Live Bodies

by Gee, Maurice

  Anschluss. Hitler. Seyss-Inquart. Communists and socialists herded on trains to Dachau. It happened in a night and a day. Still Father would not leave. He did not try until it was too late. Austria, Austria, must have rung clear in his head like a bell. Persecution and murder in full swing – it was a German sickness, and Austrian good health would soon come back. All this while trucks full of brown-shirted Viennese shouting, ‘Juda verrecke’ rumbled by in the streets, and the friendly caretaker, wearing a swastika armband, knocked him sideways on the stairs and spat in his face. But one part of my father’s brain stayed unconfused, and the message was clear: Susi and Franz must go. Now, now, now. They must escape. Franz too was clear-headed and quick and smart. If Father made the decision, Go, and put the money together from bits he had hoarded here and there, Franz was the one who worked out how it must be done.

  They both had passports, Susi’s secured just a few months before, on her sixteenth birthday, because Franz had persuaded Father it would be wise. But after the Anschluss Austrian passports had to be validated with a swastika stamp and if you were Jewish you could not get one. So most escaping Jews were turned back at the borders. Many got free – went through tortuous channels, bribed their way, some to safety, others to countries soon to be occupied. Franz had a friend who skied out over the mountains. He might have done that himself, he said in his letter, but he had Susi; so he tried an even braver thing, he went into Germany. The border officials were not concerned with Jews crossing over. From Munich he might have taken the train round Lake Constance to Switzerland, but there the guards would be alert. The other way, across the lake, had more chance of success: news of the swastika stamp might not have reached a smaller post. So he and Susi took the steamer, and it worked. The Swiss border guards let them through (the Germans closed that loophole a few days later), and my brother and sister had escaped from the Nazis. In Basel they tried to take the train to France but were thrown off because Austrian passports were no longer valid. They crossed the border on foot, paying their guide, and found another train – two young Jews with a suitcase each, with their useless passports, with their bit of money next to their skin – and reached Paris, where they could not work, where they were stateless. Susi died.

  Franz buried her. Somehow he got himself to New York – I never asked how – and there his energy ran out. Franz, who is the hero of this story, Franz, my brother, whom I never liked, found a job and rented a room and never left either; grew fatter and paler (I visited him, for an hour, in 1967) and died after thirty years of it. He left me the few dollars he had, and Susi’s Austrian passport, with no swastika stamp, and a folder of research into our parents’ death. There was also a framed studio photograph of the Mandls, taken in 1935. Father is looking proud and Mother dignified. Susi and Franz are smiling. I wear a twisted mouth that might pass for a smile. I did not want to be part of this bourgeois ceremony.

  When I went into Father’s study in the morning I was surprised to find Mother there. I disturbed them in an embrace. I had never seen them do more than formally kiss, or her take his proferred arm when they were out walking and rest her gloved fingers on his sleeve. Now they comforted each other, and held hands when they moved apart. It frightened me. It told me that my fate would be severe.

  ‘It’s not as if the university is doing you any good. You’ve wasted all your time there. You’ve not done any study. Life is not …’ Father said, and could not go on.

  ‘Life is not a game, Josef,’ Mother said.

  ‘And Susi must not… you will ruin her life. Don’t you understand, we must not be seen.’

  So, that old argument. I managed to insulate myself. But Mother, seeing my face harden, ran to me. ‘Josef,’ she cried, ‘listen to your father.’

  ‘We cannot have it, Josef. We cannot take the risk.’

  ‘There’s no risk –’

  ‘Listen,’ she cried.

  Father wet his lips. I understand how hard it was for him. I understand how much family meant. All that was most precious existed in this little compound inside the compound of our street, and forces he could only half see – turning, my father, this way and that – pressed in and threatened to destroy us. I see him in a trap, not understanding the mechanism. He hardened himself, this kindhearted man, to expel me and make the rest of them safe – and perhaps make me safe as well, in the world outside.

  ‘We cannot have you here any more,’ he said. ‘We cannot have you putting her in danger.’

  ‘For your own sake, Josef,’ Mother said.

  ‘You are old enough. And when you’ve seen it – seen the world – you can come back. We will be waiting for you here.’

  ‘You will understand then, Josef. You will be a man.’ She embraced me – her fragile bones. Father, standing close beside us, with his hand on my shoulder, turned his head away so that I should not see him weep. But I had no pity except for myself.

  ‘I don’t want to leave Vienna.’

  ‘You must, Josef. You must.’

  ‘The police will come. Police are everywhere. They’ll come and find you.’

  ‘Franz found all those papers you had hidden in your books,’ Mother said.

  ‘Papers?’

  ‘Communist,’ Father said.

  ‘They’re only pamphlets.’

  ‘They’re illegal. Josef, what are you doing? Don’t you know they’ll hang you?’

  ‘What did you do with my pamphlets? They were mine.’

  ‘Stupid boy,’ Father shouted. ‘You’re a stupid boy.’

  ‘We burned them,’ Mother said. ‘Josef, in these days, we have to be safe.’

  ‘And you are going away,’ Father said. ‘Right away. You can come back when you’re sensible.’

  ‘Darling, darling, you can see the world.’

  For me there was no world outside Vienna. And when I left – visas, tickets, money, suitcases, even skis – I believed I would find nothing there. I reached New York on a forward slant, propelled, as I’ve said, by my father’s boot, and did not stay in that unnatural city. It rose so high. We in Vienna were ground-clingers, although we might live in apartments four flights up. Thirty, forty, fifty storeys – 101 the Empire State – filled me with dismay. I felt my dislocation from my place, felt myself turn giddily in the thinned air; and I ran, leaning forward still, across America, and let gravity tumble me down the oceans into a country where, if the proportions were wrong, at least they erred on the side of smallness; where, although things remained unrecognisable still, at least I might shift along close to the ground.

  FOUR

  My senses have always been sharp and my memories are precise, and when I recall smells, sounds, textures – the smells of chocolate and coffee and cigars and marsh mud and hot leather and river water, the sound of creaking suitcases, the grinding of tram wheels, the textures of silk and lace and hair – then I experience a kind of suffocation as time stops and breathing is held still and one small part of an existence becomes the whole. My mother’s scarf slithers cold, a snake, across my wrists – and that, for a moment, is all of me. The rude smell, the savoury smell, of Father’s cigar wraps me round and I am in his study once again. Then there is taste and flavour – and almost always it is bread that stops me in my tracks. Colour of crust and firmness of bread-flesh, grain and texture of crumb, loaf-weight, weight on the palm, and the shape of it, mounded, coiled, plaited, smooth – these become a part of bread in my mouth, of its presence on my tongue. I experience a transference; it is almost synaesthesia, magical. Time and place slide across their natural boundaries and become a function of consciousness. For a heartbeat. For a breath. Regulators are not to be denied, for which I’m grateful.

  Elizabeth is baking now and although she uses something called a bread-maker, the smell is genuine enough. Warm yeast, rising dough, how ancient they are. There must be ancestral memories – hot stones, fermentation – going back into times of which there can be no other record. If one day there is to be an obituary of Josef Mandl i
t must say – I demand it says – ‘He taught New Zealanders to eat bread.’

  The kitchen, Nancy’s kitchen, from which I’ve just returned, is no longer a place in which I’m welcome or at home. Elizabeth turned the oven light on and let me look through the glass and I saw with disappointment that she had made rolls instead of the cob loaf I had hoped for. She was brusque with me and snapped off the light. My interest in bread is an affectation, she believes. The other woman, smoking at the table, thinks so too, although she has nothing to base an opinion on. She took a dozen rapid puffs to occupy herself.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Julie,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No smoking.’

  ‘Oh, shit, the nicotine mafia,’ she said, and stubbed the cigarette out in the peanut butter lid Elizabeth had placed as an ashtray.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, courteous, although I trembled briefly in a rage. ‘I don’t mind if you smoke on the porch. How are you, Julie?’

  ‘OK. Why?’

  ‘I was hoping that you’re better. Kenny said you’d had some sort of setback.’

  ‘Did he now?’ A strange unseeing glitter in her eyes.

  ‘Julie and I were talking, Dad,’ Elizabeth cut in. ‘I’ll bring you a hot roll when they’re done.’

  ‘As soon as I turn my back you’ll let her smoke again.’

  ‘Let me have the kitchen, Dad. Give me one room, please.’

  ‘Your mother never smoked in the kitchen.’

  ‘I’ll go on the porch,’ Julie said. ‘I’ll go in the garden.’ She went, with a jangle of tin jewellery and a waft of sweat.

  ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She’s your grand-daughter, Dad. You could at least be polite to her.’

  ‘Call her in, then. Call her back. I’m going.’

  I sit at my desk and watch them walk up and down the lawn – Elizabeth using her skill as a listener and the girl animated, sliding her bangles up her arms, running her hands through her hair. More trouble, I think; she only comes here when she’s got points to score. I see how sharp her lips are and how pointed her teeth.

  I’ve never liked her, even when she was a child. A thin, demanding, screeching, whining, querulous small girl. She had bones that hurt me when her mother parked her on my knee – where, to my relief, she never stayed. She had Kenny’s padding as a baby but seemed all joint and angle by the time she was four, and shed even more of her meagre flesh as she grew. I’m aware that this is selective and I see the easy damage a description can do, yet when I cast around for something nice to say – her brown thin hands, how they express; her finely made ears – I come up with bits of prettiness. I would do better to leave her alone; but there she is, centred in my view, imparting – I am sure of it, see her lips work – spites and dissatisfactions to Elizabeth.

  The rolls are firm and tender and spread with the home-made blackberry jam sent to me across the strait from Nelson. Blackberries. Another taste that brings a memory – but I’ll leave it now and concentrate on what’s before my eyes. Not that girl eating berries from her tin billy in the sun all those years ago, but this one on my lawn, with her hair shorn up one side and weighted on the other, and rings, half a dozen, ruining one ear, and a silver stud like a pimple in her nose. There’s a tattoo on the point of her shoulder. That is new. Please do not let her put tattoos anywhere else.

  I’m surprised that I care enough to ask. It comes not from love, for love is rare, but close connection; from shared blood, which binds with a knot I can’t unpick. My son’s daughter, my grand-daughter, hurts me and concerns me and I am shaken by the depth of it.

  Elizabeth is grave but there is broken glass behind her smile. She sees Julie into the little pink Honda, the toytown car, that is, I suppose, a present from Kenny (he tries to win Julie’s love with expensive gifts). She lets her hand rest on the girl’s shoulder as though trying to hide the ankh tattoo, and kisses her, which is a surprise. She whispers to Julie, prompting her, and Julie flashes a false smile at me, ‘Goodbye, Grandpa. Thanks for letting me visit.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Julie. Come back and have a talk some time.’ For I want to help, I want to like, and I’m curious. How, why, has her life turned into a path without direction, when not much more than a year ago she moved ahead so surely to her goal? I had been able to see it in her feet – another pretty part, high-arched and expensively shod (shoes from Kenny). They pointed forward, tapped impatiently to be gone. All the same there was a day when she sat with me on the veranda – in my canvas chair, she on the top step with her toes slightly turned in – and talked in a way she never had before, easily and happily and with a flicking of her hair. She leaned back on her arms and her elbows turned double-jointedly, and I almost cried, ‘Don’t, they’ll snap.’ The stretched skin of her inner arms was white and pure.

  She said, ‘I’m good at it, Grandpa. It’s nice to know you’re good.’

  ‘Congratulations. What comes next?’

  ‘After the juniors? The seniors. Next season.’

  ‘And what do you do?’ I said. ‘Do you bat or bowl?’

  ‘I do both. But batting’s my best. I scored fifty-one last week.’ She sighed with pleasure, remembering it, and I thought what a difference happiness can make, plumping out a skinny girl into a fat one. (She was not fat of course but gave a round impression on that day.)

  I asked her what she meant to do with her life, apart from play cricket.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘the law. I guess I’ll do law. I’ll switch next year. Dad wants me to go in with him.’

  ‘Property law, then? Business law?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? I want to be rich, Grandpa. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Be rich and score centuries?’

  ‘Centuries and millions,’ she grinned. ‘Centuries first.’

  ‘Does Kenny need a lawyer in his game?’

  ‘Oh, the law’s a base. You can stand on it, Dad says, and jump whichever way you like.’ She sighed again, reversed the painful angle of her elbows and massaged the insides with her palms. ‘I love your house, Grandpa. I’ve always loved your house.’

  ‘I love it too.’

  ‘I want one like this. Up top. With a view.’

  ‘You’ll get one, no doubt.’

  ‘But first I want to enjoy myself.’

  ‘You’ll do that too.’

  ‘Nobody better try and stop me.’ She touched the inside of each wrist with her tongue and rubbed the saliva in as though it were a lotion: an innocent self-love, it seemed to me, although a little strange, a little too removed from the world. ‘Come and see me play,’ she said. ‘Dad’s coming.’

  A wasp was buzzing round her face and she flicked her hand at it. Some hard part, fingernail or knuckle, sent it tumbling senseless into the garden.

  ‘You’re quick,’ I said.

  ‘Gotta be.’

  ‘Have you ever played table tennis? You’d be good at it. I played once. We had tables in our youth clubs and I played for Döbling against Alsergrund. Won easily.’

  ‘What’s Döbling?’

  ‘A suburb of Vienna. I was beaten in the final by a fellow from Josefstadt.’

  ‘Germany,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In Germany. That war.’

  ‘Vienna is in Austria. And it was before the war.’

  ‘Well, whatever.’ Julie yawned and stood up. ‘Gotta go, Grandpa. Gotta go to practice.’

  ‘In the war,’ I said, ‘I was interned. Out there.’

  ‘Where?’ she said, looking.

  ‘On Somes Island. For four years. I was an enemy alien.’

  ‘I heard about that. No one ever told me they used Somes Island though. You’re not kidding me?’

  I felt my balance slipping and I put my hand on the porch rail to hold myself still. ‘It’s not important. Only to me.’

  ‘An island must have been a picnic, eh?’

  ‘It was,’ I said, ‘yes.’ For at the word p
icnic some gigantic weight in me, an iron screen, rolled aside, and I saw the camps at Chelmno and Dachau, and what went on there; and I repeated, ‘Yes,’ and said, ‘I’m tired, Julie. Good luck in the match.’ And managed to close the screen again and think instead of her ignorance, which surely crippled her, and crippled her generation, and yet might be seen as a blessing.

  I had reasons after that for liking her more and liking her less; but saw her in her round persona only once again, as she walked out to bat for the Wellington Junior Women’s Cricket team against Canterbury.

  Kenny and I sat on the bank – Kenny and I at the cricket again! – and watched her take centre and face up and tap her bat on the popping crease, and oh how frail she suddenly was, with head up and bottom out and bony legs strapped in man-sized pads. She scored nineteen (which was her age) and stayed at the crease while other batsmen came and went.

  She was wristy, she had style and finesse, but no strength. She never drove but scored her runs in cuts and deflections and scampered in her flapping pads up and down the pitch, while numbers six and seven and eight slogged away until they were skittled or caught. Julie was mathematical. Angle and gap, pace, turn, bite of ball on the grass: she read them instantly. Clever batting. She might have won the game for Wellington but ran out of partners and her captain sent the order out for her to slog. Which she tried, and suddenly her timing and her competence were gone. They should have trusted to the skills she had. Instead she aimed for the midwicket boundary and popped a catch straight back into the bowler’s hands.

  I understand cricket. I like the game. Patience, skill, formality, not too much brute strength. I would go again if it weren’t for the beery thugs who infest the grounds. If it weren’t for the memory of Julie. She did what no one must ever do: disputed the umpire’s decision. Her clear indignant voice rang across the ground: ‘That was a bump ball.’ Turned to the square leg umpire: ‘Bump ball. You saw.’