Middle C (2 page)

Nita’s courtship, when the time came for it, was carried on in the country, too. The couple went for long walks on those same green lanes Rudi had earlier cycled over, hoping to achieve some solitude for themselves and their chaste embraces. Rudi remembered birdsong, because he had an ear for music and for poetry, while Nita saw flowers she knew well enough to name, and she frequently stooped to inspect those that
forced their stems up between the many rocks to bloom yellow, blue, and white like bursts of pleasure, but she was careful to stoop without letting go of Rudi’s hand, an attention that made her dawdling delightful for him.

I always knew we’d have a plain and simple way of getting on, Miriam said, for we were not privileged people, though we were not spared their worries. I was Nita then and could play cards and joke with men. I did hope to have a country life, away from hard roads, noise, and rancor, but Rudi wanted to be where he could use his music, and I thought him a fine fiddle player then, before I’d heard otherwise, and before his fingers grew foreign to the bow. The truth is no one could have squeezed a sweet tune from that soft cheap flimsy wood of his. What if he had had a decent violin? Maybe the opera in Vienna would have heard him, or in a café a gypsy—to his strains—whirl her skirts.

Nita’s new husband found for his family a small leaky roof in Graz, and the printer’s trade, learned from Rudi’s father, put a modest living on their skimpy table; but Rudi Skizzen’s talent lay nowhere near the typesetter’s trays or music’s page; he had two great gifts: first, he was a seer; he saw the future as if he were reading it on one of his broadsides; and second, he was born for the stage; he had as many colors as the chameleon; he filled roles like a baker; indeed, it was a Yankel he one day became, moving his family to an outskirt of Vienna and turning all of them but Joseph, who had not yet been born, into Jews simply by pinning a yarmulke to his hair with a bent wire and informing anyone interested that his name was Yankel Fixel. His wife heard this news without hearing. Was their name henceforth to be Fixel? Their name and the name of the boy who would be born, no longer under Bethlehem’s star, was Fixel? Yussel Fixel? A clown’s cap, Miriam thought. When the baby came he was circumcised, though the bris was as imaginary as the rest of life, and performed—who knew?—on the wrong day. Moreover, the mother of the recently brutalized child was now named Miriam. To her surprise. To her confounding.

The family didn’t look very Jewish, but who, Yankel argued, would admit they were Jewish if they weren’t Jewish? and why would they say they were Jewish in such uncomfortable times for Jews, when anyone who was Jewish and had any sense would put on Catholic habits in a thrice if they could get away with it, or twirl like a dervish, or leap like
any Leaping Lena, if it would do the trick. Yet, as though Rudi had waved a wand and cried presto-change-o to impress a crowd, mass was now modified until it reached kosher. Although what was kosher confused Yankel. Jews were forbidden to see milk and meat on the same plate let alone seethe a kid in its mother’s milk or drink and chew simultaneously. Jews were often thought to be otherwise than everybody, but who would want to mix milk and meat that intimately anyway? even bites of the same stew had to succeed one another. But by six hours? so they wouldn’t have an intestinal confrontation? Well, he couldn’t afford two pots for each person, two bowls, two dishes, two spoons. And every animal was unclean except those that resembled Satan—he of the cloven hoof—or those who looked silly, chewing their cud. And threw up. This was confusing. Fish without scales and fins were forbidden? who had ever heard of any? Did they mean whales? In addition, the Jews had special killers for their cows. Never mind, he was too poor to have much meat or too worried to practice rites in public and thereby advertise mistakes.

Nita claimed Rudi was especially comfortable in his role as Yankel when it came to the Jewish abhorrence of blood. They drained and buried the blood of the animals they killed, and they didn’t hunt. His hatred of hunting, which his son shared, was certainly not Austrian. They were peace-loving, he thought, the Jews. All to the good. But why did they have it in for shrimp, lobster, mussels, clams? Being a Jew would be confusing; it would mean sacrifice; yet Yankel felt there was no time to lose, so the change-o must be presto, whatever the risk. Yankel Fixel had learned that there was a small underground organization smuggling Jews out of Austria to England. England was where he was bound, but he had no money in the pocket and person of Rudi Skizzen for the passage, so Yankel Fixel, a case for charity’s mercies, he became.

It was Rudi Skizzen not Yankel Fixel who had the accomplished nose, and who could sense rot reaching a hazardous level. Rudi was not vastly lettered, but like most Austrians, he knew of Karl Kraus and of Karl Kraus’s unpopular pacifist opinions. He had few beliefs he cherished, but one was that wars were always started by the powerful to be fought by the powerless who numerously suffered and died in them, though they were never better off whatever the outcome. He knew that of all the creatures God had put into this world, humans were the untrustworthiest
and the meanest, another sentiment his son would share. In Eden, no snake had been needed. The Fall could be performed a cappella. He remembered how Karl Kraus admired dogs because a dog could smell shit a long way, though it be hidden in leather trousers, though it be squeezed from beauteous buttocks; but maybe it was not yet shit the dog smelled, but piss left in the pants, or a little blood released by a puncture, or pus from a wound long in service. Anyway, Rudi Skizzen smelled it—in the hunter-green coats, the embroidered blouses, the lederhosen, in the discreet farts from comfortable bellies, in the social rudeness of the properly positioned, and, above all, in good times: in the mug and on the platter, in raucous communal song, immersed in the smell of kraut, sausages, and beer. Austrians, he said, were both coarse and cultivated, and on the road between them was a stop called cruel. Cruelty came easy to engines of mastication, to people who didn’t keep the door closed between milk and meat.

In those days, Graz was not so populated a place that Rudi could claim to have led an urban life. To be sure, hotels lined the Mur and just over the bridge the Weitzer cosseted its clients and flew its flags. Atop the burg the clock tower spoke its piece to the clouds while in the fall the leaves of the vines along the steep hillside turned a red rich as hair. The towers of the church had tried to be twins but settled for sisters. A metal Jesus admonished the town from the tip of a very tall stick. Even in the wind the figure did not waver. A fire-breathing lion remained nailed to the
Rathaus
’s courtyard door to guard and to sustain the authority of the city. In his mausoleum, von Erlach’s statue stared at an elaborately coffered ceiling. Prosperous citizens patrolled the streets, burghers enjoying their capital.

Many years later, when Joseph was little and living in London, and his mother, Nita, grew certain her husband had disappeared for good or ill—and all between—she would laugh about what she called the Annunciation. Horror and history make a charming couple. One day, she related, your father came to me and said, The child that is getting you biggish is Jewish. He will be a nice Jewish boy and grow up to be a proper Englishman. And to stop her tears he said they would prosper in England, she would see, England was a country of constitution, of Magna Carta; but she couldn’t see, blinded by weeping and in a state of confusion. She screamed at him, No Miriam me. Nita I am and shall
remain, as I shall remain un-Britworthy and a proper Catholic girl. Nita you can be for me, Rudi said, but for everybody else you are Miriam now, and will remain Miriam until we are safely in London and out of the reach of reprisal. I see enemies in every direction, Miriam yelled at him. Yes. That is why we are making this adjustment in our selves. There are cowardly bullies and evil men circling our country, a country that has become a smelly corpse. To be an Austrian, now, is a calamity and will become a curse. We must leave. We cannot take the train so we shall harness a slower horse. Jews know something of such a life as we shall lead.

Miriam was dumbfounded by her husband’s sudden hatred for the land of his birth. All Austrians dressed warmly, loved music, and, though they may have thought poorly of others, thought well of God. Now that the empire was gone, they lived happily by themselves and on their own. They toiled without complaining, but they also knew how to eat, drink, and have fun. They prided themselves on being overweight. Miriam smelled nothing foul when she sniffed, and sometimes a nice schnitzel.

I have no knowledge of this English language. No one will understand me, and I … I shall simply wander around every town like someone in a fog of foreign words. The change will be a good one, her husband said. But our families … our past …, Miriam began, and went on even when her husband cut her off. We will not hear Austrian again, he insisted, we will not speak Austrian again, not just because of what Austria has been but because of what it will become. We will not share its future, he shouted, we will not suffer its wicked nature or bear it forward one more step.

Her tears wet her chin and throat and ran between her breasts. What Rudi had proposed was crazy, unless he had never been a Rudi but had been a Fixel all along. By becoming a Jew now, he was hiding the fact that he had been one before. That thought occurred to Nita, and it would occur to Miriam too. The change was in a way romantic, because if Rudi had been a Jew from birth, he could not, as a Jew, have courted Nita, and certainly not, as a Jew, have married her amid the consternations of two families. Gradually, she did become Miriam, because whom had she wed? A Yankel? So what was she to do?

2

Miriam, watching a video, would see the cowboys’ long coats and wide hats, and she would say, They—they looked like that: they wore long black coats hanging almost to the ground, wide-brimmed black hats, and showed faces full of solemnity and hair instead of other features. Five of them, five, she said, stood in a dark row before the opening—the hole in the house—where the Fixels camped. Caught unaware, flustered, Yankel held his yarmulke smashed against his head with one hand. The first figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have never looked into—you have never been touched by—the Torah. Their long coats made them look tall, as if their shadows had been added to their stature. In a close row they formed a fence of black posts, each post surmounted by a stiff brim. Glares were all on their side. From Fixel not a glimmer. For this case, his power of stutter was lost. The second figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have never seen the seal of God. The way they spoke made them seem wound up, their voices coming from far off like an echo among mountains. The third figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, are fore-skinned as far as your face. (It was true.) Their pale visages, from which beards hung, appeared to be far away as well, their dark clothes a cave out of which a sibyl spoke. The fourth figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have eaten unclean words; you have swallowed the poison of untruth. They each held a short black stick. The fifth figure was silent, everyone stood steady, and all were still. Finally, the fifth figure made a gesture that Miriam did not understand.

Yankel Fixel had been denounced.

This did not prevent him from enjoying the preferential treatment of a persecuted refugee. They—whoever the five Fates represented, a clutch of fanatical thugs, a row of wooden rabbis—had spoken to the false Fixel of their awareness and their displeasure, but they had not bothered to inform his boss or complain about him to anyone in the bureau that handled his affairs. So he had merely been confronted, not denounced. Denouncement might be in the offing. Rituals, he knew, proceeded by steps and stages. Perhaps Yankel should explain, he wondered aloud to his wife—she was, by his insistence, still Miriam—perhaps he should
make plain the difference between his Jewishness and theirs: they had fled the ethically enviable condition of the victim, while he had fled the guilt of natal association, the animus of villainous authority. Might they understand, then, his plight? Was fleeing permitted only to potential victims? Might no one refuse the power and the privilege, the duties and indulgences, of the tyrant’s role? the honey and the money of the profiteer? or flinch from the hangman’s vengeance, the bigot’s bile, the fat cat’s claws, the smug burgher’s condescension, and the swagger of the bully? Must the offer of evil, Yankel asked the sky, like some hospitalities, always be accepted?

In case his five calumniators returned, Yankel hurried to prepare some strategies. We’ll admit we’re not Jews … we’ll admit it … but … but we’ll beg to become Jews … yes … beg. Miriam said, He said “beg.” I won’t beg, she said. If a man wants to become a Jew, the Jews say to him, Yankel said he’d read, they say to him—how does it go?—they say, Don’t you know that Jews are oppressed, prostrate, mistreated, undergoing suffering? and then we shall say, We know and we are not worthy of you. That’s the phrase. We … are … not … worthy … of … you. I am, though, Miriam said. I am mistreated. Here … right now … hear how I am undergoing suffering. O weh! Well, I won’t beg and I won’t say I am not worthy. I am a woman. They wouldn’t let me in their boys’ club anyway. You beg, my husband, you dirty your knees, you say to them: I am not worthy of you. Go on. You say it, she said she said. But the five Fates never returned.

As the war wound down, Jews began leaking out of England and landing in America, at first a few drops at a time and then in rivulets and finally in torrents. Yankel could not hope that the leaflet business would continue to prosper during peacetime, so he too began to consider such a move. Miriam, during this period, was working at a laundry during the early evening, boiling sheets and napkins, aprons and towels, standing for hours in steam, breathing bleach and starch and soap, keeping herself clean of imposture, repeating to herself, I know I’m me, Holy Mother, I shall not beg to be another, I shall not say, I am not worthy, I’m me, dear God, you can see I’m me.