Isaac's Torah

by Angel Wagenstein

  Salzburg stretched down below our feet, squeezed between the forest folds of the mountains, with roofs here and there burnt from the bombings. Magnificent, royal Salzburg—reaching toward the Alps with its castles and squares, its churches and vaulted tunnels under the houses—here, from this height, looked like a model or a town of miniature beings from fairy tales.

  Sister Angela stretched her arm out toward the hill in front, thickly covered with clouds of greenery. “Do you see that white house, with the wall that keeps appearing and disappearing between the trees? Do you know whose home this is?”

  “How can I know?” I said indifferently.

  “Stefan Zweig.”

  Something trembled in me, awaking memories of nights spent with his books, when my mother Rebekha would worriedly open the door to see why I hadn’t switched off the petrol lamp yet.

  “Stefan Zweig,” I repeated. “He escaped to America, I think. Where is he now?”

  Angela answered without taking her eyes off the white house: “In the heaven of the righteous. For a long time now. Actually, not such a long time, but time during war is thicker: In ’42 he committed suicide with his wife in Brazil.”

  “My God, why?”

  “Yes, why? I ask myself.”

  I started thinking, then quite some time later I said, “Maybe to avoid receiving after the war a letter like mine…. In fact, do you know that according to statistics, the Jews come last in the world in the number of criminal murders? And first in suicide.”

  “Does this mean something?”

  “Maybe. As they say: as many Jews, as many opinions, as many differences. I don’t know, maybe since the time of the Tower of Babel they’ve accepted different thinking and different tongues as something inherent in the tribe and don’t try to eliminate their opponents through violence. This brought about the delusion that the Jews are adorably unified. As unified as the banker Rothschild and the revolutionary Karl Marx, who wanted to expropriate him. But on the other hand the deepest and most unsolvable disagreements the Jew has are with himself and suicide is the only way to get rid of that annoying Jewish opponent inside you, who is constantly nagging and contradicting you—”

  “That’s not funny,” Angela said, drily interrupting my overflow.

  “I’m not even trying to make you laugh. I just want to say that I fully understand Stefan Zweig. I even think this is the only sensible solution for me too.”

  She was startled, as if I had slapped her across the face, and gave me a furious, spark-flying look, and poked her finger in my chest: “Listen, you’re really a nasty Jew! Don’t you realize I dragged you out of the grave? I didn’t sleep whole nights listening to hear if you were breathing! I held you in my hands, the way you hold a child—shitting in your pants, puking, scabby, covered in lice, and stinking! In order to bring you back to the world of people, you damned bastard! And now you’ll be giving me your Jewish tricks with suicide!”

  “This is my personal problem!” I screamed.

  “Is this what you think? Then go screw yourself, you stupid jerk!”

  “And you shut your black beak!”

  Jefferson unhurriedly ambled over toward us. “Is there a problem?” he asked, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

  “Get lost! It’s none of your business!” Sister Angela angrily screamed at him. The young man shrugged his shoulders and obediently went back to his jeep.

  Angela suddenly started to cry and this changed things. Overwhelmed by regret I caressed her on the head and said with resignation, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s Stefan Zweig’s fault.”

  She looked at me and tried to smile through her tears. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “And will you write me wherever you are? Wherever I am?”

  “I’ll write you,” I said. “But is this address going to be sufficient: Sister Angela, the cotton fields by Mississippi?”

  “Where’d you get this—about the cotton and all?”

  “That’s what the rabbi said, that that’s where you come from.”

  Angela laughed sincerely, though her tears hadn’t dried yet. “It seems in Europe you haven’t read anything about America apart from Uncle Tom’s Cabin! I’m from Massachusetts—Boston. I’ll give you my father’s address; he’s the most famous Negro lawyer in New England. I studied medicine on the other side of the river—at Harvard. In my third year I interrupted my studies in order to come over as a volunteer to your damned Europe. So there. You’ll write, okay?”

  I had to stand on my toes in order to kiss this shapely, large-bosomed black woman. Sergeant Jefferson was looking indifferently and without a trace of jealousy, leaning on the jeep, because I could have been her grandfather, but from another, not-quite-up-to-par and significantly paler nation.

  SIX

  I don’t know, have you heard about that Salomon Kalmovitz, the genius Vienna fur coat maker, who would make with imported rabbit fur magnificent women’s coats of mink, otter, and even leopard? So this Kalmovitz, you know, returns to Vienna from his exile in London and moves again into his old apartment above Schwedenplatz. He can hardly wait for the sun to rise and immediately runs to the first newspaper kiosk where he asks for the daily edition of the official Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Told that the newspaper is no longer in circulation, Kalmovitz gives a polite thank you and buys himself a bag of mint drops. On the next day he goes again and again asks for the same newspaper, in order to receive the same answer. And it’s like this every morning, until on the tenth day the newspaper man tells him with irritation: “Dear sir, didn’t you understand already that this newspaper doesn’t come out and will not come out again anymore!”

  “I know, my dear sir, I know. But it’s so nice to start the day with good news!”

  I don’t really know for whom this news was in fact so good, and for whom not so good, but in any case I came to a Vienna different from the way I remembered it from the First World War—joyfully carefree, in love with itself, and prone to regard the blows of destiny as an historic Auftakt in the middle of its endless waltz—just a pause for rest and change of cavaliers. Maybe at that time it looked like this just from the outside, I don’t know, but now the city seemed to me considerably more somber and confused, having lost its boisterous mood and with difficulty enduring want, destruction, and occupation. On the walls still hung the shreds of images of a manly Hitlerian soldier with a square face and a helmet stuck on his head, with his index finger held sternly to his lips: “The spies are on the alert!” and under these posters rumbled the heavy American, English, and Soviet trucks. Or little Russian soldiers would march in step, singing and whistling collective farm ditties about some Mashas and mamashas, completely foreign in this world, enticed as if by the embrace of the rainbow over the magnificent Hofburg. The Viennese would stop on the sidewalk to gape a little at these extraterrestrial visitors with Slavic snub noses or slanted Asiatic eyes, some looked at them with unconcealed curiosity, and others with covert mistrust, still not completely realizing what exactly had sneaked into their lives, like a black cat in the kitchen, through the crack between the two words “Sieg” and “Heil,” in order to destroy everything, including Karl-Heinz Müller’s plans for a stud farm or at least a small brewery by Rostov-on-Don.

  This wasn’t the case with Frau Sigrid Kubichek, who admitted me to the city commission for displaced people, located at the confiscated premises of the National-Socialist party, just behind the Burgtheater. To her I submitted the documents issued to me by the American military authorities in Salzburg, which indicated that as someone who had been born inside the borders of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, I could be treated as an Austrian citizen, enjoying the privileges of the victims of Nazism and so on. She, this Frau Kubichek, was an extraordinary woman, fully dedicated to her mission, kind and particu
larly attentive to me when she realized that I had survived the Flossenbürg camp, from whence a comrade of hers hadn’t returned. By a comrade I mean a member of the social commission at the destroyed and now recently revived Austrian socialist party, an act of political stubbornness that should have covered with indelible shame the Jewish social democracy in Kolodetz, if in the meantime it hadn’t gone through events whose tragedy extends far beyond that memorable day at David Leibovitch’s café.

  This is how I happened to be accommodated in a small apartment in an old smoked-out building on Margaretenstrasse, which I have never left, except for the time when I had to take a stroll to the North Pole.

  On the next day I dropped in again at Frau Kubichek’s, in order to thank her for her generous compassion toward the former concentration camp inmates, and she treated me to carrot tea and Vienna croissants with nut filling—rare at that time. Real Krasnodarsk or Indian tea one could buy on the black market from Russian and English soldiers, but the socialist frau was a convinced and furious opponent of the black market—a quite dogmatic position that, to tell you honestly, I didn’t fully share. And so, over a cup of carrot tea, I learned that her husband, Franz Kubichek, was a prisoner in Russia. She was ardently anticipating his return one day, but the fact of imprisonment in no way shook her belief in the just cause of the anti-Hitler coalition and the fully deserved trouble that had reached infantryman Kubichek.

  “I am full of admiration for the heroism of the Soviet people,” she said. “To tell the truth, in the thirties, before the Anschluss, my husband and I were convinced opponents of the cruel repressions of Stalin, but now I, as well as all of Europe, have quite changed our opinion.”

  “Is that so?” I said absentmindedly.

  I, of course, shared her admiration. In this great battle my children had fallen too, hadn’t they? But I didn’t feel like arguing about the enflamed enthusiasm of Europe, because even from my pitiful observation point in Mode Parisienne at Kolodetz, three steps below street level, I could clearly see that same Europe, which could swing so easily from blind condemnation or indifference to blind adoration, and back again, in the same order. And about Stalin, who was wrongly judged by the family Kubichek before the Anschluss, I chose to keep silent and to take another croissant.

  SEVEN

  Sadness, like a morning mist, slowly dissolves in the cares of the day and the pain grows duller because life makes its own demands—like a leaf of grass that pokes through the asphalt and strives toward the sun and hope. In the same way, postwar Vienna quickly overcame its shock and its severest injuries and gradually started to regain its customary fresh mood. After all, bread had to be baked, children had to go to school, the rotten transport and medical institutions had to be restored—in other words, life had to be lived.

  I’ve hinted to you about the black market, so firmly condemned by the socially conscious Frau Kubichek, but don’t be too quick to make a superficial judgment about this postwar phenomenon. I’m not looking for paradoxes, honestly, but it was exactly these—the black market and speculation—that were the first to overcome, with their vitality and flexibility, the front lines, the borders, and the hatred; they were the first to melt the ice of frozen Europe. “Lucky Strike” and jellied ham in tins were the first American missionaries of good will, the time of “Yankee, Go Home” was still far away, because these Yankees were dragging in ham and bananas, condoms and medicines. Human masses were moving and settling, like tectonic layers that are reaching equilibrium: displaced Polish Jews were buying destroyed houses and land for a song in the American section of Berlin, Bulgarian contraband cigarettes were being transformed into French contraband wine, green military English blankets were traveling a complicated road until they were changed into real estate not far from Vienna at Baden, and looted gold was turning into fake passports for Nazi military criminals, wanted under tree and stone both in Germany and Austria, but already drinking their gin-and-tonics with a lemon slice under the palms of Latin America.

  I was forced to get involved in such affairs, smaller in the beginning, concerning coffee, chocolate, or the new American miracle, penicillin, but gradually the stakes of the game started to involve me, and one or two more significant and, to my surprise, successful coups laid the foundation for the dream of a small garment-manufacturing business. I was aware that the time of tailoring workshops such as Mode Parisienne was irreversibly over, and I plunged head over heels into making a new living in my fifth motherland, which was closing the dance line of motherlands and ideals. At least this is what I was thinking at that time, without suspecting that I would get caught up in matters pertaining to various pretenses and claims for restitution of old national property, but don’t let me run too much ahead of events!

  Sometimes I would stop by the City Commission for Relocated Persons in order to help Frau Kubichek as a volunteer translator from Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish to the crowds of immigrants who were flooding the Promised Land of Austria, where that Danube, which was still flowing with the delusion that it was blue, was cast as the modest understudy for the Holy Jordan.

  On the banks of this new Jordan, beyond the desert that the war had left behind itself, you could find Mexikoplatz—the core, the pulsing heart, and the indefatigable quintessence of speculation and black marketing. Here from morning till evening, and from late night till early sunrise, people in all languages and dialects were buying, selling, and exchanging everything possible—from family relics and Orthodox icons to beat-up “Austrofiat” military trucks, from Swiss condensed milk to original Russian vodka. And don’t think I’m talking about a bazaar where the offered commodities were displayed! None of these could be seen, people would stroll around or sit all day by their long-finished coffee and seemed to have no other care than to wait for the rain. Especially immaterial was foreign currency, exchanged in complete conspiracy, with the exchange rate here always more favorable than the official one, and if someone happened to dump phony English pounds on someone else, he could have found out without delay that the dollars received in return had not been printed in Turkey either. They even tell a story about two Romanian Jews who put on the clothes of a dead man who had been either half a meter shorter or fifty kilograms fatter, but, skillful in small currency operations in the dark, they used to pass each other in the morning and one of them would ask with his mouth half-open for information from the other:

  “How much?”

  “Five,” the other would whisper.

  Then the two of them would go to either end of the square and when coming back, hands seemingly stuck carelessly in the pockets of their shabby trousers, they would again pass each other like two ships in the ocean, and the first would discreetly inquire:

  “What five?”

  “And what what?”

  In connection with this deadly passion that had taken over Mexikoplatz—the passion to buy, sell, and mostly exchange everything possible for anything else, someone had named this remarkable operation in economic rejuvenation “Little Odessa.” This was certainly fair, because here was present that commercial aggregation of ethnicities and languages, with an apparent European presence, characteristic of Odessa before the Nazi invasion. They even tell the following story about a train that made a long stop in the middle of the night at some station. A sleepy passenger put down the window of the compartment, leaned outside, and asked the passing railway worker:

  “Excuse me, what station is this?”

  “Odessa,” said the other one.

  “And why are we staying so long?”

  “They’re changing the locomotive.”

  “With what they are changing it?”

  The railway worker looked at him in surprise. “What do you mean with what—with another locomotive!”

  “Then it’s not Odessa!” said the passenger and put up the window.

  With the above I hope I’ve explained to you clearly enough what Me
xikoplatz was all about—arena of my first, initially shy and awkward attempts to get involved in the Marxist cycle of “money-commodity-money,” though quite often this took the form of “commodity”-pause—and on the next day, “Where did that Croat disappear to?” which meant that the final “money” had evaporated.

  Of course, Frau Kubichek had no idea about this activity of mine and was thinking that I was making some money as a cantor in the synagogue, destroyed during Kristallnacht and now rising from its ashes—a stupid lie of mine that I now admit with repentance. But otherwise, you understand, I would have sunk with embarrassment about the origin of my money, drinking tea not from carrots but from real tea and with walnut croissants, which I would bring now in my capacity as an independent economic unit. The tea was clearly from Mexikoplatz, and the croissants from under the counter of a small bakery in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, which the Viennese affectionately call “Steffel,” with the bell tower stuck up into the sky. My breath was always stopped with adoration in front of this mystic Gothic prayer of stone, although poor Saint Stephen looked like a one-legged war invalid, with its left tower swept away by a bomb.

  Late one afternoon, duly equipped by the aforementioned bakery with the traditional croissants, I took up my battle post with Frau Kubichek, in order to help her on the difficult road through the language immigration jungle. From the moment I entered, I caught the strange look of my frau and the brief, troubled glance that she cast at a Soviet captain, sitting at the side on a worn-out couch and leafing through some magazine. The captain lifted his eyes, and Frau Kubichek chokingly said, “Here he is, Mr. Officer, that’s him.”