Other People’s Houses (3 page)

Until the grave, by hate and lie.

From our cradle till our last rest,

Attends us other men’s distress.

Be true and help.

You’ll come to understand—

But of yourself, I hope, and not at Life’s hard hand.

He illustrated it with a facetious drawing of my uncle, in angel garb, hovering over my
bed. The picture pained me; I felt it spoiled the noble tone of my book. This is the only notice Dolf ever took of me. His indifference excited me. I danced interminable impressionistic dances for him. I learned to stand on my head—an accomplishment of which I am still capable and proud, though it has never worked for me any better than it did then. When Paul and Dolf went for a walk by the Danube,
they took me along. Each young man held one hand. Their talk of pictures and books bounced from one to the other above my head; like a watcher’s at a tennis tournament, my eyes, if not my understanding, followed it.

On the outhouse roof next morning, I told Mitzi the new plan for my life: I was going to be a student at the university; I would walk with young and clever men by riverbanks, talking
of painting and poetry; I would take bicycle tours in the summer. Mitzi had never a word to say against it.

When Dolf left Fischamend, Paul and I saw him off at the little railway station. Paul gave Dolf a book as a good-by present, and Dolf gave Paul a book. When the books were unwrapped, each turned out to be
The Little Flowers of St. Francis
.

The next day my father arrived, late in the evening,
after the shop was closed. We were sitting upstairs in the corner room. I remember Paul was in the armchair with a book; my grandmother was laying out a game of solitaire. They were watching me do a new dance I had invented and laughing at the silly song my mother was playing. As I came waltzing around, I saw my father in the doorway, so tall he had to duck his head. I thought, That’s the end
of all the fun, and was horror-struck to be thinking so. My father was making the mock-sentimental face he always put on when he found my mother at the piano. He turned his eyes up and said, “La-la, la-la, la-laaaa. Very pretty.”

“Igo! I didn’t see you come in.” My mother closed the keyboard and stood up. “Sit down. What is happening in Vienna?”

My father told us that Tante Trude and Onkel Hans
were leaving for England. They had money abroad. He said there were lines outside the foreign consulates. Everyone was panicking because of the anti-Jewish articles in
Der Stürmer
.

Then my mother took me off to bed.

Next day at lunch, which we ate in the storeroom behind the shop so that my grandfather could keep his eye on the door, my father told me to take my elbows off the table. (The three
lessons I recall my father contributing to my early discipline were that one must not slouch at table by leaning on an elbow, that one must never eat sausage without a piece of bread to go with it, and that one must always wash one’s hands after playing with an animal.)

My father then turned to my grandfather and proposed his plan of sinking his considerable severance pay into my grandfather’s
business and becoming my grandfather’s partner.

“
Ja so,
” said my grandfather and scratched his little Hitler-type mustache, the only distinctive feature on his little person. He said, “That way we could pay off arrears in good order and put the shop on its feet.”

My grandmother had put down her fork and sat looking from her son-in-law to her husband, with her handsome black eyes opened to their
large fullness. “You are going to put the shop on its feet, Joszi, so it can walk right out of your hands into the pockets of the Nazis!” my grandmother said in a thick Hungarian accent. She and my grandfather had both come to Vienna as children. My grandmother had mastered German perfectly, but she imitated my grandfather’s accent and odd grammar so cleverly that he smiled. Paul and my mother
laughed. My father put on his mock-amused face. He turned up the corners of his lips and said, “Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-haaaa. Very funny.”

My mother stopped laughing and said, “Igo, please …”

“Maybe you haven’t looked outside today,” my grandmother said. Overnight, there had appeared in the street, outside the entrance of the shop, letters tall as a man, painted in white on the macadam:
KAUFT NICHT
BEIM JUDEN
(“Don’t buy from the Jews”).

“The local boys,” my father said.

“Franzi, your husband is almost as silly as mine,” said my grandmother.

“Please! Mutti …” my mother said.

“Franzi, your mother knows almost as much about everything as your brother Paul,” said my father.

My mother had begun to cry. My mother always cried when my grandmother and my father were being rude to one another,
though it had happened, throughout my childhood, whenever they met.

The other way my father had of making my mother unhappy was by getting ill, which he always did when I least expected it and always, it seemed to me, when there was some excitement my mother and I had planned, a birthday party or a Christmas visit to Fischamend. My mother would meet me at the door as I came home from school and
say, “Now
you
must be my friend, Lorle; they have taken Daddy away to the hospital.” And we would go down into the blue dusk and bitter-cold street and take a tram across Vienna to see my father, laid out flat in a white hospital bed without even a pillow, his pale, peaked nose pointing at the white ceiling.

“When is he going to come home?” I would ask my mother, seeing her pale, shrunken face,
in which her eyes looked large out of all proportion. Her lips seemed a dark pink, with a rough surface as if they were sore.

“I don’t know, darling.”

“Is it because of the kidney again?”

“Nobody knows what it is this time. The doctors are testing for an ulcer. Lorle, I have a favor to ask: Will you be a real friend and not ask me anything for the next twenty minutes? By then this migraine
will be better, and we will talk again. All right?”

“All right. What time is it now?”

“You can talk to Lore as you would to a grownup,” my mother told my grandmother. Sometimes my mother talked to me about my father. I was flattered, but I did not like to listen, and I cannot remember what she told me.

And always my father would get better again and come home. It seemed strange to see him upright
again, wearing his navy-blue business suit. My mother would cook him special diets and fetch him his bicarbonate of soda, and on Sundays he and I would take our morning walks. “Don’t fill her up with ice cream before lunch,” my mother would call after us.

And my father always bought me an ice cream and said when we went home we would make a joke with Mutti. The joke was our ringing the bell and
having my mother find us standing outside the door with our hands before our chests like squirrels, trembling in mock terror, which meant we had been bad again and I had had an ice cream.

The Sunday after my father came out to Fischamend, I said I would rather stay in and read a book or draw with crayons, but my mother said the fresh air was good for me, and my father said he would tell me a
story.

The trouble with my father’s stories was that they were all one interminable Kipling story about the fight that Rikki-tikki-tavi, the mongoose, had with a snake. My father’s voice droned above my head. I walked beside him, telling myself my own delicious, mildly sexy stories. The air was just the temperature of my bare legs and arms, so that I could not tell where I ended and the world
began. I remember, now, that the water meadows along the Danube are so thickly grown with pink-tipped daisies and yellow buttercups that you can’t help walking on them; they form a carpet underfoot. The mosquitos had ripened and raged that year. There were some local children skipping flat pebbles across the water, and my father sat down on the crest of the bank and told me to go and play with them.

I remember to this day the pressure of my father’s hand on the precise spot on my back, three inches to the right of my spine, where he used to push me to go and play. The fact was, I always longed to play with other children but never knew how. This time I had walked forward and stopped, and stood rubbing the back of my left hand to and fro across my temple, watching the group by the river. The
biggest, a man-sized boy, turned and threw a little pebble. I thought it was a game and felt pleased; all the children were coming toward me up the bank. Then I saw that they had filled their mouths with Danube water, and I turned and ran, but they spat it down the back of my dress and called me “Jew.” I howled all the way home, walking beside my father, I don’t know whether from shock and fright
or because of the obscene wetness that glued the stuff of my dress to my skin.

“That’s that Willi Weber’s young brother Karl,” said my grandmother. “He is the leader of the Hitler Youth Brigade.”

“The bastard!” said my Uncle Paul. “And I always linked his paragraphs for him! Teacher Berthold had a thing one year about linking consecutive ideas, and Willi Weber never could connect anything.”

“Yes!” said my grandmother. “If you’d spent more time on your own work instead of writing everybody else’s essays, you might be married to Liesel now and on your way out of the country.”

Paul looked sad. He had had a letter from Liesel that morning to say that she was going to be married and she and her husband were leaving for Paraguay. Paul said, “Willi used to do my drawing exercises. It wasn’t
a bad setup we had there.”

The next day, my grandmother happened to meet Willi in front of the shop, and she said, “You owe us twenty-five schillings for your winter coat and galoshes. Can I send Mitzi over in the morning to collect?”

But when she came into the store and boasted of what she had done, my grandfather said, “You know they had the rot in their potatoes. They can’t pay.”

The following
morning, the front of our house had “Jew” and dirty words written in red paint all over it. The bloody color was still wet and dripping down the stone when my grandfather went out to take the shutters down. He washed it off—the letters disappeared slowly but the color blotched the wall—and that’s as far as it went that time; neither we nor they had yet realized the possibilities.

In late August
came the first of the war scares. We had got into the habit of drawing the curtains in the sitting room at six o’clock every evening and gathering around the radio to catch the British news broadcasts. I don’t know if the weather clouded over or if the grim mood of the adults created in my mind the distinct memory of yellowish-gray clouds standing for days over the low roofs of the village houses.

One day, the first German regiment moved in. By noon, the square outside our windows was black with tanks, armored cars, radio trucks. Our yard was requisitioned for the paymaster’s headquarters. The soldiers borrowed one of our kitchen chairs and the card table on which Paul and Liesel had written the story of Vaselina.

Two helmeted guards stood on either side of the table while the German soldiers
in their gray-green uniforms filed past to collect their money. I sat in the passageway that led from the storeroom into the yard, watching. I had the cat on my lap. My father leaned out and told me to wash my hands. My mother said for me to go and play upstairs or the soldiers might see me. What bothered me was not that they might see me, but that in fact they did not, and I got hold of the
cat and turned its ears inside out and tied my skipping rope around its neck until it yowled.

The paymaster looked around. “Well now,” he said. “Now, you don’t want to do that to the poor pussy.”

“Pardon?” I said politely. Though I had heard very well what he said, I wanted to hear him say “
Kätzchen
” again—the unfamiliar harsh-sounding diminutive of “cat,” so different from the tenderly comic
sound of the Austrian “
Katzerl.
” The animal meanwhile was choking. The paymaster rose and came over, saying, “
Armes kleines Kätzchen
” (“Poor little kitten”), and untied it. He asked me if I knew how to skip rope, and I said yes. He ordered one of the helmeted guards to hold the other end of the rope. The line of soldiers stood at ease against the vine-covered walls. I skipped and recited:

“
Auf
der blauen Donau

Schwimmt ein Krokodil …
”

This was about the time that Neville Chamberlain paid his visit to Hitler in Munich.

I opened my eyes in the night because a voice below my window was saying, “SQ calling XW, SQ calling XW, move east twenty kilometers on Route 46, over,” or some such gibberish. Startled out of sleep, I sat straight up in my bed in the darkness. The words seemed so pregnant
with meaning that I tried to hold them against the forgetfulness already overtaking them as an engine started up and raced away down the street. There was a great cranking up of heavy engines, and a rolling of truck after truck, and an earth-cracking, wall-wrenching rumble of tons of iron tank on iron caterpillar chain through the narrow streets. It worried me that the vehicles moving away
from the square threw the light of their headlamps across my ceiling not in the direction in which they were going but in an opposite direction, and before I tucked myself back to sleep I promised myself to try to remember to mention it to Paul.

It was autumn, which brought with it a new school term and an apparently insoluble problem.

After the Annexation, the Austrian schools had been ordered
to segregate Jewish children. The city of Vienna had made the switch in simple stages. On the morning following Annexation, immediately after prayers, the teacher had announced that instead of poetry we would have an hour of handicrafts and would take down the pro-Austrian, anti-German posters that, in the enthusiasm and heated blood of the past month, we had been made to paste and pin around
the schoolroom walls. “Teacher,” said a little girl called Greterl, “can I have this one I cut the paper leaves for to take home? It says ‘Red-White-Red to the death.’” “No, you cannot, you stupid idiot!” said our teacher, who had always been a mild, good-natured woman, and she tore the pretty poster in two and stuffed it into the rubbish sack with which each classroom had been provided that very
morning. Filled with paper sentiments, it was bound, with all possible haste, for the incinerators. By the end of the week, the desks in our room had been rearranged so that the half-dozen Jewish children in the class could sit together in the rear, with two empty rows between us and the Aryans in front. A question of some worriment soon developed among the six of us in the back, and I was chosen
to carry it to the teacher: What were we to do about the “Heil Hitler!” which was from now on to greet the entrance of the teacher and begin class prayers? After some discussion, it was settled between us that just as in the past the Jewish children had remained silent during the “Our Father,” so now we would not need to articulate the words of the salute or raise our right arms, though we should
stand up as a matter of respect. I think both the teacher and I had a sense of satisfaction at having, in the general confusion, dealt neatly with a pretty problem. Within a week, all the Jewish children in our school were assigned to a separate classroom. We knew very well that no teacher wanted to teach Jewish classes. We heard them arguing passionately. I remember the teacher who came into our
classroom the first morning of the new system. She was a soft-faced, stout young woman, and her eyes were red. We stood up to greet her with the awe of children in the presence of a grownup who has been crying. She told us to get out our readers and to read to ourselves. We scrabbled for our books in our desks. We opened them. We watched the new teacher walk over to the closed window and lean her
elbows on the sill. Her shoulders were visibly shaking. Soon her weeping turned from a suppressed whisper into loud, tearing sobs, while thirty children sat in petrified silence. The following week, the school had been cleared of Aryans, and Jewish children and teachers had been brought in to make ours the Jewish school for the district.