When Minka went to the Kärntnerbar, it was the crest of the wave. We let her down to the ladies’ room by a rope and pulled her up again, and Poldi became his old self and was highly amusing. At three o’clock in the morning, we found ourselves in the beer cellar of the Paulanerbräu, sitting between a stone-drunk chap — who shouted in a loud voice that he was a former cavalry officer with a golden decoration for bravery and the official title of the Hero of Zaleszczyki — and a shy little tart I knew fairly well from midnight strolls on the Kärntnerstrasse. We had hardly had a spoonful of our gulash soup and a sip of beer when a huge, rather shabby-looking young man roared in our faces, “Juden raus!” “Jews out!”
The former cavalry officer got up in stiff dignity and said that he felt offended by having been called a Jew, and would the gentleman instantly follow him to the men’s room in the basement in order to fix the place and conditions of the duel. Poldi pushed him back on his stool. The rowdy then, surprisingly, sat down on the other side of the little tart and stared with a dull expression at the wooden table. Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at me. “Don’t you remember me, you swine?” he roared. “Arnulf! I’m Oskar. Oskar Koloman.”
I could scarcely believe my eyes. He was one of the boys at the boarding school in Styria, a good deal older than I but in the same class. “Where the hell have you come from?” I asked.
He rose to his full height and volume. “You really want to know?” He nearly fell over the table in the attempt to grasp my shoulder. “Come with me to the men’s room in the basement. I’ll tell you where I’ve come from.”
“I think you’d better go,” Minka said, in a low voice. “It’ll give Poldi and me a chance to disappear.”
I followed my schoolmate past a row of gentlemen standing against a tarred wall, showing us their backs, till he found a gap where we could stand next to one another. He had that very day been released from Steinhausen, the Austrian concentration camp for Nazis under the regime of Chancellor Schuschnigg. As one of a group of Nazi students, he had blown up a telephone booth in Graz and had been caught doing it. He had spent three years in the camp. “For a cigarette butt no bigger than this,” he howled into my face, showing as well as he could with his thick fingers how small, “for such a tiny little butt, they made me clean the latrines for a week!” Then, hammering his fists against the tarred wall, “They have forsaken us! They have betrayed us — our brethren of the Reich! They left us in the mire while they became great and mighty. Now they will come and take over here, too!” He leaned his forehead against the wall and wept.
So that was Austria. Hadn’t my father been right to keep out of it? Again I fled to the clean mountains of Styria to ski for a couple of weeks. I had nothing to do anyway but wait for the lady I still loved. We had made an appointment to meet in Vienna on the eleventh of March. I was there a day earlier, and felt as if I had wandered into a madhouse. A sort of regimented revolution was going on under the watchful eyes of fat Viennese policemen in long bottle-green coats. On one side of the Kärntnerstrasse, people with swastikas in their buttonholes promenaded, shouted “Heil!” and sneered at the people on the other side. The people on the other side, young workers — many Jews among them — shook their fists at the Nazis and shouted “Rotfront!” I could not get hold of Minka, who was helping relatives in Mödling prepare their departure, somebody in the Café Rebhuhn told me. So I went home to my grandmother’s flat, where I found that my beloved had already arrived in Vienna and would be waiting for me next evening at ten o’clock in an apartment house on the Opernring. I did not go out all the next day but spent the day in great uneasiness waiting for the telephone to ring. The cable with that precise information could only mean that something had gone wrong. But no call came. When I left the house at a quarter to ten, the streets were strangely dark and empty. I walked the short distance from the Florianigasse to the Rathaus, and through the Rathaus arcade — one of my grandfather’s dubious architectural masterpieces. Coming out, I found myself in the middle of an uncanny procession. In blocks that in their disciplined compactness seemed made of cast iron, people marched by thousands, men only, in total silence. The morbid, rhythmic stamping of their feet hung like a gigantic swinging cord in the silence that had fallen on Vienna. This cord seemed to originate somewhere in the outskirts. I could detect it through the length of the Alserstrasse, then winding round toward the Rathaus and leading down the Ringstrasse. Parades of all kinds were not rare in Vienna. They were nearly always led by a detachment of streetcar conductors and were in protest against something or other — unemployment, or the rise in the price of milk, or the pollution of the city water, brought in from the clean mountains of Styria by aqueducts. But this was different. It had an uncomfortably decisive character. I tried to break through between the blocks, but I did not succeed. Two or three times I asked a bystander what was going on, and got no answer. Impatient, fearing I would be late for the appointment with my beloved, I squeezed myself into the last row of a marching block and marched with them.
“What the hell are we marching for?” I asked the man beside me.
“Anschluss,” he barked.
Well, that literally meant “connection,” and that was exactly what I was looking for. If I could march with them down to the Opernring and get out of the parade there, I’d be in time for my appointment. But they wouldn’t let me. I was pushed out. I had come far enough to see the full height of the tower of the Rathaus, toward which the marchers turned their heads, starry-eyed. The tower was surmounted by the statue of a knight in armor, a statue I had loved as a child, so I turned my head, too, and saw a huge flag hanging down from the tower’s peak, attached to my knight’s armored feet — a red flag with a white circle, in which there was a black swastika. “So that’s it. It’s come, finally,” I said to myself. “Austria has united with the German Reich.”
It was not unexpected. For weeks people had spoken of little else. Yet how did all these people know that it would happen this very night? And how, for heaven’s sake, did they know their place in the serried ranks? They must have been drilled for months — but where? In cellars? Austrian Nazis had been underground up to this moment, an underground everybody knew about and spoke about quite openly and — with the exception of Jews and Reds, of course — with a certain sympathy. And now here it was. The whole male population of Vienna seemed to be marching in that silent parade. I felt a sudden resentment at being left out. After all, I was an Austrian myself; I had been born under the flag of the double-headed eagle as well as they, and though I was a subject of Rumania, it seemed unjust to deny me a place in one of their marching blocks as if I were a Red, or even a Jew. Politically, too, I wasn’t much different from them. Anyway, the event in itself was something I welcomed, even if I didn’t much care for the Pieffkes (as we Austrians called Germans). These people probably didn’t care for them either. Oskar Koloman had already expressed his disillusion. In any case, the unity of the Reich was restored. The dream of a century had come true. Such a political reversal would change many things, perhaps even the decision of my beloved to get a divorce from her husband, whom, unfortunately, I liked so much. There was a promise of hope in the atmosphere. In spite of that uncanny silence all over Vienna, something was happening, something important, and not merely a protest against the diminishing size of Wiener Kipfeln—the beloved Viennese croissants — and the pollution of the city water. Again and again I inserted myself into the marching blocks, trying to keep step so it wouldn’t be too obvious that I did not belong, and was pushed out of the ranks each time. At last, I came to the Opernring and hurried up the staircase of a certain house, and there she was. We both burst into hysterical laughter. “Can you imagine!” we said. “What an effort to celebrate our union!”