The Tongue Set Free, page 18
“No, I’m not ashamed! You’re trying to talk Mother into something! I’m not asleep. I know what you people want. I’ll never sleep!”
My aunt, who was most at fault, having talked away so obstinately at my mother, kept silent and looked daggers at me. Mother said tenderly: “You’ve come to protect me. You’re my knight. Now I hope you two understand,” she turned to them: “He doesn’t want me to. And I don’t want to either.”
I wouldn’t budge from the spot until the two enemies stood up and left. I still wasn’t pacified, for I threatened: “If they come again, I’ll never go to sleep. I’ll stay up all night so that you won’t let them in. If you get married, I’ll jump off the balcony!” It was a terrible threat, it was meant in earnest; I know with absolute certainty that I would have done it.
Mother couldn’t manage to quiet me down that night. I didn’t go back to my bed, neither of us slept. She tried to distract me with stories. My aunt had had a very unhappy marriage and had soon separated from her husband. He suffered from a horrible disease and had gone mad. He had sometimes come to visit us in Vienna. An attendant had brought him to Josef-Gall-Gasse. “Here’s some candy for the kids,” he said to Mother, handing her a large bag of bonbons. When he wanted to speak to us, he always looked in another direction, his eyes gaped and were fixed on the door. His voice kept cracking and sounded like a donkey’s braying. He only stayed briefly; the attendant took his arm and pulled him out into the vestibule and then out of the apartment.
“She would like me not to be as unhappy as she is. She means well. She doesn’t know any better.”
“So she wants you to marry too and be unhappy! She saved herself from her husband, and you’re supposed to marry! That last word was like a stab, and I pushed the dagger deeper and deeper into me. It hadn’t been such a felicitous idea telling me that story. But there was no story whatsoever that could have calmed me down; Mother tried so many. Finally, she swore that she wouldn’t allow the two women to discuss the matter anymore, and if they didn’t stop she wouldn’t see them again. She had to swear that not just once, but over and over. It was only when she swore by my father’s memory that something inside me relaxed, and I started to believe her.
A Roomful of Presents
School was a terrible problem. It was all different from Vienna; the school year didn’t begin in the fall, it began in spring. Elementary school, which was called primary school here, had six grades; in Vienna, I had entered the Realgymnasium directly from the fourth grade, and since I had already done one year there I really belonged in the second year of the higher school. But all attempts at getting me into it failed. The authorities rigorously stuck to my age; wherever I appeared with Mother, who asked them to accept me on that level, we received the same answer. The thought of my losing a year or more by moving to Switzerland went strongly against her grain, she just wouldn’t put up with it. We tried everywhere, once we even traveled to Bern. The answer was terse and most likely the same; since it was given without a “dear Madame” or other Viennese cordialities, it struck us as gross, and when we left such a school principal again Mother was in despair: “Won’t you at least test him?” she had pleaded. “He’s advanced for his age.” But that was the very thing they didn’t like to hear: “We make no exceptions.”
So she had to make the most difficult decision. Swallowing her pride, she entered me in the sixth grade of the primary school at Oberstrass. It would be over in six months and then they would see whether I was ready for the canton school. Once again, I found myself in a big elementary-school class, and I felt I’d been demoted back to Herr Tegel in Vienna, only here his name was Herr Bachmann. There was nothing to learn—in Vienna I had been two years further. But I experienced something more important, although its significance didn’t strike me until later on.
The other pupils were called on by the teacher in Swiss German, and one of these names sounded so enigmatic, that I always looked forward to hearing it again. “Sägerich,” with a drawled-out ä appeared to be a formation like Gänserich (gander) or Enterich (drake), but there couldn’t be a male for Säge, a saw; I couldn’t account for the word. Herr Bachmann was enchanted with this name; the boy excelled in neither intelligence nor stupidity, but he called on him far more frequently than all the others. That was just about the only thing I heeded in class, and since my mania for counting was now increasing again, I counted up the number of times Sägerich was called on. Herr Bachmann had a lot of trouble with the pupils, who were dense and mulish, and after getting no answer from five or six of them in a row, he turned expectantly to Sägerich. This boy would stand up, and usually knew nothing either. But he stood broad and powerful, with an encouraging grin and tousled hair; the color of his face was slightly reddish, like that of Herr Bachmann, who enjoyed drinking, and if Sägerich so much as answered, Herr Bachmann would breathe a sigh of relief as though having taken a good draught, and pulled the class along some more.
It took a while for me to realize that the boy’s name was Segenreich, rich in blessings, and that increased the impact of Sägerich, for the prayers I had learned in Vienna all began “gesegnet seist du, Herr” (blessed art thou, Lord), and although they had meant little to me, the fact that a boy had “blessing” (Segen) in his name and was “rich” in blessings to boot had something wondrous about it. Herr Bachmann, who had a hard life both in school and at home, clung to this and kept calling upon the boy for assistance.
The other pupils spoke only the Zurich dialect of Swiss German among themselves; the instruction in this highest grade of the primary school was in standard German, but Herr Bachmann—and not only when calling names—lapsed into the dialect, in which he, like all the pupils, was fluent, and so it was par for the course that I gradually learned it too. I felt no resistance towards it whatsoever, although I was amazed by it. Perhaps that was because the war hardly ever came up during classroom discussions. In Vienna, my best friend Max Schiebl played with soldiers every day. I had played along because I liked him, but especially because that way I could see his beautiful mother every afternoon. I went into the tin-soldier war every day for Schiebl’s mother; for her I would have gone into the real war. At school, however, the war had pretty much covered everything. I had learned how to ward off the thoughtless gross words of some of the other pupils; but I joined in every day when the songs about the Kaiser and the war were sung, despite my growing resistance; there were only two of them, very sad ones, that I like singing. In Zurich, the many words referring to war had not penetrated the language of my fellow pupils. Boring as the classes may have been for me, since I learned nothing new, I nevertheless liked the energetic and unadorned sentences of the Swiss boys. I myself rarely spoke to them, but I listened eagerly, venturing to throw in a sentence only every so often, so long as it was a sentence that I could already pronounce like them, without it striking them as too odd. I soon gave up producing such sentences at home. Mother, watching over the purity of our language and tolerating only languages with a literature, was concerned that I might corrupt my “pure” German, and when, in my eagerness, I tried to defend the dialect, which I liked, she grew angry and said: “I didn’t bring you to Switzerland so that you’d forget what I told you about the Burgtheater! Do you want to end up talking like Fräulein Vogler?” That was a sharp stab, for we found Fräulein Vogler comical. But I also felt how unfair that was, for my fellow pupils spoke altogether differently from Fräulein Vogler. I practiced Zurich German for myself alone, against my mother’s will, concealing from her the progress I was making. That, so far as language went, was my first independent move from her, and although still subjugated to her in all opinions and influences, I began feeling like a “man” in this one thing.
But I was still too rocky in the new language to really make friends with Swiss boys. I hung out with a boy who had come from Vienna, like myself, and a second one whose mother was Viennese. On her birthday, Rudi invited me over, and I came into a circle of rollicking people, who were far more alien to me than anything I had ever heard in Swiss German. Rudi’s mother, a young blond woman, lived alone with him, but many men of different ages were present at the birthday party, all of them flattering the mother, clinking glasses to her health, gazing tenderly into her eyes; it was as though Rudi had lots of fathers, but the mother, slightly tipsy, had lamented upon my arrival that I too had no father. She turned now to one guest, now to another, she turned to all sides like a flower in the wind. She alternately laughed and got weepy, and while wiping her tears away she was already laughing again. The company was loud, comical speeches were given in her honor, but I didn’t understand them. I was very dazed when such a speech was interrupted by uproarious mirth, and Rudi’s mother—groundlessly, I thought—gazed at her son and dismally said: “Poor boy, he has no father.”
There was not a single woman at the party; never had I seen so many men alone with one woman, and all of them were thankful for something and paid homage to her, but she didn’t seem all that happy about it, for she wept more than she laughed. She spoke with a Viennese intonation. Some of the men, as I soon realized, were Swiss, but none of them lapsed into the dialect; all speeches were given in standard German. One or the other of the men got up, strode over to her with his glass, clinked it, uttering a poignant line, and gave her a kiss for her birthday. Rudi took me to another room and showed me the presents his mother had gotten. The whole room was filled with presents; I didn’t have the nerve to really look at them because I hadn’t brought anything myself. When I rejoined the guests, she called me over and said: “How do you like my presents?” Stuttering, I apologized for not bringing her a present. But she laughed, pulled me over and kissed me, and said: “You’re a darling boy. You don’t need a present. When you’re big, you’ll visit me and bring me a present. Then nobody will visit me anymore.” And she started crying again.
At home, I was questioned about this party. It didn’t soften Mother any that the woman was Viennese and that everyone at the party had spoken a “good” German. She struck a very earnest tone, even using the weighty form of address “my son,” and explained that the guests were nothing but “silly” people, who were not worthy of me. I was never to go to that place again. She pitied Rudi, she said, having a mother like that. Not every woman was capable of bringing up a child alone, and what could I think of a woman who laughed and cried at once.
“Maybe she’s sick,” I said.
“Sick?” was the prompt and angry retort.
“Maybe she’s crazy?”
“What about all those presents? The room full of presents?”
At the time, I didn’t know what Mother meant, but for me too, the room with the gifts had been the most unpleasant thing of all. You couldn’t move around in it freely, there were too many gifts, and if Rudi’s mother hadn’t gotten me through my embarrassment so helpfully and tenderly, I wouldn’t have tried to defend her, for I didn’t care for her one bit.
“She’s not sick. She has no character. That’s all.” That was the final verdict, for character was all that mattered, anything else was negligible compared to that. “You mustn’t let Rudi catch on. He’s a poor boy. No father and a mother with no character! What’s to become of him?”
I suggested bringing him home occasionally, so that she could do something for him. “That won’t do any good,” she said, “he’ll only make fun of our modest way of living.”
We already had our own apartment by then, and it really was modest. It was in this Zurich period that Mother kept making it clear to me that we had to live very simply in order to make both ends meet. Maybe it was an educational principle for her, because, as I know today, she certainly wasn’t poor. On the contrary, her money was well placed with her brother, his business in Manchester was as flourishing as ever; he was getting richer and richer. He regarded her as his protégée, she admired him, and he would never have dreamt of taking advantage of her. But the difficulties of wartime in Vienna, when direct communication with England was impossible, had left traces in her. She wanted to give all three of us a good education, and this included not getting accustomed to the availability of money. She kept us very short, the cooking was plain. She had no maid, after an experience that unsettled her. She did the housework herself, remarking from time to time that she was making a sacrifice for us, since she had been raised in different circumstances; and when I thought of the life we had led in Vienna, the difference seemed so great that I had to believe in the necessity of such restrictions.
However, I also preferred this kind of puritanical life. It fitted in better with my notions of the Swiss. In Vienna, everything revolved around the imperial family, and from there it went down to the nobility and the other grand families. Switzerland had neither an emperor nor an imperial aristocracy, I imagined—I don’t know what prompted me—that wealth wasn’t popular either. But I was quite certain that every human being mattered, that each one counted. I had made this conception my own with all my heart and soul, and thus only a simple lifestyle was possible. At that time, I didn’t admit to myself the advantages this life-style brought me. For actually, we now had Mother all to ourselves, everything in the new apartment was entwined with her, no one stood between us, and she was never out of our sight. It was an intimate togetherness of wonderful warmth and density. All intellectual matters were preponderant, books and conversations about books were the heart of our existence. Whenever Mother went to plays or lectures or concerts, I participated as fully as if I had attended them myself. Now and then, not very often, she took me along, but I was usually disappointed, for her accounts of such experiences were always a lot more interesting.
Espionage
The apartment we lived in was a small place on the third floor of 73 Scheuchzerstrasse. I can only recall three rooms in which we moved; but there must have been a fourth and smaller room, since we once briefly had a maid.
We had a hard time with maids, however. Mother couldn’t get used to there not being maids here as in Vienna. A maid was called a “house daughter” and ate at the same table with her employers. That was the first condition that a girl stated upon coming in. Mother, in her high-handed way, found that unbearable. She had always treated her maids well in Vienna, she said, but they lived in their own room, which we never entered, and they ate by themselves in the kitchen. “Dear Madame” was the normal way to address one’s employer in Vienna. Here, in Zurich, that was gone, and Mother, who liked Switzerland because of its attitude, could not resign herself to the democratic ways, which reached to the very heart of her household. She tried speaking English at the table, rationalizing it to Hedi, the “house daughter,” by saying that the two little brothers were gradually forgetting it. It was necessary, Mother said, to at least refresh their knowledge during meals. That was true, but it was also a pretext for leaving the “house daughter” out of our conversations. She was silent upon hearing the reason, but she didn’t seem offended. She was silent for a couple of days, but how amazed was Mother when, at lunchtime, Hedi corrected a mistake that George, the youngest, had made in an English sentence. Mother had let the mistake pass, but Hedi corrected it with an innocent expression.
“How do you know that?” Mother asked, almost indignant. “Do you know English?”
Hedi had had it at school and understood everything we said.
“She’s a spy!” Mother said to me, later on. “She’s infiltrated our home! There’s no such thing as a maid knowing English! Why didn’t she tell us earlier? She’s been eavesdropping on us, that awful creature! I will not let my children sit at the same table as a spy!”
And now she remembered that Hedi hadn’t come to us alone. She had shown up with a gentleman, who had introduced himself as her father and had scrutinized us and the apartment, inquiring very thoroughly about his daughter’s working conditions. “I could tell right away he wasn’t her father. He seemed like someone from a good family. He interrogated me as though I were looking for work! I couldn’t have asked more rigorous questions in his place. But he was no housemaid’s father. They’ve planted a spy in our home.”
Now there was absolutely nothing to spy on in our apartment, but that didn’t bother her, she ascribed an importance to us that would have justified espionage. Cautiously, she took counter-measures. “We can’t dismiss her right away, that would look funny. We have to endure her for two more weeks. But we’ve got to be on our guard. We mustn’t say anything against Switzerland, otherwise she’ll have us deported.”
It didn’t occur to Mother that none of us ever said anything against Switzerland. On the contrary: When I told her about school, she was always full of praise, and the only thing she resented in Switzerland was the institution of the “house daughter.” I liked Hedi because she wasn’t toadyish; she came from Glarus, which had beaten the Hapsburgs in battle, and she sometimes read my Swiss history book by Öchsli. And though I was always won over whenever Mother said “we”—“we have to do this” or “we have to do that,” as though I were drawn into her decisions with equal rights—I made a stab at saving the situation, and a very cunning stab at that, for I knew how to bribe Mother: only with intellectual things. “But you know,” I said, “she really likes to read my books. She always asks me what I’m reading. She also borrows books from me and discusses them with me.”
