The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  Wittgenstein had told Ernst all about Pinsent. Ernst was a simple man of little education, but he had a good heart and felt sad when Wittgenstein told him about the death of his English friend. Ernst knew what Wittgenstein was going through, and in this respect he was a true veteran: to him, it made no difference that Pinsent had been an enemy. At bottom, Ernst knew that they all died the same way, all twisted in the same attitudes and staring stupefied at the same sky as their eyes welled up with darkness. No, it was only the martinets of the rear areas and the fierce old men at home who felt no sadness for the waste on both sides. Wittgenstein had told Ernst the story of how Pinsent was packed off to Bondock after his father had died, and how on his first day there the red-haired runt lay down in the muddy soccer field, staring at the sky as the bullies spat and kicked him. Refusing to play, not even if they killed him.

  Wittgenstein still couldn’t get over it. Shaking his head, he told Ernst, I keep wishing Pinsent had done the same in Belgium. Over and over I think of it. What if he had just laid down and refused to fight? What if we all did?

  As Wittgenstein said this, he saw Ernst staring hard at him, and then he thought that in a way he loved him. Wittgenstein was now in such a state that for a moment he even fancied Ernst was something like Pinsent. Ernst and Pinsent did share a certain purity and innocence, but that was about it. Actually, they were not alike. They were not alike at all.

  Refugees

  VIENNA had been covered with snow when Wittgenstein arrived there on hardship leave the previous winter, shortly after Kurt’s death.

  The long train that had brought him home was rife with noise and drunken soldiers, the passenger cars followed by hospital cars of wounded, and behind these eleven contagious horse cars filled with filthy, half-starved refugees, most of them Jews. It was an interminable journey, with breakdowns and endless stops for water and coal, followed by more frequent stops smelling of death and disinfectant as refugees were turned into the woods to empty slops and hastily bury their dead.

  Several times during the longer stops, Wittgenstein walked back to the refugee cars, half from curiosity and half from an impoverished feeling that he might render assistance. The latter impulse stemmed largely from Tolstoy’s example, but with the mendicant Christian also came the golem Jew with his empty bucket, having neither alms nor food nor medical training — in short, nothing these tanners and peddlers would have accepted from him. What possessed him to walk a quarter mile back into that little world caught between the war’s steel teeth? Not in the least did he understand these people, or the reaction they elicited. How many times in Galicia he had seen them hung from trees and telegraph poles with signs in Russian pinned to their coats, denouncing them as spies, hoarders, vermin. How they rocked and swung, like dark bells, with their legs and hands bound together and a look of stoical renunciation in their constricted faces. In death as in life, these Jews seemed to Wittgenstein to be profoundly uncomfortable in the world, forever outside the fold; their very passivity seemed to encourage murder in the way a rabbit will spur even the most tail-swiped cur to tear him to pieces. This was their lot, these Jews seemed to say. For good times there must be bad times, days when their red beards would hang like fleeces from the trees. Standing amid that hive, Wittgenstein would find himself closing his eyes, listening to these shtetl sounds, which nagged him like a melody he could not place.

  But there was another reason for Wittgenstein’s ambivalence and discomfort, and that was Gretl, who was now learning Yiddish and Hebrew as part of her work coordinating relief efforts between the government and Vienna’s many Jewish charitable organizations. As one of the leaders of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge, she was finding the charitable alliance increasingly difficult to hold together. In the first weeks of the war, the Russians had quickly overrun Galicia, displacing thousands of Galician Jews, whom the Austrian army shipped west to various refugee camps and to Vienna, where the Jewish population quickly doubled. Working in cooperation with the government, Vienna’s Jews managed to keep the refugees from starving that first winter. But the continued influx that spring quickly began to strain the city’s own stretched resources, fueling tensions not only between the refugees and Vienna’s Jews but with the broader populace as well. The previous summer, when Austria’s forces, buttressed with German divisions, had re-taken Galicia, further tension arose as it became increasingly apparent that the refugees had little desire to return home. Since many were petty traders, they fell into black market dealings. Many more, unemployed, would be seen standing on street corners, jamming libraries or the coffee houses in the Leopoldstadt. The relief efforts continued, with soup kitchens, subsidies, schools and care for expectant mothers, but not without deep misgivings on the part of Vienna’s indigenous Jews. After all, they said, Vienna could hardly feed itself; to continue feeding all these extra people would only encourage them to stay.

  A broader problem was the strain the refugees would pose after the war, when they inevitably would find themselves in competition with other minorities returning from the battlefield. Then there were the negative impressions these people fostered — the embarrassment Vienna’s industrious, cosmopolitan Jews felt at seeing these primitives huddled on street corners or gawking at passers-by. Perhaps more to the point in these days of frustration and stalemate was the convenient target they made for anti-Semites. Jews were already being blamed for the war, with people sniping at the Jewish black marketeers, the Jewish bankers and the Jewish war contractors who were said to be raping the army with shoddy, overpriced goods. Even among Vienna’s Jewish merchants, these village yokels had a reputation for being unreliable in business. Still, for a Jew to let down a Jew was one thing. But for him to trim a goy of his money was exceedingly bad business, especially in hard times.

  Gretl saw these as legitimate concerns, but, like other leaders, she was quick to point out that they were still relatively long-range problems. Vienna could not turn out or abandon her refugees, and Gretl urged realism. Until the war was over and the country got back on its feet, these people could hardly be sent home en masse to face starvation and the very conditions that had driven them out in the first place. The community would have to dig deep and be patient.

  Despite Gretl’s effectiveness in pressing the case for Vienna’s refugees, she was having much less success in saving that other threatened population, the men of her family. With one brother crippled and the other now dead, Gretl was engaged in a campaign to get Ludwig out of the army, or at least out of combat. Wittgenstein, however, had made it clear that he was staying put. The question was who would prevail.

  Looking out the window as the train crept into Vienna, Wittgenstein could see the massive city huddled under clumps of low winter clouds. A smoky bluish gray in his memory, Vienna now seemed singed at the edges like an old photograph, everything begrimed from the cheap coal they were forced to burn, when coal was available at all. In the station, with its resounding marble ceilings, the lights flickered ominously and the marble stairs echoed with wooden-soled shoes, leather, like most other commodities, being increasingly unobtainable. By the men’s room, a pudgy man with a soiled suit darted out from a vestibule. Sir, he hissed. Do you have any cocoa, spirits or other foodstuffs you might like to sell or trade? The man opened a valise crammed with cans and packages. Look. I have some lovely bacon and tinned milk. Choice tobacco? Silk for your girl? Wittgenstein veered away in disgust but was almost immediately accosted by another man pouring out a sad tale, then by a mother pointing to her five railish children. Outside the station, the walks were covered by grimy snow, with only a few tired old men and peasant women to stir it around with brooms and shovels. Here there was no relief, either. No sooner had he fought his way through another gauntlet of black marketeers than he faced a mass of beggars, many hobbling veterans in uniforms with pinned-up legs or sleeves, calling, Sergeant! Some help for a comrade, sir, a father and a veteran of Lwów …

  There were no cabs, and the tr
ams ran only infrequently, so he walked home through the dirty slush, amazed, through the dull November sunshine, to see whole trees and houses that had not been gutted. Still, there was an oppressiveness about the city, the shabby dearth and airlessness of a place down on its luck and now too pooped to even keep up appearances. Gretl and Mining’s letters were filled with tales of incompetence and corruption, of the endless indignities required just to secure the bare essentials of life. The swans and ducks in the Prater were long since caught and cooked, and those few citizens who still could feed a dog or a cat kept their pets inside. On Sundays, even the relatively well off could be seen lugging around sacks filled with barterables, spending their days setting up tawdry deals for a tough chicken or a bag of mushy onions. The censored news was as inflated as the money. In their desperation, even the most cynical were hungry for miracles, seriously entertaining rumors of trains of food, a secret “bread peace,” or an apocryphal scientist who had discovered how to extract starch from nettles.

  The rococo angels at the gate of the Palais Wittgenstein were dirty as pigeons. The big house was a ship cut adrift, with no gardener, chauffeur, or footman, no one to scour the stone or reputty the rattling window. The shrubs, once squared so exactingly, had gone wild, and to the side of the house, the faded gazebo lay smashed like a basket under a bough that had fallen during a summer storm. The only sign of life was the black bunting over the door.

  The ordinarily reserved Stolz, now the only man in the house, was beside himself when he saw who it was. Flustered, the old servant shook Wittgenstein’s hand, then began weeping, dabbing his eyes with a folded handkerchief. Stolz was especially distraught to see his soaking boots. Did you walk all this way, sir? Oh, I wish you had telephoned, I gladly would have fetched you. I’m learning to drive, you know. I haven’t been out alone yet, but I’m sure I could navigate the thing in a pinch.

  Within a minute Stolz had brought him a snifter of brandy and dispatched Marta, the kitchen girl, to find Mining while he helped Wittgenstein off with his boots. Once he had unbuttoned his gaiters and peeled off his socks, old Stolz looked up mournfully, shamed to see these frozen feet that looked like blocks of lard.

  Marta took his wet things. Stolz hurried for bandages. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to do something for him, but nobody knew what to do with him, least of all Mining. Groggy from incessant napping, her way of weathering depression, she lurched down the red-carpeted stairs and threw her flabby arms around his neck. He could see she had lost weight. The skin of her face was sagging, and her hair was flattened to one side. He couldn’t stand her overheated misery, her instinct to hibernate like a bear to avoid the want and hunger of this interminable winter. Sobbing and clutching, Mining looked into his eyes, begging some response from him.

  I know, he said wearily. I know …

  But she only kept sobbing. Staring into his sister’s hot, red face, Wittgenstein felt helpless and panicky. Mining wanted some kind of catharsis, but he was emotionally truncated, numb as a stump. How could he open up to her — to anyone — when he knew he would be shortly returning to the front? If he let himself go, he was afraid he might never stop.

  Please, he said, gently prising himself from her grip. Leave me a minute.

  Frowning, she said, of all things, Ludi, you’re too calm.

  I’m not too calm, he protested. I’m just exhausted. I’ve hardly slept in three days.

  Hardly had he succeeded in soothing her than he had his next hurdle — his mother. This, he knew, would be another shock. Ever since Karl Wittgenstein’s death, Frau Wittgenstein had been declining, but this last year, with Paul’s amputation and her other sons away, the decline was even more rapid, the gray hair going stone white and the face sagging. It was hardest on Mining, the perennial nurse, because the old woman was so unpredictable, weathering a string of bad days, followed by a few better ones before the next bad turn. Stumbling and depressed, cranky and forgetful, then weepy, Frau Wittgenstein was increasingly prey to incapacitating migraines and indigestion, to phantom back pains and now worsening cataracts that encased the world in a cloudy sheath, indistinct and incomprehensible but no less pressing. Because of her failing eyesight, she had insisted on giving up her cavernous room in favor of a closet-size maid’s room, where she now sat with her old woman’s clutter, her heavy carved furniture deployed around her half like a family, half like a barricade. All day long she would sit wringing her handkerchief while Mining and several maids tried to divert her from the war news, which even censoring could not improve.

  Mining thought their mother would find it less upsetting if she saw Wittgenstein out of uniform, so he changed into a sweater and trousers, then followed his sister into the little room. He smelled the old woman before he saw her, a mixture of camphor, cologne and the stealthy, slow sweat of aging, feminine grief. Mining had warned him that she might look groggy because of the sedatives the doctor had prescribed, but even that wasn’t preparation enough. She had worsened considerably in six months, and even then he couldn’t get over it, to see this most composed and pristine of women now unkempt and phlegmatic, hardly moving when he entered, as if her mind needed time to adjust. The swollen feet on the settee and the gaping look. Wringing the now omnipresent handkerchief as he leaned down to her, saying:

  Mother, I’m back. I’m here. I came as soon as I could.

  Oh, my boy … my poor, poor boy …

  In her former life, she had been comfortable only with a short, curt hug, but now she clutched him, emitting a feline moan so low as to be almost beyond the conscious frequency. And then before he could disengage himself, her heavy arm caught him round the back, slapping him such that he felt he was being burped.

  I’m so sorry, Mamma, he said. And then to his surprise, a bubble like a hiccup broke in his throat and he was weeping, feeling somehow responsible for his brother’s death, as if he bore the same disease. But this sudden surge of emotion from him rattled the old woman; it was not her son. Eyeing him in shock, she asked almost scornfully, Where is your uniform? — as if this accounted for his unsoldierlike weeping.

  I’ve been wearing it for days, the son explained. I took it off.

  The old woman paid no attention to this. Then you must be hungry, she said plausibly, as if by posing the standard questions she would find the pegs of what had fit formerly.

  No, he replied. I’m not hungry.

  But she, ignoring him, turned to Mining and asked, suddenly over-wrought, I take it they’re preparing something special for Ludi? Then, assured that they were, she reached for the next peg, asking groggily, Have you called Gretl to tell her Ludi’s home? And Paul — where is Paul?

  For the better part of an hour until Gretl arrived, they went on like this, with Wittgenstein and Mining answering their mother’s questions and ingeniously raising others so as to avoid the real subject at hand, which brooded about them like the muddy photographs that surrounded the old woman. Encased in their round frames, these portraits reminded him of a clutch of dusty old clocks. Here were Hans and Rudolf, then her husband, and now a tinted portrait of Kurt looking incongruously dashing in his uniform. Four clocks, all broken or stopped, and all of them telling different times, different stories. Wittgenstein just hoped the army stuck to its story.

  As usual, Gretl, in her own oblique way, got closer to the heart of the matter. Toward dinnertime, she arrived in a long black motorcar driven by a young bearded Jew in a leather cap. For Gretl, wartime manners were now the order of the day: newly egalitarian, she let herself out of the car and then bent in the window, instructing the driver. He was a handsome young man, as dark as a Gypsy, and as bold. Instinctively, Wittgenstein hated the impudent way the young Jew addressed his sister, and even more the way she tolerated it, sarcastic but faintly titillated, what with Rolf — now Major Stonborough — off in Poland somewhere.

  Lost in the gigantic leather bolsters of the back seat, meanwhile, was a boy of about eight in an oversize coat, wearing earlocks and a yarmulke. Wittgen
stein knew well that feral look in his eyes; in Galicia, he had seen hundreds like him, crawling over the army garbage dumps, begging, filching coal, stripping corpses. The boy was ready to bolt, one hand on the door handle, the other on the arm of his little sister, who was clutching a quilted sewing box that Gretl must have given her.

  Gretl immediately sensed her brother’s aloofness as the long car shot off, winding erratically around the circular drive and narrowly missing the gateposts. He wasn’t going to say a word, but Gretl had to have it out in the open, insistently asking, So how do you like my new chauffeur, Abba? He’s from Warsaw, really extraordinarily bright — a Yeshiva boy before he studied at the university. He speaks four or five languages and does all my translating for me. A Zionist, of course. He lied to me when he said he knew how to drive, but he’s improving.

  Knowing this would irritate him, Gretl made a wry face, then brightened, saying, But you look good — well, pretty good, hmmm? I’ll never get over you without your hair.

  Gretl gave him an impulsive hug, then continued talking, probing through the nervous patter. She, too, had lost weight and was, for her, dressed drably in a black woolen coat, dark green skirt and flat shoes. A beret was pulled over the tops of her ears, and in the tufts of dark hair that hung out, Wittgenstein saw, for the first time, flecks of gray. Gretl explained:

  I only dress like this when I’m visiting my refugees — I could hardly come in a ball gown. Don’t worry, though. When I shake the rich for money, I dress very prewar, but no jewels. Oh, no, it’s dangerous wearing them — so many thieves now. And it breeds bad feelings, so many have had to sell them, you know.

  Automatic talk this was, the chatter of exhaustion. Her eyes were dark and circled, and as she walked beside him now, kneading his arm, he could feel an edge of anxiety.

  So how are you? she asked. You’re all right?