hearing. I listen for another minute before it occurs to me: here’s your chance. I make a second cup of coffee, sit down at my desk, put the earphones back on, start the record over. This time I turn the volume knob to six.

  An hour later I put away the earphones and the record. It’s the noise, I tell myself, anything played this loud—Bulgarian workers’ songs, Gregorian chants—will make you cry, one’s eardrums pleading with one’s eyes to protest the eardrums’ demise. Amazing though, there must be a dozen-odd melodies in every one of those waltzes, each enough for a current hit song. Learning to waltz in dancing class—Mirkowitsch, the dancing school considered most appropriate by my classmates’ parents. Mine had never heard of Mr. Mirkowitsch but allowed me to attend; I had saved my allowance for nearly a year. Once a week my mother sat on a narrow chair pushed against the wall alongside the other girls’ mothers, knitting. Mr. Mirkowitsch himself interrupting a beginners’ waltz attempted by an anxious, Adam’s-apple-bobbing seventeen-year-old and me, an equally anxious sixteen-year-old. No, No, No, Mr. Mirkowitsch booms, and sweeps me away, his mighty belly a priceless aid to my ability to dance, a solid half-globe hollowing out my front from rib cage to pelvis, a misstep made, if not impossible, so surely inconsequential. Propelled by Mirkowitsch’s paunch I dance my first waltz, spinning, how light-footed this man was, dancing nightly at the age of sixty-five.

  Coming home thrilled, flushed, to find my father asleep at the kitchen table, his head on his arms folded across the day’s paper. Waking him up and telling him of my triumph and watching him rub his eyes and grin while my mother takes off her coat and lays her knitting on the kitchen table. “Well, then,” he says finally, “let’s see if it’s true,” and shakes off his slippers and bows from the waist and opens the kitchen door to the hallway, and bows again. And then he in his socks and plaid flannel shirt and old gray trousers held up with suspenders, and I in my navy blue dancing-school dress, its white lace collar rumpled, we dance the length of the hallway and back down again past the open kitchen door where my mother stands, the kitchen light behind her, my father and I more deeply in the dark the farther away from her we dance. Down to the front door, straight up again past the kitchen door to where the hallway bends at a right angle, back down the length of the narrow hallway to the front door, my father a better dancer than Mr. Mirkowitsch, and without any paunch at all. I find myself leaning into his arm wrapped around me and into his hand big and warm at the small of my back, and somehow I have finally caught on, after two weeks of fruitlessly counting steps, I have caught on, finally, to that trick of swinging into the next turn before the present one is quite over, tight, glorious whirls. My father singing “The Blue Danube,” breaking into a different set of nonsense syllables for each musical phrase, reaching the high notes by cleverly changing pitch in advance, between segments, without missing a single transition and without getting out of breath. He knew the waltz by heart, to the very end.

  Chapter 37

  At the time my father joined the army, my mother left school to tend pigs. “ . . . always liked school, but she hired herself out as a Saudirn at the age of twelve,” said my Aunt Zenzi last summer, when I visited the Styrian mountain farm that turned out not to be my grandparents’ farm at all, or not the way I had always assumed it to be: the place where my mother grew up with her parents, those two old people I had called Grandfather and Grandmother. The woman was my grandmother, but she had not raised my mother. “Grandfather” had not been related to me at all.

  My mother, it turned out, had been brought up in a small mountain village just across the border, in Carinthia. Her mother had given birth as an adolescent, the father had not been eighteen. Because of that boy—my real grandfather—the orderly chart I try to construct turns from an ample pine into a banyan tree. Illegitimate children sprout in all directions, each born by a different woman, followed, eventually, by a number of legitimate ones; all of them, irrespective of status under the law, are blessed with numerous offspring. . . . I finally give up on the chart.

  My grandmother, as was customary for pregnant adolescent farm girls, turned to the branch of the family that seemed, if not amiably disposed toward, at least able to take care of an additional child. In her case this meant an older, married brother.

  When I saw him last summer in Carinthia he wore a dark green hat, an old gray jacket with dark green piping and collar, its buttons made of deer antlers. He held on to a gnarled stick and smoked a pipe, sitting on a weathered bench under a tree, the Picturesque Austrian Mountain Farmer out of a movie.

  In his memory, all is well. There had been his own children, of course, “ . . . but she was my sister’s daughter, you stick together, you take care of your own.”

  Still, my mother, who had “always liked school,” began to earn her keep at the age of twelve. On the lowest rung of any farm’s hired-hand hierarchy, reserved for half-witted women and very young, homeless girls, she fed pigs and cleaned out their sties. Zenzi, her youngest half sister, told me so, while we sat at her large, handmade kitchen table in the Styrian mountain farm I remember well from my childhood—the farm I thought my mother grew up on, my gr
andparents’ farm—none of it true. Zenzi was my mother’s favorite relative and has been “Aunt Zenzi” to me for as long as I can remember, the woman who had been kind to me when I stayed on the farm as a young child during the war. But my mother did not have any brothers or sisters, not in the strict sense, though there were half sisters and half brothers too numerous to meet. When we go to make a call from the one house in the area that has a telephone, one of my half uncles points out various farms. “That one belongs to an uncle of yours, I mean half uncle, here lives another aunt.” He draws my attention to a woman about to walk through the front door of yet another farmhouse, she is bent forward and wears a kerchief. “That one, too, is one of your mother’s half sisters.” I consider taking yet another snapshot of a relative I have never heard of, then abandon the thought.

  There were few abortions among rural Catholics, no adoptions, and numerous illegitimate children. While disapproved of, they were also taken for granted and absorbed, somehow, somewhere, within the confines of large families. My mother’s family did not cut people off, no Uncle Eduard among them, no one officially cast out. Her family practiced a different kind of cutting-off. For them, the Austrian farmer’s precept, die Toten ruhen zu lassen, “to let the dead rest,” applied not only to the dead but also to yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and to five years ago or ten. The past deserved its rest too.

  According to this well-established system, my mother was bound to be taken in by a member of the family, and so she was. But this self-contained system had its cracks. The idyllic memories of my great-uncle skirt large gaps. He remembers only that she went to school, “like all the other children.” The school officials to whom I write to obtain my mother’s records do not respond. But back across the border in the province of Styria, in the house I thought was my grandparents’ house, my half aunt Zenzi says, “It wasn’t easy for her there. She hired herself out as a Saudirn at the age of twelve.”