The Journal I Did Not Keep Read online

  I remember Frau Resi’s raisin eyes. She was a tiny woman. Frau Resi’s husband, a cobbler, was a Communist and a dangerously outspoken anti-Nazi. I have what must be a false memory of an event I can know only from my mother’s telling, for it goes back to a time when she was an inexperienced young housewife. My mother had demanded some chore that Frau Resi considered silly, and Frau Resi had responded memorably: “Da hat sich die gnä Frau einen Schass eingetreten.” The sadly insufficient translation will have to be: “There’s where madam has put her foot in a fart.” My mother says that as she opened her mouth to voice an offended reprimand, she began instead to laugh helplessly. Frau Resi joined her. It was the beginning of a mutually devoted friendship between the two women that lasted until the Nazi edict forbade Aryans to work in Jewish households.

  Then my father was fired from the bank, and our apartment was also Aryanized. We moved from Vienna into the living quarters over my grandparents’ dry-goods store on the main square of Fischamend, a village close to the Czechoslovak border.

  The local Nazis were the boys and girls with whom my mother and my Uncle Paul had gone to school. They wrote “Kauft nicht beim Juden” (“Do not buy from the Jew”) in blood-colored paint on the walls of our house and lobbed stones into my bedroom. They leaned ladders against the upstairs windows, climbing in and out, and taking things away with them, including the radio on which we had been surreptitiously listening to the BBC. They backed a truck to the door and emptied out the store. They returned at night, knocked about the three men—my grandfather, my father, and my Uncle Paul—and gave us till daybreak to get out of the village. My grandfather and my mother were made to stay behind and close up house and store.

  We now fast-forward to the 1940s. My Uncle Paul and his wife immigrated to the Dominican Republic, where pregnant, twenty-one-year-old Edith died. Paul obtained the visa that got my grandparents out of Europe. My grandfather died in the Dominican Republic. My father had died in England a week before the end of the European war. In 1951, our family’s remnants—my grandmother, Paul, my mother, and I—arrived in America. My grandmother died in New York in 1958.

  It is the nineties. My Uncle Paul has a bad back and asks my mother for my grandfather’s walking stick. My mother says that she does not have it. She says she remembers asking Herrman, the Nazi who evicted them, to let my grandfather take it, and remembers Herrman not answering her. He had pointed them out the door.

  My mother remembers how she and my grandfather crossed the village square on foot, passing under the archway of Fischamend’s medieval clock tower, which had a weather vane in the shape of a fish. As they approached the iron bridge that spans the River Fischer, a bus came from the direction of the Czech border. The driver stopped for them and helped them on. The bus brought my mother and my grandfather to Vienna, where my grandparents stayed on with my grandmother’s sister, Frieda, until she and her husband were taken away to Buchenwald and killed.

  My mother looks in the closet of her Manhattan apartment, and here is my grandfather’s walking stick.

  Now, if my grandfather’s walking stick had to be left in the Fischamend house, it stands to reason that it could never have reached Frieda’s Vienna apartment. It could not, consequently, have moved with my grandparents into the apartment in the Rotenturmstrasse where they lived until Paul sent the visa. It could not have come on the boat with them to the Dominican Republic, or been flown with my grandmother from the Dominican Republic to New York City. And yet here, leaning in the corner of my mother’s Riverside Drive closet, is my grandfather’s walking stick.

  My mother watches her memory unravel; if the walking stick had not been left behind in Fischamend on that morning in August 1938, had my mother and my grandfather not walked across the square, or passed under the arch, or been picked up by the bus that brought them to Vienna? “There never was a bus route between the Czech border and Vienna,” says my mother. How did my mother and my grandfather get to Vienna? My mother cannot remember. What she remembers is the nonexistent bus stopping for them on the iron bridge, and the bus driver getting out and helping my grandfather up the steps.

  “And I’ve been thinking and thinking about Frau Resi breaking up mother’s gold,” says my mother. “What does that mean, to ‘break’ it? I have never understood how you could ‘break’ gold up. What gold? Omama didn’t have jewelry except for a gold watch, which she had sold years before to pay for Tante Frieda’s stomach operation.” My mother concludes that she had hoped someone was bringing my grandparents food to eat because she could not have lived if she imagined them starving.

  And what of the bus on the iron bridge? I believe it is the work of the straggler, hope, operating backward to redeem an intolerable history. I think that a blessed, rose-colored falsehood introduced into that vicious era two righteous gentiles of my mother’s imagining—a kind bus driver, a heroic cleaning woman—to make the past thinkable, the world livable.

  SPRY FOR FRYING

  In memories of journeys past, some portions remain stubbornly unavailable to recollection. I can call up no mental picture of my mother and me boarding the plane in Santo Domingo—in those days it was called Ciudad Trujillo—nor do I remember arriving in New York. (I’ve always intended to Google the airport at which we must have landed. This was May 1, 1951.) And then did we take the bus, the subway, a taxi? Did Paul, my uncle, come to pick us up?

  Other pictures come to mind vividly intact. The old Dominican grandmother who sat across the aisle calling on Jesus and her mama whenever the plane dropped, always so unexpectedly, down another air pocket. Every time we straightened out again, she beamed her neighborly, apologetic, gap-toothed smile at my mother and me as we unclenched our voiceless, white-knuckled grip from the edge of our seats. And the biblical moment, at dawn, when the clouds rent to reveal beneath us the waters of the ocean, choppy, the color of iron, auguring—what? Something terribly, beautifully significant, surely?

  “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” blinked on and off from the New Jersey shore. While my mother, on that first evening in New York, stayed in the apartment with my grandmother, Paul walked me the one block to Riverside Drive. The advertisement laid shivering paths of light across the black water of the Hudson River and turned the American sky purple. “This would be prettier than the Thames Embankment if it weren’t all so commercial,” I pronounced. At twenty-three, I had many opinions, and that America was commercial was one I had imbibed in England. It was to England that I had longed, during the drag of the years in the Dominican Republic, to return.

  I have always meant to ask our Mexican painter how long it took his family to immigrate to the United States legally. I was ten in 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, and my father and I queued around the block and up the stairs of the American consulate to get our names on the American quota.

  Hitler’s Vienna was no place to wait. I was put on a Children’s Transport to England; the family followed, as they could—Paul, a medical student, as a farm laborer, my parents on a “married couple” visa as cook and butler. I have a picture of my father, the Jewish Viennese bank accountant, a six-footer and already ill, never able to remember to serve from the left and remove the dishes from the right. After war was declared, England interned male German-speaking “enemy aliens” on the Isle of Man. Paul opted to take his new wife to the Dominican Republic. We eventually followed.

  I find myself questioning the sad, bourgeois patience with which we waited out the years. It occurred to none of us to attempt a sneak entry into the United States via Canada.

  Why didn’t it? By the time our numbers came up, my father, my grandfather, and Paul’s young wife were dead.

  My grandmother’s and Paul’s quota had preceded ours by some months. They came to New York and prepared the apartment on 157th Street, in an area that is now, as it happens, settled largely by a population from the Dominican Republic. We called it Washingstein Heights.

  We waited the required number of years to apply for “natur
alization,” a curious term suggesting that we were not only stateless but also unnatural. The dictionary explained. “Naturalization” referred to transplanted vegetation and meant “becoming established as if native.”

  What might “becoming established as if native” look like on the Upper West Side of New York? When we came, in the fifties, my uncle and my grandmother slept in one of our apartment’s two rooms; my mother and I shared the other. In the seventies, in another building, also a block from Riverside Drive, I joined the next-door apartment to the one in which I lived, so that my children, ten and eight, could have rooms of their own.

  There must have been a particular day when I looked across the Hudson and there was no “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” in the New Jersey sky. I felt surprised, and deprived. True, I hadn’t seen the brand name on any product—hadn’t looked for or missed it in the supermarket. (Google “Spry.” When had it changed its name, merged with another brand, gone belly up?) Again and yet again, and still I look across the Hudson River, surprised, by now, that I am surprised at the naked sky and unable to complete the picture in my mind: Was the second element “Spry for Cooking” or was it “Spry for Baking”? Do I remember correctly that it blinked?

  The refugee in me still tends to feel displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down my new-grown roots. It is in Manhattan. And I have a plan for the completion of my naturalization: I would like my compliant ashes to be strewn—I hope it’s not illegal—on Riverside Drive. Let me blow across the Hudson, and go where Spry is gone.

  THE MORAL IN THE CONVEX MIRROR

  It was beautiful how the room mirrored itself, distorted and precise, in the convex glass over the mantel. An eagle surmounted the circular gilt frame in which the rich Turkey carpet rose to a gentle mound. The bowl of delphiniums on the Hepplewhite table with the delicate square legs, its drop leaf leaning against the wall, appeared tiny as if at a tremendous distance. Miss Ellis in her plum-colored jersey suit and dickey, looked banana-shaped. Her real voice speaking out of the real room said, “Take Mrs. Montgomery the sugar, dear…a little kumquat jam?” while she spread a dab on her own infinitely thin slice of buttered Hovis bread and bending her head with deliberation delicately licked a speck of the sweet stuff from the knuckle of her little finger.

  It was 1942 or ’43 maybe, in wartime England. The distortion, miniaturized and sweetened inside the gilded circle reflected the approval of myself moving around Miss Ellis’s drawing room almost like a real English child.

  * * *

  —

  It was not until 1951 that the American quota permitted the family—my grandmother, Uncle Paul, my mother, and me to enter the United States. We met in New York and moved into an apartment in Washington Heights. Paul helped me rearrange and keep on rearranging the Salvation Army furniture, which tired my grandmother and did nothing to improve those two khaki rooMs. Paul and my grandmother shared the room on the left. My mother and I slept in the one on the right. “You remember the convex mirror over the fireplace in Miss Ellis’s drawing room?” I asked her.

  Our immediate need was to make a living. My mother’s first job was in a bakery started by fellow refugees. Paul, who had had to leave Vienna before getting his medical degree, worked in the lab at the Rockefeller Institute. I got a job in the office of a shoe factory in Queens from where one could look across to the United Nations. I wrote a story about a character called Jimmy who misfiled the active in the inactive files, but it was I who did that.

  I was unhappy in New York. Paul and my mother observed me with sympathy and irritation and kept an anxious eye on Grandmother the week I painted all the chests of drawers what I thought was a subtle color gray. Now the furniture was gray, and Paul refused to do any more rearranging.

  Those were the years I became an antique shop and junk shop junky. I brought home an elegant gout stool that would have needed to be new-upholstered and a slim wooden odalisque that must once have been part of a baroque chest of drawers. We self-educated shoppers never had funds enough to acquire the excellent object unless something was broken or missing.

  * * *

  —

  More time passed. My grandmother died. Uncle Paul married and moved to the Bronx. My children and I live on the twelfth floor of a Riverside Drive building in which my mother had her own apartment on the ground floor. There was the day I came home saying, “You remember the convex mirror over the fireplace in Miss Ellis’s drawing room? Guess what! I found one in a shop on Amsterdam Avenue! The gilding has flaked off on one side but they’re going to fix that. It does not have an eagle like Miss Ellis’s mirror, which turns out to have been an American antique. Mine is English.”

  My mother said, “Why do you need two convex mirrors?”

  “I don’t. I only bought the one.”

  “But you already have one.”

  “No I don’t! What are you talking about? I’ve been wanting a mirror like that for thirty years and today I found one.”

  My mother got up, opened the door of my hall closet, reached inside, and brought out a circular, gilt-framed, convex mirror incrementally larger but otherwise the replica of the one I had purchased that day on Amsterdam Avenue.

  My mother said, “Don’t you remember bringing this one home three, maybe four years ago?”

  I did not remember. I would have denied having ever seen, acquiring, or owning the gilt framed convex mirror that my mother held in her two hands, or wait! Wait: There was a dawning ghost of the recollection of stowing the thing away in my hall closet, while I figured out on which wall—since my New York apartment had no fireplace—to hang it, teaching the antique truth anew that Wanting has greater power over the mind than Having?

  THE MURAL

  It takes us—my American husband, David, and me—ten minutes by rented car from the Vienna airport at Schwechat to the village of Fischamend, near the Czechoslovak border. I used to think it was called Fischamend because there is a weathervane shaped like a fish at the top end of the medieval tower. Childhood reminiscences require a miscomprehension or two. To drive along the weather-pocked, white-walled, one-story streets was like reentering an old tale; one may not remember how it comes out but knows what the next sentence is going to say. Around the next curve there used to be—there still is! Stögermeier’s butcher shop! There was an iron bridge over the River Fischer. There, David. I told you! There is the iron bridge! To be right has an odd little importance: I am producing certification of having existed in this place. What happened to the baker who used to bake my grandmother’s new-risen black bread in his great brick oven? On this new three-story house, like a cheap false tooth, sits a plaque: DESTROYED BY ENEMY ACTION REBUILT WITH MUNICIPAL LOAN, 1947. The fish is out of sight when the stocky medieval tower straddles the road ahead. “Drive through the arch and you’ll be in the village square.” And now I know too many things to tell David. On the left will be Merzendorfer’s. I said, “People come all the way from Vienna for Merzendorfer’s famous fish dinners.”

  “Let’s have a famous fish dinner,” David said.

  The ice cream shop on the left was run by the three Kindlinger sisters and their four-hundred-pound mother, who made real lemon, real raspberry ices with a hand-cranked ice cream maker. I said, “Leni Kindlinger bought my mother’s piano for bottom dollar.”

  “Bitch,” said David.

  “Well, but she bought it, when it was patriotic to take things from Jews. The Nazis took my grandfather’s house and haberdasher’s shop. You’ll see it diagonally across the far side of the square. It’s got walls two feet thick.” After the end of the war, when the properties confiscated by the Nazis had been returned to Jewish ownership, my Uncle Paul had had a letter from the lawyer of Mitzi H., my grandfather’s pretty shop assistant. Slender golden-haired Mitzi might have been sixteen when I was nine. Uncle Paul wouldn’t let me wave when Mitzi and her troupe paraded on the square under our windows in the black skirts and Persil-whit
e Hitler Youth shirts. The lawyer transmitted Mitzi’s offer with the stipulation that we’d restore the bomb-and-fire-damaged portions of the house and pay the accrued taxes. “Paul hit the roof,” I told David. It was worrying me that I had no ready attitude with which, in another moment, to encounter Mitzi standing behind my grandfather’s wide oak counter, or would she be sitting in the raised cashier’s desk, like a witness box with a wooden swinging gate, where I used to sit on my grandfather’s lap; he would open the register to see what there might be to amuse me, but there was never anything except the tray of assorted coins, a straggle of paper clips, an eraser out of an old indelible pencil stub.

  “Here it is! Merzendorfer’s! There’s Kindlinger’s! You see that new wall with the oversized mural? That’s new. Our house is behind there.”

  “It says Polizei,” said David.

  “Behind there,” I said.

  David parked. I remember walking at a running speed and feeling David like a dream-person just out of sight behind my left shoulder. I knew, but did not stop to wonder, that he was feeling sorry for me.

  David said, “Ask at the police.”

  I said, “There must be an opening in this new block somewhere that leads behind here to where our house is. Remind me, David, to look at the mural so I can describe it to my mother. I must have missed the opening. This is already the town hall where the old police station used to be. They kept my Uncle Paul and my grandfather overnight and smacked my father’s face and broke his glasses. The next morning we had to get out of Fischamend. Let’s walk back. We missed the opening.”