by Gee, Maurice
Once out of the car Mother would allow herself to lean and point and stare. She became lively and curious. She fed us information, little facts, and so increased us. Father might wave his hand, leaving a trail of ash – the town, the lake: he did not need closer definitions than that – but Mother would tell us all. We got history, botany, politics, economics from her, as well as culinary tips and health information; we learned how to order in a restaurant and which foods complement which. I know the names of the waterbirds that feed in the rushes of Neusiedler See because of her. And so many other things I have not had to remember in sixty years: how the Roman legions formed for battle; the constitution of the Free Town of Rust; how to cook a goose. You felt her pat each piece of information into place. She hummed with satisfaction and looked to see how we had grown. Her pleasure gave her insistence a gentle quality, and put an excitement and lightness in our lives.
Father, on the other hand, was a bit of a bully. It came from carelessness not cruelty. A cigar-smoking capitalist: you would have him bloated perhaps? You would have him jowly and with a roll of fat on the back of his neck? Not a bit of it. He was spry, like me. He was trim and agile. He hopped like a flea and was too quick in his movements to keep track of. (I’m talking about the movements of his mind.) He changed direction at angles so severe that we, trying to follow, overshot, and were left groping in the dark while he sparkled somewhere else. It provoked me several times to bouts of rage, and reduced Susi to tears. Franz simply shrugged and yawned. Father laughed at us and gave us a push on the back of the head – something between a cuff and a caress. We were hopeless, he seemed to say, and had better run off and talk to our mother. He lit his evening cigar and gave himself up to his newspaper. With my father I always had the knowledge that I did not measure up. I wanted to please him but never could. I made him take notice in the end by outraging him.
I liked him best when he turned lazy, when he found nothing to interest him. He would have liked to screech round corners on our drive to Neusiedler See, but was not allowed, so he became as lazy as the car, as lazy as the countryside and the little towns. He waved his cigarette at the horizon and said, ‘Yes, all this. Very nice.’ Life reduced its pace and we ambled comfortably by the margins of the shallow lake, and Father, that sinewy man, became a little fat. So it seems. Things take a significance which they did not have – by the laws of consciousness, thank God. He gave his arm to Mother and held Susi’s hand and let Franz row when we went on the lake. Sometimes he would walk between us, Franz and me, and offer us a cigarette, which we smoked like men.
Back home, in his smoking room, he would sometimes keep Franz back after pushing me and Susi out.
‘What do you talk about?’ I asked.
‘Business,’ Franz said – which was the coal business. Father’s firm supplied the railways and the river tugs. ‘He wants to start buying timber soon. And importing Bordeaux wine. Brandy too. He gave me some.’ That was not a lie. I smelled it on his breath. ‘We talk about politics.’
‘He always talks about that.’
‘Pan-Europeanism, that’s what he wants. A continent of sans patries.’
‘That wouldn’t work.’ I was much more a realist than Franz. ‘Look how they guard borders.’
‘But we’ve got to be Austrians first. That’s what he says. Then we can think about all Europe. So we’ll be safer.’
‘We’re safe now.’ (My realism failed there.)
‘He said some Jews tried to join the Heimwehr.’
‘We don’t have to be Jews.’ (And there.)
‘Maybe,’ Franz said. ‘He says the Zionists are the trouble.’
My father was an integrationist. He simply wanted to be Austrian. Perhaps he was, more accurately, an assimilationist. He was anxious to lose his racial identity – and indeed, like many Viennese generations removed from the ghettos of the East, wanted not to think of himself as Jewish at all. Politically there was nowhere for him to go, for he was a monarchist too. He looked back wistfully (and with a trace of desperation) to the days of Franz Josef, the old Emperor, who had been sensible enough to protect ‘his Jews’. Try to protect. It had never been, never is, absolute. My father named his sons for that old man. I almost wrote ‘old rhinoceros’, but Franz Josef knew a thing or two. It’s just that he seems centuries out of his time, although he died in 1916. My father took part in the war triggered by the assassination of his heir. He did not fight, although he wanted to ‘serve Austria’, but spent his time managing coal. It stood him in good stead when he was able to go into business on his own.
We were konfessionslos, which means without religion. Some Jews of our class converted to Catholicism, others became Methodists (I can’t see what attracted them there), but Father and Mother had too much pride to take on a set of beliefs out of self-interest or fear. Their strongest belief was in their Austrian-ness. They wanted to take on the colour of Vienna, and be certain of their place, and no more noticed than any other prosperous citizen. They could not understand Judenhass (hatred of Jews) – and Father, seeking for reasons, came to believe that Jewish meddling in politics was the cause. He could not go deeper than politics. The Ostjuden, the Zionists, the Jews busy in the Social Democrat Party, and those few who found a place among the Christian Socials angered him almost equally. Arthur Schnitzler made the joke that anti-semitism became popular in Vienna only when the Jews themselves took it up. It’s a bad joke but in a way it fits my father.
Being konfessionslos made no difference in the end. Nor did being Catholic or Methodist. Abseitsstehen – staying aloof – made no difference. The hatred was not political or religious but racial. I don’t know why I bother to write that down, everyone knows. The Nazis used to chant a jingle and scrawl it on walls: Was der Jude glaubt ist einerlei. In der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei. Which means: What the Jew professes is of no account. Swinishness lies in the race itself.
I played bowls this afternoon and found Kenny waiting for me when I came off the green. He drove me up the hill to Wadestown and waited while I showered and put on fresh clothes.
‘Now, what is it, Kenny? You’ve got a problem?’
He swallowed. Kenny is a capable and decisive man – his career in business proves it – yet he cannot be a man of any sort with me. I can’t see how I’ve done this to him. I wanted him to be happy, prosperous, large in his mind, to be a man of courage and virtue, yet when I examine him he regresses to the child who had to be made to practise his violin.
It was not I who locked him in the music room, it was Nancy. I let him out when I came home; and when he developed an interest in cricket I took him to provincial matches at the Basin Reserve, and had him explain the rules to me, trying to make him feel important, trying to make him free. ‘He’s stonewalling,’ Kenny said. I liked that metaphor. I began to like cricket, its elegance and futility: the men in white, hour-long, day-long, stroking a ball with a bat, yet finishing with a drawn game at the end of it. Kenny grew tired before I did. We took the tram to Thorndon and walked up the hill, and branched off the road at the Waterworks building, approaching our house by a path through the bush. (Still I want to write ‘through the woods’.) Nancy was at the kitchen bench, preparing dinner and I stopped to admire her: so quick yet so dishevelled and impatient.
‘I wonder what she’s cooking,’ I said.
‘I’ll see,’ Kenny said, and he began climbing a tree growing just off the back of our section. He went up easily until he was fifteen feet from the ground and had sufficient angle to see the bench.
‘It’s meat.’
‘I know that, stupid. What sort?’
He went a little higher, holding the trunk. ‘I can’t tell.’
‘Come on down. We’ll go and see.’
‘Dad…’ His foot groped. ‘I can’t.’
‘Yes you can. Put your foot on the branch. Come down the way you went up.’
But his confidence was gone and with it all sense of where his hands and feet must go. He could only hug the
trunk and close his eyes.
‘Kenny,’ I said, ‘you’re a yellowbelly. You went up so you can come down.’
It was no use. I recognised his state: the narrow box with closed lid, and consciousness restricted to what the arms are wrapped around. I went to the garden shed and wrestled the ladder from behind it. Nancy ran out of the kitchen.
‘Kenny’s stuck up a tree,’ I said. (What an absurd name ‘Kenny’ is. Nancy is responsible for that.) I put the ladder into the branches and climbed up and tried to loosen his hold. ‘Kenny, it’s all right, it’s me, Dad. I’m going to take one of your feet and put it on the ladder.’
‘No,’ he whispered.
‘Open your eyes, Kenny.’
He would not. Nancy had climbed up behind me; and Susan was two rungs off the ground, bawling her eyes out.
‘Kenny, just do what I say.’
‘Josef, go down,’ Nancy said. ‘He’ll do it for me.’
‘If he’ll just put his foot –’
‘Get out of the way. Go and look after Susan.’ She hooked her fingers in my belt and hauled me four rungs down, side-stepping into the branches – amazing grace – as I went by. Then she whispered at Kenny’s ear, ten minutes long. I had to run for the kitchen, with Susan bobbing in my arms, to save the meat from burning. Called Elizabeth from her practice in the music room, left her in charge, took my post again at the foot of the ladder as, rung by rung, she brought him down. She bent outwards, was curved out, and he was safe inside her, as though he was in her womb again.
‘Kenny,’ I began, when his feet touched the ground, but her eyes silenced me. Hugging him, she took him inside while I put the ladder away and locked the garden gate. She was washing his face in the bathroom when I went looking for them. I heard their voices and paused outside the door.
‘I can do it when he’s not watching,’ Kenny sobbed.
I have that effect on him still. It does not come from any pressure I can identify; yet he will say, ‘Don’t bully me, Dad’, when all I have done is look judicious or uncertain. Perhaps I was too insistent on pointing to moral standards, too ready with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but I found myself afflicted with watchfulness in the home, a place where I should have been free. I generalised too much, I see it now; gave too many lessons, and pushed my children off, without knowing it, from the transaction they wished to make with me. Transaction? From the hug or kiss they might have offered. But does that turn a boy into a nebbish? Does it make him unable to climb down from a tree?
I offered Kenny a glass of beer, which he accepted, although I was having lime cordial myself. Bowls dehydrates me, and I wake dry-mouthed and headachy at 2 a.m. if I do not fill up with water straight away.
‘It’s that bloody woman you put on to me,’ he complained.
‘Don’t swear, Kenny. What woman?’ I said.
‘That Gummy. Gummer. That friend of yours I sold a mortgage to.’
‘I don’t know any Gummers.’
‘The mother was the one you sent. She’s senile now. The daughter’s got power of attorney. She keeps on coming in and threatening me.’
‘Mrs Lloyd’s daughter, is that who you mean? Is Mrs Lloyd senile?’
‘She’s gaga, Dad. I went to visit her. She’s lost her marbles.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘She calls herself Mrs Gauss and says she’s learning German to go to Germany.’
‘Has she forgotten Will’s dead?’
‘Who’s Villi?’
‘Willi Gauss. He was on Somes Island with me.’
Kenny sent an impatient glance across the harbour at my third eye. ‘How do I know what she knows? I couldn’t get any sense. It’s the daughter I have to deal with. She’s even crazier than her old lady is.’
‘What does she do?’
‘She says I cheated her mother. She says she’s going to the police. She’s laying charges.’
‘Can she do that?’
‘Of course she can’t.’
‘Did you cheat her mother?’
‘Shit, Dad.’
‘Don’t swear.’
‘I don’t cheat anyone. I’m not in the cheating game. I sold her a mortgage, that’s all.’
‘The sort of interest you charge, that could be seen as cheating.’
Kenny slammed his glass down. ‘I’m going.’ Red-faced, upper lip bunched, white teeth gleaming. Yet his eyes were full again.
‘Kenny,’ I called, ‘what is it you want me to do?’
‘Just get those loonies off my back. You sent them in the first place.’
Then he was gone. His car made sounds of anger in the drive.
Poor boy, I thought. Poor Kenny. I wanted be at the cricket with him again, watching his finger point out fieldsmen on his home-made chart. ‘Square leg. Fine leg. Third man.’
‘Silly mid-off,’ I said. ‘Is that why you’ve made him cross-eyed?’
I would not call him yellowbellied again. I would not say, ‘See if you can tell me, Kenny, why it’s not right to behave like that.’
THREE
I feel the need for fullness and the rounding out of things. It cuffs and buffets me with ‘not enough’ and ‘start again.’ And I must try to tell no lies, for there’s no one in a position to find me out. I need to know that I’ve improved.
Architecture comes into it. I mean the shape of the life I’ve made and how it may be built again, brick by brick, on the page. I am, above all, a practical man. So I must pull myself together. First comes Josef Mandl of Vienna. But each time I go back for my materials I must crawl through the tunnel. Direction and contour change. Air and language change. I must write those days in words that were not their own. Yet this language I write in is natural to me – think in it, dream in it, and pass my daily life. Does it mean I can know that other time only at second hand?
I say no to that, even as I feel a dislocation, the little jolt that moves me outside natural understanding and hangs me with my feet several inches off the ground. The displacement is not only mine.
Belov’d Vienna – dost thou lie on Ganges
Or on the Nile?
The poet, whoever he was, asked a good question. There were no Nazis more eager than those of my home town. Once they were released they set to. Freud speaks of ‘the deep abyss of Vienna’. Stefan Zweig says ‘the world fell back morally a thousand years’. It would be easy to proceed by quotation and accept this terminology which, in its context, is not wrong. It is just that I see the movement differently: a short step from one room into another.
These things are not mine to write about. I left Vienna in 1937, before the Anschluss, before the Blitzverfolgung, and my view does not have a place. I left on the point of my father’s toe. It is strange how I persist in that – in seeing us like figures in a cartoon. In fact he hugged and kissed me and tears ran down his face. He pressed money in my hand and made me swear to write from every port. I did that; I wrote to my parents. I wrote long after they were able to reply.
My path to communism lay through the Boy Scouts. I enjoyed the marching in uniform and the saluting and the swearing of the oath. My parents were happy to see me there, following Franz, in an organisation so structured and Austrian. What they did not know was that many of the older boys were Reds and they used the Scouts as a recruiting ground. Vienna was a political city. It was a city for organisations, both legal and underground – for bomb-throwing and arson and private armies and bloody clashes in the streets. I was ten when the workers burned down the Palace of Justice. I stood in a park with my mother and watched them marching in from Ottakring and Floridsdorf. The hunger and the hatred of the suburbs’ – men with pinched faces and starved eyes. Eighty of them were dead by nightfall, shot by the police. And when I was sixteen the Ringstrasse was blocked again, with machine-gun nests and barbed wire. I marched in my blue and yellow uniform to the Vienna Trotting Track and saw little Dollfuss, five foot nothing, prance up the steps to the draped rostrum, wearing a falcon feather in his cap. Colu
mns of Heimwehr marched by, followed by the Tyrolese National Guard in sugar-loaf hats. ‘Heil!’ shouted the crowd. I shouted too, more in confusion than anything else. ‘I announce the death of Parliament,’ Dollfuss cried. Another year and he was hanging Social Democrats and turning his howitzers on the workers’ model homes. That was the massacre of 1934. Dollfuss himself was dead a few months later, murdered by Nazis in an attempted putsch. So it went on. How could I not be political?
We camped among the beech trees, we sat around campfires singing songs, we slept in tents and cabins and learned skills that I was able to put to use several years later in the gorse-covered hills above the Hutt Valley. I was a listener and a watcher and something of a thinker too. I’ll correct that: a reasoner. Nothing original came from me, but give me information to bend and fit and I made interesting shapes. I reached conclusions, and it was natural that in clerico-fascist Austria, and in embattled socialist Vienna (it’s 1932 I’m talking about), I should come down on the left. I started listening to the German-language broadcasts from Radio Moscow and reading pamphlets slipped to me – I loved things clandestine and back-handed – by several of the older boys. The uplifting declarations and useful skills of the Boy Scout movement began to seem childish and I looked for a place to go where my new-found political wisdom might be put to use. I’ll have to examine that as well: did I wish to be useful? The most truthful answer is that I wished to be active and wished to be free. The desire was a vehicle that rolled without direction until I was able to steer it on to the Marxist highroad. Then it went along at an exhilarating pace. And indeed my beliefs were sincere. Some of them I hold to this day.