by Lore Segal
Bob Schapiro looked at Rabbi Sam and his wife said, “The six million.”
Konrad Hohenstauf looked at his shoes. He lifted pointed, tremulous fingers to cover his mouth, which must once more have parted because Father Sebastian Pechter seated on his right and Shoshannah Goldberg on his left heard him murmur, “What I have done. Ach, what I have done…”
To fill the resulting pause, Margot Groszbart said, “I have a question. How is it all of you speak such efficient English?” The Austrians demurred. “Well, you seem to get said what you want to say.” Margot had given up the attempt to activate her rusty childhood German, first in conversation with the round-chinned, baby-cheeked Erich, then with the priest who had stood before her bent at the waist as if in a condition of bowing. Neither of the young men had been about to give up the opportunity to practice his English. Margot said, “Why could I never get my American daughter to learn any German.”
“Why do you want her to learn German?” asked Ruth Schapiro.
Rabbi Sam was master of his own Socratic method: When the input he had asked for turned the conversation off plan, he knew an exercise to fetch it home. He asked them to go around the circle and free-associate with their given names, which they did until the boy appeared with a great cardboard box of Cokes and brown-paper bags of kosher lunches.
* * *
—
The circle is not a natural configuration for a roomful of strangers. The young Austrians—Erich, Steffi, and Gretel—went out to discover the New York neighborhood; Rabbi Sam had synagogue business and invited Father Sebastian to accompany him. The others disposed themselves about the ugly room and avoided each other’s eyes. The elderly people—Austrian and Jew—went for the chairs set out around a number of small tables at which the rabbi intended to break his bridge-builders into working units. At one of these tables Bob and Ruth Schapiro shared their lunch bags companionably, wordlessly, as Margot imagined them sharing a lifetime of breakfasts, lunches, and suppers. Margot had been widowed for decades. At another table Konrad Hohenstauf supported his chin on the handle of his cane and seemed to sleep. Plump, pretty Jenny Birnbaum, the only bridge-builder born in the New World, had spread her coat on the floor, curled up, and really had fallen asleep. Fritz Cohn, the Jewish stage–Viennese, shirt-sleeved, beer-bellied, mustachioed, lit a pipe and walked to and fro.
The lifelong and daily discipline of the performer translated doing nothing into guilt. Margot had sacrificed a week’s practice and ought to be making use of her time talking to someone. The unusually tall Austrian woman in the plum-colored turban sat close enough for conversation but her back was hunched and to the room. It had become oppressively hot. A midday lassitude fixed Margot onto her chair.
For the afternoon session Rabbi Sam had them go around the circle and speculate on the name they would have given themselves if they had been their own parents. Konrad Hohenstauf asked to be permitted to pass and passed when, after supper, they had to complete the sentence “When I came into the room, I thought…” going counterclockwise.
* * *
—
Tuesday morning the rabbi handed out blank sheets of paper and crayons, saying, “Don’t think, draw.”
Gretel Mindel followed Margot to one of the little tables. Gretel said, “I heard you play in the Akademie Theater. Wunderbar.”
People made a mistake thinking this a propitious opening for conversation. A decent “Well, thank you,” returned the ball to the flatterer, who had nowhere to go with it except on and on. Margot gave Gretel Mindel her professional smile. Margot Groszbart saw the girl’s eagerness. She did not return it. These young Viennese knew how to dress. In black on black with the hair left to look slept in, and not the least makeup to cover her rather sallow complexion, Gretel Mindel was, in her way, a beauty. While talking with the undersexed Erich and the overly correct Father Sebastian, Margot had felt a familiar chill which she now experienced sitting across from Gretel Mindel. Margot took it for granted that she must be radiating toward the Austrians a—reciprocally alien—heat. She gave a laugh. The girl raised a hopeful face.
Margot said, “I’m looking forward to getting Rabbi Sam’s goat.”
“His goat, please?”
“I’m going to irritate Rabbi Sam by telling him my racial theory based on an incompatibility of body temperatures.”
“It is a joke?” asked Gretel Mindel.
“Yes, yes,” said Margot and had once more surprised herself: Why make herself interesting to the Austrian girl? Margot presently said, “Asking me to draw something is like asking me to say something. My head goes empty.”
“I know! I know!” cried the girl. “I know exactly what you mean! Mine also!” Gretel Mindel now searched her mind for some other human oddity that she and the elderly Jewish pianist might discover to have in common. Gretel asked Margot if she, on entering the room yesterday morning, had thought of the Viennese as a cohort. “Were you surprised we did not even all know each other’s names?”
Margot considered and replied that that wasn’t what she happened to have been thinking. “I was thinking how I never walk into a room full of new people without a drop of the heart: I look around and think ‘Is this really all that’s available?’ My folks as well as yours.”
Gretel laughed nicely. “And I always look if there will be an available man.”
The two women glanced across the room where the rosy Erich and the stylish Steffi sat on the floor side by side bent over their drawings. It reminded Margot and Gretel to take up their crayons.
“In my age group,” Margot said, “there is Bob.” Bob Schapiro was a heavy man in a brown suit. He wore a yarmulke.
Gretel said, “But not available.”
“Well,” said Margot, “there’s always—what is the name of the fellow who did something but won’t say what?”
“Konrad Hohenstauf,” said Gretel. She drew silently awhile before she asked, “It is permitted to make jokes?”
Margot said, “Bob and Ruth probably think it’s sacrilege, but I refuse to think of Holocaust as a sacred event.”
Gretel kept drawing.
Margot, who wasn’t sure she agreed with her own logic, felt uncomfortable arguing it before the Austrian. She was drawing a train that started on the left edge of her paper and traveled off the right edge. She made a row of windows. She drew a face in each window.
Gretel said, “I have made—a Munch.” In the foreground she had drawn the back view of a lollipop-shaped human form facing the back of another lollipop in the middle distance. She said, “But your heart does not drop at Rabbi Sam.”
“It doesn’t?” said Margot.
Both looked in the direction of a pleasant incongruity—the stout rabbi with the drama of his grizzled full beard, sitting cross-legged on the floor. His sad, hot eyes above their sacks of flesh were fixed on the paper before him: Rabbi Sam was drawing.
Gretel said, “Der schaut so lieb aus. I don’t know how one says this in English.”
Margot said, “Because it can’t be said. English won’t let someone ‘look dear.’ You can say someone has a look of sweetness I guess.”
“Oh, but I think that is what he has! You think he has it, don’t you?” Gretel urged Margot.
“I don’t expect the concept of the sixties rabbi is familiar to you?”
“I was born in 1964,” said Gretel. It was the year of Margot’s daughter’s birth.
Margot said, “Somewhere under that mass of coats behind the piano there’s got to be the guitar.”
* * *
—
Gretel Mindel and Margot Groszbart took their lunch bags to the little green community garden across from the synagogue. It was a windy blue day, barely warm enough to sit. Gretel told Margot that her mother had taken her to the Akademie to hear Margot play. Margot ate her sandwich and tried to figure Gretel’s mother’s age and wondered what she might have been doing between 1938 and 1945. She did not ask Gretel. There exists a shyness—a species of em
barrassment—between the party of the murderer and the party of the murdered.
“You played Das Wohltemperierte Klavier,” said Gretel.
“So I did.”
Fellow bridge-builders passed on the sidewalk. “Who is the woman in the turban?” asked Margot. “I don’t think I’ve heard her voice.”
“Peppi Huber. We think she doesn’t speak English.”
Margot asked Gretel where she had learned her English.
“I was six months at the University of Texas.”
They waved to Konrad walking with his cane and Shoshannah limping beside him. Shoshannah waved back.
Margot said, “How old can Konrad have been in 1938?”
From a tooth-whitening ad in her dentist’s office, Margot had learned that it takes fifteen distinct facial muscles to operate the human smile. These muscles must have frozen Gretel Mindel’s jaw and welted the area about the mouth. She said, “My mother liked to tell that she was the youngest youth leader in her district. Here comes Rabbi Sam. We go back,” and deeply frowning, she asked Margot why she didn’t like the rabbi.
“Oh, but I do! How can one not like Rabbi Sam? But I don’t much care for exercises that force-feed intimacy and pressure-cook healing.”
“Better than not cooking!” pleaded Gretel. “You and I are here talking.”
Poor Gretel. Margot felt she was disappointing her.
* * *
—
In the afternoon session they went around the circle and explained their drawings to each other. There is always, everywhere a little pool of talent and a larger lack of it. Bob Schapiro looked at his wife and said, “I don’t draw.” Across his paper he had written “March 12 1938,” the date of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, in black capitals.
Konrad had removed the paper sleeve from a black crayon and rolled it, flat side down, from the top to the bottom of his paper, the darkness that covered what it was that he had done.
Fritz Cohn had drawn an adorable pair of lederhosen. He said, “You can take the Jew out of Vienna but you can’t take Vienna out of the Jew.”
“You can,” said Ruth Schapiro. She had drawn a Mogen David on a blue-white-blue background.
Shoshannah’s drawing depended entirely on explanation: “There was no khaki crayon, but this is supposed to be a soldier. I don’t know how to draw a person kneeling, but he is kneeling down planting something. I think he maybe lost his company or went AWOL and got a job on this farm.”
“Went AWOL from which army?” asked Ruth Schapiro.
Shoshannah didn’t know. “Someone maybe stole his uniform jacket, or he bartered it.”
“Is he an Ally or a Nazi?”
“We couldn’t tell. The white with the red is the bloody bandage round his head. In the background, these are supposed to be burned-out farMs. These are puffs of smoke from guns. We didn’t know if we were behind the front line or ahead, or if the war was over and they weren’t telling us. Maybe they didn’t know. They were marching us south as it turned out, and I remember this soldier kneeling, planting something. You see the row of green? Anyway. Sam said to draw something.”
Bob Schapiro looked at Shoshannah. Ruth Schapiro said, “What has this to do with the murder of the six million?”
It was here that Margot peered around the room: Some of the Austrians looked at their shoes; some looked straight before them. Konrad’s fingers covered his mouth.
Shoshannah’s drawing was destined to start a sidebar that lasted the four remaining days: Shoshannah held that a head wound is a head wound is a head wound, while Ruth argued that you have to know if it was the head of a soldier who had killed or a soldier who had liberated Jews.
Erich said, “My father died of a head wound in Russia,” but he said it in German to Steffi, later, when they were walking back to the hotel.
Jenny Birnbaum had drawn three skeletons—her grandparents and a baby uncle on her mother’s side.
The Austrians looked straight before them.
Margot’s turn. “The faces in the windows of the train are the children leaving Vienna. These figures in the background are waving parents.” Gretel Mindel looked stricken. Margot saw it. Margot went on: “It bothers me to this day that I couldn’t make out my mother among the people milling on the platform. I can’t tell you if it’s once a year, or if it’s once a month that I call up the scene and try to catch Mutti waving while the platform gets smaller and goes out of sight.”
Ruth Schapiro asked Margot, “Did your parents get out?”
“No. When they invited me to play at the Akademie I went and looked in the Resistance Archive. They were numbers 987 and 988 out of 1,030 on a train leaving Vienna June 14, 1942, original destination Izbica, detoured to Trawniki.”
“Bob and I don’t go to Vienna,” said Ruth Schapiro.
The Austrians looked straight before them. Margot thought, Where are they supposed to look? What do we want them to do with their eyes?
Rabbi Sam went last. “A bridge,” everybody said, “over a lot of water.”
The evening produced the guitar. Rabbi Sam taught the Austrians to sing Hatikvah. They sang “Ach, du lieber Augustin.”
Gretel said, “You don’t sing?”
“I’m willing, but my mouth is not.” Margot’s mouth would not open to sing Hatikvah; it would not sing “Oh, say can you see…” It refused to sing anything communally, at anybody’s command, even at the request of the infinitely well-intending Rabbi Samuel Rosen. From this Margot Groszbart chose to deduce that if birth had made her an Aryan in Vienna in 1938, she would not have sung the Horst Wessel Lied, that she could not have been seduced to open her mouth and communally shout Heil Hitler.
* * *
—
Wednesday, Margot told Gretel she was going to eat in and talk to people and found her path promptly blocked by the plum-colored turban. “I’ will Ihna ‘was sagen. I want to say something to you.” It is usually a mistake to sit down with a person one doesn’t know because it is so hard, afterward, to think of a polite reason for getting up again. But Margot could think of no polite reason for not sitting down and followed the tall, purposeful back to one of the small tables. They sat down. The turban approached so close it blurred in Margot’s vision. The woman spoke the so familiar Viennese German: “There was no anti-Semitism in Vienna before Waldheim,” she said. “This time it is the Jews’ fault.” Her eyes held Margot’s eyes. She was waiting.
Margot said, “Is it possible that you don’t recognize this old line?”
“I know. I do, but this time it is true.” The turban intensely waited.
Margot said, “I can’t have this argument with you,” and, needing no excuse, got up and left the woman sitting.
Margot saw the Schapiros by the coffee urn and walked over. Ruth Schapiro said, “We heard you play—Bob, what was it we heard Margot Groszbart play? Wonderful.”
Bob Schapiro said, “Wonderful.”
“Thank you,” said Margot. “I’ve been thinking about this not going back to Vienna. I think what I think is that not going back packs just about the wallop of sticking one’s tongue out at hell’s gate, no?”
“And we don’t buy German-made,” said Ruth Schapiro.
Margot told them her encounter with the purple turban, and Ruth said, “So? An anti-Semite. What else is new?” Margot looked back at Peppi who continued to sit where she had left her sitting. Her head appeared to be sinking in the direction of her lap. “What’s new, maybe, is she’s an uncomfortable anti-Semite. I think she was asking me to argue her out of it.” “An anti-Semite is an anti-Semite, period,” said Ruth Schapiro.
“What made the two of you come to Rabbi Rosen’s bridge-building?” Margot asked them.
“He begged us. He was afraid no Jews would come.”
Margot carried her cup of coffee away and chatted awhile with young Steffi. Steffi’s mother, it turned out, had gone to Margot’s old district Volksschule. Margot reported the Waldheim conversation to Steffi who loo
ked disgusted and said, “Die is ‘a anti-Semit. She’s an anti-Semite.” Steffi wanted Margot to tell her all the anti-Semitic remarks she remembered from her school days and was disappointed when Margot couldn’t recall any.
* * *
—
Wednesday afternoon the rabbi paired them off and sent them to the little tables to interview each other. Steffi and Bob Schapiro, Ruth and Father Sebastian, Shoshannah Goldberg and Konrad Hohenstauf. One had to wonder what language young Jenny Birnbaum and the plum-colored turban were going to interview each other in, but the baby-cheeked Erich and the historically mustachioed Fritz might hit it off.
Gretel Mindel asked to go with Margot. A premature nostalgia made her bag the table at which they had drawn pictures together. Gretel was wanting to confess. Gretel’s Mutti had lead a cadre to Poland, her job to establish the “Jew houses,” in which the deportees could be held over till their transportation to the final destination. Gretel’s mother would give a Polish farm family twenty-four hours to load what they could onto a wagon and get out of the area. Gretel’s mother boasted of never once having had to use her whip.
Gretel asked about Margot’s Mutti. Margot experienced a substantial reluctance, but said, “Okay. Here’s something I remember: When I was a bad child and didn’t put my toys in the toy chest, my Mutti would be angry and not look at me and not talk to me. So long as my Mutti was not talking or looking, it was impossible for me to play or do anything. I would walk round the apartment after her saying ‘Sei wieder gut! Sei wieder gut!’—something else, by the way, that doesn’t translate into English. You can’t say ‘Be good again!’”
“‘Don’t be angry with me!’” suggested Gretel. “‘Forgive me! Like me!’”
“Anyway,” said Margot, “I kept walking behind her saying ‘Sei wieder gut!’ till she relented or more probably forgot.”
* * *
—
Next morning they sat in a circle to report each other’s stories. It was in the act of recounting Margot’s little childhood memory that Gretel experienced that shock of recognizing something one has merely known: The Mutti whom the child Margot had followed round the apartment was the same Mutti the child on the train had not seen waving, was the woman they had put on the train going east, who had never returned. Gretel’s sentence was swallowed in a sob so that she could not immediately realign the muscles required to go on speaking.