The Vienna Melody (59 page)

Hans sat there and said nothing. Fritz gave up. Obviously Hans was thinking of the personalities of the theater in Vienna.

From New York they travelled to Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles. Hans conducted some business negotiations with little result; when his older cousin gave talks to interest people in the Salzburg Festivals, and Hans was asked, he used his better knowledge of English to correct the mistakes in Fritz's text. His taciturnity grew the farther they went. To the letters he received from home he answered, “I am well.” Fritz began to believe it was the silliest thing he had ever done, to bring this incorrigible Austrian over to a country that displeased him so unspeakably. Not for one day did his memories fade; wherever they stayed Selma's picture was set up on a separate, table amid candles and fresh flowers, as on an altar.

When the contracts were signed and the lectures for which the journey had been made were over, they sailed. They had been away two and a half months. The Statue of Liberty, which they were to leave behind them, loomed up, and the ocean, which was to take them home, opened before them.

“Well,” Fritz said, “you did survive.”

Hans was gazing at the statue with the torch held high.

“There is no uglier monument,” commented the musician.

“I find it beautiful,” Hans said. This was the first time that he had entered into an argument since Paris.

“Don't make any particular effort on my account,” Fritz said with a laugh.

“I mean it,” Hans replied. “It's not beautiful as a statue. But it is magnificent in its cry: ‘No admittance to this continent to all the Francis Josephs and the Miklaus!'” He watched it until the bronze figure merged with the horizon.

“I'm glad that there was something you liked,” Fritz remarked, and, as an old ocean traveller, prepared to make himself comfortable in his deck chair.

“You're under a wrong impression,” Hans said. “There was much that pleased me. But that's not the word. There was much that moved me.”

Fritz was so nonplussed that he took his cigar out of his mouth.

“Honestly, Fritz, I don't understand how such a fine and intelligent person as you does not feel it too.”

“Feel what? The beauty of a country where you have to take a whole day's journey to see a single tree? I want to see trees. Not stony deserts. When I go up or down Madison Avenue I think I am in a mine. I have never liked mines.”

Hans shook his head. “We had Vienna Woods in which to build Vienna. They had the desert or a rocky coast. The stones are frightening. But where their lives have taken them away from the city they are better off than we are.”

“See here,” declared Fritz, and as always, when a conversation began to engross him, he threw back his head with his strongly lensed glasses, “no generalities, please. What do you mean, they are better off? In what way is life made better because it can boast an institution known as the drugstore, where daily seventy million human beings at least eat their midday meal in full view of hair removers, laxatives, and catarrhal jellies? A life amid perpetual noise—man. I'm a musician! A life amid the perpetual stench of petrol—have you no nose? A life where every tenth house is a garage and every twentieth one is a petrol station. A life sacrificing loveliness for comfort, making certain things so easy that people loathe bothering about those other things which are difficult. A life where the radio has to tell me about some lotion or deodorant before it can announce who has been elected president. A life in which the phrases ‘Isn't it a fine day?' and ‘It certainly is' more than exhaust the potentialities of conversation. A life in which I am overwhelmed by headlines that in the first place I cannot comprehend and in the second place are not true. A life where in churches they advertise strawberry suppers and chicken dinners. A life in which a man is rated by his weekly pay envelope. A standardized life fond of quantity, lacking in imagination, passion, mystery—an assembly line which runs the same in New York as Philadelphia, in Philadelphia as in Cincinnati, in Cincinnati—God save the mark—as in Hollywood. In the morning coffee and rice crispies, or coffee and wheaties; by subway or surface car to the office; thirty minutes off at lunchtime for a sandwich in a drugstore, or the same length of time for a sandwich in a fancy restaurant; back to the office; home during the rush hour by subway, surface car, or private motor; dinner in a cafeteria or fancy restaurant, or at home; tomato juice, steak, French-fried potatoes, apple pie. A life where everyone eats the same thing, reads the same thing, asks the same questions, receives the same answers. Lord save me from such murderous monotony, superficiality, and impersonality!”

His cigar had gone out; he threw it overboard in a pet.

“Strange,” Hans said. “How mistakenly an intelligent person can see things. Everything that you say is true. But it's all false because it is not essential. Has it never struck you that the Americans have discovered what is decisive—everyday life?”

“For goodness' sake, don't make jests!”

“I'm establishing a fact. It's only now that I realize how right Papa was to insist on facts. From my first day in America to my last the thing that interested me was that Americans have an everyday life which they enjoy. Does our everyday life give us joy? Why did we come over? Because of the festival. Because of the thing for which we live: the holiday, the exception. They, on the contrary, have found that life consists of every day, and that one must live for that. They rush about in the subways and drugstores, yes. But even at dinner they celebrate. Have you never watched them eat? Every mouthful is a feast. And after dinner they have some little pleasure. Everywhere. Everyone. Every day.”

“The little pleasures of a cinema!” Fritz broke in. “The enjoyment of watching some hair-raising nonsense while you hold somebody's hand. I have, to be sure, not watched them eat, but I have seen them in the cinemas. When the story turns serious they laugh. Mistaking the sense of life for ‘lots of fun,' they have even less of an idea ‘what's all about' death. Has it not reached your attention, since you have been collecting facts, that they laugh when someone dies on the screen? They have no heart!”

“They have no fear,” countered Hans, and looked into the waves which were mounting higher. “They have been educated to believe that things will turn out right. Even their everyday has a happy ending.”

“But things don't turn out well,” Fritz objected, growing constantly more irritated by this utterly unexpected difference of opinion.

“That's a remark which they would dismiss as ‘Continental.' They know as well as I do, Fritz, that many things don't turn out right. But they do not say so. They prefer to say—and anyone brought up in Number 10 can well appreciate this—under all circumstances, when they are asked how they are, ‘Fine!' They've done away with the habit of self-commiseration along with various other things—the humiliating keys to lock up drawers and lock out trust, for instance. If you ask a European how he is he will answer, ‘Not as well as you.' Disaster, sickness, death, the Americans bear as something which belongs to life. They don't rebel against it. Fritz, can't you see why this has moved me so?”

“Don't try to inject occult meanings or motives into things which are lacking in all mystery! They act in that way because they have no imagination! Because they cannot or are not used to picture to themselves as we do either the good or the bad. That's why they are so gullible. You're surely not going to make me believe that it is a philosophy of theirs not to complain. They say, ‘I am fine,' mechanically, as they do almost everything mechanically. They have for this purpose, as for every other, a ready-made formula.”

“Don't you remember Uncle Otto Eberhard said exactly the same thing when he answered, ‘Thank you, well,' when anyone inquired about his health? They have the attitude he demanded of us and that we didn't produce—not because we had too much imagination, but simply because we were not educated for life. Our first lesson was in fear. Our last in irony.”

“I'm amazed at the way you contradict yourself! In one breath you dismiss the Francis Josephs and Otto Eberhards and in the next you quote them as examples!”

“No,” Hans said reflectively. “I think I should perhaps let Otto Eberhard in.” Then he was silent. He appeared to be absorbed in something for which he found no words. He took several turns around the deck, then stopped again beside Fritz's chair. “I think I know what it is,” he said. “They have no malice in them. They are guileless.”

“Hence the term ‘gangster.'”

“You are deliberately misunderstanding me. What we were, or at least what I was, told about this country is wrong from A to Z. They're uneducated. You can't go out at night or you'll be attacked by gangsters. The people have no manners. They're constantly slapping you on the back. The last person who slapped me on the back was your brother Otto. Nowhere is there a more lovely atmosphere or one more readily dedicated to learning than in their public libraries. Nowhere have I seen more correct manners.”

“Naturally. In Linz the pharmacist and his wife entertain the hardware merchant from Graz and his wife. All America is just one large provincial town.”

“I have not the slightest objection to provincial towns. Life is led on a cleaner basis there. They lead such a life. They keep their word. That's why they keep their marriages clean.”

“The orgy of banality you're indulging in! Are you going to tell me that you keep marriages by changing your wife or husband as often and easy as you move from one apartment to the other? Besides, our Reno happens to be Rome, and the Vatican is somewhat more particular about divorces than the judges in Nevada.”

“I think it more honest to divorce than to go on with an unhappy marriage only to keep up appearances. At least I thought so as long as I lived on the fourth floor of Number 10. Don't you feel that the Americans are more sincere than we in the old country?”

“Because they are just ridiculously naive?”

“Because they are wonderfully naive! It is because they have something childlike about them that they move me. Because their great men and women think thoughts which are great not out of distrust and complexity but out of simplicity and trust. They call it democracy, but I don't believe that it has to do with a political system. It's just human attitude. They are themselves, they want you to be the same, and they respect you as fellow creatures.”

“Who produce the Al Capones and the ladies and gentlemen who daily drink themselves into a stupor because of their inner vacuity, and the governors who kills the Saccos and Vanzettis!”

“Since when is a people judged by its shortcomings? What is their saying? Give them a chance! Tell me, Fritz, what do we ladies and gentlemen without any ‘inner vacuity' do when someone tells us a story? We cast doubts on it and criticize. They, on the contrary, are inclined not only to believe but also to appreciate it. What do we do when we go into society? We speak slightingly of the ladies and gentlemen who are not there. In all the time over here I hardly heard a single sarcastic, ironical, or wounding remark!”

“Because they lack the necessary intellectual superiority for it.”

“No, Fritz, because for that you need a certain courtesy of the heart, which they possess. And the will to have it. And the training for it. I'll trade every witticism and sharp-tongued facility for it.”

“Why didn't you simply settle down over here?” Fritz asked, his patience now reaching its limit.

“It's strange that you should say that. Once I was on the verge of deciding to do that very thing. The day you were speaking about Austria in a high school in Philadelphia. Remember?”

“Where the old ladies knitted and the young ones asked if Salzburg is in Hungary.”

“Have you always known where Cincinnati is? I can recall Aunt Hegéssy's telling us that Boston is in England. In any case, that school in Philadelphia made an unforgettable impression on me. The boys and girls together. No sex shams. No fear. Fritz! Have you any idea what that means? No fear in high school! We were obliged to go for eight years to the prison of Messrs. Miklau and Rusetter, to lose our youth and optimism there! And these American boys and girls told me they loved their school! Let me emigrate, I said to myself. Let me get away from the place where school children fear their teachers, where subjects fear their overlords, where every one fears life!”

“However, you came aboard the ship. Why?”

Hans smiled. It was the saddest smile in the world. “Over there lies a grave,” he said.

The waves had risen, and it promised to be a rather stormy crossing.

“Forgive me,” Fritz said.

Even after night had fallen the two cousins were still sitting out on deck.

“And besides,” Hans concluded, as though there had been no extended silence since his last words, “the Americans are mistaken on one cardinal point.”

“The Americans can be mistaken?”

“Oh, Fritz, why the irony? The Americans believe that Europe is a continent whose role is played out.”

“Even though you blame me for irony, that's the one thing in which I agree with them. We have grown old. They are young. We no longer need to prove that the world could not have done without us. They still have to. They have to show that they possess a music of their own, a national literature, an American philosophy. Even an American love life. We have not had to do that for a thousand years.”

“I believe firmly in the future of Europe,” Hans said, without answering his remarks. “America will never be able to give up Europe!”

“You contradict yourself chronically,” was the comment of the musician.

“In what does the contradiction lie? I now know what Europe needs.”

The sea grew so rough that the travellers could not remain on deck.