Olga with her sculptures (Miami Herald, 27 June 1954). The figurines at left and centre are probably earlier work, done in Germany; the bust at right, made in the early 1950s in the United States, is of her son Arpad.
ONE of the advantages of being a DP was that you didn’t have to do anything: UNRRA, or later the International Refugee Organization (IRO), would look after you. Conversely, one of the disadvantages of being a DP was that there was nothing much to do. Olga was not someone to sit around with folded hands, so she looked for an occupation.
She started off, like any other educated, middle-class DP with artistic interests, thinking along cultural lines. She wrote a few poems, translated some fairytales and even once stood in for her sister Mary as a singer at a concert in Hamburg. Mary, who had survived the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbrück and was living in a DP camp in Geesthacht, not far from Hamburg, had more serious professional intent as a singer: by the end of the 1940s, she seems to have re-established herself as a recitalist on the boundary of folk and art music. But Olga didn’t see herself as a professional musician after so long away from singing, and her artistic activities were all make-work within the confines of the DP community. With the encouragement and financial support of the occupation authorities, DP exhibitions, DP journals, DP concerts and even DP universities flourished—but they were hothouse plants, catering to small, national DP clienteles, and essentially amateur, even when the artists and scholars involved were former professionals.
When the British zonal authorities sent round a questionnaire on DPs’ former occupations and their trade and professional skills, Olga, with DP cunning, ‘was silent about her tailoring capacities but listed my six languages’, presumably in the hope that UNRRA would throw translating opportunities her way. But she was already investigating the possibility of re-establishing her tailoring workshop. Her future daughter-in-law, Helga Heimers, remembered Olga as a person with tremendous flair and energy for getting things started, though not so good on routine follow-up. The former qualities are evident as she bustled around setting herself up in tailoring. ‘As you know,’ she wrote cheerfully to Mischka, ‘I have no money. But, as you also know, that is no big obstacle.’
The British started encouraging DPs to work from the spring of 1946, even trying unsuccessfully to make it mandatory. But the proportion of DPs with jobs remained low, and of those who worked, most had jobs within the camps, working for UNRRA. Olga’s idea of setting up her own business outside the camps was so unusual that UNRRA’s labour statistics for DPs didn’t even have such a category.
It was complicated setting up a business as a DP. You needed to have German trade credentials (Meisterbrief), which DPs generally didn’t possess. Olga was in a better position than most, in that she had gone through some of these hoops already in 1944, when she moved her business from Riga to the Sudetenland. ‘I hope to keep the membership in the Artisan List that I already had in Sudetenland,’ she wrote to Mischka, although unfortunately she had left her Riga Artisan Card there. Mischka got regular bulletins on her business activities. ‘Things are still going quite bumpily with the workshop,’ she told him in March 1946. ‘In the first place with workers: there are not many of them, and those that are available are bad.’ By the end of April 1946, however, she had two workers and an apprentice, and was anticipating adding to her staff.
At this point, the enterprise was evidently still based in a DP camp, probably the Geesthacht camp where Mary lived, whose UNRRA director had offered help and the promise of space. But Olga was already thinking of bigger things. ‘A workshop in Flensburg is in prospect,’ she wrote, ‘and I will also get a workplace in Hamburg.’ By late May, possibly earlier, Olga had moved her residence to central Flensburg (Jürgenstrasse 4), where she planned to set up the workshop, and wrote to Mischka that he should come and visit—‘I have a good piano at home’ (presumably she was a tenant and the piano was the landlady’s). She was to have two rooms, one of them for the workshop, and ‘am bringing two [sewing-] machines from the camp. Two very lazy women workers are already working, and on 1 June another three women, hopefully better workers, are coming on board.’
Her financial situation was precarious, and in retrospect she confessed a certain degree of anxiety: ‘For a long time I was sitting here without a penny. I thought that if I died, there would be nothing to bury me with. But now things are going better … Customers are taking their things [and presumably paying for them].’ Olga, accordingly, was once again on a high. In a cheeky postscript to a July letter to Mischka, she suggested, ‘If I have a workshop in both places [Hamburg and Flensburg], I should get a car too, don’t you think?’
But the roller-coaster continued, and a month or so later she was writing that while she was still negotiating with UNRRA and the Hamburg authorities for the necessary permissions,
it’s not working out with the workshop. Now I have workers, I feed them, [but] everything is collapsing because I can only become a ‘free-liver’ [that is, a registered DP living outside the camps] if I get the workshop approval, and that is something no DP has done so far.
Part of the problem was living in the British occupation zone, which was more restrictive of small businesses than the American one. ‘Should I go to the American zone?’ Olga wrote to Mischka. But if she went there to establish a business, that meant leaving UNRRA care and giving up her status as a DP. This move—officially described as being ‘discharged on to the German economy’—was still uncommon and purely voluntary as of the autumn of 1946, although the next year the British authorities started to encourage it to reduce the numbers in their care. It was a risk, and Olga wrote that she was at her ‘wits’ end, waiting for a decision to come of itself’. But by mid September, she had decided. She would give up her DP status and move out of the British zone in order to establish her tailoring business in the American zone.
This might have seemed a momentous decision, but even before it was made, the volatile Olga seemed to have lost interest. She was now ‘almost certain to leave UNRRA’, she informed Mischka in mid August, but ‘that’s not the most important thing’. The most important thing was that she was now launching a new career as a sculptor.
Back in the 1920s in Italy and later in Riga, Olga had dabbled in sculpture. Now she had taken it up again, making little porcelain figurines, some of secular subjects (‘The Dancer’), others religious (a Pieta, a Madonna and a St Antony). This was becoming a passion, as she told Mischka in July: ‘Can you believe it, my zeal for modelling is still to the fore. It’s even as if I have to do it Early reactions from friends and acquaintances were mixed. One thought she shouldn’t be making religious figures given that she was not a believer. Another thought that one of her little figures looked like a naked Frederick the Great, evidently not a compliment as she forthwith decapitated it, unfortunately breaking the torso and an arm in the process.
But then the wonderful moment of first recognition arrived. It came from a certain Dr Richter, ‘whose father was a well-known sculptor in Dresden’. Having seen her figurines, he surprised her by asking to look at them again: ‘After he had examined them in silence for a long time, he said, a bit abashed: “I admire and envy your muse. What other more famous sculptors wrestle with, you achieve easily. The last figure is really Greek …’” Olga felt that she had finally found her artistic vocation. ‘It looks possible that a new period in my life is opening,’ she wrote enthusiastically to Mischka.
On the more mundane level, she had to get the move to the American zone organised. Her chosen destination was Fulda, 100 kilometres or so north of Frankfurt in the state of Hesse. This was almost certainly because Simon Mirkin, her Jewish protégé from Riga, had offered her a place to live there. Mirkin, who had survived the Riga ghetto and the Stutthof concentration camp to become a DP in the American zone, was grateful to Olga for saving his family in the early years of the war; in his first postwar letter to her, he related his father’s last words before their separation (when Boris Mirkin was sent off to Buchenwald, where he died on 19 February 1945): ‘My son, when some day we are freed, we must meet up at Frau Danos’s house in Riga.’ Working as an interpreter for HIAS and the US Army, Mirkin had substantially better rations and access to goods than the Danoses had in the British zone, and their correspondence in subsequent months periodically mentions food and clothing he had sent them. But, best of all, Mirkin seems to have owned a house in Fulda, presumably inherited from his businessman father. This house, at Florengasse 53, was his registered address as a DP until his departure for the United States early in 1947. After Olga moved to Fulda in the winter of 1946–47, it was to become both her residence and the address of her tailoring shop, now upgraded to the Olga Danos ‘Fashion Salon, Bespoke Clothing to Your Own Pattern’.
But it wasn’t the tailoring/fashion business that preoccupied Olga that winter—a time of record-breaking cold, though Olga never mentioned that in her letters and Mischka only in passing. Her budding career as a sculptor was the first thing on her mind. Shortly after arriving in Fulda, she wrote the most excited and buoyant of all her letters to Mischka about the remarkable way her sculpture prospects had taken off. She had ‘plucked up courage’ to call in at an art dealer’s and offer to sell him one of her figurines for 250 marks. He agreed to buy it and gave her an introduction to a porcelain factory where she could get her figurines fired. As she walked home, an extraordinary thing happened, a bolt from the blue:
[The dealer] appeared at my side, very animated, and wanted to talk to me again, this very day, even though it was late … He wanted to know how many [figurines] I could give him, and in what time frame. He would take everything from me, whether it was heads, arks or costumes. He offered to arrange exhibitions in Frankfurt, Munich and other places, and asked if I would also take official orders, whether I used a model, if there was anything else particular I wanted.
On his insistence, she went to the porcelain factory, where he showed her figurines to a group of about twenty people, including his son and the master artisan, who all raved about their artistry and tried to persuade her to work for them.
They would put an atelier at my disposal; I could come and go when I want to, can produce one figurine in a week or five—it doesn’t matter … It was very hard to stay calm and relaxed. They wanted me to sign a contract immediately. I said I had to think it over and would come back next week. But the director was to come in the next day, so I said all right. Could you come at 10? Yes, I can do that …
Olga was astonished, exhilarated and a bit frightened at the speed with which events were unfolding. She wondered if the dealer could have fallen in love with her, in a coup de foudre, since she couldn’t imagine that ‘the dead figurines could have such an impact’. (In a later letter, she wrote ironically of her disappointment in finding that it was her figurines he had fallen for, not her.) It’s at this point that the reader of their correspondence becomes aware that something had shifted in their relationship. Mischka, now in his twenty-fourth year, seemed to have gained in authority, while Olga’s requests for his advice had not only become more frequent but acquired an almost deferential tone. ‘What will I do?’ she wrote apropos of her negotiations with the art dealer about her figurines. She didn’t understand half the legal language in the contract— terms like ‘retouching’, ‘reproduction’ and ‘author’s rights’. ‘I’m afraid of making a fool of myself. Mischi, if only you were here!’
Mischka replied in measured and weighty terms, advising caution in business dealings:
On author’s rights and so on, naturally you must establish clarity. In a restrained way you must also tell them what you want to get out of it, if others are making money out of you. I hope you didn’t let yourself be caught unawares and make commitments … A name is also something to be paid for.
In the same rather ponderous, ‘grown-up’ tone, he encouraged her to value her art rightly, neither too high nor too low, and recognise that artistic success comes through ‘mastery of materials’ (in other words, no careless or slipshod work).
No doubt this was part of a genuine, spontaneous readjustment of relations as Mischka became fully adult. But it’s also possible that the savvy and self-aware Olga was not just registering an adjustment but consciously encouraging it—in a sense tutoring him in his new role. In the early months of 1947, both of them seem to have been reflecting upon their relationship and even, uncharacteristically, discussing it overtly. Olga’s special place in Mischka’s heart had been evident before—for example, in the reflection in his diary that ‘The highest thing in the world is a mother’s love’. But in March 1947, he raised the question in a letter to her that he thought important enough to copy into his diary:
Dear Mama! It is a strange thing. When I leave you, I always feel bad because I have behaved ungraciously. And another strange thing: I am careful not to let any trace of warmth come into my voice and behaviour. So I jump to the other extreme. Why is this? Why do I put up these barriers? Even writing the salutation of a letter [to you] means overcoming some resistance each time. And yet you are the only Complete Person that I know. Only Arpad [his brother] can compete. Also you are not uncongenial to me …
After a digression into other topics, including the failure of girls of his own age to live up to his ideal, he returns to the question of Olga: ‘Your only “fault” is a lack of precision. That is the only thing that in the course of decades I have been able to observe.’ The letter concludes with some elaborate circumlocutions about ideal types of women that I take to be a typically roundabout way of suggesting that Olga came close to his own ideal type.
Many mothers would have blanched at the difficulties of replying to the text, let alone the subtext, of such a letter, but Olga was up to the task:
My dear Mischutka! You don’t need to feel bad when you leave me. I know exactly how you feel about me, much better than you express it. I respond to your inner attitude. I think that with regard to your behaviour to me, it’s my own fault, that is, the fault of how I brought you up [that is, with the emotional distance discussed above] … Now that unsentimental way of behaving towards each other has become internalised, and we keep it up, even as we know what we are to each other.
Olga’s response continued with a cheerful reassurance that she could always see through him anyway. It was always quite obvious to her, from various little ‘signs that you are not conscious of’, how he really felt at a given moment about her or things in general. She wouldn’t tell him what these signs were ‘so that you don’t hide them’. But the implied comparison with other women set off some alarm bells. She didn’t like his tendency to compare his girlfriends with some ‘ideal type’ and then find them wanting, she wrote brusquely. He ‘shouldn’t try playing this kind of theatre with your wife, when you have one. That can have bad consequences, and deservedly.’
Adding a bit of introspection of her own in a subsequent letter, Olga reflected on her upbringing of her sons, particularly her efforts to maintain some emotional distance:
I didn’t shower you with tenderness, but treated you in a comradely fashion. I never kissed any of you on the mouth, always only on the eyes. When you were still little, you were for me, I could almost say, even if it’s not quite right … sacred, [meaning] that one instinctively feared to profane. Later I intentionally did nothing, I was afraid of awakening your sensuality as young boys too soon.
Whether Olga had succeeded in her aim of discouraging her sons from falling in love with her is open to debate. She may have been more successful in bringing them up to be proud, with a strong sense of their own dignity: ‘I never asked you [her sons] to beg pardon—politely saying sorry is something else. It could make me really angry if Iantschi [Jan] did this on his own initiative, and [I] forbade him to do it.’ Mischka didn’t need instruction on these lines. Olga might tease him in her letters about being a bad correspondent (‘Write soon, dear lazybones!’), but he never started his replies with the conventional apology. I was interested to learn of Olga’s part in developing a trait in Misha that was very familiar to me, but hitherto a bit puzzling. Misha was generally an easygoing man, but he never apologised for anything, large or small. The reflex ‘Oh, sorry’ that punctuates most people’s everyday interactions was quite absent from his. If he saw that he had done something that annoyed me, he would, without comment, simply avoid repeating it.
At this period, Olga was undoubtedly the most important person in Mischka’s life, and he in Olga’s. That, of course, didn’t mean that they lacked separate private lives. Mischka often wrote to Olga about his; she sometimes wrote (but more briefly and in less confessional vein) to Mischka about hers. When describing business relations with men, she might indicate that business did not exclude flirtation, on one or both sides. She would occasionally give an ironic report of a suitor, like the Englishman (probably an officer with the military government or UNRRA staffer) whose love letters kept comparing her to other women, always with the conclusion ‘You are so different, so different’ (Olga quoted this phrase in English).
When Olga’s two German admirers from Riga, Herren von Koelln and Seeliger, showed up again in Germany, Olga passed on the information to Mischka. Von Koelln (or Koellner) was in Wiesbaden and had got a job as a hotel porter. Paul Seeliger, the former commandant, had resurfaced in Flensburg, making contact not only with Olga but also with Mirkin, his former charge in the ghetto. Mischka met Seeliger too, and later told me that the former camp commandant had then
already been imprisoned, de-nazified and released; the latter in a large measure because of the statements of support from some Jews of the Riga ghetto who had survived and made it to New York—they had on their own initiative sent letters about Seeliger to the de-nazification authorities in Germany.
While there is a letter in Olga’s papers that strongly suggests that she and Seeliger had an affair at some point (whether in Riga or in Germany is not clear), no hint of this appears in Olga’s and Mischka’s correspondence. In other words, she would tell him about suitors she was not interested in, but not those she was. Mischka, for his part, either did not know or did not choose to know about any lovers in Olga’s life.
Olga felt the loss of her Riga family keenly. Two of her sons, as well as her ex-husband, were trapped in the Soviet Union, with its closed borders and restricted contact with the outside world. She knew through the DP grapevine of Arpad Jr’s arrest and banishment to Gulag and couldn’t bear to think what might be happening to him. Even with Mischka with her in Germany and Jan probably relatively safe in Riga, she wrote in her diary that ‘life seems to have lost much of its point for me’:
What strange fate has left me making my way in the world like a gypsy. Like a comedian, a buffoon. Smiling and smiling. Very often merry, just as often sad, but always smiling … Once I had a family. Five people, for whom I was the fulcrum. For these people I learnt to bear hard things lightly. For them I learnt to have an eternal smile. And now I am alone …
Olga’s sentiments, as expressed in her diary, often have a theatrical quality. When she wrote to Mischka, the tone was less exalted but the sense of loss equally strong: ‘Almost every night I dream of Arpad or Ianschi, sometimes also of Papa.’ She had an ‘out-of-control yearning’ to see her two absent sons and was making ‘impossible plans’ to go to Riga herself, she told Mischka in January 1946. These plans did indeed seem impossible, given the closed border. But Olga was always a spinner of schemes, and this one surely tapped into the romantic sense of herself that is central in the diary—no doubt she knew the ‘heroic exploit’ genre of émigré memoir exemplified by Princess Volkonsky’s story of crossing the border in disguise after the Russian Revolution to snatch her husband from the clutches of the Cheka. Olga was still thinking about such an exploit several months later. ‘Do you know, Mi, that I am giving serious consideration to fight[ing] my way through to Riga. But first I have to make sure of the Swedish side. I have got things underway with the Swedish church in Hamburg.’ (What this reference means is unclear, but presumably the Swedes had established connections in Latvia, probably covert.)
When international postal service reopened for civilians in Germany in April 1946, Olga and her sister Mary both wrote to Sweden and Riga, hoping to find or get news of Arpad and Jan. Some news came in six months later—a postcard to Mary from the Jewish neighbours who had lived in the apartment below hers in Riga, had spent the war in Russia and had now returned. The neighbours were mainly concerned to recover furniture from their apartment that had been moved to Mary’s after they left, but they had got Mary’s address from Arpad Sr—which meant not only that he was still alive, probably living in the old Danos apartment in the same house as Mary’s, but also that he had information about their whereabouts. This must have been a blow to Olga’s increasingly fond recollections of her ex-husband: he could have got in touch, or at least sent a message, but he hadn’t. ‘Probably he can’t write,’ she commented when passing on the news to Mischka. Actually it seems that Arpad Sr had fallen in love with a young singing pupil and planned to marry her. But Olga, of course, didn’t know that.
Since she started to keep her diary in the early 1920s, Olga had always regarded it as ‘the book of my marriage’. In an entry in the spring of 1946, she expanded this definition to make it ‘the book of my marriage that no longer exists, of my family that has been destroyed’:
I can’t help thinking of my poor awkward old husband. I see him always sitting in front of the radio, straining his ears, or reading a book. I haven’t made any of the people who loved me happy. My poor husband. Probably he still doesn’t understand why I left him.
She thought of Arpad Jr (‘my best friend’) too; and with the approach of St John’s Day (Johannistag)—in Germany a workday like any other, but in Latvia a holiday—she thought of Jan: ‘Oh, Jantschi! Are you still alive … Jantschi! … Where are you, my darling? In Latvia? … Is Balva with you? Are you in Russia? Siberia? Are you a soldier? Oh, Jantschi!’
Olga kept trying to make contact with her son and ex-husband in Riga through any means available. In March 1947, a strange woman knocked on her door in Fulda, looking for shelter for the night. She turned out to be a DP preparing to repatriate to Latvia and promised to try to find news of the Danos family. ‘Perhaps she will do it. I am both happy and fearful at the prospect.’
Then, in 1948, out of the blue, a letter came from Arpad Jr. He said he was back in Riga (though without explicit reference to his Gulag spell and release) and working for the time being as a labourer on bridge construction. He probably also gave the news that Jan and his wife Balva now had a child, since Olga learnt of it at about this time. Reassuring though this was, his letter caused Olga and Mischka as much anxiety as relief.
The letter’s text, in Latvian, has unfortunately not been preserved; all we have is some worried correspondence between Olga and Mischka that includes quotations, whose underlying meaning they were trying to understand. They were worried, in the first place, because they suspected that Arpad had been encouraged or even forced by the Soviet authorities to write the letter and, in the second place, because the letter evidently asked them to come home. Such letters were often sent to émigré relatives—some personal, some dictated and formal, and others in between—because the Soviet state, as well as their families, wanted them back. They knew Arpad had written the letter because they recognised his handwriting, but a close analysis of his corrections suggested that he had a censor, real or imagined, breathing down his neck. Mischka referred to the letter as having the character of an ‘article’ rather than a personal communication, which suggests that Arpad had not only written in an official style but may also have expressed some conventional Soviet-patriotic sentiments. The Arpad they knew had not been pro-Soviet, though who knew what Gulag had done to him.
In fact, Gulag had left Arpad damaged, the result (so the later family story went) of his having intervened in a fight to protect a woman and been badly beaten up for his pains. It would not have been unlike the Arpad I knew decades later to have written something like an ‘article’ to his family, since one of the characteristics of his condition, which seemed to me to be a kind of autism, was precisely his habit of addressing people as if reading out an official text rather than having a personal conversation. The first time I met Arpad, in the early 1990s, he almost ignored Misha, although he hadn’t seen him for years, and thrust on me, as a Russian reader, an elaborate Russian typescript of a draft law for the reform of marriage, the topic that was currently obsessing him. It was beautifully done, both in terms of style and presentation, and if Arpad hadn’t said he was the author, I could have accepted it as a genuine product of the Soviet Union’s utopian moment back in the 1920s. But an ‘article’ obviously wasn’t what Mischka and Olga expected from Arpad in 1948.
The Soviets were eager to repatriate their citizens, including those like the Danoses and other residents of the Baltic states whose citizenship was very recent and tenuous. But Soviet repatriation had a bad reputation in the West because of the forcible return of some millions of former POWs and other DPs in the immediate aftermath of the war. Now the Soviets were no longer forcing people to repatriate (with individual exceptions when their hush-hush security services captured suspected war criminals and collaborators in Europe), but the DP community and the Western Allies remained highly suspicious, fearing that even voluntary repatriates would be arrested on their return. Olga’s unexpected repatriating visitor the previous year was one of a comparatively small number of DPs who took up the Soviet invitation.
Mischka and Olga had no intention of going back to Riga, but they were worried that their failure to do so might cause trouble for Arpad, all the more because of his vulnerability as an ex-prisoner. Arpad’s letter urged them to write, as well as urging them to return, but they were not sure if this should be read at face value or, Aesopianly, as its opposite. The issue was whether they should reply and, if so, what they should say. ‘It’s clear that one must write,’ Mischka wrote to Olga. ‘In my opinion the most important thing is that Arpad knows that we have received his news, so that he is not unnecessarily worried. Then we will see how things go. It must be better [for Arpad] to receive as little mail as possible from abroad.’ Olga did in fact write, probably twice, but no further letters came from Riga, and she later felt guilty about having taken the bait in case it had caused trouble for her sons.
Mischka’s advice was expanded in a later letter, after he had consulted his Latvian student friends Bičevskis and Stauvers. They thought ‘it wouldn’t hurt to write a letter saying something like that we would be happy to return, but have to stay here for a while’. In other words, to convey the idea that they were not planning immediate repatriation without explicitly ruling it out, so that Arpad couldn’t be blamed for having anti-Soviet relatives. Only the minimum of information about themselves should be offered; after all, Arpad knew they had survived. ‘Exact information on my doings is not appropriate,’ Mischka wrote sternly to Olga. ‘And not about yours either.’
In the same year, Olga received worse news from Riga: her husband, Arpad Sr, had died. The family information on this is that Arpad’s marriage plans had fallen through, and after the singing pupil had left the city, he started neglecting his health and not taking insulin for his diabetes. The woman then changed her mind and came back to Riga, but it was too late: he was dead. Jan and Arpad attended the funeral. But this backstory was probably unknown to Olga and Mischka for another decade, when correspondence from within the Soviet Union became easier and Jan and Arpad Jr made contact. It is not clear exactly when Arpad Sr died, but the news had reached Olga and Mischka by June 1948.
Unlike Olga, Mischka gave little conscious thought to the family back in Riga, although a diary entry in 1945 notes that he often dreamt of them. His father’s death was a trauma that he quickly and rigorously suppressed. I thought at first that it went totally unmentioned in his correspondence and diary but then realised that it must be what he was writing about in two enigmatic entries reporting some unidentified shocking news in the summer of 1948:
It is remarkable, but probably commonplace [this word in English] that it seemed somehow empty of content, it doesn’t take root in my consciousness; it is really as if I haven’t grasped it. That ‘no longer existing’ is somehow so alien, calling forth something like fear, a sense of pure strangeness. Since Herr W [his landlord] has cheerfully turned the radio on, I absolutely can’t concentrate anymore.
This unwillingness to state the fact of a death, or even to use the word, remained characteristic of him throughout his life: ‘he ain’t no more’ was the odd way he would inform me in the 1990s that someone he knew was dead, and one felt that even that was being dragged out of him. The next day, 6 June 1948, he made another entry, even more clearly indicating the depths of his distress: ‘I see myself forced to do again something I already did once, that is again to go so far as to seek an analysis, although at the moment I don’t feel myself capable of it’. When or where this earlier analysis, evidently by a psychologist or psychoanalyst, took place is unknown, but Misha all his life had a respect for the discipline that I found surprising (and wrongly, as I now see, attributed to the influence of American popular culture in the 1950s). I doubt, also, that he carried out the analysis plan on this occasion, as if he had, it would probably have been mentioned when he started having panic attacks the following year. Insofar as I can make sense of the next sentences of the second diary entry, he thought news of his father’s death had had a ‘catalytic effect’ that might enable him, in the course of an analysis, to bring his feelings to the surface and make it possible for him to express them. Yet even half a century later, Misha spoke only unwillingly and tensely about his father’s death.
Olga probably told Mischka of the death face to face; at any rate, there is no mention of it in their surviving correspondence, other than a sad reference in a letter from her in the summer. Her main confidant about the death was her diary. She recorded the news on 2 April 1948, noting that this would be the last entry in ‘the book of her marriage’:
I can scarcely see for tears, but I have a duty to write in it. You, to whom the highest feelings of my life belong, lie under the earth. Dead, like my mother, without my being able to lighten their last hours. No, much worse, abandoned by me, left alone, unhappy. I sob, as I have heard women sob, take myself in hand and then burst out in a long loud sob. Now that I have written it out, I am calm. I will not weep any more. All the tears of my life have now been wept for you, and for me, I again wept at your death as I wept often in so many pages of this book. The last time I saw you was as the ship sailed away … As the ship turned, I came to the prow and saw you walking away. Slowly like an old man, supporting yourself with a stick. You didn’t turn round again, and I watched as step by step, slowly, tired, you walked and disappeared round the corner. You went home, quite alone, to remain quite alone … That hurts so deeply, even though I had long ago inwardly freed myself from you … I feel so tired of life, so old. Arpad is dead.
In fact, it was not quite the last entry. Four pages were left in the diary, and for her husband’s birthday in May, Olga filled them with a postscript, beginning with a careful transcription of Heinrich Heine’s lyric ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ (‘In the Wonderful Month of May’), which Robert Schumann had set to music. It was the song Arpad had sung when they had first met and he had singled her out as his future bride. On that occasion, his friend had told her that if she married him, she would need courage. Now, she wrote, ‘that life, requiring too much courage, is now [over]. And in the end I came to the end of it too. The end of my courage.’
In summation, Olga offered a poetic eulogy:
Somewhere stands a hill. Perhaps your daughter-in-law— our daughter-in-law—has planted some flowers. Perhaps it is forgotten, since time has forgotten you …
‘And that is all.’ So sounds the last of my thoughts devoted to you. The page lies before me. Your hand wrote those lines. And now it’s impossible to grasp that this hand is no more.