A Chosen Sparrow Page 4

  This ended my career as a street singer. Frau Stompfer felt cheated and so did I. She had lost her hope of profits, and I the dream of the kindly millionaire who would be attracted by my song. In revenge I tattled to Fritzl who warned us that such an offense would probably lead to my being taken away, along with the fee for my keep and the ration book. Neither of us really wanted this to happen. As mean as life was in the Stompfer house, there was a roof, a blanket, there was food other than the pork that was denied me. I went to school. I had books from the free library, and if I made up clever lies, freedom to wander in the city. And dreams! On my mat in the corridor, attacked by wind that sneaked under the door, I dwelt in a castle, I tended a lavender cyclamen, I entered the gates of an earthly heaven. All the while I coughed, sniffled and dripped but would never use one of my precious handkerchiefs for so filthy a purpose as blowing my nose.

  Frau Stompfer stole these treasures. I knew the moment I opened my box and found them gone. It was during a very poor time when there was little money to buy food, none for fuel. Black market manipulations brought in small profit; Herr Stompfer had lost his job as doorman (two other jobs as well) and spent his time at the Weinstube boasting to other jobless men about the tricks he had used to outwit stupid bosses; he did a few errands, cadged money for wine; Mimi had spent her earnings on a hat with a feather. I knew instinctively what had happened to my handkerchiefs, tracked the thief to the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Sacher where she often stationed herself. “Please, gracious lady, the handwork of a poor war widow,” she whimpered, offering my handkerchiefs for sale. My attack was so vicious that she claimed her remaining kidney was permanently damaged. She threatened to call a policeman and have me taken to some dungeon where “a little Jew savage belongs” but at the approach of an officer, she hurried me away as my ration card had to be renewed the following week and it was necessary for me to accompany her to the food office.

  For a week the Stompfers ate pork or bacon or pigs’ feet every day. Every dish was cooked in lard. All week it rained. Frau Stompfer complained of kidney pains and repeated her threats. On the following Sunday I went to visit the Mayrs. “Bring something nice back with you,” said Frau Stompfer. “Look sad and they may give you cakes to take home. When you eat with the rich, don’t forget your true friends.” I did not have to try to look sad. Frau Mayr noticed at once that my bones protruded more than usual, that my eyes were swollen, my cough harsher. “Leni, child, does she give you nothing to eat, this Gesindel?” I had never talked much about my life in the typical Viennese home because I did not want my fine friends to look down on me. This time I was so tired, so feverish with my cold and so childishly in need of someone to care about me that I flung myself into Frau Mayr’s arms and wept that I did not want to go back to prison.

  “Why should you go back to prison, child? Have the Germans returned or are those thieves teaching you to pick pockets?”

  This was so close to the truth that it brought on a new freshet. Exultant in my power to move them to tears and pity, I went on and on, hysterically, with my list of grievances. Certain words so shocked Herr Mayr that he not only sent the girls out of the room but ordered his wife to stand with her back to the door so they could not hear through the keyhole. The weeping ended, I waited for the effect of my performance. Herr Mayr showed no change of face but remarked dryly that the zither was not in his opinion an important instrument. He did not think I had inherited my father’s talent but nevertheless considered it disgraceful that Willy Neumann’s daughter should have zither lessons from a Heurigen player. I was fed, comforted, made to promise that I would never again use any of Mimi’s vulgar words, given a bottle of cough syrup to take back with me. “If that is the best you can get from them,” remarked Frau Stompfer, “your visit was not worth the carfare.”

  Not long after this Herr and Frau Stompfer received an official letter inviting them to the office of an important Herr Direktor. Herr Stompfer was sure that his reward had come at last; a grateful government would offer him an easy, lucrative post in some centrally heated bureau. Frau Stompfer made grandiose plans. In the kitchen tubs were filled with hot water. Both of them bathed. The black coat and striped trousers were pressed, and Frau Stompfer borrowed Mimi’s new hat. All for the purpose of learning that the orphan, Leonora Neumann, was to be taken out of their cozy home.

  “Like we weren’t worthy,” sniffed Herr Stompfer as he removed the striped trousers. “There are elements in this present government, I can tell you…”

  Frau Stompfer wept. “This dear little girl that I cared for like my own, even though she is a Jew, snatched away from me without reason. No reason at all. Certain people,” she sniffled delicately, “have been meddling. Poor, poor Leni. It won’t be so easy, I can tell you, with those musical snobs.”

  Herr Mayr had little to say about the Stompfers except that he considered it wrong for Willy Neumann’s daughter to live in the house of a man who had once been a spy for the Nazis. “It is indisputable,” said Frau Mayr. “He has heard it from most reliable sources. Those Gesindel should be in jail instead of getting good money for the care of a Jewish child. And,” her nostrils widened as she ranted, “cheating her out of the necessities of life.” Her eyes were on me at every meal. “Eat more, Lenchen, a growing girl needs good food.” The Mayrs had not asked to be paid for keeping me. They needed every pfennig to take care of their own family, but they seemed to suffer a need for atonement which all of their religious penances could not assuage. Perhaps I am straining to find an excuse for genuine goodness of heart. Yet the stream of apology was unending. “Only two girls left in this big apartment. It is too lonely without at least three of you chattering and disturbing the music and making a mess in every room.”

  The two oldest of the Mayr girls had married foreigners. Her parents and sisters had no sympathy for Lilly who now lived in the Eastern Zone of Germany. She deserved it for having fallen in love during the Nazi Occupation with a Prussian, a Piefke, whom the Viennese despise beyond all other Germans. On the other hand the Mayrs boasted constantly about Maria who had married an English lance corporal, a man who could not speak a word of German and was also tone-deaf. They lived in a place called Bradford, Lanes., and had two beautiful little boys. The older one listened to classical music on the radio and beat time accurately with a toy baton that his tone-deaf father had whittled for him. “Some day they will come and visit us, the whole family, and you two young ones can sleep on the floor.”

  The third daughter Heda, a brilliant musician, had won a competition and been invited to play the harp with the orchestra in Linz. Proud of her daughter’s talent, Frau Mayr was nonetheless apprehensive about an unmarried girl’s living away from home. She had gone to Linz and found a suitable room in the home of a cultured family. Now only Trudl and Elfy were left at home. Trudl was quite without musical talent. She played the piano, but her father was not at all satisfied with the quality of her efforts.

  “I will teach you myself, Leni,” he told me on the day I moved in, “You have a certain aptitude but your teachers have given you nothing. Nothing! Forget everything that was ever taught you, practice for an hour every day and in a few years you may be allowed to play with our family group.”

  “You are too hard on her, Otto,” scolded Frau Mayr.

  “Who knows if she was not born with a gift? She sings nicely but think, Otto, when she was of an age to learn and remember music she heard no instruments of any kind. Almost nine years old before she ever heard a piano! To say nothing of the flute.”

  Herr Mayr regarded me with gentle eyes. He never caressed me, never asked for a kiss at bedtime but was less often stern than with his own daughters, bestowed small gifts and privileges and I am sure deprived himself of small comforts so that I should have a few groschen for pencils and cheap toys and an occasional Eis. Since I was smaller than any of their daughters I naturally inherited the clothes which had been passed from one to another of the sisters. I thought the dresses qui
te nice. I came to their house with the clothes on my back, my three handkerchiefs, a pink celluloid comb and my own toothbrush. (As you can well guess, Frau Stompfer had kept the rest of my clothes to sell to the neighbors.)

  Sharing with Elfy Mayr an old wide bed and feather quilt with a fresh linen cover buttoned over it, I had to get used to a pillow. At first it affected me like the American soldier’s chocolate. It was too rich. I felt smothered. At this age, however, I was able to accustom myself to the amenities of what Frau Mayr called a cultured home.

  Another luxury was protest. The Mayr girls, unlike prisoners or children in a refuge or a ward of the Stompfers, felt free to express their opinions. Heda was strong of will, Trudl impertinent. It was not long before I learned to take such liberties, rebelled at household rules, answered saucily and once, in a terrible tantrum, slapped and kicked my darling Elfy. Certainly I deserved punishment, naturally expected it. For lesser sins Frau Stompfer had bruised my whole body. “I am wrong, please,” I whined in the tone I had learned in that house of false humility, “forgive me. It’s hard for a little girl to learn to behave correctly in a cultured home.”

  Frau Mayr and her husband exchanged looks. I knew they were thinking of my prison stories and also of the indignities I had suffered in the Stompfer house. I became sadder, humbler; the Mayrs suffered guilt more acutely. I do not think I used my tears consciously, but a child learns by instinct to work on the weaknesses of older people. My penalty was light, an hour of lonely meditation in the storeroom among bottles of wine, jars of preserved cucumbers, jelly, turnips and potatoes. When I was released there was no mention of my wickedness.

  There were other sins. 1 was untidy, forgot duties, dreamed when I should have studied, shirked piano practice, read library books when I should have helped the overworked maid polish silver. For such omissions the Mayr girls were scolded more harshly. Perceiving my advantages I became expert in the use of emotional blackmail. I played the martyr sweetly, extracted tribute in tenderness. “What a sweet little girl,” remarked friends and cousins who came to call, “so good and gentle in spite of all that she has suffered.” I pretended not to hear the compliments but swallowed them as greedily as fine pastry.

  On my first Sunday in their home Frau Mayr had asked if I would care to come to Mass with them. “My mother said the Jews would never break their faith with God,” I answered with false piety. It may have been that I was reading a book I liked and wanted the precious hour for myself, or there may have been the more devious reason that I had come to know the value of martyrdom. Converted, I should have been like all the rest, one among thousands of Austrian Catholic children. With such vulnerable protectors as the Mayr family I was not only safe but unique and cherished.

  Frau Mayr repeated my answer to her husband. “Let us respect the wishes of the dead. Otto.”

  “But where is she to get religious instruction?”

  “Her people have suffered enough for their faith, let her be,” his wife answered, and so I had my Sunday mornings for reading romances, practicing the piano or dreaming of earthly rewards waiting for a girl who so richly deserved them.

  Long after her parents had ceased to trouble themselves about it, Elfy worried about my immortal soul. She was my first and my best friend. At night in bed we whispered the secrets of growing up, mocked grown people, laughed so deliciously in the dark that her mother would often call, “Girls, girls, go to sleep or there will be no dessert for you tomorrow.” Yet I must put down here how I carried a burden of resentment against Elfy for so many years that even when she died at twenty-four in a terrible motor crash I was still laden with this bitterness and found myself telling her that she had been wrong about my people having killed Christ. She had been told this by an older girl at the very door of the church. The accusation hurt. Who were my people? Jews. Was I to blame for something they did…if they had done it…two thousand years ago? Elfy said I was.

  I had no answers because I did not know the facts and was ashamed to ask questions. According to Elfy the fact of my having been born a Jew was an act that I had willed before I was conceived. How had this happened? Had my mother and father also willed their destiny before birth? For this odd sin they had been punished by injustice and cruelty. Could a man hurt anyone by playing the violin? I tried to make Elfy understand that if I had been around at the time of Christ I should have tried to keep these people…had they been my people … from killing him.

  “I will be your friend anyway,” she said.

  Poor burdened children that we were, if only someone had told us that the loads we had to carry were not only our own sins but also the legends of thousands of years. Asking the inevitable questions of troubled adolescence…What is life?…What is love?…Why is injustice?…we could not know that we were prisoners of tradition and prejudice, locked in by the ignorance of our ancestors, the fears and superstitions of whole tribes of people. I have had to endure many experiences and much suffering before I discovered the sources of all this useless guilt, but poor Elfy was never to know.

  She did not even know the facts about her body. A good mother like Frau Mayr had never told her daughters how babies came nor what men did to women, and in her convent school the girls were not permitted to mention nor even look at their own flesh. Boarding students, Elfy told me, took their baths in cotton shifts. “That’s silly,” I said, but wondered if it did not cultivate an exquisite refinement which could never grace a girl who had lived in a prison, stood in line naked waiting for a bath in a children’s home, listened to the talk of prostitutes and known Mimi Stompfer. I told Elfy about boys’ bodies and she refused to believe me. She was, I think, the only one of the Mayr girls who truly believed that she would burn in Hell if she committed fornication, and had only been kissed respectfully by her fiance when she burned to death in that motor accident.

  The two older girls liked boys. Trudl worked in a shop on the Kohlmarkt, flirted in streetcars and went to balls nearly every night during Fasching. When Heda came from Linz for a holiday she could talk of nothing but her new sweetheart. This saddened her father. “I thought her music came first.” His wife answered, “My daughters are true women, they want to marry and have babies.” Heda’s lover was also in the orchestra. He played the bass drum and other tympani. Although Herr Mayr would have preferred woodwinds or strings, he found Heda’s fiance more acceptable than the nonmusical men the two older girls had married.

  “I’ll never fall in love with a musician, they don’t make enough money,” declared Trudl who danced with clerks but dreamed of a count, a cinema star, an American millionaire.

  The older girls flirted while Elfy and I merely admired the American soldiers stationed in Vienna. They were so much more dashing and extravagant than the English, their uniforms fit better than the French. (No decent girl would look at a Russian!) I always examined the American faces in the hope of finding the one who had given me the chocolate. I wanted to show him how well I spoke English and to tell him in his own language that I adored him.

  The soldiers stared back at me, laughing. Sometimes they spoke and I would show off my facility in English. There was no thought of flirtation. Not only was I young and small but, I thought, hideous. Trudl and Elfy had grown plump on the starchy diet but I, with such an appetite that I was always ashamed of asking for more, was still so skinny that my elbows and knee joints jutted out like deformities and my small head looked like a pinpoint on my long thin neck. People still asked the silly question about those big blue eyes. Frau Mayr said I might someday be pretty, but I was sure that this was offered as consolation. When I saw my sad little face in the mirror and the spiky body in hand-me-down dresses I felt that no man would ever love me.

  Our goddesses were the cinema stars. With every coin we could get our hands on, we went to the theatre. The opera had reopened in the Theatre an der Wien; as the family of an orchestra player we were sometimes admitted free to the gallery. How I dreamed as I drank weak coffee and nibbled Frau Mayr’
s little cakes after one of these heavenly evenings: I was Violetta, I was Thais, I was Tosca, I was Leonora.

  Herr Mayr shook his head when I tried to sing the great arias. True pitch I had, but my voice was without greatness. My talents were better fitted to light music, to the American jazz songs we heard on the U. S. Forces Radio Program. Herr Mayr shuddered when we tuned in such musical abortions but whenever he was out of earshot, Trudl and I would listen or I would play the piano and sing like the artists whose voices we heard on the platters. My real gift was a musical memory. I had but to hear a song once to remember the music accurately. As for the words, it helped my study of English, I told Frau Mayr, to be able to sing Don’t Fence Me In.

  When I was seventeen there was a change in our lives. Herr Mayr became ill with a congestion of the lungs and was kept in the hospital for six weeks. He came back to the apartment an old man. His career was over. We think of the flute as a light instrument but to play it constantly requires great control of the breath. He could play other instruments, but was no virtuoso as with the flute. “How will we live?” Frau Mayr asked of the cushions, the walls, the carpets. Her husband’s pension was not enough to provide for all of us. Frau Mayr was a real Viennese in her love for tender veal, for cream, pastry and cakes made with quantities of butter. All these delicious things were on the market again, but the cost was unbelievable to a housewife who remembered prewar and pre-Hitler prices.

  “I’ll go to work,” Elfy said. She was eighteen and such a musician that all of her teachers at the Conservatorium prophesied a brilliant future. I can see her still, a plump angel with the bass fiddle between her knees. “What can you do?” wailed her mother. Elfy was not ready for an important orchestra, but she thought she might get work in some provincial city. “And leave home!” exclaimed her mother. “It would cost all you earn to pay for your room and board and would be no help at all.”