Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

  One day in mid-March 1938 my father took me with him to a shoemaker who specialised in shoes for the handicapped. I remember because my eleventh birthday wasn't far away and there was a calendar on the shoemaker's wall. As we waited on the bench I couldn't stop counting the days to my birthday because I knew my parents were going to give me a box kite from China. You wouldn't call my father's flat feet a handicap, but it was painful for him at work standing all day. Pimmichen bought her shoes there, and held Herr Gruber in the highest esteem. He changed people's lives, she insisted, claiming sore feet stole from old people the will to live. When Herr Gruber made a pair of shoes he took it as his duty to compensate for the bunions, corns, and bumps that come with age. He was in demand, as we saw from the half a dozen others waiting that day in his narrow shop, which smelt of leather and tanning oils.

  I kicked my legs to make the time go faster. Suddenly there was a tremendous noise outdoors, as if the sky was falling. I jumped up to see what was happening but my father told me to close the door, I was letting the cold in. My next impression was all of Vienna shouting the same words, but it was too huge a sound to make out the single words they were saying. I asked my father and neither could he, although he was getting madder the further the big hand moved round the clock. Herr Gruber ignored what was going on outside; he continued to take the measurements of a boy who'd suffered from polio and needed the sole of his left shoe to compensate ten centimetres for the stunted growth of that leg. By the time Herr Gruber got to my father, my father couldn't stay still, especially as Herr Gruber finished with his feet and continued to fuss around measuring his legs to see if there was a difference, because if there was, it wasn't good for the back. Herr Gruber was the same with everybody; my grandmother said he cared.

  On the way home we went by Heldenplatz, and there, I'll never forget, I saw the most people I'd ever seen in my life. I asked my father if it was a million people; he said more likely a few hundred thousand. I didn't see the difference. Just watching them, I felt I was drowning. Some man on the Neue Hofburg balcony was shouting at the top of his lungs, and the mass of people shared his fury as much as his enthusiasm. I was astounded that a hundred or so adults and children had climbed up on the statues of Prince Eugen and Archduke Karl, both on horseback, and were watching from up there. I wanted to climb up too — begged my father, but he said no. There was music, cheering, flag-waving; everyone was allowed to participate. It was amazing. Their flags had signs that looked as if they would turn if the wind blew on them, like windmills turn their four arms.

  On the tram home my father looked out the window at nothing. I was resentful that he hadn't let me join in the fun when we had been so close to it. What would it have cost him? A few minutes of his time. I studied his profile. His features on their own were gentle enough, but his sour mood made them, I was ashamed to observe, ugly. His mouth was determined, his face tense, his nose straight, severe, his eyebrows knotted irritably, his eyes focused on something not present to a degree that nothing would divert him, or me either as long as I was with him. His neatly combed hairstyle suddenly seemed merely professional, a means by which to sell better. I thought to myself: my father cares more about his work, his profits, his factory, than his family having any fun. Slowly, my anger subsided and I felt sorry for him. His hair didn't seem quite so nice — it stuck up in a few places at the top where it was thinning. I took advantage of the tram going around a bend to lean on him with more weight than was really called for.

  'Vater,' I asked, 'who was that man up there?'

  'That man,' he answered, putting his arm around me without looking in my direction, squeezing on and off affectionately, 'doesn't concern little boys like you, Johannes.'

  ii

  Some weeks later two men came to carry my grandmother off on a stretcher so she, too, could cast her vote in the referendum concerning the Anschluss; that is, whether or not she was in favour of the annexation of Austria as a province of the German Reich. My parents had been gone since early morning to cast theirs. My grandmother was in the best disposition she'd been in since she'd slipped on ice and broken her hip on her way back from the pharmacy after purchasing a menthol cream to work into her knees.

  'Lucky I went to the pharmacy that day,' she told the men. 'It healed my arthritis — it did! I don't think about my knees any more because my hip hurts more! It's the best remedy for an ache — find another ache somewhere else.'

  The men did their best to smile at her joke. They were elegant in their uniforms and I was embarrassed because I could see that to them she wasn't Pimmichen, she was just an old woman.

  'Ma'am, before we leave, did you remember to take your identification papers?' asked one of the men.

  Pimmichen could talk more easily than she could hear others talking, so I answered for her. In her excitement she didn't hear me either. She carried on as they lifted the stretcher — she was Cleopatra being conducted to Caesar — until one of the men nearly dropped her; then she joked she was on a flying carpet over Babylon. She told them how different life used to be for her and her parents, before the boundaries and mentalities had changed, how she'd dreamed of seeing Vienna once again the flourishing capital of a great empire, imagining that the union with Germany would somehow restore the lost grandeur of Austro–Hungary.

  Later in the day my Grandmother returned exhausted and in need of a sleep, but by the next morning she was back on the sofa grappling with a newspaper, its pages like a pair of insubordinate wings. I was on the rug, crouching naked in front of my mother, who removed a bee sting from my back and another from my neck with tweezers before pressing cotton, cool with alcohol, on the spots. She examined me for ticks in the most unlikely places — between my fingers and toes, in my ears, my bellybutton. I protested when she looked in the crease of my buttocks but she took no heed. She'd warned me about going to the vineyards to fly my kite.

  Afraid of the newly set restrictions, I explained exactly what had happened. I'd gone to the field, but there wasn't enough wind so I was forced to run to get the kite to fly, then I had to keep running if I wanted it to stay up in the air — if I stopped just a second to catch my breath it made the strings droop which made it fall down more, so I ran and ran until I found myself on the edge of the vineyards, where I stopped obediently, I swear, but then, Mutti, it landed in the middle, all by itself, and I had to go get it. It was your and Vati's nice present to me.

  'The next time there's not enough wind,' my mother replied, pulling a wisp of my hair every few words, 'try running in the other direction, away from the vineyards. There's plenty of room in the field for you to run the other way.' Looking down at me, she lifted an eyebrow sceptically, dropped my balled-up clothes on top of me.

  'Yes, Mutter,' I sang, glad not to have received any punishment. I couldn't dress fast enough. She slapped my bottom, as I knew she was going to, called me 'Dummer Bub' — silly boy.

  'It's 99.3 per cent in favour of the Anschluss,' read Pimmichen, her attempt to wave a victorious arm less effective than anticipated: it fell back down involuntarily. 'That's almost a hundred per cent. My, my.' She handed the ruffled-up pages to my mother before shutting her eyes. My mother set the paper aside, saying nothing.

  There was much change and confusion at school. The map changed. Austria was scratched off and became Ostmark, a province of the Reich. Old books gave way to new, just as some of our old teachers were replaced by new ones. I was sad I didn't get to say goodbye to Herr Grassy. He was my favourite teacher and had been my sister's six years earlier. During the first day's attendance call he'd realised I was Ute Betzler's little brother. He had scrutinised me, trying to find the resemblance. My parents' friends used to tell us that our smiles were alike, but I wasn't smiling just then. Ute was his student the year she'd passed away. I couldn't help but think that he probably remembered her better than I did.

  The next day he kept me after class to show me a coconut ark containing tiny African animals carved in exotic wood — giraff
es, zebras, lions, monkeys, alligators, gorillas, gazelles, all in pairs, male and female. I bent over his desk in admiration. He said he'd found the ark in 1909 in a market in Johannesburg, South Africa — like my name, Johannes — and then he gave it to me. My happiness had a streak of guilt. It wasn't the first time Ute's death had brought me gifts and attention.

  Fräulein Rahm replaced Herr Grassy. The reason, she explained, was that many of the subjects he used to teach us — ninety per cent of the facts he had made us struggle to memorise — were forgotten by adulthood, and thus useless. All it did was cost the state money that could be better used elsewhere to the greater benefit of its people. We were a new generation, a privileged one; we would be the first to take advantage of the modernised scholastic programme, to learn subjects those before us hadn't had the chance to learn. I felt sad for my parents, and told myself that in the evenings I must teach them all I could. Now, we learned less from books than we had before. Sports became our primary subject. We spent hours practising disciplines to make us strong, healthy adults rather than pale, weak bookworms.

  My father was wrong. That man did concern little boys like me. He, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, had a great mission to confide in us children. Only we, children that we were, could save the future of our race. We were unaware that our race was the rarest, the purest. Not only were we clever, fair, blond, blue-eyed, tall and slender, but even our heads showed a trait superior to all other races: we were 'dolichocephalic' whereas they were 'brachycephalic', meaning the form of our heads was elegantly oval, theirs primitively round. I couldn't wait to get home to show my mother — how she'd be proud of me! My head was something I'd never cared about before, at least not its form, and to think I had such a rare treasure sitting upon my shoulders!

  We learned new, frightening facts. Life was a constant warfare, a struggle of each race against the others for territory, food, supremacy. Our race, the purest, didn't have enough land — many of our race were living in exile. Other races were having more children than we were, and were mixing in with our race to weaken us. We were in great danger, but the Führer had trust in us, the children; we were his future. How surprised I was to think that the Führer I saw at Heldenplatz, cheered by masses, the giant on billboards all over Vienna, who even spoke on the wireless, needed someone little like me. Before then, I'd never felt indispensable. I'd felt like a child, something akin to an inferior form of an adult, a defect only time and patience could heal.

  We were made to look at a chart of the evolutionary scale of the higher species. The monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas were on the lowest level, and worked their way up. Man was at the top. When Fräulein Rahm began to lecture to us, I realised that some of what I'd taken to be primates were human races drawn in such a way that certain traits were accentuated so we could comprehend their relationship with the simians. She taught us a Negroid woman was closer to the ape than to mankind. Removing the hairs of the ape had proven to scientists to what extent. She told us it was our duty to rid ourselves of the dangerous races halfway between man and monkey. Besides being sexually overactive and brutal, they didn't share the higher sentiments of love or courtship. They were inferior parasites who would weaken us, bring our race down.

  Mathias Hammer, known for asking oddball questions, asked her if we gave the other races time, wouldn't they eventually move up the evolutionary scale on their own like we had? I was afraid Mathias was going to be scolded, but Fräulein Rahm said his question was essential. After sketching a mountain on the chalkboard she asked, 'If it takes one race this much time to evolve from here to there, and another race three times as long, which race is superior?'

  We all agreed it was the first.

  'By the time the inferior races catch up to where we are today, the peak, we won't be there any more, we'll be way up here.' She drew too quickly without looking. The peak she added was too high and steep to be stable.

  The race we were to fear most was called Jüdisch. Jews were a mixture of many things — Oriental, Amerindian, African and our race. They were especially dangerous because they'd taken their white skin from us, so we could be easily fooled by them. 'Don't', we were constantly reminded, 'trust a Jew more than a fox in a green field.' 'The Jew's father is Satan.' 'Jews sacrifice Christian children, use their blood in their mitzvahs.' 'If we don't rule the world, they will. That's why they want to mix their blood with ours, to strengthen themselves, to weaken us.' I began to fear the Jews in a medical way. They were like the viruses I'd never seen but had learned were behind my flu and suffering.

  One storybook I read was about a German girl who'd been warned by her parents not to go to a Jewish doctor. She disobeyed, was sitting in the waiting room hearing a girl inside the doctor's office screaming. Knowing she'd been wrong to come, she got up to go. Just then the doctor opened the door, told her to come in. From the illustration alone, it was clear who the doctor was. Satan. In other children's books I took a good look at the Jews so I'd know how to recognise one in a heartbeat. I wondered who on earth could be fooled by them, especially clever Aryans like us. Their lips were thick, their noses big and hooked, their eyes dark, evil and always turned to one side, their bodies stocky, their necks adorned with gold, their hair untidy, their whiskers unkempt.

  Only at home I didn't get the credit I deserved. Whenever I showed my mother my fine head, all she did was mess up my hair. When I declared to her how I was the future — Zukunft in German — in whom the Führer put his trust to one day rule the world, she laughed and called me 'my little Zukunft' or 'Zukunftie', to make me cute, rather than serious and important as I was.

  My new status wasn't accepted by my father either. He wasn't at all grateful for my willingness to teach him important facts. He diminished my knowledge, called it nonsense. He objected to my greeting Pimmichen, my mother or him, with 'Heil Hitler', instead of the traditional 'Guten Tag' or 'Grüß Gott', which came about so long ago in the Middle Ages, no one really remembers any more whether it means 'I give my greetings to God', 'Greetings from God', or 'You greet God for me'! By then it was automatic for everyone in the Reich to salute each other 'Heil Hitler', even for minor transactions — buying bread, getting on a tram. That's just what people said to one another.

  I tried to talk sense into my father. If we didn't protect our race, the logical outcome would be catastrophic, but my father claimed he didn't believe in logic. I found that unbelievable for someone who ran a factory — how could he not believe in logic? It was so dumb what he said, surely he was pulling my leg. He insisted he wasn't, that emotions were our only trustworthy guide, even in business. He said people think they analyse situations with their brains, think their emotions are nothing but a result of cognition, but they're wrong. Intelligence isn't in the head, it's in the body. You come out of a meeting not understanding — 'Why do I feel angry when I should be jumping with joy?' You walk through the park on a sunny day and wonder why your heart is heavy, what on earth could be bothering you. Only afterwards do you analyse it. Emotions lead you to what logic is incapable of finding on its own.

  I wasn't quick enough in finding a good example to show him he was wrong; I found it later in bed. The only one I came up with then was: 'If a stranger gave you proven figures for your business, don't tell me you'd throw them in the rubbish simply because you felt they were wrong? You would rather trust illogical feelings than proven facts?'

  He answered with a bunch of numbers between 430 and 440 Hertz, asked me what these figures meant logically. I didn't answer, frustrated that he was avoiding the subject and on top of it being corny, because 'Hertz' sounded like 'Herz' — German for 'heart'.

  'To your brain, these figures will mean nothing, just some sound frequencies. You could stare at them on a piece of paper all you want and no understanding would come out of them. But . . .' He walked over to the piano, pushed down some keys, looked at me so I had to glance away. 'Just listen to the notes, my son. They will mean what I feel when I hear you speaking. Logic wi
ll take you nowhere you want to go in life. It will take you many places, far and wide, yes it will, but nowhere you really want to go, I assure you, when you look back on your life. Emotion is God's intelligence in us, in you. Learn to listen to God.'

  I couldn't keep it in any longer. I blurted: 'I don't believe in God any more! God doesn't really exist! God is just a way to lie to people! To fool them and make them do what those in power want them to do!' I thought he'd be angry but he wasn't.

  'If God doesn't exist, neither does man.'

  'That's just Quatsch, Vater, as you well know. We're right here. I'm right here. I can prove it.' I tapped my arms and legs.

  'Then what you're really wondering is whether God created man, or whether man created God? But either way, God exists.'

  'No, Vater, if man made God up, God doesn't exist. He only exists in people's minds.'

  'You just said, "He exists".'

  'I mean only as a part of man.'

  'A man creates a painting. The painting is not the man that created it, nor an integral part of that man, but entirely separate from that man. Creations escape man.'

  'You can see a painting. It's real. You can't see God. If you call out, "Yodiloodihoo, Gott!", no one will answer you.'

  'Did you ever see love? Have you ever touched it with your hand? Is it enough to call out "Hey, Love!" for it to come running on its four swift feet? Don't let your young eyes fool you. What's most important in this life is invisible.'

  Our argument went on in circles until I concluded that God was the stupidest thing man ever made. My father's laugh was sad. He said I had it all wrong; God was the most beautiful thing man ever made, or man the most stupid thing God ever made. We were about to go at it again, for I had a very high opinion of man and his capacities, but my mother insisted she needed me to help her hold a pan upside down for her while she worked the cake out. Distracted, she'd cooked it too long. I recognised her old tactics.