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Copyright © 2019 Christine Leunens
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ABRAMS The Art of Books
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TO MY HUSBAND, AXEL
The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds. They escape the liar’s grip like seeds let loose in the wind, sprouting a life of their own in the least expected places, until one day the liar finds himself contemplating a lonely but nonetheless healthy tree, grown off the side of a barren cliff. It has the capacity to sadden him as much as it does to amaze. How could that tree have gotten there? How does it manage to live? It is extraordinarily beautiful in its loneliness, built on a barren untruth, yet green and very much alive.
Many years have passed since I sowed the lies, and thus lives, of which I am speaking. Yet more than ever, I shall have to sort the branches out carefully and determine which ones stemmed from truth, which from falsehood. Will it be possible to saw off the misleading branches without mutilating the tree beyond hope? Perhaps I should rather uproot the tree and replant it in flat, fertile soil. But the risk is great, for my tree has adapted in a hundred and one ways to its untruth, learned to bend with the wind, live with little water. It leans so far it is horizontal, a green enigma halfway up and perpendicular to a tall, lifeless cliff. Yet it is not lying on the ground, its leaves rotting in dew as it would if I replanted it. Curved trunks cannot stand up any more than I can straighten my posture to return to my twenty-year-old self. A milder environment, after so long a harsh one, would surely prove fatal.
I have found the solution. If I simply tell the truth, the cliff will erode chip by chip, stone by stone. And the destiny of my tree? I hold my fist to the sky and let loose my prayers. Wherever they go, I hope my tree will land there.
I was born in Vienna on March 25, 1927, Johannes Ewald Detlef Betzler, a fat, bald baby boy from what I saw in my mother’s photo albums. Going through the pages, it was always fun guessing from the arms alone if it was my father, mother or sister who was holding me. It seems I was like most babies: I smiled with all my gums, took great interest in my little feet and wore prune jam more than I ate it. I loved a pink kangaroo twice my size that I troubled to drag around but didn’t love the cigar someone stuck in my mouth, or so I conclude because I was crying.
I was as close to my grandparents as to my parents—that is, my father’s parents. I never actually met my grandparents on my mother’s side, Oma and Opa, as they were buried in an avalanche long before I was born. Oma and Opa were from Salzburg and were known far afield as great hikers and cross-country skiers. It was said that Opa could recognize a bird from its song alone, and a tree from the sound of its leaves moving in the wind, without opening his eyes. My father also swore that Opa could, so I know my mother wasn’t exaggerating. Every kind of tree had its own particular whisper, he said Opa once told him. My mother talked about her parents enough for me to grow to know and love them well. They were somewhere up there with God, watching me from above and protecting me. No monster could hide under my bed and grab my legs if I had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, nor could a murderer tiptoe up to me as I slept to stab me in the heart.
We called my grandfather on my father’s side “Pimbo,” and my grandmother “Pimmi” followed by the suffix chen, which signifies “dear little” in German—affection having the curious side effect of shrinking her some. These were just names my sister had made up when she was little. Pimbo first set eyes on Pimmichen at a ball, one of the typical fancy Viennese ones where she was waltzing with her handsome fiancé in uniform. The fiancé went to get some Sekt and my grandfather followed to tell him how beautiful his future wife was; only to be told that he was her brother, after which Pimbo didn’t let him in for another dance. Great-Uncle Eggert sat twiddling his thumbs because, compared with his sister, all the other ladies were plain. When the three of them were leaving, my grandfather led the others to the Benz motorwagon parked just behind the carriages, and resting his arm on the back of the open seat as though he were the owner, he looked up at the sky dreamily and said, “A pity there’s only room for two. It’s such a nice evening, why don’t we walk instead?”
Pimmichen was courted by two fine matches in Vienna society, but married my grandfather thinking he was the most handsome, witty, charming of all, and wealthy enough. Only the latter he wasn’t. He was in truth what even the bourgeoisie would call poor as a church mouse, especially after the expenses he suffered taking her to the finest restaurants and opera houses in the months prior to their marriage, compliments of a bank loan. But this was only a white lie, because a week before he’d met her he’d opened with the same bank loan a small factory that produced irons and ironing boards, and he became wealthy enough after some years of hard work. Pimmichen liked to tell us how lobster and champagne transformed to sardines and tap water the day after their wedding.
Ute, my sister, died of diabetes when she was four days short of twelve. I wasn’t allowed to go in her room when she was giving herself her insulin shots, but one time, hearing my mother tell her to use her thigh if her abdomen was sore, I disobeyed and caught her with her green Tracht pulled up past her stomach. Then one day she forgot to give herself her shot when she came back from school. My mother asked if she had, and she said Ja, ja, but with the endless shots her response had grown into more of a refrain than a confirmation.
Sadly, I remember her violin more than I do her, the glazed back with ribbed markings, the pine smell of the resin she rubbed on the bow, the cloud it made as she began to play. Sometimes she let me try, but I wasn’t allowed to touch the horsehairs, that would make them turn black, or tighten the bow like she did, or it could snap, or turn the pegs, because a string could break, and I was too little to take all that into account. If I was lucky enough to get as far as drawing the bow across the strings to emit a noise that delighted only me, I could count on her and her pretty friend bursting into laughter and my mother calling me to help her with some chore she couldn’t manage without her brave four-year-old. “Johannes! My sweet little Jo?” I gave it a last try but could never move the bow straight the way Ute showed me; and it ended up touching the bridge, the wall, someone’s eye. The violin was wrenched from my hands and I was escorted out the door, despite my enraged wailing. I remember the pats on the head I got before Ute and her friend, in a fit of giggles, shut the door and resumed their practice session.
The same photographs of my sister stood on the side table of our living room until one by one, with the passing years, most of my memories were absorbed into these poses. It became hard for me to make them move or live or do much other than smile sweetly and unknowingly through the peripeteias of my life.
Pimbo died of diabetes less than two years after Ute, at the age of sixty-seven, though he had never been, to his knowledge, diabetic. When he was recuperating from pneumonia the disease had arisen from a dormant state, after which his sorrow was incurable, for he felt he was the cause of my sister’s death by having passed it on to her. My parents said he simply let himself die. By then Pimmichen was already seventy-four years old and we didn’t want her to struggle on her own, therefore we took her in. At first, she wasn’t at all fond of the idea because she felt that she would be intruding on us; and she reassured my parents at breakfast every morning that she wouldn’t bother them long . . . but this didn’t reassure them or me, as none of us wished for her to die. Every year was to be Pimmichen’s last, and every Christmas, Easter and birthday my father would lift his glass in the air, blinking his moist eyes, and say that this might be the last year we were all together to celebrate this occasion. Instead of believing more in her longevity as the years went by, we strangely believed in it less and less.
Our house, one of the older stately ones painted that Schönbrunner yellow common in Austria, was in the sixteenth district, called Ottakring, on the western outskirts of Vienna. Even though it was within the city limits, we were partially surrounded by forests, Schottenwald and Gemeindewald, and partially by grassy fields. When we came home from central Vienna it always felt as if we lived in the countryside rather than a capital city. This said, Ottakring was not considered one of the best districts to live in; on the contrary, it was, with Hernals, one of the worst. Its bad reputation had come about because the portion of it that extended toward the city was inhabited by what our elders would call the wrong sort of people, which I think meant they were poor, or did whatever one does not to remain poor. But luckily we lived far away from all that. From the windows of our house we could not actually see the hills covered with vineyards, famed for the fruity Weißwein they’d produce after the grapes spent a summer of basking in the sun; still, if we took our bicycles we would be zigzagging along the roads just below them in a matter of minutes. What we could spot from our windows was our neighbors’ houses, three of them, in old gold or hunter green, the most-used alternatives to Schönbrunner yellow.
After my grandfather’s death, it was my father who ran the factory. He had the necessary experience because when Pimbo was the director my father had worked under him, supervising the workers. My mother warned my father of the dangers of the firm getting too big; nevertheless, he decided to merge the company with Yaakov Appliances, which was not bigger than Betzler Irons but was exporting all over the world, bringing in impressive profits. My father argued that 100 percent of zero was zero, whereas any way you looked at it, a thin wedge of a lot was more. He was satisfied with his partnership, and soon Yaakov & Betzler was exporting its modernized irons and home appliances to strange lands. My father bought a globe and, after dinner one night, showed me Greece, Romania and Turkey. I imagined Greeks and Romans (I thought Romans were what one called the people who lived in Romania) and Turks in stiffly ironed tunics.
Two incidents from my early childhood stand out, although these moments were neither the happiest nor saddest in those early years. They were superlatives of nothing really, and yet they are the ones my memory has chosen to preserve. My mother was rinsing a salad and I saw it first—a snail housed among the leaves—and with a flick of the hand she threw it in the rubbish. We had several bins, one of which was for rinds, peelings and eggshells, which she buried in our garden. I was afraid the snail would be smothered as it could get quite juicy in there. My mother wouldn’t let me have a dog or cat because she was allergic to animal hair, so after some begging on my part and some hesitation on hers, she, with a queasy look on her face, consented to my keeping the snail on a dish. She was as sweet as mothers get. A day didn’t go by without me feeding my snail lettuce. It grew bigger than any snail I ever saw—as big as my fist. Well, almost. It poked its head out of its shell when it heard me coming, swayed its body and moved its antennae at me, all this of course at its own slow rhythm.
One morning I came downstairs to find my snail was gone. I didn’t have to look far to find it and after detaching it from the wall, I put it back on its dish. This became a habit and every night it escaped and went farther so that I would spend the onset of my day looking for and detaching it from table legs, the Meissen porcelain on display, the wallpaper or someone’s shoe. I was running late for school one of these mornings, hence my mother said I could look for it after breakfast if I had enough time. Just as she said this, she set the tray down on the bench, and we both heard the crunch. She turned the tray over and there was my snail, all broken to bits. I was too old to cry the way I did—I didn’t even stop when my father came running, thinking I’d gotten myself with the carving knife. He was sorry he couldn’t help because he had to leave for work, so my mother promised to fix the snail for me. I was in such a state, she finally conceded I didn’t have to go to school.
I ran for the glue to stick the pieces of shell back together, but my mother feared the glue would seep through and poison the snail. She thought it best that we kept it moist with drops of water; all the same within an hour my poor pal had shrunk to something miserable. At that stage Pimmichen suggested we go to Le Villiers, a French delicatessen in Albertina Platz, to buy a pack of escargot shells. We rushed back and left a new shell on its dish, but nothing happened—my snail wouldn’t come out of the old one. Eventually we helped the withered bit of life into the new shell, with fragments sticking to its back. After another two days of care and grief it was clear my pet was dead. If I took its death harder than I had my sister’s and grandfather’s, it was only because I was older—old enough to understand I’d never see it or them again.
The other incident wasn’t really an incident. It was just that Friday evenings, my parents went out to dinner parties, exhibitions or operas, and Pimmichen and I would melt a whole bar of butter in the pan with our schnitzel. Standing in front of the stove like that, we’d dip bits of bread into it and bring them directly to our mouths, our forks getting devilishly hot. Afterward she made us Kaiser schmarrn for dessert, scooping and sprinkling into the pan each ingredient I wasn’t allowed to have and could, in a jiffy, feast more than my eyes on. Normally I was forbidden even to dream of such things because my mother was afraid anything rich could cause diabetes. If only she’d known. But somehow it tasted better without her or anyone else knowing.
One day in mid-March 1938 my father took me with him to a shoemaker who specialized in shoes for the handicapped. I remember because my eleventh birthday wasn’t far away and there was a calendar on the shoemaker’s wall. As we waited on the bench I couldn’t stop counting the days to my birthday because I knew my parents were going to give me a box kite from China. You wouldn’t really call my father’s flat feet a handicap, but it was painful for him at work standing all day. Pimmichen bought her shoes there as well, and held Herr Gruber in the highest esteem. He changed people’s lives, she insisted, claiming sore feet stole from old people the will to live. When Herr Gruber made a pair of shoes he took it as his duty to compensate for the bunions, corns and bumps that come with age. He was in demand, as we saw from the half a dozen others waiting that day in his narrow shop, which smelled of leather and tanning oils.
I kicked my legs to make the time go faster when suddenly there was a tremendous noise outdoors, as if the whole sky was falling. I jumped up to see what was happening but my father told me to close the door, I was letting the cold in. My next impression was all of Vienna shouting the same words, but it was too huge a sound to make out the single words they were saying. I asked my father and neither could he, although he was getting madder the further the big hand moved round the clock. Herr Gruber ignored what was going on outside; instead he continued to take the measurements of a boy who’d suffered from polio and needed the sole of his left shoe to compensate ten centimeters for the stunted growth of that leg. By the time Herr Gruber got to my father, my father couldn’t stay still, especially as Herr Gruber finished with his feet and continued to fuss around measuring his legs to see if there was a difference, because if there was, it wasn’t good for the back. Herr Gruber was the same with everybody; my grandmother said he cared.
On the way home we went by Heldenplatz, and there, I’ll never forget, I saw the most people I’d ever seen in my life. I asked my father if it was a million people; and he said more likely a few hundred thousand. I didn’t see the difference. Just watching them, it felt much like I was drowning. Some man on the Neue Hofburg balcony was shouting at the top of his lungs, and the mass of people shared his fury as much as his enthusiasm. I was astounded that a hundred or so adults and children had climbed up on the statues of Prince Eugen and Archduke Karl, both on horseback, and were watching from up there. I wanted to climb up too and begged my father, but he said no. There was music, cheering, flag-waving; everyone was allowed to participate. It was amazing. Their flags had signs that looked as if they would turn if the wind blew on them, like windmills turn their four arms.
On the tram home my father just looked out the window at nothing. I was resentful that he hadn’t let me join in the fun when we had been so close to it. What would it have cost him? A few minutes of his time? I studied his profile . . . his features on their own were gentle enough, but his sour mood made them, I was ashamed to observe, ugly. His mouth was determined, his face tense, his nose straight and severe, his eyebrows knotted irritably, and his eyes focused on something not present to a degree that nothing would divert him, or me either as long as I was with him. His neatly combed hairstyle suddenly seemed merely professional, a means by which to sell better. I thought to myself: My father cares more about his work, his profits and his factory than his family having any fun. Slowly, though, my anger subsided and I felt sorry for him. His hair didn’t seem quite so nice anymore—it stuck up in a few places at the top where it was thinning. I took advantage of the tram going around a bend to lean on him with more weight than was really called for.
“Vater,” I asked, “who was that man up there?”
“That man,” he answered, putting his arm around me without looking in my direction and squeezing on and off affectionately, “doesn’t concern little boys like you, Johannes.”
Some weeks later two men came to carry my grandmother off on a stretcher so she, too, could cast her vote in the referendum concerning the Anschluss; that is, whether or not she was in favor of the annexation of Austria as a province of the German Reich. My parents had been gone since early morning to cast theirs. My grandmother was in the best disposition she’d been in since she’d slipped on ice and broken her hip on her way back from the pharmacy after purchasing a menthol cream to work into her knees.
“Lucky I went to the pharmacy that day,” she told the men. “It healed my arthritis—it did! I don’t think about my knees anymore because my hip hurts more! It’s the best remedy for an ache—just find another ache somewhere else.”
The men did their best to smile at her joke. They were elegant in their uniforms and I was embarrassed because I could see that to them she wasn’t Pimmichen, she was just an old woman.
“Ma’am, before we leave, did you remember to take your identification papers?” asked one of the men.
Pimmichen could talk more easily than she could hear others talking, so I answered for her, but in her excitement she didn’t hear me either. She carried on as they lifted the stretcher—she was Cleopatra being conducted to Caesar—until one of the men nearly dropped her; then she joked she was on a flying carpet over Babylon. She told them how different life used to be for her and her parents, before the boundaries and mentalities had changed; and how she’d dreamed of seeing Vienna once again the flourishing capital of a great empire, imagining that the union with Germany would somehow restore the lost grandeur of Austro–Hungary.
Later in the day my grandmother returned exhausted and in need of a sleep, but by the next morning she was back on the sofa grappling with a newspaper, its pages like a pair of insubordinate wings. I was on the rug, crouching naked in front of my mother, who removed a bee sting from my back and another from my neck with tweezers before pressing cotton, cool with rubbing alcohol, on the spots. Then she examined me for ticks in the most unlikely places—between my fingers and toes, even in my ears and belly button. I protested when she looked in the crease of my buttocks but she took no heed. She’d warned me about going to the vineyards to fly my kite.
Afraid of the newly set restrictions, I explained exactly what had happened. I’d gone to the field, but there wasn’t enough wind so I was forced to run to get the kite to fly, then I had to keep running if I wanted it to stay up in the air—if I stopped just a second to catch my breath it made the strings droop, which made it fall down more, so I ran and ran until I found myself on the edge of the vineyards, where I stopped obediently, I swear, but then, Mutti, it landed in the middle, all by itself, and I had to go get it. It was your and Vati’s nice present to me.
“The next time there’s not enough wind,” my mother replied, pulling a wisp of my hair every few words, “try running in the other direction, away from the vineyards. There’s plenty of room in the field for you to run the other way.” Looking down at me, she lifted an eyebrow skeptically and dropped my balled-up clothes on top of me.
“Yes, Mutter,” I sang, glad not to have received any punishment. I couldn’t dress fast enough, though, and she slapped my bottom as I knew she was going to and called me Dummer Bub—silly boy.
“It’s 99.3 percent in favor of the Anschluss,” read Pimmichen, her attempt to wave a victorious arm less effective than anticipated for it fell back down involuntarily. “That’s almost a 100 percent. My, my.” She handed the ruffled-up pages to my mother before shutting her eyes, after which my mother set the paper aside, saying nothing.
There was much change and confusion at school and even the map changed—Austria was scratched off and turned into Ostmark, a province of the Reich. Old books gave way to new, just as some of our old teachers were replaced by new ones. I was sad I didn’t get to say good-bye to Herr Grassy. He was my favorite teacher and had been my sister’s six years earlier. During the first day’s attendance call, when he’d realized I was Ute Betzler’s little brother, he had scrutinized me, trying to find the resemblance. My parents’ friends used to tell us that our smiles were alike, but I wasn’t smiling just then. Ute was his student the year she’d passed away, and I couldn’t help but think that he probably remembered her better than I did.
The next day he kept me after class to show me a coconut ark containing tiny African animals carved in exotic wood—giraffes, zebras, lions, monkeys, alligators, gorillas and gazelles, all in pairs, male and female. My eyes must have been big as I bent over his desk and admired it all. He said he’d found the ark in 1909 in a market in Johannesburg, South Africa—like my name, Johannes—and then he gave it to me. My happiness had a streak of guilt, nonetheless, as it wasn’t the first time Ute’s death had brought me gifts and attention.
Fraülein Rahm replaced Herr Grassy. The reason, she explained, was that many of the subjects he used to teach us—90 percent of the facts he had made us struggle to memorize—were forgotten by adulthood and thus useless. All it did was cost the state money that could be better used elsewhere to the greater benefit of its people. We were a new generation, a privileged one; hence we would be the first to take advantage of the modernized scholastic program and learn subjects those before us hadn’t had the chance to learn. I felt sad for my parents, and told myself that in the evenings I must teach them all I could. Now, we learned far less from books than we had before. Sports became our primary subject and we spent hours upon hours practicing disciplines to make us strong, healthy adults rather than pale, weak bookworms.
My father was wrong. That man did concern little boys like me. He, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, had a great mission to confide in us children. Only we, children that we were, could save the future of our race. We were unaware that our race was the rarest and the purest. Not only were we clever, fair, blond, blue-eyed, tall and slender, but even our heads showed a trait superior to all other races: We were “dolichocephalic” whereas they were “brachycephalic,” meaning the form of our heads was elegantly oval, theirs primitively round. I couldn’t wait to get home to show my mother—how she’d be proud of me! My head was something I’d never cared about before, at least not its form, and to think I had such a rare treasure sitting upon my shoulders!
We learned new, frightening facts. Life was a constant warfare, a struggle of each race against the others for territory, food and supremacy. Our race, the purest, didn’t have enough land—many of our race were living in exile. Other races were having more children than we were, and were mixing in with our race to weaken us. We were in great danger, but the Führer had trust in us, the children; we were his future. How surprised I was to think that the Führer I saw at Heldenplatz, cheered by masses, the giant on billboards all over Vienna, who even spoke on the wireless, needed someone little like me. Before then, I’d never felt indispensable; rather I’d felt like a child, something akin to an inferior form of an adult, a defect only time and patience could heal.
We were made to look at a chart of the evolutionary scale of the higher species, whereby the monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas were crouching at the lowest level. Man, to the contrary, was standing tall at the top. When Fraülein Rahm began to lecture to us, I realized that some of what I’d taken to be primates were actually human races drawn in such a way that certain traits were accentuated so we could comprehend their relationship with the simians. She taught us a Negroid woman, for example, was closer to the ape than to mankind. Removing the hairs of the ape had proven to scientists to what extent. She told us it was our duty to rid ourselves of the dangerous races halfway between man and monkey. Besides being sexually overactive and brutal, they didn’t share the higher sentiments of love or courtship. They were inferior parasites who would weaken us and bring our race down.
Mathias Hammer, known for asking oddball questions, asked her if we gave the other races time, wouldn’t they eventually move up the evolutionary scale on their own like we had? I was afraid Mathias was going to be scolded, but Fraülein Rahm said his question was essential. After sketching a mountain on the chalkboard she asked, “If it takes one race this much time to evolve from here to there, and another race three times as long, which race is superior?”
We all agreed it was the first.
“By the time the inferior races catch up to where we are today, the peak, we won’t be there anymore, we’ll be way up here.” She drew too quickly without looking, and the peak she added was too high and steep to be stable.
The race we were to fear most was called Jüdisch. Jews were a mixture of many things—Oriental, Amerindian, African and our race. They were especially dangerous because they’d taken their white skin from us, so we could be easily fooled by them. “Don’t,” we were constantly reminded, “trust a Jew more than a fox in a green field.” “The Jew’s father is Satan.” “Jews sacrifice Christian children, use their blood in their mitzvahs.” “If we don’t rule the world, they will. That’s why they want to mix their blood with ours, to strengthen themselves and to weaken us.” I began to fear the Jews in a medical way. They were like the viruses I’d never seen but had learned were behind my flu and suffering.
One storybook I read was about a German girl who’d been warned by her parents not to go to a Jewish doctor. She disobeyed and was sitting in the waiting room hearing a girl inside the doctor’s office screaming. Knowing she’d been wrong to come, she got up to go. Just then the doctor opened the door and told her to come in. From the illustration alone, it was clear who the doctor was: Satan. In other children’s books I took a good look at the Jews so I’d know how to recognize one in a heartbeat. I wondered who on earth could be fooled by them, especially clever Aryans like us. Their lips were thick, their noses big and hooked, their eyes dark, evil and always turned to one side, their bodies stocky, their necks adorned with gold, their hair untidy and their whiskers unkempt.
Only at home I didn’t get the credit I deserved. Whenever I showed my mother my fine head, all she did was mess up my hair. When I declared to her how I was the future—Zukunft in German—in whom the Führer put his trust to one day rule the world, she laughed and called me “my little Zukunft” or “Zukunftie,” to make me cute, rather than serious and important as I was.
My new status wasn’t accepted by my father either. He wasn’t at all grateful for my willingness to teach him important facts. He diminished my knowledge and called it nonsense. He objected to my greeting Pimmichen, my mother or him with Heil Hitler, instead of the traditional Guten Tag or Grüß Gott, which came about so long ago in the Middle Ages, no one really remembers anymore whether it means “I give my greetings to God,” “Greetings from God,” or “You greet God for me!” By then it was automatic for everyone in the Reich to salute each other Heil Hitler, even for minor transactions—buying bread, getting on a tram. That’s just what people said to one another.
I tried to talk sense into my father. If we didn’t protect our race, the logical outcome would be catastrophic, but my father claimed he didn’t believe in logic. I found that unbelievable for someone who ran a factory—how could he not believe in logic? It was so dumb what he said, surely he was pulling my leg, but he insisted he wasn’t and that emotions were our only trustworthy guide, even in business. He said people think they analyze situations with their brains, that their emotions are nothing but a result of cognition, but they’re wrong, for intelligence isn’t in the head, it’s in the body. You come out of a meeting not understanding—“Why do I feel angry when I should be jumping with joy?” You walk through the park on a sunny day and wonder why your heart is heavy, what on earth could be bothering you. Only afterward do you analyze it. Emotions lead you to what logic is incapable of finding on its own.
I wasn’t quick enough in finding a good example to show him he was wrong; I found it later in bed. The only one I came up with then was: “If a stranger gave you proven figures for your business, don’t tell me you’d throw them in the rubbish simply because you felt they were wrong? You would rather trust illogical feelings than proven facts?”
He answered with a bunch of numbers between 430 and 440 Hertz and asked me what these figures meant logically. I didn’t answer, frustrated that he was avoiding the subject and on top of it being corny, because “Hertz” sounded like Herz—German for “heart.”
“To your brain, these figures will mean nothing, just some sound frequencies. You could stare at them on a piece of paper all you want and no understanding would come out of them. But . . .” He walked over to the piano, pushed down some keys and looked at me so I had to glance away. “Just listen to the notes, my son. They will mean what I feel when I hear you speaking. Logic will take you nowhere you want to go in life. It will take you many places, far and wide, yes it will, but nowhere you really want to go, I assure you, when you look back on your life. Emotion is God’s intelligence in us, in you. Learn to listen to God.”
I couldn’t keep it in any longer so I blurted: “I don’t believe in God anymore! God doesn’t really exist! God is just a way to lie to people! To fool them and make them do what those in power want them to do!” I thought he’d be angry but he wasn’t.
“If God doesn’t exist, neither does man.”
“That’s just Quatsch, Vater, as you well know. We’re right here. I’m right here. I can prove it,” I said as I tapped my arms and legs.
“Then what you’re really wondering is whether God created man, or whether man created God? But either way, God exists.”
“No, Vater, if man made God up, God doesn’t exist. He only exists in people’s minds.”
“You just said, ‘He exists.’”
“I mean only as a part of man.”
“A man creates a painting. The painting is not the man that created it, nor an integral part of that man, but entirely separate from that man. Creations escape man.”
“You can see a painting. It’s real. You can’t see God. If you call out, ‘Yodiloodihoo, Gott!’ no one will answer you.”
“Did you ever see love? Have you ever touched it with your hand? Is it enough to call out ‘Hey, Love!’ for it to come running on its four swift feet? Don’t let your young eyes fool you. What’s most important in this life is invisible.”
Our argument went on in circles until I concluded that God was the stupidest thing man ever made. My father’s laugh was sad, and he said I had it all wrong; God was the most beautiful thing man ever made, or man the most stupid thing God ever made. We were about to go at it again, for I had a very high opinion of man and his capacities, but my mother insisted she needed me to help her hold a pan upside down for her while she worked the cake out. Distracted, she’d cooked it too long. I recognized her old tactics.
The most serious disagreement I had with my father concerned our conception of the world. I saw it as a sickly, polluted place that needed a good bit of cleaning up and dreamed of seeing only happy, healthy Aryans there one day. My father, however, favored mediocrity.
“Boring, boring!” he cried. “A world where everybody has the same doll-headed children, the same acceptable thoughts, cuts their identical gardens the same day of the week! Nothing’s as necessary to existence as diversity. You need different races, languages, ideas, not only for their own sake, but so you can know who you are! In your ideal world, who are you? Who? You don’t know! You look so much like everything around you, you disappear like a green lizard on a green tree.”
My father was so upset this time, I just left it at that and decided not to bring up the subject again. Nevertheless, after I’d gone to bed, I overheard my parents talking in their room and put my ear against the door to hear what they were saying. My mother was worried that my father shouldn’t be having these discussions with me, because the teachers in school asked their students what they talked about at home. She said they’d ask in a way so I wouldn’t realize the danger and that I was too young and naïve to know when to keep my mouth shut.
“There are enough people out there to fear,” my father said. “I’m not going to start fearing my own son!”
“You must be careful. You must promise me not to argue with him like that anymore.”
“It’s my role, Roswita, to educate my son.”
“If he adopted your views, imagine what kind of trouble you could get him into.”
My father admitted that sometimes he forgot it was me he was arguing with—he felt more as if he was talking to “them.” He said language was more personal than a toothbrush, and he could hear it straight off when someone started using someone else’s in a letter or in a conversation, and hearing “their” language in his little boy’s mouth just disgusted him.
On April 19, the day before Adolf Hitler’s birthday, I was admitted into the Jungvolk (the junior section of the Hitler Youth), as was the custom. My parents had no choice because it was obligatory. My mother tried to cheer my father up, telling him I had no brothers and was turning into an only child and it would do me good to get outdoors and be with other children. She pointed out that even the Catholic youth groups were learning to use weapons and shoot at targets, so it wasn’t as if it was the Great War and I was being sent to Verdun. My mother, I could tell from her face, found me handsome in my uniform, despite herself. She readjusted my brown shirt and knotted scarf, and tugged on my earlobes. My father barely looked up from his coffee to acknowledge me, and I couldn’t help but think, had I been on my way to the War to End All Wars, he probably would’ve acted as indifferently.
That summer we, the Jungvolk, were assigned our first important task. All the books that had promoted decadence or perversity had been collected up from throughout the city and we were to burn them. The temperature that month was hot—at night it was impossible to keep bedcovers on—and with the bonfires we were making it grew intolerable. We, the younger ones, were supposed to carry the books over to the teenage boys from the Hitler Youth, who had the actual privilege of throwing them in. I and the others my age envied them, for that was obviously the fun part, but if one of us tossed a book in on our own, just for fun, we were smacked on the spot.
Soon the air around the fire was hot and hard to breathe. The smoke was black, and stank of burning ink. The books didn’t take keenly to being burnt; they made eardrum-breaking pops and fired out red-hot bits that threatened clothes and eyes. The established hierarchy didn’t last long. In no time, tossing in the books became the task of the pariah. What trouble and toil it was for me with my thin arms to cast book after book, volume after volume, far enough into the blaze. One name caught my eye: Sigmund Freud. I’d seen it before on the shelves of our own library. Kurt Freitag, Paul Nettl, Heinrich Heine and Robert Musil followed, as did a history textbook of mine, probably obsolete. Clumsily, I dropped it close to my feet. The fire knew no limits and that one, too, was promptly smoking, withering, pages flying up in the air, a few somersaults, a last zest for life, glowing and finally frittering away.
When I came home there were gaps in our library, leaving me with a vague, uncomfortable feeling, as if the keys of a piano had been pressed down and weren’t coming back up. In some places a whole shelf full had collapsed like dominoes to cover up for the missing books. My mother was having trouble carrying a load of laundry upstairs on her own and trudging back down, she jolted when she saw me. I thought it was because I was black in the face but, going to help her up with the next load, I was shocked to see the basket was chock-full of books. She stumbled over her choice of words as she told me it was, um, only in case we didn’t have enough newspaper in the winter to start our fires—there was no use burning them now in the hot weather. I was lost for words. All I could think was, didn’t she know the trouble she could get us into? She told me to take my shoes off and go have a bath.
Oddly enough, once my mother was made to attend motherhood classes, the family atmosphere lightened. My father liked to tease her lots at dinnertime. He hit his fist on the table and held his plate up for another serving, bellowing that it was about time she attended her wife classes! Pimmichen and I loved it when he complained that she was miles away from getting the Deutschen Mutter Orden, the medal mothers received if they brought five children into the world. Mutter blushed, especially when I joined in, “Yes, Mutti, more brothers and sisters!”—and Pimmichen, “Should I begin knitting?” Our encouragement redoubled when my mother tucked her thin brown hair behind her ears, softly remarking she was getting too old to have more children. She was fishing for compliments and naturally got them. My father said he hoped they taught her how to make nice, plump babies in motherhood school, whereby Pimmichen slapped his hand but it was no secret to me. I’d already learned everything there was to know about these scientific workings in school.
My father sighed, saying he’d married her too soon—if only he had waited they would have received a marriage loan, a quarter of which would be canceled with each newborn child. Financially, my mother could’ve been beneficial. Maybe they could divorce and start again? My mother squinted her eyes in mock anger. Only if she was allowed to buy some new dresses with her play-money, she said. What she meant was the Reichsmark, which still felt foreign in our hands. Her cheekbones were wide and her mouth thin and pretty, but it didn’t stay still long; for it twitched and contorted until my father’s laugh freed her smile. I liked it when my parents were affectionate with each other in front of us. Every time my father kissed my mother on the cheek, I did likewise to my grandmother.
The gay mood didn’t last long. I think it was only the next month, October possibly, that trouble began. It started when a few thousand members of the Catholic youth groups gathered to celebrate a Mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. There were more outside than could fit inside the old stone walls. Afterward, in front of the cathedral, in the heart of Vienna, they sang religious hymns and patriotic Austrian songs. Their slogan was: “Christ is our guide”—Führer in German. This demonstration was in response to a call by Cardinal Innitzer.
I wasn’t there, but heard about it at an emergency meeting of our own youth group. Andreas and Stefan, having seen it, gave us vivid accounts. I am honest, as I have taken it upon myself to be, so I will admit that Adolf Hitler was by then as important to me as my father, if not more so. He was certainly more important than God, in whom I’d lost all belief. In the biblical sense, Heil Hitler had a connotation of “saint, sacred.” We were enraged by the Catholics’ bad conduct; it was a threat, an insult to our beloved Führer, a sacrilege. We would not stand around and tolerate it. The next day some of us from the Jungvolk joined in with the older boys from the Hitler Youth to burst into the archbishop’s palace and defend our Führer by throwing to the floor whatever we could get our hands on—candles, mirrors, ornaments, statues of the Virgin Mary, hymn books. The efforts to stop us, outside of praying, were minimal, and in some rooms nonexistent.
A few days later I stood in Heldenplatz amid a crowd comparable to the one my father had pulled me away from more than half a year earlier. The banners—Innitzer and the Jews are one breed! Priests to the gallows! We don’t need Catholic politicians! Without Jews and without Rome, we shall build a true German Cathedral! and others, all on a vast scale—flapped in the wind, creating sounds I imagined a great bird could make. It was too tempting. I decided to climb one of the monuments this time too, fancying Prince Eugen’s horse more than I did Archduke Karl’s. I elbowed Kippi and Andreas but they reckoned the crowd was too dense to cross. It didn’t stop me, I was willing, and small enough besides. I edged my way between people, and, after some slipping and sliding, succeeded in climbing all the way up the horse’s cold front leg. I wrapped my arm around it and held on tight so I wouldn’t be pushed off by others who had gotten up there before me. From above, the yelling was different, almost magic, and I watched the mass of tiny individuals below. They reminded me of a tree, noisy and alive with sparrows one cannot see until some enigma sets them off, then no more singing, only a tremendous flapping and it emerges out of the tree, a body composed of countless vacillating points held together by some perfect, infallible force as it turns and twists and dives in the sky, and raises its head as one great creature.
Shortly after these incidents I have just described, the November cold came to stay. The sky was clear, the sun a distant point of white and the trees bare. Tension was in the air. It was that November, I remember, that word went around about a Jewish student who’d gone to the German Embassy in Paris and shot an Embassy official. Rumors snowballed, people in the streets sought revenge and many Jewish shop windows across the Reich were smashed to pieces. I wasn’t allowed to go outdoors to see but I heard all about it on the wireless. It was called Kristallnacht and I imagined crushed crystal like snow covering the streets and footpaths of the Reich, hollow clinks and chimes as more fell, stalactites of glass holding fast to window frames, an arctic decor both shimmering and ominous.
Afterward, my father was absent for days on end and whenever he wasn’t, his mood was so sour I often wished him gone again. There was no more joking at home, especially once the factory, Yaakov & Betzler, abruptly changed its name to Betzler & Betzler. Even my mother and grandmother were careful how they spoke to him. They lowered their voices, inquiring whether maybe he would like some coffee? A little something to eat? They tiptoed in the room he was brooding in, left trays just within his reach, and didn’t even bicker about a nibbled-on biscuit put back in the dish with the others. They were acting like mice; he was eating like one.