The Edit Page 26

  “Yours. Your obsession. Only you don’t recognize it.”

  “Errant flummery. You demean the memory of Frau Wotruba by such fictional re-creations.”

  “Do I? How can you be so sure it wasn’t Frau Wotruba you discovered on that train at Mauthausen? You make no mention of the poor woman’s identity in your diary entry.”

  “It couldn’t have been her. Don’t you see? She was sent away long before I went to Mauthausen.”

  “I give up. No. You’re right. It wasn’t Frau Wotruba. But it was a woman, for Christ’s sake. It could have been her. That’s the bloody point! I used her persona to get through to you, to touch you with the enormity of what you and others allowed to happen, facilitated even. We are all Frau Wotruba. The world is Frau Wotruba. Can’t you see that?”

  “—”

  “Is there no way to reach you? Can’t you understand your own writings? Haberloch, there’s another perfect instance. …”

  “The man was a meddler, a nuisance. I don’t condone what happened to him, certainly.”

  “Yet, in another time, you might have pushed him into the quarry yourself.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You admitted to dealing in slave labor. It’s what made you rich. Advokat Haberloch was investigating such corruption.”

  “Again, Miss O’Brien, you have your dates confused. Haberloch was long dead by the time I myself became involved in such shameful schemes.”

  “But if he hadn’t been? If it had been you he had been investigating? What then, Herr ____? We’re all Frau Wotruba. The world is the victim.”

  I admit to being moved by Miss O’Brien’s arguments. A chink of light shone through. I begin to understand what she is saying, but I could not let her see that. We parted once again as enemies locked in deadly combat; I am still shaken by her last story.

  What did happen to Frau Wotruba? Perhaps I should have saved her.

  I feel my entire body churning, seething, bubbling. God, how that woman has shaken me up! But I do not hate her for it anymore. No. I begin to feel the deepest sort of affection for her, not romantic in the least. Deeper than that. Like a blood tie.

  I feel suddenly that I want to live up to her challenge. To write the true story, to get through all artifice.

  This is such a story. One that I had not intended for these pages, the thought of it being too much for me to bear. Too much pain.

  It is 1947 and I am just about to leave Europe forever. I have been hiding out for two years in various places—the last fifteen months spent on a chicken farm in the Harz Mountains, the hireling of one Frau Magda, who knows nothing of my past but who has taken it into her head that we will soon be married.

  I have secured help through some of the other men in the corps who formed a network to help those of us wanted by the Allies. The show trials in Nuremberg are still in progress; I have changed my looks with a mustache and longish hair dyed jet black.

  Through our network, I have secured passage on a freighter leaving Naples in three weeks. Frau Magda knows nothing of this. I have also secured my assets in a safe hiding place, even the few lovely canvases I will take with me into exile. Uschi long ago renounced me and changed her name. From contacts in Vienna, I hear only the scantiest reports of Mother and Maria. It is not thought safe for me to visit.

  Then, one day, through these selfsame contacts, I learn that Mother has died and Maria has been packed off to a home. It is my last link with my former life, and one that I am both saddened and relieved has been broken. If Maria is in a home, then there is no need for me to return. The time is so close now: I sail in a week. But I am drawn to Vienna; I know I cannot leave Europe without returning one more time. Perhaps Maria needs me? There is the promise I made Mother. It is no good. I must risk all and return one last time.

  I simply steal away from Frau Magda’s bed in the middle of the night; a rooster crows at my departure.

  It is a dangerous trip for me on public transport, for my picture has been in the papers along with other wanted war criminals, but finally I arrive in my native city only to discover it quartered up like pieces of strudel to accommodate the four victors. I show my forged papers three times simply to reach the First District: first to the British, then to the French, and finally the Americans. The fresh carefree chewing-gum faces of the Americans pollute all of Europe. One cannot turn around anymore but there is one of them, a Hershey bar in hand, ready to call you by your Christian name, slap you on the back, and let bygones be bygones. There is something profoundly obscene in such insouciance. Give me the French any day, those who hold a grudge unto death and show it in their faces. Or even the Russians—damned ignorant and mean. Distrustful as the peasants they are beneath those wool uniforms. But the Americans! Such a surface life as they demonstrate is frightening; they are the type to shrug with a winning smile as they blow up the world.

  Stephansplatz is still a disgrace; the cathedral has begun to be rebuilt, but there is so much that needs to be done and so few resources. It is broad daylight as I enter our apartment building this last time. Frau Bechman still hides in her portier’s lodge; it is just as well, for I have no desire to explain my presence. There are few enough who would recognize me now. Most believe me dead or to have defected to the Russians to work in their secret service. I have spread several versions of my fate abroad.

  Up the stairs, I see that the nicks and gouges are still in the door to our flat. I reach over the sill and find the key to our flat, concealed after all this time in the secret place I showed Mother at the join of wood and plaster. I insert it in the lock; the click of tumblers opens the last door in my room of illusions. This is a trip taken for the rawest of sentimental reasons, I soon discover. I have not come to check on Maria, but to fetch some memento, some sign of my former life. Something to take with me into exile.

  I lock the door in back of me. The flat is much as I left it two years before. Not even the smells have altered: a mixture of talc and coal dust. In another week, the flat will be in the hands of a receiver; all traces of my family will be erased. In another week, I will be sailing for Central America, my identity changed for that of another. It will be as if I had never existed. I want desperately to latch onto some physical manifestation of my real life; something to remind me not only of Mother and Father, but also of my life as it was spent in Europe.

  Mother’s room is filled with her collectibles. She never gave up her passion for the secondhand shops, not even when I was at the height of my career and had settled a healthy allowance on her. There was the old marble-topped dressing table she had been so elated to find—only five reichsmarks from a dealer in the Second District. An eiderdown quilt covers yellowing linen on her simple metal-framed bed. On the wall are reproductions of von Alt and Waldmüller. A steamer trunk sits in a corner, covered with stickers from some of the great hotels of Europe and the Far East: the Savoy in London, the Gritti in Venice, Raffles in Singapore, the Plaza in New York. Another bargain from her searches in the Second District, once belonging to a famous mezzo-soprano at the State Opera. Mother prized this trunk as if it were her ticket of admission into an exotic world. If there is anything in the flat that will be of consoling service to me in the coming years of exile, I know that it will be found in this trunk. The lock was sprung years ago while we still lived on Hubertusgasse. Father’s impatience at getting cuff studs out while Mother searched high and low for the key to the lock. It had been on one of their theater outings, and his ravishing of her trunk had put a sore damper on things. Inside the trunk are photos of weddings and graduations, mostly mine, as well as documents: birth, marriage, death, and promotional certificates, all of which I ignore. Such two-dimensional representations of life will not see me through the future. Besides, I cannot risk carrying with me any such proofs of my real identity. Beneath the papers and photos are boxes containing the odd bit of jewelry—an amethyst broach in the shape of a
butterfly I had once purchased for Mother; Father’s gold watch chain (what had ever become of the watch?); a set of garnet earrings that Mother had last worn on her fateful trip to the Volksoper the night Frau Wotruba and I had indulged ourselves; nowhere in sight are the pearl-studded cuff links Father had been in search of when he broke open the lock of the trunk.

  Perhaps I will take the cuff links if I can find them. They have a symbolic if not intrinsic value to me. Other boxes contain scraps of Maria’s and my schoolwork: rulers and pencil stubs we had discarded, a pencil sharpener in the form of a lion I had used my first year at school. None of this speaks to me, however. I continue my search, and at the very bottom of the trunk, I come upon one item I know will be worth taking.

  Carefully wrapped in a Wednesday edition of the Kurier from 1936 is my glass ball with the miniature of St. Stephan’s in it. I tip it upside down and the tiny world is shrouded in a veil of snow once again. There is snow outside too, now. A real Austrian snowfall swirling about outside Mother’s window. The globe in my hand mirrors this real world. It feels alive. I can smell the freshly washed, line-hung linen of childhood beds when this glass ball was continually on my bedside table. I tip it again and smile at the swirl of white confetti in the liquid. Yes. This will be my memento, my talisman of a European life.

  The front door clicks. I freeze in place with the glass of snow in my hands. The second turn and clink of the tumblers opens the door. Caution has, by this time, become my main motivator. Trapped in the rear bedroom, I can hardly brazen out a confrontation with the estate agents or police or any other people who might be letting themselves in the flat. I close the lid of the trunk and am under the bed in a flash, snuggling with the dust balls and odd stocking and camisole that still linger under there. And none too soon, either, for footsteps sound down the hallway, headed straight for this bedroom. A woman’s voice, the solemn grunting tones of a man in assent. The bedroom door is thrown open: four legs present themselves for my inspection, from the knees down. It is my only field of vision from my position under the bed. The woman’s are encased in black fishnet stockings carried on impossibly high-heeled shoes open at the toe. They are the sort tarts might wear at midday. The man’s legs are covered in khaki of that particularly repugnant shade sported by the US Army. These pants are tucked into black combat boots imperfectly polished. Both pairs of shoes carry clumps of dirtying snow on them. It melts onto the parquet as they stand.

  “Komm, Schatz. Sei nicht unruhig. Wir haben ein Gaudí. Sicher … Du . . .”

  The voice sounds strangely familiar. No. It can’t be, I reason. She is safely ensconced in the asylum in Purkersdorf. More likely that Frau Bechman is making money on the side. A sort of interregnum until the formal disposal of the flat. She has obviously sold the key of the flat to street women. This is only logical with housing so tight in the city. Love as an industry has to continue. Still it rankles me that the portier has done so.

  “Whose place is this, little girl?”

  The man’s voice is thick and drawling. A caricature of voices one hears in the undubbed Hollywood movies. Something melancholy about this, deep and sad as treacle.

  A high heel is kicked off on her passage toward the bed; there is a second kicked off and then an explosion above me as the girl throws herself onto Mother’s bed.

  “Komm, du. Ich will dich. Aber jetzt!”

  A black-stockinged leg dangles over the bed lasciviously, ticking back and forth like a metronome. The combat boots approach the bed, then hesitate.

  “This okay, baby?”

  “Ja. Schön. Okay. Mama’s Bett. Schön. Okay. Mama ist tot. Dead. Verstehst? Jetzt, fick mich!”

  The words pierce like a stiletto in my ear: Mother’s bed! Then the click and swoosh of an unfastened belt and the khakis dropping, exposing legs as black as onyx.

  A gasp from Maria atop the bed: “Schön …”

  The rip of soft fabric and then a groan of springs as he mounts her. Her groans are raspier than those of the spring. …

  So there it is, my first confession. My sister fucking (yes, the ugly Anglo-Saxon word) a Negro soldier with me cowering under the bed all the while. My ultimate humiliation. We had fought the war for racial purification, and then this.

  I hid under the bed until they both left, then departed, not giving a second thought to Maria. She could take care of herself, apparently.

  I was shipped across Switzerland into Italy and to Rome where the Holy Fathers hid me at the Abbey of ____ until it was time to make my way to Naples and board a ship. I departed the shores of Europe on a rainy March day in 1947. I did not look back as the old freighter pulled out of the harbor.

  I awoke earlier than usual today, filled with a kind of Scrooge-like glee that it is not too late. It is never too late. It is, to continue the metaphor, as if I have laid Marley’s ghost to rest, have begun to deal with my own past truly for the first time. To see it for what it was.

  My God! What a vista opens before me! What an endless horizon of past, present, and future.

  That painful ugly story of my sister, Maria, is partly responsible. But it is the Irish who forced me to it, who prodded and poked at the truth.

  I have finally come to a decision about Miss O’Brien. I see it quite clearly now: She must be set free. But I admit to a bit of teasing pleasure: taking her breakfast this morning, I gave no inkling of my decision. Rather, I was as cold as Scrooge was with Bob Cratchit when the poor clerk came in late the day after Christmas. I made little response to her pleas for an outing, her tirade that she is losing her mind with inactivity and indifference. I smiled inwardly, but only grunted in reply: “We shall see.”

  Oh, Miss O’Brien. Shall we ever see. I can just imagine the look on her face when I tell her this afternoon after her yard time.

  Cordoba is coming to dinner tonight; perhaps we shall all three have it together.

  The day draws on, and I have been busy in the kitchen. A simple meal for tonight, and my mind is not really focused on it. Rather, it is on Vienna. These are not sentimental daydreams of my youth, however, but fantasies of what life will be like for me there now. I will take a simple flat somewhere in the Inner City, near the sound of church bells. Lunch at the local beisl, concerts or theater at night. No more wild animal calls from the ravine to disturb my sleep.

  So much to do, so many plans to make. I feel alive again after decades of cold storage. Well, hardly cold, but in limbo nonetheless.

  I sit at my trestle table again and I cannot wait to tell the Irish, to see the look of disbelief on her face. She is out in the compound now, sitting on a boulder. No pad and pencil for her today. She simply gazes into the heavy blue sky overhead.

  A “V” of seagulls fly over the compound. “Kaaa,” they call at O’Brien as if she is food. She does not flinch at their harsh cries. Her gaze takes in the compound itself now, then seconds later she flinches. Perhaps she sees something in the compound. It is time I clear the long grass again, a task I do not look forward to. But then, perhaps there is no need what with the decision I’ve made. A shiver from Miss O’Brien, but she cannot be cold, for now she very nonchalantly unbuttons her shirt and takes it off. I have complained of this behavior; it is unseemly. But she says she enjoys sunning herself and that I needn’t watch if the sight sickens me. I go back to the kitchen to check on the fish marinating.

  After ten minutes in the kitchen, I decide to go down and let Miss O’Brien in. I can no longer wait. I am positively glowing with anticipation. I call through the door at her naked back. She rises, her shirt a ball held in front of her breasts so that I cannot really complain of immodesty. She brushes past me: I notice a mole below her left shoulder blade. The skin of her back is freckled with all her recent sunning. She stops midway between the outside door and her room and turns to me.

  “Have you given any further thought to letting me go?”

  How incredible, I
think. It is as if she reads my mind. But I want this moment to last, to defer the pleasure of my announcement that bit longer. I assume the Scrooge-to-Cratchit tone of voice.

  “A degree of thought. Yes.”

  “Any decision?”

  I treasure this moment, twist it in my hand like a diamond cutter in search of facets. “It’s very difficult. How can I be sure you won’t tell the authorities? I would like to trust you, Miss O’Brien.”

  She clutches the crumpled shirt to her chest as if it is a baby about to suckle. I recall her own story of Frau Wotruba in the train; suddenly she reminds me of that woman again, not of Mother at all.

  “You’re never going to let me go, are you?”

  I let the question go unanswered a teasing moment and am about to reply in the affirmative when she quite calmly takes the shirt away from her pendulous bosoms and begins unfolding it.

  The peacefulness of the action catches me completely by surprise, for out of the tangle of shirt she draws a small green band that coils around her arm like a bracelet, its thicker end held firmly between her thumb and forefinger. The snake’s tongue flicks out at me, deep and obscenely red. She comes toward me with the hideous reptile, aiming it like a gun. I am completely speechless, terrified at the sight of it, for it is the deadly poisonous variety.

  She continues to approach with the snake about her arm, bare breasted like some Minoan princess.

  “I think I’ll be leaving now. Back into your room very slowly, Herr ____. Slowly and quietly and without letting your hands go to your pockets. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to throw my friend here into your face.”

  But I am too frightened to move. The snake’s presence has struck me to the very marrow. I feel my knees weaken.

  “Now!”

  The harsh edge to her voice makes me move, unwillingly, toward her room. She makes me enter first and then follows, the snake eyeing me all the while. I am struck with the most horrid fear: All my worst dreams are coming true.