by John Lawton
“A cello, Papa. A 1707 Mattio Goffriler cello.”
§11
“Did he say where he was going?”
“To London.”
“Good God, why London? Why not Paris or Amsterdam? What does London have to offer? The madman Thomas Beecham. Beecham waving his baton in the pouring rain for a nation of philistines in wet wool and false teeth!”
“Papa, I didn’t ask why London, but Viktor told me all the same. He thinks Paris will fall. He thinks Amsterdam will fall.”
“Amsterdam? But Holland is neutral.”
Imre thought a moment about the stupidity of what he had just said—Julius would have laughed him into blushes for that—and added, “I suppose Viktor has seen what the Nazis can do. He told me everything about his flight from Germany.”
“Me, too.”
“And the cello? He just gave you the cello?”
“Yes. He called it ‘portable property,’ but he didn’t explain what that meant.”
“I think he meant the cello was valuable. Is it worth much?”
“A fortune, Papa. It is worth a fortune.”
“Bloody hell!”
And from the kitchen her mother’s voice, “Imre! Pas devant!”
§12
Being, as Viktor had promised her, “the first to know,” she never doubted. The Germans were coming. But in never doubting she never imagined. “The Germans are coming” remained a phrase and conjured no reality. The reality was not that the Germans were coming but that Rosen was gone.
On March 14, 1938, the Germans took Vienna without a shot being fired. Hitler’s cavalcade rolled into the city to a rapturous reception.
Méret thought she would be kept home as she had been during the workers’ strike and in the dangerous days following the death of Dollfuss, but her father had talked her mother around.
“She’s growing up. This is the world in which she will have to live. God knows, I wish it weren’t, but this is the world in which she will have to live . . . or change it.”
So she was allowed out, not to change the world but to mingle with the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, who crowded into the Heldenplatz to see forty staff cars roll up to the Hofburg, to have their cheers drowned out by a Luftwaffe fly pass, to hear the Führer address his Ostmark from a balcony of the old Hapsburg palace.
“I know that the old eastern capital of the German Reich will do justice to its new tasks just as she once solved and mastered the old ones.”
But she was more interested in the new patriots than in Hitler. Vienna had, throughout her childhood, been a city of paramilitaries—of young men strutting around in riding britches, or lots of leather belts with straps and buckles, or shirts in odd colours, sporting arcane insignia. Something in the Viennese that loved a uniform as much as a waltz—the Heimwehr, the Jewish Youth Bund, the Schutzbund, the Patriotic Youth Movement, the Loyal League of Left-handed Lutheran Housepainters—every so often one or other of them got banned, which fanned the flames of membership wonderfully by reducing the uniform to a badge worn secretly behind the lapel, as discreet as Mae West’s cleavage, as gratifying as a mason’s handshake. Now the brownshirts were openly on the streets, and those without brown shirts sported striking red brassards—a black swastika on a white circle. A waltz, a good cup of coffee, an Apfelstrudel, a uniform, and a speech from a bored dictator. What more could Vienna ask?
She drifted off. Enough is enough and the mob would go on cheering long after Hitler had showed his contempt and vanished from the balcony. Turning from the Heldenpaltz to head north toward home, she passed a face she thought she knew, arm raised, head up, cheering till he was hoarse.
She stared at the arm bearing the brassard until he noticed her.
“Hello, young lady.”
“Hello, Herr Knobloch.”
It was her father’s barber. The man who had daubed her with a toothbrush Hitler moustache. The same lackadaisical socialist who had never wanted to be German and had been stunned when told by her father that they all would be one day soon. Now that one day had arrived.
Knobloch lowered his arm and clapped a palm across the swastika, not so much concealing it as reassuring himself that it was still there and that that was what the girl was staring at.
He turned and the two walked up the street side by side.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Do you, Herr Knobloch?”
“But it’s easy. Dead easy. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
“What happened to ‘it can’t happen here’?”
“It has happened. Just as your dad said it would.”
“Tell me, Herr Knobloch, do you think my father will want his beard shaved by a Nazi?”
“I’m not a Nazi.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’m a survivor.”
“And this is what you do to survive?”
“What? Just putting on me armband and giving a few cheers so the neighbours can see? That’s nothin’, that’s nothin’ to what we might end up doing. I know your dad’s the clever one, but I’ll make a prediction now. I don’t know, you don’t know, and your dad don’t know what any of us will have to do to survive.”
They walked on a few streets in silence. The sound of cheering faded into the background, and they came to a parting of their ways.
Knobloch pulled off his brassard and stuffed it into a jacket pocket.
“Tell your dad I’ll be round in the mornin’ at the usual time. Nazi or no Nazi, I’ll bet he still wants his shave.”
He smiled. He was not an unpleasant man. A simple man, she thought, a bit of a wag. But she could not tell if his pretense that things might now go on as normal was meant to reassure her or just himself.
“I’ll tell him,” she said.
§13
Méret had been in the Vienna Youth Orchestra since June 1936—a matter of weeks after her professional debut with Rosen—and had found herself the youngest member. In the best of circumstances she did not make friends easily. To make friends at all was on the fringe of her nature, but she had found herself adopted, rescued from her own silence, by three musicians in the youth orchestra—Magda Ewald (trombone), two years older; Roberto Cacciato (clarinet), a year older; and Inge Reiter (viola), also two years older. Magda was Austrian through and through, Roberto was the son of Italian immigrants, Inge was as Viennese as Magda—but Jewish.
Inge was not a practicing Jew and could not name a single member of her family who was. Asked when the family had secularized, her father Jakob “Jack” Reiter would usually reply, “When did the ark crash on Ararat? It must have been the day after that.”
Jack Reiter was an acquaintance of her father’s. Perhaps a friend, perhaps not. He ran a cinema just around the corner from the Artemis Theatre. Imre had treated its opening with some contempt. Working with Shakespeare and Schiller, he had no need of Mary Pickford or Douglas Fairbanks. And certainly no need of the competition. But when Reiter gave over evenings to the new German cinema, to the work of Fritz Lang or F.W. Murnau, Imre softened, all but conceded that the cinema might be art. Méret had been to the cinema many times with her father, had been terrified by Nosferatu, dazzled by Metropolis, awed by the prescience of Dietrich and Nazimova. Was there another earthly creature as ugly as Max Schreck? Was there another earthly creature as beautiful as Marlene Dietrich? Was there another earthly creature as graceful as Alla Nazimova?
When their daughters became friends, Imre’s enthusiasm all but burst. Ever the conciliator, peacemaker, fixer, he suggested that they had the makings of a string quartet. Neither girl showed much interest in this, but Jack Reiter quashed the idea with a plain statement of the times.
“Imre, I doubt you will have so much as a moment’s difficulty recruiting the two violinists, and we have no shortage of venues, but do you really think anyone but you will want their children associating professionally with Jews?”
The idea had died on Jack’s lips and i
n her father’s heart. Méret never thought about it again.
In the days after the fall of Austria, Méret continued to wander the city—her father’s “change the world” diminishing in her mind with every day that passed. It seemed to her that Vienna was now one vast and endless parade. Every organization that could teach men to march in step did so. She viewed what Vienna was enduring, what it was becoming, what it had so half-heartedly willed into being, with a glassy detachment. It was something seen reflected in a shop window.
There were Jews on their hands and knees scrubbing graffiti from the paving stones in the street—there was talk of rabbis being forced to clean public lavatories armed only with toothbrushes. And soon Jews were excluded entirely from public life, from the civil service, from the universities . . . from the press.
Passing the Reiters’s home, a few streets from her own, she found Inge sitting outside the apartment building. A large hand-painted sign next to her read: “Apartment sale. Everything must go. Bargains for all.”
“What’s going on?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We’re selling up.”
“Why?”
“My father has lost his job.”
“Why?”
“He’s a Jew in what the Nazis say is a vital arm of communications.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“Only that he shows newsreels in the cinema. That makes him part of communications. The Nazis are getting rid of all the Jews in newspapers and radio. By this stretch of logic, that now includes my father. He won’t be paid at the end of the month, and perhaps not for months to come, so we must sell to live.”
“Everything?”
“God knows. Our neighbours have turned into crows and we are just carrion. They offer us pennies for things my father worked hard to buy and he accepts.”
A fat old woman wrapped in black emerged with a handful of cutlery, cackling out loud about the low price she had paid, loudly proclaiming that she had got the better of a Jew. She shuffled on down the street without even noticing Inge or Méret.
Méret stepped into the hallway, heard the bumping hubbub from the rooms above, climbed the stairs to the sitting room where a sad, pale Herr Reiter sat taking change in an old tobacco tin, listening with none of his daughter’s anger or impatience as people he had known a lifetime argued over coppers and robbed him blind.
Passing the bathroom on her way to Inge’s room, she saw Frau Reiter sitting on the linen basket, red-faced and angry. Seeing Méret watching she kicked the door to. In Inge’s bedroom all her books and toys were laid on the desk. Childhood spread out like a deck of cards. Among them was a black-faced doll, canvas body stuffed with cotton rags, its head a shiny orb of porcelain with painted curls and red lips. Years ago, Méret’s father had bought her a china-head doll with painted flaxen curls and blue eyes. The head was cracked now, the blue paint of the eyes flaking. Inge had taken better care of hers. Méret had always wanted a second china doll—some girlish daydream that the dolls would talk to one another when she wasn’t there, and if she came home early and crept in she might catch them, out of their box and talking, like characters in a Hans Christian Andersen tale. It was a fantasy of an eight- or nine-year-old, which she found surprisingly alive at fourteen.
She picked up the doll, slipped quietly past the bathroom door, wove her way among the jostling arses of fat old women to Jack Reiter with his open tobacco tin. She dropped a zwei groschen coin into the tin. Reiter scarcely looked at her. She ran down the stairs, banged into another of the fat old women and spun round to find herself on the pavement facing Inge, clutching the black-faced doll.
“How could you?” Inge said. “How could you?”
They never spoke again.
She held the doll tightly all the way home.
If she had her way they’d never part.
Was there another earthly creature as low as Méret Voytek?
§14
A week after the Anschluss the youth orchestra assembled for its nine a.m. Monday morning rehearsal.
There were three notable absences: Doktor Judt, the conductor; Inge Reiter, viola . . . and all the other Jewish musicians.
In Doktor Judt’s place stood another doktor—Doktor Sauerwald, who introduced himself as the Reich commissar for the city of Vienna. In turn, he introduced their new conductor, Professor Kaiserman. They all knew Kaiserman; he’d stood in for Judt on numerous occasions and taught piano at the Konservatorium where many of the musicians were studying. He wasn’t Judt, who wooed them, coaxed them, badgered them, berated them—all with a twinkle in his eye—but he would do. They would get on with Kaiserman.
“You will not miss the Jews,” Sauerwald said to no response.
“Vienna is a resourceful city, a city of talent—your new conductor will fill these empty seats with good Aryan musicians.”
It was obvious why they’d sacked Judt—the man was far too liberal to be tolerated by the Nazis in a position of influence over youth. It was less obvious where they’d find “good Aryan musicians”—the absence of the Jews put their numbers down by more than a third.
“From this moment on you are all enrolled in the Hitler Youth; from this moment on you are musicians of the Third Reich!”
From this moment on they were a part orchestra. Dressing them in brown wouldn’t make them whole.
Sauerwald gave Kaiserman the stage and left. Kaiserman endeared himself to his young musicians at once by saying, “It’s all right. You won’t have to wear the uniforms except when the party needs an orchestra.”
This broke the silence. Everyone talked at once. Méret found herself wondering why or when the Nazi party would ever have need of an orchestra.
Kaiserman took several minutes to regain control—but with both arms in the air and the palms of his hands horizontal, dipping, patting the air with a gentle motion, he conducted the remnants of his orchestra back to silence. He pointed at a boy who played second violin. The boy stood up.
“Herr Professor, where will we find these musicians?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where will we find musicians as good as Lasky or Beidermann or Kaitz or Blumenfeld?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
By mid-April they were up to strength again, without being up to par. The newcomers were treated by their fellow musicians as second-raters until they could prove otherwise. And by the end of April the uniforms of the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädel, in which Méret found herself idly enlisted, had been issued. It created another division to add to that between first- and second-rate—those who wore the uniform unasked, those who wore it only when asked, and the bold few who would not wear it when asked.
Among the latter was Roberto Cacciato. A club foot—one leg an inch shorter than the other, and a thick sole added to his left boot—made him, he argued, unfit for and hence exempt from any military service. Why therefore should he wear a uniform of any kind? He wore instead the unofficial uniform of the proletariat—the navy pea jacket and the round cap with a small peak. A modest if unsubtle statement that in any other organization in the Reich would have cost him a beating.
The first time she was asked, Méret donned the uniform. She could be happy in a white blouse and a black skirt. Only the jacket rankled. The usual SA baby-shit brown with the usual red, white, and black swastika on the arm. Taking her seat among the cellists she caught sight of Roberto, defiantly working-class blue. He winked at her. He read her mind it seemed. This was her Knobloch moment. He knew it, she knew it. This was what she did to survive.
§15
At home she practiced what Viktor Rosen had taught her on an 1859 Bösendorfer upright. A piano made in Vienna—a piano forever associated with Vienna. This particular specimen was well-travelled. Her greatgrandfather had had it shipped new to Budapest, her grandfather had brought it back with him when he settled in Vienna some thirty years later, and her father had had it lugged around the city from apartment to apartment a
s his fortunes improved.
“One more move and we might have room for a grand,” he would say every so often, although not lately.
Méret reminded him early on that Bösendorfer made the largest grand piano in the world, with ninety-seven keys.
“Oh, we’ll knock down a wall or something. We’ll do without a bathroom and piddle in the street with the urchins.”
“Papa!”
He wouldn’t dare say anything so rude except when her mother was out.
She was out now. Méret was at the piano, running through scales. Her father was wandering around, slitting open his mail from the third post of the day with a paper knife, often as not discarding the letter and keeping the envelope.
Her mother came in. Groceries in a small wicker basket, followed by the maid—more groceries in a large wicker basket.
Her father was halfway through a sentence—“My dear, did you remember . . .”—when he noticed the red, white, and black swastika brassard on her arm and on the maid’s.
“Have you taken leave of your senses!?!”
Her mother’s hand wrapped around the swastika, much the same gesture Knobloch had used, but she was trying to conceal it, protect it.
“Have you gone mad, woman?”
“Imre, you don’t understand. We cannot go down the street—”
He tore it off in a swift movement, lunged for the maid but she fled to the kitchen, screaming, and slammed the door.
Then her mother squared off to her father and slapped his face. And he slapped her back, so hard she stood rigid for a moment scarcely believing he had done this. Then the tears welled in her eyes, the red imprint of his hand spread out across her cheek, and a trickle of blood crept down from one nostril.