The door-bell rang. I answered it and signed my sister’s name for three gas-masks, one of them a child’s. “And the baby,” I asked, “the little girl? ”
“A blanket can be wrapped round her and she can be carried to the nearest gas-shelter.”
“Oh. Where is it? ”
A nervous smile. “There isn’t one.”
*
The first inoculation not having taken, the Czechoslovak writers tried again. This time it was brief. Perhaps the vein they were drawing on for the serum had closed.
Prague, 30th September, 1938
To the Conscience of the World
On this day when, by the decision of four statesmen, our country has been abandoned and delivered to injustice, with its hands bound, we remember your declarations of friendship, in the sincerity of which we believe. . . . Sacrificed, but not conquered, we charge you, who for the present have escaped our lot, to persevere in the common struggle of mankind.
I folded it away and with it the memories which otherwise might have lain about and got lost. Not all of these need looking after. A great many of them are out of the reach of a merely human memory. Such is Hradcany, lifted above sleeping Prague in a light thin enough to seem worn by time. Its absence, if it were destroyed by bombs, would be the form into which, for the sake of longer life, it had changed. There are others, among them Jiřina, for whom my skull is a thin cup, holding a very little life. During these last months she has written three times, letters so full of her eager spirit there is no room in them for bitterness or doubts. The third and last was a postcard, showing a narrow window closed by a grill of Renaissance iron-work; in the room behind it, one lamp. Since then, nothing.
*
In the train this evening I tried to read a poet. He had to struggle, poor wretch, with only my weak help, against the other people in the carriage. They had musical instruments of some sort on the rack. One, tall and stout, was a Jew; with him were a short fat man in an enormous overcoat protecting all of him except his head and feet, and a negro with one peg-top leg: clipped to it, the striped trouser-leg of a morning suit. The leader was the short man: facing him, the Jew learned aloud verses beginning: The Gollies are having a party, the Gollies are having fun. He had so much trouble in memorising it that the repetitions formed behind him a landscape, unchanging for an hour, the street with the fun palace, youths and girls fumbling their pennies into the slot, slack-fmgered, half-ashamed, the shops offering a drug guaranteed to cure both impotence and fertility, the Odeon selling cheap illusions at so much the living-hour, torn newspapers, the stale air which by now is only the breath of all these unclean bodies and of what they eat and excrete: all today’s dear pleasures. Every few minutes the leader snatched the page from his hands and “heard ” him. He was anxious. “You gotter be word perfect. The spotlight is on you. Yes, yes, you know it, but you’re thinking. You mustn’t think.” This went on and on, and the Poet triumphed! Not easily, but he triumphed. He was stronger, more solid and wiry, than many writers who show off their useless muscles. Of all poets the least able to bear the street coming into his house, waiting in an attentive anguish until the space of an obscure room gave birth to exotic voyages, until a lamp figured agony, a fan ecstasy and flight, he was still stronger than this cacophony of the present. The sunset on the left of the train was his favourite hour: in just such a flat green country, the curve of the river, a girl’s arm throwing off a white shift, her nakedness, the absent swan, merged into a single musical phrase, each of its notes containing all the others. Indoors again, the sunset reflects itself in a mirror, the only living gesture, and fixed, of a mind nailed to the Absolute. A modesty not to be distinguished from extreme pride closed for him every door leading to the life he could quite easily have led, in which a high reputation would have attached to work falling a degree or less short of his ideal. Je vague peu, préférant à tout, dans un appartement défendu par la famille, le séjour parmi quelques meubles anciens et chers et la feuille de papier souvent blanche. Movement, apparently motionless, towards a limpid purity reflecting all the errors of life. Even the three jazz musicians?
*
Vienna: 19, Paradisgasse.
My friends have lived in this house for a great number of years. Since it held a large family it is of fair size — but modest, even a little shabby: at the back its wooden verandah looks over a neglected garden, admirable for children. And since they are Jews, they will not be allowed to live here much longer. A Nazi official called yesterday and looked over it. Already one of the daughters, the most brilliant, is in Palestine and the tall young son on his way there. The other daughters, candid and lively, the youngest so gay, must go. They have had one alarm, when suddenly they were taken away to clean the Nazi barracks. Their mother implored to be taken instead. The young storm-trooper, almost a boy, looked at her and said, with simplicity, “But of course they must come. Would you let your mother go in your place? ” It was clear he would have been shocked if the girls had shown such a lack of affection and respect.
Before any harm came to them at the barracks they were sent home. The woman who had been a servant in the house, until the order forbidding Aryans to work for Jews, ran as soon as she heard about it to the barracks, and raged and scolded — it takes a good deal to silence an angry Viennese working-woman — until she got her way.
But the parents? How much Vienna means to them! How they are held to it by all the deeds and thoughts of a quietly long married life, and of the childhood from which almost without interval they passed into being husband and wife. The thoughts and voices of their great-great-grandparents reach out from the dark streets close to the Danube, to clutch and draw them. How become deaf to all this, and to the voices of old cups, of chairs polished during a lifetime, of worn fine linen? In the end they will decide to go with their children, and Vienna will be the poorer by a retired professor of history and his wife. Don’t you see? Their goodness, simple without naivete, has a loyal radiance, and Vienna is no longer so full of light that it can afford to lose it. It cannot, but it will: it will lose the serenity of Anna’s smiling mouth, a young moment cancelling the grief, older than she is, of her eyes; it will lose the love she pours over so many of its commonest things, reviving them; her body, which still keeps its angular girlhood; her mind, sheltering in the very centre of its experience an essential innocence. She has no supple or caressing softness: all her acts are purely direct and simple, the direct movements of a spirit. What, when she goes, will happen to the things in her house which she has served carefully all her life because it was a way of serving her parents, who also had used them, and her children? To the cup she is turning in her fingers? “Look, it was my mother’s,” she says, smiling.
Who will drink from it in future — and what, in Nazi Vienna, will he drink?
*
Some of the many Jews in Vienna, less courageous, or closer menaced than my friends, have not waited. Either they had no hope of escape, or the end, when they thought of holding out, was too heavy for them to carry. They snatched themselves from it, some violently; but one at least whom I knew gave himself poison in a cup such as Anna had shown me, his name-day cup, given him when he was an infant; perhaps he felt, because it had always been in the house, that it was still friendly.
Others are trying to escape. They fill the courtyard and rooms of our Consulate, pressed closely together, jostling each other for a foothold on the stairs, clamorous or silent, patient, raging. Their faces all have the same habit: at moments they become quite vacant, as though the life behind them sank down, unable to drag itself another step; then in a minute it remembers and starts up, and sweat breaks out on the yellowish skin, or the lips tremble and a drop of moisture forms there and hangs. There is an extraordinary odour, making it difficult to breathe in the rooms. I have never smelled it before, and I recognise it — the smell of fear. The harassed consular staff does its best; it is forced to keep the door locked on the inner courtyard, letting in two or three at a
time the crowd which surges forward, all at once, crying, imploring life, as soon as the door opens. If I hold my passport up above the heads of these frantic shades, I shall be let in ahead of them. For a long time I cannot make myself do this. Why remind the others that one of us here is still alive?
Some of these men and women come here day after day and stand. They are losing their hold on time, on the time they knew. When after hours of waiting they realise that the door is closing for the last time they do not feel that a day has passed. Each of them now is increasingly alone: his mind has ceased to remind him, not only about the passage of hours and days, but that these walls, these stones and stone steps, look to other people as they do to him. Knee deep in it like animals in a stream, each is living closed in a single world of feeling — heat, hunger, or the trembling of his limbs. See, they don’t talk to each other: at first they did, taking out a hope or a terror and handing it round. What could they say now when none of them sees anything except his fear? All he hears or touches is only this sensation of fear, which belongs blindly to him, not to any of the others. The world now is only what he feels. He is his fear.
A woman who has been leaning against the wall, with both hands on it, faints. They look at her lying there in her black clothes, and at first no one moves. At last and sullenly, three men lift her and carry her outside. What if in their absence the door opens again for a minute? And against the other wall a child sitting on the ground plays, tired of it, with a small wooden horse. Continually he lifts his eyes to look at his mother standing above him. She, pale, and like the others alone, has ceased to answer his look, and he turns it again to the toy which long since stopped caring for him.
*
Today it rained, a chill fine rain which clings like cobwebs. Why am I in Vienna, if all I speak to turns out to be the husk of something I expected to find alive — the park now almost a barracks, the friendly owner of the Keller become slyly a Nazi? I felt restless and ashamed this morning. I walked about the streets, between the Kärntner Strasse and the Graben, to and fro endlessly: I had forgotten what I was looking for until, very suddenly, I stumbled on it. It came abruptly and gently out of the Vienna of eight years ago; and gave itself up — one of those moments, unwilled, unbidden except by the cry in us we did not even know was waiting and with all its force expectant, when the whole of a past, of one of our pasts, opens itself in the present. It lives, we say, again. What nonsense! Its new life is no more like the old than my hand, with eight more years of work marked on it, is the hand I brought here in 1930. The endless moment this morning when I stood and brushed the rain from my face in front of an obscure shop in a narrow unpromising side-street, had had dissolved into it an infinity of moments. They cannot be counted because I can’t separate them. There are all those when as a child I was saving my pocket-money — a weekly threepence — against the next birthday or Easter or Christmas or the anniversary of her wedding or New Year: it was no use for her children to think of giving my mother a present which was not fine or unusual; common things did not please her and she never pretended they did. And when I grew up, in every new or foreign place I visited, I searched the shops for the right present to take back to her. It was less habit than an instinctive will. Where the child, pretending an interest, had stood and stared into foreign shops, the grown woman, alone now, stared thinking: Would it do for her? Would she like it? If ever my whole self acted, it did when it looked for presents for her — as it does now when I give things to my only son or myyoung sister. And perhaps only then.
When I was here before, it was very hot. I looked a long time at handbags in the window now covered with anti-Jewish notices, but day after blazing day passed before I could make up my mind. I walked about, giving her this dress and that bag, giving her the milky Danube looked down on from the Kahlenberg, giving her the Opera House and Jeritza’s clear voice of light and triumph, but it was not until the moment in front of this shop, accidentally reached — not a street where you would expect such a shop — that I saw her present: the curiously woven bed-jacket in white soft wool, almost weightless, a feather lying on my hand. Could I, when I was buying it, know that she would admire it so much she would grow afraid to wear it? It spent almost all its time with her between layers of soft paper. Or that the moment, nearer than all the others, and part of them, inseparable, which would give to this latest its form and colour — springing from the bitterest depth, the gentlest shadow, of my life as daughter and human being, stifling me — of a tear, would be the one when I handed it to the two women who were dressing her? “She liked this, it’s almost new, let her wear it.”
*
There is no way, in words, to express these moments formed from a lifetime of others. It can be done in music, where without effort the ear takes in a whole world of experience dissolved note by note in a single phrase. The poet who came nearest to it, in certain of his poems, did not succeed. Offered one of his condensed and complex images — and when their sense is most musical their sound is often least so — we cannot help separating the several images, to set them side by side for the benefit of a false clearness, and thus all but destroy them before reviving them by plunging them again into the verse.
Mais langoureusement longe
Comme de blanc linge ôté
Tel fugace oiseau si plonge
Exultatrice à côté
Dans l’onde toi devenue
Ta jubilation tine.
Even in the verse the words are hard and definite, more images than evocative. Evocation may be strongest when the objects it names are least clear.
And since he, of all poets, failed, it seems that there is no direct way, by means of words, to express the only realities of our life. We live, apart from these few scattered moments, wholly on the unreal surface, joined by words to things and creatures about whom we know nothing except in the moments we cannot share with them. Extreme and unendurable — except that we endure it — silence of our life. The only words we find are lies. The mind speaks no language, and language offers only symbols of mind. Sometimes, not often, we act the truth. But here, too, it is perhaps only the last minute which is true, when it is out of our hands to make a deceitful or false gesture.
*
Remembering it — and the rain had stopped — I went through the other courtyards into the Josefs-Platz. It was empty, except for an elderly man who was standing as if puzzled: he might have forgotten why he had come. Looking at him a little closely I saw that he was a Jew. I walked across the small square, my back to its shuttered windows of the Pallavicini palace, followed by them, to the place where in 1930 a few rows of chairs faced a platform in the angle of the Redouten-Sale and the great Library. It was dark then, the dark warmth of a June night. There were no lights except in a few windows, and one on the platform for the singers. Behind the chairs occupied for the most part by foreigners with money to spend, the small crowd of Viennese people, a few of them barefoot, shadows and unmoving in the darkness. I stood now in the full sunlight and asked for the darkness. It came only for a second, and in the Pallavicini building behind me windows opened in rooms where a lamp turned down scarcely showed a single or two or three listening figures, and the last note of the Nachtmusik reached across eight years to die in the sunlight, in the empty square. Empty? The elderly Jew was there — listening — or only seeing. Hardly likely that his silence was the same shape and colour as mine, but like mine it filled the square, between the windows, and as far upwards as we chose to think. And no doubt for him, too, nothing as he waited happened, except perhaps the silence itself, the refusal to answer, the stubborn absence of the dead when we speak; the waiting, the doubts, the remembered moment where the darkness will be reflected, and when as now we neither hear nor speak.
*
It is good to look back sometimes, and notice how great joy or great despair alike told us nothing, absolutely nothing. I was fourteen when we moved into a new house. I can see myself cutting up a loaf at a table in the window of
the kitchen: such a large room, and full of air and brightness. Outside I could hear children playing in a garden, and a poignant delicious joy seized me, with the thought of living here, mixed somehow with the smell of the new bread I was buttering, and the idea of new friends. Nothing warned me of the despair these children would make me suffer by jeering at my awkwardness. Nor, when I was suffering the agony of being laughed at, could I imagine — and be comforted — a time when they would be exemplary men and women, about whom I should not even know whether they are living or dead.
*
Budapest.
The delight of solitude in a foreign town. I felt it as soon as I woke this morning. No one here knows me, I shall speak to no one, except concierges and waiters, I am free — and always under my eyes, I have only to go to the window, less cloudy, brighter and colder than in Vienna, and a part of the life here, the Danube. This feeling of freedom, of my real and own life stretching itself in me, realising that it is free to feel, think, be what it please, is extraordinary — and worth a great deal.
And what is this own life? Let me look at you. Come; come forward from whatever it is you hide in, an old blackened, with age, mirror, or a lie or many lies. No one is here. Even the room doesn’t know you, has never seen us, and will forget us the moment we have gone. In any event, and however long you live in it, you never manage to impress a room. Outside, a foreign city, indifferent, with its secrets you may guess but needn’t acknowledge, is waiting: you can walk in it without being seen. Well? Nothing, I see, expansive or reckless: a rather cold curiosity; an eye, an ear; self-absorbed, shut-in. There is more in you than I thought of the old kind of captain, the man who carries all the responsibility for his ship and the authority, so that he is deeply and for months alone and can never give himself away, and if to begin with he were reserved or felt slighted, he has become secretive, surly, hard. It is when you are alone in a foreign country that you behave like him, and are more like him than you are like her, the captain’s young wife who only needed company to walk about staring openly and wondering. This morning it is as if a drop of the North Sea had found itself in Central Europe. Would it change its nature? No — it would become itself, completely, coolly, joyously itself— if joy is this feeling of space round what has been squeezed and twisted.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 12