by Gee, Maurice
When the old man died he returned to Berlin and was in a rat pack roaming the alleys. The food they got, these scavenging children, came as often as not from charities. His mother drudged and slavvied for people who had just a little more than her, and, he hinted once, turned to prostitution for a time.
How did he get his education, the book-learned sort? I do not know. Communist youth groups had him soon enough – a natural progression. He was at a Marxist school on the Frisian Islands at the age when, eight or nine years later, I was passing my Matura at the Gymnasium. Then journalism, always in Berlin. Berlin was the centre of the world; even Moscow was a province. He worked for the communist press, wrote pamphlets and broadsheets, and was in, as well as reporting on, every street action of the time – against the SA and the republican Reichsbanner both. Four years of that. After 1933 he went underground. The Gestapo took him in for questioning. They broke his jaw and cheekbone and several of his ribs, and beat his kidneys with a rubber hose – ‘pissing blood, Josef, have you ever pissed blood? You feel as if your life is running out.’ Somehow he kept his teeth intact. He must have them for grinning at girls.
They expelled him from their Reich – two days to get out – and he went looking for Germans in the world, looking for Nazis, and found them in every place he stopped. Found them in the south seas: Samoa. Found them in Sydney and Melbourne. Auckland too. His cover here, he told me on the beach, would soon be blown.
‘I am making a dossier, Josef. All their names. One day it will be their turn. They stand before us in their underpants in a little room. We are the ones behind the desk. I will make von Schaukel shit his pants.’
I asked him what he had meant when he told me not to go back to Austria. Why must I get my family out? I believed it was to hear his answer that I had stayed in Auckland – but of course it was more than that. I was drawn to him like some light metallic thing, pin or paper clip, to a magnet.
‘I know only what Hitler means to do,’ Willi said. ‘He will have all his Germans, every one. And then – you heard his man, Hoch – he will squash his Jews. Austria will be first. You must read the papers, Josef. Get your family out.’
‘Yes, I will,’ I said. ‘I’ll write today.’
‘Bring them to New Zealand. You must stay here. I need your help.’
What he needed was a translator. He must have someone to turn his articles – his stories too, his plays – into English.
‘I have met a man,’ he said, ‘who is just back from a visit to Germany. Two weeks, that is all he had, but he tells these Schlafmützen here how wonderful it is. He stands on a stage and describes the German miracle, and soon he will print it in the paper. I must write and say what lies he tells, and you will translate. We will talk to him, Josef, this afternoon. Roy Cooksley is his name.’ He switched to English. ‘We will cook this bugger properly.’
‘He’ll know I’m a Jew.’
‘No he won’t. They think it is all caftans and long hair, it is Shylock here. You will be Josef Mandl from Berlin. A rich young man who travels to see the world. You are in love with our Führer, can you do that?’
We called on Mr Cooksley and his wife for afternoon tea. He lived one beach away, at Castor Bay. He was not a Nazi; a common or garden fascist, that is all. The ground was thick with them (and they are still around: my son Kenny is one). Willi was not entirely right. Cooksley smelled something wrong in me, even though he could not say Jew. I was, and still am, surprised by it, for I was more convincing than Willi. He played the journalist proud of his country, eager for praise, and hammed it dreadfully – but Cooksley’s puzzled looks were all for me. His wife and daughter simply seemed offended by my manners. What is it about these people, I wondered, that they respond more to a buffoon than a gentleman?
‘Your parliament,’ Willi said, ‘has passed a new trade agreement with Germany. That is good. We must be friends. The Germans are a very friendly people.’ (And I stepped in to translate most of that.)
‘I found them so,’ Cooksley said. ‘We found them,’ remembering with a little nod, half resentful I thought, to include his wife. He was one of those thick-necked, backward-slanting men, whose front, including his belly, seemed all chest. He reminded me of a farmer of the Upper Austrian sort, but he was, he told us, in insurance.
‘We are now most-favoured-nation,’ Willi said. ‘That means you like us, we like you?’
‘As far as trade goes,’ Cooksley said. ‘But we like you all right, the wife and me. We like the spirit in Germany, and the discipline. We beat you fair and square twenty years ago, but you’re up and running now and not so far behind. Everybody there thinks alike, that’s the thing.’
‘We like the way they look up to Herr Hitler,’ Mrs Cooksley said.
‘And the way they train their children. Hitler Youth. No snivelling there and no cheek either. But the best thing was the women, we thought.’
‘Ah yes, the women,’ Willi smirked, turning French.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Mr Gauss.’ Although he named Willi, he glared at me. ‘What I mean is, they weren’t painted up. They kept their self-respect, didn’t they Myra?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Cooksley, looking at her daughter, who kept her eyes fixed on her hands in her lap.
‘Healthy-looking women. Wholesome is the word. They looked as if they could march all day with their men. They’ll be good for babies. Having babies. Big strong girls.’
‘The men were fine and healthy too,’ Mrs Cooksley said.
‘Not a weed among them,’ Cooksley agreed, looking at me. ‘I never saw a single pair of round shoulders there. We went to a meeting in Dresden. Thousands of people. Uniforms, wonderful uniforms. Oiled boots. They all saluted Herr Hitler, their arms came up like they worked on a spring.’
‘Wonderful,’ said his wife.
‘And one voice. Sieg Heil. Why can’t we do that?’
‘The Führer in his book calls it Pflichterfüllung. Josef?’
‘Duty,’ I said. ‘Readiness to obey the call.’
‘We could do with some of that here,’ Cooksley said.
‘So if you lived in Germany you would be a Nazi?’ Willi said.
‘Now just a minute, I didn’t say that. It might be there’s too many policemen on the streets. And Germans have to watch what they say. They’re not British after all. But if I was there – the Old Country, I mean – I might just find myself supporting Sir Oswald Mosley.’
We ate pikelets with jam. The daughter rolled the tea trolley in and handed round the cups while her mother poured.
‘Did you go to Germany too?’ Willi asked.
‘I stayed home with Aunty,’ she replied.
He smiled at her. How friendly he seemed. ‘Have one of these,’ he offered, tapping a pikelet with his fingernail.
‘When it’s my turn.’ She pushed the trolley to me, with red cheeks but a disapproving mouth. I thought what unpleasant small unlit eyes she had.
‘These camps they talk about,’ Cooksley said, with half a pikelet swelling his cheek, ‘we never saw them. The people we talked to hadn’t heard of them. The wife and me reckon they’re propaganda. They’re all lies.’
‘Did you see any Jews?’ I said.
‘Not many. Not in the places we went. Because there’s laws. “Jews not admitted”. “Jews strictly forbidden in this town”. Say the words, Myra.’
‘Juden Verboten.’
‘That’s it. Plain language. It’s best if inferior races know where they stand.’ He gulped some tea and washed the pikelet down. ‘Herr Hitler says it in his book. I’ve got it underlined. “With Jews there is no bargaining – there is merely the hard Either-Or.” Not that I know much about them, Jews I mean, except money-grubbing. It’s just that “Either-Or” I like. Straight talking. And the salute.’ He stood and flung his arm up. ‘Sieg Heil! Wonderful.’
Willi jumped to his feet. This,’ he cried, ‘this is the way.’ He clicked his heels, tightened his buttocks, gave a perfect Nazi salute. ‘Heil
Hitler!’ Then he grinned at me, frozen in my chair, and said to Cooksley, ‘Do not ask Josef to salute. He hurts his elbow playing tennis with Baron von Cramm. It is sad for him.’
We walked back over the hill. Willi let me tremble for a while, then let me rage.
‘Never mind, Josef,’ he said. ‘I shall fuck his daughter.’
‘Her,’ I said. ‘She’s a Nazi too.’
‘She is nothing yet. She is green fruit. But you will see how she ripens up. Leave it to me.’
‘We must write the article,’ I said. ‘Straight away.’
‘I must write it. You must translate. Do not worry, Josef, there is work that you can do. You will come and live with me. I have room in my house. And for both of us, plenty of girls on the beach. We will have fun. But what you must do first, write to your family, get your family out.’
I wrote that night. I went to share his house. And he was right: before long the Cooksley girl was in and out of his bedroom. She never passed me without blushing and turning down the corners of her mouth.
Willi and I were busy and ‘had fun’ too – he more than I – until March of the following year, when the Anschluss came.
SIX
When my money ran out I hunted for jobs. There were none on my level that I could do. My English was not good enough for clerical work – and was certainly not good enough for translation, as Willi found out. I could only labour at unskilled jobs. So I worked in canteens and kitchens, in bakehouses, on assembly lines, lasting nowhere more than a few weeks. I worked in a sawmill, where I saw a man killed by an overbalancing stack of timber. His hand, three-fingered from some previous accident, was all of him that showed, reaching out from the sawn planks. My own hands, ruined by two days’ stacking, would not allow me to continue there, but I should not have gone on anyway. I was not ready for that casual kind of death.
I went down the road and started at the tanneries, which made me smell like a man who scrubbed out sewers. There I was allowed to take home scraps of leather, and I sold them to a refugee whose wife sewed them into purses. These people were from Vienna too. They were Jews and were, like me, konfessionslos. For a while I fancied myself in love with the wife, but that was because she knew my streets, she spoke my tongue. Her husband, older than her, had been a doctor. Now he worked in the brickworks at New Lynn, and worked at his English half the night – not to study medicine and qualify again, that was finished with, but to get the essential thing done and stand, he said, upright and make his way. He had seen, quicker than most, that business was where the refugee would succeed – making things, providing goods that we had taken for granted but that New Zealanders had not felt the need of yet.
His wife went into the local grocer shop and asked to buy sour cream. The scandalised owner shooed her out. Everything was fresh in his shop, how dare she ask for sour? I was to remember that. There came a day when I made them eat sour cream in this country.
Rosina was the woman’s name. She was clever and well mannered and had expected to find a welcome among the established Jews of Auckland, but they were upset by the influx of nonreligious Jews and moneyless Jews. They told Rosina she must learn her place, which was not to come in by the front door. They found a job for her as a cleaner. Her husband too, doctor or not, must start at the bottom and make no fuss and not be seen. For a time it seemed to this couple that they were back in fascist Vienna, but then they learned the huge ignorance of Jewishness in New Zealand and they rested in it and found that poverty was their greatest burden.
There were many of them, Rosinas and Karls, putting aside their largeness, making their narrow start; saving their inner wealth for a day that was still far off. I was one of them and yet not one. Leave aside that I was not a refugee. Leave aside that I was single while they, almost all of them, were married. And leave aside my secret life with Willi. My difference from them was that I believed I would go home. They understood that there was no home. They had seen a change in nature. I still thought Vienna was there. I had had Franz’s letter and knew of Susi’s death and I heard, each day, my parents’ silence, yet I had only seen the Nazis marching, I had seen nothing else.
I knew that my parents were almost certainly dead. I knew that I would never return to live in Vienna. Yet I passed my days in expectation. Deeper than all else lay expectation. I was like the drowning man who does not accept until the last second that he is dead. I had not yet known that darkening in my consciousness.
The Weisers shared a house with another couple in the side streets of New Lynn, next to a muddy river called the Whau. On Sunday afternoons their house was a magnet that drew the Austrian refugees of Auckland into the west. It was not the conversation, not even the food, that took them there. (Rosina baked bread, pastries, Kipfels; she was a marvellous cook – but had lost her job in an Avondale tearooms because she could not do pikelets and scones.) It was Karl’s gramophone and his five hundred records that drew those busloads of silent or discreetly murmuring foreigners out through the barren suburbs to the edge of the farms. Silent? Silent Viennese? They had learned quickly not to speak their language in public places.
The garden at the Weisers’ house sloped down to the river and there on a table on a piece of lawn surrounded by bean rows and radish patches Karl set up his concert, when the weather allowed, and his guests sank down on blankets or sat straight-backed on kitchen chairs and dreamed and wept and thought and conducted the afternoon away, however the music and their histories took them. The volume had to be low or the neighbours complained. They complained of the ‘screeching’ of Lily Pons and the ‘bellowing’ of Martinelli, of violins like, one said, ‘a gang of bloody tomcats in the night’. They would not have minded hymns, said the woman on the other side. So the refugees drew in close and sat with arms interlocked and sometimes faces touching.
Those of us who were unmusical – there were a few – gathered at the water’s edge and discussed politics and the state of the world and our hopes of finding more suitable work and this strange land we found ourselves in. We meant, we said, to join its army and fight in the war that was now only two or three months away. We meant – every one of us was passionate – to fight against Hitler. I remember all that passion with deep sadness. It had no bluster or loudness in it. There was so much defeat we had already known.
Autumn and the blackberries were ripe. Several of the young men and women took basins from Rosina’s kitchen and went out to harvest them along the river bank. I had not seen such blackberries before. They were as large as plums, and perhaps, I said to Rosina, they fed on the sticky river mud and so grew plump. She and I left the others and crossed the bridge to the Avondale side of the river, where there was a special clump of vines she had saved for us. This was the Rosina I fancied myself in love with, and perhaps she fancied herself a little in love with me, unlikely though it seems, for an infant swelled her womb, a lovely melon shape that plumped her out and made her ripe and rosy. We went along between the blackberry vines and the mangrove trees and heard Martinelli complain across the tide-swelled river and saw the amphitheatre of the lawn, with table and gramophone and audience. Karl waved at us and we waved back. He mimed the singer, down on one knee with arms outspread, which made Rosina laugh. ‘Isn’t he a lovely man?’ That persuaded me not to kiss her, which I had been set to try when we should be hidden, baby or no. I said, This reminds me of the Kuchelau,’ although it was nothing like, and the semi-rural countryside nothing like the Woods. What was like was the happiness I felt, unspoiled for the moment by all that had happened since I had been there with Susi.
A shallow bank rose on our left and I saw an expanse of promising blue through the trees, while in the west, over the ranges – out where those long waves curled and crashed – a purple blackness intensified. The blackberry vines tangled with the mangrove tops and although fat berries hung over the water there was no safe way to harvest them. I was all for rolling up my trouser legs and climbing, for hanging upside down like a monkey if it would make Ro
sina admire me, but she forbade it and followed the vines up the bank, where she found a patch of sun on yellow grass and sat down to eat our juiciest berries from her billy. That, I said, was cheating, but I was eager to join her in the dishonesty, to set up a bond and share guilt – of which, of course, we had none, excepting comic guilt. And I kissed her on her berry-stained mouth, but it was, like our guilt, more comic than serious. It was – how shall I put it? – occasional. It seemed that we would sin against the hour, would somehow leave it incomplete, if we did not kiss – it would be like a sunny landscape with no artist’s signature.
Then we talked of this and that – of her baby mostly and, a little, of Karl’s ambition, which she shared almost to the end, where it frightened her, and of our horrible jobs – among other things she cleaned lavatories – and her holidays in the east, in Galicia, and of the cafes of Vienna, mine the student sort, where one could read the afternoon away over a single cup of coffee and then play cards until dawn, and hers those marble-tabled halls inhabited by furred sweet-smelling matrons filling their afternoons with bridge, and sighing and saying, ah, no, ah, yes, at the monstrous, the impossible cakes. She had, she said, served her pre-nuptial apprenticeship there, in the Vindabona – but preferred, she said, eating berries from a tin billy with me.
Thunder rolled distantly, hundreds of miles out to sea, and we imagined Karl’s anxiety for his records. ‘We should go back.’
‘Yes, but first I’ll show you something,’ Rosina said. ‘Up here, help me up.’ I took her hand and hauled her up the slope, watching her, admiring her, and thinking regretfully of the love I could not have, until I felt the top bar of a fence pressing my back and a great expanse of light swelling behind it. I turned and she said, ‘There, have you ever seen any place so empty?’