The World as I Found It (57 page)

Ernst tried to move the men, but they just shuffled back a few paces, then continued milling. Stize, meanwhile, pretended not to notice this insubordination. In Stize's mind, the men had obeyed: they
had
moved, even if they hadn't moved much. In fact, in view of things, he seemed to think the little maneuver was highly satisfactory. Yes, Stize acted as if he had moved mountains as he stood there, cloaked in arrogant authority while discipline crumbled around him. Turning to Wittgenstein, Stize raised his eyes, as if to ask, Are we through? But Wittgenstein wasn't through.

Sir, he asked. May I have a word with you? Leading him around the traverse, Wittgenstein told him about the previous night's incident and his prime suspect, Grundhardt.

He's a big problem, sir, said Wittgenstein. I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't partly responsible for this typhoid scare.

Stize had heard this before. Here you go, he said, blaming this Grundhardt for everything. I agree the man's a bad apple, but unfortunately we need every apple we can get right now, bad or otherwise. You have no evidence.

I've tried to get evidence, sir. Nobody will report him.

Stize eyed him wearily. Well, then you're stuck with a bad apple, aren't you?

True, sir, said Wittgenstein, trying to contain his anger. But might the bad apple spoil the whole barrel?

The whole barrel?
Delighted now to do some truly serious posturing, Stize shook his head with a condescending smile. Sergeant, in this square mile where we stand, there are
countless
bad apples. And that's not even counting the Russian bad apples. In any case, Sergeant, with so many bad apples around us, and with so many soured apples, besides — the lieutenant took a dramatic breath — well, how are you sure that your bad apple is the rotten one? Then, smiling in anticipation of his wit, Stize said dismissively, Make applesauce, Sergeant, make applesauce. Now, I must go. I've a staff meeting in fifteen minutes.

Sir, said Wittgenstein, trying to make one last point. Since you'll be at that meeting, I'd like to remind you of the increased activity our patrols are noticing in the Russian lines. Also, of the fact that they seem to be digging forward reserve trenches. They'll be making rapid progress now with the flooding over.

Stize waved him off. We're watching the situation closely, Sergeant. Intelligence says the Russians have nowhere
near
the shells they need to mount an effective offensive. Their reserves are down, as is morale, and aerial reconnaissance shows negligible movement in their rear areas. No immediate cause for alarm, I assure you. Stize swatted his gloves against his hand and looked around. Ah, here's the stretcher. Good. Very good. I'll notify the medical officer of the rumors — suppose they may want to boil the water or something. You'll be apprised of the diagnosis once it's available.

The men were still milling around as Stize returned Wittgenstein's salute, then left with Krull to make one more pitch for booting horses. And watching them with a grin was Grundhardt, tossing his privates in his pockets like so much spare change.

A few minutes later, once the Hungarian had been carried off and the men had been dispersed on work details, Wittgenstein spoke to Grundhardt. They were alone in an empty dugout dimly lit by a smoking kerosene lamp. The cold earth smelled of mildew and gave off fumes from their urine, an ammonia smell that burned his eyes.

Wittgenstein brought the lamp closer to Grundhardt and said, I don't suppose you know who started this typhoid rumor?

Zealously, Grundhardt replied, It's no rumor. Everybody knows it. There's an epidemic. The Russians gave it to us, the Jews gave it to the Russians, and God gave it to the Jews. I've seen typhus — I know. Like little flies I've seen the children brought from their houses. In the gutters and in swarms by the roads, I've seen —

Shut up!
Wittgenstein felt he had to beat him back. Had Grundhardt said that grass was green, Wittgenstein would have denied it. It's not typhus, he said. And if I hear you spreading any more of this nonsense, I'm going to have you charged with sabotage. Do you know you can be shot for sabotage?

Grundhardt stared at him fiercely. Rationally, Wittgenstein could see through his sham — there was something puffed up and ludicrous about him — but even so he felt the hair bristle on the back of his neck. Hunkered like a wolf, with low gray eyes, Grundhardt smelled his fear and exploited it. Floundering now, Wittgenstein said, This is your last warning, Grundhardt.

But Grundhardt just eyed him contemptuously and said, Why should I waste my breath? You'll see — Antal won't be the last.

Later, Ernst laid his hand on Wittgenstein's shoulder and said with a squeeze, Did you get the little rat straightened out?

It was an innocent squeeze, just the corporal's way of establishing contact. How many times had Wittgenstein been walking in the darkness only to feel Ernst clap him on the arm? The gesture meant much more to Wittgenstein than it did to Ernst — that's why it made Wittgenstein so nervous. Besides, Ernst was his friend, and the feelings Wittgenstein sometimes had for him were, to Wittgenstein's way of thinking, not suitable for friends, much less for the army.

In that sense Wittgenstein's friendship with Pinsent had been easy: Pinsent wasn't his type. But the confident, rough-looking Ernst was. For the most part, Wittgenstein had done well at burying his desires, but then a bulging calf, a bare back or a pair of white buttocks in the stinging antiseptic steam of a delousing shower, would spoil everything. Why? Wittgenstein wondered. It was just hair, muscle, skin. Why did he find these details so overwhelming?

In Tolstoy's
Gospels
, the temptations were so homey and simple by comparison. A peasant working in a field would look up and see a devil with little goat's horns peeping down from a stunted tree, urging him to take a drink or a pinch of snuff. But the peasant's sin was small potatoes and his devil a mere pipsqueak compared to the devil of lust. And undergirding it all was despair — these periodic urges for sex were always an index of his despair.

Wittgenstein had told Ernst all about Pinsent. Ernst was a simple man of little education, but he had a good heart and felt sad when Wittgenstein told him about the death of his English friend. Ernst knew what Wittgenstein was going through, and in this respect he was a true veteran: to him, it made no difference that Pinsent had been an enemy. At bottom, Ernst knew that they all died the same way, all twisted in the same attitudes and staring stupefied at the same sky as their eyes welled up with darkness. No, it was only the martinets of the rear areas and the fierce old men at home who felt no sadness for the waste on both sides. Wittgenstein had told Ernst the story of how Pinsent was packed off to Bondock after his father had died, and how on his first day there the red-haired runt lay down in the muddy soccer field, staring at the sky as the bullies spat and kicked him. Refusing to play, not even if they killed him.

Wittgenstein still couldn't get over it. Shaking his head, he told Ernst, I keep wishing Pinsent had done the same in Belgium. Over and over I think of it. What if he had just laid down and refused to fight? What if we all did?

As Wittgenstein said this, he saw Ernst staring hard at him, and then he thought that in a way he loved him. Wittgenstein was now in such a state that for a moment he even fancied Ernst was something like Pinsent. Ernst and Pinsent did share a certain purity and innocence, but that was about it. Actually, they were not alike. They were not alike at all.

V
IENNA
had been covered with snow when Wittgenstein arrived there on hardship leave the previous winter, shortly after Kurt's death.

The long train that had brought him home was rife with noise and drunken soldiers, the passenger cars followed by hospital cars of wounded, and behind these eleven contagious horse cars filled with filthy, half-starved refugees, most of them Jews. It was an interminable journey, with breakdowns and endless stops for water and coal, followed by more frequent stops smelling of death and disinfectant as refugees were turned into the woods to empty slops and hastily bury their dead.

Several times during the longer stops, Wittgenstein walked back to the refugee cars, half from curiosity and half from an impoverished feeling that he might render assistance. The latter impulse stemmed largely from Tolstoy's example, but with the mendicant Christian also came the golem Jew with his empty bucket, having neither alms nor food nor medical training — in short, nothing these tanners and peddlers would have accepted from him. What possessed him to walk a quarter mile back into that little world caught between the war's steel teeth? Not in the least did he understand these people, or the reaction they elicited. How many times in Galicia he had seen them hung from trees and telegraph poles with signs in Russian pinned to their coats, denouncing them as spies, hoarders, vermin. How they rocked and swung, like dark bells, with their legs and hands bound together and a look of stoical renunciation in their constricted faces. In death as in life, these Jews seemed to Wittgenstein to be profoundly uncomfortable in the world, forever outside the fold; their very passivity seemed to encourage murder in the way a rabbit will spur even the most tail-swiped cur to tear him to pieces. This was their lot, these Jews seemed to say. For good times there must be bad times, days when their red beards would hang like fleeces from the trees. Standing amid that hive, Wittgenstein would find himself closing his eyes, listening to these
shtetl
sounds, which nagged him like a melody he could not place.

But there was another reason for Wittgenstein's ambivalence and discomfort, and that was Gretl, who was now learning Yiddish and Hebrew as part of her work coordinating relief efforts between the government and Vienna's many Jewish charitable organizations. As one of the leaders of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge, she was finding the charitable alliance increasingly difficult to hold together. In the first weeks of the war, the Russians had quickly overrun Galicia, displacing thousands of Galician Jews, whom the Austrian army shipped west to various refugee camps and to Vienna, where the Jewish population quickly doubled. Working in cooperation with the government, Vienna's Jews managed to keep the refugees from starving that first winter. But the continued influx that spring quickly began to strain the city's own stretched resources, fueling tensions not only between the refugees and Vienna's Jews but with the broader populace as well. The previous summer, when Austria's forces, buttressed with German divisions, had re-taken Galicia, further tension arose as it became increasingly apparent that the refugees had little desire to return home. Since many were petty traders, they fell into black market dealings. Many more, unemployed, would be seen standing on street corners, jamming libraries or the coffee houses in the Leopoldstadt. The relief efforts continued, with soup kitchens, subsidies, schools and care for expectant mothers, but not without deep misgivings on the part of Vienna's indigenous Jews. After all, they said, Vienna could hardly feed itself; to continue feeding all these extra people would only encourage them to stay.

A broader problem was the strain the refugees would pose after the war, when they inevitably would find themselves in competition with other minorities returning from the battlefield. Then there were the negative impressions these people fostered — the embarrassment Vienna's industrious, cosmopolitan Jews felt at seeing these primitives huddled on street corners or gawking at passers-by. Perhaps more to the point in these days of frustration and stalemate was the convenient target they made for anti-Semites. Jews were already being blamed for the war, with people sniping at the Jewish black marketeers, the Jewish bankers and the Jewish war contractors who were said to be raping the army with shoddy, overpriced goods. Even among Vienna's Jewish merchants, these village yokels had a reputation for being unreliable in business. Still, for a Jew to let down a Jew was one thing. But for him to trim a goy of his money was exceedingly bad business, especially in hard times.

Gretl saw these as legitimate concerns, but, like other leaders, she was quick to point out that they were still relatively long-range problems. Vienna could not turn out or abandon her refugees, and Gretl urged realism. Until the war was over and the country got back on its feet, these people could hardly be sent home en masse to face starvation and the very conditions that had driven them out in the first place. The community would have to dig deep and be patient.

Despite Gretl's effectiveness in pressing the case for Vienna's refugees, she was having much less success in saving that other threatened population, the men of her family. With one brother crippled and the other now dead, Gretl was engaged in a campaign to get Ludwig out of the army, or at least out of combat. Wittgenstein, however, had made it clear that he was staying put. The question was who would prevail.

Looking out the window as the train crept into Vienna, Wittgenstein could see the massive city huddled under clumps of low winter clouds. A smoky bluish gray in his memory, Vienna now seemed singed at the edges like an old photograph, everything begrimed from the cheap coal they were forced to burn, when coal was available at all. In the station, with its resounding marble ceilings, the lights flickered ominously and the marble stairs echoed with wooden-soled shoes, leather, like most other commodities, being increasingly unobtainable. By the men's room, a pudgy man with a soiled suit darted out from a vestibule. Sir, he hissed. Do you have any cocoa, spirits or other foodstuffs you might like to sell or trade? The man opened a valise crammed with cans and packages. Look. I have some lovely bacon and tinned milk. Choice tobacco? Silk for your girl? Wittgenstein veered away in disgust but was almost immediately accosted by another man pouring out a sad tale, then by a mother pointing to her five railish children. Outside the station, the walks were covered by grimy snow, with only a few tired old men and peasant women to stir it around with brooms and shovels. Here there was no relief, either. No sooner had he fought his way through another gauntlet of black marketeers than he faced a mass of beggars, many hobbling veterans in uniforms with pinned-up legs or sleeves, calling, Sergeant! Some help for a comrade, sir, a father and a veteran of Lwów …