by Gee, Maurice
‘I am more at home,’ he said. ‘Hey Sarge, I swap you one egg for one soused herring.’
Sargoff shook his head and walked on, grinding his black teeth. In our camp of angry men he was the angriest and we had learned to keep clear of him.
The Cobar pulled out from the wharf, past the buoy that marked the place where a bore was sunk for fresh water in the sea. It had been abandoned after striking rock, and a tanker still arrived a couple of times each week with an 8000-gallon load. Dowden had threatened to make us drink from the cattle troughs if we did not cut down on our use of water.
I described hillside meadows above Vienna and spring-houses built over springs, with streams winding through the grass away from them and running in little waterfalls among the flowers.
‘Very pretty’ Willi said. ‘It will take them a thousand years to build a Vienna or a Berlin here. Look at it, their capital city. You could scrape it off the side of the hill with your hand. Do they really think Hitler will come here?’
‘There are Jews to kill, so he’ll come. And Reds called Willi Gauss.’
‘Yes,’ Willi said, and ground his teeth like Sargoff. His hatred of the Nazis had more weight than his contempt for New Zealanders. ‘When we escape we must learn how to survive in these hills. Make raids, that is what we must learn. Steal and live by our wits. And learn to kill.’
‘Not kill,’ I said, startled.
‘Nazis, I mean, not these Dummkopf New Zealanders.’
‘We should take Sargoff to bite off their heads,’ I said, and mimed him biting the heads off herrings and spitting them into the sea.
‘It’s no joke,’ Willi said.
I had expected to please him, for his humour was cruel – but it was scornful, sarcastic, satirical, emerging through his sense of better knowledge and greater worth. Sargoff was base coin; I should have known.
We watched stores from the Cobar travel up the tramway to the camp. The wire hummed and the wheels rumbled, while down at the wharf the Italians waiting to load up sang Neapolitan love songs, music that makes me hungry to this day.
‘Coffee,’ I said.
‘Schweinewurst. Beer.’
We laughed sourly, knowing it was tea, and little of that, and sides of mutton dirtied with coal, and that the beer meant for our canteen would get no further than the guards’ mess. We competed in tales of deprivation: boiled swedes, turnip jam, acorn coffee, bread with sawdust mixed in the flour, and clothes made of paper, shoes with paper soles (my 1919 Vienna tale, which came from my parents), and the scavenging children of Berlin, the ragged bands fed by English Quakers (Will’s tale). Then we left poverty behind and I eulogised my city – the cafes, the pastry shops, wine villages in the hills, the parks and palaces, the river with its barges, the streets with yellow tramcars sparking along. I cannot be lyrical any more, for they are places deformed by time, and other things, and this city on the hills that we swept into its harbour that day in an earthquake jumble of broken timber and bent tin, is richer than Vienna now. And Willi is dead in his Berlin of beer cellars and brandy shops.
The sun is shining. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The new fast-ferry, heading out, makes a wide curve round a container ship. It is one of Wellington’s rare windless days, with no threat from the south. The island lies flatter than it should, each of its three levels flat, and the quarantine buildings – no llamas now, no exotic sheep and goats – might be a cottage resort. Hut 7 was knocked down long ago, all the huts. The hole under my bed was filled in after it was found. No strolling lovers will tumble down when the island makes its next change into a picnic spot. But our thirty-six feet of tunnel remain. (That figure is exact. A nervous private inched along holding a measuring chain.) It begins nowhere and ends nowhere, our wormhole scraped out with a Dutch hoe. It is like a hollow in my brain, bending left at 30 degrees; but is not unpleasant, it brings no pain. I altered my shape in the tunnel; I passed from one life into another, changed hemispheres, and would have to pass through a similar wormhole to go back. We did not make our escape; were marched off by a clown with a pointed stick. But when I looked through the narrow window at the Wellington hills and the frail houses perched on them, it was as though I completed my passage and emerged in a place where I was free.
So I live in a house whose timbers grow pink in the rising sun, and I look from my desk at the island where I slept inside a barbed wire fence. I think of the boy I was in Vienna before passing through that narrow place, which did not break my continuity but made me dimorphous. They shipped me to the island as a ‘live body’, and delivered me back as a live body too; but my cells were different, my molecules were changed. Josef Mandl of the Rote Falken, marching in the Vienna Woods, singing the Internationale and raising his fist in the red salute, is Joe Mandl (rhymes with handle) of Wellington, drawing dead to the jack at the Tinakori Bowling Club. I stepped out of one world into another; emerged from my hole and watched the black hills turn to grey and then in a sudden burst let their colours out. The houses turned pink and the windows shone.
I never told Willi. He would not have understood.
TWO
Because I grew up in Vienna people expect me to be musical. ‘Ah,’ they say (always they start with ‘ah’)’– ah, Mozart’, ‘ah, Mahler’, ‘ah, Johann Strauss –’ and they ask me if I play an instrument. (It is like expecting all Australians to throw the boomerang.) I find it hard to answer civilly. I say that I went to the opera with my friends when I was young and stood in the fourth gallery where one could hear but not see, and they take that for enthusiasm – the poor student, thirsting for music, standing entranced above the moneyed throng. They say ‘ah’ again. ‘Ah, The Magic Flute! Don Giovanni! Wonderful!’ I don’t disabuse them – that I went to be with a girl I liked – but turn the conversation to other things. And if they insist on staying in Vienna, I talk about subjects that did interest me, and still do – painting, architecture, politics. Most of them have not heard of Egon Schiele or Alfred Loos. Dollfuss and Schuschnigg raise a glimmer of recognition in the older ones. Herzl, no. I tell the story – I should not, I cheapen it – about Jabotinsky speaking at the Konzerthaus, four hours he spoke, and at the end holding up a suitcase and crying, ‘Run, Jews, run.’ They smile uneasily at that. They do not know how or when to say the word ‘Jew’.
Freud they have heard of. It is astonishing how much they think they know about Freud.
I took Jabotinsky’s advice in the year that he gave it, 1937. My father’s boot was planted on my rear and I ran, leaning forward to keep my balance, across Europe and the United States, and sailed down the Pacific and entered New Zealand by way of Australia. It was my good fortune to arrive as a tourist not a refugee, then it turned into a misfortune. I had lived in a great city and crossed two continents, but my world narrowed to an island in a harbour enclosed by hills, and to a tunnel scraped in the ground. But enough of that. I glimpsed my wife on Somes Island. That’s where I first saw the woman I would marry. She wore a Wren’s uniform and her hair was pinned up, very smart, under a black and white hat.
Now if it’s music that you want, she was musical. She played the piano rather well. Thanks to her, all our children learned: piano, cello, violin. Our grand-daughter is at the Juilliard School, thanks to her. Why haven’t I written down her name? Her name was Nancy and I loved her very much.
She banged out easy tunes for me, things that gave me pleasure, and laughed and called me ‘old rum-te-tum’, which I didn’t mind; and when we were in Vienna in 1982 I took her to the opera and enjoyed (sitting not standing) the way the voices climbed over me and up into the roof – acoustical experts will disagree – instead of coming round the corner like a train; but enjoyed her pleasure more. In the Kärntnerstrasse I waited patiently while she listened to students busking – violins and flutes – and when she said, ‘I wish Kenny could have gone on with it,’ I answered with an honesty I would have avoided in Wellington: ‘He wasn’t good enough.’
‘I know,’ she said
.
In Wellington she would have been fierce: ‘He could have been.’
Elizabeth, our older daughter, was nearly good enough. The piano was her instrument and I hear her playing now in the living room which still, in ‘our family’, is ‘the music room’. Elizabeth has ‘come home’, at her own insistence, and is ‘looking after me’. With her I have to use these quotation marks. There’s a lot of her language I can’t have people mistaking for mine.
To begin with, how can my house be her ‘home’ when she has been married and raised children in another town far from here, and made a garden that featured in ‘City Gardens’ on TV, and been a well-known hostess (prime ministers at her table), and partnered her husband round the world many times, to this conference or that, and been, as she claims, ‘fulfilled’? Divorce does not alter it. The younger prettier woman at her husband’s side does not cancel out ‘all the good times we had’. Sometimes this seems healthy and at other times sick. I want her to be happy but I also want her to rage and break things – break him. She won’t do it. ‘I’d rather move on to something new.’ What then brings her ‘home’ to this old man?
She says that she is getting out of her children’s way and giving them a chance to get to know their father’s new wife. That is too much self-effacement. It’s self-abasement. ‘If I can help them all to be happy I will,’ Elizabeth says. She loves her husband still but does not want him any more. Is my daughter some sort of saint? I ask myself that question when I exhaust all other ways of trying to understand her. And I ask myself too whether it might not be that she is sly, she’s devious. Perhaps she’s just relieved to be free – delighted perhaps. The tunes she plays are merry enough. But if freedom is what she is after, why come here?
She’s pretty still. She is a smooth-faced woman. There’s not a wrinkle to be seen. Her body is plump – nice and plump, I almost wrote – and she dresses in a way that makes her seem rich and ripe, but also locked-up and unrevealed. Concealment is a good part of her style. She is a smiley person; smiles with genuine sweetness – I think it’s genuine – but sweet has never been a flavour that I’ve liked: I much prefer savoury, in women as in everything else.
Elizabeth is contradictory. She’s deep. One must not be taken in by her surfaces, yet she gives one little option but to accept what she presents, for she’s vigorous in turning away exploratory expeditions – no visa granted – and subtle in her defensive shifts when the intimacies of shared experience, or of blood, bring about penetrations deeper than she wishes to allow.
A consequence is that she can seem shallow. She seems dim. People talk down to her or are too attentive and too kind. She lets it happen. Understands. Now and then she steps back and takes a deep breath to give her strength. As a hostess, as a dinner party or reception guest, she must have done better. Have I said that she is intelligent? Elizabeth has many interests and is able to converse wittily and sensitively. She’s good at leading with little questions, and good at being quiet in a clever attentive way. It’s a pity then that when she is happy and relaxed, which is most of the time, she lets her language lie so dead.
She’s welcome here, in my house. She can, if she likes, make it her home. But she is not, definitely not, ‘looking after’ me.
I need no looking after. I am a spry old man. Before Elizabeth came I hired a woman to clean the house and iron my shirts and fold my sheets (I washed them and pegged them out myself, enjoy pegging clothes out in the sun), but I did my own cooking and the dishwasher did the washing up. I am a clever cook. I’m good at subtle tastes and various and competing flavours. Sauces, spices, herbs, with small cuts of meat and baby vegetables: these are the things I used to treat myself to. I am a better cook than Nancy was. I’m better than Elizabeth. But it’s all gone.
There was never an ounce of fat in my cooking. There’s not an ounce of fat on me. ‘You need more weight on you, Dad,’ Elizabeth says. Just a few minutes ago she brought me a cup of coffee and a sticky cake. Sticky cakes are another thing about Vienna that I do not miss. I opened the window and threw it on the lawn, where two thin sparrows tore it urgently before a gang of starlings arrived.
I must say that I like what she is doing in the garden. We will end up on TV.
‘What are you writing?’ she asked me yesterday.
I made a defensive shift of my own. ‘Putting a few things down before I forget.’ I hoped she would think I meant things that I must do; or business perhaps, although I have no business left. I closed the notebook carelessly and yawned.
She had seen from her glimpse of the crowded pages that it was more than I said, and my bad acting reinforced it, but she’s helpful and she let my deception stand.
‘Do you draw maps any more?’
‘Maps?’
‘And charts? Diagrams?’
‘No.’
‘Whenever we had a map to do for school you’d always do it.’
‘Did I?’
‘Wonderful maps. You used to do little strings of barges on the rivers. The teachers couldn’t understand.’
‘It was a map that helped get me locked up,’ I said.
‘Locked? Somes Island, do you mean?’ She looked at it incuriously. ‘Spies draw maps. Was that what they thought?’
‘It showed a naval base. It was there so I put it in. I was an innocent young man.’
‘You must have been. With a German name.’
‘I was a Jew so I thought I’d be safe.’
‘Poor Dad.’
‘A good many things got reversed down here.’
‘Down here’ made her blink, for she was not used to hemispheres in me. I had always pulled my accent straight – as straight as I could manage – before I spoke. My children were never much aware of having an Austrian or a Jewish dad. Later, when they were curious, I produced anecdotes and left them to find the larger history for themselves. They’ve not questioned me about it, none of them, ever. I shared the history with Nancy, as I shared my life.
‘See, Dad, Vienna,’ they’d say, pointing at the name on the page of a book, the way an entomologist’s child might say, There’s a beetle, Dad’, and walk on. I walked on too. I did not stop to examine Vienna, and I take little notice now. I do, though, examine the Vienna that is gone. I used to draw maps of it, and I drew one after my conversation with Elizabeth yesterday. The Ring and the Kärntnerstrasse are the only streets marked in, and St Stephen’s Cathedral the only building, although I included the ferris wheel at the Prater, and the river and the canal. Hills and woods stand around the margin and flat lands run away to Hungary. A tug with smoke rising from its funnel tows a string of barges upriver from Budapest.
My map is out of scale but no matter. I did not draw it for accuracy or to pinpoint this place or that, but to illustrate where the city stands. My family, generations back, came out of the East to the Vienna that, historically, guards the West. The hills and the woods mark a boundary. You can stand in Vienna – as I did once on a bridge over the Donaukanal – stand like a direction post with one arm pointing east and the other west, signalling a change at that point. From the wanderer to the settled man. From cart to motor car and plough to desk. From the communal to the social. Prayer to conversation. Dark to light. So it seemed to me. I had just walked up from Josefstadt, where Eastern Jews filled the Taborstrasse, people so foreign to me, so antipathetic and, it seemed, dangerous too, that I had walked fast out of there and not rested until I was on the Sweden Bridge and could see the hills in the west and the stars sprinkled in the sky. I turned myself into a signpost and sighted along my right arm into Europe.
This map I’ve drawn is part of my history. I’ll keep it although I’ll not show Elizabeth.
The streets where you could see large motor cars – Bentleys and Daimlers with chauffeurs at the wheel – and, through cafe windows, plump be-ringed matrons playing bridge; and nursemaids in frilly caps pushing baby carriages, and pretty girls fresh from class arm in arm with fathers carrying silver-headed canes; and more pr
etty girls (Vienna was a city for them) smiling from behind mountainous cakes in pastry shops – they were the streets where I belonged. It caused me some confusion, for I was a communist; but when I remembered I narrowed my eyes, observing the decadence, and curled my lip in a show of scorn. How these bourgeois would run from me if they knew the future I was plotting for them.
My father had a silver-headed cane. My father owned a Mercedes – but drove it himself. I did not scorn to go along for the ride. Mostly we went into Burgenland. A favourite drive was to Neusiedler See, where our goal was usually Purbach. Sometimes we crossed on the ferry to Podersdorf, and once we went to Illmitz, further south, but that turned out to be too long a trip for Mother, who liked to be home in Gluckgasse before dark. Franz sat in front with Father, while she was in the back seat between Susi and me. She felt safe there, and made us safe, and was queenly, dignified, turning her head to the left and right. She did not care for novelties and she never exclaimed. No craning to see out the rear window for her. She did not lean or point and would not allow us to hand things across her. I’m not sure that she saw much more than the back of Father’s head as we drove. Father chain-smoked Turkish cigarettes, which Franz would stub out for him in the dashboard ashtray. Mother ate Leckerbissen, little sweets from a basket lined with frilly paper, keeping her right hand bare to pick them out. At intervals she offered one to Susi and me. Three on the outward trip, three driving home was the ration.
My mother and father seem like caricatures. I mustn’t allow that. They died in Nazi concentration camps and I won’t allow that either – I mean that I won’t picture them there. I have dreamed their deaths many times but dreams have no place in my narrative. What I must do is see my parents straight. From my description so far you would expect Mother to be plump and greedy and vain, a complainer perhaps, and not to have much time for her children. The opposite is true. She was tiny. I am not a tall man but the top of Mother’s head fitted under my chin when I embraced her. I used to worry that her bones would snap if I squeezed too hard. Her hands were as light as balsa wood; she herself as light as balsa wood. Leaning backwards to lift her feet off the ground, I seemed to be lifting dry sticks. It did not come from ill health, for she was strong and agile and had a lovely pinkness in her cheeks. She was always busy round the apartment. Had borne her children easily. Had raised them in what today would be called a hands-on way, even though a nursemaid did all the grubby work. There was no fragility in her, but she had a nervousness that came from love, and from ambition perhaps. She was greedy for her children to succeed, and always alert; was cunning, ruthless, savage sometimes, against any person standing in our way. She was a snob. That accounts for her performance in the Mercedes. But there was also ceremony there and I can’t see that as a vice. She was a little neurotic about physical dangers. That was fragile in her, I suppose. She did not want us killed in accidents. My father, who longed to drive fast, had to drive slowly, and not set our destination too far away. We must be home in the Innere Stadt before the sun went down. If the street lights flickered on as we arrived she would smile and say, ‘There.’