Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

  She couldn't have said anything worse, especially at that vulnerable moment. 'That's a fat lie if ever I heard one,' I spat.

  She acted as if she hadn't heard me. 'Soon I'll be free,' she said to herself.

  'Sorry, I shouldn't tell you the truth. My mother is plainly trying to give you false hope.'

  She took her time before she began again. 'Don't you know the Americans joined the war last summer? They're helping the British in North Africa, in France. They're fighting to free us.' Behind a pretence of assurance, her voice sounded scared.

  'The majority of American people don't approve of their involvement. They want the president to go back to their policy of political isolation.'

  'Your mother heard about their progress on the BBC.'

  'Yes, and just yesterday she thought she heard my father calling down for glue so he could fix the wallpaper peeling off your nook.' This, in passing, was the truth. 'It's normal. She's gone most of the night, doesn't sleep, so she dreams standing.'

  'I've heard the word "Amerikanisch" a lot, I'm sure. My hearing has become acute since I use my eyes less.'

  'Then you must know the Japanese have entered the war on our side? You must have heard we have a secret weapon? We'll never lose the war.'

  'Your mother heard that the Germans were working hard on it, but she said the Americans . . .' Her voice trailed off.

  I snatched the newspapers from around her, held them to her nose. The headlines were in the Reich's favour, the dates I pointed to were recent. It took a while for her eyes to adjust. She blinked dully at them.

  'I don't want to give you false hopes, Elsa. I can give you real ones. I have thought of better ways to help.'

  She didn't ask me what those were, not even when I took her hand, waited for her to encourage me. She turned over on her side, her back to me. It was the only part of her I found to my distaste — independent, stubborn, rude — and I was about to poke her for attention when one of the newspapers she'd been lying on caught my attention. On the front page was a picture of a public hanging in Cologne– Ehrenfeld, which in those times was ordinary enough, but what was extraordinary was that I recognised the face of the Edelweiss Pirate who'd attacked our Hitler Youth march. I examined it, was sure it was him. The ringleaders had been caught and hanged. It was numbing. I folded the page and put it in my pocket. Too bad Kippi wasn't there to show it to.

  ***

  The war situation was, in fact, getting desperate. I was sent out to collect batteries, scrap metal — anything that could be used as war material. Going from house to house I was bound to come across some crackpots. Some people offered me rusty nails, putting them in my palm like gold pieces. One man gave me his deceased wife's hairpins and the hooks off her suspender belt, and one lady offered me a handful of vegetables, swearing they had iron in them. The honest truth.

  I added my mother's wireless to the items I was handing in. She put up quite a fight, told me to say we didn't have one. My excuse was unforgivable, looking back. I said I couldn't lie. I picked up newspapers she left lying around. Any articles I didn't want Elsa to see, I ripped the pages off and fed them to the burning coals.

  I didn't want to face it but I knew Elsa was right. Soon we would lose the war and she would be free. I had no idea what I could do to keep her. But I believed she could learn to love me, was convinced my sole fiend was time. Time to get to know me better, to forget Nathan. Instinctively, I knew the more desperate her situation was, the more of a chance I had. I needed to maintain her despair, then offer myself as her only hope, if not happiness. Every day I wished for a miraculous turn of events. If only we could win the war, my life would be saved.

  Thick smoke covered the city. The Opera was burnt. The Burgtheater, the Belvedere and the Hofburg (which Pimmichen still called the Hapsburg Imperial Palace) were damaged, as were the Liechtenstein and Schwarzenberg palaces. I remember the Cathedral of St Stephen was hit, the very cathedral where the Cardinal Innitzer had preached against Adolf Hitler. There were no firefighters to put out the fire because they were in combat.

  Vienna was declared the new front. Elderly Volkssturm ran past me, stiff-legged, clutching their machine-guns to their tired breasts. Those who hadn't enough teeth to whistle through had their old lungs to whistle for them. The most shocking Volkssturm I saw, though, were children — they couldn't have been more than eight. In adult-sized helmets and clomping boots they revived a forgotten memory of Ute, fresh out of her bath, parading in front of the trumeau mirror in my parents' room in Mutter's loose ball slippers, boobies burgeoning, ankles waggling.

  After each attack, more people took to living in cellars and catacombs, and idled about on the road. I was beginning to find beauty in destruction, ugliness. I thought to myself with simultaneous humour and melancholy: Elsa must be rubbing off on me.

  One wet day, I'd been assigned to collect war materials in the twenty-first, and as I was going by Floridsdorfer Spitz, I saw where a public hanging had taken place. Thinking of the Edelweiss Pirates I'd seen in the newspaper just days before, I studied the faces of the traitors who, according to the notice posted in front of them, had helped the enemy undermine their compatriots and kill their own kind by supporting the Resistance.

  They hung there as if they hadn't a care in the world. I fancied them to be puppets, imagined pulling their cords so they could come to life, legs marching, arms swinging, heads bobbing. I pulled their cords harder so the couples jiggled, danced, jumpity jump, slapped ankles. Then I saw that one of them was my mother, slappity slap dancing with another man. This will make no sense, but in that inert moment the earth swelled in my ears to block out noise, time, solidify the sky, like a dome immuring some better part of me for good. Another me — deaf, numb, dense — stepped out of my old self and continued forward to the blurry rest, the guards holding me off, I choking to make them understand who I was and who she was, not being listened to, wrestling with ill-will, striking out at fate, being dragged away, weightless, powerless, my face in the mud, facing down into darkness where I'd initially stood looking on so carelessly.

  My grandmother understood that it was too painful for me to speak about my mother. She understood this without my having to tell her. Talking would have reduced the holiness of my mother, loving me in life as I felt she still did in death. My silence was my way of keeping her high above; talking about her would bring her down to our pitiful world. My grandmother had her own way of expressing her grief. She sewed together the pieces of the red jersey my mother never finished and took the habit of wearing the constituted garment for days on end. It didn't even reach her waist and the edges hung with ragged woollen fringes. These came apart and the jersey imperceptibly worked its way up. It was only when I referred to it as her sexy red bra that she got the hint and put it in her mothball-smelling chest of precious articles belonging to the vast artefact one calls the past.

  x

  After removing the baskets of letters my mother had stuffed in Elsa's former hiding place, I carried Elsa back upstairs, for she was too dizzy to sit up on her own, let alone stand. I took care of her the best I could, but have to say it wasn't easy. I'd never done the shopping, cooking and house-cleaning for myself, and suddenly I had to do all this and take care of Elsa and Pimmichen. I made mistake after mistake. I poured milk into Pimmichen's tea — it was too hot for her to drink otherwise — and it curdled. I'd bought buttermilk instead of milk. Elsa would hardly touch the sandwiches I made, yet I'd put no salt or soap in them. I had to drag the reason out of her. It turned out her stomach ached if she ate certain animal products.

  My meals were catastrophes. From the depths of her bed, Pimmichen explained all I needed to know. You put a dab of cooking fat in the pan, added a couple of sliced potatoes, then covered them with beaten eggs. Cooked, the omelette should be folded over. She didn't mention that the potatoes had to be boiled beforehand. I wanted to make beef stroganoff to remind her of her old sojourns in Budapest, as well as, I admit, impress Elsa. I used
up all our ration cards for the little meat, but figured we'd have titbits of it all week; all I'd have to do was warm it up. I didn't ask Pimmichen for advice — how complicated could it be, everything chopped up and mixed together?

  I threw in the meat, onion and salt. But something was missing — my mother always had lots of juice. The meat was turning dry, the onion black. I added a litre of water: the contents floated to the top. I went to Pimmichen for last-minute help. She said you had to add a teacup of flour to thicken the sauce. This formed lumps which, forked, turned back to powder. After much evaporation the sauce gained substance but the meat was too tough even for me to chew, and I had all my teeth. In the end I ground the pieces down with the cheese or carrot or whatever-it-was shredder and the taste matched the presentation.

  Needless to say, supplies were a daily problem. Soap had grown outlandishly expensive. I had to go and get crude blocks of it from an isolated house in Neuwaldegg where a spinster made it herself the old-fashioned way. After spending the afternoon walking all the way out there, I spent a good deal more out of my purse. The black market had become unreliable. The bread tickets had been so poorly counterfeited lately they were rejected by the first baker to set eyes on them. The forests were gradually becoming depleted of deer and wild boars. Quality and quantity plummeted, prices soared. Many unscrupulous go-betweens were making a fortune on people's hunger. Those small shopkeepers who bartered were the worst. One greedy butcher offered to trade me a quarter-kilo of cooking fat for the shoes right off my own two feet!

  One morning at the public market, I was the last one in a queue long enough to have been that of a weekend fair. A farmer stuck his head out of his truck in a no parking zone and whispered that his potatoes were cheaper than the ones I was queuing for. I was uneasy about leaving my place, for several newcomers were already lined up behind me. The farmer dropped his price until I was convinced to take a look.

  The bag he showed me was more than we were allowed to buy, and really cheap, but since I'd come to do my shopping as usual on foot, the quantity was equally persuasive and dissuasive. Reading my mind, he said he'd help me with it as soon as he was done with his sales. I accepted and he dropped the sack at my feet. He went back to his truck for a coin he needed for my change and I was stunned to see him drive away. It was impossible for me to pick the sack up on my own and some strangers, feeling sorry for my handicap, helped get it on my shoulder. Carrying it home was as clumsy as carrying a dead man, and as nerve-wracking, because I could have been caught red-handed in possession of an illegally purchased product, the quantity alone being a giveaway. It fell every hundred metres, whereupon I'd have to wait for someone to help me again. Some people, anticipating my problem, crossed the road to avoid me.

  At one point I left the bag where it was and offered to sell its contents to people passing by. But they were on their way home with arms full and didn't want to burden themselves with more potatoes. I ended up taking handfuls out and leaving them behind. To make it uphill, I had to dump almost half the sackful. I looked back with regret, to see pedestrians reaping the harvest off the footpath.

  I went to prepare the damn things for lunch. It was one-thirty in the afternoon: I was running late. Usually I took Elsa her meal at noon, and Pimmichen about an hour thereafter. As I rinsed the dirt off them, the original volume dissolved under my eyes, exposing a much smaller potato. Peeling brought another blow — there was as much black as white. I carved out sprouting eyes, dug out rot, snipped off tops, bottoms, sides, leaving me bits of potato as small as dice. I would have killed the farmer if I had bumped into him the next day. His giant sack provided me with exactly one pot of potatoes, which would've cost me one-tenth of the price had I purchased them honestly like everyone else, not to mention all the risk and aggravation!

  I didn't have any better luck with the cleaning. I dusted off the furniture with the beeswax my mother had used. The dust clung to it like honey, and so did armies of ants marching in from the windowsills. I washed our clothes and was surprised that something as small as a sock could share its tint with a whole load of laundry. The ironing was the worst. I ironed one side of a garment only to come up with as many creases on the other side, and ended up branding that familiar blunt-nosed triangle on a good deal of our clothes.

  Our material comfort was deteriorating. I recall the torn strips of newspaper in the toilet, a disagreeable sensation, although maybe a less disagreeable one than had I read them. Our telephone wasn't working; neither was the electricity. Some crook sawed off a shutter in the middle of the night. I made it downstairs to cut my toes on the broken glass, the window frames fanning my face, no one in sight. Nathan was first to enter my mind: I had a hunch he was crouching behind our japanned screen, waiting to ambush me. That was before I noticed the bare fireplace, and it took me a moment to realise that our cartel clocks and who knew what else were missing.

  Every day just carrying drinking and washing water up to Elsa and then down was a real chore, and we didn't always have running water, so first I had to find it. She was reluctant to give me her chamber pot but had no choice. I think it was terrible for her — she couldn't look me in the eye. I didn't mean to make her feel bad, but if I caught a glimpse or failed to hold my breath long enough I gagged. If I told her once I told her a hundred times, I didn't mind, even if my body had funny ways of acting on its own.

  The most mortifying for her were her monthly bleedings, which were in fact decreasing steadily. I cleaned the nook day and night but still the silverfish multiplied. I offered to bring her up the rubbish bin, so she could put whatever she needed into it herself, but she said it was dangerous — if anyone went through it they'd know it wasn't from Pimmichen or me. She had a point. It took some convincing for her to let me bury what was what in the garden along with the peelings.

  At about this time Pimmichen suffered a series of bronchial infections, stomach and head flus. I tended to her needs as much as I did Elsa's, bedpan and all. I don't know if anyone can imagine to what extent my life had changed. I was a teenager, itching for adventure, and I found myself in a housewife's shoes, shopping, cooking, cleaning, a lot that kept me, both grievously and soothingly, bonded to my mother. Stepping into her shoes, I had a better idea of what her life had been, or at least I was experiencing certain aspects of it first hand. In my head I often chatted with her about the domestic concerns I hadn't known a thing about before. There was hardly a moment's rest and I preferred it that way, considering how guilty I was feeling. I imagined that the message I had failed to deliver had resulted in her death, that the knot the woman gave me had been meant to warn her of the hanging. It ate my insides out that once I'd caught sight of my mother, I hadn't continued to search among the hanged bodies for my father. Or had he been standing in the crowd when it happened? Did he even know about it? Was he suffering as I was? Or was he still safe in his work camp? I tried to do what I was sure my mother used to do: blank her mind in the non-stop chronometer of domestic labour. My chronometer was harder to keep up with than hers, though. With only one hand, the smallest task — buttering bread — took me twice as long as it had her. Perhaps this had more to do with my inexperience than anything else. More than once, burning the chest of a shirt with the iron, or burning bread in the oven, I yelled for her, knowing all too well she wouldn't come rushing to help me, but her not coming remained beyond bearable.

  If the three of us could have lived together normally it would have been far less work, for better or for worse. I would have had only one platter to put on the table and each would serve herself. But that wasn't the case. Pimmichen was sick in her room, with special diets to contend with. Elsa was upstairs and her meals had to be taken up in secrecy. Up I went, down I went. Then it was Pimmichen's turn again. And all this in between paying bills, running to the pharmacy, fumbling with ration cards, not letting on that there were more than two of us yet finding ways to make meals sufficient for three. My stomach had to be loud to remind me of myself. I hardly had
time for that one. I ate whatever came to hand, standing or on the run.

  The domestic tasks were tedious, and I was too young to tolerate boredom. I hated it as much as old people hate instability, yet I never considered getting out of it. The fact was that far from impairing my feelings for Elsa, it strengthened them. I took care of her; she was thus mine. Perhaps some of the mystery disappeared from before, when she was my parents' forbidden protégé, tucked away behind a wall, under a floor, in the non-existent spaces of our home. We had a different relationship now centred on her needs for nourishment, cleanliness; we had less time for conversation. It was the same with my grandmother.

  Those nights the house grew bigger. So did the darkness it contained. Elsa upstairs, Pimmichen downstairs, I in the middle. I dwelled on when I was a boy, my mother cutting magical snowflakes out of paper or tucking me in with her thumb crossing my forehead. I'd never come to terms with the fact that I hadn't been permitted to give her a burial. The soldiers had done the job — dumped her body in some ditch along with the others, or maybe burned them all and discarded the ashes. What they did with such enemies, where and how, was esteemed to be none of our business.

  I waited impatiently for another dawn, tossing, turning. Wishing my father would return, I had gone to the police for advice. There was no way for me to visit Mauthausen, I had been told, but I was perfectly free, of course, to write. I debated a long time before writing of the hanging. Maybe I shouldn't have, but it seemed wrong to write about the weather. I tried to be neutral so I wouldn't incriminate him. Because my letters went unanswered, though they weren't sent back to me, I felt my father was blaming me.

  The moonlight shone in. On the wall I perceived shadows like fat dogs with many ears. They were from the baskets I'd set down near my bed. The daylight adequate, I picked a letter out of one. Then another. My face reddened but it was impossible to stop.