The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  Arriving with a six-man SS contingent, the Gestapo inspector who had come that first night was a mild-faced man with thinning hair who might have sold insurance in his former life. Dressed in a dark suit with a swastika armband, he was not in the least imposing or sinister; if anything, he was quite matter-of-fact as he opened his briefcase and produced blood papers for Gretl and Mining.

  Gretl still had her health, but Mining was now hugely overweight and ailing, with arthritis, a bad heart and a left arm that had swollen twice the size of her right following the removal, two years before, of her cancerous left breast. Ever since Rolf’s death from leukemia four years before, Mining had been living with Gretl, and she was now Gretl’s greatest worry: Gretl thought her sister would have a coronary right there when the SS came through the front door with rifles and drawn pistols.

  Panting like a stricken animal, Mining just stood there, white-faced and staring, holding her fat dimpled arm. Gretl wasn’t doing so well either. She felt the blood slowly draining from her head. It was late, very late, and she remembered hearing how the SS made their arrests late like this, when people were asleep and thus more docile and confused. The ploy worked. Gretl’s mind was quite blank with fear, and her legs were weak, but she felt she must remain standing or else relinquish all control. She grasped the table. The Gestapo inspector was reading some idiotic charge against the Reich, and her right leg was falling asleep. Then her left leg began to tremble, and she looked at the SS troopers, thinking of what they say about dogs — how even the most vicious dogs are fine until they sense the fear that gets their blood up.

  Gretl felt fear now. It was like death by exposure, starting in the legs, then traveling up the spine until it addles the brain, making one dizzy and desperate for sleep. Stop it, she told herself, telling herself that she must think not only for herself but for her poor sister. With her fleshy bulk sustained by this now feeble heart, Mining looked ready to topple over.

  Liebste, Mining, es macht nichts, setz Dich hin, said Gretl oversweetly, begging her to sit. But no sooner had Gretl said this in an effort to somehow ease the situation than she looked again at the young, black-gloved SS men blocking the door with their rifles, their peaked caps and black suits luminescent with a meaningless sorcery of braid and insignia. They were like leashed dogs, she thought, they were like lean and hungry Dobermans, hungry to snap and roust den Juden from her house. Mining, Gretl said more forcefully. Mining, darling … please sit down while I speak to these men.

  It seemed that her only recourse was to resort to a forlorn and absurd kindness, as if mere breeding would show, or matter, at such a time, much less suggest to these men that they should follow her kind example. Trying to fight paralysis or sleep, Gretl found all kinds of delaying, distancing questions coursing through her mind. This was the part that no one had been able to prepare her for. In all the times she had heard people describe this now familiar experience, no one had been able to properly convey the shock that would hit her, much less the silly things she was liable to say. In her shock that night, she did not know, or did not want to admit, that for the first time in her life, she was powerless — an old nobody. She was freezing to death and didn’t quite believe it; in her powerlessness, she was being sucked down, yet she still fought it like death, focusing on her sister’s fear so as to ward off her own, saying as to a child, Mining, listen to me. You must sit down …

  But Mining only managed a confused, stricken look, and in that moment Gretl saw her big sister reduced to the mute dependency of a child. Cradling her heavy left arm like an infant over the nonexistent breast, Mining looked at her, then more indignantly at the inspector, and squeaked hysterically, I’m very sorry — I’m sorry but I will have to sit! And then there was Gretl’s jarring panic as her sister blundered back, collapsing into a slender chair that made a sickening crack as Mining’s heavy, varicose legs gave way.

  The perspicacious inspector clearly viewed himself as a scalpel, not a meat cleaver; he was visibly discomfited by this unpleasant scene. Please, Frau Stonborough, he insisted. Please, both you ladies must sit and rest yourselves.

  But with Mining’s tumble, Gretl’s fear turned to rage. In her contempt for this imbecile, Gretl thanked him with an edge of sarcasm, obstinately saying that she preferred to stand, danke. The inspector felt her contempt — he was all too conscious of that gulf of class she represented — but instead of taking offense, he took even greater pains to show that he was not some party thug, that he was indeed a man of discernment and civility. It was really quite pathetic. The inspector’s manner was one of ceremonious disappointment as he explained to Gretl, in the most muted tones possible, that the Reich was prepared to treat her and her sister as Gentiles, but that as bona fide friends of the Reich they could not break the law by harboring those of Jewish blood. The inspector said this on a hopeful note, assuming, naturally, that the two women would find it a profound relief. But Gretl was not relieved. Suddenly she was furious, telling him in the prickly voice she used on recalcitrant tradesmen that she was a Jew and did not wish the Reich to consider her anything but a Jew.

  At this, the inspector glanced with vexation at his men — the woman was obviously mad — and repeated, as if it were an incontrovertible scientific fact, that she was nonetheless a Gentile; her blood papers were quite clear on that point. At Gretl’s remark, meanwhile, Mining had pulled herself up from her seat. Her eyes were swimming. Gretl could see exactly what she was saying. Are you mad? Mining was asking. Do you think that, as a Wittgenstein, you can say anything? Mining hadn’t forgotten the facts. She hadn’t forgotten the people lined up outside the consulates, frantically seeking permission to emigrate. Nor had she forgotten those already interned in SS camps, or murdered. Many had committed suicide in the first violent days of the Anschluss, when shops were wrecked and Jews were attacked by roving mobs. On the Kärntnerstrasse and Graben, down streets of smashed and boarded-up storefronts with Jude scrawled in white paint, Jews had been forced to get on their hands and knees to scour the paving stones. No one had been spared. Even rabbis and decorated war veterans had been publicly humiliated. With their own beards, Hassidic Jews were forced to symbolically scour the stones while the mobs howled and the fun-loving SS men prodded them with their riding crops or rode them piggyback by their earlocks.

  In her way, Mining was far better prepared for this than Gretl was. Age and sickness had taught Mining something: if nothing else, she had learned what it is to be powerless. All her life Gretl had laughed or scorned away the bad, the crude, the idiotic. Never had she been powerless. Never in her life had she been in a situation where something couldn’t be worked out; the family politician couldn’t yet comprehend these politics. Characteristically, Gretl had labored under the delusion that because the Nazis were disgusting and fraudulent, they could be scorned away by their betters as having no moral power — as if moral power meant anything against guns and tanks. Yes, Gretl saw that she was quite deluded in this late hour. They were no longer Wittgensteins: they were nobodies — Jew harborers, or at best pawns the Nazis might keep around while it was expedient to show the world that it wasn’t so bad, that Vienna still remembered with gratitude her best citizens.

  Gretl didn’t know what had gotten into her just then; the words had just leapt out. She wasn’t heroic, she was scared to death. Besides, there was nothing she could do now. That knowledge was what broke her, as the soldiers brought down the people who had been hiding upstairs. Gretl was standing with Mining, trying not to cry. And then she was crying anyway as her friends — an old doctor, a schoolteacher whose husband and son had been seized, a lone girl of fifteen and a family of four — were led outside. Out they filed, past a gang of kerchiefed youths wearing swastikas and carrying nasty little eagle-headed daggers on their belts. And there they were loaded into a tall black van and taken away, never to be heard of again.

  After this, Gretl knew she could not remain in Vienna. Every Jew who could had left by then, and any left were stru
ggling to get foreign entry permits or were in hiding. After months of harassment, Freud had been deported, and then only after heavy diplomatic pressure had been put on the Nazis. Not that this stopped them from confiscating nearly everything Freud owned. What did they care that he was old and dying? To them, he was just another rich Jew to turn upside-down and shake before discarding. Freud was the linchpin. If the Nazis were willing to publicly mistreat a man of Freud’s stature, then it was clear they would stop at nothing to make the Ostmark, as Austria was now called, judenrein.

  Gretl wanted to throw bombs. She knew she could do no further good by staying in Vienna, and yet for weeks after the Gestapo incident she did nothing, absolutely nothing. At first, she stayed out of stubbornness and anger, feeling that they had no right to drive her out of her own city. But then her anger wore her down and she fell into despair. Yet it was despair of the worst kind — the humbling, debilitating despair that she recognized as the despair of the old. She was sixty-one. Oh, a young sixty-one — a mere girl of sixty-one, her more charitable friends would say. And hearing these innocent blandishments, Gretl would cock her head wistfully, wanting to believe them and then playing the same game, telling these flatterers, in turn, how good they looked, shaving off a few guilty years. But now the strain told. She looked sixty-one, she thought — looked a good sixty-six or seventy. And for the first time she truly felt old and useless, felt the creep of decrepitude. It was as if somebody had knocked the wind out of her. Bad enough she had to largely fend for herself for the first time, but she now had the additional burden of caring for Mining. She hated it. It just was not her nature to play nursemaid, and Mining knew it. Mining felt guilty for needing her help, and Gretl felt doubly guilty for not giving it more freely. And then Gretl would find herself getting irrationally angry. Angry at life and the Nazis. Angry at herself! Angry that goodhearted Mining, who had nursed her father and mother, should have such a spoiled brat for a sister, and at that an incompetent brat who could scarcely iron a blouse or cook.

  Every day her son Stefan would call, asking when she would leave, and every day she would stall, becoming increasingly inert and helpless. She just didn’t feel resilient or adaptable enough to be uprooted to a new country. And what will I do without my friends? she would ask, willfully forgetting that her friends were gone, or dead, or else trying desperately to scrape up Reichsfluchtsteuer and other Nazi ransom taxes with what remained of their seized or frozen assets. And this was when they could even find a country that would take them, in those times of worldwide depression and unemployment.

  Above all, Gretl had reached that intractable age where she could not endure the idea of leaving her home. She loved this modern house that her brother had built for her. It reminded her of one of those lacquered Chinese boxes, dark and luminous, with well-fitted doors and clasps that locked, and everything of exactly the right proportion. Perhaps she best liked the house for being so unlike life, especially as it was at present. The house was like a dream unfolding, revealing a tall door, then a slender hall and a labyrinthine stair that spiraled down with the skewed but haunting logic of prime numbers. In the center of the house was a glassed-in elevator that her brother had specially designed. At times these days Gretl would find herself thinking up excuses to ride it up, then down again, watching, amid its whir, that slow, devolving hierarchy of steel and glass, light and darkness. Living in that house with its books and paintings, she sometimes felt like a monk in the Dark Ages. Yes, she would think. This was why she was staying in Vienna. She was holding a few precious things for safekeeping until men learned to read again.

  For a few minutes she would feel a little better with this fantasy, but then she would find herself getting angry again — blaming life and the Nazis, the chaos of Austrian politics, on and on. But of all the things she blamed, she felt the strangest was this urge to blame her culture. In her mind, even Gretl could not help scorn the notion. One might as well blame the weather, she thought. As if culture had planted the knife and welcomed Hitler! As if culture should have prevented this like a kind of moral prophylactic! Just like you, Gretl, she would think. Always looking for a boogieman or culprit. But still, if her culture couldn’t stop Hitler — or even had invited or created Hitler — then why not feel betrayed by it? And how strong or deep was culture if the river could be diverted into a grotesque Teutonic religion of Bayreuth festivals, of garlanded girls and men in lederhosen, blowing hunting horns?

  If not vaguely ludicrous, these questions were certainly pointless in her present predicament — Gretl was all too aware of that. She knew that she was woolgathering and avoiding, but she couldn’t help herself. She was so preoccupied and forgetful these days. Up and down the elevator she would go, her mind wandering, then stuck like the humming electric panel that was waiting for her to push 1, 2 or 3. Very well. Down she would go. But then she would remember something upstairs — a book she needed or a light she had left on. And so up again with a whir, watching the floors pass, feeling herself lofting up invisibly like a rising body of heat. Chunk, the doors would open. But standing there, she would hesitate. The light she thought she might have left on was, as she very well knew, off. The book was downstairs or unimportant. And the fact was, she was stuck. Don’t be neurotic! she would tell herself, now on the verge of tears. But looking down, she would see the perforated toe of her shoe — an old lady’s black shoe, soft as the plush lining of a coffin — tapping the threshold of that stone floor. And such elegant black stone it was, a polished slate like onyx. But God, how it showed dust. It was so unspeakably dusty and untidy — it was like her whole life! But it wasn’t dust or forgotten lights that were tormenting her. Dread was what it was, a dread as debilitating as malaria. Deep breaths as she stood by the door, amid that insistent humming. Toe tapping. Not wanting to step off, yet oppressed by the thought of the shutting doors and then the slow drop, floating down like the dust.

  The other anxiety was where they would go. They couldn’t decide. America? Mining would suggest. Ugh, said Gretl. France? Even worse. England, with its bleak, chilly weather? Italy! Italy, so gorgeous, so warm and sunny. Gretl spoke beautiful Italian, and they had some distant cousins there. But the disgusting politics! And so dirty! Switzerland, then — Switzerland, where years before Gretl had so shrewdly put the bulk of her fortune, just as her father had done before the first war. But the Swiss were so stodgy, and she was feeling so old, buried beneath this dust. And so it would press down, the heaviness of long, slack days when the two old sisters, afraid to go out and too depressed to even listen to a radio symphony, would look at each other and start weeping — weeping as once their mother had wept, with their handkerchiefs balled in their fists.

  Death’s Head

  NOW, AFTER HAVING SPENT WEEKS adrift in that house in the wake of the first SS visit, Gretl was told that the SS was there again. But to send only one man? Mining was asleep, so Gretl came alone down the elevator, her heart fluttering as the door opened. Once again there was that hesitation, the toe on the threshold as she saw the SS Sturmscharführer in his black bulletproof suit, his legs encased in two punishing cylinders of gleaming black leather.

  It made her flesh crawl to see his shoulders covered with this braid and regalia, which reminded her of skittling insects. The Sturmscharführer’s back was turned, and he was looking with wonder at the geometry of her house, with its ribbon windows and lyre-like radiators. Gretl would never forget the silver death’s head insignia on the tall peak of the cap he held under his arm as he turned and said with a respectful nod, Frau Gretl. And then she saw that big shovel of a face and realized that it was Max. Max, who had laid the floor on which he was standing and helped build the geometric stair beyond. It was impossible. To see Max dressed up, to see him contained in a uniform, no less, and so dour and reserved, with none of that wild profusion she remembered — at first this was a shock, but then it all fit with the most awful logic.

  Neither she nor her brother had heard from Max, or of him, since
that “scene,” as Gretl called it, at Russell’s school. Ludwig had given her a full account of that visit, and its distressing end. Still, Gretl had expected it all to blow over. She never thought it would be the last of Max. Never one to give up, Gretl had even made inquiries about him, as had her brother, but these never produced anything. So finally, reluctantly, they concluded that Max was dead — killed in a brawl, found along a road somewhere or perhaps dead from drink.

  Wittgenstein dreaded Gretl’s questions about him. For years, every time Gretl had seen her brother, she would say, And you still haven’t heard from Max? just as if it had been last week that Max had left, and not four or five years. No, Wittgenstein would say bitterly, I haven’t heard. And if I haven’t heard, I won’t, so we might as well forget it. Well, Gretl would say, unable to put it aside. I just can’t understand it. Something really must have happened to him, don’t you think? And then with a pained shrug Wittgenstein would reply, Of course something happened. Something always happens.

  And looking at Max now, Gretl saw that something had indeed happened. She was not altogether surprised, either, feeling that she was seeing something she had glimpsed years ago but had pushed back in her mind. Once, she had even raised the possibility that Max might have joined the Nazis, but Wittgenstein rejected it as being beyond Max; he said it was pointless speculation and slander of the dead. But Gretl was well aware of Max’s anti-Semitism and his hatred of communists, his lingering bitterness about the war. Like her brother, she had clearly seen his dark side; and like him she had suppressed it because Max was so extraordinary, because in him she saw so much more good. Not that Max’s bad points were always easy to ignore. Gretl remembered Max making some asinine remark about Jews, and how she angrily told him that the Wittgensteins were Jews by blood. Max refused to believe her. You Wittgensteins are not Jews, he had insisted. Even if you say you are, you are not. And even if you are of Jewish blood, there is nothing remotely Jewish about you.