Live Bodies

by Gee, Maurice

  Had she understood me or was it simply chance? She had knowledge, of course, through her circumstances and her history, that duplicated mine and perhaps shadowed forth the ways my mind had taken and perhaps showed plain where I stood. She seemed to know, yet could not have guessed, that bringing me to this place would overturn me and, again, set me on my feet.

  ‘It’s a race course,’ Rosina said.

  ‘Yes, I see. I didn’t know there was a race course here.’

  ‘I discovered it one day out walking.’

  And it had been, I understood, for her a little bit like a blow, coming from the trees to the edge of this vast unexpected place; and it was for me a hole in nature. It was all that had been mine and was mine no more. It was all that I had lost.

  The white rails made their way by geometry round to my right, to my left, and off into the distance like skeleton arms, past a grandstand hollowed out, and closed their embrace over there, a mile away, in front of toy houses where the world went on – but in the centre was nothing. Flat green grass, with here and there a goalpost for rugby reaching up. It was – how can I say it? – it was the emptiness Vienna left. It was Vienna stolen from my life and never to be mine again.

  ‘Josef,’ she said, ‘are you all right?’

  I wanted to say that I had joined them, the refugees, and that I knew there was no home, but I said nothing, for it was not sayable. All I could do was hold her hand and walk down with her to her house, and say, ‘It was pulling you up that bank too hard,’ to explain the whiteness of my face, which she remarked on, and smile at her to concede that all she imagined might be true. She held my hand as though she were holding me up.

  The thunderstorm broke and wet us through, and Rosina made blackberry pie for the several who stayed on, and I rode back to Milford – bus, ferry, bus – wearing clothes borrowed from Karl and thinking, I shall wear these clothes for ever now. Tears? On my own, late in the night, on the still beach. I wept for my parents and for Susi, but made a gravelly sort of moisture, for although I came close to them there was no way of touching, no bathing them in grief, no mingling I could achieve. I wept dry tears for myself. I stood in this place, on these two feet, a refugee, and in a way the whole empty world was mine. Off in the distance a door opened, a door closed, as Willi let Norma Cooksley out. Her footsteps sounded on the path as she went unescorted home.

  What can I do now?, I thought, and there was nothing except stay on and join their little army and when the time came go back there round the world and fight against the Germans – and against the Austrians too, the Viennese.

  It seemed enough, although it was thin, cold, airy – enough to fill the rest of my days.

  I said to them, ‘Give me a gun. Put me in your army. Send me over there, I can fight,’ but all they did was look at papers on their desk, and say, ‘Who are you, Mr Mandl? What are you doing here?’ And they said, ‘Do you have a camera? You must hand it in. And you must have your radio sealed.’

  They did the same with Willi, for we were not refugees. We were all – tourists and temporary residents and refugees alike – aliens, that was the blanket term, but Willi and I had arrived before the Anschluss and before Crystal Night, and in any case he was not a Jew. He had not begun to publish his anti-Nazi writings until the start of the war, had stayed in the German club – happily, the Tribunal implied – until then. It was useless for him to claim that it was part of his cover, that the deeper he infiltrated the more damage he might do. And useless for him to claim that having a Jew share his house – the risks he took doing that – proved his anti-Nazi sentiments. They put Willi on the island quick. He was one of the first to go, with Hoch and Geissler and von Schaukel. Me they classified C and sent to the State Placement Service, which found me a job on a farm, and when my uselessness with cows was sufficiently proven – it took, surprisingly, four months, during which time I shivered and complained and broke things and was butted, kicked, trodden on, shat on and once, I am ashamed to say, was discovered frostbitten in the corner of a shed, hidden underneath a pile of sacks – they sent me to a joiner’s shop where I made mouldings and skirtings. I became quite good at that.

  In June 1940 a ship called the Niagara was sunk by a German mine in the Hauraki Gulf. A great upsurge of spy hysteria started in New Zealand, fuelled by the weekly newspaper Truth. There were tales of lights flashing mysteriously in the dead of night from high on hills, and other lights that answered from the sea and then vanished, then sank; and of people passing packets on street corners, with no word, and hurrying away to cars that waited out of sight; and women in phone boxes speaking German; and strange men digging at the edge of public parks; and others with binoculars who watched the channel where the ships went out. Boys’ Own paper stories, Schmidt the Spy. Now I learned not to be seen, as my father had wanted. Now I learned to creep and defer and not open my mouth. I hid myself as a German not as a Jew – I who was an Austrian; but blazed, I am pleased to say, on the two or three occasions when I was cornered. I told my persecutors exactly who I was and challenged them to hate the Nazis more.

  ‘Hey, Fritz,’ they answered, ‘Fritzie, have a swim,’ and they swung me, two on my arms, two on my legs, back and forth, and threw me in a great arc off the ferry wharf into the harbour.

  I stayed away from Karl and Rosina, from the refugees, for they began to make their way. They made this step, that adjustment, and although they were uncomfortable still, and on an angle from most things taken for granted by these rudimentary New Zealanders (who seemed to me, at times, several steps behind us on the evolutionary ladder), yet they were a little more snug and I did not want my troubles disturbing them. I haunted offices that might give me something useful to do; I explained who I was, a man whose country had been invaded, whose property had been looted by gangs of Brownshirt thugs, who belonged nowhere any more, and please take me, train me, give me a gun, let me go back there and let me fight; and when none of this impressed the man behind the desk, I was, I said, a man whose parents had been murdered, which made him blink at least, and ask what evidence I had.

  None. That was the worst of it. I had no word or report, however roundabout. No fibre in me twitched: they are alive. No great hollow opened: they are dead. Yet I never, from the time I learned of Susi’s death, had any hope.

  I looked at the face over the desk. It took its health and colour and humanity from some blissful territory on the far side of the divide, its ignorance from there, and its patience with me – a place where my words and knowledge would never penetrate – and it maddened me, and I forgot my deference and invisibility and leaned clutching at collar and hair and cheeks to drag him over, and had to be held a while, down in a corner; and then, amazingly, he gave me tea and a biscuit and sent me home.

  That was kind. That was more than I could have expected. Yet he must have made a complaint, for the following day a policeman from the Aliens Department turned up at the joinery factory and asked me to accompany him to my room, which he had a warrant to search. From that moment I was in the camp.

  He found books in German left in my care by Willi and, alas, Mein Kampf was among them. He seemed puzzled by it, but pounced on Marx and Engels like old friends and asked me what I did with them, as though perhaps they served as instruments in some secret vice. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re a communist?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said, ‘although I’m not a party member any more. What I am is an anti-Nazi.’

  He nodded as though it were of little interest. But the next thing he found made him shiver with delight. I’m sure he thought he’d changed the course of the war. Among my letters, which were from Franz, from Willi on Somes Island (heavily censored), from the Red Cross saying that nothing was known of my parents’ whereabouts, was one I had been writing to Susi on the day I learned of her death. It was in German, so he could make nothing of it, but on page two, for her entertainment, I had drawn a map of Auckland, with its volcanoes blowing and little ships loaded with butter (bread and butter
and jam and sailors picnicking on the decks) departing from the wharves and sailing up the Rangitoto channel, and little toy warships at the Devonport Naval Base, their guns shooting corks that went ‘pop!’, and a ferry pulling out from the bottom of Queen Street, and Josef Mandl making a despairing leap for it and landing with a splash in the sea. He looked at it a long time. He turned it upside down and held it to the light.

  ‘What would this be?’ he said at last.

  I explained that it was a letter to my sister, written more than two years before and never sent because she had died.

  It was in a writing pad, waiting to be torn out. I saw how fresh it looked, so I showed him Franz’s letter telling me she had died, and said, I’d hardly be writing to someone who wasn’t alive.’ I turned away from him to hide the wetness in my eyes. ‘It was written before the war started. It was June 1938.’

  ‘Susi could be a code name.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll have to take all this for translation. Come with me.’

  He took me downstairs and used my landlord’s telephone, gripping my forearm all the time. He asked for a car and two more men. They sat me in a chair in the middle of my room – have I said that I had moved from Willi’s house to a bedsitter in Grafton? – where I could reach nothing, and they lifted the mats, shifted the furniture, felt in my bedclothes, they pried a loose skirting board off the wall (which my landlord charged me for when they had gone); they searched the bathroom and lavatory and kitchen, which I shared, and one of them, young and keen, fetched a step ladder from the back yard and climbed through the manhole into the ceiling, where he found a stack of magazines specialising in health corsetry which I could not persuade them were not mine.

  They loaded every book and scrap of paper into butter boxes, they checked the seal on my radio, went through the Aliens Regulations with me clause by clause – had I changed my abode, had I left it at any time for more than twenty-four hours, had I travelled more than twenty-five miles away from it? – but I must say that when I had settled down, when I had my indignation under control and was simply waiting for them to load me into their car and take me away, I found myself overcome with respect for them, and with pity for their decency. They called me Mister, they never laid a hand on me more than was required. And I thought, They will either win the war because of this, or lose it. They don’t understand what they’re fighting against and that’s either a weapon or a huge handicap.

  In the end they gave me a receipt and said goodbye – advised me to learn the regulations by heart – and they left me sitting only slightly rumpled in my chair. I should have been a bleeding ruin whimpering in a foetal ball down in a corner of the room.

  That night I lay in bed thinking of my map. It was a naval base and shipping lanes; and Susi, with whom I’d been joking, seemed long dead: she was dressed in strange clothes which our grandmother might have worn – crinolines, skirts that reached the ankle, a fur boa. Susi, who had fled the Blitzverfolgung, suddenly belonged in an age of innocence. I made an enormous shift in time from her, and was so close she seemed to sit on my bed, which sank under her weight. She held my hand and I could love her without grieving.

  Three days later I was summonsed to face the Aliens’ Tribunal at the Supreme Court. Nothing now surprised me except the leisureliness of the procedures for locking me up. I felt, perhaps because of Susi, fatalistic and peaceful, ready for what might happen and angry only in a wistful, partly humorous way at the absurdity of these New Zealanders in refusing to use a willing able-bodied man.

  The Tribunal had three members: one I believe a retired judge, one a pensioned-off army officer and the third a civil servant. They were sharp and courteous. The procedures lost their leisurely pace. There were chairs, a table, a general air of dowdiness in the room. There was formality but no ceremony – which suited the civil servant and, strangely enough, the judge, but made the officer querulous. He seemed to want someone to salute him. They did not at first ask to hear my story but took a version of it from papers supplied by the police.

  Several years ago I visited the National Archives in Wellington and read my file which, because of my attempts to escape from the island, is rather fat. Only Willi generated more paper than me. I read the Tribunal’s report and discovered that all three members were struck by a feeling of ‘great uneasiness’ about me. Someone underlined in red the word ‘Jew’ every time it appeared. ‘Mandl presents unsatisfactory features,’ they wrote, ‘and might well be pliant under the offer of money. He has not the straightness and honesty of others who have appeared before this Tribunal.’ (I looked up Hoch and Geissler and von Schaukel. They admired the straightness of von Schaukel.) ‘He exhibits the shiftiness and the free way with the truth already noted in others of his race who have appeared before us.’ So, without knowing it, I encountered anti-semitism, and part of their reason for locking me up was that I was a Jew.

  I find it hard to think about this coolly.

  Elizabeth works in the garden. How busy she is with her trowel and how intimately she feeds pellets of fertiliser – slow release, she tells me – into the worked loam about the roots of her seedlings, which will, I imagine, as it’s autumn now, fill our winter flower-beds with colour. She is like a young mother feeding spoonfuls of pudding to her child, and yet is unlike, for she is removed from the danger of immediate response. She would be appalled, I think, at the emotions running free in my room, and if she came through the door – if she had come in a moment ago – would have backed out with a cry of alarm.

  But I have myself in control again. They were not bad men, they were simply stupid. And seeing that word, I cry no, that lets them off too lightly. How is one to know that they would not have stood jeering in the street as Jewish matrons, down on their knees, scrubbed the pavements of Vienna clean? That they would not have killed my father in Dachau and my mother in the Chelmno death camp? This one yes, that one no, how is one to judge? Let me just record: someone underlined Jew in red, and the three of them locked me up.

  I gave them other reasons, gave sufficient cause. The map was one. My sharing house with Willi was another.

  ‘Were you aware of visits paid to Gauss by a young woman called Norma Cooksley?’ the judge asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they were friends. But surely …’ Was my shrug a Jewish shrug?

  ‘Were you aware of the immoral nature of the relationship between Gauss and this unfortunate young woman?’

  ‘I knew,’ I said, and my English began to let me down, ‘I knew that they made some sex together. But she is surely old enough …’

  ‘Did you also have immoral relations with young women in Gauss’s house?’

  ‘I had,’ I said, ‘yes, one. But I only touched her on the outside of her clothes. She was afraid.’

  ‘Was that young woman a schoolgirl?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘certainly not. I would not have relations with a schoolgirl. I do not understand these questions.’

  ‘Who was that young woman?’

  ‘I do not remember her name,’ I lied – and they heard it. ‘She was a …’ I tried to explain the concept of ‘Du süsse Wiener Mädel’, which translates as ‘the sweet Vienna maid’ – a shopgirl, I said, with whom it is all right for the young student to gain his first experience of love. My young woman had been, I joked, ‘a sweet Auckland maid’ who had allowed me scarcely any liberties at all.

  What stony faces. They would have locked me up for that alone. But there was more.

  ‘Did you help Gauss compile for the German consul a list of Jews working in Auckland businesses?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he must have told you.’

  ‘Told us what, Mr Mandl?’

  ‘That we made them up. We even put Spinoza in. We put in Jew Süss. He worked for the city treasury.’

  Are you telling us that the whole of the list you and Gauss made was a lie?’

  ‘It was a joke. Willi didn’t care by then if they knew he wasn’t a Nazi.’
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  ‘You gave the consul a list of made-up names?’ Our crime was lèse-majesté, I saw.

  ‘Mr Mandl,’ said the judge, ‘these actions that you claim you were engaged in against the Nazis, is there anyone you know who can substantiate them?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘no one here. I suppose most of the people are dead. Some got away to America. But there are refugees here who were communists. They could tell you that those things went on. Those battles in the streets. And at the university.’

  ‘Who are they? These people?’

  ‘No. I don’t remember.’

  ‘It will help you if you give us their names.’

  ‘I will give you the names of New Zealanders who are Nazis. Wouldn’t you like to have those?’

  ‘This attitude doesn’t help you, Mr Mandl. If you have the names of communists you must make them known.’

  ‘Is New Zealand at war with Russia?’ I asked.

  They became angry and I was angry too and grew careless. So that they should know I had spilled my blood fighting on the streets of my home town I described a running battle with Schuschnigg’s fascist police, how the student groups armed with batons and stones had thrown themselves in waves against armed men, mounted men, and how we had retreated, bloody but in good order, to the safety of the university.

  ‘We led that,’ I said, ‘the YCL. The socialists and Nazis were only hangers-on.’

  ‘One moment,’ said the civil servant. The judge had picked it up too. The Nazis were joined with you in this brawl?’

  How could I explain to them the street politics of Vienna in the mid-nineteen thirties?

  ‘You have to understand,’ I said, ‘the enemy on that occasion was the fascist government. So all of us, all the underground groups, joined in the fight. It happened sometimes. It didn’t make us hate the Nazis less. We made use of them, that’s all. That was before we had seen what they really were.’