The World as I Found It (94 page)

And much as she made fun of it, Gretl loved her shabby little apartment, with its bad plumbing and the decomposing scrollwork that edged the cracked ceilings. Still, a coat of fresh paint could not dispel the history of the place, which had slowly gathered like the dust on the hinges. Deep in the recesses of one of the closets, wedged behind a board, she had found an old copy of the Passover Haggadah marked in places with hairpins. Later, in her bedroom, a workman found a rumpled, brownish photograph sandwiched behind the window molding. It was a picture of a mother and son. Wearing a starched white blouse, the mother was dark haired and nicely
zaftig
, holding a dark-eyed boy of about three on her lap. But such a superstitious place to stick a photograph — literally under the woodwork, as if in the hope that it would one day be found in memory or accusation. More troubling for Gretl, the workman turned up a second picture of the boy. This one showed the boy a little older, four or five perhaps. Sitting on a bench in short pants and a big cap, he was smiling and snuggling with a snarly lion cub with thick, ungainly paws. Where had the picture been taken? she wondered. The zoo? The circus? Had the boy a father? Gretl didn't know why she would find herself staring at that picture of the seemingly brave boy with the mirthful eyes and that big floppy cap. Even to herself, she couldn't quite explain why it struck her so, bringing forth a chill. No explaining why the photograph seemed to her prophetic — why she felt so sure that the boy and his mother were now under earth, or why at night she would sometimes grieve to think that they were probably not even buried in the same place. Not even buried together.

For Gretl the whole city was a little haunted with this new life going on in their midsts, where formerly the old life had dwelt. At night, the pipes shuddered and moaned, and the reeking hallway was filled with children who slammed doors and ran down the resounding marble stairs. She was a curiosity among her neighbors, who, like everyone in Vienna, had of course never, never supported the Nazis. And who could blame them — a captive people. All were Hitler's victims. The devil was dead, and the Nazis were gone. All were Viennese again. And look, business was improving! The cafés were slowly reopening, and the shops now at least had some goods on their shelves — it did not do to be asking silly, morbid questions of people who had lived through air raids and Russian plundering, followed by months of near starvation after the war. To ask questions was to be somehow sick or mischievous, not forward-looking. To ask questions was mean-spirited —
ungrateful
, like not cleaning one's plate.

So be it. Gretl didn't rock the boat. She minded her own business — the old, she wryly wrote her brother, have no choice but to mind their own business since nobody minds them. It was Gretl's way, this bittersweet humor. She said she was old and funny looking, but in fact she had her hair done three times a week and cut a far more elegant figure than she was willing to admit in her tailored clothes. Besides, being an old fuddy-duddy made for a better story in her comical letters to her brother: better to play an old character than to just be another old lady shuffling down the street, pulling her little wheeled grocery cart. Her letters were now peppered with exclamation points and words typed out in capitals: “I DIED … I tell you, that woman is such a BITCH!” Reading them, Wittgenstein could hear his sister's still throaty laugh and run-on stories. She said that her apartment reminded her of a lifeboat filled with those few things she had managed, with Max's help, to rescue from her former life. There was the portrait Klimt had done of her, still young and dark haired, wearing a long white gown. There were also a few Chinese vases, the black lacquered writing desk and the old family pictures in their stands — things completely out of scale and now too lavish and grand for this silly, pinched life of hers.

And she was so amazed with her silly old self. Her telegraphic letters would proclaim these small daily triumphs: “ARRIVED CARRYING MY OWN BAGS … I RODE THE TRAM … A REAL PROLETARIAN.” Twaddling along in her furs, she said, she felt a bit like dispossessed royalty, in truth, a little deshabille. Almost all her friends were dead or gone, but she found several old, dear friends and managed to make some new ones. These were mainly “old Jewish ladies” — obstinate returnees like herself, who used too much rouge and perfume, wore feathered felt hats with veils and rolled their stockings over their knees, having grandly given up garters and girdles. All except Gretl had copious cats (“I'M SICK OF HEARING ABOUT CATS!”), and they met every Sunday at the Café Alte Backstube, where, at a marble-topped table in the corner, they gabbed away the morning before going to a symphony or play, and then on to Zur Linde or Schöner's for a glass of wine and maybe a bite to eat.

It wasn't much, Gretl said, and yet she had learned to love this unlikely, untidy life of hers, which gradually took another unexpected turn. She had a Russian girl named Katerina who cooked and kept house for her. Gretl soon took a deep fondness for her and her five-year-old boy, Alyosha, whose father had been killed in the war. Finally, Katerina and Alyosha came to live with her and became her “little family.” So Gretl had no need of cats. She had the boy, and the boy had a doting “auntie” who spoiled him terribly. She took Alyosha to the theater and the opera, to museums and the Wurstel Prater. Letting down her cultural defenses, she even took him to some of those silly American dance movies that her brother was always urging her to see when she needed a lift. Ach,
Top Hat
. Ach, Busby Berkeley. For the boy's sake, she even suffered Disney's
Mickey-Maus
and then
Schneewittchen
, dozing amid all with the gamboling dwarfs and furballs. But in her present state, even Disney would creep up on her. When Snow White ate the poisoned apple and lay dead in the crystal casket, she suddenly found herself clutching the squealing Alyosha, “SOBBING LIKE AN OLD FOOL.”

And slowly along the way, Gretl discarded some of her sophistication like so much useless ballast — or discarded, rather, the imperious standards and expectations of sophistication, which she said was half finickiness anyhow. It wasn't just old age. Gretl said she was not one of these “ADORABLE, SOFT-HEADED” old ladies who love all children and always remember birthdays, and yet she felt herself changing. And it was so odd, she said, the things she took pleasure in, pleasures so small that they seemed to peep at her like the little sparrows on her window ledge. Here, suddenly, were all the small, insignificant things she had never noticed, the people on the street, the slow turn of the seasons, the way things grew. Modest as they were, these pleasures were real, and they drew her along, enticing her to nibble at the crumbs strewn along the path of this unlikely life, which seemed to have reserved for her only such things as befitted her diminished appetite. Wasn't it odd, she wrote, the way old women, like young shopgirls, live on sweets — little tastes of things, scarcely enough to fill a bee? And wasn't it the most amazing thing, how this life could accommodate everyone at his own pace? Whatever it was, it seemed enough to her now. Just to watch her silly little plants growing on the windowsill was good. It seemed to her that she had even learned to love on a different scale.

Gretl had had some seven months of this cramped contentedness, when she felt a lump that became a pain that became cancer. And then she was hooked like a struggling fish to decline and death. Oh, she hated it. It seemed so unfair to die with this horrid pain, diseased and dressed with sores and dwindling down to a stick — to die ignominiously like her father, filled with the smell of her own fetor. It was so ugly and humiliating. She was the first to admit that she was a chicken about these things; she was a perfect baby about it. At night she would cry in Katerina's young arms. And then she would get so stupidly furious at Mining, the deserter, furious that she should have died cleanly without this horror and without even being there to care for her. And then there came the day when, with the sharp dread of panic, she decided to stick her head in the oven while she still had the strength. She got as far as turning on the gas and getting down on her knees. But she gagged at the first whiff, as sickened by the gas's rotten marsh smell as by the sharp familial shame it evoked, a stench of smothered anger. For so long this anger had lain dormant, so subtle and virulent. Like an ineradicable stain, it now bloomed in her blood, spreading through her body like this cancer. Never did she think she could have sunk to this point. Never did she imagine that she would suffer this rage and desperation against things that had happened longer ago than it seemed human flesh could endure or even remember. And now to be pinned like a moth to this life with this pain and rage. And, worse, to have the way out closed to her — to be not innocently, insensibly old, nor even wise! To be nothing but bitter, harboring this senseless fury against the impervious ghosts of the ageless dead. To the dying old woman, this was a pain beyond reckoning.

Gretl was through the worst of these metamorphoses by the time she told Wittgenstein about her cancer. And he came immediately, closely followed by her son Stefan and his American wife, Shirley, who flew in from New York.

The family scrupulously kept their promise to let her die at home. For seven weeks that spring, Wittgenstein watched his sister die. He wished he could have died for her: if there were one person in the world he would have spared the shocks of this life, it would have been her. Yet for all Gretl's squeamish fear of doctors and the instruments of the sickroom, Wittgenstein was amazed at the extent to which she finally inured herself to invalidism and then to the prospect of death. And in a way he had never seen, he realized that even death was a language which, like everything else in this life, must be learned. He had seen so much death, but this death he watched as if it were his own, and he learned from it. This death put his life in such relief that it seemed he could finally see the wonder of this
once
, this once-to-be that life held forth. To behold death in the face of this once, he knew there could be no reincarnation, and he thought it a blessing, to have this once to swell forth, then to be enfolded like a seed into the sheltering darkness of eternity — to be lost in time among such furrows as the sea makes.

He was jealous and saddened by her leaving, but in the end, he forgave her this death, which he had watched so closely. He gave her leave to die. And softly Gretl groped her way into it, like somebody prying open a door and creeping down a dark stair. She was careful. Like him, she had never quite known what she was religiously, but so much did she want to be sure now that she sent first for a rabbi and then called the next day for a priest.

With that there was nothing anybody could do but keep her drugged. Anger was gone. Will was gone. Every cell in her was slack and fatal, yet there was still life or pain or both, which she gripped like her son's hand even after it seemed she was barely conscious. Gretl was generous in death. Unlike her canny father, she did not die in secrecy. Rather, she died with everyone present, not even minding when Alyosha, busily playing with his toys and asking audible questions, tiptoed over to her bed and stood there open-mouthed, watching his old auntie like an egg that was about to hatch.

W
ITTGENSTEIN NEVER RETURNED
to Vienna after Gretl's death.

Two years before, he had left Cambridge for good, with the distinct feeling that he had only a few good years left to complete his work. His instincts were right, as it turned out. He stayed for a time in London, then he had a fairly good year living and working in a little cottage along the Irish coast, where he tamed two summering terns to feed from his hands and filled three notebooks with remarks. Later, he went to America for several months, staying outside Princeton, New Jersey, with one of his young friends and his new wife. Quite unexpectedly, he liked America, was amazed at the lavish American plumbing and more amazed still by the cars roaring down U.S. 1, all so thunderous and new as they passed the orange-roofed Howard Johnsons. Wittgenstein even picked up some American slang and after that might be heard to say with relish, Hot diggity dog! I'm hep. Or, Let us case the joint.

One day during his American visit, Wittgenstein was walking on the meadowlands of a nearby farm with his friend and his wife. The friend was to be a father, and his young wife was as full as life is full when one looks in the right places and in the right frame of mind. Wittgenstein was happy for them. At sixty, he still had his bad periods — not black periods as in Trattenbach, but blue periods, when he could not work or think productively. But he was generally happy, and certainly happier, on his good days, than he had been at any other time in his life. Other than calling it old age, Wittgenstein didn't know how to account for this enclosing feeling of lightheartedness, which reminded him of Gretl's letters during the last year of her life.

But on this day, while walking in the meadow with the young couple, something else took hold of Wittgenstein: a feeling of perfect ease and grace. They were talking about the heavens, when it occurred to Wittgenstein that the three of them might represent the movement of the sun, earth and moon. Suddenly he was quite excited about his idea. The husband and wife didn't quite know what had gotten into him, but they were intrigued and happy to go along with the game.

You, said Wittgenstein to the wife, you cannot be running. Not in your condition. You, then, will be the sun.

So saying, he sent her off. Slowly circling the wide meadow in her long dress, counterbalanced by her oblong belly, she stared at her feet in concentration, her long strawberry hair sticking to the perspiration on her freckled back. Infused with the game, Wittgenstein was shaking his head excitedly, telling her she must go much slower, yes, and rove out much farther to be the mothering sun, traversing millions of miles in her sweep.