Knit one, purl one.
I see.
Now turn it over and start again from the beginning.
That’s all there is to it?
That’s all there is to it.
3
A man sits in Vienna at the Café Museum over a glass of mineral water, trying to think what he might bring back for his mother to give her pleasure, his mother who was a child in Vienna. Should he buy her a little bronze St. Stephen’s Cathedral, or a real Sacher torte from Hotel Sacher, or just bring her a twig from a tree on Arenbergplatz, not far from the apartment where she used to live? He can’t imagine that his mother was once a child. A year and a half ago, when he came to bring her to the Home and found her already waiting for him in her hat and coat on a chair in the vestibule, she introduced herself to him as a major in the Imperial and Royal army, ready to march off into battle. Beside her stood a small, dark-blue suitcase, and in her lap she held the little box with the gold buttons. He knew the box well, he’d used these buttons in Ufa to buy two or sometimes even three kilograms of air from his niania; he’d polished them when he was bored waiting for his mother, often staring at the double-headed eagle. Here in Vienna this eagle spread its wings not only atop the Hofburg, it was everywhere in the city, glancing at the same time to the right and the left: on cast-iron railings, on fountains, above the entryways to buildings, and even on the shop sign of the Trafik where he’d just bought himself a pack of cigarettes — and this although the Kaiser had been dead for three-quarters of a century now. Everywhere here this eagle was still spreading its wings above its two heads, as if to hold them together.
Did time in Vienna really pass so slowly?
Or not at all?
In the Eastern part of Germany, a state had been founded and had remained a state for forty years, had been a quotidian reality for forty years, with new buildings springing up, schoolchildren, the victory of Socialism, please wait to be seated, Heroes of Labor, 10-pfennig streetcar tickets, I’ll petition the authorities, run down to the Konsum and get yourself an ice cream, Karl-Marx-Allee at the corner of Andreasstrasse, the gathering place for May 1, picking cherries in Werder, Ernst Busch singing of the Peasant’s War, the lift is stuck again, Socialist sister countries, dear Comrades — and at some point, after an entire lifetime of life, everyday reality and state had broken apart, had disappeared, been stamped into the ground, wiped off the map, crumbled, been swept aside by the People — but in Vienna, it seemed to him, everything that had always been there had simply endured. Bombs falling on Vienna at the end of the war, as his mother always insisted — this is something he cannot for the life of him imagine, since all the buildings he’s seen here are so vast, so unscathed.
Although he’s traveled to Frankfurt am Main many times since the opening of the border, and also to London, Trieste, and once even to New York with his wife and children to see the Statue of Liberty, the man still privately thinks of Vienna as “the West.” Like it or not, the scent of coffee at Café Museum reminds him of the packages his first girlfriend used to receive from her relatives in the Federal Republic; he can’t stop calling the current era Age of the Winners, and again and again finds himself marveling at how so-called modernity appears to derive its superiority solely from the fact that it’s been around for a good hundred and fifty years now. Like it or not, when he looks at the people here, he sees they are used to driving fast cars, that they know what a tax return is, and have no cause to hesitate before ordering a glass of prosecco with their breakfast. Just the way they let the door slam behind them when they walk in shows him how sure they are of being in the right world everywhere in the world. Now he too is sitting in this right world, he even has the right money in his wallet, although he’s drinking water to conserve his “West money.” No dogs allowed. The signs with the images of the dogs prohibited from entering butcher shops, restaurants and swimming pools existed in East Germany as well, and probably they existed everywhere in the world. The border that used to separate him from the West has long since fallen — but now it seems to have slipped inside him, separating the person he used to be from the one he’s supposed to be now, or allowed to be. I don’t know how you recognize a human being, his mother said to him last time he visited. He doesn’t want prosecco with his breakfast, like it or not. And he couldn’t care less if the others can tell by his way of looking around, by his hair and cheeks, that he comes from the land that has finally, rightly so, thank God, high time now, been wiped off the face of the earth, the land of — what madness — publicly owned enterprises, red carnations for your lapel on May 1, rigged elections, old men wearing berets left over from the Spanish Civil War, and dialectics taught at school. A Man — how proud that sounds. Getting off the night train at six in the morning, he saw people sleeping on pieces of cardboard in the station. In what world had he spent the last forty years? What happened to that world? Will he have the heart of a dog now for the rest of his life?
Later he leaves the café in his own company, meaning to stroll for a little while before his appointment that isn’t until the afternoon, they’re selling horse meat at the Naschmarkt, herbs, apples, and flowers; he promenades across the square then strolls across to the Rechte Wienzeile; it’s still too early in the day for the porn cinema there, he has no desire to desire anything, blindly he strolls down a side street, makes a right turn without a plan, and onward: streetcar tracks, the entryways of the buildings giving off a smell of quicklime and dust as though it were summer already, he passes grimy shop windows, walking ever farther down this street. He’s happy not to have to go look at anything a foreigner in Vienna is supposed to see, he likes walking like this through everyday reality. In a spot where a very long time ago an angel kept watch over a building’s front entrance, the low building no longer stands, instead there’s a modern five-story hotel. Indeed, the building where his great-grandmother once lived fell victim to one of the few bombs dropped in the final days of the war, in March 1945, but by then his great-grandmother had already been dead for more than four years, her apartment had been emptied out and passed on to others. But he knows neither who his great-grandmother was, nor where she lived, he steps to one side when the revolving door deposits a group of tourists onto the sidewalk. As far as this descendent of a Viennese resident is concerned, Vienna has been washed clean of stories, it took less than a human lifetime for the city to lose all connection to him. Less than a human lifetime for homeland and origins to diverge. He is free, doubly free; he carries around within him a vast dark land: all the stories his mother never told him or that she hid from him; perhaps he carries with him even those stories his mother never knew or heard of, he can’t get rid of them, but he can’t lose them either, since he doesn’t even know them, since all of this lies buried deep within him; for when he slipped from his mother’s womb, he was already filled with interior spaces that didn’t belong to him, and he can’t just look inside to inspect his own interior. His father once spent three weeks in Berlin almost forty years ago, but he didn’t know about it, how could he have? His father later spent an eternity living in Vorkuta, and twelve years ago he died there, but the son knows neither of these things. The son can make his home anywhere in the world, in Berlin for example. If he knew what questions to ask, knew what, where, and to whom, then an official of the Jewish Community of Vienna would surely be able to dig up one or the other list and inform him that his great-grandmother was brought to Opole in the district of Lublin with the first transport of February ’41, that his grandmother moved six times within Vienna and then was sent via Minsk to Maly Trostenets in July ’42, and that his aunt spent many months hiding in a friend’s apartment and then was sent in ’44 to Auschwitz. But given what he knows, he finds Vienna just as dusty as any other metropolis. Kettenbrückengasse, Mariahilfer Strasse, Siebensterngasse, Mondscheingasse. There on the otherer side, as his mother would say, is a second-hand shop; who knows, maybe he’ll find something here that he can bring her.