Tobacco Shop

The nineteenth century apartment building is only a few subway stops away from the Hauptbahnhof; it’s easy to find. The entrance is chocolate-brown, there are grass-green blinds, and the trash bins have been emptied.

Leopoldstadt, Second District. My father describes the neighbourhood with a guidebook in his hand. He is wearing worn-out jeans, a wrinkled flannel shirt, and a blue baseball cap, a rather depressing sight. It wasn’t that long ago when he exercised regularly, he would play soccer on Margit Island, or at Vérmező on weekends, now he is out of breath after two flights of stairs. What kept him in good condition in the past weeks is mostly the fights with his sister.

He punches in the code he received from the owners in an email a few days ago. They even sent pictures of the two apartments and the neighbourhood. Carefully renovated high class apartment buildings, surrounded by a nice green park, bars, and coffeehouses, on the banks of the Danube. They even sent pictures of their family, the Ottisch family and their dog Bonny.

We march into the entrance. It’s covered in marble. The reception is on the second floor, but fortunately there is an elevator. Bandi pushes the correct button. The dimly lit foyer is empty; there is no one around. We loiter cluelessly for a while and then go back down to the entrance.

“What are you waiting for? Give them a call,” Edit tells my father.

He has a hard time entering the right numbers. The phone rings but the owners do not answer, even after several minutes. It’s as if we had arrived at a ghost apartment. Here we are in the middle of the city and they don’t lift a finger, even though we had arranged everything in advance. Bandi heads back noisily to the elevator.

“This is really shitty,” he grumbles.

He starts to lose patience even though he usually has the patience of Job. Surely, it’s those bureaucratic Austrians who messed up the system.

Upstairs a small table in the corner indicates where the reception is. Above it there are metal boxes with different labels: key, apartment number, code. And forms that need to be filled out. There are also pens and tiny candies in a small dish. You can hear loud barking and scratching coming from the door across the hall, but apart from this, nothing. Nobody comes to greet us. But the name Ottisch can be found on a small copper plate with the number 220. My father scrolls down on his phone to the email from the owners and using the code opens the box with the label ROOMS.

He gives a triumphant cry when he sees the name Klein on an envelope with the keys, 114 and 115. Bandi is visibly irritated. “This means that our apartments are not on this bloody level. I’m telling you that they pulled a fast one on us. Why do they make our lives miserable with these damn numbers?”

He takes out a form but angrily crumples it.

Edit pats his waist. “It’s okay, sonny,” she says. She would really like to reach his shoulders, but my uncle is much too tall for that. Had Edit grown taller she could have slapped his face, but without a footstool she didn’t stand a chance, the same way my grandmother didn’t either. When she threatened to punish Bandi, supposedly, he would always smirk and bring the footstool. This time he stared at his sister, the way the lion looks at its trainer.

My father grabs the keys with an assured gesture and stuffs a fistful of candies in his pocket. He won, and no one can argue with that.

Bandi keeps sulking. It’s all the same to him. For sixty years all he’s been hearing is how smart my father is. The others pay no attention to his mumbling or pretend not to hear him. According to my mother, he’s been carrying the hurt of being the youngest child and feels he has been treated unjustly. He realized, even as a child, that he stood no chance beside his siblings. First of all, there was Edit. She survived the Shoah with her parents, which made her a hero, the darling of the family. She managed to stay alive in spite of the horrors. Whatever she did was fine. She couldn’t be reprimanded or criticized; it was not allowed. Then came my father, the know-it-all. Faced with those two, Bandi could never be right. This allegedly changed when they found out that he had a weak heart. All of a sudden he became the second favourite, right after Edit. My father, on the other hand, because he didn’t have any illness and didn’t experience the war, became the black sheep, but, it seems even this couldn’t make Bandi feel better.

Making a lot of noise with his suitcase, Bandi heads downstairs taking the narrow staircase. He bangs his suitcase against the wall followed by a thud and swearing. In a few minutes he shouts from the first floor.

“False alarm, the numbers here start at 150.”           

“No problem, then go down one more floor.”

The apartments have identical furniture and are separated by a wall. The one for two is assigned to Bandi and his wife Ági, the larger one to us. Everything is white inside, the furniture, the electric stove, which supposedly is the kitchenette, the dishes and the mugs in the narrow cupboard. The place is clean, simple, and practical.

Edit smacks her lips in approval when we enter the door. She places her orange-pink suitcase on the threshold.

“The Fritzies fixed up this Jewish apartment nicely. Didn’t they?”

The sentence sticks in my craw but I nod politely. “It looks good, indeed. But what makes you think that it once belonged to Jews?”

“One can sense it. Besides, it’s the apartment, the neighbourhood. Just have a good look.”

I let it pass. What’s important is that it’s clean. In the meantime, my father carries the suitcases into the apartment. There are two bedrooms. Father and Mother will use one, and Edit and I the other.

I know that my father heard what his sister had just said, yet he doesn’t say anything. But the expression on his face conveys that he would rather be impaled than react to what Edit asks, does, or thinks.

Edit is not fazed by this and keeps calling out to him with her arms akimbo.

“What’s the matter, aren’t you going to say anything?”

And since there is still no answer, she just shrugs it off. She starts off inspecting all the rooms; in the meantime, my father surreptitiously closes the door, all of us are already in the foyer.

I’m curious what the first thing is that my aunt will check in the apartment. She doesn’t leave anything to chance. She keeps opening all the wardrobes, inspects the empty hangers, moves her finger across all the dishes. When she is done, she sniffs the air. Perhaps she suddenly feels nostalgic for the Jewish Vienna.

This trip was all her idea. Even though she had only recently moved back home from Uppsala. The plan is that immediately after dropping off our luggage, we leave to find the jewellery store, one of her old obsessions, and in the meantime we will tour the city. Which, according to her theory, is actually ours.

“I guess you know that Vienna and Budapest owe their flourishing to the Jews. I can hardly wait to see my father’s jewellery store! That was his life’s achievement, a beautiful jewellery store. Inside it had cherry wood panelling, elegant furniture. Outside it was embellished by an impressive sign. There was a statue of a small monkey with a watch on its wrist.” She becomes uncertain. “Or was it a pageboy? I don’t remember any more, but it’s not important. Just think of it! If it hadn’t been for those wonderful and fine people, like my father, there would be nothing here.”

My father’s face darkens. “You mean to say our father.”

He kicks at a metal box in the middle of the sidewalk. Perhaps these Austrians are not as tidy as they claim to be.

I look at Edit. “Speaking of Grandpa, is it true that he once won big at the horse races?”           

But Edit has stopped listening to us; she is delighted by the look of the city. She loiters in front of the shop windows. I can tell that she is enchanted by the beauty of the buildings. But in her mind she must be planning out today’s activities.

“Once we find the shop, we won’t stop until we get to Pürstner,” she says. “Although it is more difficult to get a reservation there than to get an audience with the Pope. Så, don’t worry I’ll take care of it. Afterwards we’ll have coffee at Hawelka and eat a fine Esterházy pastry or an apple strudel.”

My mother and I look at her with gratitude; Bandi mumbles something that no one can understand.  My father makes a dismissive gesture.

I have heard the story of the alleged jewellery store a thousand times. But no one knows how Grandpa Klein ended up in Vienna. The family used to live in Eger and moved to Budapest during the war, and after the Shoah they didn’t move back. But how does Vienna enter into it? As if Edit has taken a vow of silence, she never says anything about how the store was purchased, or maybe she had just forgotten about it after spending forty years in Sweden.

There are several family legends according to which the inheritance was just a small tobacco shop that, apart from tobacco, cigarettes, and candy, also sold cheap watches.

We are standing in the centre of the Ring. We are almost there and we will see it at last. Even though I try to fight it, some of Edit’s enthusiasm has rubbed off on me.

At the indicated address, instead of the jewellery store we find a Tesco Express. Edit’s favourite buildings—the Opera and the Fine Art Museum—are all here; my aunt is crazy about Neo-Renaissance, that is why she likes to think about the Ring with its beautiful jewellery store and not the tobacco shop. Tesco was definitely not part of the picture.

Edit is at a loss, as she is thoroughly examining each possible building in the neighbourhood. “I don’t understand. I was told it was here.”

My father becomes irritated. “Edit, you should say who told you that and when.”

My aunt doesn’t reply. And when the others ask, she shakes her head not understanding the questions.

My father rolls his eyes. He knew it from the start that it would turn out this way. And there you go; he was right. It took my mother three days to convince him to come along, and he’s been saying ever since that because of this escapade he would need to start working Sunday night to meet his deadlines. There is no one else who could do it.

When Edit moves away from our side, he steps in front of us. “This whole business is so pitiful. Even if it was done for Edit’s sake, you dragged me over here, and me, being an idiot, let you do it. We can eat wiener schnitzel and potato salad at home, and let’s not get into the topic of the store.”

My mother massages his shoulder which makes him ease up a bit; this usually helps. “As far as he is concerned, we can go to Leopoldgasse,” he mutters. “There is a synagogue near there. Perhaps that will suffice for Edit for once.”

Bandi, on the other hand, insists on going to Berggasse. He has a faint memory that some celebrity used to live there, but he can’t remember who.

Ági keeps nodding, her husband has the right idea. “Let’s go to Berggasse, it won’t kill us. Then we can decide which restaurant to go to.”

“So, what number on Berggasse?”

“Thirteen Leopoldgasse.” Edit looks at them sternly: “Pay more attention, stimmt? You remember, right? Whom, who else, Herzl. The pamphlet Der Judenstaat was on father’s desk. As a youth, he planned to move to the Holy Land; he at least had kraft. He joined a Zionist group that prepared him for aliyah.  He spent months in the countryside working hard on a farm, in the barnyard, and lived in dilapidated shacks. There were ten or fifteen of them, all young. My God, we wouldn’t have been able to endure it. He was on the point of leaving for the journey but then his varicose veins operation got in the way.”  

I can picture my grandfather, tall and slim, as I knew him from black and white photos, from before the time when he met my grandmother. His red curly hair was parted on the side and shiny with Brilliantine. Of course, you can’t see it in the photos. In one of the pictures, he is standing next to a Soviet military car; the back of the photo says 1946. He has a self-assured smile as he blinks in the bright sunshine. In my childhood, he used to take me for ice cream, or to the Széchenyi bath. He used to sit on a stool in the kitchen and prepare tasty morsels from peameal bacon and bread. He would pick them up with the point of his knife and ate them that way. He would put the leftovers covered in brown butcher paper in the fridge. His stool on the black and white checked tiles would give a loud creaking sound when he moved.

I learned it from my mother that the children were wary of my grandfather, or at least my father was. Perhaps my grandmother, too. When he was at home, they had to be quiet if they didn’t want to hear him shout. I imagine how they froze when grandfather glared at them, and they kept eating their soup without a word.

Then there were more photos, Grandpa Klein working the land, somewhere in the country, while he prepared to go to Palestine soon after he turned twenty-one. He is carrying sacks and shovelling out the barn. He looks young and virile. He lives in a shack with a packed earth floor, with about ten others, one of them is a beautiful girl, Lola. Those two are inseparable from day one. However, the throbbing pain in his legs gets worse by the day. He is advised to get medical treatment. He doesn’t know at that point what will happen to the trip. Now I see him at an older age, sitting at his desk in his study that was stacked with books, his arm pointing in the direction of the Holy Land. Like Theodor Herzl in the painting. I try to shake off the image. Edit’s voice brings me back to reality.

“Så? Do you remember now?”

Bandi looks at us all lost. He has no idea what Edit is talking about. How come he never heard about Der Judenstaat before? Ági frowns, my mother smiles smugly, and my father turns his back.

Edit looks us over, convinced that we don’t remember anything, especially her brothers, who always lived on the moon.  What’s the point in telling them anything?

“Yet it would have been interesting if our father had ended up in Palestine. Who knows how we would have turned out?”

I look around, frightened. I hope my father didn’t hear what his sister said. How many times should I tell you, since ’48 it’s no longer Palestine, but Israel.  That’s how he fumed the last time she mentioned the word. Fortunately, he is out of earshot this time. He’s looking at a plastic bottle in a shop window. He used to use something like this when hiking, but he no longer goes, just as he gave up soccer, and replaced it by sitting in his armchair. My father could be a Zionist, but not in the classical sense. He has no intention to make aliyah; he has never even been to Israel. He always says next year, whenever somebody asks whether he and his wife would like to go. At the same time, he can’t accept that Israel’s existence is a thorn in the side of some people to this day, especially when he is reminded of it by someone in his own family.

On Leopoldgasse there are groups of tourists, the scent of fresh bread drifts from a café. Edit is scanning the other side of the street impatiently; she can hardly wait to take pictures of the Herzl domain. She seems to have forgotten why we were here.  

After we checked it out, the next stop is Berggasse. Bandi points to the page in the guidebook where the museum named after a famous psychiatrist is indicated by a small red flag. Edit makes a face. She is not at all interested in 19 Berggasse; that’s where Freud lived with his family. Her father never believed in psychoanalysis. They had that in common.

“Only in communism,” my father remarks with a hint of schadenfreude.

Edit growls at him. Her eyes could kill. “Shut up!”

“I don’t understand why you need to be ashamed. They were both communists from the beginning. Our mother even distributed pamphlets.”

“Why do you always have to talk about these old things; do you really want to talk about communism in the middle of Vienna? It’s gone, it’s over. Stimmt? Let’s drop it.”

But my father is only getting started.

“What’s the matter with you? Our mother became an assistant director and our father taught Marxism in the Party college. And what about Auntie Sára’s decoration, the one she got for being a partisan? Is that chopped liver? Good old Auntie Sára who was commended in person by Tito. Besides it was because of that good old girl that you could buy your blue Trabant car ahead of the others. If I were you, I would go look at the sofa and walking stick of the old psychoanalyst.”

It’s not as if my father believed in psychoanalysis. Whenever the topic of psychological problems came up, he would claim that the whole business was nonsense, it’s a waste of time, and it’s only for weak people.

Edit doesn’t respond. Cursing to herself, she starts off following Bandi on the other side of the street.

Perhaps it would have been a better idea to start off in Hawelka or Pürstner. The chances of a fight would have been smaller on a full stomach. By the time I get to the other side, they are all milling about in front of the Herzl house. Edit is just about to take a picture of my mother and Ági in front of a pink and white building, which looks like a large pastry in the shape of a cube. A plaque on the side states in a few words who used to live here. It’s a museum but it doesn’t even have a lousy commemorative room.

Once in the neighbourhood we visit the Jüdisches Museum. Edit buys pomegranate shaped earrings and a plastic yad in the gift shop. Afterwards she buys everyone a pretzel in the five-hundred-year-old Grimm bakery. We devour them like kids.

“These Fritzies know how to make them,” she says while chewing.

To that my father looks like he is about to cry in anger. “Not Fritzies, my Edit!”

Edit waves it off; it’s all the same to her. “The bottom line is that they know their business, let’s not fight. The day has been tiring enough. Let’s go to Stephansdom instead.” She wants to ride in a horse-drawn carriage.

On the way to the cathedral, she stops at the first fast food place. She orders six bratwursts with mustard and pickles, then starts eating, lost in pleasure.

“What are you staring at? The horse-drawn carriage will wait but the good Fritz food won’t.” And then she distributes the paper plates dripping with fat.