Vienna: February 12, 1934
At the end of the street, the red and cream trams turned around and the conductor would emerge with a long, hooked pole and reverse the steel arm that skated along the overhead wires to pick up the current. It was a common sight to see trams stand idle awhile, two crews chatting and smoking as their routes and shifts met a five-minute overlap. There was even a glass and iron hut with a dull copper roof and a belching, coal-burning stove to accommodate them on winter mornings such as this.
But these trams had been idle too long, and when the conductor locked the doors and took his leather bag of small change and walked off to the hut, a word was whispered down the long queue that in its present context baffled her.
“Strike.”
On the tabula of the mind she tried to write the word. Streik? Streich? In fairy tales, the ones her father had read to her when she was very small, giants and ogres were felled by a streich—often tripped up by cunning, giggling boys and girls. It was close to meaning a prank. But who was playing a prank on whom?
It was close to meaningless.
“Strike.”
Suddenly, her mother was behind her, a hand upon her shoulder, saying, “You must come home, now.”
“But . . . but . . . school. It is Monday. A school day.”
The hand slipped from shoulder to upper arm, gripping her firmly and pulling her out of the queue.
“Don’t argue. We are going home. Today you must study at home.”
Her mother took her by the hand and walked her back the way she had come.
“But I have art today. I can’t possibly miss art!”
“You shall miss everything until all this is over. Do you hear me? You must not go out of the house until all this is over.”
“Until all what is over?”
In the afternoon. As the light of day faded. In her room. She paused in practicing her scales at the sound of raised voices—a misnomer, only her mother’s voice was ever raised.
“Why must you get involved? It’s got nothing to do with us!”
She could not hear her father’s reply. Only a tone of voice she knew well . . . the reasonable, placatory, futile, gentle music of a gentle man.
And then her mother once more.
“For Christ’s sake, Imre, are you trying to get us all killed?”
Her father did not come home between opening up the theatre and the night’s performance. Méret and her mother ate in near silence. Méret not daring to ask any questions, her mother mouthing only platitudes about Méret’s studies, telling her she was bright enough to miss a few days at school. Besides, nobody else would be going to school, either, so what was lost?
At night she heard noises in the street. Not close by but not distant.
In the morning, her father came into her bedroom, hugged her and told her she was a lucky girl who’d been given another day off school.
On the second night she heard gunfire, not pistols or rifles but big guns, cannons, echoing across the city from the workingmen’s apartments in Karlmarxhof.
Her bedroom door opened quietly. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, smelt the dark scent of cologne and tobacco that seemed always to wrap itself around her father, inviting her to bury her face in his clothes, and then heard him whisper, “It’s alright. She’s sleeping.”
In the morning the barber called. It was her father’s treat to have the barber call on him, rather than he on the barber, two or three times a week. When she was smaller she had thought it fun to let Herr Knobloch daub her face with foam from the brush and pretend to shave her. But blade never touched flesh—the gleaming edge of his cutthroat razor lay folded in a stainless steel bowl—only the back of a plastic comb shaved the white blobs from her top lip and hairless chin.
Today, her father stretched out in the chair he kept at his desk in the study, the razor gliding gently, bloodlessly across his cheeks, exchanging wisdom with Herr Knobloch.
“I mean,” Knobloch was saying, “it can’t happen here, but all the same . . . you can’t help worrying . . . I mean . . . where’s it all going to end? A bloke doesn’t feel safe in his own home. What with Heimwehr bully boys and those Nazis taking their orders from Germany . . . I ask you, are we part of Germany now?”
Most days Imre could make Knobloch laugh—gently pricking at the bubbles of his workingman’s pride and his workingman’s half-hearted mix of opportunism and socialism. Today he didn’t even try.
“Not yet,” he said simply.
“Not yet? You mean . . . ?”
“Yes. One day. And perhaps soon.”
“What? Greater Germany? I’m not German. You’re not German. I ask you, Herr Direktor, what is Germany? Brown shirts, boiled cabbage, and jackboots. What is Vienna? A good cup of coffee and a fag. That’s Vienna. Caffs and barber shops . . . and . . .”
“Theatres,” Imre concluded for him.
“Yeah. Sorry. O’course. Theatres too. Not that I ever been in one.”
“You should. We serve a good cup of coffee and we sell fags.”
Now Knobloch laughed. Now Knobloch noticed Méret.
“Hello, young lady.”
Her muttered reply was scarcely audible. She loved to watch the morning ritual of her father’s shave. It was better than any parade, as good as any film at the cinema. Because her father was the star, relaxed and trusting and pampered—waited on cheek and jowl. And the touch of magic as his face was revealed, strip by strip, the peeling away of layers, a gentle flaying, as the razor skimmed across his skin. She knew the strokes of the razor by heart. Knobloch never varied. He had mapped the face so well, knew which flick of the blade would catch what bristle. She loved to watch. She hated to speak. Knobloch was so friendly it was . . . scary.
“Remember when I used to shave you?”
Now he leaned down and dabbed a single fleck of foam onto her top lip. Now he grinned, now he laughed.
Her father was standing. Smiling.
“Knobloch, Knobloch. You will get us all shot.”
Just before her father wiped her lip clean, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. The old joker had given her a Hitler toothbrush moustache. Even her father thought it was funny.