In those days, Graz was not so populated a place that Rudi could claim to have led an urban life. To be sure, hotels lined the Mur and just over the bridge the Weitzer cosseted its clients and flew its flags. Atop the burg the clock tower spoke its piece to the clouds while in the fall the leaves of the vines along the steep hillside turned a red rich as hair. The towers of the church had tried to be twins but settled for sisters. A metal Jesus admonished the town from the tip of a very tall stick. Even in the wind the figure did not waver. A fire-breathing lion remained nailed to the Rathaus’s courtyard door to guard and to sustain the authority of the city. In his mausoleum, von Erlach’s statue stared at an elaborately coffered ceiling. Prosperous citizens patrolled the streets, burghers enjoying their capital.
Many years later, when Joseph was little and living in London, and his mother, Nita, grew certain her husband had disappeared for good or ill—and all between—she would laugh about what she called the Annunciation. Horror and history make a charming couple. One day, she related, your father came to me and said, The child that is getting you biggish is Jewish. He will be a nice Jewish boy and grow up to be a proper Englishman. And to stop her tears he said they would prosper in England, she would see, England was a country of constitution, of Magna Carta; but she couldn’t see, blinded by weeping and in a state of confusion. She screamed at him, No Miriam me. Nita I am and shall remain, as I shall remain un-Britworthy and a proper Catholic girl. Nita you can be for me, Rudi said, but for everybody else you are Miriam now, and will remain Miriam until we are safely in London and out of the reach of reprisal. I see enemies in every direction, Miriam yelled at him. Yes. That is why we are making this adjustment in our selves. There are cowardly bullies and evil men circling our country, a country that has become a smelly corpse. To be an Austrian, now, is a calamity and will become a curse. We must leave. We cannot take the train so we shall harness a slower horse. Jews know something of such a life as we shall lead.
Miriam was dumbfounded by her husband’s sudden hatred for the land of his birth. All Austrians dressed warmly, loved music, and, though they may have thought poorly of others, thought well of God. Now that the empire was gone, they lived happily by themselves and on their own. They toiled without complaining, but they also knew how to eat, drink, and have fun. They prided themselves on being overweight. Miriam smelled nothing foul when she sniffed, and sometimes a nice schnitzel.
I have no knowledge of this English language. No one will understand me, and I … I shall simply wander around every town like someone in a fog of foreign words. The change will be a good one, her husband said. But our families … our past …, Miriam began, and went on even when her husband cut her off. We will not hear Austrian again, he insisted, we will not speak Austrian again, not just because of what Austria has been but because of what it will become. We will not share its future, he shouted, we will not suffer its wicked nature or bear it forward one more step.
Her tears wet her chin and throat and ran between her breasts. What Rudi had proposed was crazy, unless he had never been a Rudi but had been a Fixel all along. By becoming a Jew now, he was hiding the fact that he had been one before. That thought occurred to Nita, and it would occur to Miriam too. The change was in a way romantic, because if Rudi had been a Jew from birth, he could not, as a Jew, have courted Nita, and certainly not, as a Jew, have married her amid the consternations of two families. Gradually, she did become Miriam, because whom had she wed? A Yankel? So what was she to do?
2
Miriam, watching a video, would see the cowboys’ long coats and wide hats, and she would say, They—they looked like that: they wore long black coats hanging almost to the ground, wide-brimmed black hats, and showed faces full of solemnity and hair instead of other features. Five of them, five, she said, stood in a dark row before the opening—the hole in the house—where the Fixels camped. Caught unaware, flustered, Yankel held his yarmulke smashed against his head with one hand. The first figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have never looked into—you have never been touched by—the Torah. Their long coats made them look tall, as if their shadows had been added to their stature. In a close row they formed a fence of black posts, each post surmounted by a stiff brim. Glares were all on their side. From Fixel not a glimmer. For this case, his power of stutter was lost. The second figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have never seen the seal of God. The way they spoke made them seem wound up, their voices coming from far off like an echo among mountains. The third figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, are fore-skinned as far as your face. (It was true.) Their pale visages, from which beards hung, appeared to be far away as well, their dark clothes a cave out of which a sibyl spoke. The fourth figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have eaten unclean words; you have swallowed the poison of untruth. They each held a short black stick. The fifth figure was silent, everyone stood steady, and all were still. Finally, the fifth figure made a gesture that Miriam did not understand.
Yankel Fixel had been denounced.
This did not prevent him from enjoying the preferential treatment of a persecuted refugee. They—whoever the five Fates represented, a clutch of fanatical thugs, a row of wooden rabbis—had spoken to the false Fixel of their awareness and their displeasure, but they had not bothered to inform his boss or complain about him to anyone in the bureau that handled his affairs. So he had merely been confronted, not denounced. Denouncement might be in the offing. Rituals, he knew, proceeded by steps and stages. Perhaps Yankel should explain, he wondered aloud to his wife—she was, by his insistence, still Miriam—perhaps he should make plain the difference between his Jewishness and theirs: they had fled the ethically enviable condition of the victim, while he had fled the guilt of natal association, the animus of villainous authority. Might they understand, then, his plight? Was fleeing permitted only to potential victims? Might no one refuse the power and the privilege, the duties and indulgences, of the tyrant’s role? the honey and the money of the profiteer? or flinch from the hangman’s vengeance, the bigot’s bile, the fat cat’s claws, the smug burgher’s condescension, and the swagger of the bully? Must the offer of evil, Yankel asked the sky, like some hospitalities, always be accepted?
In case his five calumniators returned, Yankel hurried to prepare some strategies. We’ll admit we’re not Jews … we’ll admit it … but … but we’ll beg to become Jews … yes … beg. Miriam said, He said “beg.” I won’t beg, she said. If a man wants to become a Jew, the Jews say to him, Yankel said he’d read, they say to him—how does it go?—they say, Don’t you know that Jews are oppressed, prostrate, mistreated, undergoing suffering? and then we shall say, We know and we are not worthy of you. That’s the phrase. We … are … not … worthy … of … you. I am, though, Miriam said. I am mistreated. Here … right now … hear how I am undergoing suffering. O weh! Well, I won’t beg and I won’t say I am not worthy. I am a woman. They wouldn’t let me in their boys’ club anyway. You beg, my husband, you dirty your knees, you say to them: I am not worthy of you. Go on. You say it, she said she said. But the five Fates never returned.
As the war wound down, Jews began leaking out of England and landing in America, at first a few drops at a time and then in rivulets and finally in torrents. Yankel could not hope that the leaflet business would continue to prosper during peacetime, so he too began to consider such a move. Miriam, during this period, was working at a laundry during the early evening, boiling sheets and napkins, aprons and towels, standing for hours in steam, breathing bleach and starch and soap, keeping herself clean of imposture, repeating to herself, I know I’m me, Holy Mother, I shall not beg to be another, I shall not say, I am not worthy, I’m me, dear God, you can see I’m me.
Professor Joseph Skizzen remembered how his mother smelled when she returned to their shattered flat, how her odor glowed as though she were a fumigation candle as she made her way amid the dark stench of wet burned paper, wet charred wood, the peppery bite of powdered glass, the reek of oil and rubber, of smoke-stuffed sofas. And his
father was insisting that things looked grim for them again. In the world, affairs and facts smelled rank. To get to America as Jews they’d have to have papers attesting to their circumcised and wretchedly safe Semitic state, their exilic condition, and these bona fides they didn’t have. They would need visas, no doubt, which they couldn’t get. The Fixels were, in fact, fakes.
I am not a fake, Miriam said. You have made us fakes, she also insisted. You, a Yankel, have turned your children into liars, into Dvorahs and Yussels. Who are these folks? Abashed, annoyed, her husband would try to explain that people could choose to be otherwise than the selves that neighbors and the nation had shaped for them; that only an accident of birth separated Rudi Skizzen from Yankel Fixel; that she was Catholic because of her cradle; couldn’t she take the cradle away and be … well … British? This line of reasoning was not persuasive. Actually, he, her husband, the man who thrust himself into her so reliably Tuesday nights, as well as Saturdays sometimes, when the week had not been too strenuous, performing the act of ownership with only now and then a few huffs that couldn’t be helped so as not to disturb the children by moaning or threatening the thin mattress with his movements, was the same young man who had walked shyly along that rock-gardened country lane near Graz, steadily holding her left hand in his right and occasionally nuzzling her neck or nibbling an earlobe to hear her chuckle and chide him; he was the same because his convictions had not been revised; the heart that beat inside him kept up the same watchful rhythm as ever; he had no different a nose for disaster than before; and now the odor of the old order was overcoming him. He was a rare man, he told her, a wary man, a man of the middle, of leave-me-be, someone trying to stay out of moral trouble, a man of peace.
Gradually, a week at a time, the Rudi Skizzen who had wrapped himself in Yankel Fixel began to emerge as Raymond Scofield. He got a job in an offtrack betting parlor. He replaced his collection of Jewish jokes with quotations from music-hall songs and Gilbert and Sullivan. He left on his face a tentative slim mustache. He ate chips and tried to eat the fish. He spent more money than he should on movies. He bought a cloth cap. He practiced raising a finger to its bill. Not that he wanted to look touty. Not that he wanted to seem obsequious. What he wanted was to fade into the background, be a piece of household goods lost in the rubble of war; rubble from which the state summarily removed the family when it bulldozed blocks of bombed-out, burned-down, hovel-smelly buildings. This entailed considerable official confusion: Just who were they? Where should they be put? Confusion, especially among officials, his father said, was good, was promising, was an improvement. He told his wife she needn’t have her head shaved as he had suggested despite her screams of defiance, so she wouldn’t need the wig she refused to wear; that she could toss it down the broken stairs just the way she had already hurled it; and she’d never have a need to say, I am not worthy. Mary Scofield, he thought, should look for employment as a clerk. She should get rid of her accent by going to movies or listening to the BBC and then find safe work in an office. She should keep in mind that England was a class-driven society despite its constitution and its Magna Carta; a culture that could teach even the Viennese the importance of place and position. Stirring tubs of steaming dungarees was not for a Scofield who clearly had some social standing. Consequently they could claim to be only momentarily down on their luck.
Although his father could mimic British speech fairly well, his wife was unable to play the ape. Her accent could have held down papers in a wind. She refused, absolutely, to take on “Mary.” She was too worshipful of the real Mary, sick of subterfuge, and wary of the English, who struck her as snobs before all else; so, in compromise, Miriam she remained. Miriam Scofield was possible, Yankel—who was now Raymond, Raymond Scofield thought. Yankel Fixel was a bottom feeder, with a carp’s muddy name; Raymond—ah—Raymond Scofield would leap from the river to snap at the air. Calmed by the compromise, Raymond Scofield took a deep breath in order to think ahead. And from resentful, rebellious Miriam, Raymond Scofield stayed his hand, though she thought she saw it raised. The light was bad.
Infants and small children are sheltered from such changes, which take place at a level in adult life they hope, as they age, they will never reach. But the smells were different when they left the bomb-outs for simple bare rooms, institutionally disinfected, equal and anonymous; the look of their parents, the clothes they wore, the way they walked, the frowns they bore, were different, and to infants and small children the look of things, the sound and smell of things, the feelings, like atmosphere, that fill every emptiness, are all that life is. The warmth of their small stove was nothing like an open fire; they saw the world now through unbroken panes of greasy glass; they no longer had to pick their way among hazards, but the cream-walled room was cream walled night and day and all around them every way they turned. When Miriam came home, steamy and pungent, her smell seemed redundant in a room that was not a ruin, a room with a curtained corner for the commode, an uncovered corner for a stove, walls against which were pushed a small bed and two cots, no place where you could watch your pee fall through open floors for several stories. Miriam lay in Ray’s arms more often than before because brooming the floor of the betting parlor was easier on his energy, and because in that bed there was room and reason finally to conceive.
Though, to her relief, she did not, which Ray put down to the slow and silent—almost insincere—thrusting that was required, as if the children, now both in public school, didn’t know what their restless tossing and turning meant—to a degree, anyway. They are doing the blanket-bouncing business, they said. Ray urged Miriam toward another job. She felt clean as a creamery, of course, but he was sure his sperm could not live inside a womb so under the influence of soap.
Ray began to consider seriously what would be required, in terms of proper papers, friends, bribes, funds, to continue their journey to the New World, which now included Canada—indeed, Canada now looked easier. But they had no British papers, no Austrian ones, no identity, which the recently named Raymond Scofield should have found appealing, and indeed he would have, under slightly different circumstances, reveled in it, though he kept spelling his fresh name “Schofield,” a mistake that was dangerous. The Fixels were on some bureaucrat’s hands, the result of a national sympathy now silently regretted, and it seemed to Ray likely that those hands would be happy to release him from their responsibility. Release him, perhaps he thought. To be in the singular for the first time.
How is this possible, Miriam would frequently exclaim, she said, when trying to convey to her grown-up boy her husband’s preoccupations, because Ray would treat her exclamation as a question, and then misunderstand its obvious import. When we left Graz, Ray would maintain, we undid our ties; we left our prior selves behind like old clothes on their way to rags; we joined the dispossessed, yet were not one of them, either; and lived among ruins, and were seen only by corpsmen, clerks, and firemen when the cracks grew large enough to make us visible: that is why I can become a Scofield; it is a world of opportunity; anything is possible for us. But for the Jews … Jews have to be Jews now. They can never be French or Polish or German again. Opfer. He used the German word. They will always be Opfer. Opfer forever.
What gave Ray moral weight was the news: of the war’s victorious progress—or its calamitous outcome, according to Nita, who stubbornly retained her Austrian affections—news that justified his forebodings, that more and more stamped his harsh judgments with righteousness and made the family’s bizarre move as prescient as the foreknowledge of a prophet. You may seem clean because you smell of soap, he said, but I am clean on both sides of my conscience; your hands may be wrinkled they are so overwashed, but mine are smoother and whiter than paper. He held up his palms. You can see right through. The work my hands have done need not be hid; therefore I cannot be Austrian; an Austrian’s hands should slink back into its sleeves. And you too can enjoy an untroubled heart. Nita nodded without agreement. Her husband’s Thanks to me was l
oud though unspoken. My heart has been kidnapped, she said, borne with my babies away into a world of wreckage. I could have lived in my village a quiet harmless life … and held my hands out to anyone. Ray made a face yet not one of denial. You would have shaken hands that made profits, he insisted, that made killing implements; that fingered folks for the police; that helped in roundups; that made murder: hands of an uncle who supplied a troop, hands of a cousin who drove a truck, a nephew who sold clothes. You would be unaware: of the neighbor’s son who shot gypsies, homos, Jews, and the dentist who drew the gold from their teeth. There are so many slyboots, friends whom the Nazis fondled. You would have met on the street in Graz where you had gone to buy a hat—this one, that. You would have sat in a seat on the same train. You would not stare out the window but pretend to read as the train rolls past wire, cleared trees, a camp. You would have smiled at a man who had strung some of that wire, who had held a megaphone, who had taken advantage of imprisoned women. That would stain even well-washed hands and overcome nature’s fondness for pale ones because even a Negro’s palms are pink. Your graceful fingers would not be gnarled by honest work; they would slowly take the shape of claws. To desire an Austrian nationality is to accept the acts of assassins, tacitly to agree to—my God—mayhem and massacre. Now that you are no longer Nita, you are free of such disgusting contaminations. Don’t let their sort be lichen on some forest rocks, unseen and unremarked, or taken for granted like the persistent damp of Vienna’s stones, its postered kiosks, its gray streets. To the pure, to the stateless, my Nita, anything is possible.
Including … betting on a winning horse. Ray worked six months as a janitor at the betting parlor before he placed a modest sum upon the nose of a long-shot nag, not even in hope, more out of curiosity, and received immodest winnings, winnings which took him by surprise, took him aback, shook him up, shook him so he saw a solution in the sum he suddenly had in hand. This was the sort of shock Miriam later imagined her husband to have had: after a life of undeserving failure, a sudden unmerited success. Once you’ve placed a bet, you’ve made your bed, she said. Once you’ve been bitten by a bet and you’re ahead, you’re dead. Because bettors were mainly men of low principles, she was certain, often at loose ends, frayed in the bargain, men whose knowledge of the world was entirely set in terms of shortcuts, which, if you took enough of them, would allow your journey to zig in a ceaseless circle, to zag without seeing an end. Conceivably he could have lost his money in a game of cards and run shamefully away. To hide from whom, however? He could have gone from sin to sin, his appetites as sharp as razors, if he’d known what sin was or where sins were or how, even, to begin a stretch of sinning; but, though he could spot evil in a rubber stamp, he couldn’t tell a streetwalker from a floor lamp. Eventually, both police and such parlor patrons as confessed to Ray’s acquaintance concluded that he had secretly spent his money on documents, on plans, on bribes, on a steamship ride.
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