The Journal I Did Not Keep Page 33
“Ask them at the police what happened to your grandfather’s house.”
“I’ll ask at Kindlinger’s.”
* * *
—
The people at the ice cream shop were new people. Leni was alive. Leni had retired. Knock on that window. I recognized the thin, neat sturdy old woman in a proper black wool shawl, who looked out of the casement.
“I’m Lore, Joseph Stern’s granddaughter, from America. This is my husband, David. I’m Franzi’s daughter.”
“Ah ya, die Franzi. And little Paul.”
It took me a moment to understand what was peculiar: it’s not possible for me to be in conversation with a human acquaintance without the corners of my lips lifting into however faint a smile. Leni Kindlinger was not smiling. The Stern house? That’s where they built the new police station. The house had to come down. The Nazis used it as their district headquarters, the English bombed it, the beastly Russians billeted their robber band in there. The night before they left one of the drunken mujiks doused the place with gasoline—nearly burned down the village. That was a night. Yes, Mitzi H. has a haberdasher’s shop but that’s over across from Merzendorfer’s. You’re leaving again today? Before you leave, knock and say goodbye. I asked the old woman about the Merzendorfer girls, who had gone to school with my mother, and mentioned other names: Ah ja. This one is dead, that one gone; others live round the corner, where they always lived. “Don’t forget,” said Leni Kindlinger without a smile, “knock at my window.”
* * *
—
“She is senile,” I said. “I remember the letter from Mitzi’s lawyer. I remember my Uncle Paul hitting the roof.”
“Ask at the police station,” said David. “I’m having a thought.”
Over the famous fish dinner David developed his thought: “What if Mitzi had bought up the decrepit house on the valuable land in the village center dirt-cheap—maybe in cahoots, maybe with the municipality! Is there any property attached?”
“There’s a strip of forest out in the Schwechat direction.”
“Near the airport,” cried David, and he was getting very excited. “Do you know what the land values out there are likely to be! We’re going to take a look at the town records of that sale. We’ll ask at the police station.”
“No.”
“You don’t want them to get away with it!”
“I want to find Mitzi. I want to take a look at that mural and say goodbye to Leni and go home to New York.”
* * *
—
Mitzi’s haberdasher’s shop was over across from Merzendorfer’s, the display windows cluttered in the way my grandfather’s window had been cluttered with socks, men’s and children’s boots, ladies’ dirndl skirts and aprons, buttons, bolts of pink-and-navy spotted cotton and each item had a hand lettered card on which it said what the item was and what it cost.
The shop was closed. Saturday. “My grandfather never closed Saturday. We were open Sunday till 12. One Sunday we opened and every outside wall and window had been painted over with the word JEW in large red letters. We spent the day scrubbing but the stain remained, pink. I said, “She may live over the shop.” And here there came down the stairs, a group in Sunday dress. It was the tilt of Mitzi’s nose I recognized behind the blue veil she had over her straw-colored permanent—a corseted woman upholstered in blue crepe-de-chine.
I said, “I’m Lore. This is my husband, David, from America.”
“Ya, die Lore!” cried Mitzi. “Just when my son is getting married! We have to be in church! At half past one! Na ya, und die Frau Franzi! And dear Herr Paul! You see. I have my own shop—I learned everything I know from Herrn Stern. “The Stern house? No! I never bought the Stern house. That came down, after the war.”
Mitzi behind the baby blue veil was trying to remember—she remembered! The lawyer maybe wrote…yes, she remembered that he wrote a letter but she couldn’t remember if Herr Paul ever even answered. “Anyway it had to come down…the English…the Russians. You saw the new police station? Na! Die Lore! A real American! With a husband! How do you do! The wedding!” She turned, distraught. “Karli, my gloves, the white ones, on the table, upstairs, at half past one…the church…”
* * *
—
The unsmiling Leni Kindlinger beckoned us around the corner and into her house. A white cloth had been laid with flowered china. There were cakes and coffee and bowls of ices—essence of lemon, the Platonic raspberry, and the Merzendorfer women came, and the others who were still alive around the corner. Na ya die Franzi they said, Franzi with the pigtail down her back. What a complexion! Used to play the piano day and night, very talented, and the little Paul who used to follow her everywhere even when she was courting—what was the young man’s name? No one asked what Franzi or Paul were doing now. Perhaps what people do in New York is outside Fischamend’s range of inquiry. They did ask what had become of Herr and Frau Stern. Listen, they said, you people were lucky! First we had the Nazis, then the bombings—we’re too near the Schwechat airport—and then the beastly Russians! You got away in time! What do you know what went on here.
* * *
—
David walked me into the police station. It was two steps up to the door. There used not to be steps. I couldn’t tell where the new floor was in relation to the old, but I figured that the typewriter stood, vertically speaking, a little back of the spot where my grandmother’s black iron, wood-burning range, used to stand. Or maybe not: History had done away with the groundplan of my early geography.
“Ask,” said David.
The young policeman, at the typewriter, had a cleft in his chin and a wave in his yellow hair, which was side-parted. No. The police station had always been the police station. The only haberdasher’s was Mitzi H.’s across from Merzendorfer’s. The old Stern house? He put both soft blond hands over his heart: He was born in 1949. He didn’t know a thing. He knew the town records were kept in the old town hall which closed early Saturday and did not open till Monday morning, by which time David and I would be home in New York.
* * *
—
I told my mother to sit down. There was something I had to tell her: Grandfather’s house is gone behind a wall with a mural. David, I never remembered to look at the mural!
My mother said, “It shows a wall-sized mother, father, boy, and girl.”
“How did you know that!” I asked her.
“But you knew that,” said my mother. “Don’t you remember, when Cousin Rudi visited Fischamend last year he brought us a snapshot—you have it here somewhere—of the mural on the wall of the new police station they built on the site where they had taken down our old house. You remember.”
What I have remembered from my Fischamend visit is the nonexistence of the floors and walls that had formed the rooms in my grandfather’s house. It’s not the dismantled stones that must, substantially, exist as gravel somewhere, a part presumably of the sand on which Fischamend walks: What puzzles the imagination is the inability to reconstruct the spaces in which we had moved: I can’t position the window that overlooked the square in the wall at the right distance from the angle of the door there used to be on the left. It is a lack that matters not at all—is hardly more than a fancy to which, nevertheless, I find myself recurring as to the place on which I am able to stand and look at the losses.
PRINCE CHARLES AND MY MOTHER
I used to like laughing at New York for thinking of itself the “Empire” State, at Vermont for organizing itself into “kingdoms,” at American dads for calling their girls “princess.” And I thought that I thought it was hilarious to be going to England to meet Prince Charles until my mother pointed out how often, and to how many people, I mentioned this eventuality. I’d disappointed her. My mother is a true-born democrat.
* * *
—
The occasion was the Royal Charity Premiere of Into the Arms of Strangers (this year’s Academy Award winner for fea
ture-length documentaries). The film alternates footage from the years 1938 and 1939 with interviews of some dozen of the 10,000 Austrian, German, and Czech, mostly Jewish, children whom the Kindertransport brought to England out of Hitler’s Europe. I was one of the children, and my mother was one of the parents who had brought their children to the railroad station and gone back to empty apartments. Ninety percent of the children never saw their parents again.
My mother, who is ninety-six, is the only one of the interviewees who did not fly to England for the London Premiere.
* * *
—
A special bus transported us to Leicester Square (to the same cinema where, a week later, the queen attended a command performance of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas). There were the familiar police barriers. One of our English attendants said that when Londoners see a barrier they go and stand behind it and wait. I hope they were not too disappointed to see, descending from the vehicle, fifteen male and female Kinder in their seventies.
My favorite part of the exercise was our letter of instructions. Under the heading “Royal Protocol” it read:
When meeting HRH The Prince of Wales, he will offer his hand, which you should shake and greet him using the phrase, “Good Evening, your Royal Highness.”
It is considered improper to engage HRH in further conversation unless it is initiated by HRH The Prince of Wales.
Once this occurs, the conversation will usually become more informal and it is normal to refer to The Prince of Wales as “Sir.”
Ladies should “bob” rather than curtsy on greeting HRH The Prince of Wales.
Gentlemen should incline their heads slightly.
We waited in the great scarlet lobby. There seemed to be a lot of people standing with their backs to the walls. The fifteen “presentees” were seated on fifteen chairs arranged in a U at the open end of which was placed a chair for the prince. Someone came and put a small round pillow on it. The prince, however, did not sit. Deborah Oppenheimer, the film’s producer, herself the American-born child of a Kind, introduced one after the other. Most of the Kinder swear they have no memory of anything that was said.
When my turn came, Deborah Oppenheimer told the prince my name and, like a good hostess, gave him a conversation starter: She mentioned that in the camp where the children waited for distribution to foster families, I had written a letter addressed to the refugee committee, and it had been instrumental in getting my parents out of Vienna. Now the prince had my mother he could ask me about.
We have read our fairy tales. It’s hard not to think of a prince as a young man. This one, of course, is an aging young man, slim, a little crumpled. I noticed that the hand I had shaken was red and curled itself protectively back into its sleeve. He asked me always one more and yet one more question as if to show he was in no hurry—a demonstration, I thought, of the art of good manners. Before he moved on, the prince leaned his head as if confidentially toward me and asked, “Before you got away, it got pretty bad, did it?” I have no memory of what I said to that. I was wondering if this pleasant prince knew his history. Did he know the type or magnitude of the badness about which he was asking me, or was it a demonstration of the art of British understatement?
Someone pointed out that Prince Charles finished his fifteen conversations at 9:10, the moment precisely when we needed to repair to the screening. The prince is a pro.
* * *
—
The members of the invited audience complained that they had to be in their seats since 8:15.
Several rows had been removed in front of the row where the prince’s party was seated after someone had come and put the little round pillow on his chair. Now there marched down the aisle in a sort of soft-kneed goose-step four trumpeters in red stockings and red and gold costumes like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. (Let me laugh! What other defense does the democrat have vis-à-vis royalty?) The four trumpeters ranged themselves back to the screen, face to the prince, played “God Save the Queen,” and goose-stepped up the aisle and away.
* * *
—
Since it is improper to engage HRH The Prince of Wales in conversation unless initiated by him, I did not get to say what I have been waiting to tell someone since I left England after my final exams in the summer of 1948: Sir, England, under the auspices of the County of Surrey, paid for my years of study at the University of London. At the beginning of each semester I was sent a form on which I put down how much I would need for tuition, books, rent, food, clothes, the Underground, and the sixpences for the gas fire. This sum was promptly sent to me. Nobody asked if I was a British national, or how I meant to repay the investment England was making in me. “Thank you,” is what I wish I had said to Prince Charles.
THE SECRET SPACES OF CHILDHOOD:
MY FIRST BEDROOM
The secret I want to talk about is the geography of my first bedroom.
My first bedroom coincided with the Herrenzimmer, the “gentlemen’s room” as the family living room used to be called in prewar Vienna. Here, come nighttime, my mother opened my little bed and she and my father retired through the door located at the foot of the bed into the dining room behind the right wall. I could hear the mumble of the conversation grown-ups have, after the children are got out of the way, about things grown-up people know.
In May 1938 the Nazis requisitioned our Vienna apartment. The most interesting thing, sometimes, about a memory is the stubborn impossibility of filling in the holes in it: I can see the alien uniforms standing around our Herrenzimmer. I know there were more than one but not how many, nor do I see myself, or where I stood, though I sense my father like the unseen dream presence behind a dreamer’s back. I do see my mother. She is standing to my left. I was ten years old. The time had come for me to learn that what the grown-ups didn’t know was how to save me, that they didn’t know how to save themselves.
My parents and I took the train to the village of Fischamend and went to live with my grandparents. In August, the Nazis requisitioned my grandparents’ Fischamend house, and my grandparents, my parents, and I got back on the train to Vienna. We lived with aunts, cousins, and friends—whoever had room—until we were able to leave Vienna on our thirteen-year migration via England and the Dominican Republic to New York. I put it all down in a novel I called Other People’s Houses. I wonder if the Ancient Mariner in his latter days got really tired of rehearsing his old trauma. Every story I tell starts, willy-nilly, with this ur-story.
I returned in 1968 with my American husband. The stairs of a Viennese prewar apartment building spiral round the central elevator in its wrought-iron cage. On the second floor I said, “There: Number 9. That’s our door. Number 10 was Xaverl. At least my mother called him Xaverl. He had sinus trouble and my mother said you could set your clock by Xaverl’s early morning coughing, honking, and spitting.”
“What are you going to do?” asked my husband uncomfortably.
I rang the bell of Number 9: the sound of a Vienna doorbell.
“What are you going to say?” asked my husband.
“Boring!” I remember thinking of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s new wave novel because instead of using metaphors and similes to describe a habitation in colors, shapes, smells, and histories, he related the front porch in measurements, width by length, and the plantation of trees visible from the porch in terms of metric distances and compass directions.
I’ve come to think Robbe-Grillet was onto something. What do we bring away from our nostalgic—our so curiously, so helplessly urgent—pilgrimages to a past long since refurnished with the colors, shapes, and smells of the histories of the new people living in our old childhoods? We confirm the blueprint plus elevation of our first geographies. And what if they’ve removed the walls? In an essay called “The Mural” I’ve described how my husband and I rented a car to Fischamend and crossed the village square toward the oversized father/mother/child painted on the building that housed the new police station which replaces my grandpa
rents’ house. “What puzzles the imagination,” I wrote, “is the inability to reconstruct the spaces in which we had moved: I can’t position the window that overlooked the square in the wall at the right distance from the angle of the door there used to be on the left.” They had removed the floor I stood on.
* * *
—
With my ear inches from the door of our Vienna apartment, I was intensely excited to discover I knew that when the door opened I would see, directly across the foyer, the door to the little toilet I refused to go into, nights, when it was infested with ordinary robbers. To the left, I told my husband, is the kitchen and beyond the kitchen the miserably narrow maid’s room my mother had regretted in her refugee days when she was maid and cook in an English household. Listen: the slippers slurping across the parquet floor toward us from the right are coming out of my parents’ bedroom, past the bathroom door, and along the wall where the little wardrobe with my clothes used to stand. They’re turning the L of the foyer past the door with the glass inset that leads into the Herrenzimmer. I mapped the Herrenzimmer in the air. Here’s the window. Here are the three leather armchairs around the round table, here’s the glass-fronted bookcase, the tile stove, door into the foyer, door into the dining room. My bed stood right here.
The chain on the inside stopped the door from opening. In my mind’s hindsight it is Hansel and Gretel’s crooked, beak-nosed witch peering through the crack. She asked me what I wanted and I asked for my father. She said there was nobody by that name living there. I knew that. My father had died a quarter of a century before during the week that ended the European war. The elderly witch who was living in my Vienna apartment suggested I go and talk to the concierge and then she shut the door.