The Edit Page 17

  One ironic aside, that this villa had formerly belonged to a Jewish banker and had become ours only because of the racial laws that Uschi purportedly detested, did not diminish in the least her passion for the place. She became as house-proud as a washerwoman with a new municipal flat. But none of this did I throw in her face: It was part of our unspoken agreement.

  Agreements: We soon hit upon the compromises of our marriage. Two paragraphs above I mentioned “her” bedroom, for by this time we both understood that ours was not to be a deeply physical union. We had, instead, agreed to present ourselves in the best possible light regardless of what occurred in private. To the outside world, she was decorative, if not a trifle eccentric in her tastes and beliefs. But that was allowed as she came of a good family. In many ways then, from the outside, she appeared to be the perfect wife for a young and promising Staffel officer. I did not mourn the lack of love; I had no time for such sentiments in those hectic years. We lived separate lives, Uschi and I. I did not inquire how she spent her hours away from me, nor she of me. So, “her” bedroom then.

  My sleeping accommodations were much more frugal: a simple single bed in an unadorned back bedroom of the villa. More often still, I slept on an army cot in my office in town. I was often reminded in those years of the old emperor, Franz Joseph, and of his wife, Sisi, the elusive Empress Elisabeth. He the tireless old civil servant, and she the frivolous wife. He had no more support in that quarter than I did. She was forever wandering across Europe avoiding the poor old man. He, too, slept on a simple cot and by day did his duty to his country. Uschi had not yet taken up gymnastics as the empress had, though it is true she had become a devotee of the game of golf. She was, in fine weather as she told me, generally to be found at the exclusive golf club in Lainz. Not that I ever looked for her there. And I had yet to find my own Katharina Schratt—­someone else to comfort me as the emperor had in that actress. Another difference: the empress had at least presented Franz Joseph with a son. Uschi was an iceberg in that respect. An iceberg does not give birth. Uschi was too worried about her figure to participate in such activities as childbirth.

  But if there was no support at Hohe Warte for me, I found it elsewhere: from my mother. Her work as a parent should have been done. After raising me and laboring hard for all those years so that I might get a good education, one would assume that she could sit back proudly and simply be pampered. But Mother was not like that at all. She was one of the few to recognize the emptiness of my marriage, and she tried to see me through the struggle of those years. Mother already had burdens of her own, for sister Maria was a special case. At nineteen, she was turning into a striking black-haired beauty. Her eyes were a bright blue, but one had only to look into them to know something was amiss. Despite the color, those eyes shed no light. They were all spatial color; they emitted nothing of their own. Only reflective surfaces. She had always been a simple child, Maria. But as she grew older, we began to understand that this was not a mere act, not an affectation. She was to be a little girl forever. Thus Mother was destined to be a mother for the rest of her days. I hesitated in bringing her more problems, but I think she found my occasional afternoon cake-and-coffee visits a relief in her routine days. Lord knows they were for me, too.

  Perhaps the most difficult part of my work was the constant requests by friends and acquaintances to help a “good Jew.” Everyone seemed to have their good Jews; we all knew one or two. There was the little watchmaker on Ungargasse who always had candies in his pockets. Like Brahms, he would walk the streets followed by a troop of children who knew of his tricks, for suddenly he would toss up a veritable snow shower of sweet mints. Or the tobacconist from whom Mother had bought her shop. This lady allowed Mother to pay her over several years, interest free, because she knew we were a fatherless family. A Jew nonetheless. Even Hitler had his favorite Jew: Dr. Bloch in Linz, who had treated the Führer’s mother in her fatal illness. This Jew doctor survived the war, living almost in sight, so to speak, of the camp where I spent the final years of my Staffel career, Mauthausen.

  Only I, the bureaucrat in charge of resettlement of the Jews of Vienna, was disallowed my good Jew. They were made a logistical problem for me; success and failure were easily differentiated in my monumental task. Numbers pure and simple directed my actions. Each good Jew decreased my statistics; ergo, there was no such thing as a good Jew. These were my orders; such were the terms of my appointment. One hardly brands Franz Joseph a war criminal for putting into effect the awesome train of events after Sarajevo that led to World War I. Yet I, a humble bureaucrat, suffering from my burdensome work as much as others, am hounded to the ends of the earth for putting into action orders over which I had no power whatsoever. Franz Joseph could, I suppose, simply have ignored the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He had no great love for this nephew, after all. But I had no such easy avenue open to me. I was caught in the middle. I do not hyperbolize either when I speak of the suffering the duties caused me. There was one instance especially in which I should have liked the luxury of having my good Jew.

  It happened in this way. It was fall of 1942, not long before my posting to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. A glorious autumn, and the heat stayed with us well into October. Fine balmy days with the leaves tumbling out of the trees almost in slow motion; the parks full of the golden rain of them. One particularly warm day, my mother approached me for a favor—a thing she did not, as a rule, do. I thought I had made it clear enough both to her and my sister, Maria, how difficult the whole business was for me. I have found the task presented to me an enormous responsibility; I spent countless sleepless nights wondering about the destination of these hapless people, for—contrary to the later decision at Nuremberg—I was merely a “bearer of orders” and not a “bearer of secrets,” as the bureaucratic jargon had it. I had not been told anything explicitly about the Final Solution. I was not a cognoscenti of the new language rules. My brief spoke of “resettlement in the east.” As far as I knew, that is exactly what it meant. It was only after the war that all the information came out on the true meaning of this terminology. Of course, I had my doubts at the time. I could not imagine what all those Jews would be doing in the Government General of Poland. They were urban Jews and had been for centuries. To expect them, overnight, to revert to rural ways and to survive on the land—well, such questions frankly were not part of my orders, yet I thought of them nonetheless.

  And then when my mother came to me that one day, her face drawn and rather mournful looking, I knew that she had come for the favor she had never yet asked.

  “It’s Frau Wotruba,” she said without any preliminaries.

  My orderly had, unbeknownst to me, kept Mother waiting the better part of an hour in the outer office. She was excited and flushed.

  “Easy now, Mother,” I responded. “What is it about Frau Wotruba?”

  But I knew. In a way, I think I always knew. After all, what Aryan woman would carry on so with a mere boy and then compound the sin by carrying on with the boy’s father? She was a woman without shame. She did not know the meaning of the word; and it is exactly that absence of shame in what is otherwise a worthy race that sets them apart from the family of man. I listened as Mother explained. We were in the Rothschild Palace office. I tapped the loose piece of star-pattern parquet under my desk. It was an irritation, that piece of unglued parquet. My windows were open; the light summer drapes fluttered in a breeze. A car horn sounded; there was the rattle of a streetcar in the distance. I wished I could be out in the fresh air; I wished I did not have to hear what my mother was preparing to ask.

  Frau Wotruba had received resettlement orders, it seemed. A Mischling, second class as it turned out. These mixed-race cases were lower priority, and thus, she had lasted until the very end of the Jewish evacuation, most probably thinking herself to be safe. And after all, she knew, via my mother, of my important work and must have counted on my protection. Yet this wa
s all the more reason for me to be hard and unmoved. I had to be the example by which others patterned their professional lives. Were I to allow personal considerations to creep into my decision making, I should be no better than any of the pettifogging bureaucrats we had rid ourselves of when we put an end to the Republic. What indeed had all our sacrifices been for if I allowed myself to make an exception? All these thoughts passed through my mind, along with a remembrance of the warm embrace of Frau Wotruba and of our private times together. The softness of her bosom, her exquisite shudder of delight as she rubbed against me.

  And then my mother told me how sorry she was that she had asked, but Frau Wotruba was frantic. She had pleaded. …

  “You mean she sent you here?”

  “How could I refuse the poor woman, son? How could I? Granted, she was not always upstanding with us. But then her poor husband and your father were such fast friends.”

  Just like a Jew, I thought, to presume on old connections in order to get them out of a fix! This knowledge steeled my heart to the woman and I told Mother that there could be no exceptions. There was simply nothing I could do. Mother actually seemed relieved at this. From that day on, she looked at me in a different light. No longer was I her overgrown son. Now, I had become a man in her eyes. I had stood firmly by my duty. Only cowards and Jews attempted to wriggle out of theirs.

  I do not know what became of Frau Wotruba. I assume she was lost somewhere in the vast hordes of Jews sent to the east. She was a very frail creature, really. I doubt she could have survived resettlement for very long. I feel no sense of guilt that I could not help her; I like to think that had she known the full extent of my devotion to duty, she would not have asked for any help. She might even have found my devotion to duty a manly virtue, as Mother did.

  “What’s this?”

  “A text.”

  “Why do you insist on calling it that? Is it a story? An essay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really, Miss O’Brien, you can be most infuriatingly vague. Isn’t it typical that amateurs such as myself are the ones to safeguard the sanctity of forms? I refer specifically to your latest creation. Shall I call it a text, as well?”

  “As you will.”

  “I’m no critic …”

  “They always say that before they assume the role. You don’t have to be. I don’t write for the critics. I write for the people.”

  “Neither am I a Catholic any longer, though the smell of incense and the brushing sound of a priest’s cassock filled many of my earlier days. Mass at Stephansdom, the sound of the organ filling the immense space.”

  “Exactly what is your point?”

  “I just think you come awfully close to the edge with this one.”

  “The edge of what?”

  “Of decency … good taste.”

  “Shit! That old war horse again, is it? You know, Herr ___, I find that when people run up against something they don’t understand or that makes their hair bristle or that churns their guts uncomfortably, they let themselves off the hook by crying about bad taste and propriety. We’ve gone through all that old argument before.”

  “The title, even. ‘The Annunciation.’ Isn’t it rather a sick joke? And then the scholar, this fellow named—”

  “Kaltmann.”

  “Exactly. Rather tedious symbolic stuff, don’t you think? Hardly worthy of you. ‘Cold man.’ The precise, scientific sort.”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “But you’ve played the tricks. You’ve been unfair to us. Exactly what you accuse me of. You give us this character, we get to know him quite well, and then you have him destroy himself over such a trifling matter.”

  “You think it was?”

  “Who cares about Sogdian dialect, anyway? Some absurd ancient Near Eastern tongue.”

  “You seem to, for one. At least you’re agitated about something. You see, he had to kill himself to keep the secret. He couldn’t trust even himself to keep the secret from the world.”

  “But what’s so earthshaking about it? So he translates this old rendering of the Bible. Where is that passage, anyway? Yes. Here: ‘And thus Mary, wife of Joseph, found herself with child for the third time, and this one, unlike the others, was born living, to be named Jesus.’ And over this sentence, over this piddly footnote to history, you will have us believe that this Kaltmann chap, a man who spent his entire life breaking the linguistic code of the language this fragment was written in, that this sort of man would hang himself over the discovery of such a piece of information? Absurd.”

  “Pain is relative.”

  “Which means?”

  “While the debunking of the Virgin Mary myth may seem a trivial historical footnote to you, for Kaltmann, it signaled the shattering of his well-ordered universe. I mean, it is the central male myth, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t follow you at all, Miss O’Brien. Sometimes it’s as if you’re talking Sogdian.”

  “It’s at the very heart of the way man views woman. We live by extremes. The archetypes of Mary and Eve. Polar opposites. Mary the virgin, who is neither soiled nor sweaty. She has not given into crude animal sexuality. She is the pure vessel. The white light in a crepuscular world. She has no other meaning or function than that of bearing a man child who becomes a messiah. A repeat of your Viennese mother and the pasha son.”

  “But with the subsequent loss of one’s own independence, Miss O’Brien.”

  “Exactly. For there’s the flip side. Eve the spoiler. The whore. The clipper of hair and testicles, no matter the name given to her. Mary Magdalene, Judith, Salome, and all the other idols of perversity you men have created. You carry around a symbol of that yourself. You put it on your wall.”

  “You mean my Rubens.”

  “Judith and Holofernes. A lovely subject. Call her what you like, Judith or Eve, the idea is the same. I suppose I could have had poor Kaltmann translate that scene from the Garden of Eden, had him discover that it was Adam and not Eve who ate the apple from the tree of wisdom. Man, the toy-maker and putterer who will never leave well enough alone. It wasn’t woman, after all, who opened the biggest Pandora’s box of all, unleashing the atom. It will destroy us all sooner rather than later, but no one is yelping about the evil inside of man that he must always tinker about with things. It is man who does not listen to that tiny voice inside us all counseling, ‘If it works, do not fix it.’”

  “But what has all this got to do with Kaltmann?”

  “It would be as if you discovered that you were illegitimate, perhaps. That your mother had you by another man. It was that sort of betrayal for Kaltmann. It brought his universe tumbling down around him. And he had nothing to replace it with. An uninventive man, to be sure, and not an uncommon sort. For Kaltmann, it was the woman as either virgin or whore. When he found that Mary was an elaborate hoax, then all that he was left with was the whore. It comes from thinking in extremes, and it starts right here, right here with this one man and one woman together. There seems to be no middle place for woman. There is a virgin or whore polarity, played out in modern terms in career woman versus mother goddess and howler at wolves. Man and woman is the fundamental political unit, and it is sick. That’s why all politics is sick. That’s why the world is on a course of self-destruction. It’s pictures like Rubens there. It’s men like Kaltmann. It’s policies of hate and extermination. And all because we, you and I, man and woman, are at odds with each other. The old battle, the virgin and the whore.”

  “I’m supposed to see all this in Kaltmann?”

  “Oh, do piss off! You’re not supposed to see anything. You’re not supposed to find parallels in the story with our own situation. You’re not supposed to understand. Feel maybe. Understanding is a tall order.”

  “If you’re going to be like that.”

  “No, wait. Don’t go just yet. I didn’t want to tal
k about the story. Look, I need to get out for a while. I’m going crazy in this one room and that chicken run out back. Just for a drive. Or maybe a bit of fishing on your boat. Don’t shake your head. I’ve got it all figured out. I’ll be disguised. People won’t know who I am. I’ll wear some of your clothes, hide my hair in a cap. What do you say? I’ll be so good. No funny business, I promise. Just a change of scenery. You can trust me. What do you say?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Dear Herr ____,

  “I take up here your persistent argument—indeed it may be the theme of your memoirs—about the chaotic force of sex and the female as representative thereof. I haven’t heard such errant bullshit since slogging through that old pederast Plato. Though I think you’ve put the argument in a nutshell: So long as we, men and women, continue to view each other as polar opposites, the fight will be engaged. The fact of the matter is that we are all a continuum, a color spectrum of energy. For reasons mostly to do with former biological necessity, women tend more toward one end of the spectrum and men toward the other. But it is imperative to remember always that we are parts of one spectrum, not two distinct ones. We are slide trombones at A and G, respectively.

  But let’s backpedal to Plato for a moment. It was his group of gormless twits and sycophants who encouraged the old fart to his extremes of thought. The Greeks, Plato foremost among them, were hung up on one problem: how to make the goodness of a good human life secure from the vicissitudes of happenstance by using reason as a controlling agent. Reason would be the buffer from all ‘outside’ agencies that could fuck up love or friendship or object ownership. It was always this tuche, as the Greeks called happenstance, that could knock the good (i.e., both the artificially ordered life and happiness as attained through living) right off its track, never mind the terminus to which it was headed. And never mind what Kant might have to say about the invulnerability of the ethical quality of life from mean old tuche. Then goodness, for Plato, is a fragile condition, a compulsive child who needs the rarified air of the mountains and no disruptions, please! A child who must at all costs avoid the debilitating stress of appetites, feelings, emotions. These must be warded off with fingers in the sign of the cross. That was the price of complete immunity to tuche. All passions were suspect and thus suppressed. They might undermine one’s personal dedication to rational self-sufficiency. That is the paradigm Plato imagines for us at the peak of his argument in Phaedo, in the Symposium, and even in the Republic: rigid self-control, denial of emotion—a life of self-sufficient contemplation where unstable activities and their objects have no intrinsic value. Well, we all know that this led Plato and his followers down the merry road to sodomy—no messy emotions there. Just get it up, get it in, and get it off. Slam, bam, thank you, man.