A Chosen Sparrow

by Vera Caspary

  “Will you give me the great pleasure of having a glass of champagne with me?”

  “Thank you, but I am working now.”

  “When will you be finished? May I invite you for supper?”

  “It will be late. I work until one o’clock.”

  “My car will wait for you. Please do me the honor.” I was not certain and I gave him only a bit of a smile. When I had finished the song he was gone.

  A long hand, bone-thin, played with the pepper shaker. The flesh was sprinkled with faded freckles. His hair which had at first seemed without color was a reluctant red. He had a habit of slipping off into reverie, sucking in his lips and looking through the walls at some distant scene. I wondered how many hundreds of schillings he had paid to have this small, elegant restaurant kept open so late. Candles in tall holders shed a golden haze upon a centerpiece of violets. (Had a florist’s shop been opened or another vendor deprived of her night’s work?) I know the menu still, German Rheinsalm, partridge, asparagus from Holland, a dessert of meringue and strawberries. The private dining room was furnished in fine antiques, designed for splendid eras and noble dinners, for bare shoulders, diamonds, sable and aigrettes. From a gold frame Kaiser Franz Josef frowned down at a girl inappropriately dressed in a plain white blouse and black skirt.

  Our conversation was also inappropriate to the mood and hour. In the car Herr Metzger had explained that while waiting in the barber’s salon he had read the story about The Glamour Girl Who Grew Up in a Nazi Prison, Diffidently he said he would like to know more about my experiences if it did not hurt me to talk about my sad childhood.

  While we ate meringues and drank champagne I chose my anecdotes with discretion, made no mention of filth or cruelty as I did not wish this attractive gentleman to think of me in ugly surroundings. I was a normal girl, I wished him to find me a dainty creature to whom the daily bath was a habit begun in infancy. He listened tautly, barely touching the expensive food. When I stopped to sip wine or relish a strawberry he begged, “Go on, go on,” with hungry impatience.

  “I forget.”

  “One never forgets. The mind buries what it does not choose to remember.”

  His sympathy was absolute. It worked on me like a hypnotist’s command. Instead of my well-kept hand with tapering, lacquered nails upon the tablecloth I saw a childish paw, skinny, soiled, the nails overgrown with pallid cuticle. “Leni, child, you must learn to keep your nails clean.” Where and when had I heard this voice? The lady digs out the dirt from under my nails with a pointed twig. There are solid walls on all four sides of the prison courtyard. Sometimes we walk together, my small hand in hers. Sometimes we walk in the rain, sometimes hitter sunshine hums through our clothes. In winter we wear the same thin rags. Few of us have coats and often we find dead women on the cold ground. This lady was once a school teacher. She tells me about the beasts of the forest, teaches me the elements of English and geography, draws maps in the air with her forefinger so that I see North America as a cloud formation. She is a Communist, too, and can fight. Once she punched it out with the pockmarked whore for the privilege of combing the lice out of my hair. One morning my Communist friend is missing from the parade ground. I am not told whether she died of cold or starvation, was beaten to death or sent away on the sealed trains.

  “You haven’t forgotten. We don’t forget,” Gerhard Metzger said. Our plates were slid off the table by a waiter who came and went like an invisible man. Coffee was set before us. Somewhere a church clock struck three times. I had not thought of the Communist schoolteacher for years and her face, as well as the pockmarked whore’s, came back as clearly as the strokes of the clock.

  I raised my hands and studied my fingernails again. It was not possible to look directly into my companion’s face. His sympathy had touched some deeply guarded spot. A layer of protective flesh was torn away because his eyes had looked into mine too eagerly. He touched me gently and I felt fingertips as tender as a child’s upon my wrist.

  “I am sorry, please,” it was the old rueful voice of humility, “forgive me. I find it painful to think about those ugly times. Let us speak of pleasanter things. Tell me about yourself. Who are you? Where do you come from? What is your profession?”

  Silence persisted. I became tired of looking at my fingernails and studied an antique cabinet that almost filled the opposite wall. It was elaborate, painted, gilded, inlaid, as baroque as Vienna’s famous Pest Column with its whorls and flutings, stars, shells, cupids, garlands, crescent moons, eagles’ heads, saints, vines, crowns and demons. Not a drawer, not a knob, not a square centimeter was without its dozen symbols: vice, virtue, pagan god, holy cross, asceticism, fertility, delight and cruelty, all typical of Viennese baroque; like our palaces, our churches, our characters, our very lives.

  My companion returned from the alien shores of his reveries. “Please forgive me. It was thoughtless to ask you to talk about all those…” Definite words offended him. He seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation; at last, “You must be very tired. Let me take you home.” In the Prussian accent kindness had a hard glaze. All of his movements were clipped. He held my coat dutifully, led me to the car so crisply that I could not tell whether he was showing friendliness or mere courtesy.

  We rode in silence. At the door of our apartment house, while we waited for the Hausmeister to come down, cold air assaulted us and we shivered in the mist. When the door was finally opened Gerhard Metzger bade me good night and bent over my hand. His lips did not quite touch it. I thanked him for the splendid supper.

  “For me it was a great privilege. Thank you. ‘Wieder-sehen.” The brusque Prussian accent can make the most ardent speech sound indifferent. I was afraid he did not like me and that I would not see him again. And I wanted to, intensely. In spite of his strange, withdrawn and impersonal manner, I felt that I was falling in love with the moody Prussian.

  Every night when I finished work I hurried out to see if his car waited down the street. Why? Gerhard Metzger had not aroused the wild eagerness which had excited my first meeting with Martin nor, like Rick, enraged me and aroused impossible dreams. The conversations of my intellectual friends were far more stimulating, but none of these men appealed to my passionate imagination. In Gerhard’s long silences, sad eyes and rueful smile I saw the lonely man who needed my affection. His unrest challenged my spirit. I felt that this handsome, elegant, unpredictable man was stumbling and groping toward me like a cripple in the dark.

  The first supper had set a pattern. The same room in the same restaurant was prepared each night. The baroque cabinet became a familiar background, the waiter offered the indulgent smile an old man visits upon lovers. Franz Josef relaxed his disapproval of my simple costume. Roses, tulips, narcissus replaced violets. Menus changed; English roast beef and Burgundy wine, veal with Moselle, lobsters and Montrachet, all exquisite, all thoughtfully ordered in advance.

  Gerhard continued to question me. I protested. “Please, don’t make me think of it any more. Here we are in such a lovely place, the food is so delicious…”

  When food packages come for prisoners the wardens help themselves to chocolates, sausages, biscuits and shaving cream. But when the guards are busy or lazy they throw unopened parcels into a caldron and boil them into a soup; paper, string, glue, black bread, sausage, plums, shaving cream, bonbons, soap, chocolate, cakes and pads of paper. If you bite on a hard substance you will find a stub of pencil. We wait in line hungrily for these splendid treats. Starving palates need the illusion of sweetness. Women fight, kick, attack each other savagely to get ahead in the queue so that the delicacy is not gone before they get their share. In a fight the warden pokes out a lady’s eye. She is only a tart. Someone grabs me and buries my head in her bosom to shut out the sound of my shrieking. If I call attention to myself I will be beaten or sent away. Where could I go? Who wants a Jewish child so stupid she cannot look silently at brutalities?

  “You remember something acutely. Tell me about it,”
he said. “It will help you to speak out.”

  I could eat no more of the roast duck or stuffed pheasant. French wine tasted like water from the latrines. “Once on Sylvester,” I giggled foolishly, “the prisoners celebrated. They toasted each other with water from the latrines, embraced and kissed, sang holiday songs and wished each other happiness in the coming year. Mutti sang the songs my father had written.”

  At the sentimental recollection I began to cry.

  “That’s good for you, dear. Buried emotions are like old wounds, infections that are better when they’re cleaned out.”

  “Please, please…”

  He regarded me with tragic eyes. Sympathy was so acute that I could not resist. “Do you honestly believe it will help me to talk?”

  “Once,” he moved to the banquette beside me and spoke softly, “I was in a sanitarium. For nerves. My nerves have always been weak, even in childhood. And after the war I became quite ill and my mother took me to Switzerland.”

  Now it was he who slipped off into the past, keeping me waiting while he dwelt among echoes.

  “And you recovered?”

  He returned to the banquette. “There was a doctor…”

  “A psychoanalyst?”

  “Not a Freudian,” Gerhard answered with a slight shiver. “A very clever man, he made me dig certain things out of myself, out of the caverns.” With a reassuring smile he added, “I want you to get over these buried horrors which make you so nervous.”

  “Am I nervous?” I thought myself normal and cheerful.

  “Tell me, dear, were you often beaten?”

  I saw Gretl. A female warden, big-stupid, foul-mouthed, a woman selected from among the coarsest and ugliest in her slum or village. Wardens, not depraved when they come to work in the prison, soon learn the secrets. “I want you tonight,” they whisper to the youngest and prettiest of the prisoners. These invitations bring privileges, a drink of cognac from the store of medicine in the locked cupboard, a cigarette, followed by mysterious and sinister acts. “I want you tonight,” Gretl says to my mother who is gently bred and has natural curls and a long graceful neck. Mutti can never fight back. Gretl’s revenge is endless. She cuts the rations of a sick woman trying to stay alive on ten decas of bread a day and one ladleful of potato-skin soup; she spits when Mutti passes or strikes her with the truncheon. To make my poor mother suffer more Gretl beats me or, as brutally, picks me up and presses terrible moist kisses on my mouth. Or puts her hand under my makeshift garment. “How do you like that, my pretty one?” I am old now, over seven, and bear beatings and caresses quietly for fear that if I cry out the ogress will have my mother taken away at night. Like my Communist schoolteacher, like Ceci and Martha who was said to have been a nun, like the lady who slapped me for spying and the one who had the miscarriage in the latrine.

  I was able to tell all of this to Gerhard. As I spoke the memories crowded back, forgotten faces came to mind. I heard the terror of voices raised in helpless grief, the cries of women marched off, suddenly and without preparation, to certain death. Gerhard strained toward me, every muscle tight, his eyes like a deaf mute’s fixed on my lips. This happened many times. I would talk until I was parched. Wine was offered but it left my mouth dry. It made me sick to exhibit the sufferings of old friends for the reward of this man’s sympathy. Nausea would rise, the taste of undigested opulence fill my mouth. “Please,” I would sigh and close my eyes against the reproachful specters.

  How shall I describe his tenderness? No nurse helping a patient through the dreary days of recovery showed such gentleness of understanding. “You’re growing stronger, dear, you are not so afraid of yourself.” In order to show my growing strength, I dug deeper, believed it healthful to clean out the wounds, to speak aloud, to overcome reticence and abandon shame. Herr Mayr became the enemy. I saw him stamping down the roses of the rug, heard him command his children to leave the room lest they hear the dirty secrets of an unworthy soul. He had forbidden me to think about such evil things, had promised eternal suffering for the sins of memory and resentment.

  And taught me modesty. When Heda had freed herself from homely conventions, become modern and talked glibly about her affair with Johnni, I had tried to appear worldly but was little less shocked than Elfy by the frank sex talk. With Martin and Rick I had been cautious, too, perhaps because their talk had brought me close to the margin of forbidden thoughts.

  On the night I tasted my first oysters (Gerhard had ordered them flown from the Mediterranean fresh that day) I described the miscarriage in the latrine, horrified myself with the tale of the warden who had wantonly crushed a pair of breasts to a purple, winy pulp. Over a dessert of rum cake with whipped cream and almonds I found courage to mention the Nile horse game. “Go on, go on.” Gerhard gripped the edge of the table with pale fingers while I, leaning back against fat cushions, became the grubby urchin who had come to enjoy the gruesome shows.

  Hard voices shout profanity, fists smash, blood darkens the cobblestones. I hurry to the scene. Brutality entertains me. Days without violence have become dull. At night a little monster of curiosity creeps out to study the shadows of women making love. A light from the corridor shines obliquely through a barred door. The small voyeur can wedge herself into narrow spaces and learn the mysteries. Through bars the shadows, magnified, humped and rhythmic, are like animals described for me by my Russian friend. I know the names of forest creatures and zoo animals. This I call the game of the Nile horse (German for hippopotamus). I know, too, that it is sinful because once I was caught watching, told not to look lustfully upon evil and hit hard across the mouth.

  Which of the girls, asks my accuser, play the Nile horse game? She is crazy to know, asks over and over again. I would tell her if she were not so generous with blows, so fond of threatening me with punishment in Hell, so meek and unctuous with the wardens. Some of my best friends play the night games, the gypsy who lost an earlobe from an infection that followed a fight with a tough warden who had taken away her gold earrings; a tall, proud girl who committed the crime of race adulteration by marriage to a Jew. She is consoled by the one we call Vogli, Little Bird. The name does not fit her at all; she walks like a man and when no one is looking she kisses and caresses me. Her embraces revolt me. She has a hairy mole on her chin.

  “Were you ever molested by men?”

  “We never saw any men. Except the dentist once a year or the doctor when we were sick. Otherwise there were only the guards.”

  “That’s what I mean, the officers. How did they behave toward you?”

  “What would they want with a child? There were always plenty of whores. There was one I remember…” big and rosy, always good-natured, I adore her. She is often taken off to be punished. At first I cried and trembled for fear they would kill her, but now I know she will come back with something hidden between her breasts, a bit of sweet or sausage or an apple for me. She can kiss me as much as she likes. “The best thing to be in prison is a whore.”

  I began to laugh. Hysteria gripped me. Tears ran down my cheeks, the muscles of my stomach ached, I hugged myself and rocked backward and forward on the seat. Gerhard pulled me toward him and held me until I became calm. “Child, child, how you have suffered.” His eyes were mirrors of pathos.

  It did not occur to me that his fervors were extraordinary, nor did I question the excessive excitement that shivered through both of us. Between these suppers I thought about the revelations and wondered at my own feverish and overwrought state of mind. I would promise myself not to think so much about the past, certainly not to talk freely, but not infrequently I was the one who introduced the subject. His inexhaustible sympathy became a drug which I craved with such urgency that I used these perverse attractions as a coquette uses flattery. I flirted, too, cajoled with the wiles of a Mimi Stompfer, played gracious lady like a coffeehouse countess with the charming trick of sitting down as if every chair were a bed. In languishing tones I spoke of death and blood, offered sweet glance
s with accounts of atrocity, accompanied a tale of rape with a swish of petticoats.

  The more of myself that I revealed the harder I clung to the man. Martin and Rick Connors had awakened my mind, but had never succeeded in arousing such lively sensations. One night I told Gerhard about these clever young men. I hoped to make him jealous, but the conversation turned another way. “I had some boy friends, very intellectual, students and scientists who kept arguing about forgiving the Germans. They particularly wanted to know if I could forgive.”

  “Can you?” His face was drawn tight. When he was in real misery, rather than suffering the tensions of his self-induced punishments, the muscles of his right eye became uncontrollable.

  I could not answer glibly but felt it cruel to keep him in suspense and answered that I had often thought about it without finding an answer. “During that time, the Nazi days, there must have been a kind of group madness in them. Like in the Middle Ages when people danced themselves to death.” I found it simpler to quote Rick than to express my own confusions. “And in religious massacres and the Spanish Inquisition, they killed and burned in anticipation of their own tortures.”

  “And you forgive?”

  “I don’t want to kill and torture people. Not children, certainly! Nor old, helpless people and young mothers, but,” I swallowed venom, “those who did it and those who ordered the cruelties…” and held my hands taut between my breasts as though unspoken words were unholy prayers.

  “You’d like to kill them?”

  “Killing, plain quick death, is too good. I would like to watch them burned in slow fires and boiled in oil, slowly…”

  With an absent look in his eyes Gerhard plucked a flower out of the centerpiece. “Look, it is the color of your eyes,” he said as he gave it to me.