Schlepping Through the Alps

by Sam Apple

  Still, Sichrovsky's reasoning was somewhat deceptive: All of the major Austrian parties might have shameful pasts, but they weren't all equally shameful. The Social-Democratic Party (then known as the Socialist Party) and the People's Party had gotten into bed with Nazis. The Freedom Party had been founded by and for Nazis. The leaders of the other parties might still be anti-Semites, but unlike the Freedom Party officials, they no longer used Nazi rhetoric in their speeches.

  I should have challenged Sichrovsky, but I was overwhelmed by the forcefulness of his delivery and was also tired and not thinking clearly. I thanked him for his time and left. On my way out he handed me an autographed copy of his new book, Jewish Love Stories.

  It was midday. I bought a black Puma bag with gold stripes on the side because a very attractive saleswoman with long blond hair and an earring in her nose had encouraged me to do so, then headed to a small shoe-repair stand, hoping that my shoes could be returned to a single color. An old man with reddish hair and a strong chin stood behind the counter, racks of shoe heels and small tools behind him. “Because you are tourist,” he said, “I will polish shoes for ten schillings.” I doubted that tourists received special discounts, but it sounded like a good price, and so I stood on the street in my tube socks and waited. When the old man handed my shoes back, I announced that I was a journalist and asked him what he thought of the current government.

  The old man paused, then looked me up and down. “You are Jewish?”

  “Yes,” I said, slightly startled.

  “I am Jewish,” he said. “From Russia.”

  I smiled, but the man seemed no warmer now that we had made a connection. “And what do you think of this government and Haider?”

  “More Nazis in America than here,” the old man said loudly. Then he glanced at my shoes and said it again. “More Nazis in America than here.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  The old man repeated the phrase for the third time, as though it were suddenly the only thing he knew how to say in English.

  Unsure of what else to do, I paid him ten schillings for the shoeshine and walked off.

  In my now even-toned shoes, I ventured into Vienna's Second District, the center of the city's large Jewish community until 1939, and made my way to Jambo, a small African restaurant where the administrators ofno-racism.net had instructed me to meet them. Before I left for Austria, I had done a web search on “racism” and “Austria” and found thatno-racism.net kept popping up. The site was mostly in German, and I wasn't quite sure what it was all about, but when I e-mailed and said I was a journalist, the administrators expressed interest in meeting me—no doubt assuming I was a much more important person than I am.

  For five minutes I was the only white person in the restaurant. Then two men and two women fromno-racism.net walked in, and they too were white. Both of the men had brought black dogs, one of which was wearing a red bandana. The younger of the two women looked about my age. She wore a tank top, and her apricot-colored hair brushed her exposed shoulders. She reminded me of the cool hippie girls I had lusted after from a distance during college.

  It was too noisy to hear one another at Jambo, but before we left, one of the men—he refused to give me his real name—insisted that I interview the restaurant's owner. I walked up to the bar, where I was introduced to a tall Kenyan man named John. I asked John if he had experienced a lot of racism in Vienna, and he said that he hadn't had too many problems until six years ago, when he opened Jambo. Since then the police had repeatedly raided the restaurant, rounding up people who didn't have papers. Now and then they came looking for drugs. “Sometimes I want to close the restaurant,” John said, “but I don't want them to think they've won.”

  I spent the next three hours talking with theno-racism.net administrators about the treatment of immigrants in Austria. They explained how Haider had manipulated anxieties about Austria's integration into the European Union to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment, and they took turns describing the cruelty of the government's response to asylum seekers.

  The police brutality they described sounded a lot like what was going on in New York at the time, but one difference, I learned, was that Austrian politicians could still get away with openly racist remarks. Freedom Party officials regularly call black immigrants “drug dealers,” and in past elections the party had put up signs calling on Austrians to stop Vienna from turning into Chicago—their code name for the black inner city. The year before, in a discussion of the increase in foreign doctors in Vienna, Haider had remarked, “In the future every jungle bunny [Buschneger] will be able to treat his kind in Austria.”

  “But in terms of actual treatment of the minorities and asylum seekers,” I asked at one point, “has there really been a big change between this government and the last?”

  There was a brief pause, then the woman in the tank top, Irene (pronounced E-ren-e), broke the silence. “Before asylum prisoners had to do a hunger strike for two weeks to get the government to respond,” she said. “Now you have to do it for three weeks.”

  I liked the response and the giggle that followed it. When we parted, I thought about asking her out, but I was supposed to be a professional journalist, and besides, I'd never had the confidence to ask out a woman I didn't know, let alone when my nose hair might be visible.

  On the U-bahn ride home, I sat across from a tall African man. I felt like an idiot. All this time I had been thinking only about Jews, but the Freedom Party, I was coming to understand, was a greater threat to the new immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe. The best way to memorialize Austria's Jews, I thought, was to fight for the Nigerians and Bulgarians and Slovenes and Slovaks. They were the Austrian Jews of today.

  Sixteen

  How Funny to See You Again

  Hans wasn't scheduled to return home until the next evening, and in the morning Christine and I had plans to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum together to see the El Greco exhibit.

  On the way to the museum Christine told me that prior to Hans, the love of her life had been a man named Peter, who had committed suicide. “He was very extreme,” Christine said, “maybe more extreme than Hans.” She said Peter was also Jewish, also something of a philosopher, and, amazingly, had also worked with sheep, although only briefly and not as a shepherd.

  “How did you manage to find two Jewish men in Austria who had worked with sheep?” I asked.

  “I was looking for people who understand,” Christine said, “people who know what is psychological pain even if it is a different psychological pain from mine.”

  “Well, if you were looking for psychological pain, Hans was a great choice,” I said.

  “Yes,” Christine said without smiling.

  In the museum, surrounded by El Greco's anxiously gesturing Christians, I saw Irene standing next to an older woman.

  I thought about approaching her, but what would I possibly say? I could start with Hey there, but then she'd say, Hi or Hey, and then what would I say? What's going on? What's up? It was impossible.

  I looked at El Greco's sensuous Mary Magdalene gazing heavenward, her lilac cloak falling off her creamy shoulders. Then I turned to the corner of the room, put my index finger under my nose to check for the hair, and walked over to Irene.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said. “How funny to see you again.” She was wearing another tank top. Her hair was pulled back, but she had left out one sexy wisp to dangle over the right side of her face. She had brown eyes and piercings up and down her ears.

  “Yeah, it's really funny,” I said.

  “I'm here with my mom,” Irene said.

  “Cool,” I said. “So is there anything to do in Vienna at night?” Irene said that yes, in fact, there are things to do in Vienna at night and that if I'd like, she could show me one of them. We made plans to meet at a bar on the Danube called Flex later that evening.

  I had a date with a woman I barely knew. It called for a celebration. I brief
ly entertained the idea of running up to the museum guard and giving him a leaping chest thump, then thought better of it and quietly returned to Mary Magdalene. It felt a little bit like a miracle.

  Hans arrived at Christine's apartment tired and dirty later that afternoon.

  “How were the last few days?” I asked.

  Hans shook his head. “With Kati, there is always difficulties,” he said, pulling off his shirt. I could see the exhaustion in his eyes and in the slight droop of his jaw.

  Unlike me, Hans has no issues about stripping in front of others, and the next thing I knew, he was naked in Christine's hallway shower singing a Yiddish love song about a mother who goes to the market to buy coal and returns with a groom with “little black eyes” for her daughter. After the shower Hans put on what I assumed was Christine's silk Chinese robe and announced that he was going to be on TV in a few minutes—an Austrian film crew had spent a few days taping him for a popular nature program. Christine joined us in front of the TV in the spare bedroom.

  The segment lasted five minutes and showed Hans, Kati, Andi, and Wolfi walking in the mountains. There was footage of Hans calling to the sheep and of Kati yanking a goo-covered lamb from its mother's womb with alarming force.

  I was about to congratulate Hans when it ended, but he didn't look at all pleased. “You see they create this fairy tale for television,” he said, turning off the TV.

  Christine nodded. “They want to show Hans and Kati like it is one happy family,” she said. “They don't like to show the reality.”

  “You will tell the real story,” Hans said with a glum smile.

  Later it occurred to me that the TV program had made no mention of Hans's Yiddish singing.

  I asked Hans about this omission, and he said the director wasn't interested in his singing. “I told him about it, but he wanted only to tell the story of shepherd in the countryside,” Hans said. “This would be what the TV audience here would like to see.”

  Irene was sitting in the dark at an outdoor picnic table in front of Flex. The bar was on the bank of the Danube, and it was chilly. She wore an orange zip-up sweatshirt, the hood resting between her shoulder blades.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  We bought beers and talked casually for a minute, then Irene took out a lighter that was covered in what looked like rubbery Hershey's Kisses.

  “I make these,” she said, noticing my interest. “I sell them from my bike at all the antigovernment rallies.”

  “That's awesome,” I said.

  “Do you smoke marijuana?” she asked.

  I thought back to the last time I had tried years earlier: After two hits I had declared to a roomful of people that I was having an asthma attack and had to be talked out of calling 911.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Irene handed me the silicon-covered lighter and a tightly rolled joint.

  “You first.”

  I put the joint between my lips and flicked at the lighter's wheel with my thumb. Nothing. I flicked again. Then again. Nothing. This woman will never have sex with me, I thought.

  Irene took the lighter from me without asking. I felt her skin on mine.

  “You don't smoke much?” she said.

  I shrugged, and she lit the joint, still perched between my lips. I did my best to inhale.

  Next to us a group of teenagers, also sharing a joint, occasionally broke into song. Later one of them came over to Irene and said something about the Führer. When she handed them her lighter, I understood that he had said Feuer, or “fire.”

  The smell of pot was thick in the air. The Danube moved quietly behind us. I asked Irene a lot of questions about herself and she said, “Pfu,” as in, That's a tough one, again and again before answering. She told me that when she wasn't protesting or working on the no-racism website, she was writing her thesis on refugee children living in Vienna and doing freelance Web design.

  I told her about Hans and the sheep and the shit and the hop hops. Probably the drugs kicked in right around then, because Irene began to laugh fairly hard. Then I too began to giggle for long stretches, hoping that we weren't really laughing at what an idiot I was.

  When the conversation turned serious, Irene told me that her father died a year before and that she still missed him every day.

  She was a hippie with a serious side, a free spirit who had more or less devoted her life to fighting for the rights of minorities in Austria. Nothing could have impressed me more at that moment. I was smitten, and maybe a little drunk.

  Irene lived near Christine, and we agreed to take the train back together. When I stopped to buy a ticket, Irene laughed at me. The Viennese subways don't require tickets to get on the train and instead rely upon occasional raids, or “controls,” as Irene called them, during which the police stop the train and check everyone's ticket. I hadn't yet experienced one of these raids, but the entire system struck me as an incredibly bad idea. Even if you've purchased a ticket, it's not particularly relaxing to know that at any minute your train might be raided by German-speaking cops.

  “But what will we do if there's a control?” I asked.

  “We'll run as fast as we can,” she said, walking ahead of me and laughing.

  On the one hand, I could hardly think of a worse scenario for my Nazi-ridden psyche than to have Austrian police chasing me through the streets of Vienna. On the other hand, a small and rather stupid part of me liked the thought that I was cheating the anti-Semitic bastards out of fifty cents.

  Just moments before my stop, I turned to Irene. “Will we stay in touch?” I asked.

  “Why not?” she said. We were at my station.

  “But I don't have your number,” I said, stepping off the train.

  “Okay,” Irene said, laughing, “I'll give it to you.” She jumped out of the train seconds before the doors closed. It was just before midnight, and we were the only two people on the Johnstrasse platform. We looked at each other.

  “This doesn't make any sense,” Irene said.

  I wasn't sure what she meant, but I liked the reference to the “this.” Until that moment I hadn't been sure there was a “this.”

  I leaned forward and she leaned forward and we pecked on the lips.

  “Does this make any sense?” she asked, looking up at me.

  Hell no, I thought. You're Catholic and Austrian, and I'm obsessed with what your people did to my people, and besides, this cant make sense because things like this don't happen to me—I can barely make eye contact with women, let alone get them to kiss me in subway stations.

  “I don't know,” I said.

  Irene put her hands on my chest and ran them down my stomach, and we walked back to my apartment together.

  In bed, Irene's body pressed against mine, I made a crack about my being a Jew and her being an Austrian. Irene told me she didn't like to look at things that way.

  “I'm just joking around,” I said.

  “It's not funny,” she said. “We're both just people.”

  Seventeen

  Escape from Vienna

  Hans was in the back room on the night in 1972 when the neo-Nazis threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the Spartakus apartment. He heard the smash of the glass and the squeal of car tires, but by the time he ran outside, the assailants were gone.

  That night the Spartakus members gathered around the table and debated their next step. The bomb, in their eyes, was more evidence of what they had been saying all along: The fascists were again preparing to destroy their political enemies. The street thugs weren't the only threat. The Austrian authorities were also cracking down. One member of the group had been charged with kidnapping a reformatory escapee he had helped to hide from the police. Another member had received a death threat from an officer in the Austrian army. The stakes had risen. Something had to be done.

  The meeting, like all Spartakus meetings, was led by the leader of the group, a dark-haired Frenchman named Roland Perrot. Going
by the nickname Remi, Perrot arrived in Vienna in 1968, claiming to be on the run from the French police for his involvement in the May ’68 student revolt in Paris. After Remi died in 1993, one of his supposed fellow combatants in the “international brigade” revealed that rather than fighting in the streets, Remi had been in a psychiatric institution prior to his arrival in Vienna. But there was no way for Hans or the others to know this at the time. They saw Remi, then in his midthirties, as the only adult who understood their anger, and they were mesmerized by his stories of fighting in the student barricades.

  As the members of Spartakus sat around the table in silence, Remi told them that it was time to abandon Austria. Spartakus was being intentionally provoked, and the group's best strategy was to avoid the trap being set for them. Away from Austria they could regroup and create their own settlement, a place that would be entirely free of capitalist corruption and bankrupt bourgeois values.

  Before the project had been merely to create a new type of human being. Now they would create an entirely new society. There would be no egos, no jealously, no private property, and no wages. And, most important of all, no one would put his own interests above the group's. “Our plan was to create a Cuba in Europe,” Hans said with a laugh.

  Not everyone in the group agreed that fleeing the country was the best strategy. In a brief account of his years with Spartakus, Michael Genner, the accused kidnapper, describes the decision to leave Austria as a disastrous misjudg-ment. “We could have joined in the left movement that had arisen in Austria—arisen not least through us,” Genner writes. “But—we fled. We ourselves gave up.… It was the decisive mistake from which all the other mistakes derived.” Hans, near the bottom of the Spartakus hierarchy, had no say in the matter. Remi was the undisputed leader, and he had made up his mind.