Exile Music Page 10

  At last we caught sight of the Bolivian flag, fluttering red, yellow, and green above Waaggasse. As we drew closer, my father pointed out the Bolivian coat of arms in its center. A long-necked animal stood beside a palm tree and a golden sheaf of wheat as the sun rose over a mountain in the distance. Above it all, a bird was poised for takeoff. This pleased me. A country with such a pretty picture on its flag could not be too scary. Not as scary as a country with flags like ours.

  In a throng of other supplicants, we spiraled up the narrow stone staircase, pausing to catch our breath before the brass plaque announcing that we had arrived. We were not permitted to see the consul himself, but a diminutive, sepia-skinned woman let us in and—after we had waited with the others for nearly five hours—gave us the stack of documents we needed to complete in order to apply for visas. “You will need thirty-six dollars per family member to launch your life in Bolivia,” she said crisply.

  “We can’t take that much out of the country,” I whispered to my father.

  “We’ll worry about that later.”

  On the forms, we had to state how we intended to make a living in Bolivia. It would help our cause, the woman in the consulate informed us, if we would agree to become agricultural laborers. My father stared at her as if she had asked him to join the circus. “Agricultural laborers?” he asked in wonderment. “But we are Viennese!”

  “I am trying to help you, Herr Zingel.” The woman was clearly offended. “If you want the very best chances of getting out of Austria, you will agree to become agricultural laborers.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  She shrugged. “You might get a visa, but I cannot guarantee.”

  It wasn’t the Bolivians, however, who gave us the most trouble. I cannot complain about the Bolivians. Before we could leave we had to acquire a tax clearance certification from the new government—proof that we owed no money in taxes.

  The SS used all of their sadistic bureaucratic might to toy with us. Every time we arrived with a signed document we were told it was the wrong one, that we needed to start again. Or that we had failed to provide an adequate photograph. Or that there was a fee we had neglected to pay.

  In October, we again had to apply for new passports (after having already been forced to trade our Austrian passports for German ones) that identified us as Jewish, with a large red stamp. It says something about our state of mind that this did not even seem bizarre to us, given everything else that had happened.

  “If they want us to leave, why do they insist on making it so damned impossible?” I had rarely heard my father curse. He was not an angry man.

  My father and mother waited endlessly in lines while the Gestapo men shouted at them, kicked them, and, worst of all, laughed at them. This struck me hard. I could understand anger, could understand shouting, but that anyone could actually derive pleasure from—could laugh at—the misery of another person was an unpleasant revelation.

  One late afternoon at our local police station, one of these black-booted men tripped my mother as she tried to leave, so that her papers (apparently filled out incorrectly, again) went flying in every direction and my mother collapsed onto her knees. Wincing, she pulled herself up from the marble floor, slick with tracked-in rainwater, and crawled after our documents. One of her hairpins fell from her hair, loosing a lock of it that dragged in through the slush. The men around us laughed uproariously. “Stupid, clumsy Jewish cow.” I stared at the square face of the officer who had spoken. What had happened to our world to turn it so upside down? Men had once stood outside of my mother’s dressing room with flowers. Men had once traveled from other cities to hear her sing. Men had once wept when she opened her mouth. Now, as angry tears streamed down my face, I couldn’t help turning back. My mother’s fingers dug into my arm, urging me forward. “My Mutti,” I called to them as she dragged me away. “My Mutter is Arabella. She is Isidora and Liù and Eurydice and Ariadne and Salome and—” I tried to think of another. Just as my mother pulled me through the door I yelled, “My Mutter is a nightingale.”

  I am guessing their surprise at my audacity is all that kept them from taking me from my mother to teach me a lesson. By the time they had registered my words and started toward the door, we were gone, my mother breaking into a run. “Don’t you ever,” she said, stopping in a nearby alley to shake me by my shoulders so hard my back teeth rattled together, “do that again. They could take you away from us, Orly. They could hurt you. Oh, don’t you ever, ever again!” And then sobbing, she pulled me into her arms in an embrace so tight it drove all of the air from my lungs.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE ALSO REQUIRED MONEY to purchase passage on a ship, although we didn’t want to buy tickets before we had visas in our hands. The Italian ships were less expensive than the English or Dutch, so it was an Italian ship on which we hung our hopes. There were several leaving from Genoa in the autumn, and we wanted to sail as soon as possible.

  Every morning, my mother rang the Bolivian consulate from a neighbor’s still-working phone to check on the status of our visa applications. At least once a week, I walked there with one of my parents, in the hope that the sight of our abject faces would move them to mercy. But all they saw all day were abject faces.

  We could only wait.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE WERE RUNNING out of money. No longer could we buy fish or fresh fruit. Strudel was out of the question. I was always hungry. At night sometimes I woke to feel my mother’s fingers tapping along my ribs, as if counting how many of them she could feel through my skin. I didn’t want her to worry. I started rummaging in the dustbins in the streets and alleys around us, especially near food markets, to find the occasional half-eaten roll or rind of cheese. I brought back bits of bread or carrot for the smaller children when I could find them.

  One night, sometime after the Anschluss but before the end of the year, we were listening to the radio over a dinner of soup without bread when Hermann Göring said, as if this were a rationale for it all, that the Jews had controlled art, theater, and everything else. In case his meaning was unclear, he added, “The Jew must clearly understand one thing at once, he must get out!”

  So why was he making it so hard to leave?

  Nineteen

  On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew, assassinates German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris. On November 9 and 10, the Nazis use this pretext to burn down or vandalize more than a thousand synagogues, rob and destroy thousands of Jewish stores and businesses, arrest approximately thirty thousand Jewish men, and murder at least ninety-one.

  I remember the sound of shattering glass. Call it Kristallnacht if you want, but for us it was Pogrom Night. Kristall is too pretty, too glittering, too pacific. The word “kristall”—for me—evokes the shimmer of the Musikverein, of the opera, of the eleven tons of glass suspended over our heads. So I cannot call it Kristallnacht.

  Two nights before the pogroms, the dark erased the moon, hid her face from us, took away even her reflected light. An eclipse, my mother said.

  Everything before that night has a dreamlike quality to it now. As if my entire life until then had been a diorama I was observing from the far side of the glass, a pretty whirl of lights and music that disguised the festering hatreds all around us. The hatred we had been too caught up in our own world to see. I only woke up when the last vestiges of our world broke apart. My memories of that night are so sharp they could slice through skin.

  As soon as we heard the first cries demanding Jewish blood, we locked ourselves in the apartment, although we knew even there we were not safe. I huddled close to the others and waited for someone to come murder us. On that filthy, overcrowded mattress, we listened to our fellow citizens calling for our death. We waited, listening to screaming from the street, the sounds of gunfire and beatings. I lay curled against my mother’s warm
back. “Why?” I kept asking her, as my father paced by the windows, keeping watch on the street. “Why are they doing this?”

  My father started to explain about the Jewish boy who killed a German diplomat in Paris, but faltered. It was too flimsy an excuse for the enormity of what was happening. This had clearly been planned. All around us things shattered—things, and people.

  Only the very youngest children were asleep; the rest sat up with the radio. We kept our lights out, not wanting to draw attention to our continued existence. And then they came. They banged on the door until it opened, locks splintering. My mother wrapped herself around me, pulled my head to her chest. In the dark of her embrace I listened to the boots trampling through the apartment, the bloodlust in the voices ordering us to turn over our money, our jewels. I heard my father’s voice, explaining we had nothing left. I heard the voices of the other men, the other women, pleading for their wedding rings. The children next to us cried when their brothers and fathers were taken, while their mothers tried to keep them quiet. I heard my cousin Felix’s voice above them all. “Don’t wait for me, Mutti. Go when you can.” But they didn’t take my father. Perhaps they took one look at his spindly violist’s body and could think of no possible use for him.

  I heard Aunt Thekla’s cries.

  My mother began to sing to me. To all of us, really, given that it was impossible to sing in that small room and not sing to us all. She sang in Italian, perhaps not wanting to sing in a tongue we shared with Nazis.

  Perhaps the worst thing the Nazis did to me that night besides stealing my beloved cousin was fail to register my mother’s song. Arms full of our coats and our last items of jewelry, they pounded back down the stairs, moving on to the next Jews. “Earn your own money!” I wanted to yell. “You sing Elektra five times a week!” Was this what they called “a proper day’s work”? Taking our valuables? What lazy men, I thought as I lay there. Nothing but common thieves.

  They were nothing but common murderers, too, of course. But I did not know that until the next day.

  As the sounds from outside grew louder—I could hear the fracturing of the world, smell the smoke from the fires, hear their cries of Juda Verrecke!—her voice did, too, as if she thought she could hold up our walls around us with sound alone. I pressed my face against her skin, no longer scented with lilacs but with bitter sweat. I focused on the reassuring feel of her rib cage expanding under my fingers. Here she was, my mother. Breathing. Singing. If I could just narrow my world to that, I would be all right.

  They took so many men that night. Broke into their homes, stole them from their wives and children. Some they beat to death before they even got to a camp. Some they tossed out of windows like refuse. Some they sent to the camps. Some they lined up in the street and shot in the head, one by one.

  We never found out where they took Felix.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, I slipped out of the apartment before anyone was awake. I wanted to see if there was anything left of our city. Someone had to see what they had done, I reasoned. I was small; I could easily hide. Besides, the Nazis were not after children, were they? They had only taken men.

  Outside, the streets were silent, most people were finally sleeping or too terrified to emerge—or gone. I stared around me in shock. Splinters of glass crunched under my feet with every step. Anxiously, I scanned the sidewalks for remaining Nazis. I walked past shattered shop windows and spray-painted slurs. I stepped over the stiff body of a cat.

  The window of Weiss’s shop, where I used to take the Groschen my mother gave me to buy Küfferle Schokoschirmchen and chocolate-covered marzipan balls, was gone, just a few shards of glass left around the edges. Chocolates had been scraped from the shelves, barrels of shiny boiled sweets emptied on the floor, crushed beneath boots. Where was kind Mrs. Weiss, who always gave us an extra piece of marzipan, shaped like a tiny cherry or banana? I crouched down to retrieve a marzipan bunny from the pavement, where it had fallen from a thief’s pocket or hand. One of its ears had been torn off. I wanted to burrow it into my own pocket, to place it somewhere safe. But I did not. Treading carefully, I stepped quickly through the glass and set the small rabbit back on a bottom shelf.

  The department stores had been emptied, food shops robbed, flower shops reduced to a scattering of bruised petals. A few shopkeepers stood in the wreckage, looking around for something they could salvage. Scrawled on the walls, in ugly jagged letters: Jud. As if it were a curse word.

  A charred shadow had replaced the nearest synagogue. Nothing remained but a field of cinders, a few still smoking. I saw a man on his knees, digging in the ash with his fingers, searching for something left. This is what they had been burning. Around the periphery, bodies lay scattered like broken dolls.

  The orphanage in the next block was gone. Mobs of our delirious countrymen, I later heard, had hacked its contents to pieces and driven the children barefoot into the streets before setting it ablaze.

  That was enough. I turned and ran all the way back to our room.

  We heard the rest of the news on the radio. More than a thousand synagogues had been set on fire, not only in Vienna but across the whole of Austria and Germany. Sacred scrolls had vanished. Tombs were invaded. Even our dead were not safe.

  We couldn’t stay inside forever or we would starve. I often volunteered to look for food. I couldn’t bear to stay in the crowded apartment for long. My mother didn’t want me to go, but she was quickly learning the limits of her ability to protect me.

  Some days I passed among the crowds unnoticed. Some days an arm would stretch out before me, barring passage. “Dance for us, little Jewess,” someone would say.

  And so I would do jumping jacks, my arms and legs opening and closing, opening and closing, as my braids danced across my back and my breath came in gasps. When my mother asked me why I came home sweaty and disheveled, I told her I’d been racing other children in the park. It could have been worse. So much worse.

  One of my few treasured possessions was the dirndl that had been my grandmother’s when she was a girl. While my father’s parents had always been city dwellers, my mother came from the countryside. The red of the dirndl’s skirt had faded to pink and the blue of the apron had been washed to a pale grey, but to me it was as vibrant as ever. I loved its little puffed sleeves and laced bodice and that it felt like a kind of uniform. Even though city children sometimes teased me for dressing like a peasant, I loved it because it had always been ours. I loved it because it was Austrian, because I was Austrian. I had been wearing it the night we left home; it was one of the two dresses I still owned.

  I kept forgetting we no longer were Austrian. And somehow my mother and I had missed the edict stating that Jews were no longer allowed to wear the national dress, including lederhosen, Styrian hats, and dirndls. Or maybe there was no edict. Maybe our Austrian neighbors did not need an excuse.

  One afternoon while my parents were waiting in yet another line, I slipped out of the apartment and made the long journey on foot back to Alsergrund, grateful I had done it before with Stefi and Anneliese on our way home from the Prater. I had been waiting for the chance to go back to our neighborhood. I needed to see Anneliese, to tell her where we were, to be sure of her. I wasn’t going to go to our old building, I wasn’t that stupid, but I thought perhaps if I waited in the Jewish cemetery on our street, I’d see her walking home from school. I was lucky no one stopped me on my way. No one looked at me at all.

  But I had only just rounded the corner onto our old street when our former neighbors set upon me. My second-grade teacher saw me first. “Orly, you can’t come back here.”

  “And you can’t wear that anymore.” Frau Floch stood in the doorway of her intact butcher shop. I paused, unsure if she was trying to be helpful or mocking me. As if to answer my unspoken question, she stepped forward and tugged on the strings of my apron. “These clot
hes, they are not for you,” she said, like a stranger. “They’re for Austrians.”

  By the time she tore the apron from my body, I was surrounded. A man yanked my right arm behind my back while another used his pocketknife to slice away the strings of my bodice. “It was my grandmother’s,” I protested weakly, still believing logic might make some difference. “We’re Austrian.”

  “No,” said the man with the knife as he tore the skirt from my legs. “You’re a Jew.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN I RETURNED in the shredded remnants of the dress, my parents were furious. “What were you thinking?” my father yelled. “Do you not understand the danger you put us all in when you call attention to yourself? Do you really not understand?” My mother was almost more concerned about the fact that I now had only one dress left, a worn green frock already too tight. Part of me, some irrational, reptilian part of me, wanted my parents to go back to Alsergrund and fight for me, to go after the people who had stripped me, hurt me, made me sweat until I thought I’d faint. But they wanted to live. They wanted me to live.

  Twenty

  On November 12, 1938, the Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from Economic Life bars Jews from operating any kind of business.

  After Pogrom Night, my parents began to talk seriously about sending me to England with a large group of children, a rescue effort by the British government that was being organized by German Jewish organizations. Kindertransport. The first transport was just for German children, but there could soon be more.

  Our visas had still not come through, and we did not know how much longer we could survive. My parents argued about whether to keep me by their sides, or send me to safety. It was urgent that they get me out of Austria, my father said. They could always meet me somewhere later. But we can still get her out with us, my mother cried. The visas could come any day. Haven’t I already given up my son? She could not see any new life without me.