The Tongue Set Free, page 14
But then in Varna, when the vehement downpours began, the steep main road leading down to the harbor was full of deep holes. Our droshkey got stuck; we had to get out, people came to help the coachman, and they pulled with all their might until the droshkey was free again. Mother sighed: “The same roads as before! These are Oriental conditions. These people will never learn!”
So her opinions wavered, and ultimately she was very glad when we started back to Vienna. But since a shortage of food had begun in Vienna right after the first winter of war, she stocked up on dried vegetables before we left Bulgaria. Countless pieces of the widest variety were threaded together, she filled up a whole suitcase, and was then highly vexed when the Rumanian customs inspectors at Predeal, the station at the Hungarian border, emptied the trunk on the station platform. The train began moving, Mother sprang up, but her treasures lay scattered on the platform amid the jeers of the inspectors, and she had lost the suitcase as well. I felt it was beneath her dignity to grieve about such things, which only had to do with food; and instead of comfort, that was what she got to hear from me, to her annoyance.
She blamed the behavior of the Rumanian officials on our Turkish passports. In a sort of hereditary loyalty to Turkey, where they had always been well treated, most Sephardim had remained Turkish subjects. However, Mother’s family, who originally came from Livorno, were under Italian protection and traveled with Italian passports. Had she been traveling with her girlhood passport under the name Arditti, then, she felt, the Rumanians would certainly have acted differently. They liked Italians because that’s where their language came from. Most of all, they liked the French.
I had come right out of a war that I didn’t care to acknowledge, but it was only on this trip that I began understanding, in an immediate way, something of the wide range and universality of national hatreds.
The Discovery of Evil Fortress Vienna
In fall 1915, after that summer trip to Bulgaria, I started the first year in the Realgymnasium, the kind of secondary school that emphasizes modern languages. It was in the same building as the elementary school, right near the Sophienbrücke. I liked this school much better; we had Latin, something new, we got several teachers, no longer boring Herr Tegel, who always said the same thing and had struck me as stupid from the beginning. Our class teacher was Herr Professor Twrdy, a broad, bearded dwarf. When he sat on the podium, his beard lay across the table, and from our desks we could only see his head. No one disliked him, as comical as he appeared to us at first—he had a way of stroking his long beard that inspired respect. Maybe he drew patience from this gesture, he was fair and seldom lost his temper. He taught us Latin declinations, had little luck with most of his pupils, and kept reiterating “silva, silvae” for them indefatigably.
I now had more classmates who seemed interesting and whom I still recall. There was Stegmar, a boy who drew and painted marvelously; I was a bad draughtsman and couldn’t see enough of his works. Before my eyes, he cast birds, flowers, horses, and other animals on the paper and gave me the loveliest ones just as they were created. Most impressive of all was the way he swiftly tore up a drawing that I was amazed at, throwing it away because it wasn’t good enough and starting all over again. That happened a couple of times, but eventually he felt he had succeeded, scrutinized it from all angles, and then handed it to me with a modest and yet slightly solemn gesture. I admired his talent and his generosity, but I was disturbed at not being able to see any difference; all the drawings struck me as equally successful, and even more than his talent I admired the lightning-fast execution of his judgment. I was sorry about every drawing that he ripped up, nothing could have gotten me to destroy any paper with writing or printing on it. It was breathtaking to watch how quickly and unhesitatingly, nay, cheerfully he did it. At home I was told that artists are often like that.
Another classmate, fat, dark, and stocky, was named Deutschberger. His mother had a goulash booth in the Prater amusement park, and the fact that he lived right near the Tunnel of Fun, where I had been something like a habitué not so long ago, captivated me in his favor initially. I thought that someone who lived there had to be a different kind of person, far more interesting than the rest of us. But the fact that he was indeed, and in a different way than I could have known (at eleven, he was already a full-grown cynic), soon led to a bitter enmity.
We used to walk home from school along Prinzenallee with another classmate, who was really my friend, Max Schiebl, a general’s son. Deutschberger did all the talking; he seemed to know everything about the life of adults and gave us an unvarnished account of it. For him, the Prater, as Schiebl and I knew it, had a different face. He would catch conversations between patrons at the goulash booth, and he had a lip-smacking way of repeating them to us. He always added comments by his mother, who hid nothing from him; he appeared to have no father and was her only child. Schiebl and I looked forward to the walk home, but Deutschberger wouldn’t start talking right away; it was only when we had passed the playing field of the Vienna Athletic Club that he felt free to launch into his real subject matter. I believe he needed a little time to figure out what he would shock us with. He always ended with the same sentence: “You can never learn about life early enough, my mother says.” He had an instinct for effect and heightened his stories every time. So long as he talked about violence, knifings, muggings, and murders, we let him be. He was against the war, which I liked; but Schiebl didn’t care for that and asked him questions in order to make him change the topic. I was too embarrassed to repeat these conversations at home, for a while they remained our well-guarded secret, until his victories went to Deutschberger’s head and he dared to go to extremes; this caused a great agitation.
“I know where babies come from,” he suddenly said one day, “my mother told me.” Schiebl was one year my senior; the issue had already begun absorbing him, and I reluctantly went along with his curiosity. “It’s very simple,” said Deutschberger, “a man plops on a woman the way the rooster plops on a hen.” I, full of the Shakespeare and Schiller evenings with my mother, flew into a rage and shouted: “You’re lying! It’s not true! You’re a liar!” It was the first time I turned against him. He remained utterly derisive and repeated his words. Schiebl kept silent and Deutschberger’s total scorn was discharged on me. “Your mother doesn’t tell you anything. She treats you like a little kid. Didn’t you ever watch a rooster? A man and a woman, etc. You can never learn about life early enough, says my mother.”
It wouldn’t have taken much for me to start punching him. I left the two boys and ran across the empty lot into our building. We always ate together at a round table; I controlled myself in front of the little brothers and said nothing as yet, but I couldn’t eat and was close to tears. As soon as I could, I pulled Mother out to the balcony, where we had our serious conversations during the day, and I told her everything. Naturally, she had noticed my agitation long ago, but when she heard the reason, she was dumbstruck. She, who had a clear and perfect answer for everything, she, who always made me feel that I shared the responsibility of raising the little brothers, she fell silent, silent for the first time, and remained silent so long that I grew scared. But then she looked into my eyes and, addressing me as she always did in our grand moments, she solemnly said: “My son, do you trust your mother?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“It’s not true! He’s lying. His mother never told him that. Children come in a different way, a beautiful way. I will tell you at a later time. You don’t even want to know it now!” Her words instantly removed my desire to know. Nor did I really want to. If only that other thing was a lie! Now I knew that it was a lie—and a dreadful lie to boot, for he had made it up, his mother had never told him that.
From that moment on, I hated Deutschberger and treated him like the dregs of humanity. At school, where he was a bad pupil, I never whispered answers to him anymore. During recess, when he came over, I turned my back on him. I never said another word to him. We didn’t walk home together anymore, I forced Schiebl to choose between him and me. I did something even worse: When the geography teacher asked him to point out Rome on the map, and he pointed to Naples, the teacher didn’t notice; I stood up and said: “He pointed to Naples, that’s not Rome,” and he received a bad mark. Now that was something I would ordinarily have despised, I stood by my classmates and helped them whenever I could, even against teachers that I liked. But my mother’s words had filled me with such hatred of him that I felt anything was permissible. It was the first time I experienced what blind devotion is, though not a word had been spoken about it between Mother and myself. I was enraged at him and saw him as a villain, I gave Schiebl a long description of Richard III and convinced him that Deutschberger was no one else, just young as yet, and somebody ought to put a stop to his game while there was still time.
That was how early the discovery of evil began. My tendency haunted me for a long time, even in later years, when I became a devoted slave to Karl Kraus and believed him about the countless villains he attacked. Life in school became unbearable for Deutschberger. He lost his self-confidence, his pleading looks followed me everywhere, he would have done anything to make peace, but I was intransigent, and it was strange to see this hatred increase, rather than diminish, because of its visible effect upon him. Finally, his mother came to school and confronted me during recess. “Why do you persecute my son?” she asked. “He’s never done anything to you. You were always friends.” She was an energetic woman with quick, powerful words. Unlike him, she had a neck and she didn’t smack her lips when speaking. I enjoyed her asking me for something—leniency for her son—and so, as open as she, I told her the reason for my hostility. Unabashed, I repeated the taboo sentence about the rooster and the hen. She turned to him vehemently; he was standing behind her, trembling. “Did you say that?” He woefully nodded his head, but he didn’t deny it, and that ended the whole matter for me. Perhaps I couldn’t have refused anything to a mother who treated me as seriously as my own, but I sensed how important he was to her, and so Richard III changed back into a schoolboy like me and Schiebl. The controversial sentence, however, had returned to its alleged source, thereby losing its strength. The persecution collapsed; we didn’t become friends again, but I left him alone, to such an extent that I have no further memory of him. When I think back to the rest of my schooltime in Vienna, approximately six more months, he remains vanished.
My friendship with Schiebl, however, became closer and closer. Everything had gone well with us from the first, but now he was my only friend. He lived further up the Schüttel, in an apartment similar to ours. For his sake, I also played with soldiers, and since he had very many, entire armies with all branches of arms, cavalry and artillery, I often went to his home, where we fought out our battles. He was very keen on winning and couldn’t stand defeats. If beaten, he would bite his lips and make an angry face, sometimes he tried denying his defeat, and I got mad. But that never lasted very long; he was well brought-up, tall and proud, and although he was the spitting image of his mother, and I never got over my surprise at this resemblance, he was no mama’s boy. She was the loveliest mother that I knew, and also the tallest. I always saw her erect, high above me; she bent down to us when she brought us a snack, placing the tray on the table with a slight bow of her upper body and promptly straightening up again before inviting us to help ourselves. Her dark eyes haunted me, I dreamt of them at home, although never telling Max, her son. I did ask him, however, if all Tyrolean women had beautiful eyes, to which he decisively said “Yes!” adding, “All Tyrolean men too.” But the next time, I realized he’d told her, for she seemed amused when she brought us the afternoon snack, watched us play a bit, contrary to her habit, and asked me about my mother. When she left, I sternly asked Max: “Do you tell your mother everything?” He turned blood-red, but absolutely denied it. He told her nothing, he said, what did I think of him anyway, he didn’t even tell his father everything.
The father, a small, slight man, made no impression whatsoever on me. He not only was shorter, but seemed older than the mother. He was a retired general, but had been called back for a special assignment in the war. He was inspector of the fortifications around Vienna. In fall 1915, when the Russians had broken through the Carpathian Mountains, and there were rumors that Vienna was in danger, Schiebl’s father took us two along on his inspections when we didn’t have school. We drove to Neuwaldegg and then tramped through the Vienna woods, coming to various small “forts” that had been dug into the ground. There were no soldiers here, we were allowed to view everything; we went inside, and while Schiebl’s father banged his swagger stick here and there on the dense walls, we peeked through the chinks into the deserted forest, where nothing stirred. The general was a man of few words, he had a somewhat grumpy face, but whenever he addressed us to explain something, even during the walks through the forest, he smiled at us as if we were something special. I never felt embarassed with him. Perhaps he saw future soldiers in us; it was he who had given his son those huge tin armies that kept multiplying incessantly, and Max told me that he inquired about our games and wanted to know who had won. But I wasn’t used to such quiet people, and I certainly couldn’t picture him as a general. Schiebl’s mother would have been an absolutely beautiful general, I would even have gone to war for her sake, but I didn’t take the inspection tours with the father seriously; and the war, which was talked about so much, seemed furthest away when he banged his stick on the wall of a “fort.”
Throughout my schooldays, and later as well, fathers made no impression on me. They had something lifeless or aged for me. My own father was still inside me, he had spoken about so many things to me, and I had heard him sing. His image stayed as young as he had been; he remained the only father. I was, however, receptive to mothers, and it was astonishing how many mothers I liked.
In the winter of 1915–16, the effects of the war could be felt in everyday life. The time of the enthusiastically singing recruits in Prinzenallee was gone. When small groups of them now trudged past us on our way home from school, they didn’t look as cheerful as before. They still sang “In the homeland, in the homeland we’ll meet again!”, but home didn’t seem so close to them. They were no longer so certain that they’d be coming back. They sang “I had a comrade,” but as though they themselves were the fallen comrade they sang about. I sensed this change and told my friend Schiebl about it. “They’re not Tyroleans,” he said, “you’ve got to see the Tyroleans.” I don’t know where he saw marching Tyroleans at the time, maybe he and his parents visited friends from their Tyrolean homeland and heard confident words from them. His faith in victory was unshakable, he would never have dreamt of doubting it. He didn’t get this confidence from his father, a man of few and never big words. When he took us along on his excursions, he never once said: “We shall win.” Had he been my father, I would have long since abandoned any hope for victory. It must have been his mother who kept his faith up. Perhaps she said nothing either, but her pride, her unyieldingness, her way of looking at you as though nothing bad could happen under her protection—I too could never have cherished doubts with such a mother.
Once, walking along the Schüttel, we came near the railroad bridge that spanned the Danube Canal. A train was standing there, it was stuffed with people. Freight cars were joined to passenger cars; they were all jammed with people staring down at us, mutely, but questioningly. “Those are Galician—” Schiebl said, holding back the word “Jews” and replacing it with “refugees.” Leopoldstadt was full of Galician Jews who had fled from the Russians. Their black kaftans, their earlocks, and their special hats made them stand out conspicuously. Now they were in Vienna, where could they go? They had to eat too, and things didn’t look so good for food in Vienna.
I had never seen so many of them penned together in railroad cars. It was a dreadful sight because the train was standing. All the time we kept staring, it never moved from the spot. “Like cattle,” I said, “that’s how they’re squeezed together, and there are also cattle cars.”
“Well, they’re so many of them,” said Schiebl, tempering his disgust at them for my sake; he would never had uttered anything that could offend me. But I stood transfixed, and he, standing with me, felt my horror. No one waved at us, no one called, they knew how unwelcome they were and they expected no word of welcome. They were all men and a lot were old and bearded. “You know,” said Schiebl, “our soldiers are sent to the war in such freight cars. War is war, my father says.” Those were the only words of his father’s that he ever quoted to me, and I realized he was doing it to wrench me out of my terror. But it didn’t help, I stared and stared, and nothing happened. I wanted the train to start moving, the most horrible thing of all was that the train still stood on the bridge.
“Aren’t you coming?” said Schiebl, tugging at my sleeve. “Don’t you want to anymore?” We were en route to his home to play with soldiers again. I did leave now, but with a very queasy feeling, which increased when we entered his apartment and his mother brought us a snack. “Where were you so long?” she asked. Schiebl pointed at me, saying: “We saw a train of Galician refugees. It was standing on Franzensbrücke.”
