A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  Maria’s father owned a taxi company before the war, and as a girl Maria was sent to school with a car and driver. Her father hated Hitler and the Nazis, and blamed them for everything. He foresaw the demise of his country in their takeover. As a result, Maria was against Hitler also – though really (and she has remained this way her whole life) she had no politics at all. Later, like everything else in Austria, her father’s business collapsed, and rather than face the ignominy of poverty, embodied most painfully in the fact that his daughter might have to walk on her own two feet, he killed himself. She was, I believe, twelve years old.

  At the time of the Anschluss, in 1938, Maria was working as a housekeeper and au pair in a large country estate outside Leeds. She was eighteen, and had been there a few years making money and sending it home to her mother. Everybody knew that the annexation of Austria meant war. She was told to mail her passport home at once; there was no such thing as Austria any longer. She should return as soon as her German passport arrived. Maria hated the Germans, and it was disconcerting to find that she was one of them. She has never changed her opinion that Austria and Germany were not just two different countries but two separate civilizations. Germans were sterile mathematicians. They knew nothing of romance and art. They were obedient dogs who ate anything. Even though she held these views, and even though the English family asked her to stay, and even though her mother urged her not to come home, she returned to Vienna.

  Herbert’s father supported Hitler and the Nazis. Even though he was a doctor – like his father, and his father’s father – they were not the kind of people whose children had personal drivers. For most of my life, I had no idea what Herbert’s politics were. Maria had never discussed him in that way; perhaps she felt it was none of her business. She never seemed to think anything about the war was her business (a lot of Austrians suffer from this), and she never faced the crimes the Nazis committed, the genocide that rid Austria of the many great minds who built and modernized the city she adored. In the summer of 2003, when I went to Vienna for a month to research a novel I never wrote, I saw a photograph of Herbert in the mountains around Salzburg, taken before the war. There are, as always, the pretty girls with bows in their hair. Herbert has his shirt off and a kerchief tied around his neck. They are sitting in picnic tranquillity beneath a Nazi flag they have planted. The shot was taken from above, at a long distance, and below them a quiet green valley sprawls toward hills in the distance.

  I inherited Herbert’s military keepsakes – his medals, his decorations (all of which incorporated swastikas), his uniform buttons. I was the only one of his grandsons who showed real interest in my Austrian heritage, and it was Maria’s decision to let me keep them. After my parents divorced and I moved with my mother from San Antonio to Conroe, just north of Houston, I used to march around the house wearing an amalgamation of these things and my father’s US Navy aviator’s jacket, hat, and officer’s ribbons.

  When the Russians invaded Vienna, all the young women went out of their way to make themselves ugly. The stories they heard of Russian infantry had everyone in a state of delirious terror. They were raping all the girls and women and killing everything else: babies, boys, and old men. Only old and hideous women, so it went, were safe. Maria changed the names of her boys to Petrovich and Nikolai. When the Russians came, the soldiers, she said, raped her every day, several times a day. This is something I learned very late – during a telephone conversation in 2003 – though I had heard about the changing of the names, and many other stories, from an early age. The soldiers liked the boys’ names – perhaps they found the misuse of the patronymic for my uncle charming – and didn’t kill them. Eventually she and the boys fled the city. She used to tell a magnificent story about running down a long road out of Vienna with many other women and children. She had Peter in one arm and my father in the other, and explosions followed them. I have no context outside the immediacy of that image. I have no idea what road they were on. I don’t know if they were headed south or west. I see her, the boys, other people, trees, smoke. It’s like a scene from a movie – what have I experienced that would lend it authenticity?

  A lot of people, she said, gave up. The fear paralysed them. Some women begged others to take their children. A lot of these people were captured rather than killed, she said, but the Russians left a lot of dead on that road.

  She found refuge on a farm. This farm emerged naturally in her memory but is incongruous to me, now: why did no one else go there? Why was it safe, if they were being chased? Why did the Russians continue to pursue the Viennese outside the city, since from the sound of it the Nazi army was nowhere to be found? Was it, possibly, that the farm is another memory entirely, that somehow got entwined with the road? Is it possible that I have it all wrong – that the road came during the first wave of invasion, and the farm came only after the Americans arrived?

  I intended to ask such questions – not only about the road and farm but about everything, especially Herbert – during that conversation in 2003. I had just returned from Vienna, and my interest in that past had been reignited by the photographs I’d seen of Herbert, by speaking nothing but German for a month, by a book about Hitler’s Vienna, by the city itself. But when she mentioned, almost as an aside, that like many young women she was raped by Russian soldiers, and when I asked her to repeat herself, she said, with a breeziness that made it seem unlikely she was exaggerating, Yes, hundreds of soldiers, hundreds of times, I was too embarrassed to continue the interview.

  My cousin Fielding – Maria’s grandson by a different grandfather – told me recently that Maria has a boyfriend in the nursing home, but the man thinks he is a teenager, and they hold hands and whisper to each other. When Fielding went to visit her, the man told him: I like your daughter very much. Then he tried to sell himself as a suitor. Maria believes she still runs errands for Fielding’s parents. She does not know how long she’s been at the home – her presumption is about a week, though it has been more than a year – and she talks with pride about the fact that she stays busy, and drives her car all around the city. The most considerate thing to do is agree with her; otherwise she becomes distraught.

  My stepmother tells me the home takes its residents for day trips. They board a bus and drive outside the city, under the impression they are headed somewhere, and look out the windows at the countryside, which, to many, surely, exists in a state of ceaseless evaporation. A few hours later they return, having not left the capsule of the bus.

  It is autumn in Dublin, chilly and dark. I am sleeping with socks on. My Vespa is barely alive in the mornings, and seems to recoil at the sight of me. I have to wear a hat in the house to avoid headaches. I am trying to save money by not turning on the heat, but Elísabet is walking around in winter coats asking if there are any more blankets for her bed. She has been here several weeks and will leave before Christmas – my first housemate since Chicago, ten years ago. She is an Icelandic playwright, novelist, and performance artist. I don’t know what to make of her, but I like her. Very little she says makes any sense. She sleeps like a hibernating bear. She drinks a lot of milk. She went to an AA meeting in Malahide a few weeks ago, and now she is running the meetings. Everything that happens becomes one of her stories. A few days ago she lost her notebook, and now she is writing a novel in which a strange creature sets a character on a quest, but the creature does not know what the quest is, since it lost the notebook.

  Elísabet – who is the kind of person who finds meaning in her dreams, in accidents, in the offhand comments of total strangers, and who believes tiny people live under rocks – is fascinated by Maria’s history, and wonders if her stoicism comes from a monumental coldness. Though this is not the Maria I know, it is of course possible. It might explain her relationship to the truth of the past, which she no longer has to face. She has escaped the guilt of complicity. Nobody can talk of Austrian grandparents who fell in love during the war without millions of dead Jews bringing it all back into persp
ective. Her suffering, I must remind myself, is nothing to anybody but us. Herbert’s death is nothing to anyone but us.

  Often Elísabet and I discuss her as though she were dead. I have placed a black-and-white picture of Maria and Herbert on my dining-room table, and Elísabet says it gives the house a sense of mourning. Herbert is seated in a wicker rocking chair, in his officer’s uniform – grey trousers and jacket, black collar, white epaulettes – with one leg stretched out and the other bent. He is holding his left hand in his right hand on his lap. The top of his head is dressed in a white bandage. Maria is standing behind the chair, leaning forward, with her arms around Herbert’s chest. Her cheek is touching his head. She, too, holds her left hand in her right hand. Maria has high cheekbones and wide-set eyes. She has dark, shoulder-length hair that is pulled back from her face. They are smiling, but Herbert isn’t looking at the camera – he looks as though he’s just been told something mildly funny by a person standing to one side. The shadows behind them spill a long way, and there are no leaves on the little tree they are sitting under. I can’t tell anything from it. I can’t tell if they are happy or sad. The embrace seems formal and slightly posed. Surely he is leaving for the front again, and they are already married. She is probably pregnant, though she may not know it. The picture I have in the frame is not even a photograph. It is a granulated printout of a digital scan of the original, which was destroyed a few years ago by a flood in Texas.

  Elísabet and I have spent hours interpreting the picture. She says Maria’s cardigan reminds her of the bricks at Auschwitz. She wants this chapter to begin: My grandmother’s cardigan reminds me of the bricks at Auschwitz. I fear that I am not suited to that kind of writing.

  After the war, the story becomes more coherent. Maria got work at a US Air Force base outside Vienna. I can’t recall what her job was, though she told me on a few occasions. One day she was invited to eat breakfast with some of the officers – she was still very beautiful – and she broke down and wept at the sight of bread and jam. When she told them she could not eat something so extravagant when her children were starving – my father was suffering from rickets – they began to send her home with baskets of food. It is the only episode she tells from her entire life that makes her wistful.

  In 1947 she received a letter from an American officer she’d met when he’d worked at the base, Jim Baxter, asking her to come to Oklahoma and marry him. There was a picture of him in the letter. He mentioned his love for her, which had grown since they parted. He mentioned his job and stability. Her family convinced her there was nothing in Austria – no money or food, no men. She moved to Oklahoma and married Jim; shortly after that they relocated to Texas – the Alamo Heights district of San Antonio. Jim adopted my father and Peter, and they took his surname.

  Jim and Maria had a child together, Jim Jr – Fielding’s father. They divorced in the early 1980s: Jim, then in his sixties, left Maria for a 33-year-old. Though I called him Opa (as I called Maria Oma), and he raised my father, I have no memory of him. I must have been around him quite a bit as a child, but I never noticed.

  Maria was unfazed by the divorce. She had never loved him, she explained. She was merely loyal and regretless. Many years later she would admit that her trepidation in emigrating came not just from leaving Austria – she was a patriot – but because she hardly even remembered Jim Baxter.

  A few years after the divorce, Maria began working as a nurse for a woman with Alzheimer’s outside the town of Boerne, about thirty miles north of San Antonio, where the Texas Hill Country begins. When the woman died, her husband, Bob Wallace, a rich attorney with a big white Cadillac and a big red Cadillac, proposed that, since they were old anyway, and he had some money, and would like to travel in Europe with a companion, they ought to get married. She agreed – the prospect of annual trips to Austria sold her. There was no ceremony I knew of, or if there was, no children were invited. Bob hated children. He could not tolerate irrationality. During meals he sat us around a humiliatingly small table, far away from the adults. Yet he had childlike fascinations and habits. He kept loaded guns all over his house and refused to move them, even though the idea that some marauder would be targeting his house was ludicrous. He was a ham radio operator. He was learning, at the age of eighty, computer programming, and obsessively played a golf game on his PC; he allowed me to play with him, and the fact that I always won was incomprehensible to him, and humorous. He seemed emotionless, and yet he used to cry at the sound of classical music. I interviewed him once for a high-school project, and realized he was the most interesting person I had ever known. The tape of that interview is lost, and I’ve forgotten everything he said, everything but this: once, when he was poor and starving, during the Depression, he had cleaned himself up, walked into a diner and ordered two large steaks. When it came time to pay the bill, Bob told the owner he had no money at all, but he’d work for his food. The man threatened to call the police, and Bob argued that he’d never get his money that way. He got a job as a dishwasher, then a cook. A few years later he was the lead attorney in Texas for FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

  I sit here, at the dining-room table, beside the picture of Maria, waiting for this memory to spark others. Something comes back: I remember sitting in the room with him, checking the tape to make sure it was running. Flipping it when it stopped.

  His house was situated at the top of a tall hill, and he owned the whole hill, down to little streams and thick woods that surrounded it, which was unused land for the most part. He had a salt lick and used to sprinkle dry kernels of corn all around his yard, and mobs of deer used to migrate through the space while we watched from the back patio. They would stop and eat everything, and we had to be absolutely quiet or they would spook and trample away. My father and Bob spent a lot of time chipping golf balls around. Bob argued with other men about politics and philosophy and religion, and whether he was right or not, he always won the arguments. Nobody could keep up, or wanted to. He was a devout atheist – unlike my father, who was a private and disinterested atheist. He called black people niggers and did not understand why they wanted to be called anything else – and by anything else (this dates him rather severely) he meant coloured. When lots of grandchildren visited, the boys played war in the woods, and the girls did indoor things. Maria often wore a dirndl and baked. We had transplanted the Aryan dream to the Texas Hill Country.

  I spent a lot of time at that house by myself. Because I cared the most about my Austrian heritage, I was the favoured grandson. I slept in a big bed in one of the large guest bedrooms. In the daytime it was fine, but at night the ceiling filled with tiny scorpions that cast great vampiric shadows in the lamplight. I wrapped myself up to my neck in a blanket and slept like a plank of wood. I told Bob he had scorpions in his house and he looked at me very much like I expected him to.

  At the age of eighty-five, Bob suddenly became sick: emphysema and a dozen other illnesses. His mind was still fierce – he remembered everything that ever happened; he wanted to get out and exert the influence of his mind on the world – but he could not control when he went to the bathroom, couldn’t walk on his own, could barely breathe and depended on an oxygen mask. His condition transformed Maria from a wife to a nurse. One day he sent her out for groceries and took his army issue .44 and blew his brains out. She found his body, which she never described. He was the first person I ever personally knew who died. A few days later I telephoned her and asked how she was. I’m fine, she said, how are you?

  A few days ago I was virtually alone on the Dart from my part of town to the city. After a few dry weeks, Dublin had finally come alive in the rain. No city in the world transforms in rain like Dublin. In the sunshine it is hard-edged and ugly and rank. In the rain it softens like a sponge, swelling, and all the open spaces narrow. The train passed out of the trees and suburbs and graffiti, where it rises over the houses slightly, above Clontarf, and the whole grey city was like a swamp floating in the bronze light of an
overcast sunset, twinkling and shimmery building tops, rays of heavy rain slamming onto certain streets, this one and that one, and the bay, settled, chopless, paralysed. Above it, great blue-black clouds like Zeppelins rumbled hulkingly toward the city. It seemed like an invasion. An overweight woman with nice black hair, my age, sat a few seats ahead of me in a woolly black coat, reading a magazine. Another guy, handsome, in his twenties, on the telephone ahead of her, was talking to a girl. He was being very smooth. The train began to decelerate as we approached Connolly Station. The view of the bay was lost, and the high vantage, and so was the curious sense, which strikes from time to time, that I was not me but Herbert, suddenly alive after sixty-five years, but with no memory and no acquaintances. I stood and waited by the doors. The rain became so heavy, all at once, that the city disappeared completely.

  I have a sense that somehow I must find a way to die in Vienna: I have never felt that I belonged anywhere else. Fielding came to Dublin from Texas a month ago, a few weeks after Elísabet arrived. He had been writing a seven-page philosophical essay for twelve months – the story of the possibility of a true self told in narrative – and needed some form of release to mark the end of it; otherwise he might go on revising forever. We have turned out to be radically different people, and I wonder if Herbert is responsible. Fielding is deeply optimistic about the future and doesn’t drink much. He is unconcerned about specifics of his past, and perceives humanity as a fragmented tissue of souls that must look forward if it is to achieve a state of perfection. Like Elísabet, he looks for connections that help to piece together our understanding of ourselves and the world. His essay is tender and sorrowful. I told him it was an unconscious autobiography and he told me my essays were clumsy philosophies. When I asked if he thought often of Vienna, he said he hadn’t much reason: Maria was his only link, and she was just a person – whereas for me she had, since the onset of her dementia, become a symbol of my lost and unrecoverable self.