The Journal I Did Not Keep Read online

The Steffi Stahl Dance Studio taught my class of little girls everything from tumbling to dancing on pointe. Only Elfi Parizek had that which, like grace itself, is given or withheld: talent. When Elfi was absent, we understood that she’d had a call to perform with the children’s ballet at the Vienna Opera.

  But I was the one who could stand on my head—except at the Christmas pageant, where my headstand was the tableau’s centerpiece and I only got one foot into the air, a failure that did not traumatize me. Why didn’t it? I was able to perform that headstand into my fifties, until the day I was going to do it and didn’t, and never tried again.

  I have an intense memory of sitting in Steffi Stahl’s office, to be registered, I suppose. In the advanced fashion of the 1930s, she wore a modified men’s suit—my first encounter with chic and more: Vati had read to me from the newspaper, how this same Steffi Stahl, who sat in a chair saying something to my mother in answer to something my mother said to her, had been in a near fatal accident. She had escaped from a burning car. I looked for signs, looked with all my eyes, and my heart thrilled. Why have I not integrated into my writing what, that morning, I knew about the erotic power of escapes, of burning cars, and of chic? “Kunst kommt from Können” Steffi Stahl taught us. The translation, “Art is technique,” will never scan or alliterate. Steffi Stahl, always the two names, scanned and alliterated.

  * * *

  —

  We tumbled. We back-somersaulted, cartwheeled, and walked on our hands. I stood on my head. We danced the Veil Dance to Grieg, and the Hungarian czardas. My mother took Steffi Stahl’s class for the mothers. I was allowed into the dressing room with her if I closed my eyes when the ladies came out of the shower. They caught me peeking and they laughed at me.

  * * *

  —

  There was the day Steffi Stahl collected us and our mothers in her office: A film company was sending scouts around the Vienna dancing schools. They were looking to cast a particular child in a particular role. We must all go into the gym, sit on the floor, and take turns to stand up and demonstrate our talent.

  Now when little Viennese girls went to birthday parties, it was usual for us to perform. I would say a five-line poem by Christian Morgenstern, whose Gallows Songs the poet W. D. Snodgrass and I later translated into English. My poem was called “Der Schnupfen.” Here is Snodgrass’s English version.

  The Virus.

  A virus crouched upon the terrace

  Watching for someone he might harass,

  Then hurled himself with malice fierce

  Upon a human name of Pierce

  While Albert Pierce could but respond, “Hey

  Shoo!” and had him till next Monday.

  What an opportunity for some “business”: crouching, hurling, sneezing! The future was incalculable before me.

  I sat on my spot on the floor watching the long-legged Gusti and her little sister, whose name I can’t remember, stand up and do—I don’t remember what they, or what any of the other children did, except for Elfi’s clown act with a painted clown face. I was aware, chiefly, of my bottom in contact with the spot on the wooden dance floor where the magnetic force generated at the earth’s center exerted a downward pull against which my wanting, my intending, my continuing to believe that I was going to stand up and recite the “Schnupfen” had no power.

  I did not understand that I was not going to do anything until I saw Steffi Stahl walking the three scouts to the exit and Mutti came with my hat and coat.

  * * *

  —

  If there is a lesson to be learned from these failures I can’t think what it is. My life did not go down the drain. There are things I have accomplished and things that I failed to do. I don’t believe that I have ever jumped into the water from the edge of the pool. And there is another thing I failed to do which has remained with me. It has no relation with either physical cowardice or stage fright. What it has in common with both is a type of internal paralysis.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve known the New York subway to spook me when it felt as if it were barreling through the earth’s bowels at the speed of a runaway train in the power of a mad conductor. It was always more than half-playing at horror. I understood what was occurring in the minds of the passengers the time when the speeding train failed to stop at the designated station. Everyone looked at everyone else or rather did not look at anyone, and there was the passenger who lost it. He was a boy of nineteen perhaps and wore a yarmulke. He shot out of his seat, strode up and down the aisle, and shouted. “What’s going to happen? Where are they taking us? How do we get out of here? Do the windows open?” he asked one after another of the stone-faced passengers. Someone should have calmed, should have comforted him, should have said…What could one have said to him? I meant, I intended—I thought that I was going to get up and put myself next to his person. That I, that all of us, continued to sit, is a failure that recurs like an old movie scene.

  SARDELLEN BUTTER

  When my mother and I visited her cousin Tante Lizzi Bergel and my cousin Peter, I first experienced the combination of the salty Sardellen Butter (anchovy butter) spread on a fresh crusty Wiener Semmel, together with—I can recall it precisely—hot tea with a lot of lemon and a lot of sugar. Is it chemistry, or a certain place on my genome that determines this love of sweet-and-sour?

  * * *

  —

  The Bergels visited us to say goodbye—it must have been early in 1938 before the expropriation of our flat in 81/83 Josefstädter Strasse in Vienna. Onkel Fritz, Tante Lizzi, and Peter seemed fortunate to be going to France. Peter and I sat on the couch and he got me to promise I would let him know as soon as we knew where we might immigrate to. He was going to build an airplane out of wood and things and come and see me.

  Peter, and Onkel Fritz, had built things before. For my ninth birthday the previous year, they had made a doll’s room for me with doll furniture and real electric light that turned on and off with a light switch. And that was the spoiler—that switch. It was the size of the real switch that turned on the light in the real room and that could not be the size of a doll’s room light switch, and it ruined the doll’s room for me.

  Peter never flew to England to visit me. The Germans occupied France and Uncle Fritz was taken away and interned. Peter and his mother spent the war years in hiding behind a curtain in someone’s Paris kitchen. After the war, when they learned that Onkel Fritz was dead, Peter and Lizzi went to Argentina. For a while Peter and I exchanged letters.

  Many years later, my daughter, Beatrice, who was traveling in Argentina, tried to find Peter and Tante Lizzi. She traced them to their last address. The concierge remembered them; they had moved away the previous year.

  I have made the Sardellen Butter and the sweet lemon tea since, but it is a taste that remains among the things to desire.

  A CHILD’S WAR

  I’m telling Bessie about my revelation—which must have been before my tenth year, because it occurred in the dining room in Vienna.

  Of this dining room I retain two contradictory recollections. In one, the margin around the square table leaves barely enough room for the four dining chairs. How then, in the other recollection, can my mother be practicing on her Blüthner grand piano which stands on my right, its keys toward the window?

  I stand with the piano on my right, my back is to the table. I can’t ask my mother, who died ten years ago at age 101, if I am right in remembering that the radio, which I retrospectively endow with the features of the cathedral-shaped radios of the 1930s, stood on the small table to the left of the window. The window gives onto a square gray yard that had no function except to be between our and the next four-story building in the block-through housing complex between Josefstädter Strasse and the Albert Gasse. In the yard, there is a tub with a bush nobody cares anything about. Out of the radio comes the male announcer’s voice giving the latest report from the Spanish Civil War, and I understand that there is always war happe
ning somewhere.

  Bessie is waiting for the revelation. I argue that revelation does not require a new truth. This truth was new to me. The thought was mine because I had thought it. Bessie believes that I have grafted an adult idea onto a childhood memory—a memory which I have shown to be unreliable. But I am unable to unremember what I remember—the wallop of sudden knowing that the quiet in our dining room, the absence of event in the yard outside the window, is a deception: Somewhere there is war, and there will always be war.

  * * *

  —

  Fischamend, 1937

  War was not an alien idea to an Austrian nine-year-old like me. When Mr. Knightley brings out a drawer full of old memorabilia to entertain Mr. Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s Emma, I see Grandfather’s drawer of WWI medals, buttons, buckles. There were sepia photographs of young men in uniform and picture postcards with oval medallions framing the pretty ladies who, the year I turned them over on Grandfather’s countertop, would have been in their middle forties. Their left shoulders and breasts were naked under diaphanous folds, and out of their small, half-open mouths the rows of their white little teeth smiled with the seduction of modesty.

  * * *

  —

  New York, in the 1950s

  My friends were into Freud. When I told Alana my curious inability to remember the word “celery,” she made me do some dream work. I offered the recurring dream in which my mother and I sit in the cellar—cellar! Celery!—across from a wall pierced with narrow slits. We are bombarded by ordnance which we repel with tennis racquets. “A war dream!” I said. “Sex dream,” said Alana: “Cellar. The lower regions.” “Come off it!” I said, but the vegetable has never since caused me the least difficulty.

  * * *

  —

  Kent, in the late summer of 1939

  There was the day in England when Mrs. Gilham, my Tonbridge foster mother, took me and my foster sister, Marie, to be fitted with gas masks. For the littlest children there were colorful Mickey Mouse masks, but when the evil-smelling rubber attached itself to the babies’ faces, they howled in terror. Everyone took home one of the grotesque masks in a square box with a string to wear over our shoulders. We were never to leave the house without our gas mask. On the way home the distraught Mrs. Gilham asked me—didn’t I come from over there?—if there was going to be war. I told her, no, Hitler would not be so foolhardy as to go to war against the Allies. Mrs. Gilham seemed relieved, but she had frightened me: The grown-ups knew no more about what was going to happen than we did. How were they going to take care of themselves and of us?

  On September 3, the day war was declared, the weather was unsuitably brilliant. Mrs. Gilham cried and gasped for breath and sent Marie and me to fetch Mr. Gilham, who was working down on his allotment. With our gas masks over our shoulders, Marie and I ran all the way. “WAR!” we shouted, breathless, as soon as we made out Mr. Gilham’s figure squatting near a corrugated-iron toolshed on the far end of his plot that was striped with tidy rows of tomato plants, carrots, lettuce, beans. “Mum says to come home. It’s war!” yelled Marie. Mr. Gilham straightened up. “Charlie!” he shouted to the man weeding the neighboring allotment: “War!” “Which?” shouted Charlie with his hand behind his ear in a pantomime of not having heard. “WAR,” shouted Mr. Gilham with his hands cupped into a megaphone. “Oh! Okay!” Charlie shouted back, nodding his head up and down in a pantomime of having understood, and went back to his weeding.

  Nothing happened. The weather continued to be unnaturally, ostentatiously lovely. It was shocking, and reassuring, that the radio played the same tunes it had played before The War. The next-door Hoopers and their dad were digging a bomb shelter in their back yard. Marie and I went to school and unless we forgot, we carried our gas mask in its square box on the string over one shoulder.

  * * *

  —

  My mother and father were working as a “married couple” meaning cook and butler in Kettle Hill House, in nearby Sevenoaks. On Thursday, their afternoon off, they visited me at the Gilhams’. The police had come to my parents, requisitioning torches—flashlights in the U.S.—and large-scale ordnance maps, to prevent my mother and father from signaling information to the enemy across the not-very-distant Channel.

  The Gilhams had no telephone; I try to remember by what means my mother, some few weeks later, communicated to me that they were holding my father in a Tonbridge school, en route to his internment on the Isle of Wight. England was rounding up all “German-speaking enemy alien” males over sixteen. (My old love of England tells me to believe that, in the early days and months of the war, these determinations must have made sense and seemed necessary.) I borrowed Marie’s bicycle and circled the schoolyard. The soldier with the gun let me peek through the locked gates into the yard where some men stood about, but I did not see my father. I bicycled home.

  There followed the decree that ordered all German-speaking enemy aliens to remove themselves from within a certain number of miles from the coast. My mother arrived with her bags. She packed mine and we boarded the train for Guildford.

  * * *

  —

  Guildford, Surrey, 1940 to 1946

  Kari Dukasz, a onetime journalist and sportswriter, and his wife, Gerti, Viennese friends of my parents, were working as a “married couple” in Guildford. They had found us a little room. I remember that it was at the head of a steep stair. I was throwing up. Between bouts I lay on one of the two beds and my mother read me David Copperfield and that’s when I knew what I had not known before: This was what I was going to do. I was going to be a writer of books.

  On the Isle of Wight, my father had suffered a first small stroke. He was released as—I’m guessing—a German-speaking enemy alien unlikely to be a danger to England’s war effort. Had Uncle Kari telegraphed him our present whereabouts? My father arrived in Guildford that same night and stopped a policeman to ask for directions to our address, which he had written on a piece of paper, and the policeman arrested him for being an alien out after curfew. I want to believe that it was the same policeman, who, later that same night, brought my father to the little room at the head of the stair. I remember waking and seeing my parents sitting together on the edge of the other bed. My father was crying.

  Miss Wallace, a member of the Guildford Church Committee for Jewish Refugees, found my mother a job as cook to the McGregor family who lived in Shalford’s Old Mill, a National Trust property. As for me, Miss Wallace took me home to live with her and the elderly Miss Ellis who owned the large Victorian house called Belcaro.

  Did my father continue to live in the room at the head of the stairs? I remember my dismay when I looked out the window and saw him stoking the bonfire, as assistant to the regular Belcaro gardener. I have come across the two dog-eared booklets with which, once every other week, my enemy-alien father and mother were required to check in at the local post office.

  * * *

  —

  The Battle of Britain

  When the nightly blitz began in London, the Guildford refugees told each other a Graf Bobby joke. Graf (Count) Bobby was the creation of anonymous prewar Jewish Vienna wits. He spoke the dialect of the vanished imperial court, and his repertoire of stories of the “Polish joke” type had come to England in the refugees’ intellectual baggage, relocated and updated: Graf Bobby, returning to home base from the nightly flight, lands his plane with a full complement of explosives. What does he think he is doing, thunders his superior! “Yes, well, I know, but what could I do?” explains Graf Bobby. “Just as I arrived over London, they sounded the all-clear!”

  Weekends at the McGregors’ felt like a party. They opened the Mill to their interesting London friends, who needed a break from the nightly bombing. My mother did the endless amount of cooking in the spirit in which Ginella, the oldest McGregor daughter, entered the land army. Guildford itself was an unlikely target for a planned attack, but there were the German planes, which, unlike Graf Bobby, dumped their leftover car
go, and one of these made a direct hit on Mrs. McGregor’s vegetable marrow. A marrow is a gourd that can grow to enormous size. Its taste is bland and watery and it is not, fortunately, popular in the United States. Just as we knew when the Germans flew over Guildford on their way home, we learned the sound of our planes returning from their nightly missions on the Continent. We had watched the chevron formation in which they set out in the direction of the Channel. In the morning we leaned out of the window and saw the gaps and counted the missing planes and men who would not return.

  * * *

  —

  A Dogfight

  I was visiting at the Mill on the day my young Aunt Edith came to introduce herself to my mother. Edith, with her little English had been up to London in a useless attempt to free her new husband from internment on the Isle of Wight. It was thrilling to meet the pretty woman who had married my beloved Uncle Paul. Edith cried when she embraced my mother. She hugged me, and I had never felt anything so soft as the skin on the underside of her arm. My mother made us lunch, but I can’t remember eating it because the two younger McGregor daughters called us to watch, in the cloudless sky, silenced by distance, the extreme drama of a dogfight between a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt. I remember failing to keep track of which was which and not knowing if it was the German or ours that was going into an increasingly rapid circular descent belching black and gray smoke. The neat silver plane turned hell’s own red, roasting—was it the German pilot inside, or the English? Edith wept and hid her eyes. The plane touched down out of our sight behind the cap of a nearby hill and in the subsequent silent blue there hung, like the modest brown seed of a dandelion, a human, a man, floating downward with the gentlest swinging motion, from the leisurely parachute—nor were we ever going to know if he was ours or if it was the German.