by Gee, Maurice
Again I hear a voice saying ‘not enough’. All right, go back.
At the Gymnasium I took English as my optional language and found that I had an aptitude for it. I liked its simplicities and its suppleness. It seemed to me a language made for forward movement. The mind-filling certainties of German were like good food, served with ceremony, but English was a stand-up feast; it was plucked from the table and eaten as one stretched across for something of competing flavour on the other side.
Is it only now that it seems so? I could not have made these judgements then. My father held that German was the greatest of all languages and that it was our natural tongue; felt perhaps that, mounded over us, it hid our ancestry from view. He saw no reason for me to know any other language, but chose Italian when I insisted, out of his admiration for Mussolini. I rebelled – one of the luckier rebellions of my life – but would not have had my way if Mother had not supported me. She had spent several years in England as a girl and spoke the language rustily and wanted someone to practise it with. As well as that, she wanted to share with me. For several years we sat knee to knee in her little parlour or strolled arm in arm in the parks, exchanging formulaic pleasantries and cramped information. Gradually I became proficient in the language and far more confident than she. ‘And how are you this afternoon, my son?’ she might begin, and I would reply, ‘I am very well thank you, Mother.’ ‘But it was not long before Top hole, old fruit’ became my response (I had bought a novel by P. G. Wodehouse in an Austrian Railways lost property sale), and we laughed in our second language and I began to chatter in it – albeit with an accent I still hear every time I open my mouth today. There are tricks my tongue never learned to do.
On the political level I took Wodehouse’s novel for realism. How strange that in Dollfuss’s Austria I should pledge myself to destroy Bertie Wooster’s world: that in a police state, with the workers crushed and the peasantry under the thumb of savage priests, I should see a dinner-suited drone as my foe. It did not last for long: ‘discussions’ with the agitprop committee put me right. But I jump ahead – and I do not mean to write about that side of my ‘education’. How futile it seems now. Enough to say that Trotskyism was portrayed as our greatest enemy.
With fellow students from my class (I’m in the eighth class now), fellow members of the KJV, I delivered illegal leaflets in tenement blocks in Döbling. The method was to go to the top floor, break open the packet, and come down fast, leaving a leaflet in each letter box or under the mat. I loved doing that. I was quick and neat and cool – was out of there wearing a little smile and on my bicycle pedalling home while the others were only halfway down. It was part of our discipline that we must ignore each other and not try to help if someone got into trouble; must ‘fade away like smoke’, our leaders said. We were like smoke in the streets of our city and soon we would be a fire burning old structures to the ground. I’ve no doubt all the underground groups felt that, and there were enough of them: communist, socialist, Nazi.
We heard them on Sundays in the Woods, singing their songs, as we, in our clearing, sang ours. The Woods were outside the city boundaries and although we kept an eye out for the mounted Heimwehr, illegal groups were safe there from the police. Several years ago I exchanged letters with Trudi Prager, who was my girlfriend in the summer of 1935, and she, in Miami, looking back more than fifty years and writing in a bouncy style that reminded me, wrenchingly, of her way of walking and of hugging and of kissing, yet also, I imagine, with a tear in her eye, recreated those afternoons of sun and comradeship and hope and singing. ‘Remember the little clearing,’ she wrote, ‘and how we came to it over the stream and how you boys offered your hands to the girls on the stepping stones. That used to offend us modern misses. “Get your paws away.” Do you remember me saying that? And Wolf trying to carry Gretl and slipping on the rocks and dropping her to save himself? Some swain! But weren’t those good days, Josef? They were our spring, and although we lost our summer, we can look back on some happy times.’
We put our food in the common pile, each what he could manage (I, from a wealthy home, was clever enough to see that quantity not quality served me best), and sat down obediently, although with a serious iconoclastic glee, to our morning of discussion and political study. Each of us had to lecture at some time. When my turn came I spoke about the struggle of the Chinese communists, a talk based entirely on Malraux’s Man’s Estate, which I’d just read.
I was there as much for this, the serious part, as for the social-ising and the flirting, the singing and the games that we moved on to in the afternoon. Some people came for that alone, and sat hiding yawns through the talk sessions, and we had our sexual opportunists too – couples dropped out and were not seen again – but a core, perhaps a dozen, were dedicated Marxists, and among that group I was perhaps the most ardent. Ardent, though, for revolutionary air more than tyrant blood. I felt myself uplifted on the swell of history. I was borne along by inevitability. How does this translate into everyday speech? How did it set me stepping through my days? I was an eager, bright boy, tumbling out his words – too many words. I see myself not with flashing but with darting eyes. Excitement moved me rather than passion. Nervous movement, in mind and body both, kept my insecurities from fastening on me. ‘Yes’ was my word – interrogative and affirmative – and ‘we must’ my declaration. I was a bit of a joke, but being laughed at seldom offended me, for it acknowledged, in a curious way, my purity, and turned me into the conscience of our group. Trudi Prager does not mention it. She simply says that it was hard to stop me from exclaiming. She says I sat there nodding and turning like one of those mechanical dogs that say ‘Yap, yap.’
In the afternoon we played games, some of them introduced by the ex-Boy Scouts among us. Instead of ‘Der Kaiser schickt Soldaten aus’ we played ‘Der Lenin schickt Soldaten aus’. Through the trees, across the stream, the Nazis were marching, their white socks flashing like rabbit tails and their leather pants gleaming. We raised our fists and roared at them, little roarings in the Vienna Woods – how sad and terrible our games seem now. We finished the day standing in a circle, singing the Internationale, all three verses, with our fists raised in the red salute, and then marched back to town in ranks, to the tune of our fighting songs, ‘Die Arbeiter von Wien’ and ‘Roter Flieger-marsch’. People cheered us in the growing darkness and some joined our ranks and sang with us. At the tram terminus we broke up and went our ways, but little groups, carried away, would sometimes march on singing into the suburbs.
That, for several years, is how I spent my Sundays in Vienna. It worried Mother and enraged my father. Keep your head down, do not be seen except as a Viennese gentleman going to work or going home – that was his prescription for safety. Schuschnigg gave him hope for a while. He was no less a fascist dictator than Dollfuss had been, but was at least a lawyer and not a peasant. His policy was to keep Austria Austrian and Hitler and his Germans behind their frontier, and while he had Mussolini’s support there seemed some hope that he might do it. His anti-semitism was a tactic – he used it only when he felt it would do him good. Schuschnigg had not understood, any more than my father had, the Judenhass of the Austrian.
I argued with my father that the best way for Jews to assimilate and not be seen was to join, join, join – Boy Scouts, I said, chess clubs, Esperanto groups, barefoot walkers. The argument would not extend to the KJV or the GRSV (United Red Student’s League), which I joined when I went to the university, or to the Hilfzentrale, a pacifist organisation we began to infiltrate. The Hilfzentrale too was declared illegal. ‘Everything you are in is underground,’ my father cried. At times he recoiled from me as though I was unclean, as though I brought dirt and slime with me from down there. But to me we seemed creatures of the upper air. Every Aktion, every Treff, secret though it might be, took place in a glow of excitement and righteousness. The Nazis were earthbound, monochrome, while we were spirited and free, we were the future. I saw it in the long swinging stride of ou
r girls, in their mannish haircuts – the Bubikopf – and in our red scarves which we sometimes wore pirate fashion round our heads.
Did I not glimpse the thing that uncoiled and opened its eyes and moved on its heavy sinuous path to crush and kill us? The answer is, no I did not. I saw violence, bulging faces, bulging eyes, and heard shouts and screams and saw blood and broken teeth, and heard, more than once, bones crack. I was a player in a dangerous game and brought home, two or three times, blood on my face to prove it. I had no doubt that it was an important game. Yet I could not be deep and could not scheme, could not be ruthless, and must have seemed light and unreliable to our bosses. I never became a boss myself.
Franz obeyed my father, he kept his head down, but Susi wished to follow me. She tried to join the Red Falcons, an underground children’s group I had been in for a few months between the Boy Scouts and the KJV. Like me she was trying to be free, she wanted to be bobbing her hair and wearing a dirndl and marching in the Woods and running in the streets. I told her how we fought the Nazi students at the university and each side tried to throw opponents down the steps to the waiting police, who were not allowed inside the buildings. I told her about meetings closed by detectives, and friends of mine questioned and beaten in the cells, and how once, at a Hilfzentrale meeting on The Economic Causes of World War, the speaker had barely started when the police commissioner himself jumped up and cried, ‘You’re a pacifist organisation, you must not talk about war’. So one of the young KJV members, Herbert Roth, read a pamphlet instead, and it came much closer to sedition than the official speaker would have dared. The commissioner snatched it: ‘We’re confiscating this.’ It will cost you three Groschen,’ Bert Roth said, and the commissioner paid up.
That was a triumph just right for a girl of fourteen. Susi beat her feet on the floor in excitement. I told her how we wrote slogans on glass windows with fluoric acid, and how a group of students hid a red flag in the neon lighting tube above a blackboard. A time mechanism unrolled it slowly behind the professor during the compulsory lecture on Catholic Doctrine of the State. Susi laughed and beat her feet again. I did not tell her that there were bitter quarrels about this action because although it was supposed to be joint only the hammer and sickle appeared on the flag and not the socialist three arrows.
How shall I write of Susi? She escaped the Nazis but died in Paris of an asthma attack before even Father and Mother were dead. Franz, whom I loved as one loves a brother but did not like, buried her there and carried on to America where he – the coal factor’s son, destined for wealth – worked behind a counter in East Side New York until he died. And that is a brief history of my brother and sister. It will not do.
I can only say of Susi that I loved her. I can only see her as she was for me. How can I pretend to know how she was for herself – a girl-child in the Vienna of the thirties, raised in a non-Jewish Jewish family, given everything she needed, and more, but little of what she wanted, and asking her brother to make her free? How do I say who that Susi was without spilling over her all that she was for me? I can only choose an incident, describe what Susi did, and hope that some part of her is contained in it.
Father would not allow her to join the Red Falcons or go to the Woods with me on Sunday. So now and then I took her to the Kuchelau, a sandy beach on the Danube north of the city, a popular picnic place at the time. The Alsergrund YCL met there, as well as Nazi and socialist groups, but Mother and Father did not know that. There was little chance for organised activity because the beach was crowded with ordinary Viennese enjoying an outing, but fierce impromptu debates went on between the communists and the socialists, and now and then Nazi groups tried to march. Sometimes we would sit cross-legged around some wise man and listen to his experience and advice.
There was a communist lawyer there the last day I took Susi, a worn-looking but lively man who had done time in the fascist concentration camp at Wollersdorf. Susi had not heard of concentration camps and could not believe we had one here, in Austria. In Germany perhaps, in Hungary. The lawyer smiled. He was taken with her. (Susi had the same features as me, but some shift in growing had turned her away from the foxiness I retained into a sharp-edged prettiness.) He gave us a short course in modern history, which I didn’t need, although I sat there patiently, cross-legged. The sun, the crowds, the company: I’m happy, I thought. The meadows on the far side, the running of the river, and the city quiet in behind, while he spoke of Hitler, Horthy, Franco, Mussolini, made me think of longer histories and – it followed naturally – of the importance of this moment, now. I want nothing more, I want no change, I thought – and grinned at my sinfulness: a communist wanting to keep things as they were. Meanwhile Susi drank in his lesson, and when he moved on to police interrogation and how we must behave in court her eyes began to flash with a foxy light. Always sign your statement close to the last line,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ Susi answered, knowing the reason before he explained. ‘The accused must turn accuser,’ he went on, and ‘Yes,’ she said. I smiled at her, and thought, This moment, now.
I took her swimming in the brown river, in the safe band between paddling children and young men sporting in the current far out. While we were there a German tug came down, towing barges. This was a regular event (and how discordant, unnatural, the hooked cross flying above the toy boat with its red funnel and tip-tilted nose). Each of the groups – communist, socialist, Nazi – gathered at the waterline and shouted slogans, sang their songs as it steamed by. A few of the stronger swimmers swam right out and cried, ‘Down with Hitler’ and ‘Freedom for Thälmann’ only a yard or two from the string of barges. Susi and I, up to our necks, screamed and shouted too. She bobbed on her toes, submerging as far as her mouth, then springing up until her throat was bare. I can still see her small fist dripping water while she smacked the surface with her other hand. We sang, or tried to sing, the first verse of the Internationale.
The Germans on the tug ignored us usually – the captain smoked his pipe and the bargees went about their work – but on that day a man on the stern of the last barge answered with a clenched fist, the red salute, which raised a roar of approval from the beach. The Nazi group there, white-socked, leather-buttocked – they kept to their ‘uniform’ in spite of the heat – exploded into rage and charged, wedge-shaped, at the Alsergrund YCL. They knocked them flying and set about them with their boots. That was all I saw of the larger battle: it became close and personal. Forgetting Susi, I ploughed from the water and found myself wrestling on the sand with a Nazi thug – his breath in my throat, his saliva smeared on my cheek. He rolled on me and crushed me with his weight and rose on one arm to beat my face, but two young men from the socialists pulled him away and threw him in the water and pushed him under when he came up.
Then I saw Susi. She had a double-fisted grip on the belt of another Nazi who was lifting and throttling the lawyer from Wollersdorf, and she tried to jerk him away. She was like a terrier in a dogfight swinging on the tail of some huge hound. He turned and punched backhanded, clubbed her with his fist, and she went tumbling on the sand with her hair (she should have been allowed her Bubikopf) twined round her throat. I scrambled to her and picked her up and did not see the end of the battle (people ran from all over the beach with their boots in their hands and clubbed the Nazis into retreat). I cleaned her and dried her with her towel and took her to a water tap and washed her bleeding mouth. For a few moments she was dazed; then she wept; and then grew happy. We had beaten them, she said. Yes, I agreed, and now we had to go home and face our father. Susi, brave Susi, made a grimace of mock fear with her wounded mouth.
Parental rage – I have felt it myself. And I sympathise with my father’s extravagance, for he was afraid. He struck me; he gave me a full-handed slap that made my mouth bleed the same as Susi’s. And when my mother, examining her, cried that her tooth was broken, he rushed at me for a second blow. Franz stood in his way. ‘Father,’ Franz said, ‘we’re a family.’ It was a powerful word and it sto
pped him, although he continued to shout at me – using, among other terms, meshuggah and ganif: the only time I ever heard Yiddish from him.
He banished me from the supper table but someone, Mother or Franz, must have used the ‘family’ argument again, for Franz came to my bedroom door and thrust his head in. ‘You can come.’ And when I was at the table, Father said, ‘We’ll have no more talk about it now. Josef and I will talk in the morning.’ Mother kept her eyes down and would not look at me; Franz, plump and waxy-skinned, ate in his orderly way; and Susi, white with pain from the nerve in her broken tooth, managed only a small agonised grin. I was resentful. I felt I had done well and should be praised – but enough. Enough of me. Before I set off on the tour that has lasted the rest of my life I want to say how they, Susi and Franz, made their escape from Vienna – and so be finished with them and let them rest.
This I put together from the letter Franz wrote from Paris to poste restante in Auckland, my only address. He told me about Susi – the girl of sixteen dying in a shabby Paris room, with her un-favoured brother, who had saved her, at her side. I’ll talk about the saving, not her death, for I cannot, no matter how I try, make it mine. I’ve wept over her and wrung my hands but she won’t be mine.
