Troth. She must have used it quite unconsciously, without a second thought as to the word’s immeasurable profundity. This made me rather pensive for a couple of days. She was right: an incredible breach of troth was taking place all around us, but which troth was actually being broken? One already sensed that the faith, the pure enthusiasm with which this transformation had been yearned for and then greeted, was being betrayed. Troth itself was betrayed, I thought. For instance, the troth to the old empire. This Reich had no more to do with my dream of the Holy Roman Empire than with the glorious dream of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. But I was soon tired of brooding about it. After all, I was a Rumanian, and even if I had been an Austrian, how could I have prevented what all the other Austrians obviously welcomed? I felt frightfully sorry for Minka and all our friends, but it was not my fault that they happened to be Jews, and in the event that they got into serious trouble I could use my connections with the SS to help them out again.
These connections were by no means limited to Sturmbannführer Malik. I had run into my old schoolmate Oskar Koloman again, and this time he looked prim and tidy, in a splendid black uniform, with the insignia of an even higher rank than that of Sturmbannführer. “Heil, Arnulf,” he greeted me. “How is it you’re in civilian clothes? Don’t you want to join us?”
“I am Rumanian, you know.”
“That means nothing. You were born an Austrian. Sooner or later, all German-speaking people will come home to the Reich. I can easily arrange for you to change your nationality.”
“I’ll think it over,” I said. “Thank you anyhow.”
“You were a fairly good skater, and not bad at horseback riding, as I recall. We need sporting types, you know. We have some excellent horses at the Mounted SS. Come and ride them, if you want. What are you doing otherwise?”
“Well, I’m trying to get on with architecture. But it bores me stiff.”
“You see! Studying bored me, too. That’s why I amused myself blowing up a telephone booth. It cost me three years, all right, but look what I’ve become now. Not bad, hey? You can have the same if you want. But tell me”—he looked at me mistrustfully—“don’t you have contact with Jews? I remember that dark girl you were with when we met again for the first time.”
“Oh, she’s a Turk,” I said, and laughed.
“A Turk. I understand.” He laughed, too. “However, a Jewess is no Jew, and a Turkish girl even less. I do understand, you old swine. Now, don’t be a fool, and come riding one of these days?”
I did. They had excellent horses. I rode one that had belonged to the Rothschilds, and was very good indeed. The cavalrymen were fantastic yokels. They clicked their heels and threw up their arms and shouted “Heil Hitler!” every time they saw me. Sometimes I had the impression they did not take it seriously themselves, because they tried so hard to do it seriously. On the whole, they seemed quite harmless, happy with their uniforms and their obsolete importance. Oskar, in order to avoid silly questions about my riding there without being a member of the SS (also, perhaps, in order to give himself an air of clandestine importance), had told them that I was a Rumanian engaged in some special intelligence work, and I did nothing to destroy this legend, so I was treated as if I were the bearer of top secrets that would soon enable Adolf Hitler to unite the Carpathians with the Styrian Alps. I knew I could certainly count on Oskar, because, in a drunken moment, he had confessed to me that his group of Austrian Nazis had been deceived by the men of the Reich. He and his friends had not at all wanted Anschluss but a separate Nazi Austria under their own leader, Dr. Rintelen. The next day, he came to me and implored me never to mention what he had told me. I grasped his arm and said, “Well, Oskar, after all, we have always been friends. Let’s not fuss about how reliable we are,” whereupon he grasped my arm and said, “Arnulf, I always knew you were a fine fellow, though you sometimes”—and here he laughed heartily—“have a trifle too much to do with the Turks. However, I would very much like to meet that Turkish girl of yours. She has something that appeals to my particular taste. If you don’t mind.”
Of course, Minka knew about all this, and laughed when I told her that she had only to smile at Oskar and he’d immediately make her an honorary Aryan. “Aryans,” she said. “I can’t stand the sight of them any longer. The sooner I get my affidavit the better. I want to get out of here. It breaks my heart, but I simply have to.” She was waiting for her affidavit for England, as most of our friends were. It was not easy to get an affidavit. The English would take only people who wanted to be employed as servants, so very soon some clever man opened a butlers’ school on the Praterstrasse, where Jewish bankers and intellectuals were taught how to wait on the British. I once went there with Minka, and we laughed our heads off. Old stockbrokers were waddling around with aprons about their hips, balancing trays and opening bottles of champagne. My talent for imitating Jews made me invent a sketch in which a Scottish laird, reading in the newspapers about the sad destiny of the Viennese Jews, decides to dismiss all his wonderful Highland servants and replace them with Dr. Pisko-Bettelheim, Jacques Pallinker, Yehudo Nagoschiner, and such. Minka’s house had become a sort of center for the few Jews left in Vienna and some Aryans unfaithful to their new flag, like myself. My sketch was a great success.
During that summer and autumn of 1938, most of the Jews I knew went away. Some of them were arrested and locked up for a while, and came home with some rather gruesome stories about what was going on in the prisons of the Rossauerlände. Some disappeared, and we did not know whether they had been put in jail or had just fled at the last moment. All this was pretty awful, I had to admit. But one knew, after all, how people were—some being horrid, others really very nice—and those who got arrested were not always entirely innocent. A Jewish lawyer, telling about his cruel treatment at the hands of the SS, said proudly, “But I was not arrested for just being a Jew. I am a criminal.” However, I was becoming bored with the Nazi attitude of promise, hope, and expectation, as nothing really happened, and the whole thing was nothing but a great mess with some sordid highlights. Vienna had become a dreary place. Even Oskar complained; he didn’t enjoy the Heurigen anymore, God knows why. Then he said, “Do you remember our school library? Well, there was a book called The City Without Jews. Actually, I never read it. Have you? Anyway, I sometimes have the feeling that Vienna is just that. There’s nobody left to hate.”
There was a young boy of great musical talent around Minka in those days—not Herbert von Karajan but a little Jew by the name of Walter, whom I had come to like very much. He was intelligent, and funny, and extremely well read. Minka protected him, as, in happier times, she had protected me, and he showed me a touching affection and confidence that I could not resist. Since he had relatives in America, he got an affidavit rather quickly, and we decided to give him a farewell party. We chose an out-of-the-way place—a small winegrower’s cottage behind the Kobenzl—with the poetic name, in the Viennese dialect, of Häusl am Roan (Cottage at the Edge of the Vineyard). We were a party of sixteen, and there were some pretty girls. Someone still had a car, and it took two trips to get us all out there, and we were gay as in the old days. Walter played the nice old Viennese Heurigenlieder on the piano. I performed the butler Yehudo Nagoschiner, serving the wine and the fried chicken. Below us, beyond the hills that smelled of mown hay, lay the sparkling lights of Vienna. Suddenly this idyllic happiness was interrupted by a voice that roared, “I’ve finally caught you in the very act, you scoundrel!” I felt the marrow of my bones freeze. In the door stood Oskar, with a group of sturdy men in civilian clothes behind him. My poor Jewish friends stood or sat motionless as he came toward me, followed by his silent men. Then he threw his arms up and said, “But don’t let me interrupt your good time. I’m a schoolmate of Arnulf’s, and I wanted to show a few friends from the Reich what a true Viennese Heurigen looks like.”
It was true. He had not come to arrest me, or anything of the kind. When I asked him how he knew where I was, h
e said with a smile, “Old boy, there are very few things we don’t know.”
“Come on, don’t give me that. Who told you, really?”
“Your grandmother.”
“My grandmother?”
“Well, that old witch with the trembling voice who answers the telephone at your house.”
Old Marie, then. I was a fool. For months I had told her where I could be reached when I went out, hoping that a call might come through from Bucharest to tell me that things had changed again and that my beloved was getting a divorce. I was more than a fool; I was blind to what was going on around me. I felt this very strongly when Oskar poked his elbow into my side and said, in a loud voice, with a glance toward his companions, “Now, how about introducing me to your beautiful Turkish girl friend?”
“She is my wife,” I said. “We are celebrating our wedding.”
The Germans were very pleased to hear this, and clicked their heels and congratulated us, shaking our hands so hard they almost pulled our arms out of their sockets. One of them sat down next to Minka in order to tell her about a cousin who lived in Istanbul. Oskar clapped my shoulder and said with a wink, “Don’t look so frightened. Tell that little Jew there at the piano to play some Heurigenlieder.”
The Germans soon got very drunk. The one with the cousin in Istanbul flirted with Minka, in competition with Oskar. The others danced with the pretty girls, and finally one of them performed a most courageous jump over a small stone wall in the garden, misjudged the distance to the ground, fell, and broke his leg. The Germans made a stretcher for him, so they could carry him to the nearest hospital, and then, in a great hurry, they shook our hands, clicked their heels, threw their arms up, shouting “Heil Hitler!” and “Long live Kemal Pasha Atatürk!” and disappeared as spookily as they had come, with Oskar waving and calling good-bye.
“You bastard,” Minka said to me. She went out into the vineyard and sat down on a stone. I followed her.
“I’m sorry, Minka. I know I am a mindless ass.”
“Never mind. After all, it was funny. Did you see darling little Walter playing the piano as if the devils were standing over him?” She laughed her enchanting laugh. “But still …” She sank back with a deep sigh.
It was dawn. Out of a mist in the valley Vienna rose, the peaks of its towers first, then the Riesenrad, the Ferris wheel, in the Prater, the monuments, the roofs, the streets. I sat beside Minka, looking down at all this. Suddenly I heard a strange sound coming out of Minka’s throat, and thought she was going to cry, but she was laughing instead. “Do you know what happened to Friedel Süssmann?” she asked. “I told you that in order to get her affidavit she got married at the British Consulate to an English sailor she had never seen before? Well, when she got to England, she was met by some gentlemen in black. They had come to break the news to her that her husband had fallen from the mast and broken his neck. She now has a widow’s pension—one pound a month.”
“Listen, Minka,” I said. “After all, I am a Rumanian. My hands are not tied. I need not tell you what it would mean to my parents, and you know that I love somebody else, but if it would help you—I mean, just in order to get you a passport that would enable you to get out of here, and, of course, with an immediate divorce afterward—if you want to, we could bloody well go and get married. You won’t get a pension, though, if I break my neck.”
She drew herself up slowly till she was looking into my face. Then she took it in both her hands, as she had done when I first came to her flat, and kissed me. “You know, my darling Brommy,” she said, “that you are the dearest person on earth to me. I could never have felt closer to a brother, if I’d had one. You are a bastard, it’s true, but I am more fond of you than of anybody else. Just kiss me, once—and kiss me tenderly.” Her mouth was as beautiful as ever, and I could even feel more than the tenderness I would have felt for a sister. In that moment, it appeared to me that if she had not been a Jew, I could have loved her even in the same way, or perhaps more than, I loved the one I had lost. Still, I felt a twinge of bad conscience, as if I were being a traitor to my flag.
“All right,” she said. “That’s that. And now don’t be afraid that I’ll say yes to your kind offer. I couldn’t possibly marry you. Apart from the fact that it would hurt your parents and that you love somebody else—we could certainly get an immediate divorce, but that is not the point—I would not want to marry you, if you understand what I mean. Because of certain goyish qualities of your soul. But still, you are the dearest to me. Come, let’s see how the party is getting on.”
A few days later, she got her affidavit, and within a fortnight she had sold her things, even Professor Raubitschek’s carved-wood bookcases, and gone to London.
There I saw her once more, in the year 1947. God knows how she had found out where I was living—near Hamburg at that time. Anyway, I got a letter from her saying that she was all right, and married to a man—not a Jew, by the way—who had left Austria in 1938 and who was as sweet and decent as could be, a professor of philology and a great admirer of Karl Kraus. They were about to emigrate to America, and she would very much like to see me once more. She enclosed in the letter a ticket to London and all the papers necessary to get me, as a former Rumanian, a visa for Great Britain. I accepted all this more than gratefully. I was as penniless, as starved, as miserable as any displaced person could be in the rubble of Germany in early 1947. As she had known how—and where—to trace me, she must also have known that my father had fired his last shot into his temple when the Russians took the Bukovina in 1940, and that, two years later, my grandmother had died in Vienna. I had not had a chance to build up a life or settle in a place for all those years.
There was only one difficulty: I had no valid passport. But Minka had even thought of that. A friend who was with the British Military Government arranged to get me a travel document. It defined me as an “individual of doubtful nationality” but brought me to England, all right. Her husband fetched me at Victoria Station, took a closer look at me, and said, “Let us go to have lunch first. She doesn’t know that you are arriving today. I have not told her, in order not to excite her too much.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is there anything wrong with her?”
“That trouble with her hip seems to have affected her spine. She is in great pain, and you will have to be very patient with her.”
They lived in a nice house in Cadogan Square. Minka’s husband showed me in, fixed me a drink, and then called up the stairwell, “Oh, Minka, would you mind coming down? There is a friend of yours.” She came down the stairs, a middle-aged woman with gray hair, bent and torn by the atrocious pains of cancer of the bone. “Who is it?” she asked sharply. Then she saw me. “Brommy!” she said, and covered her face with her hands, her poor, tortured body shaken by her sobbing.
On the evening before their departure for America, all of our old friends who had managed to emigrate to Britain came to their house to bid them good-bye. Even though they had been told I would be there, they marveled at seeing me, as if I were a creature from another star. They could not stop asking about Vienna during the war, and how it had looked when I last saw it. They remembered things I had long since forgotten. Had Oskar survived? Oh, he had been hanged in Poland? Poor chap. And Guru Malik, the spiritualist I had told so many funny stories about? No! Had he really been dematerialized by a bomb? Great success, that one. Every one of the guests had brought me a gift, things I badly needed at that time—mostly secondhand clothes. And when, at the end of the evening, I had kissed Minka good-bye—forever, as we both knew—and had shaken hands with everybody, I went back to my hotel carrying two large suitcases full of old clothes that I hoped to sell in Hamburg like a handalé, to make enough money to follow Minka to America.
She died there a few months later.
Pravda
“As if he were lost among the lotus eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland.…” What was this? Where did it come from? It had the rhapsodic inton
ation of memory, but he was not sure whether it was his memory, although grammatically it sounded as if it were: even his memories could no longer be narrated simply in the murmuring imperfect tense, they required the resolutely indicated “as if,” the subjunctive, the mood of possibility, in any case the shift into the indefinite; even if occurrences had occurred from occurrences, the chain of motifs reached so deep into the past, reached back to the beginning of recorded time, the dawn of history, the golden haze of myth where everything was open, any possibility. Only one thing was certain: time was passing, had passed even if occurrences had not assumed a visible shape, time had slipped, kept slipping through the grip of memory, a great, great deal of time—and he had lived from the fullness of days as if they were inexhaustible, he especially: for it was not just one life which, these days, formed and would go on forming (not for much longer, he told himself, perhaps for ten more years, at best fifteen), but a half dozen different lives, lived in different eras, in different countries, in different languages, among totally different people; his name had had a different ring, had been pronounced in different ways, his costume had changed with his tailors and barbers, with the fashion of his environment, people he had met frequently twenty years ago could not for the life of them recall having made his acquaintance, he certainly looked different at sixty from what he had looked like at forty, at twenty, a man with totally different characteristics: in the south, his gestures were livelier than they had been in the north, there he had smoked a pipe, here cigarillos, there he had drunk whiskey, here wine, there a woman’s shiny black hair had electrified him, here it was the fragrant mane of a blonde.…
to be sure, through all this, he had unshakably said “I” to himself, he had never felt any doubt as to his identity. He raised his eyebrows ironically whenever he heard or read the phrase that someone was “seeking his identity” like some lost or never possessed object that was rightfully his; it gave him a sardonic pleasure, when someone expressed perplexity or unfulfillment or disconnectedness, to ask that person in the broadest American accent, “You’re lookin’ for your lost iden’ity, aren’tcha?”—even though he himself could scarcely have indicated what constituted his own identity—:
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 27
