Schönbrunn

At the end of May, I saw Schönbrunn Palace, including the room where Napoleon slept and Emperor Franz Joseph lived, the neatly trimmed park and the large greenhouse where old palm trees stood in huge tubs among shards of glass, as if wrapped in felt. I was drawn home to this big sad city, full of ruins and sun, hungry girls and disguised Nazis. I had already visited Strauss’s grave and Beethoven’s last apartment, stood by the immovable ferris wheel in Prater, and walked around the fortress-like building in Floridsdorf where the Schutzbund men had bravely fought back during their tragic uprising. We had to fill our days wandering the half-empty streets, reading emigrant books, or going to daytime performances organized by hungry artists in the accidentally surviving theaters or on stages in parks.

I came to Schönbrunn by accident. A journalist friend of mine had looked down at me with contempt and said that I would have to be an uncultured barbarian to not take an interest in such a remarkable monument of the historical past, especially since I had a car and so much free time. I promised him I would visit Schönbrunn so as not to be an uncultured barbarian.

However, neither Napoleon’s son’s tomb nor the wooden gray rotunda in the neatly trimmed park made much of an impression on me. I listened attentively to the explanations of a volunteer guide, and thought about the two young Japanese acrobats I had seen a few days before on a stage in a park here. It seemed that the girls had no bones, so easily and deftly did they each fold like a pocket knife, twisting their arms and legs against the joints and sticking their heads between their legs, standing with their backs to the audience. The audience applauded enthusiastically, the girls bowed awkwardly in all directions and ran backstage, where a calm, elderly Austrian German woman, their mother, was waiting for them. She protected her Japanese daughters from the annoying encroachments of the young officers. On her lap was some knitting, and thin long knitting needles glittered in her hands. She poured ersatz coffee from a thermos into a plastic yellow cup, and the girls took turns drinking it, and eating small pieces of dark bread. They were breathing heavily and looking around fearfully, but their mother remained calm and majestic in her tranquility, like the bronze Maria Theresa sitting on a high pedestal in an untidy square in front of the Historical Museum, surrounded by generals.

Then they would go home, the daughters holding the mother’s arms and clinging to her like chickens to a hen. They’d earned honestly earned their ersatz coffee and dark, earthy bread, no one had hurt them, and an old Japanese acrobat with broken legs was waiting for them on Mariahilferstrasse in a wheelchair: small, gray-haired, with black sparkling eyes, in love with his white wife and rubber daughters.

I left the Schönbrunn park. The sun was warm, just like in summer, and the lawn on the large square in front of the palace was green and happy with its green happiness. No one was sitting on the benches, nothing disturbed the silence. From time to time a car would drive up to the palace, officers would get out silently and, stomping hesitantly on the spot, would move to the park gate. It was difficult for them to play the role of tourists after all they had experienced a few days before in the battles on the streets of this now calm and sad city.

I wanted to look at the green lawn. I approached the bench and noticed an old man in an old-fashioned suit and an old hat. He was not leaning against the back of the bench, but sat in a tense posture, with his eyes closed, his skinny hands on the yellowed shaft of an old walnut stick. I sat down next to him. He did not open his eyes.

I could have moved to another bench, but I stayed. The old man sat motionless, bluish-gray strands of thin hair falling from under his hat to his ears and to the back of his head. His cheeks were covered with unshaven gray hair, two deep furrows stretched from his humped, thin nose to his lips, and small, deep wrinkles gridded around his eyes, covered by purple thin eyelids. Something glinted and swam in the furrows across the old man’s face. The old man sobbed loudly, like a child, his head bowed, but then he raised it again without opening his eyes, as if not wanting to look at the green grass that lay at our feet in the warmth and light of the generous May sun.

Deliberately I loudly clicked the lid of my aluminum cigarette case. The old man was surprised to see me.

“Have a smoke,” I said. “Do you smoke?”

Silently, with long fingers as thin as old parchment, he took an Austrian cigarette and waited for me to light it from my Austrian lighter. “Don’t cry, it’s all over now.”

The old man greedily swallowed the heavy smoke of the cheap cigarette and was silent. He was old, it was hard to say how old, but he kept his posture steady for his age. His jacket, striped trousers, and shoes had long since served their purpose, but they were clean, as was his shirt with its ancient gutta-percha collar that clutched his wrinkled old neck. Only his black bowtie no longer retained its freshness. Neat poverty could not have found a better embodiment. The tears had already dried in the furrows of the old man’s face.

“I am a very old man,” he said, not turning his head, “and I have seen a lot. Maybe you are interested in talking to me? I have no one to talk to in this town where I was born. My wife died long ago. The ashes – all that’s left of my friends – were used for fertilizer.”

He took another greedy swallow of bitter smoke, waited till the cigarette cooled, and put it in his pocket. “I’ll smoke it tonight… I used to smoke cigars, I can’t say that I could afford the luxury kind, but I had enough money for decent ones. No, thank you, I won’t take any more from you. I used to be an accountant in a respectable firm; now I’m an old beggar. You say that everything is over. But tell me: Why don’t the dead want to die in our memories? Why do they want to live in our memories, in our souls? Why do they want to do this? What seeds do they sow in the desert that remain in our hearts after them? I am tired of barren love.”

A cloud floated in the sky and for a minute covered us with a cozy shadow. Some birds chattered merrily in the bushes, three girls in short pants with light backpacks on their shoulders rode their bicycles one after the other on the gray asphalt, working energetically with their beautiful slender legs in sports shoes, and soon disappeared around the corner. The old man looked after them with his big gray eyes, transparent as cold autumn water, in which the leaves had not yet fallen and the slow rains had not yet broken. In that gray transparency, nothing seemed to be reflected. Everything floated and disappeared, leaving no trace, like a cloud or a leaf on water. The old man’s face was calm, even indifferent He was not talking to me, but to himself, as old lonely people talk, tired of life, its long struggle, and searching for answers to old unresolved questions, which become more and more numerous at the end of life. Even if the world doesn’t answer them, they don’t stop talking. Their path becomes narrower, shorter, and their end is near, but still they pursue an answer, because there is no answer when you are gagged with earth, as an unfortunate poet once said.

“Perhaps one of them is called Mitzi. It’s a common name,” the old man said, looking with his gray eyes after the girls who had long since disappeared around the corner. “When you see girls like that, you can say for sure that one of them is Mitzi. Mine was also called Mitzi, although her real name was Frida. Strangely enough, she loved her father. More than he deserved. More than a girl’s heart should love. But how can we measure our love? She lived for me, and died saving my life. No one needs the life of an old accountant who has spent his whole life counting other people’s profits. Did I tell you her name? Mitzi. Mitzi was her name.”

The old man reached into his pocket, pulled out a half-smoked cigarette and put it between thin, dry lips. I lit it with my lighter. The flame was pale, barely visible, and it merged with the sunlight and immediately went out. The old man thanked me without looking at me. He could have spoken to a dog or a tree like that, slowly enunciating the words as if he were extracting them from distant memory caches where they had lain unused for a long time, almost shocked to death by the silence.

“At first, it was still possible to live, and Mitzi went to art school, even though they were already shouting that we should all be hanged like dogs because we ate German bread and poisoned the German air with our breath. I waited for her in the evenings outside our house. She kissed my shoulder” – he touched his left shoulder with his right hand fingers – “here. And she never complained. Even on the day when two ignorant men at the door to her school snatched the folder of drawings from her hands and tore them to pieces. They wanted only authentic German art. This is an ancient fairy tale, it has been used here for centuries by various unskilled people. But now they had the state, the Fuhrer, armed thugs on their side. They did not let Mitzi go to school. I was fired from my job because they needed an authentically German accountant, and for a long time we lived off the fact that Mitzi painted pictures and people who didn’t know better exhibited them as works of authentic German art. And she laughed so merrily that I was afraid for her sanity.

She had big blue eyes, not gray like mine, and not brown like her mother’s, but blue, and she didn’t have to dye her hair – it was exactly the color that was considered to be authentically German. Who gave her that hair and those eyes? What do we know about our women? Around us there were always many young beautiful female officers, artists, and performers, and I was just a bookkeeper. Besides, Mitzi’s mother died giving birth to Mitzi, and as God is my witness, I was a good father and gave my heart to this girl. Mitzi was slim and strong, she loved to swim and played tennis with young men in cream pants and white shoes. Now they no longer greeted her, and she laughed and kissed my shoulder.

He touched his thin fingers again to the place on his shoulder where her kisses had been, then covered them with his palm, a gentle and helpless movement that revealed the old man’s soul full of love.

“Life was getting harder and harder. People with money fled abroad – to Brazil, to Mexico, to the ends of the earth. Young people were also fleeing, they didn’t need money, their youth was their capital. And I was old and poor. The young poet, whom Mitzi hadn’t met for three years, came to see us the day after the Nazis entered Prague. ‘I’ve decided to leave my homeland.’ He said this word with a squeeze, as if swallowing bitter medicine. ‘I don’t know. Maybe to Portugal, maybe to Nicaragua. I’ve been thinking about you all these three years, Mitzi. You have to come with me. You can’t stay here. No one knows what kind of hell awaits those who stay here.’ ‘And Dad?’ Mitzi said, smiling. The young poet stared at the strip of floor between his worn-out shoes. He stared for a long time, as if hoping that the answer to her question would crawl out of the gap between the tiles of the old parquet. His face turned gray, and his ears became waxy, like a dead man’s. ‘No,’ the young poet whispered to the floor, looking at the same gap, into which he wanted to fall forever. Mitzi pinned a carnation to his flannel jacket and kissed him on the lips. ‘Thank you, I’m staying,’ she said. A week later, we read in the newspaper that he had been shot dead on the Brenner on his way to Italy.

“I don’t remember when Otto first appeared, a blond, clumsy giant in an SS uniform. He blushed like a boy when he talked to my Mitzi. He had been wounded in the arm, I think in Westerplatte, and his right arm was hopeless, but I saw how tightly he held Mitzi with his left when I went to my room so that I wouldn’t see her mysteriously cheerful eyes. He didn’t tell me about his military service, but he didn’t need to. Mitzi told him not to pay attention to me – I am not her father, I took her in as an orphan. Can’t you see that we are of different blood? She is grateful to me for raising her, that’s all. And Otto tolerated me as one tolerates an old rag until the time when it has to be burned or thrown into the trash. When the Fuhrer went to the east, we were taken to Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz. I didn’t know where it was, I was never interested in that, before or after. Who among us thought that the names of these places would be written in the blood of millions in the chronicle of humanity? Mitzi said, ‘I don’t love him, I hate him. I hate all murderers, all these bastards in human skin, but I will sleep with him because he promised that you would not be taken away. And he will keep his word. He’s an honest killer. Don’t cry – I love you more than my conscience, you are my father…’”

The old man suddenly stood up and, poking at the asphalt with his stick, walked a few steps along the green lawn in a surprisingly steady gait.

I did not stop him, although everything he could say to me was disappearing with him. But he stopped near the trash can to throw into it a long-extinguished cigarette butt. He wiggled his long fingers over the trash can like a blind man, came back, and sat down next to me again, gently straightening his striped pants on his knees.

“All the neighbors loved us, we never quarreled with anyone. We occupied three small rooms in a six-story house on Ringstrasse, and only one neighbor, Frau Schultz had for many years stopped greeting us, which made me think that she was to blame for everything. She passed me with her thin lips pursed, and the fake stones in her earrings glittered ominously, jiggling in time with her heavy gait. Frau Schultz was a widow, I remember her husband well. He fell from a scaffolding many years ago, leaving her neither children nor wealth. A young architect.

“Otto came in the morning and brought a cake for Mitzi and a bottle of French brandy for himself. Mitzi wanted to eat the cake right away because she hadn’t had cake in so long, but Otto said: ‘Wait, we need to talk to you.’ He blushed so deeply that even the skin between the hairs on Siegfried’s skull was burning. He found himself a glass and, sitting down at the table, began to drink cognac. He drank half a bottle and just then started to speak, mixing brutal cursing with drunken tears. ‘You deceived me,’ Otto sobbed. ‘This lousy man is your father, and I am now tainted forever because I did not just sleep with you, but loved you like a sunbeam, like a nightingale loves a rose.’ He was sentimental, like all Westphalians, he sincerely loved my Mitzi, and it was hard for him to part with her. He talked and drank, drank and talked, delaying the final moment, and Mitzi sat pale and calm and, as if mesmerized, looking at the cake-a tube of cream-that she had placed on a blue plate with a golden rod. But Otto would not let her eat the cake, he called her tender words, then swore like a field officer in the barracks. ‘I haven’t told you everything yet, my baby, I know that your name is Frida, and don’t look at me with these blue eyes, I will tear you out of my German heart. And although I will never be able to wash away the shameful stain, I will know that at the decisive moment I behaved like a loyal soldier of the Führer and a worthy son of the German fatherland.’ And Mitzi remained silent all the time, only occasionally getting up and kissing me on the shoulder, because I was also there and also silent in my chair by the window, where there was always a book of poems by the young poet who was killed at Brenner.

‘“Now you can eat this cake,’ Otto suddenly said.

“’Give me a piece, Mitzi,’ I said.

“‘No, dad, it’s been so long since I’ve had cake,’ Mitzi replied.

“She fell out of the chair at once. I leaned over her in silence.

“Otto left without looking at me or at the work he had done.

At night, Frau Schultz came and said: ‘Come with me, you cannot stay here.’

She told me to take off my shoes and brought me to her room on the sixth floor. There was a windowless closet that looked like a linen closet. She put a chair there and brought me warm coffee in a thermos. ‘Thank you, Frau Schultz,’ I said to the elderly woman. ‘I was afraid you hated us, you haven’t greeted me for so many years.’ ‘You are a blind man,’ the woman replied. ‘I could not wish harm on my Alfred’s daughter. Have you not seen or heard anything around you for so many years? They are dead, my husband and your wife, do not think badly of them, they loved each other, and I loved you all my life, but you did not notice this love, you did not need love, you loved only your Mitzi, the daughter of your wife and my Alfred.’ Oh, how she cried that night in the small closet that looked like a linen closet! ‘There is still enough love on earth to save this earth and the people who live and will live on it,’ the woman said.

“And now I am alive, I have smoked your cigarette and I am going home now, and Frau Schultz will help me take off my suit and clean it and put it in the closet and give me my pajamas, and I will sit by the window on the sixth floor and look out at this sad city, at these houses and ruins that have seen so much and know so much that no man in the world can know. You say that everything has already passed. Nothing passes. The longer I live, the more questions I have. I am too old to wait for answers. If my Mitzi knew that I was not her father, would she have died saving my life? Why do I love her as no father has ever loved his daughter, even though I have known everything for a long time? Why was there nothing to forgive my wife for –I just had to understand? You say that everything is over – I want to believe you. Love remains. And the crime? The dragon’s teeth are not a myth.”

We smoked another cigarette in silence. The old man left without saying goodbye. He poked at the asphalt with his walnut stick, barely bending his knees, and from a distance one could think that he was really blind. A column of our soldiers was passing by, it blocked the sight of him from me, and when the soldiers had passed, the old man was gone.

In the evening, I went to see a paralyzed Japanese acrobat on Mariahilferstrasse. A small, wrinkled Japanese man with a gray, bristly head and sparkling black eyes sat in a chair on high, thin wheels, his rubber daughters in flowered, long-sleeved, wide-sleeved robes, coiffed like Madame Butterfly, fussing over him with a casual, sincere tenderness. They resembled him with that elusive resemblance that in a young person allows you to guess the signs of inherited traits that are not specific to an individual but to a long chain of previous existences. From under a paper Japanese lampshade, light fell on a round table where eratz coffee was steaming in small cups of fine porcelain. Frau Karolina Makamura, a powerful white woman with a crown of ash-coloured hair on her large, beautifully sculpted head, reigned over this unusual family with calm, gentle, and confident authority. She touched the small, delicate things that filled her household with the care of a giant entrusted with the care of small children.

Makamura, the paralyzed acrobat, spoke to his daughters in Japanese, and they answered him in the same way, like the echo of quiet birds at dawn.

“‘Do you speak Japanese?’ I asked Frau Caroline Makamura.

“‘I don’t need to,’ she replied, pouring me coffee into a tiny Japanese cup. ‘I love and understand them anyway.’”