Other People’s Houses (2 page)

1940 and wartime. My father, along with all male German speakers over the age of sixteen, was taken away and interned on the Isle of Man. My mother and I moved from what had been designated a “protected area,” and was out of bounds to “enemy aliens.” I was
twelve. When my mother and I arrived in the ancient market town of Guildford, I was throwing up. Between bouts I lay on a bed in a narrow room at the head of a steep stair, and my mother read me
David Copperfield
. Right then the concept
writer
burst upon me.
This
was what I was going to do. It did not occur to me that I’d been doing it since I was ten.

I came to New York in 1951 and took a class
in “creative writing” at the New School. I couldn’t think of anything to write
about
. The Holocaust experience, it seemed to me, was already public knowledge; I had read about it in the papers and seen it in the newsreels at the movies. It was at a party that somebody asked me a question to which my answer was an account of the children’s transport that had brought me to England. It was my first
experience of the silence of a roomful of people listening. I listened to the silence. I understood that I had a story to tell.

I am at pains to draw no facile conclusions—and all conclusions seem facile to me. If I want to trace the present from the occurrences of the past I must do it in the manner of the novelist. I posit myself as protagonist in the autobiographical action. Who emerges?

A tough enough old bird, of the species
survivor
, naturalized not in North America so much as in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive. Leaving home and parents gave strength at a cost. I remember knowing I should be crying like the little girl in the train across from me, but I kept thinking, “Wow! I’m off to England”—a survival trick with a price tag. Cut yourself off, at ten years, from feelings that
can’t otherwise be mastered, and it takes decades to become reattached. My father died in 1945, but the tears did not come until 1968, when David, my American husband, insisted I owed myself a return to my childhood. I cried the whole week in Vienna, and all over the Austrian Alps.

Finally, I’ll posit two oddities that, I think, attach to the survivor: an inappropriate anxiety, together with
an inappropriate happiness. The former tends to keep me out of the movies. I’ve sat next to American friends and felt them cozy themselves into that communal darkness for the pleasure of suspense—a suspense I experience as disagreeable. Is it because history tells me that the barrel of the gun into which the fellow on the screen is staring
will
go off in his face? It did go off. We were there.

And what makes my mother distrust the monthly statement from her bank? She goes down, lines up at the counter, and tells the bank officer that there must be a mistake. He calls up her account on the computer and the account is correct. My mother comes home and says, “It’s a mistake. I
can’t
have this much money.” My mother can’t accommodate the happiness of having what we need.

Lore Segal

New
York

March 1994

The “Carter Bayoux” of my book once told me a story out of his childhood. When he had finished, I said, “I knew just where your autobiography stopped and fiction began.”

He said, “Then you knew more than I.”

Part 1

CHAPTER ONE

Vienna: A Liberal Education

“Did you read this, Igo?” my Uncle Paul asked at dinner in the autumn of 1937. “Another speech and Hitler can put Austria in his pocket. I know the university; it’s ninety per cent Nazi.”

“A lot of Socialist propaganda,” said my father.

My mother’s brother Paul, who lived with us in Vienna and was twenty-six, a medical student, and generally avant-garde
in his thinking, liked taking extreme positions in order to prick my father, who was forty-two and an accountant, to his predictable platitudes.

“You’re talking about a handful of lunatics,” said my father.

“We Jews are a remarkable people,” Paul said. “Our neighbor tells us he’s getting his gun out for us, and we sit watching him polish and load it and train it at our heads and we say, ‘He
doesn’t really mean us.’”

“So what should we do? Go and hide in the cellar every time some raving lunatic in Germany makes a speech?”

“We should pack our rucksacks and get out of this country, that’s what we should do,” Paul said.

“And go to the jungle, I suppose, and live off coconuts. According to your brother, Franzi,” my father said to my mother, “every time a raving lunatic in Germany
makes a speech, we should go and live off coconuts in the jungle.”

“Is it going to be war?” I asked my mother, aside. I had a sick feeling in my stomach. I knew about the First World War. I had a recurring nightmare about my mother and me sitting in a cellar with tennis rackets, repelling the bullets that kept coming in through a horizontal slit of window.

“No, no, no. Nothing like that,” my
mother said.

I tried to imagine some calamity but did not know how. My mother was ringing the bell for Poldi, the maid, to bring coffee. I decided there must not, there could not, be anything so horrible that we would have to pack and leave everything. I stopped listening to the grownups.

On the eighth of the following March, I had my tenth birthday. On the twelfth, Hitler took Austria and my
mother called Tante Trade a cow.

Tante Trade, a cousin of my father’s, and her husband, Hans, were having dinner with us and had arrived with the news that Chancellor Schuschnigg had abdicated in favor of Hitler. When Paul called a friend, the editor of a Socialist paper, for confirmation, he was told, “Not yet.” We ate with the radio on, and suddenly the music was interrupted for a short speech
by Schuschnigg, which ended with the words: “And now I say good-by to my faithful friends and compatriots and wish them all a bearable future.” Then they played the Austrian national anthem for the last time: “
Sei gesegnet ohne Ende, Österreich, mein Vaterland.
”

“They’re playing it slower than usual,” Tante Trade said. “Franzi, don’t you think they are playing it slower than usual?”

“They’re
probably using the record they always used,” my mother said.

“
How
can you say so, Franzi, and you a musician. Listen, Hansi! Igo! Don’t you agree with me, they are playing it slower than usual?”

“Trude, you are a silly cow,” my mother said. “Don’t you understand what has happened to us?”

“What has happened?” I asked.

“Hans, our coats,” Tante Trade said. “You heard what she called me, and in
front of the child.”

Everyone was standing up. “Trade, I apologize,” my mother said. “We’re all nervous tonight.” But Tante Trade was already walking out of our front door.

Very early the next morning, my parents took me downstairs and we stood in a long line of people outside the bank at the corner; the bank did not open. All around us in the street were young men in strange, brand-new uniforms,
saluting each other with right arms stretched forward. It was a clear, sunny March morning. Bright new flags were flying, but my parents hurried me back home.

By May, Poldi, the maid, had to leave our Jewish employ. My father was given a month’s notice at the bank where he had worked as chief accountant for twelve years. A week later, an S.S. sergeant commandeered our ugly, tall, lightless flat
and all its furnishings, including my mother’s Blüthner piano. My father, who had to remain in the city until the end of the month, went to stay with Kari and Gerti Gold, good friends of my parents, who offered him the use of their now empty maid’s room. My mother and I went to the country to live with my favorite grandparents, and I had the happiest summer of my life.

My grandparents lived in
a big village near the Czechoslovak border, some twenty kilometers from Vienna. I used to think the village was called Fischamend after the great bronze “fish on the end” of the medieval tower that stood on the central square, catercorner from my grandfather’s shop, but now I rather think it took its name from its geographical location at the point where the River “Fischer ends” in the Danube.

Our house was huge, old, and rambling, with thick walls. The ground floor was taken up by my grandfather’s dry-goods store. The first week, I amused myself by messing with the rolls of fabric on the shelves in the storeroom behind the shop, where my grandmother made dirndl dresses and aprons for sale, until she told me to run along and see my grandfather.

Out in the shop, I danced on the counter
until my grandfather got down the box full of ribboned medals and picture post cards “
vom Grossen Krieg
” (from the Great War) as a treat for me. There were pictures of men in peaked caps and mustaches, and ladies looking over their rosy shoulders out of oval clouds, but I preferred the drawers full of shoelaces, buttons, hairbrushes, and catgut for violin strings. One day I found a violin behind
the boxes of gum boots, but the whole summer’s searching never turned up the bow.

My grandfather told me to run along out to the yard, and he lent me his young salesgirl, Mitzi, who was standing idle, to play with. Mitzi and I would sit on the sunlit outhouse roof, sucking the little sour grapes from the huge vine that grew and twisted like a thick, tough snake along three walls of the square
yard and was too ancient to ripen its fruit. We talked for hours, or, rather, I talked. I told Mitzi my life plans. I was going to look like her when I grew up; Mitzi was fifteen. She had fair hair, a fine country color, and a pretty, petulant mouth. Mitzi was my only friend in Fischamend until Paul got thrown out of the university.

My Uncle Paul was the hero of my childhood, a role in which
he by no means recognizes himself. He says he remembers himself as shy, except in his own set, with a tendency to fall over his own feet, but precocious. He says he was one of those clever kids who have a mission to enlighten their benighted parents and expose the foolishness and knavery of all the world. Paul punished his anti-Semitic teachers by failing his examinations, so that when the Nazis dismissed
Jewish students from the Vienna university, he was still one semester short of his medical degree.

Paul was a slim young man with a rich head of hair. Old ladies embarrassed him by commenting on his immense violet-blue eyes. What a pity, they said, they were hidden behind glasses. He carried his long, witty nose with an air of melancholy.

It was Paul, not my father, who had been the man in my
life: Our affair, dating from my birth and based on a mutual enthusiasm, was an entirely happy one. In the evening, before my light was put out, this Paul, who hobnobbed by day with his glamorous friends, artists and revolutionaries all, sat by my bedside and initiated me into what was going on in politics, science, and poetry. For light entertainment, he would sing the four-footed German student
songs, accompanying himself passably on his guitar and taking, every once in a while, a lip-smacking draught from an imaginary stein of beer.

Or we talked about me: Paul encouraged me in drawing and painting, for which he said I, unlike himself, had an interesting talent. He was a fair audience for the impressionistic dances encouraged at my dancing school, though, after some hours, he might
thank me and tell me he had had enough and wished to be left alone to get on with his studies. If I persisted, he slapped me roundly and looked into my face with such frank and genuine irritation that I went away, unprotesting, to find my father and tease him for a while, but there was not the same satisfaction in it.

The only treachery my uncle had ever perpetrated upon me was a bicycle tour
he took the summer before Hitler, into the Austrian Tyrol and across the Alps into Italy. He went with his own friends. I was not invited.

Hitler put an end to that. There was no gadding about after Paul arrived at Fischamend late in May, sneaking into the yard by the back door and up the back stairs to the east wing of the house, in which my mother and I were staying. His right ear was gashed
and bleeding freely. My mother sat him down in a chair and sent me for water and bandages, with instructions not to let my grandmother catch wind of anything, but when I returned from my errand, my grandmother had arrived on the scene and was tying up my uncle’s face, toothache fashion, saying quietly and bitterly, “You and your clever friends never did have any sense—getting into street fights
with the Nazis!” Paul patted his mother’s hand and grinned at me across the room.

After this incident, I understood that Paul was going to stay indefinitely.

Now Paul’s friends came out to Fischamend from Vienna to visit. Liesel came to spend a weekend. Liesel had been Paul’s girl for years. She was beautiful and witty, and even my grandmother approved. She was blonder than Mitzi, and more delightful
to talk to, because she would talk back to me and we had conversations. I sat on her lap while she and Paul sat in the yard at a card table with paper and pencils. They were writing a fairy story for me. The heroine was called Princess Vaselina. The hero was a pretentious commoner named Shampoo von Rubinstein, and as they wrote they laughed and laughed.

When Liesel left, my grandmother said it
was Paul’s own fault. She said that if he and his friends had not spent their time playing at socialism and walking round the picture galleries, he could at least be a doctor now. I did not like him to be scolded, and I went to sit on his lap, but he said that my grandmother had a point there, and he looked quite depressed.

The next visitor was Paul’s friend Dolf. According to my grandmother,
he had had the most baleful influence on Paul’s career. Dolf was a poet. I thought he was splendid. He was extraordinarily tall and seemed to be embarrassed about it; he had a way of scratching the top of his head that stood his shock of black hair up in a cone and made him look even taller. He was so tall that when he sat down in a chair he folded like one of our folding beds. Paul made him write
a poem in my autograph book. He wrote:

Dear child,

We are followed from our cradle and first cry