A Chosen Sparrow

by Vera Caspary

  Martin Haffner was not the type of man who would ordinarily have come into the Königshimmel. At our first meeting I found him disconcerting, far too brusque and direct. “Well, what’s the story?” Martin said. He had come to interview me. At this time there was a revival of interest in the victims of the Nazis. Books about that period were popular and there had been several films on the subject. The boss suggested that we get some free publicity (publicity was his obsession) by having someone write my story. Until a few weeks before, the boss had not known that I was Jewish. During job-hunting days I had not let out a word about my origin. It had been safer to let employers believe that I was no different from the rest of the drab working class. But Herr Kraut had suspected, asked questions. And he saw that the story of my unhappy childhood would appeal to an editor who would like to take advantage of the current trend.

  I hesitated. The boss urged, “It would bring in tourists, particularly Germans. They like to beat their breasts about Nazi cruelties. Do you know they’re visiting the concentration camps by thousands? And the Americans are fascinated, too. If your story is picked up by their papers we’ll do a big business next summer.”

  I wanted to keep the pleasant job and gave grudging consent. Herr Kraut was delighted. “You’re a smart kid, Leni. You’ve got a real Jewish head.” The boss aimed his forefinger at my temple. “How’s this for a headline, dear? The Glamour Girl Who Grew Up in a Nazi Prison.” Herr Kraut loved American expressions like Glamour Girl. He hurried to the telephone and very soon told me that on the following Friday I was to be interviewed by a famous journalist. The description was exaggerated and typical as Herr Kraut would never admit that anyone associated with him could be merely good at his work.

  When I went into the bar at four o’clock in the afternoon it was empty save for the one man who did double duty as bartender and waiter at this quiet hour, and a lady with a dachshund that kept jumping off a chair and immediately begging to be lifted back to the seat. When Martin Haffner came in the dog ran to him and the lady jumped up eagerly. Martin thought this lady was the Glamour Girl and introduced himself. I hurried forward, much to the lady’s disappointment. She sank back into her chair and sipped the last drops of a small mocha. Martin and I shook hands. A warm wave passed through me. The face I looked into was not handsome, but there was strength in the mouth, intensity in eyes set wide apart over a flat nose like a monkey’s. His voice was deep and rich, his language beautiful. He spoke German like a cultured member of the older generation, not at all in the style of my generation which uses language corrupted in the Hitler years.

  “Well, what’s the story?” he said. No compliments, no chitchat, no comments on the weather.

  Since the Mayrs had commanded me to forget the sordid past I had tried with a fierce will to push all of that filth and ugliness out of my mind. I presented myself to Martin Haffner as a pathetic victim, gentle, tender, untouched; I told him of the things I have written here, the flight to Prague, my father’s disappearance, our capture, my mother’s death in the prison, and of my rescue by the American soldiers who had given me my first piece of chocolate.

  “Is that all?” asked Martin.

  My mind stood still. Reality…the odors, unwashed flesh, rotting teeth, the night smells of sleep, defecation, women…and the cruelties…savage beatings, flowing blood, fights, death, animal lust…were not admitted to the mind of a Glamour Girl. Silence persisted while the espresso machine hissed, the dog’s toenails tapped the floor, the roar of street traffic came through the walls.

  I said, “You don’t find the story interesting enough to be written?” I became self-conscious. “I understand. I’m not important.”

  “Why not?”

  “So many others suffered, so many died. Better people, more important…”

  “You survived. That’s important.”

  “But who am I? An insignificant girl with no great talents. Why was I the one to be saved?”

  He smiled a little. “Haven’t you heard that God heeds each sparrow’s fall?”

  “So many sparrows fell. Was God watching? Did He count them? Why was I chosen to live?”

  “You feel awfully sorry for yourself, don’t you?”

  He made me angry. To hide my feelings I told the waiter to refill our coffee cups. The lady and dachshund left the bar. A couple of customers entered and the pastry waitress came in. I asked Martin for a cigarette.

  He said grimly, “Very well, I concede. You had a bad time but you don’t have to feel so superior. Other people suffered, too.”

  Later I learned Martin’s story. As a boy he had been dressed in brown uniforms and sent out to march and shout, “Heil!” His father had been a successful salesman for a metal company and then became some sort of agent who worked for both the government and the manufacturer of weapons. Martin did not think his father had been quite honest, but he could not explain the nature of the business clearly enough for me to know just what trickery had been practiced.

  “As if that weren’t enough,” Martin added bitterly, “he became a party member before the Anschluss! My father helped bring this country to its knees and its downfall.” In the last year of the war the Nazis had turned against his father, dug up the record of his early transactions, declared him a traitor, had him imprisoned, then shot. Martin had neither love nor pity for his late father. The tragedy was his mother, a gentle woman who had known nothing about her husband’s maneuvers. The government provided no pension for Haffner’s widow. She was ill with diabetes, needed special foods, and had never been educated for poverty. Martin had started a novel, was passionately devoted to his work, but had to spend most of his time writing trivial pieces for the illustrated weeklies which are read in coffeehouses, hairdressers’ and dentists’ waiting rooms. Most of his good friends, he said, were in the same situation.

  “So you see, I am not talking merely as an objective observer.”

  “But it is very different with you. As a child you had parents and love, a home and religion,” I argued. “You knew what you were. But I am a Jew because they say I am. I have had nothing from it, no family, no traditions, no faith. Where do I stand?”

  “With both feet on solid earth like everyone else. And you’re free now, you earn your own living. To demand more is arrogance.”

  “I do not demand much!”

  “Not revenge? Compensation? Are you such a saint?”

  The passionate conversation was interrupted by my boss who came in to pay oily compliments to the journalist and to ask if Herr Haffner did not consider it a great story. Martin was blunt. He did not think much of the boss’s idea, but in a grudging way agreed to write it for the sake of the few schillings he would be paid by the weekly magazine. A few weeks later the story appeared, six paragraphs and pictures of The Bezaubernde Leonora with and without the zither, in street costume, as a child in an old snapshot taken at Baden by Herr Mayr, and also a photograph of the Königshimmel Bar and Nite Club. The pages cut from a weekly magazine were framed and hung at the entrance. They brought good business. Herr Kraut complimented me and again praised my Jewish head. It was this story which, indirectly, brought me to the castle.

  I had never before met people like Martin’s friends. Often they enraged me, speaking about our beautiful, cultured Vienna as if the city belonged to a tribe of ignorant savages. Some of them, like Martin, were themselves Viennese while many were foreign students. Such clever young intellectuals could not experience any feeling without questioning themselves, as well as their friends, about its deeper meaning. They were very much interested in me and my experiences, and were constantly demanding emotions which I did not know I felt. While I often grew angry at their arguments, I know now that I owe much of my ability to think, analyze, to their probing. Several were American medical students studying at our famous eye clinic and pathology laboratories. They had served in the American Army and had their expenses paid by their government while they were educated in a foreign country. My favorite was a y
oung man called Rick…Rick Connors…who was writing his doctor’s thesis on the influences of Dr. Freud’s early life. He declared that the Viennese ought to be ashamed for not honoring this immortal scientist as he was honored in other countries. Another of his preoccupations was with our feelings about the Germans. Could we ever forgive the war crimes and atrocities?

  “But we were on the same side in the war,” Martin reminded him. “And just as bad as they were. What we must first ask is if we forgive ourselves.”

  “Leni should tell us. Can she forgive?”

  I looked around at the group at our table in the Café Grabengruber. It was Sunday afternoon and I was free to spend my time with friends until I went to work. The dark paneled room was smoky so that I saw the faces behind a blue film. They were all very male, very ardent, compelling, and I said, “I shall probably have to marry an Austrian.”

  They laughed. “Can you love us?”

  I could not immediately find a clever answer, and was glad when Rick suggested that I must find a foreign husband. I flirted with him lightly, but thought about life in America as I had seen it in films where people lived in splendid apartments on the roofs of high buildings overlooking great, sunlit cities, or in small white houses where girls in pretty dresses waited on verandas for handsome boys to come in clean, new cars. The dreams and inviting smiles were quite useless since Rick had shown me pictures of his American fiancée, a girl called Mary who had gone to college and now held a wonderful job in Washington.

  To be quite truthful, I shall have to confess that I found my steady admirer, Martin, less appealing than Rick Connors who was tall and blond with clean film-star looks. In Martin it was strength that excited me. Soon after we met he had tried to become my lover. I had allowed him to kiss me while we danced, or under barren trees in the park, in a dark corridor, but would never go with him to any place where we would be alone.

  Out of these evasions stemmed all of our minor quarrels, criticism, sudden retreats and caprices. It was sham on my part, the hypocrisy of an eager virgin. In my mind I was prepared for the great experience and believed myself a girl of modern ideals. From novels and new friends I had acquired new standards. My generation had grown up in cynicism, determined not to accept the values of older people who had promised so much and provided us with defeat and disillusionment. Even Heda, Frau Mayr’s own daughter, had slept with Johnni before their marriage.

  “Are you having an affair?” asked Heda when she came with Johnni and her baby to spend Christmas with her mother.

  I denied it indignantly.

  Heda was already pregnant with the second child. She clasped her hands over the rounded belly. “What’s wrong about it when a girl is single and earns her own living?”

  Elfy was shocked. I defended my modern attitudes but explained that I could not give myself unless I was madly in love with a man. I found Martin’s strength a temptation but he did not arouse the passions of my imagination. He was too self-sufficient. “I want a man to care terribly. Martin’s too fond of himself. I must have real love.”

  “Find out first what love is,” advised Heda.

  Elfy fled the room. Heda and I went on with our discussion. She said I was a sentimental little idiot and would probably die wondering. Her attitude made chastity seem an unbearable and unnecessary burden.

  On the thirty-first of December, Rick Connors gave a Sylvester party in his tiny apartment. I arrived at three o’clock when the Königshimmel (which had stayed open an extra two hours) closed its doors on its last drunken customer. Rick’s party was at its height. There were so many guests that when we danced we could not tell whether our partners were in front or behind. Martin became angry if I looked at another man. Many couples left quietly, walking down the stairs with their arms around each other, pausing to kiss many times between the four floors. Martin and I were angry when we left, and walked apart, barely speaking. When he left me, in broad daylight, at the door of the Mayr’s apartment building I thought I had seen him for the last time.

  Several weeks passed. The season of Fasching began with all of its gaieties. There were masquerades, artists’ balls, dances given by butchers’ associations, waiters, plumbers, trade unions, clubs, church societies, charitable organizations, parties for aristocrats in every fashionable hotel, palace and embassy. Walls and lamp standards were plastered with bills announcing the entertainments. I danced all night, slept all day, worked from nine at night until one in the morning, danced again. It seemed a relief to go out with gay young men and not have to listen to the interminable arguments of young intellectuals. I had three admirers in constant attendance: Toni, a painter whose energy and wit kept me merrily awake through breakfast; Arthur, a young bank manager, solemn, but a beautiful dancer; Felix, who worked in a government office. None had asked me but I wondered what it would be like to marry a painter, a bank manager, a civil servant. Tame!

  One night Rick Connors came to the Königshimmel. I flirted with him while I sang, and later accepted his invitation to supper. He was so alive! I felt it in his fingertips. He told me that Martin had gone to Berlin to work with an American writer on a series of articles about neo-Nazi activities, and would not return for several weeks. Rick then suggested that I come up to his apartment. I was all tight wires, nervous laughter and dreamy indecision; recalled Heda’s advice, thought about the tall American houses where laughing young couples lived, of the handsome husbands helping gallantly in the kitchen. I remembered another element as well.

  “What about your fiancée?” I demanded. Everything depended upon his answer. I did not want him to consider me inferior to a girl who had gone to college and held a government job.

  “Let me worry about that,” he said lightly.

  I pulled away from his exciting hands. “If that’s what you want, you can find a girl on the street.”

  I went home that night in a taxi that I paid for myself. For several weeks I had eyes for no man, however charming. They seemed all the same, insensitive, cynical, monstrous. Perhaps, as Heda had prophesied, I would die wondering. Martin sent several postcards from Berlin and a charming letter in which he declared that he missed me sadly. Let him, I thought. I wanted more from a man than a few caresses or a frivolous affair.

  This was my mood on the rainy night that Gerhard von Richtgarten Metzger came into the Königshimmel. He had seen the story in the weekly journal and come purposely to find me. He wore an English mackintosh, a Borsalino hat, and carried a silk umbrella from Paris. Immediately he was recognized as a German and rich. In spite of the Italian hat, the English overcoat, the Paris umbrella. Coffeehouse employees have an instinct for nationalities and pocketbooks. At once the energies of the entire staff were set in motion. The wardrobe girl who also served as pastry waitress set down her tray to relieve him of coat and hat. The manager whisked a Reserved sign off the best table. A waiter raced to bring the Scotch whiskey and soda the customer ordered. It did not end there. The waiter was typical, overworked and talkative. Other customers waited while he offered the new gentleman his opinion of the horrible weather, the horrible political situation, the horrible high prices. The pastry waitress thrust her tray at the customer, who winced at the assortment of cream cakes and pastries. The waiter ordered her away imperiously. Almost at once she was back, this time with a tray filled with cigarettes, cigars, matches, chocolates, chewing gum and Italian nougat. The waiter, still blind and deaf to other customers, brought newspapers of several German cities, but explained unhappily that a customer was reading Die Welt of Berlin and Hamburg. At the same time an aged newsman thrust the latest Vienna papers at the customer. The waiter waved the old man away, but two minutes later he returned triumphantly with the Berlin Zeit.

  This is how things happen in a Vienna coffeehouse. Once more the pastry girl brought her tray, this time filled with pretzels, nuts in glazed paper envelopes and sticks of pastry flavored with cheese. Next came the flower-seller, her basket filled with violets, their leaves fresh and moist with r
ain. The gentleman shook his head, but changed his mind suddenly, called her back and said he wanted to buy her entire stock of flowers. She was indignant; “If you buy them all how can I make a living?” Nevertheless he bought them and paid a good price in spite of the waiter who had hurried to protect his customer’s interests.

  “Please give these to Fräulein Leonora.” It was an extraordinary gesture, but the waiter showed no less composure than the customer. In a coffeehouse remarkable things happen. All this time the pianist was playing waltzes. He bowed and left. A boy carried the zither to an empty table. Everyone became silent, watching to see how I would thank the gentleman who had sent me all those violets.

  He had sent no card, no note, no name. “That’s him, the Piefke,” whispered the waiter, holding open the curtain so that I could have a look at my admirer from the cubbyhole where, when I was not singing, I spent my time. It was not a dressing room as I did not need one. I wore my “costume” when I came to the club and when I left. Since I could not afford elaborate gowns I wore a uniform of my own choice, well-fitted black skirt and a white blouse from the best shop on the Graben.

  I told the waiter to take the violets to the refrigerator and went out with a single bunch in my hand. I laid it on the table beside the zither while I played. Discreetly, through lowered lids, I glanced at my admirer. The scent of his flowers was as fresh as a spring forest. Fortunately I knew Mozart’s “The Violet.” I sang it first with the zither, then signaled the pianist to return and to play the accompaniment while I walked among the tables. Singing, I lifted the violets to my lips, archly touched the moist petals to my cheek. As I approached the gentleman’s table I directed my song at him. He rose, an extremely tall man, slender, with a narrow frame. His hair was almost without color, which added length to his face. I noted with pleasure that he was very handsome in a fine-drawn aristocratic way with pale flesh tight over narrow bones.