by Anne Raeff
“Had Karl warned Bruno that he had married?”
“We had written a letter together.”
“And how did Bruno react?”
“He didn’t. He never mentioned it. On the day of our first meeting, I didn’t know what to wear, so I set his picture on the bureau to get a sense of his taste and tried on all my clothes—not that I had very many; still, I tried them all on, but the later it got, the plainer I felt. When Karl came home, I told him I thought it would be better if I didn’t meet Bruno after all. There was no reason really. They were the friends, and I could stay quietly at home. Or I could visit my father. He could drop me off at my father’s, and I could stay there overnight. In the morning he could call for me.
“But Karl insisted. He said that if we were truly to be companions, then Bruno had to know me and I had to know Bruno. We argued. It was the first time. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘Bruno would prefer never to set eyes on me.’
“‘But why?’ Karl asked.
“So in the end, I agreed. We met at a very expensive restaurant, where Karl and Bruno ordered champagne. Karl told him about my family—my melancholy father, my sisters—and how different I was from all of them. I held my breath, almost praying that Karl would say nothing about the baby, but I couldn’t open my mouth to change the subject, to ask Bruno questions about the Iron Guard in Romania or whether he had actually seen Adolf Hitler. To this day, I am grateful that Karl never mentioned my pregnancy to Bruno in my presence because, although Bruno was perfectly nice, I didn’t like him. He was too handsome, his voice too mellifluous, his eyes too blue. I kept imagining him sewing new skin onto a bloody, glistening body with one hand, stitching quickly yet carefully, his eyes intent on his task, laughing silently about something a friend had told him the night before. I couldn’t help wondering if he had been faithful to Karl on his journeys. After dinner, he insisted we dance together, and he told me that I danced beautifully, to which I replied that I had learned at the cabaret. My reply made him chuckle.
“I spent a lot of time alone after Bruno returned. After that first meeting, Karl didn’t insist on our all being friends, so the only time we really saw each other was at the cabaret, though sometimes all three of us would go to the opera. Bruno never set foot in our apartment. And why should he have? He had a very elegant apartment in the First District, complete with a view of the spires of the Stefansdom, with Ottoman furniture that he had bought on his travels. I never saw the apartment, but Karl described it to me in detail. I couldn’t help asking about Bruno. It made Karl so happy to be able to talk about him, about his latest burn case—‘the poor man’s left eye had simply been melted down’—about his family’s house in the country where Karl was often invited for the weekend. I was invited too, but never agreed to go and Karl got tired of pressing me. We both disliked arguments.
“I decided I wasn’t going to be bored anymore. Bruno’s return woke me up, pushed me out into the world. My days were spent exploring Vienna, the city in which I had lived all my life but had never really known. So strange how that can happen to a person living in what was considered one of the most exciting cities in all of Europe. A city can be so isolating, almost as if the more different types of people there are crammed together in a small area, the farther away they all are from each other. New York is the same way—a little island crisscrossed with thousands of invisible boundaries. Just a few years ago, Karl and I were walking towards New Jersey across the George Washington Bridge, as we often liked to do, when two youngsters from the Bronx stopped us to ask what was on the other side of the bridge. Can you imagine? Before I married Karl, that’s how I was in Vienna—I had hardly heard of the Stefansdom, let alone set foot in the opera house or walked in the palace gardens or visited the museum.
“One day, I began browsing through the closet; it was one of those days when none of my clothes satisfied me, when I couldn’t find the right match for my mood. Because Karl had not been home in a few days, I was out of sorts and vaguely thinking about how much more adventurous I could be if I were a man. As a woman, it was daring to go to the museum alone. But as a man, I could pack a little bag and go to Budapest. Not that I couldn’t pack a bag and go to Budapest. I had been to Italy, after all. Yet I was tired of people watching me, wondering who I was, the pregnant, lonely woman in Italy, the solitary young woman examining the Bruegels in the Vienna Art Museum. And for whom was she waiting all afternoon in that cafe, smoking and reading a thin volume of verse? If I were a man, I could go to a bar and get drunk. I could go to a café by myself—sit at a corner table, drink cognac, watch. I could have a lover called the Wizard who made new skin grow like spring grass.
“It was that day that I started wearing Karl’s suits. I found a pair of his old glasses, wore my hat tipped low over my eyes. My breasts didn’t even need strapping; in fact, they were invisible under Karl’s crisply starched shirts and wool suit jackets. I practiced walking in front of the mirror—long, confident strides, arms swinging jauntily. Karl’s clothes felt especially warm and comfortable in the days of bone girdles and high, thin heels. I bought thick wool socks; two pairs were enough to allow my feet to fill Karl’s wing-tipped shoes. In those shoes I could walk all day long. It is amazing how shoes can change your life.”
“Did Karl know about this?” Tommy asked.
“I have never told anyone. You are the first.”
“Do you still do it?”
“Now? Whatever for? No one bothers an old woman in New York.”
“Maybe you should try it, just to see how you feel after all this time.”
“Would you want to dress like a woman at this stage in your life?”
“Now that’s an idea, a brilliant idea. When I die, they can lay me out in drag. You know, I don’t think that in the end any of the scores of drag queens I have known over the years and who have died over the years were ever laid out in drag.”
“You never told me you were a drag queen.”
“I wasn’t, but perhaps that was my mistake. Drag queens are always well-loved by all—couples drive in from New Jersey and Indiana to see drag shows. Everyone seems to adore a man dressed like a woman much more than a man dressed like a man who likes going to bed with other men. I could even invite my parents to the funeral; I’d hire a band like they have at weddings to play all their favorite tunes—Sinatra especially. They just love Sinatra.”
“I think people love men who dress like women because they pity them. They have to pity a man who would want to be treated like a woman, wouldn’t they?”
“And they would have to pity a man who would want to die as a woman—shriveled, covered with lesions, teeth rotting, thinner than death but wanting to be beautiful, soft, and loved.”
“So you want people to pity you when you’re dead?”
“No, I want to think of people pitying me when I’m dead. That way I can spend my last days pitying them for hating me while I’m alive.”
“Will you have the energy to keep listening to my story with all that pitying you have to do?”
“That’s what’s so great about pity; it requires so little energy. So now, Mrs. Mondschein, I want to hear about your life as a man.”
“I saw my first husband once. It was at Demel’s, the finest café in Vienna. He kept looking at his watch nervously. He was my true test, and after my encounter with him, I knew I was safe. I watched for a while from my corner table and then approached him.
“‘Herr Ohnmacht, what a pleasure,’ I said. It was obvious he had no idea who I was, but he shook my hand politely and asked me to join him. I introduced myself as Herr Bernhardt and mentioned my affiliation to his political party.
“‘Ah, of course. Herr Bernhardt. I’m afraid I’m a little bit preoccupied these days.’
“‘Terribly sorry to disturb you. I was just on my way out.’
“‘
No, please, stay and have a cognac.’
“So we drank cognac together, my first husband and I. We talked about politics—the grim situation in Germany. I told him I had just returned from Berlin on business. He was fascinated by my accounts of the Nazi rallies and worried about Hitler’s promise to annex Austria. I said perhaps it was for the best. After all, we had to pass through fascism before we could get to socialism. He said he’d rather have the Germans deal with that. ‘And what about anti-Semitism?’ I asked.
“‘That is the least of our worries,’ he replied and offered me a cigarette. I was just about to ask him about his Jewish lady friend when a gaudily dressed woman fluttered to the table. We were introduced; she smiled coquettishly. I kissed her hand in the Viennese fashion and left them to themselves.
“I got so confident in my new clothes that I almost went to visit my father as a man, but at the last minute, just when I was about to ring the bell, I panicked and ran away. I had planned to say I was a friend of Karl’s, a specialist whom Karl had sent to see if perhaps there was something to be done after all. I had even brought a notepad on which to write down my findings.
“Being able to watch without being watched provided me with such a sense of pleasure and exhilaration that I very rarely thought of the adventures that could have been mine had I dared. I suppose I stayed away from my father’s house because I was sure that there they would see through my disguise, smell me out as one of their own who had gone astray and given birth to a daughter too frail to survive. I also avoided the cabaret, where surely they would not have been fooled.
“Who knows if I would have eventually mustered the courage to take my new self into the depths of the city and abroad? Who knows if I might not have remarked over breakfast one morning that life had become so much simpler since I began dressing in men’s clothes? Who knows if Karl would have laughed and suggested we go off for a stroll together one day, or if he would have felt guilty for leaving me out of his life? Karl was so easily prone to guilt. So often I thought of telling him about how I amused myself in his absence, but my secret became too precious. And then our German neighbors had other plans for us, and Herr Bernhardt, being much too sensitive for extremist politics, was forced into permanent exile.
“On February 26, 1938, my father died. On the eve of his death, he told his three daughters to go back to Poland before it was too late. He wrote down the names of all of our relatives in Lemberg and Warsaw, relatives I never knew we had. He told us to take his watch because it had been his father’s and his father’s father’s before that, and he gave us old pictures of our mother when she was a child. There would be some old people who would remember her. We were instructed to say that she had died of scarlet fever.
“We gave my father a simple funeral. Karl paid for it though my father had set aside a small sum for this purpose. My father left a letter which he asked us to read to all those who came to pay their respects while we sat shiva. In his letter, he warned us all that the end was near, that within a month it would be too late, and that our only hope was Poland. How many times I must have read that letter during that long week of sitting dry-eyed in our living room with its yellowed curtains and the watermarked ceiling I stared at in between guests. My sisters cried and cried until a smell that was a combination of warm milk and dried beef emanated from them and filled the room. I had wanted to put the letter away after the first day, but Karl and my sisters insisted on complying with my father’s request. And since my sisters could not bear to read it—they would begin to cry after the first sentence and fall wailing onto the sofa—the reading of the letter became my duty. Solemnly I read and reread it every time a new visitor arrived with a basket of baked chicken or fresh coffee cake. Some of the neighbors shook their heads and mumbled ‘poor Herr Feinberg’ as I read. And some of the neighbors laughed nervously when I finished and then began talking about the differences between Germany and Austria. And just a handful of neighbors—the old and feeble for the most part—blinked nervously and mentioned the names of distant relatives in America.
“I often wonder how many of them remembered my father’s advice and, when the time came to abandon their homes, headed east for Poland. And if they did, did they also curse his memory as the gas seeped into the chambers at Treblinka and at Auschwitz? But who besides my sisters would take the advice of my father, the tired bookkeeper who died of no illness at all just one month before the Anschluss? Only my sisters. Karl and I tried to convince them to go to London where one of Bruno’s colleagues was helping refugees get work as live-in maids and cooks. Everything was arranged, but they wouldn’t go because they had promised my father they would go to Poland. ‘The Germans can never defeat England, but Poland, anyone can defeat Poland,’ Karl told them, but they were going to Poland. ‘Besides, there are hardly any Jews in England,’ they said.”
“And why didn’t you go to England, then?” Tommy cut in. “How did you end up in Pribor?”
“I had a chance to go, but I didn’t want to be a maid or a cook. The thought of being stuck in a kitchen or in a washing room all day long and then lying awake at night in a tiny bed in a tiny room in a big house made me want to die. Karl’s situation was more difficult because they began arresting Jewish doctors and intellectuals immediately, and, though he thought about leaving, several of his colleagues had already been denied visas. It didn’t take long to convince Karl to let me stay with him, and so we went into hiding.
“Bruno organized the whole thing. He had a friend—he seemed to have friends everywhere—who operated a small, very expensive insane asylum in the Austrian Alps. It was one of the few such places that survived the war, and its guests (for they truly lived like guests at a resort hotel) continued their mad lives safe from the front and the experiments of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Instead, they listened to the gramophone while dressed in ballroom attire. They waltzed through the war, happily or miserably out of their minds, depending on each one’s particular case, but oblivious all the same. Bruno’s friend, a Doctor Kiesslinger, prepared the basement of the South Wing for us. The South Wing was reserved for only the most serious cases. Day and night we listened to hooting, banging, singing out of tune, and grunting animal noises coming from above us. There was a man, the cousin of an important Nazi general, who thought he was a donkey. Many nights we would lie awake making up stories about our invisible upstairs neighbors: the woman who recited the names of hundreds of different flowers all night long at the top of her lungs was the abandoned mistress of the Count So-and-So’s son and daughter of the Count’s gardener; the man who brayed like a donkey had been flung from his stallion in the Serbian campaign during World War I; the man who cried out for food, especially eclairs, day and night in the high-pitched voice of a castrati, ‘I’m hungry, I’m starving. Somebody help me!’ was the homosexual son of a baron from Graz.
“We were only going to stay there until Bruno returned with false documents so we could leave together. We joked about our imminent rebirth as a young gentile couple—‘the gentleman has a weak heart and is traveling to London to see a specialist.’ Bruno was to get all the medical papers, too.
“And so we waited. One month, three months, six months, one year. Then I stopped waiting. Dr. Kiesslinger had a few contacts. He knew of people who would take us through the mountains into Switzerland. He even offered to pay for everything since he had no family, no one to worry about except his patients, who adored him even though sometimes they bit him or threw their food in his face like angry children. But Karl wouldn’t leave. Just in case. How would Bruno find us if we left? When I told him I thought Bruno was either dead or had betrayed us, he flew into a rage, smashing books around our basement like our insane cohabitants. He wouldn’t speak to me for days after that, looking at me with the eyes that an old rabbi uses on a fallen woman.
“Two years went by, and then it was too late. No one would risk the mountains. No one would risk false d
ocuments. And by that time, we were used to our seclusion and late suppers with Dr. Kiesslinger after the patients were locked in their rooms.”
“So what happened? Did Bruno abandon you or was he dead?” Tommy asked.
“You must be patient. You will know when it is time.”
“You want me to suffer as you did, don’t you, Mrs. Mondschein? Isn’t this enough suffering for you?”
“Would it help if I told you that your suffering is far greater than mine ever was?” I said, spontaneously taking Tommy’s hand and kissing it like I had done in the café when I was introduced to my first husband’s lady friend.
“Ah, Mrs. Mondschein, always the perfect gentleman,” Tommy said, and we both laughed. “I’m tired, Mrs. Mondschein. I don’t think I can stand any more of these terribly sad things today.”
“I can stop any time you want.”
“I don’t want you to stop, just to wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow’s always another day. Right?” he asked, as if he weren’t quite convinced.
“Yes, of course it is.”
The Twins
Sometimes when my mother is in a really bad state, my father gets into a cooking frenzy as if he thinks he can lure my mother out of her bed with the exotic smells of Moroccan tagines or orange duck. It doesn’t work, and usually has the opposite effect—the sweet aromas and good cheer that food brings make her even more determined to stay in the safety of her sickly-smelling room, but he refuses to give it up because cooking helps him, and, for that reason only, I don’t say anything. Last night we had rack of lamb with rosemary, lemon, and artichoke hearts, homemade spinach pasta, which he made with the pasta machine, endive and watercress salad, and, for dessert, an apricot-kiwi torte. All kosher of course. We actually keep a kosher home for my mother’s sake.
