by Kurt Palka
Emma stood stiffly and Willa studied her for a moment, then she reached out and gave her sister another hug.
Finally there was just the harsh sound of the diesel engine under load and Willa’s face in the rear window as the car pulled away. The freezing rain had begun to turn to snow.
“Mom,” said Emma. “Can I ask? Have you spoken to them, at the museum?”
“About Tom? Not yet. There hasn’t been a good moment.”
“Just to give him a try, that’s all he’s asking.”
“I know.”
Emma stood waiting. “I should go,” she said then. “Mark some papers. I’m filling in this week at the college.”
“Oh good, Emma. That’s good. I know you like that. And thanks for all your help.”
They embraced and she stood for a moment and watched Emma walk away, careful on the slippery ground. Emma looked back over her shoulder once and raised a hand in a small motion, then carried on.
TWO
SHE WALKED SLOWLY back around the side of the house, holding on to the rough wall and to spars of the trellis where the last brown leaves of clematis clung to vines.
She stood for a moment and held out her hand to let snowflakes settle on the glove, on the stitched ridges in the black leather and on her fingers as they moved.
Look, she said to him. Snow. The girls were here. But you know that.
She was going to go upstairs but now changed her mind and continued along the garden path, around the house, past the roses with their heads buried in piles of leaves, past the bare apple trees, the bare gooseberry bushes. The wall of the neighbour’s house showed yellow through the evergreens. The garden is mourning, she quoted Hermann Hesse for him. And golden drips leaf upon leaf down from the tall Acacia tree.
The day we met, she said. Was there snow then too? I can’t quite remember.
She did not think so, because of the motorcycle and the way they were dressed. She reached and touched a last gooseberry still dangling, and left it there.
I thank you for everything, she said to him. I am so very grateful.
She stood a moment and looked around, then turned back and entered the house and climbed the stone stairs.
On a landing she paused to catch her breath. No, she decided. No snow that night, but quite cold. She remembered that. And Mitzi was along. Evening clothes; she and Mitzi in long gowns, silver opera wraps and peacock feather hats; he in a classic black dinner suit with white tie and stiff stand-up collar. Over it he wore an old leather army coat, a thing cracked with age and split at the seams. Mitzi sat in the motorcycle sidecar that was shaped like a rocket, with her feather hat in her lap, clutching the handrail like a child on a roller coaster. And she herself sat on the pillion seat and held on to him with both hands, her own feather hat wedged against his back. Her teeth were chattering with the noise and the bumpy ride, but she remembered grinning at Mitzi and shouting from sheer wild exuberance.
Late October it was, 1932. In the parks they passed, under monuments to glories and to famous men long gone, the homeless were sleeping in piles of fall leaves, great clusters of leaves, entire families huddled together, lost voices in the dark. A militia truck cruised with dimmed lights; a gang in the pay of some warlord on the prowl for other gangs of other warlords, pale young men huddling on the truck beds with clubs and iron lances pried from picket fences as their weapons. The motorcycle roared past them, with her and Mitzi in their bright outfits like Valkyries flying through the night, and the militia boys’ faces turned in unison as if pulled on a string.
The black Norton boomed past all this, past the State Opera House and past the famous hotels lit like spaceships with their doormen in frogged coats, then a right turn off Schubertring and a few more quick turns, rattling on the cobbles, and there was the entrance to the building on Beatrixgasse where she and her other best friend Erika were sharing a flat. Mitzi had a garçonnière of her own on the uppermost floor.
It was three o’clock in the morning. With the Norton shut off, they could hear the hour bell from St. Stephen’s.
“And who is he?” her mother said the next day on the telephone at the post office. “Countess Melltrop saw you and she called me. You even left with him, you and the hairdresser. And on a motorcycle!”
“That was Mitzi. You know her. How many best friends do I have? Her and Erika. Mitzi was booked for the evening to look after the singer’s hair and makeup, and she brought me along.”
“And the boy?”
“Boy? He’s twenty-six.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s a captain in the reserve cavalry. Someone we met at our table. He’s nice and interesting. His mother was the accompanist for the soprano.”
Silence on the telephone. Then, “I thought you didn’t like soldiers.”
“Not usually. I think he’s different. We’ll see.”
“Different, how?”
“He just is. For one thing he’s an officer, from a good family. He listens and thinks before he talks.”
“Talks about what?”
“Mother,” she said.
“All right. Never mind.”
“And he’s a good dancer. It was fun. You could see how lavishly those monarchs used to live. Gold and velvet everywhere, room after room, and dozens of servants with trays of champagne and canapés. And so many men in fat cummerbunds and ramrods up their asses—”
“Clara,” said her mother.
“Well it’s true. Even now, in these times. The poverty in Vienna, Mom. Erika is working the parks for the Red Cross, and you should hear her stories.”
“You’re supposed to be studying. Not spending all night on motorcycles with strange soldiers. Soldiers! And you wore next to nothing, said the countess.”
“Don’t listen to her. And I am studying. I am doing very well. You’ll see. If I can, I’ll come home on the weekend.”
SHE DID not go home that weekend, nor the next few thereafter. Instead, when her studies and work on the various papers allowed, she went for drives with Albert, for picnics on a blanket on the hard ground under flaming trees, with leaves drifting down. At a store in the first district she spent far too much money on a picnic hamper of wicker with leather corners, like a small suitcase. It was made in England, and it came complete with good porcelain and cutlery and cups and glasses all buckled into compartments.
Sometimes Mitzi came along, or Erika, or his younger brother, Theodor, but more often it was just her and him on the black Norton rattling through the hills around Vienna and through echoing city streets like carefree vagabonds, talking to each other over his shoulder, laughing. It was pure happiness, pure exuberance; pure beingness, she tried to explain to her mother. Wait till you meet him, she said on the telephone.
“What happened to the law student?” said her mother. “The Heller boy. He seemed nice and polite.”
“He was. Then I met this one.”
“A dragoon on a motorcycle.”
“Mother! Just leave it. Wait till you meet him.”
The difference with Albert was that with him she felt intensely alive and completely able to be herself. Alive and a touch guilty at times being so happy among the troubles and the poverty and the growing numbers of homeless living under bridges and in the parks. Flying past it all on the black machine piloted by this man in a leather greatcoat and aviator goggles, past ancient buildings with green copper roofs and Gothic fronts, and late-blooming roses in the parks still scenting the air.
“MY CAREER AMBITION?” she said to him one day in the palm house at Schönbrunn. It was winter by then, their first. They sat among tropical plants on a white cast-iron bench while small yellow and red birds flitted among palm fronds.
“I am going to be a teacher and a writer,” she told him. “That and perhaps a literary translator also.”
“A teacher?”
“Yes. A good one.” She told him about Mrs. Allmeier, who so long ago had drawn her out of her cave in junior high. Who had given her
the courage to stand up and speak, who had been the first to take her ideas seriously and had shown her how to pursue them in linear ways, and when to keep pursuing them and when to drop them.
That kind of teacher, she told him. And a writer, if possible. Her grandfather had been one, she said. And her father had just published a work on the last days of Pompeii. He was an archaeologist and museum director.
In any case, she wanted to be someone following her interests and living by her mind. A portable career that would allow her to have a family also.
She had no doubt whatsoever saying those things. It was what she would do.
They sat with their wool coats open, small puddles forming around their winter boots on the tile floor. Two yellow birds had hopped close to sip from those puddles. It was a Sunday, and they’d walked along Elisabethallee, down Maxingstrasse, and into the park by the west gate. It was snowing. Beyond the glass walls large flakes settled slowly. There was no wind whatsoever.
THE REST OF HER WORLD was ideas then. Ideas of politics hotly debated at the league meetings: Zionism, Communism, Capitalism, National Socialism. And not to forget the importance of other -isms, such as Atheism and Existentialism, that opened one-way doors into the world to come. Fascinating doors that lured you and then snapped shut behind you, and there could be no going back ever.
One of her professors was Dr. Sigmund Freud. He came only when it pleased him, and then he strode the dais in his spats and vested suits, waving a cold cigar and thinking out loud, like a man alone in his study. He followed no lesson plan, no book, no notes; investigations, he called his lectures, thoughts on psychology as it related to society and to issues between men and women.
Ludwig Wittgenstein travelled from Cambridge to teach logic and the philosophy of language and the mind. Unforgiving and cynical he was, and he used his intelligence like a sharp knife to slice away unreason and non sequitur and leave nothing other than fact and truth as he saw it. And like a gift for life he gave them his trademark phrase that on things on which there was nothing to be said, one had best say nothing.
“Why?” he asked. “Why?” And smiled when the class sat in silence. Wittgenstein moments, they called them. Moments beyond words.
None less than the archbishop’s senior adviser gave lectures on the role of Christianity in western art and civilization, and Martin Heidegger came for a period of time, because he liked Vienna, he told the class. He taught Greek philosophy, the philosophy of thought itself and his own concepts of Existentialism.
Once, after a lecture Heidegger had given on Thrownness, she saw him sitting on a bench in Resselpark. He looked lost and alone, with not even pigeons at his feet. During the lecture someone had asked him about suicide and he had replied that, while it was a completely acceptable way out and perhaps the only serious question to ponder, it too was completely futile. He stepped to the blackboard and drew a mountain cliff and a stick-figure standing at the edge.
He pointed at the cliff and said, “You leap off whether you want to or not. Thrownness, yes? At the moment of birth, as we’ve said. Life is an involuntary leap into existence, and by the time you are conscious, you know that all this is rather pointless and will end in oblivion. There is no other possibility. So why then cut your throat halfway down? Why not just wait and enjoy the fall. There must be something interesting along the way. The view, perhaps. The flowers passing, designs in the rockface as you fall. A kiss from some stranger.”
He looked away from the class to the drawing and with his thumb wiped away the stick figure and drew a new one in mid-air halfway and head first down the cliff.
“Knowing that may help,” he said. “Help with what? Well, with making a game out of it. A game. Something to take your mind off the inherent randomness and pointlessness of the entire thing itself. A project, a coming-to-yourself, being in control of yourself as you plunge, which is the only way to survive. We must live as if life mattered, so to speak.”
Heidegger said that it could be seen from this that if Falling Man allowed himself to be distracted by the pointlessness and terminus of his falling, by the anxiety it caused, he would then miss all the fun and all the diversions available along the way.
“Like that kiss from a stranger,” he said. “So let’s call it As-ifness. To live as if things mattered. Every action, every thought, every word. Without it, we are nothing. As-ifness. We’ll be talking a lot about that.”
But that day in the park he was sitting alone on a bench, looking lost, looking like a fired salesman in an ill-fitting suit, when he could have played his As-if game and made the effort to walk a few steps to the flowerbeds and smell the roses. She stood watching from across the street, stood trying to learn from him while the sun moved an inch in the sky and cars and trucks passed noisily between her and him. Since he was the master, this image she knew must contain something for her to understand and learn from. But she did not understand. Not then.
As it turned out, Martin Heidegger could not complete the lecture series on Thrownness and Beingness he had planned. The government declared National Socialism illegal, and the university fathers found out about Heidegger’s outspoken support of some of the thinking in the party. First he was banned from Vienna University, then he was banned even from crossing the border into Austria.
He was replaced by Dr. Roland Martin Emmerich, a middle-aged professor in workingmen’s clothes with bicycle clips on his trouserlegs and shirts without collars. But he had two Ph.Ds and he was brilliant. He taught Søren Kierkegaard in the German translation of his work called Existenzphilosophie; he taught Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche, and he spun out their ideas until they rang like bells in the auditorium. His lectures turned the crowded hall into something like an isolation chamber within a society still lost in the wreckage of the monarchy and looking to tradition and religion for support.
“It’s all so very interesting,” she said to Albert. “So … liberating, that’s it! The freedom to think that way. It’s fantastic.”
It was the first time in her life that she heard a full and tenured university professor speak out loud the notion that God and all scriptures relating to Him might in fact be mere invention in the face of our own irrelevance.
“A mere romantic fiction,” Professor Emmerich said to them. “A human wish and yearning in our blundering search for meaning and structure and guidance. Think about it.”
She learned that the idea of God, in Nietzsche’s terms, had for centuries provided moral structure and rules on how to live responsibly. Now, in the Godless world coming to western society, the meaning in everyone’s life was that person’s own interpretation. As was the morality of all choices and actions.
It was both liberation and obligation, because Nietzsche had also cautioned, and Heidegger and Husserl said more or less the same thing, that men and women by declaring the idea of God to be a fervent wish at best, a cry for help, had perhaps run themselves off the rails and had doomed themselves spiritually. They had doomed themselves either to hopelessness or to an everlasting effort to rise above their fears and weakness, to become an Übermensch and find other forms of meaning. They had blithely shouldered a responsibility that had theretofore been entrusted to God.
THEN, SOMEWHERE along the course of her philosophy studies, something happened to her. This was not until the Emergency and the night they found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg on the sidewalk, but as though knowledge had gradually settled into her bones, she came to understand without a doubt that ideas could be firm structures for intellectual and moral support. For survival. From this insight it was not a long step to the thought that moments of inspiration and courage had to be seized and anchored in some form of principle, in a certain inner attitude, if only so that they might be recalled in days of darkness. It was a thought that stayed with her and grew even when unattended, the way certain plants grow best in dim light and without tampering.
“Principles of attitude,” Professor Emmerich said when she mentioned
it to him. “Not a bad idea, Miss Herzog. Not altogether new, but with lots of work still to be done.” This was during one of his open-door sessions, and she and he sat in the unravelling wicker chairs in his office and the note was hung from the door lintel telling other students to wait.
“See where you can take it,” he said. “Let it condense, but stay with it. Support it with first-hand insight and with scenes from literature. Look at Yeats, look at Goethe, definitely look at Hesse. Look at Thoreau. Circle it for a while. Talk to me again in six months or so.”
The image of Martin Heidegger on his park bench had stayed with her, and eventually she understood it to be telling her that even an existential genius could feel lost at times, could indulge in the sweet sinking feeling, the being-sunk feeling, and that this was all right as long as one had the inner resources to raise oneself up again and climb out of the hole. Like exercising some kind of mental muscle, she wrote in reminders to herself. In any case, once a person had opened the door to the primary existentialist notions of self-determination, accountability, and the lifeline of As-ifness, that door could never be closed again.
Fired on by a sense of breakthrough, she enrolled in additional courses in literature. Under Professor Anton Ferdinand she studied the Russian and the American novel for full-blooded characters forced to make difficult choices under pressure. With her friends Mitzi and Erika, and with Albert, she went to readings at the American embassy by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. And one Sunday in the fall she and Albert took the train all the way to Salzburg to attend a reading by Stefan Zweig. After the reading she stood in line and then asked him to sign a copy of her favourite novel of his, Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman. He reached and took the book from her, and he asked her name.
She told him.
“You like this?”
“Very much. It’s so true.”
“True?” He looked into the distance for a moment, then he bent over the book. She could see the top of his head, his scalp in the straight part in his hair; his neck in the snow-white shirt collar. He ran the blotter over his writing, closed the book, and handed it to her.