The World as I Found It (88 page)

In her way, Mining was far better prepared for this than Gretl was. Age and sickness had taught Mining something: if nothing else, she had learned what it is to be powerless. All her life Gretl had laughed or scorned away the bad, the crude, the idiotic. Never had she been powerless. Never in her life had she been in a situation where something couldn't be worked out; the family politician couldn't yet comprehend these politics. Characteristically, Gretl had labored under the delusion that because the Nazis were disgusting and fraudulent, they could be scorned away by their betters as having no moral power — as if moral power meant anything against guns and tanks. Yes, Gretl saw that she was quite deluded in this late hour. They were no longer Wittgensteins: they were nobodies — Jew harborers, or at best pawns the Nazis might keep around while it was expedient to show the world that it wasn't so bad, that Vienna still remembered with gratitude her best citizens.

Gretl didn't know what had gotten into her just then; the words had just leapt out. She wasn't heroic, she was scared to death. Besides, there was nothing she could do now. That knowledge was what broke her, as the soldiers brought down the people who had been hiding upstairs. Gretl was standing with Mining, trying not to cry. And then she was crying anyway as her friends — an old doctor, a schoolteacher whose husband and son had been seized, a lone girl of fifteen and a family of four — were led outside. Out they filed, past a gang of kerchiefed youths wearing swastikas and carrying nasty little eagle-headed daggers on their belts. And there they were loaded into a tall black van and taken away, never to be heard of again.

After this, Gretl knew she could not remain in Vienna. Every Jew who could had left by then, and any left were struggling to get foreign entry permits or were in hiding. After months of harassment, Freud had been deported, and then only after heavy diplomatic pressure had been put on the Nazis. Not that this stopped them from confiscating nearly everything Freud owned. What did they care that he was old and dying? To them, he was just another rich Jew to turn upside-down and shake before discarding. Freud was the linchpin. If the Nazis were willing to publicly mistreat a man of Freud's stature, then it was clear they would stop at nothing to make the Ostmark, as Austria was now called,
judenrein
.

Gretl wanted to throw bombs. She knew she could do no further good by staying in Vienna, and yet for weeks after the Gestapo incident she did nothing, absolutely nothing. At first, she stayed out of stubbornness and anger, feeling that they had no right to drive her out of her own city. But then her anger wore her down and she fell into despair. Yet it was despair of the worst kind — the humbling, debilitating despair that she recognized as the despair of the
old
. She was sixty-one. Oh, a young sixty-one — a mere girl of sixty-one, her more charitable friends would say. And hearing these innocent blandishments, Gretl would cock her head wistfully, wanting to believe them and then playing the same game, telling these flatterers, in turn, how good they looked, shaving off a few guilty years. But now the strain told. She looked sixty-one, she thought — looked a good sixty-six or seventy. And for the first time she truly felt old and useless, felt the creep of decrepitude. It was as if somebody had knocked the wind out of her. Bad enough she had to largely fend for herself for the first time, but she now had the additional burden of caring for Mining. She hated it. It just was not her nature to play nursemaid, and Mining knew it. Mining felt guilty for needing her help, and Gretl felt doubly guilty for not giving it more freely. And then Gretl would find herself getting irrationally angry. Angry at life and the Nazis. Angry at herself! Angry that goodhearted Mining, who had nursed her father and mother, should have such a spoiled brat for a sister, and at that an incompetent brat who could scarcely iron a blouse or cook.

Every day her son Stefan would call, asking when she would leave, and every day she would stall, becoming increasingly inert and helpless. She just didn't feel resilient or adaptable enough to be uprooted to a new country. And what will I do without my friends? she would ask, willfully forgetting that her friends were gone, or dead, or else trying desperately to scrape up
Reichsfluchtsteuer
and other Nazi ransom taxes with what remained of their seized or frozen assets. And this was when they could even find a country that would take them, in those times of worldwide depression and unemployment.

Above all, Gretl had reached that intractable age where she could not endure the idea of leaving her home. She loved this modern house that her brother had built for her. It reminded her of one of those lacquered Chinese boxes, dark and luminous, with well-fitted doors and clasps that locked, and everything of exactly the right proportion. Perhaps she best liked the house for being so unlike life, especially as it was at present. The house was like a dream unfolding, revealing a tall door, then a slender hall and a labyrinthine stair that spiraled down with the skewed but haunting logic of prime numbers. In the center of the house was a glassed-in elevator that her brother had specially designed. At times these days Gretl would find herself thinking up excuses to ride it up, then down again, watching, amid its whir, that slow, devolving hierarchy of steel and glass, light and darkness. Living in that house with its books and paintings, she sometimes felt like a monk in the Dark Ages. Yes, she would think. This was why she was staying in Vienna. She was holding a few precious things for safekeeping until men learned to read again.

For a few minutes she would feel a little better with this fantasy, but then she would find herself getting angry again — blaming life and the Nazis, the chaos of Austrian politics, on and on. But of all the things she blamed, she felt the strangest was this urge to blame her culture. In her mind, even Gretl could not help scorn the notion. One might as well blame the weather, she thought. As if culture had planted the knife and welcomed Hitler! As if culture should have prevented this like a kind of moral prophylactic! Just like you, Gretl, she would think. Always looking for a boogieman or culprit. But still, if her culture couldn't stop Hitler — or even had invited or created Hitler — then why not feel betrayed by it? And how strong or deep was culture if the river could be diverted into a grotesque Teutonic religion of Bayreuth festivals, of garlanded girls and men in lederhosen, blowing hunting horns?

If not vaguely ludicrous, these questions were certainly pointless in her present predicament — Gretl was all too aware of that. She knew that she was woolgathering and avoiding, but she couldn't help herself. She was so preoccupied and forgetful these days. Up and down the elevator she would go, her mind wandering, then stuck like the humming electric panel that was waiting for her to push 1, 2 or 3. Very well. Down she would go. But then she would remember something upstairs — a book she needed or a light she had left on. And so up again with a whir, watching the floors pass, feeling herself lofting up invisibly like a rising body of heat.
Chunk
, the doors would open. But standing there, she would hesitate. The light she thought she might have left on was, as she very well knew, off. The book was downstairs or unimportant. And the fact was, she was stuck.
Don't be neurotic!
she would tell herself, now on the verge of tears. But looking down, she would see the perforated toe of her shoe — an old lady's black shoe, soft as the plush lining of a coffin — tapping the threshold of that stone floor. And such elegant black stone it was, a polished slate like onyx. But God, how it showed dust. It was so unspeakably dusty and untidy — it was like her whole life! But it wasn't dust or forgotten lights that were tormenting her. Dread was what it was, a dread as debilitating as malaria. Deep breaths as she stood by the door, amid that insistent humming. Toe tapping. Not wanting to step off, yet oppressed by the thought of the shutting doors and then the slow drop, floating down like the dust.

The other anxiety was where they would go. They couldn't decide. America? Mining would suggest. Ugh, said Gretl. France? Even worse. England, with its bleak, chilly weather? Italy! Italy, so gorgeous, so warm and sunny. Gretl spoke beautiful Italian, and they had some distant cousins there. But the disgusting politics! And so dirty! Switzerland, then — Switzerland, where years before Gretl had so shrewdly put the bulk of her fortune, just as her father had done before the first war. But the Swiss were so stodgy, and she was feeling so old, buried beneath this dust. And so it would press down, the heaviness of long, slack days when the two old sisters, afraid to go out and too depressed to even listen to a radio symphony, would look at each other and start weeping — weeping as once their mother had wept, with their handkerchiefs balled in their fists.

N
OW, AFTER HAVING SPENT WEEKS
adrift in that house in the wake of the first SS visit, Gretl was told that the SS was there again. But to send only one man? Mining was asleep, so Gretl came alone down the elevator, her heart fluttering as the door opened. Once again there was that hesitation, the toe on the threshold as she saw the SS
Sturmscharführer
in his black bulletproof suit, his legs encased in two punishing cylinders of gleaming black leather.

It made her flesh crawl to see his shoulders covered with this braid and regalia, which reminded her of skittling insects. The
Sturmscharführer
's back was turned, and he was looking with wonder at the geometry of her house, with its ribbon windows and lyre-like radiators. Gretl would never forget the silver death's head insignia on the tall peak of the cap he held under his arm as he turned and said with a respectful nod, Frau Gretl. And then she saw that big shovel of a face and realized that it was Max. Max, who had laid the floor on which he was standing and helped build the geometric stair beyond. It was impossible. To see Max dressed up, to see him contained in a uniform, no less, and so dour and reserved, with none of that wild profusion she remembered — at first this was a shock, but then it all fit with the most awful logic.

Neither she nor her brother had heard from Max, or of him, since that “scene,” as Gretl called it, at Russell's school. Ludwig had given her a full account of that visit, and its distressing end. Still, Gretl had expected it all to blow over. She never thought it would be the last of Max. Never one to give up, Gretl had even made inquiries about him, as had her brother, but these never produced anything. So finally, reluctantly, they concluded that Max was dead — killed in a brawl, found along a road somewhere or perhaps dead from drink.

Wittgenstein dreaded Gretl's questions about him. For years, every time Gretl had seen her brother, she would say, And you still haven't heard from Max? just as if it had been last week that Max had left, and not four or five years. No, Wittgenstein would say bitterly, I haven't heard. And if I haven't heard, I won't, so we might as well forget it. Well, Gretl would say, unable to put it aside. I just can't understand it. Something really must have happened to him, don't you think? And then with a pained shrug Wittgenstein would reply, Of course something happened. Something always happens.

And looking at Max now, Gretl saw that something had indeed happened. She was not altogether surprised, either, feeling that she was seeing something she had glimpsed years ago but had pushed back in her mind. Once, she had even raised the possibility that Max might have joined the Nazis, but Wittgenstein rejected it as being beyond Max; he said it was pointless speculation and slander of the dead. But Gretl was well aware of Max's anti-Semitism and his hatred of communists, his lingering bitterness about the war. Like her brother, she had clearly seen his dark side; and like him she had suppressed it because Max was so extraordinary, because in him she saw so much more good. Not that Max's bad points were always easy to ignore. Gretl remembered Max making some asinine remark about Jews, and how she angrily told him that the Wittgensteins were Jews by blood. Max refused to believe her. You Wittgensteins are not Jews, he had insisted. Even if you say you are, you are not. And even if you are of Jewish blood, there is nothing remotely Jewish about you.

Max didn't care when she showed him old family pictures and memorabilia: her great-grandfather's prayer book with its thin silvery pages and a Kiddush cup engraved in Hebrew. Max was woefully ignorant about Judaism, and he was typically disbelieving when presented with physical evidence.
He
was not a materialist. He didn't care what was written or fixed on photographic paper. For him the past was a vast fabrication to be shaken off in the way a tree sloughs its own leaves. Gretl found his denials incredible. She gave him a good tongue lashing, but, like her brother, she viewed his excesses as a comparatively small price when stacked against the greater rewards of knowing him. And of course Max had not always been the troubled man she last remembered. Moreover, he intrigued her. For an intensely curious woman like Gretl, this was in itself an irresistible asset, and it was partly a result of how Gretl had changed in the wake of the First World War. Relief work had been a profound awakening for her. The refugees expressed another realm of existence, one quite apart from that select and, as she now saw, intensely sheltered milieu in which she had grown up. Gretl wasn't the only one whose eyes had been opened by the war, and Max appealed to her in essentially the same way he did to her brother. The best thing about Max was that he was so utterly unlike them. In his sweaty way, he was like a breath of fresh air — such an antidote to their refined world. In his crazy, unrestrained freedom, Max had once seemed to Gretl to be the purest expression of the lower class and the promise of that class. In the beginning, at least, Max had conveyed the liberating and still rather novel conviction that men and women could learn and grow, that life need not run forever on the same fixed rails of tradition and class. For Gretl, Max was a letter from the frontier. He didn't hunger for what she had. Unlike most people, he didn't stand in awe of her. He loved to tease her, and she took strange delight in his impertinent remarks. And Max, in turn, adored her and probably listened to her as much as he did anybody, including her brother.