by Lore Segal
Margot gave a straightforward account of Gretel’s mother’s Nazi career. “She never had to use her whip,” she concluded.
Gretel said, “She did other things.”
Shoshannah reported only her own faithful promise not to tell what it was Konrad had told her that he had done. She drew her chair up to his chair, and using her right hand to lift her inoperative left arm, laid the left hand on Konrad’s wrist. “You were only eight years old!” she said to him.
* * *
—
Universally irritated—by the superior intensity of Gretel Mindel’s emotion over her own aging memory; by the mileage Konrad Hohenstauf was getting out of what he wasn’t telling; by the hurt hunch of Peppi Huber’s shoulders; the Schapiros’ single incorruptible idea; and Sam Rosen’s incorruptible goodwill, Margot walked out of that door and hailed a taxi. She opened the door into the calm of her handsome apartment, finished yesterday’s soup, skimmed the Times, failed to reach her daughter on the telephone, and sat down for fifteen minutes at the piano before she got back into a taxi so as not to be late for the afternoon session.
* * *
—
Morning and noon of their last day. Gretel, Steffi, and Erich took Margot to lunch in the little corner restaurant they had discovered. When the conversation relaxed into German they forgot that she wasn’t one of them. Steffi was a good mimic. She appeared to blow herself up to Bob Schapiro’s size and said, “Sixmillionsixmillionsixmillion.”
Erich said, “Did you see Ruth let the cuff of her sleeve fall accidentally on purpose open, to show the numbers on her wrist?”
“Did that strike you as impolite of her?” asked Margot.
Steffi said, “Na, aber die is’ immer so hochnäsig.”
“Hochnäsig” translates, literally, into “high-nosed.” “Interesting,” Margot said to Gretel beside her, “that both languages place the seat of arrogance in the nose. Do you know the expression ‘being snotty’?” They had lost Steffi and Erich to a conversation of their own. Gretel had been studying Margot and now said,
“You don’t think we have the right to say Ruth Schapiro does anything wrong?”
“I think you’re wrong about her being ‘hochnäsig’: It’s not that she looks ‘down her nose’ at you, it’s that there is no way for her to look. What is the right way for Ruth Schapiro, with the numbers on her wrist, to look at you?”
Gretel said, “That was not what I asked: You think we don’t have the right to criticize you.”
Margot understood Gretel to mean “we all” and “you all,” and said, “That’s right. I don’t grant you the right. Notice,” she added, “that you and I are now saying the things for which Rabbi Sam has no exercises.” She turned to all her table companions and asked, “What did you all come for?”
“I know the answer,” Gretel bitterly said. “We came for you to console us for having been terrible.”
Margot looked affectionately at Gretel. She patted the girl’s arm.
* * *
—
Margot had agreed to give a little recital on the upright, which had not only the look but the timbre of a barroom piano. She played the first prelude and fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier with a smile in the direction of Gretel Mindel. Gretel, as the day advanced, had become weepy.
Afterward, everybody followed Rabbi Sam upstairs for the Shabbat service. He had the Viennese visitors rise to be introduced to the congregation. Bridges was the theme of his sermon.
When they returned downstairs, the windowless meeting room was transformed. The little tables had been rearranged into one long table covered with a cloth. During the salad, Rabbi Sam had them go around the table and say how the workshop had changed their lives.
Konrad passed. Shoshannah had made friends. Her hope in the human capacity for reconciliation had been revived. Steffi vowed to let no anti-Semitic remark in her hearing go unchallenged. Both Jenny Birnbaum and Erich Radezki were going to make their reluctant mothers tell their stories. Fritz Cohn was thinking of retiring to Vienna. Ruth said, “Bob and I are going to live in Israel.”
“I’m going to Israel,” Gretel said. Her ticket was taking her not back to Vienna but to Jerusalem, where she was registered for six months at the university. “I’m going to study Hebrew,” she said.
“I’m going for a week’s visit to my daughter in Los Angeles,” said Margot. “Then I’ll come home and practice the piano.”
During the chicken, with vegetable garnish, Rabbi Sam announced his plan for another workshop under the auspices of Father Sebastian’s church. He hoped the New York bridge-builders would come to Vienna and participate.
“I will come,” said Shoshannah.
“I want my mom to go,” said Jenny, and Fritz Cohn supposed that by that time he might have an apartment in Vienna.
During the chocolate layer cake, Father Sebastian rose. He had a request to make of the Viennese exiles.
“I’m not an exile,” Ruth Schapiro said.
“Write a letter to Vienna. Tell us what you think about us,” said Father Sebastian.
Redheaded Ruth Schapiro with the number on her wrist said, “I don’t think about you.”
“Come! Come to the workshop!” Gretel said to Margot. “Come and stay in my apartment.”
“Thank you,” Margot said. “I don’t know that I’ll be going back to Vienna.”
Gretel came to help Margot look for her coat. She said, “Forgive me!”
“What for?” asked Margot. “I don’t know that you’ve done anything wrong.”
The girl held Margot’s coat for her and wept and said, “I’m studying Hebrew!”
“I’ve forgotten mine,” Margot said.
Gretel was watching Margot put her first arm into the first sleeve and the other arm into the other sleeve and felt time running out, and here came Father Sebastian to reinforce the invitation to Vienna and he shook Margot’s hand goodbye, and Margot shook hands with Erich and with Steffi. “Goodbye, young Jenny. Goodbye, Schapiros!” She embraced them. “Goodbye Shoshannah, goodbye Fritz.” Everybody was shaking hands with everybody except for Konrad Hohenstauf, who had not come to join in the adieus by the door, or the plum-colored turban, who had left without anybody noticing. “And thank you, Rabbi Rosen!” Margot said as she walked out.
“Sei wieder gut!” Gretel called after her.
It came to Margot Groszbart that she had not said goodbye to Gretel Mindel and she meant to—she thought she was going to turn around and wave to her, however she kept walking.
HILDA
You don’t want not to know about others what you want others not to know about you.
Rereading an early story of mine—it is called “Donald’s Hilda”—no one comes to mind as a model for the character of Donald. But had I kept a journal I would have noted the presence in the hotel dining room of the new woman who would become Hilda.
The hotel was in Holborn behind the long defunct Marshall & Snelgrove, in one of London’s squares of identical houses. Each had half a dozen steps leading from the pavement to the front door and steps that went down to the tradesmen’s entrance in an area rather like a moat. In the center of the square was what I liked to think of as a garden in a cage. The hotel residents could borrow the key and I did, once, and sat on a bench. I was the only person there and it was green and pretty and I never went again.
The inexplicable operation of memory: When I moved in I remember checking the bathroom up the stairs on the second floor. It had a voluminous white tub with feet. I lived in that hotel my two last years at the university, so it’s not possible that I never went into that alien bathroom, but I am unable to envision myself into it.
My ground-floor room faced front and was pleasant enough. This was the late forties, the war over but heating still rationed. We were not supposed to drop the sixpences that would have lit the gas fire between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon, and we didn’t. It is my fond belief that nobody in England cheated.
We did our reading in coat and gloves in bed.
In the communal dining room, I sat at the window table with a delicately boned, bespectacled African man and his bespectacled English wife, a librarian from central casting. She was older than her husband and regarded him with nervous admiration when he sent his dirty fork back for a clean one. I kept in touch with them for a time, or intended to.
The newcomer and I ran into each other in the hallway and introduced ourselves. Call her Hilda. She invited me to her room. “This is my first night here,” she said.
“Just for a little while,” I said. “I have an essay to write…a lot of reading.”
She was past her middle forties, an unusually large woman who wore light-colored silk blouses tied with bows at the throat. Her blue, very round eyes were fenced by spiky lashes. The hair was extreme Shirley Temple, and when she spoke her mouth remained open in a little moue. “London these days!” she said. “They don’t give you enough light on the stairs, you could kill yourself. This is my floor, I think? Yes. You mustn’t mind the mess. I moved in this morning and haven’t unpacked really. You won’t believe the room they gave me.” She unlocked her door, saying, “When I start teaching I need to get myself a better address.”
I reminded myself that I was not to mind the mess. The room was narrow; the margin around the single bed allowed for the single chair into which the big woman let herself drop. “Tired!” she said. “Must be the excitement of being back in London! Sit.” She indicated the bed and leaned forward to shut the suitcase, but too many things were spilling out of it and she abandoned the attempt. “Just shoo all the stuff off and sit. Be comfortable. Shut the door,” she said.
“What do you teach?” I asked her.
“Singing. I’m a singer.” She poked a large shoe delicately among the things that covered the floor. “Somewhere there’s an electric hot plate that I’m not even supposed to use. I thought we could make ourselves some after-dinner coffee if I can find some cups, if there’s a kettle.”
“That’s okay, really. I can’t stay long.”
“You can stay. Have you been in Bermuda, where they know how to run hotels? Beautiful, beautiful place but I never stay long anywhere.” She said that she would suddenly feel she had drained a place of anything it had to offer, that she could offer it nothing more, and up and away she would go! Life was too fascinating to waste on any one place. She adored traveling, simply loved being in a new place, meeting people, except for the first day. She always thought next time would get easier but funny thing was, it got harder. “I didn’t tell you about the man I met on the boat, coming over? George J. Kaiser. English. You may have heard of him? He’s something high up in the BBC. He wants me to audition for him.”
“Well that’s good! Good,” I said, “that’s wonderful.”
“Donald, my ex-husband, always says ‘Hilda has pulled another rabbit, out of her hat.’ George, the man I was telling you, he had to go out of town for a day or so, but he made me promise to contact him.”
“Well,” I said, “I better be going…a lot of reading…”
“We haven’t had our coffee,” she said. “You haven’t told me about yourself, and after you leave I will have nobody to talk with. Funny isn’t it?” She let out a broken-backed laugh, “It’s I cannot bear being alone, no use thinking I can, because I can’t.” Looking into her two round eyes I thought that I could see all the way down to the abysm of this woman’s life.
Back in my room, I couldn’t rid myself of a fantastically detailed recollection of the clutter. I worried where she was going to put all the things on her bed in order to get into it.
* * *
—
I was sorry when Hilda joined me at the table with my two friends because all conversation was henceforward Hilda talking. Before the year’s end she invited me to a musical evening at which she sang. Astonishing, the power and beauty of the voice coming from someone I knew to be a silly woman.
I left England after my finals. Hilda sent me a Christmas card: She was married! She had married the George J. Kaiser whom I had cast as a figment of her desperation. The address from which she wrote was a good London address. The occasions are not infrequent when I have discovered that the rabbits from life’s many hats challenge my intuitions.
* * *
—
A Postscript
Fast-forward several decades. I don’t know if I was right to think I needed to compensate my children, six and eight years old, for their father’s early death by taking them on European holidays. My mother came with us one Italian summer. The first warm evening in Rome, I lingered at the window, pleasantly excited, watching the outdoor café life of the Via Veneto four floors below, when the scene enlarged: The big woman on the other sidewalk—was that Hilda, or someone looking like Hilda who must now be in her sixties? Could a prosperous marriage have taught my old London acquaintance how to dress and to coiffure her Shirley curls so handsomely close to the head? The woman was Hilda’s size and had the pouter pigeon frontage we associate with the opera diva. I watched her fast-stepping toward the left and out of my sight.
* * *
—
Next day we went around the too, too gorgeous city. My mother told me about her Roman honeymoon. What she remembered was wanting to go home to her mother. The deal with my children was that there would be something every day that they wanted to do, if they promised to put up with the things the grown-ups were going to do. We had supper that we all liked. My mother was tired and ready to take the children up to our rooms.
I stayed below, ordered a glass of wine at one of the little tables, and watched the flower seller work the other sidewalk. A gypsy? Maybe not. She was bare-legged and wore the sorriest little no-color frock. Her hair, thin and short-cut, did not look clean. She might be in her thirties, a handsome woman if it had not been for a look of ill health. One could tell that the eyes had no hint of a smile, and did not change expression as she pursued what must be a luckless business, trying to get the old gentleman smoking a leisurely cigarette, or the chatting group at the next table to buy the flowers from her basket. What should tourists sitting over an evening drink do with a bunch of tulips or lilies? I saw them shake their heads, “No, thank you, no. NO!”—Luckless and desperate, with the desperation, was it, of one who had eaten nothing that day?
And then I saw the other one again! At a closer look from street level, it was indeed Hilda. Her unusual size was boosted by high heels, and a long gown of some dark, sparkling stuff that looked expensive. The only accessory was a square, jeweled evening bag which she carried on the side that was toward me. Her head high, she passed behind the flower seller and fast-stepping toward the left, conveyed to any and everybody who might be watching that she was hurrying to an assignation for which she was anxious not to be late.
I kept meaning to go up to bed but sat watching the sad flower seller work her way to the right and out of my view, I thought, until I saw her cross the street toward my side where she continued to hawk her unwanted ware, table by table, causing a small commotion when she became insistent. Seeing her approach my table, I would have preferred to avoid her, but hadn’t paid my waiter. She came upon me and I was surprised at the touch, actually, of her hand. She was pressing a tulip stalk into my palm. When she removed her hand, the flower fell to the sidewalk. She bent, picked it up, and gripping my hand which I found myself unable to release, she forced my fingers to close around the flower stalk and held them closed. “Don’t. Stop it! Don’t do that,” I said to her, laughing at the ridiculousness of being in a hand-to-hand struggle with the flower seller. “Stop it! Here.” I didn’t count the lira I grabbed out of my handbag. “And take your tulip!” But the flower seller had moved to the next table. I called for the waiter, having lost any desire to stay, and became aware of the emptiness where the flower seller had been. The flower seller had fainted.
The American couple at the next table were calling for a gendarme. Someone—two people were hel
ping the flower seller onto a chair where she slumped, the mouth pale, with drooping lids, breathing in and out. One of the men commissioned himself to summon medical help, people were putting flowers back into the basket. I told myself that I would make one too many if I injected myself into the crowd collected around the stricken woman.
That’s when I saw Hilda, coming from the left as if someone had taken and reversed her direction, so that the jeweled evening bag was now on her other side, away from me, returning from the assignation that had not eventualized? She looked before her, high-stepping, so that any and everyone who might be watching, must believe her to be hurrying toward an assignation to which she was wanting not to be late.
* * *
—
My mother was still awake but I did not tell her, and should not, if I had kept a journal in those days, have written down that I had witnessed the despair of the flower seller who had fainted from hunger; and the desperation of the elderly Hilda for whom nobody had been waiting on the left nor was going to be waiting on the right, for these are humiliations to which I ought not to have been privy.
FUGUE IN CELL MINOR
A midweek afternoon. The driver of the bus must be inured to the more stop than go traffic inching east on 57th Street, but this halt is a regular stop.