Vienna at Nightfall

by Richard Wake

  To which, Henry replied, "My father was like that, too. Like clockwork: reports from his guys on Monday, bookkeeping and the bank on Tuesday, inventory and orders on Wednesday, deliveries on Thursday, inspecting the new inventory on Friday..."

  "Especially the new blonde inventory," Liesl said, and everybody laughed, partly because it was funny but mostly because it sounded funnier coming from a librarian. But what it meant most of all is that she knew what Henry really did for a living, and what his father had done for a living, and she wasn't fleeing the scene. This was big and pretty much unprecedented, and it explained the look on Henry's face. He tended to be so perpetually anxious around his girlfriends, never quite relaxed, always seeming to anticipate the end when it was only the beginning. But not here, not with Liesl. He just looked content.

  Liesl asked Johanna about the museum, and she offered some details about the mysterious exhibition she was planning, the one that she had said was "daring." As it turned out, it was going to be a show that featured the works of three modern artists. "Very arresting -- there is a boldness to the lines and the subject matter that is captivating," she said, and I guess that was daring, seeing as how the Rudolf Museum was an old-money, aristocratic kind of place whose board was full of people like her father. But it wasn't that daring.

  This was: "Max Ernst, Felix Nussbaum, and Max Beckmann," she said when Leon asked her the names of the artists. He fancied himself a connoisseur, even if his museum visits had been limited to openings where he cadged free drinks and compiled lists of boldfaced names for Der Abend before he moved up to the Die Neue Freie Presse. The truth was, he had not been back to a museum or gallery since he had stopped being paid to go.

  Ernst. Nussbaum. Beckmann. Jew. Jew. Jew. The only people at the table who got it were Leon and I. We made eye contact immediately. As the conversation shifted, I was able to turn to my left and offer Johanna an arched eyebrow. She half-shrugged, half-smiled. Then she leaned over, kissed me on the cheek and whispered, "I told you it was daring."

  That didn't begin to describe it. Vienna had always had an uncomfortable relationship with its Jewish population. Some tried to assimilate, like Leon's family, which had come from somewhere near Budapest in the 1870s. Leon was third generation and barely religious. He always said he had more Gentile friends than the average Jew in Vienna, and the ability to exist in both worlds was an attainable goal for people like him, even if there was never true equality. The way most people figured it, Jews could excel in the professions, Gentiles could control the civil service and the military, they would share the business landscape, and everybody could go on with their lives. If Jews would give up the practice of their religion, they could even intermarry. Their lives would be complicated that way, but not impossible.

  But then there were the eastern Jews who came after the war, who packed into Leopoldstadt. They were peddlers, not professionals, and they didn't want to be professionals. They didn't want that for their kids, either. They didn't want to fit in -- but it wasn't just a we-don't-care-about-fitting-in mindset. They actively did not want to fit in. They kept their beards long, and they kept to themselves -- and the youngest among them who weren't Zionists were Communists. The truth was, Leon had much more in common with Gentiles than he did with the new Jews.

  The one thing they did share was support for the current government under Schuschnigg, and the one before that under Dollfuss. Neither one was a liberal -- hell, Dollfuss would have kissed Mussolini on the mouth, with tongue, if he were standing next to him -- and he had a stepladder. You see, Dollfuss was about 4-foot-11, which generated all manner of unkind humor. There was an especially funny one about how a Nazi plot to kill him had been foiled when investigators found a loaded mousetrap outside the door of his apartment. Of course, that one became a little less funny in 1934, after Dollfuss was assassinated during an attempted coup by the Nazis.

  Since then, Schuschnigg kept up with the Nazi ban that got Dollfuss killed, and at least occasionally gave lip service to the rights of Jews. But it was lip service, and every Jew knew it. As Leon said, "The best thing Schuschnigg has going for him is that we're afraid of what might come next if he gets kicked out."

  So if Jewish professors couldn't get tenure anymore at Vienna University, well, they would live with that and adapt, like the doctor who sewed up Leon that night in the emergency room. And if the two musicians from New York who came for a series of performances were forced by the Konzerthaus to anglicize their names in the publicity materials, well, the shows were still excellent. And if the Boy Scouts now insisted on separate troops for the Jewish boys, well, it was a way to reinforce Jewish values on impressionable young minds. In Vienna, in 1937, there was a rationalization for almost anything if you wanted there to be one.

  Ernst. Nussbaum. Beckmann. Jew. Jew. Jew. This would not go over well in the world of the Vons, and this was their museum. Johanna's father really was on the board of directors. Her credentials for getting the job on the museum staff were unquestioned, but neither was her lineage. This exhibition, if it were to take place, would be viewed as a direct attack on that lineage.

  I think I loved her. It was on this cloud that the rest of the evening floated.

  Just before we were getting ready to leave, a man I did not recognize followed me into the bathroom. I started peeing as he waited behind me. We were the only two inside. I finished, buttoned up, headed for the sink and saw him there, leaning back against the door to force it shut, to make sure it was just us.

  I nodded an acknowledgment as our eyes met, what polite strangers do. He looked at me, a little tiredly, and said, "Go for a ride on the Prater, Tuesday afternoon at 1. Just bring the microfilm. And I was told to tell you to enjoy the wine, that it actually is very good."

  22

  I probably hadn't been on Tram 1 in 10 years, but the cars hadn't changed, not a bit, not since the first time I had been on one after the war. The only thing that had changed was the circumstances.

  The ambiance was worn, dark, old, the windows scratched by kids with coins. The leather on the seats was shiny from decades of asses, shiny when it wasn't worn through entirely and split, the horsehair spilling out. The floor was perpetually dirty, nicked and scraped and sticky in places. Somebody once told me they hosed down the cars every month and pushed the standing water out the doors. You know they never used any soap, not that it would have helped.

  On a Tuesday afternoon in February, seats were plentiful. There were a handful of people in the car when I got on. That was different, because they only time I had ever taken the tram out to the Prater was on a packed car on a Friday or Saturday night, with some combination of Henry and Leon and whoever else, accompanied either by girls or by hopes of meeting girls once we arrived at the park. They were terrific, entirely carefree times for a teenage soldier home from the war, even if Vienna was overrun by the unemployed and struggling terribly with its new post-war status. It once had been the capital of a vast empire, with all of the size and grandeur befitting that status. Now, thanks to Versailles, the size and the grandeur remained, but the empire was nothing, just a bunch of farms linked by towns without industries and people without prospects.

  That didn't matter to Leon, Henry or I. We all had some combination of work and school -- Leon and Henry with their parents, me with Uncle Otto -- and we weren't getting shot at by Italians any more, and we were successfully managing to pursue the kind of fun that teenagers pursued. Thinking back on it, I'm pretty sure I was never wholly sober on one of those Friday or Saturday nights -- which was really the only thing about the tram ride that hadn't changed over the years. Because, on this day, I had drunk the entire bottle of Reisling after I had removed the cork, pried out the microfilm and put it into an envelope that was now hidden in my shoe.

  I got on at Schwedenplatz. There were seven stops to the park, which was the end of the line. Five of the stops were on this side of the canal, and there were normal people doing normal workaday things riding along with me
. I eyed them all up and down -- the smiling school-age boy who undoubtedly had a note from the school nurse in his pocket about some phantom stomach ailment; the woman with a package from someplace, wrapped nicely as a present; a handful of men dressed for business; and the people who got on with me: a pregnant woman with a baby in a carriage, and an old couple lugging a string bag of winter produce, a bag that now sat at their feet. I wondered which one might be following me, which was silly. But it's what you did when you had an envelope containing microfilm hidden in your shoe.

  The car began to empty with each stop. I mean, nobody was going to the Prater on a Tuesday in February. I actually made a phone call before I left, to make sure it was open. It was a benign enough day, the sun in and out, the temperature in the high 30s, but it wasn't precisely Ferris wheel weather, even if the cars on the famous old ride were enclosed.

  One by one, my fellow passengers got out. After the sixth stop, the only ones going to the end of the line were me and the people who got on with me at Schwedenplatz. At which point, the silent panic that had become my best friend settled in for another visit.

  There were entire days when I couldn't shake the feeling in my stomach, the fear. It was during these times that I couldn't believe what I had gotten myself into. I was paralyzed during these times, not physically but mentally. I couldn't think about anything else, couldn't concentrate on work or Johanna or whatever book I was reading. My mind would just wander, mostly to Captain Vogl and our chat in the lobby of the Dom Hotel. When you think about it, the search at the train station was more dangerous, but I could shake that memory for some reason. Vogl, I couldn't shake. I guess it was the fear of the unknown that he represented.

  At the end of the line, the tram lets everyone out, then drives empty a few feet where it lands on a wooden turntable and is, well, turned in the opposite direction, back toward the city. I got out first, helping the woman with the baby carriage at the door. The old couple followed. I eyed them up and down again, trying to get some sense. But, really: a pregnant woman with a baby carriage and an old couple? Neither would be able to keep up with me if it ever came to that. The whole thing was stupid. Still, I walked extra fast away from them, heading left into the park and toward the Prater. It was probably a half-mile away. I turned after walking for about three minutes. The old people looked as if they had barely moved from the tram, that's how far back they were. And the pregnant woman was nowhere to be seen. She had either headed in the other direction or taken one of the trails toward other attractions in the park.

  With that, my blood pressure settled down a bit. The envelope in my shoe was uncomfortable, but I left it there, an annoying reminder. There was almost nobody in the amusement park when I got there, and pretty much everything was closed. A small snack stand was open, and so was the Prater. I thought about a cup of coffee but decided against it -- let's just get this over with. I didn't know who I was meeting, or where, but I figured the thing to do was go for a ride. I bought my ticket and walked through the cattle chute to the entrance. Two people were waiting for the next stop -- a couple of 16-year-old boys who had pretty obviously ditched school. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be handing them the microfilm, but I didn't know what else to do but get on. It was only at the last second that a man in a brown overcoat handed the attendant his ticket and made us a foursome. It was the same guy, my regular contact.

  The enclosed cabin probably had room for 30 people, so we weren't exactly crowded. The two boys headed to the front left and looked out the window. I walked to the back right. The brown overcoat followed me.

  "So, do you have it?"

  "Not even a hello?"

  "Fine. Good day, Herr Doctor Kovacs. Now, do you have it?"

  I sat down on the bench. "It's in my shoe."

  He snorted, then shook his head. "You're right, they never look there."

  Fuck this guy. That's all I could think as I took off my shoe, removed the envelope and handed it over. I mean, really: fuck this guy.

  "It went OK?"

  I told him about the pickup in the club bathroom, and the Gestapo captain at the hotel, and the wine bottle, and the search at the train station. He seemed slightly bored. "So, it was pretty routine."

  "Routine for you, not for me," I said, my voice rising, and he kind of shushed me with a hand gesture, just to make sure the boys wouldn't hear. But seeing as how one of them was in the middle of telling a joke involving two kittens and a brassiere, and telling it loudly, there wasn't a lot of risk.

  "I don't know if I can do this anymore. This is eating me alive. It's killing me."

  His face softened when I said that, just a little. His tone changed. "Look, it's always like that at the beginning. The first time is the hardest. You get used to it, I promise. You never want to lose your caution, that edge, that little bit of nervousness. But it stops being paralyzing. It becomes your routine, a routine of awareness. You stop having a stomach ache all the time."

  "But what if I want out?"

  "If you want out, you get out. I know people who've done it. But if you think you're drinking a lot now to get through this, think again. Because there is no drinking like the drinking you do to live with the fact that you're a coward."

  I glared at him. He said, "Look, you don't need to make any decisions now. A lot of times, these little delivery missions are a one-off, and they never contact you again. And if they do contact you again, and you can't handle it, just tell me, and that'll be that."

  The ride on the Prater lasted maybe 10 minutes. We didn't say much for the last five, but I felt better just saying out loud what I was feeling, and hearing him say that I could walk away. When we got out, he headed one way, and I headed the other, back toward the tram. At the exit from the park, the old couple with the string back full of carrots and turnips was seated on a bench, taking in a sliver of February sun. I looked back and saw my contact headed toward a different exit, followed by the pregnant woman pushing a baby carriage.

  23

  Emil Fassbender came into town once a year from Salzburg to meet with the head of the bank that employed him as a branch manager. We all fought together in the war, and it gave us an excuse to get together and tell all of the old stories, which I hated. Especially the story where I was the big hero who saved 10 of us singlehandedly.

  We decided to keep it simple and meet up at Fessler's. There was a small private dining room where we could be loud assholes without disturbing the regular customers, and that was pretty much a given -- the loud assholes part -- whenever Emil was around. It was as if he had to bottle up his personality for 51 weeks a year and hide it behind the sober propriety required of a bank manager, and then he just let it all loose on the 52nd week, like somebody shook a bottle of beer and it exploded all over us. Through drinks and dinner and more drinks, all of the old stories had been re-told. Leon and his various female conquests took up half of the night, as always -- and he never disappointed, always adding a new detail with each yearly retelling, of a birthmark or a squeal or a sister in the next room. Then there was the one about the time Emil had to order a flanking maneuver at Udine because the captain was too drunk to function, and the time we raided the wine cellar in a mansion in Pordenone, and the time when the cook nearly killed us all with a version of sauerbraten that left us throwing up for days outside of Villach. It was getting late, and I thought I might escape this year, but then Emil banged on the table and nearly knocked over the seven empty wine bottles and said, "Alex! Hero!"

  "Nah, I'm bored with that one."

  "Then I'll tell it," Emil said, and thus began a slurring, semi-incoherent recitation of a story that had become an established truth for all of us, but which was much more fiction than I had ever been able to admit.

  The setup was accurate enough. We were in Gorizia. There were 10 of us trying to hold on to our position at an abandoned farm. We had been led to believe that reinforcements were coming, but that we were on the extreme right flank of our army's position, and that it was
vital we not be turned. I have no idea if this was true, but that's what they told us. And if the 10 of us were the army's right flank, the barn where I was positioned alone was the right flank of our right flank. We had all just scrambled for cover when the shooting started, and I was 100 yards away from a large henhouse, where two others were stationed, and 300 yards from the main house, which occupied some higher ground and where the other seven were located, including Henry, Leon, and Emil.

  So that was the setup. It was a hellish hour as we fought and waited. Two guys in the main house were shot, but not that bad, one in the arm, one in the thigh. One guy in the henhouse got it worse, in the shoulder. I can still hear him screaming. I had the sense that there were a lot more of them than there were of us, but I wasn't sure -- because they had the advantage of cover from the woods that encircled the farm, and then the cloud of dust that was beginning to be kicked up.

  So that's all true. And we did manage to hold the position. And when our reinforcements showed up, the shooting stopped. And when we began to advance, there were eight dead Italians at the tree line across from the barn, on my side.

  "Eight!" Emil yelled, again banging the table, again nearly toppling the empty wine bottles. It was quickly established that the dead were in a position to the right of the barn and that the only person in our group of 10 with a clear shot at them was me.

  "Eight! If they get through, we're all dead! Dead! Every one of us is dead -- they would have got us from two sides!"

  That is the way the story has always been told, and that is what it says on the commendation. And the truth is, I am a good shot, and they all knew it. But the truth also is, I didn't shoot any of those Italians, not one. The fact is that I fired randomly out the window of the barn a couple of times, but that I spent nearly the entire hour crawled up in a ball in the corner of the barn, sobbing, literally shaking. Only when the shooting stopped, and our reinforcements arrived did I manage to pull myself together.