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

  Only a few years earlier my adolescent father had slept on a bench in his master’s shop. Where did she sleep? I remember the straw sacks in the attic corners allotted to the farm’s hired hands. My grandmother had married the man I called Grandfather, but she had not reclaimed her daughter. That one slept on someone’s straw sack somewhere, and she received meals. At fourteen she ran away. Or rather, “she went to Vienna.” The railroad fare must have been unattainable to a girl who worked for room and board. Did relatives give her the money grudgingly, or readily enough, content to have her leave?

  Fourteen, fifteen. I picture my sixteen-year-old daughter on her own, in my mother’s shoes, I picture myself. At sixteen, about to exchange continents, I was protected enough not to have been on a date or out of the house by myself after dark.

  The worst I can conjure up about her stay in Vienna may be beside the point or may not come close to what happened during those years, which she hid, certainly from her children, probably from her husband, possibly from herself. The twelve-year-old Saudirn turned fourteen-year-old maid had metamorphosed, under her own power, into a proper housewife, careful about where she bought meat, knowledgeable over whose greengrocer’s onions were cheapest, which bakery had the freshest rolls.

  In our house she deferred to my father. My father, that’s where my mother starts. With him begins her life, as if Ernst Seiler had given birth to her. Instead of stories about her childhood, she would offer the description of how she had met her husband in a movie theater, his gesture of giving her a handkerchief and her description of his smile and the lovely manner in which he had held her elbow and steered her through the crowd once the film was over. The saga of how my parents met is embedded in my memory side by side with the Hail Mary she taught me, I was able to recite both at an early age. Not once did she talk about her adolescence, she only recalled how he proposed to her, during a late spring outing on the Schlossberg, the hill in the center of Graz, complete with a list of which trees were in bloom, she was fond of telling this tale and I loved hearing it. She cut herself loose from her past and set it adrift more thoroughly, more completely, with more decisive finality and a far more relentless surface equanimity than my father would be able to muster in cutting loose from his own, some years later, or her daughter a few decades hence. “She always liked school, but she . . .” “She went to Vienna as a young girl.” How young? “Oh, fourteen, maybe fifteen.” What did she do in Vienna? “I believe she was a maid, we don’t really know. Maybe she watched children?” Not even the traditional, quasi-heroic term “runaway” applies, they let her go, it wasn’t an issue. At twenty-five, in Graz now, she meets my father. At twenty-six she marries him.

  “Everyone was registered, that was the law,” a woman at the Austrian consulate tells me. “Anyone changing addresses had to register anew. A branch of the police kept those files. Write to the police archives in Vienna, if she was there they’ve got to have a record of her somewhere.” I do, but there is no record of Juliane Margarete Vallant anywhere. “Well,” says the woman at the consulate, “of course there were always people who chose not to register, though that was illegal. Fugitives and such.” And if she wasn’t a fugitive, or not in the sense of the law? “She could always have used a false name. In that case, there isn’t a thing you can do about tracing her.”

  When my mother reappears, it is on the marriage certificate and in my father’s records, kept by the police archives in Graz. The woman he marries is described as being Roman Catholic and working in a dairy store. There is no record of when she left Vienna, how long she has been in Graz, or where she lived before her marriage. To wonder about “whys” seems, in the absence of conventional data, nearly presumptuous.

  Chapter 38

  The streetcars in Graz run on tight schedules. In the morning I had to get the 7:17 to be at my desk before the bell rang at 8:00. The 7:27 meant I was late. At the end of the school day my mother knew to the minute when to expect me. The last stop, where the streetcar turns a loop before heading back into town, was two blocks from our house. From our kitchen window my mother could see me climb off, that’s when she turned on the burner under the soup she had made for my lunch. Sometimes a teacher would keep us two or three minutes after the final bell. Other times I would buy a candy bar in a shop near the school, which might or might not make me miss a streetcar, and which annoyed my mother since she thought it spoiled my appetite. Four or five times during my high school career I was asked to have lunch at the house of classmates, occasions that filled my mother with a mixture of excitement and dread as she anxiously rehearsed my table manners. She and I were equally aware of the differences between these doctors’ or lawyers’ families and our own, and the muddled upheaval and pride such invitations aroused in her intimidated, enraged, and pleased me.

  Once, when I was sixteen and in dancing school, a boy I had met there waited for me after school, across the street, according to prevailing ritual. Together we slowly walked for a few blocks. It wasn’t the boy who excited me, but the idea of him. What my friends were beginning to take for granted, what was the prerequisite for peer esteem in an all-girl school, was finally happening to me, a boy had picked me up after school—a public announcement, an affidavit, proof of desirability.

  We shook hands, two stops down the line, and he waved to me once and stood looking after the streetcar until it turned a corner.

  Except for my luncheon invitations—always discussed nearly a week in advance—I had never, in nearly six years at the Gymnasium, missed two streetcars coming home. I was twenty minutes late, to the second. My mother screamed, most of her words unintelligible except for Hure, Hure, whore. She hit me, she screamed even more loudly, she slapped me again, she sank into a kitchen chair with her head buried in her hands, she jumped up repeatedly to slap me some more, finally collapsing in her chair for a last time, sobbing helplessly, desolate. It was the reaction to a catastrophe.

  Except for that time, five years earlier, when I had accepted a stick of gum from an English soldier, my mother had not laid a hand on me. Other mothers beat their children, I had seen enough kids with bruises in elementary school. But my mother did not scream, my mother did not hit. She might nag, she might scold, she might cry over a trifle in the newspaper, but those seemed minor quirks in a woman who was, so it appeared to me, balanced, at rest. Not satisfied, there was little to be satisfied with for years, but willing to put up with whatever came along, as cheerful as any woman could be next to a husband who was, for years, granite.

  What did not occur to me then—ducking blows, confused, and frightened—I wonder about now, so belatedly, finding myself unable to fill an eleven-year hiatus in my mother’s life with even minimal tidbits. What did she imagine was imminent after two missed streetcars, what made her so afraid for me, what did she see while she buried her face in her hands? I tried to leave the kitchen but she would not permit that. I stood with my back against the closed kitchen door, watching her sob. In the end she reached for one of my father’s handkerchiefs, which she had ironed only a little while earlier. The old blanket with which she covered the kitchen table while ironing had only been folded, not put away, an alarming sign in itself. The table, though, was set for me to eat.

  She blew her nose and wiped her face and then ladled out my soup. My face still hot from the last slap, I ate every drop of the clear, fragrantly seasoned broth, small tender dumplings, freshly cut chives sprinkled on top. Then there was reheated goulash. I sopped up the last drops of gravy with pieces of bread, aware of my mother standing behind me, leaning against the stove, looking at my back.

  Neither she nor I said anything to my father or brother about the incident and it did not repeat itself.

  Chapter 39

  As vague as much of my father’s life remains to me, I am able to mull over a number of signposts. There are the boyhood stories he told: a railroad going over a bridge, not far above a brook, small boys betting who would dare to crawl up under the bridge and stay t
here, holding on to the wood beams while the train barreled above his head. My father’s grin when he said, “They all fell in, they all let go. It felt like the final judgment, but I held on. I wet my pants and got hell from our mother, but for one day that summer I was a hero.” And the cabinets full of files in the Graz police archives, which continue to be tended to whether the men circumscribed in those files have been with the police for the last thirty-odd years or not. And the Berlin Document Center, maintained by the U.S. State Department. Its vast complex of records includes my father’s membership card issued by the National Socialist German Workers Party. A photocopy arrives by airmail, the return address is The United States of America, Official Business. The cover letter points out that the enclosed is being forwarded “free of cost” and that it is a copy of the only record on Ernst Seiler, indicating that he officially joined the Nazis in Graz, on April 1, 1933, membership number 1,619,667.

  How amazing, I think, after the excitement at receiving such an efficient and decisive answer has waned, how amazing. Picture them all, the secretaries who keep those files straight, the officials, the clerks, the person who received and sorted my letter, the one who read it and told someone to look up Seiler, Ernst, the clerk who found and photocopied and refiled the card, and whoever dictated and finally typed that letter. And Seiler, Ernst was a speck, unknown among party hierarchy. Yet though he was a Nazi nobody, and though he has been dead since 1973, his record is maintained by our State Department. . . .

  But thinking about my mother is like stepping onto quicksand or reaching into fog. Nothing is as it appeared, what I assume I know about her turns out to be wrong, she slips through my fingers again and again. In the meantime my eyes begin to burn, I am cold, I am uncomfortably hot, I want to do anything, be occupied with anything else. As if she is saying from the grave: All my life I didn’t talk about myself, there will be none of this now that I’m dead, leave me be.

  Chapter 40

  Thanks to my parents’ genes I am five foot eight, fair-skinned, and nearsighted. My nose slants toward one side and I have good teeth and a prominent jaw, family characteristics all. Also thanks to my parents’ genes and/or example and encouragement I can be charming, do well with languages, and tend to make rash decisions.

  When it first dawned on me—this persistent undercurrent, this aversion to things Jewish; for no reason I could pinpoint, and though I fought it as fiercely as I could—I tried to keep my parents out of it. After all, they had never taught me a thing about Jews. Not by example, not in words, nor, so far as I can dredge up, in any realm outside the verbal either. Besides, I told myself, there are a great many things you acquired on your own: a preference for well-worn clothes over new ones, a dislike of Baked Alaska, science fiction, and most sports, a passion for the shade of blue that is furthest away from turquoise. . . .

  It is appalling to talk in terms of taste. Much as I try, though, I cannot come up with better comparisons. My convictions are firm: it is evil—and stupid—to be a bigot. “Taste” is the appropriate category. Not just preference but something palpable, something in my mouth.

  A characteristic I acquired later then, outside my parents’ sphere of influence? Except that this seems so very unlikely. I did not consciously meet a single Jew during the decade I spent in the Midwest. Yet as soon as I started working in New York the instinct—the feeling? the sentiment? the reaction?—was there, as much a part of me as straight hair.

  Most of my adult life I have camouflaged my straight hair by getting permanents. Sometimes, when I wait too long, my real hair shows; it not only looks different from the rest, it is impervious to being wound on a curler. Only when the new growth has been altered chemically can I hope to end up with curly hair.

  “Hair is composed mainly of the protein keratin . . . whether . . . straight or curly depends on the tertiary structure of the keratin molecule,” says my encyclopedia. Since “the third month of fetal life” there have been, right below my scalp, nearly two million bulbous roots, programmed to produce straight hair. Until this body is dead, my hair will continue to come out of my scalp straight, no matter how soon and how often I disguise its true state. Unlike my straight hair, my most private of aversions never shows. But it seems equally a preordained matter, the essence of which I have no control over, though I am adept at disguising it; something unvoiced, but part of me nonetheless.

  Though that is how it feels—preordained, immutable—it seems too farfetched to imagine anti-Semitism a matter of genetic property, encoded along with straight teeth or straight hair. Nor does it seem probable that I just caught it, from the air in Graz or a nearby mountain farm. It is also unlikely that a precocious fellow toddler let me in on the ground rules of racism; I had no playmates until the age of five, and by that time Jews were no longer mentioned by anyone I knew.

  Even if I don’t know when or how, I have no choice but to assume that my parents made clear, somehow, very early on in my life, that they were anti-Semites. I was not born like this, it was done to me.

  Chapter 41

  Sometime before the end of the war, sometime before my brother was born, sometime before my new set of parents came to stay, sometime before it was over . . . there I am, snuggled down in the sidecar of my father’s motorcycle. My mother sits behind him, her arms are wrapped around his waist. We travel at angels’ speed, trees whiz past and turn into ribbons at either side of the road, snatches of my mother’s laughter flit above the engine’s roar. Sometimes my father looks back and down at me. His teeth shine, I feel myself shine, a shiny, glistening thrill as the wind howls, as the ribbon of trees unfolds before us, a thrill until now exclusively their own today embraces me.

  Some of my mother’s hair comes loose from under her scarf and snaps in the wind. Earlier she has squeezed into a pair of my father’s trousers, a motorcycle like his is not meant to be mounted decorously, sidesaddle-fashion. The trousers are tight on her, my father had smiled and cupped her behind in both hands, her thigh at my right—I can reach out my hand and touch it—is outlined so as to appear naked; midway through the ride a seam begins to unravel, I watch the sliver lengthen, a sliver of my mother’s flesh gleams beside me. The heady reek of gasoline, the leather seat beneath me as pungent as my father’s boots, sweet, just-mowed hay, the spice of pines slices through me, fairy-tale sabers.

  These two people of splendor belong to me, I belong to them. I am party to their revelry. Her full breasts are flattened against his back, she stretches an arm toward me and squeezes my hand, her face is flushed and dazed above me. This speed, unencountered in dreams, this keen passion, this thrill—I could not bear them were it not for the snug cave that envelops me, wrapped as I am in the blanket from my crib at home, protected by the metal sides of a dream crib bound to the glittery monster that roars under my father’s hands. My very own windshield before me, snug as no crib can ever be. Because this crib is connected to him and her, they will not abandon the side of this crib, not as long as the monster continues to roar. I am tucked in safe, as if in preparation for sleep. But I do not sleep, I gulp instead, I slurp and gobble, I am robbed of breath and drown in wanton angels’ speed, a searing sky turns to balm over our self-made storm. I close my eyes and sit up straight and stretch my neck. The storm blasts my forehead, spits grit at my teeth, I swallow it greedily, I lick my lips for more, I know I can always inch down again into my crib and bid the storm vanish at will, off my forehead and nose and mouth, though it roars, even now, in a forgotten part of my brain.

  Chapter 42

  I got my start on anti-Semitism before I had any words. When I was ready to learn the words to go with the feeling, which had already been implanted, none was supplied. “Jews are clannish” means nothing to me. None of the beliefs is there to buttress the attitude, but that does not faze the attitude.

  All my adult life I have lived in America, speaking English. In English I merely have a slight pronunciation problem with the word “Jew.” I have no trouble pronouncing it in
German. But in German, that word never became an “adult” word for me, as it did for my friends back home. At least—even if their parents were like mine and did not speak about Jews; and even though none of us learned anything about Jews in school—they have since had a couple of decades of life in Austria, where a Jew is now chancellor, where Jews are in the headlines and discussed in articles and books. But because I was still an adolescent when I came here to live and to speak only English, the German word—not spoken in Austria while I lived there—has never become a regular word for me, a normal word, just another noun among the hundreds of nouns that are part of my German vocabulary. There has been no adult use, no adult modification. So it has remained raw, attached only to a feeling, a “bad magic” word. Jude. It means contemptible, it describes revulsion.

  I have been aware of all of this for years now, unable to rid myself of it despite a well-working brain and willpower nurtured by a father who placed great value on willpower. There is, of course, the philosophy that holds that sanity and comfort consist of accepting oneself, faults and all. Does prejudice fall into a category of such faults, something like: right or wrong, my body/mind/anti-Semitism? Do I say to myself: Well, Ingeborg, it seems you are prejudiced. But as long as you don’t knock a diamond dealer’s hat off with your purse, what’s the harm in it? Accept, accept.

  If I were a woman from Passaic, New Jersey, whose father had put in a couple of years in the Pacific during the Second World War, whose mother belonged to a volunteer group giving directions and delivering flowers in a hospital, and whose great-grandparents had come to New Jersey from, let’s say, Wales; if I were that woman and anti-Semitic, I might not go on about it. As it is, I hopelessly love two people who belonged to that party, that movement, that sightless, soulless Moloch that ingested the Six Million. And while it flatters me when a friend looks at photographs of my parents and tells me I smile like my mother or have my father’s eyes, I also clench my fists and take quick, shallow breaths in the middle of the night at the thought: How can you go on insisting that your parents could never have had anything to do with . . . with that? Why, after all, not? If you are uncomfortable looking at a photograph of men you’ve never set eyes on—and no one ever encouraged you, and—wretched, despicable cliché be damned—some of your best friends are, in fact, Jews? While they most surely did not know a single Jew personally; while everyone around them took anti-Semitism for granted like rain in April; while prejudice of one form or another against Jews had existed in their country for centuries; while the manifestations of this prejudice had severely escalated within their parents’ lifetime. And then there he was, their own, great, beloved leader, who understood an all-pervasive fear and decriminalized the hatred that accompanied this fear, made it official; presented publicly what had long been fantasized privately, and within a context of self-preservation. Let’s get them out! No talk of killing, mind you, just get ’em out, let somebody else bother with them for a change, they’ve been enough trouble here, let’s get those Jews out of Austria, out of Greater Germany, out, out. . . . Well?