Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.)

by Ingeborg Day

  Dominating this particular area on my board is a photograph of my father. He is thirty-five. It is a three-quarter portrait, clear-eyed gaze directed toward distant vistas, black hair cut short at the sides but full above a high forehead, the strong jaw and chin I have inherited looking beautifully proportioned on him, a serious, perfectly shaped, luscious movie-star mouth. He wears a white shirt, and the knot of his dark tie sits a little askew, endearing to me. The photograph ends at the notch of the lapel of a tweed suit. Since insignia seem to have been worn below the notch, this photograph lacks all political identification.

  I have a few others of him from around this period, also wearing a suit, decorated with a narrow bar-pin and a doodad that looks like a tiny bell, or possibly a miniature brass instrument. The photographs are small, and I cannot make out the meaning of his decorations, but he is clearly not wearing a swastika pin. There are no photographs of him in uniform, except amid a military band, he is in his early twenties. I puzzle about this. My mother once told me, smilingly, “He had his uniforms tailor-made long before he became an officer, he was vain back then.” Not a single photograph of my vain, uniformed father. Did he destroy them all, later? That would explain it. But why would he not have had at least this particular photograph taken in uniform? It is an official portrait, no little snapshot in the park like the others. On its back he wrote in his beautifully flowing, flamboyantly graceful script, “In grateful love to my dear, brave wife in memory of Ingelein’s first birthday. Father. Munich, 1941.”

  There he was, having been sent to Munich by his Nazi cop superiors in order to get a belated high school education; it was 1941, still a time when it seemed as if the war would be won by his side. Life must have smiled on an Austrian Nazi who had been an Illegaler for years: a National Socialist long before the Anschluss and the attending rush of “March Violets,” those hundreds of thousands of Austrians who became Nazis when the time was right.

  He had good reasons to have himself photographed in a tailored uniform; it would have been the appropriate garment to wear on a good-size photograph signed “Father,” to be sent to his wife back home, commemorating the birth (he had held my mother’s hand during the delivery) of his daughter, of whom he was very proud and whom he had named—not Maria, or Theresia, or Veronika, or Ursula, or any other traditional Austrian name—but Ingeborg: “Either the daughter or the mistress of some god called Borg,” as someone once explained to me, as Nordic a name as an Austrian can come up with.

  Chapter 25

  I slept with one Jewish man once, with a second one several times, a man who was “fascinated” by my “background” and liked to hear, in bed, about my father. I stopped meeting him because I got scared: Playing with fire/Risking the wrath of . . . whose wrath? It felt like defiant slumming, exotic and perilous, more perverse than anything involving the mere manipulation of bodies, if my father could see his Ingelein now.

  Chapter 26

  According to my bulletin board, August 21, 1944, was the opening day of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the formation of the United Nations; American newspapers must also have proclaimed, United States forces advance on Paris. In Graz that day, nurses and doctors, summoned to the hospital’s basement shelter by warning sirens, abandoned my mother on the delivery table. She gave birth to her son alone. He was nine months old and gravely ill with encephalitis on May 8 of the following year, the day the Allies call V-E Day. Directly below, my handwritten note on an index card says, May 9, 1945, Russians take Graz.

  But the Russians soon swapped Graz to the British for other considerations, and there is a photograph of the town hall bedecked with British flags, British tanks out front, and a couple of British sentries. It’s just a flag, I tell myself, and some tanks they had no more use for, the war was over.

  I have pinned a 1978 postcard next to those English sentries, a postcard of that same town hall lit up for the festivities celebrating the eight hundred and fiftieth birthday of Graz. (In the sixth century, a fortress “gradec”; 1128, name “Graz” recorded for the first time; 1278, passes into possession of Habsburgs; 1379, Friedrich III commissions castle, cathedral, and city gates; 1533 and 1580, Turks burn all villages in the vicinity but are rebuffed by heavily armed city; 1578, Jesuits found university, which becomes focal point of Counter-Reformation; Johannes Kepler teaches here, 1594–1600; Turks defeated once more, 1664; 1738, first opera house; 1797 and 1805, besieged by French; 1809, surrender to French, much of it razed, people of the city pay large sum to save bell and clock tower; 1919, new frontiers place the provincial capital in a border region devoid of the all-important resources of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire; etc.) It was temporary after all, and the British flags don’t fly in front of my Rathaus anymore. Still, the sight of these alien, crisscrossing stripes hanging from this lovely, boring, run-of-the-mill baroque building at the center of my hometown. . . .

  All the statistics I know about my parents are collected here, along with “historical” dates of the period. It’s all there now and I wake up each morning with a start and stare at this imposing monster grab-bag, and I still can’t keep the dates and facts in my mind together. Something interferes. I cannot see my parents as part of it. Not long enough, at any rate, to make specific, personal data click into place on the grid of official history, not long enough to fit an Ernst Seiler and a Juliane Margarete Vallant Seiler into a Kristallnacht—did they watch, that night, Jews’ shop windows being smashed, a mob, excitement, a fire here, rumors of a larger one across town? Did Ernst Seiler throw a few rocks himself? Would he have? Wouldn’t he have? Am I reduced to a single conviction about my father and that particular night: that he wouldn’t have touched so much as a tin spoon, no thief, Vati, no looter? “There are only two instances that grant a man the miserable right to steal—and they are these: if his family is about to starve, I mean starve; and if the very lives of members of his family are at stake.” I remember how he would set his mouth, having once again pronounced one of Seiler’s laws, how curious I thought it, at nine, eleven. He could make his lips, always now turned down at the corners, but still full, my father had a beautiful mouth, how he could make his mouth appear thin-lipped, but without seeming to draw his lips in, or not so that I could notice it, there was a period of half a year during which I tried to imitate how he would set his mouth to nearly hide his lips. I used my mother’s small, round pocket mirror for my practice sessions. My brother used the same mirror to annoy neighbors by beaming “sunspots,” as he called them, onto their windows. So that much I know. He would not have been among the looters. Setting fires doesn’t fit either, arson seems out of character for him, it takes so little initial effort, the eventual spectacle, the grandiose, blazing violence all vicarious, done for you. But smashing a large, polished, plate-glass window, bashing in two, four, half a block’s worth of Jewish storefronts, a different story, that. Far easier to imagine than having him watch—no, he wouldn’t have just watched. He could, of course, have been inside, at home, totally out of the picture. Could he have? As a street cop? Weren’t they all rounded up, all out there, on full alert, though not to keep windows from being smashed or a sixty-five-year-old tailor from being knocked sprawling on a sidewalk; the rabble climbing over him to get into his shop, grabbing five men’s suits, still on hangers, one of them unfinished, neat white basting-stitches marking what the length of a sleeve was to be, the half centimeter to be taken off at the shoulders, the man carrying the suits is short and breathes heavily through an open mouth, the hangers are getting in the way, annoying, how they knock against his chin, nose. Margarete Juliane surely was at home that night, that’s no mere guesswork, no fantasizing now. Just as surely as he would not have been among the looters, just as surely he’d have ordered her to stay at home, behind locked doors. Might she have huddled in a back room, covering her ears with the palms of her hands, a gesture all her own, that one, some initiative of her own left then, after all? Of course, he might even have prevented the smashing of windows
, might have kept a small mob at bay, one cop’s gun against a handful of men, clerks or assistants to the chef at a good restaurant, Leberknödelsuppe a specialty; armed now with a reedy-looking table leg, a hammer, a crowbar. Why would they battle a cop with a gun, if all they had to do was round a corner to find a sergeant who’d watch them go at it, face impassive, or one who’d join them in ransacking a shoe store, a pawnshop, there, grab that silver-plated figurine before the fat guy gets a hold of it, too late, but there are jade bracelets and radios and fur collars next door, the whole-animal-kind, little black claws intact on slender paws, glass eyes. There were cops like that, not many, but some. Not necessarily “Jew-lovers,” but disciples of order who considered a mob, out for nothing but material gain, contemptible, who managed to save a window from being smashed on one block, a store owner’s head from being bashed in by a bentwood hatstand wielded by a sixteen-year-old printer’s apprentice. Considering how fervently Ernst Seiler adored discipline and order, could he not have been one of those few, behaving in a manner befitting a human, if only by default? It is as plausible and as possible, as implausible and as impossible, as imagining him hurtling the first, large brick through window after window, moving on after each satisfying crash, letting the others bother with splinters and shards, protecting themselves against little accidental cuts, common, surely, all that frantic shoving, getting your hands on the loot, Jews’ loot.

  Mere speculation. There was no Kristallnacht on farms; whether or not my relatives living on those farms know what my parents, by then living in the city, were up to that night is a moot point. They do not speak about such matters. At most, they allow as how one could not believe that a man like “der Ernstl” could ever have been involved in “anything like that.” Not “der Ernstl,” who built a house brick by brick, who designed and cut and soldered awkwardly proportioned, clumsy-looking constructions of solid iron tubing meant to hold my mother’s ever-expanding collection of houseplants, his Christmas presents to her; the plants obscured the massive iron limbs beneath, and the final effect pleased my mother very much. For us children he made a sled from the same solid iron tubing (webbing from a lawn chair, discarded by one of the English officers, was painstakingly rewoven to serve as the sled’s seat), a killer sled. Now I wonder how we were lucky enough never to collide with anyone riding a “regular” wooden one, a luxury, rich kids’ gear; my father’s soldered iron menace would have reduced those elegant, varnished wooden curves to splinters. It was exhausting, dragging that vehicle home at the end of an afternoon, more exhausting yet pulling it uphill, but coming down, ah, no one else’s sled could come close to the feel and speed of our homemade, solid-iron wonder. And there was an iron-tubing abacus, too, easily half a yard high. I remember it as well as the sled, I do not need to be reminded by relatives of what all he did for us children, and under such meager circumstances, too. “He loved making things by hand almost as much as he liked his music,” one of my mother’s friends points out to me, “a man like that does not destroy, willfully, heedlessly, he had no greed in him, your father. Der Herr Seiler was a man of honor, how you can even pose such questions, he was a smart man, an outstanding chess player, a musician as versatile as I’ve known no other, a craftsman who loved working with his hands, making things, installing windows, not smashing things to bits, I am ashamed of you for your thoughts.”

  Everything she says is, in its way, correct. I am ashamed “for my thoughts,” at least for a little while. But the nagging soon resumes, that slight but incessant clawing, that wondering going on inside the tiniest toy bunker, installed, unobtrusively, in a short, narrow alleyway of the right hemisphere of my brain, a fairyland bunker far smaller than any computer crystal dreamed up so far; sitting there, solid, protecting the rest of my cerebral territory from being invaded by whatever it is, clawing and pawing, most often barely at my level of perception, then for hours, days, not to be ignored: Vati, Vati, what did you do and why?

  Chapter 27

  So my day has started again and I edge out of bed and remake the corner I’ve slept in and there is my cat, stretching her torso across Hitler’s War, one of her back paws planted on Mein Kampf, the other one on the spine of The European Right, squashing Varieties of Fascism and shedding black, silky hair on The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich.

  I go to the kitchen to make coffee and drink it standing up, my back to my corny, genteel bedroom, ruffled pillows covered with swastika-books, the apartment of a lunatic. “The premises were littered with Fascist literature,” it would say in a police report.

  Chapter 28

  A gruesome murder in this city is followed by a trial. There is a photograph in the Times. The caption reads: “Members of the Hasidic community of Crown Heights gather in a hallway during recess in Brooklyn trial.”

  I cut out the photograph because it brought me to a halt while leafing through the paper, a halt first and then an acceleration of leafing and then going back to it, and scrutinizing it, and cutting it out, and now the clipping is turning yellow.

  It is a photograph of eight or nine men. Most wear glasses, as I do, most are smoking freshly lit cigarettes. As a chain smoker, I can appreciate their relief at being released from a tense, NO SMOKING room into the nearest hallway. All have their heads covered, most by hats, a couple by yarmulkes. There is nothing foreign-looking about a yarmulke to someone brought up as a Roman Catholic. The hats are all the same except for the one on a man in the background whose hat is pulled forward, a “fashionable” hat. All the others are narrow-brimmed and pushed off the forehead. Either they are too small, or the angle at which they are worn makes them appear too small.

  The tilt of hats, dark suits, beards. Only one man wears a discernible sidelock: quaint, maybe amusing, not the current fashion in men’s hair, but a pretty ornament, really; what would I give to have hair of this texture?

  When I try to dissect what I see in this photograph, all I come up with are aesthetics on the most superficial of levels, that of fashion. And I know well that an Austrian Dirndl costume can seem odd, that rucksacks are considered quaint by many people in this country, that men in leather shorts and pointed hats with feathers strike most Americans as hilarious.

  But my reaction has nothing to do with curls and tilts of hats. There is an emotion in me that cannot be synchronized with any one detail, or with a congregate of these details. It is a quick, short rush, a smell, that taste in your mouth that first warns you that you are going to be sick. It passes before I can become fully conscious or ashamed of it, I let it—make it—pass, quick, quick, over, over. But staring at a crumpled newsprint photograph I find that as fleeting as the sensation is, it does not exhaust itself. I cannot point to a single detail and say, “Here! See? I am offended by such-and-such, I am put off by this-and-the-other.” Yet no matter how often I look at the photograph, my reaction persists. I dislike—intensely, specifically—a group of men smoking in a hallway. I don’t know these men. I have, in fact, not once in my life spoken to a man in a tilted black hat with a narrow brim, and a sidelock. So what is it? Simply that these men are proclaiming, publicly, through a combination of innocuous details, that they are Jews.

  Chapter 29

  For sixty-eight of his eighty-six years, Franz Josef I spent his days, by the Grace of God, as Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, King of Dalmatia and Lodomeria, Duke of the Bukovina, Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, and Margrave of Moravia.

  I don’t know how many of history’s acknowledged rulers managed to stay on a throne for more than sixty-eight years. There may be scores of them. But I was taught only about one, his persistence in sticking to the business of ruling continues to impress me, and sixty-eight years do add up to seventeen four-year administrations.

  At the beginning of this century, one segment of this emperor’s subjects consisted of German-speaking Austrians, like those on both sides of my family. Most of them were born in a village, lived there, and were honorably buried within walking
distance of where they had spent their lives. They were inhabitants of a mighty empire (whose size they did not comprehend) mainly in terms of what there may exist above and beyond being born, living, and dying.

  Various notions of “above and beyond,” inextricably linked to the notion of “Mighty Empire,” meant a great deal to other Austrians of the time. To a philosopher, for instance, or to a pioneering physician, to a politician of that era, its scholars, composers, would-be revolutionaries, artists, intellectuals, prominent businessmen and poets, or to a lovely, nervous, very young and emerald-laden minor duchess about to attend her first ball at court.

  But for Austrians akin to my family, “above and beyond” consisted of loyalty to Franz Josef I, the only ruler in memory of the great majority of his subjects, and a vague pride, inculcated in grammar school, in one’s country’s “history.” Roman Catholicism, and the security that was rooted in belonging to a family, a place, and a craft, were also among an Austrian villager’s “above and beyond” categories, but those realms were connected only loosely to being a citizen of the Empire.

  Within the Empire, “my kind” of Austrians, along with all other German-speaking inhabitants, were a minority whose status was increasingly in question. The “primitive, endlessly squabbling Slavs”—as Austrians were fond of describing their compatriots to the south and east—were becoming more than a nuisance. “Squabbling Slavs” had, of course, made up the majority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for centuries. But if Franz Josef I chose to reside in Vienna, to speak German, and to have his far-flung bureaucracy administered by German-speaking Austrians, well, that was a Serb’s tough luck.