“I had my own problems to deal with at the time.”
“How could you not do anything? There were mass arrests and people being massacred.”
“Is it excuses you want to hear? Shame? I can’t go back in time. I will not repudiate the person I was and still am. I wasn’t courageous. I saved my husband. I saved my own life. That was all.”
Anna struggled with herself not to make any response. She needed Adele to be a person she could admire, a person of superior wisdom, formed by a fate beyond the usual. No one escapes the bell, the Gaussian curse. The all too mediocre truth was staring right at her. She would have preferred to hate the woman.
“Don’t judge me. You don’t know how you would act if it was your back against the wall. Maybe you would be a heroine. Maybe not.”
“I’ve heard that line before. It doesn’t work for me.”
“I lost people close to me in the war also.”
It was no excuse to Anna, especially an excuse of this kind.
“Why should I be more to blame than Kurt? He acted no differently! Did his intelligence give him license to be blind?”
“You’re hiding behind him.”
“If you read his correspondence, you would understand just how blind he was. It made his friend Morgenstern smile. Probably to keep from shuddering. Kurt was preoccupied only with himself.”
“Your husband was a coward?”
“No! He simply had a great capacity to ignore things. He couldn’t stand any kind of conflict. Even if I had wanted to respond, if I had been able to get past my education, my fear, I could never have made him look squarely at life. All he had to do was raise the specter of Purkersdorf.”
“He used his depression as an excuse?”
“As a rampart against reality. Sometimes.”
“And you went along with it?”
“You want me to be both stupider and more lucid than he was! To be everything that he was not.”
“I’m not demanding anything from you.”
“You are looking for a nice old lady, maybe a little crazy, who says wise things while she sips her sherry. I am not that person, dear girl. Like you, I am a woman who has given up. You don’t recognize yourself in me because your resignation is recent. It’s a kind of lightness that only weighs on you with time.”
“You’re wrong on my score. ‘Light’ is the last word to describe me. And if I had given up, I wouldn’t be here.”
Adele grabbed her wrist, and Anna didn’t have the heart to pull away. She felt the life still pulsing through the big, liver-spotted hand. She hesitated a moment, but she did not lean in to kiss the old lady. She had no forgiveness to give. And no desire or right to give forgiveness. Their precarious friendship wouldn’t survive such a parody of absolution. Adele seemed to be drifting off already, or to be pretending to in order to avoid saying goodbye. Anna tucked her in carefully.
Before she left, she pulled the blinds down and turned off the lights. In the hall she came across a couple that was clearly under stress: the man was carrying a sleeping child whose mouth was smeared with candy. In the woman’s pinched face could be read all the reproaches that she planned to address to the rearview mirror. The lobby was garishly festooned with garlands and the night nurse looked sour. No need to summon any special Halloween ghosts — everyone walks around with his own escort.
20. 1938: The Year of Decision
Do you endorse the reunification of Austria with the German Reich, decreed on 13 March, 1938, and do you cast your vote for the party of our leader, Adolf Hitler?
— Austrian referendum ballot, April 10, 1938
The predawn sky, when I opened the windows, was as gray as on every other morning. I could hear the grape pickers calling in the distance. I lit the stove, humming a little song, made his breakfast — a cup of tea and a slice of dark bread — aligned the knife and fork according to his specifications. Everything had to be perfect. I took the liberty of drawing a horizontal figure eight with the plum jam. Hoping he wouldn’t take exception to it. I was exaggerating my happiness a little: it was my wedding day, the focus of many years of yearning. I poured myself some tea to settle my nausea. I shined his shoes, ironed his clothes carefully and laid them all out on a chair, attentive to the creases. My man’s clothes were sometimes more expressive when he was somewhere else.
I’d banished dreams of a big church wedding with Vienna’s high society in attendance — I’d worn white once already. But this wedding, with its few guests, performed like a tiresome formality, had a faintly sad smell to it. Crossing the entrance hall, I saw a tired woman in the mirror. Was this the young bride-to-be? I took out my bobby pins and fluffed my hair. “Come on, girl, consider yourself happy and put the best face on it. Make the most of this moment, Frau Gödel!” I dressed before waking him with a kiss.
He had given me a free hand with the wedding. I was used to that kind of decision making: “Take care of the details!” I was logistics, and logistics I would remain. Kurt was deeply absorbed in preparing his next course of lectures at Notre Dame University in the United States. After teaching for a year in Vienna, he had been given his university’s permission to teach elsewhere. He’d accepted an invitation from his friend Karl Menger in Indiana and another from Abraham Flexner at Princeton. His departure had been planned as far back as January, despite the uncertainties of this chaotic time. Kurt didn’t seem to worry about it. After a few months of euphoric concentration, reassured of having recovered his ability to work, he looked forward eagerly to leaving Austria.
Our sudden decision to marry surprised my own family and the few close friends who knew about our affair. The “festivities” would not strain our budget unduly: the civil ceremony would be followed by a simple meal, attended by my parents, my sisters, and Kurt’s brother, Rudolf. The witnesses would be Karl Gödel, a cousin of Kurt’s father, and Hermann Lortzing, an accountant friend. A person’s absence can, in some cases, be more humiliating even than their hostile presence: his mother declined our invitation. His closest colleagues, for their part, had almost all left Europe.
We took the tram and met our friends in front of the town hall. We had made lunch reservations at a tavern right next to the government building, not far from the university and the cafés where Kurt had spent so many hours. It was the kind of detail Kurt appreciated: he would quit his bachelor student life and enter the married state all in the same neighborhood, without disruptions to his routine. Not that his familiar universe hadn’t changed. The façades were plastered with Nazi flags, and the heavy boots that tromped constantly through the buildings had made most of his friends flee. We were clinging, I realize now, to a Vienna that had vanished. It would take us both a while longer to realize it.
We led our meager procession up the steps of the town hall. My parents and my sisters, who had overdressed, felt awkward in the presence of the stolid, bourgeois Rudolf. They kept their silence.
I had invited neither Anna nor Lieesa to my wedding. I would have liked to query redheaded Anna about my blue velvet coat, in which I’d been caught once or twice in a downpour. She might have come with me to choose the little hat I wore, absolutely simple, gray with a ribbon, my one extravagance given our precarious finances. I borrowed a brooch from my sister, and I could have tapped Lieesa for her husband-catching stole. It had brought me luck, before the moths attacked it, as they attacked our memories. But my girlfriends inhabited two separate compartments of my life that history didn’t allow me to bring together. Not inviting Lieesa was to betray my youth. Not inviting Anna was to betray my gratitude toward her. But it was unimaginable, and in fact dangerous, to bring Anna, my Jewish friend, in contact with Lieesa. And both Kurt and I wanted the ceremony to gloss over our tricky pasts. Consenting finally to give me his name, Kurt had also passed on to me his worst feature, his inability to make difficult decisions — when, that is, the choice involved flesh-and-blood creatures and not mathematical symbols. Anna had made no objections; she understood. I brought her a slice of wedding cake and some candied almonds for her boy. Lieesa no longer spoke to me and hadn’t for some time. “Frau Gödel.” Now I was upper-crust.