A Glove Shop In Vienna

A Glove Shop in Vienna

I must have flown over Vienna a dozen times and scarcely stirred in my seat. So why, this time, did I peer forward so eagerly into the darkness, searching the haphazard sprinkling of lights below me for… what? The city of my boyhood? My youth?

No, it wasn’t the Vienna of the chestnut trees, Strauss in the Stadtpark, guglhupf at Sacher’s that I groped for, devastated by the sudden, embarrassing nostalgia of middle age. It was something more specific; a particular collection of… ghosts, I suppose. The ghosts of my ancestors.

Only of course they weren’t ancestors then. Just my relations. And could anyone have made ghosts of them though they were long, long dead?

My Tante Wilhelmina, who threw me bodily over a laurel hedge in the Tiergarten to shield me from the sight of two ancient llamas making sudden love? Or Gross Tante Gretl, overcome by Goethe, walking skirtless in the Brahms Platz, the Nature Lyrics open in her hand?

No, they would have made lousy ghosts, those gloriously batty aunts of Old Vienna. I can see them now, each embalmed, timeless in their own moment of legend: Great-aunt Netta, overcome by grief on the day that Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself, rolling her false grey plait into the Apfelstrudel. Great-aunt Trudi carrying the waistcoat button which had belonged to Beethoven to concerts in the Bosendorfer Saal.

There wasn’t much wrong with my uncles either. Uncle Ernst, who ate eighteen Zwetschkenknodel on the day he died. Great-uncle Gotlieb, agonisingly shy, who spent his wedding night sitting alone beneath the equestrian statue of the Archduke Charles. Great-uncle Frederick, hurling — on the barricades in ‘48 — a barrel of salted gherkins at the Imperial Guard.

But mostly, as the plane flew quietly through the night, I found myself thinking of one man in my past — my very distant past — Great-uncle Max.

Great-uncle Max was a very old man indeed when I was a boy and he was famous by that time not for any particular eccentricity or time-defying bon mot, but for something both less spectacular and more remarkable: a Great Love.

Needless to say, in the matter of a Great Love there are bound to be elements of secrecy, of mystery… As a boy, overhearing the women gossip in my mother’s drawing room, the story bored me. A Great Love seemed to me in every way less interesting than the ability to swallow eighteen Zwetschkenknodel or throw pickled gherkins at the Imperial Guard.

Now, close on half a century later, I was no longer quite so sure.

The story of my Great-uncle Max’s Great Love is unusual in that it has not only a happy ending but a happy middle. The beginning, however, was sad.

Max Bergmann was thirty-nine, unmarried, a successful solicitor, small, blue-eyed and just a little bald when he attended, on a historic night in May, a performance of Rheingold at the Opera House.

Rheingold, if you remember, is the first work in Wagner’s great operatic cycle, The Ring. Uncle Max, slipping into his box and bracing himself a little (for Wagner made him nervous) thus saw the curtain go up on what the programme referred to as ‘the underwater bottom of the Rhine’.

The Vienna Opera at the time prided itself on the realism of its stage effects. Cardboard waves undulated laboriously from left to right and back again: jagged rocks pierced the watery gloom; undefined but undoubtedly sub-aquatic plants wreathed upwards towards the proscenium arch.

And dead centre, triumphant, the piece de resistance: the three Rhinemaidens, lowered from steel cables to hang suspended some twenty feet above the stage.

Mermaid-tailed, scale-covered, golden-haired — the size of half-grown hippopotami — they swayed and sang, immortal sirens of the deep, beckoning men to their doom.

‘Weia Waga, Woge du Welle’ sang the centre maiden, a lady named Helene Goertel-Eisen, not because she was off her head but because that was what Wagner, in his wisdom, had given her to sing.

The rest is operatic history. The ghastly twang of snapping steel; the orchestra, at first unheeding, pursuing its relentless Wagnerian leitmotif, then breaking into splintered sound, silence…

While Helene Goertel-Eisen, pushing forty, topping the scales at one hundred and twenty kilos, came crashing to the ground.

She was not, in fact, greatly hurt. Shaken, of course. Bruised. Angry; very. And the lawyer she called in to help her sue the Opera Company was Uncle Max.

Max had been deeply upset by the incident. The vast, invincible figure hanging aloft in shimmering silver, and then the flailing limbs, the crumpled body, the broken mermaid’s tail rolling into the footlights…

He never attended a performance of Rheingold again. And six months after the accident, he married Helene Goertel-Eisen.

Whether my Great-uncle Max and my Great-aunt Helene were happily married I cannot say, for it was a question which, in the Vienna of my childhood, no one asked, let alone answered. In those days (when the infant Freud, I daresay, was still bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse) one wasn’t happily married. One wasn’t unhappily married either. One was married.

Certainly my Uncle Max was very good to her. To the end, he called her his ‘Rheinmaderl’ and denied her nothing. As for my Aunt Helene, she gave up her career and settled down contentedly in the big yellow villa in the suburb of Hitzing which Max bought for her, furnishing it in the Makart style which was just sweeping Vienna: peacock feathers, shell ornaments and large numbers of small stuffed animals under glass. Freed from even the minimal restraints of her career, she was able to indulge her passion for Karlsbad plums and Linger Torte and became, even by current standards, not just very, but extraordinarily fat.

After a year or two, being of a rather indolent nature, she brought her Cousin Lily to live in Hitzing, to take over the housekeeping.

Cousin Lily belonged to that now extinct band of faintly-etched and unassuming spinsters whose own lives never quite break into flame and who live at the periphery of others — often indispensable, as often ignored. She was pale, long-nosed and ageless and wore round her neck a necklace of the milk teeth of all the children in the family. It was a disquieting necklace: brownly mottled in places, never quite free of the suggestion of dental caries and tiny flecks of dried blood.

Milk teeth or no, Cousin Lily was an excellent and unobtrusive housekeeper, keeping Uncle Max’s clothes in order, supervising the maids. And my Uncle Max, now a vigorous man in his early forties, thus had a beautifully run home, a prosperous business, an undemanding wife…

Had, in short, everything.

Well, nearly everything. For to tell the truth, Aunt Helene was a trifle too undemanding. Probably it was quite simply a matter of her bulk. One imagines her, in the matter of sex, prepared in every way to do her duty but feeling, perhaps, that it was all happening a long way off; possibly even to someone else.

If Freud had by now stopped bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse, he could not have got much further than examining his incipient moustache in the bedroom of his parents’ house. It was therefore in the conventions of his own day that Uncle Max solved this most conventional of problems.

He took a mistress.

In the old Habsburg Empire there was a precedent for everything. From Bohemia one got the best cooks, the finest glass. From Hungary one imported horses and violin players for the Philharmonic.

But for a mistress… somehow, for a mistress you couldn’t do better than a real, a proper ‘eclit’ Viennese.

My Uncle Max, searching the chorus at the Folk Opera, the little dressmakers scuttling by with cardboard boxes, found what he was looking for at last, in a glove shop in the Karntner Strasse.

Susie Siebermann was everything a mistress should be: golden-haired, blue-eyed and not too young. Uncle Max, detecting an unexpected rip in his grey kid gloves, had been despatched by Tante Helene to replace them before an important dinner. Susie did nothing except sell him another pair, but it was enough.

He offered her a villa in the Vienna Woods, but she was modest and sensible and took instead a small apartment in the unfashionable district beside the Danube Canal. This she furnished simply, in the old Biedemeyer style, with painted furniture, white-looped curtains and geraniums in pots — for there was nothing of the courtesan in Susie, who recalled a simpler, more pastoral kind of mistress: Giselle in her forest hut waiting for Prince Albrecht: Gretchen at her spinning-wheel… Only one object linked Susie’s love nest with the grand villa in Hitzing: a large, mildly malodorous stuffed squirrel (a present from an anonymous admirer) on which Uncle Max, when he came to visit, hung his hat.

The apartment faced inwards, towards a cobbled courtyard with an old pear tree in the centre, and when the shutters were closed (and of course they always were closed when Uncle Max was there) the call of the street sellers, the carpet-beating, the sound of tug-boats hooting up the Danube, came as the gentlest, the most undisturbing counterpoint to their secret and illicit love.

And indeed their love was secret. Very secret. It had to be. Let no one imagine that the Vienna of those days was a permissive ‘oh-la-la’ sort of place. In the Imperial Hofburg, sixty-seven or so moribund Archduchesses tottered about on Spanish heels, sniffing out imperceptible breaches of etiquette. Vast armies of monumentally incompetent civil servants nevertheless managed to keep tabs on the bourgeoisie. No, in the Vienna of my Uncle Max’s youth, a prosperous solicitor who wanted to stay that way did not exhibit his mistress in public.

And then, of course, there was Helene. Helene who, in one doom-filled moment, had been thrown so tragically from her steel cable above the underwater bottom of the Rhine and who must never, never be hurt again.

And she was not. My Uncle Max and his Susie were incredibly careful. He never took a. fiacre to the apartment but walked, his hat over his eyes, or took a horse-bus two stops further before doubling most cunningly back. To the concierge he was Herr Finkelstein from Linz, and it was as Herr Finkelstein that Susie addressed him when she opened the door, even if the corridor was entirely empty. Nor did he ever, however much he might be tempted, visit Susie more than twice a week: on Tuesday evening when Helene held a card party, and on Saturday afternoon when she visited her relations.

So much is fact. What happened next — how the change in their relationship came about — no one will ever know for certain.

For my part, I think it happened very slowly. I think for days and weeks and months my Uncle Max came and hung his hat on the stuffed squirrel and sat politely, first in Susie’s kitchen drinking coffee, because after all it was a business arrangement and neither of them was all that young. And then one day, perhaps, he put down his coffee cup too quickly, staining the cloth, and when Susie rose to dab at it he caught her and held her and began then and there to pull the hairpins from her piled-up golden hair. I think the day came when, returning to his office after lunch, he took a long and pointless detour past the glove shop in the Karntner Strasse — not to see her, of course, or wave to her through the glass — just to know that she was there.

He was not a very imaginative man. Susie was even a little stupid. There cannot, on the surface, have been much spiritual content in their love. He called her his ‘Putzchen’’, his ‘Mauslein’, she, no doubt, giggled and squealed during moments when exaltation would have been more proper.

And yet, as he walked through the dusk towards his abode of shame and found the May-green lime trees limned in lamplight almost too beautiful to be endured, he must have begun to suspect that he was getting more than he was paying for. Until one day, lying behind closed shutters in his Susie’s arms, listening to the soft cooing of the pigeons on the roof, it must have dawned on my modest, unassuming Uncle Max that he had found what half the world was looking for in vain: a Great Love.

With this realisation came sudden black despair. What was he doing to her, his Susie, his treasure? Hiding her away behind closed shutters and barred doors! What was he doing to himself? Tearing himself from her for days at a time, confining his passion to the inhuman restraints of the calendar! How bitter it all was, how cruel!

‘Ach, Suserl,’ my Uncle Max would say as the scent of lilac, piercing the shutters, drifted towards the bed on which they lay, ‘how I would like to take you driving in my carriage to the Prater.’

‘Just once,’ Susie would confess, rubbing her cheek against his. ‘Just once I would like to walk on your arm down the RingStrasse and nod to all my friends. I am so proud of you.’

But of course they knew it could never be. Sweet and precious their love might be but also, and for always, secret, unhallowed, furtive.

And this was the way things stood until the day of Tante Helene’s epic picnic in the Vienna Woods.

The Vienna Woods, even as late as my own childhood, deserved every impassioned stanza from Austria’s minor poets, every waltz-beat paean from the pen of every Strauss. A blue-green halo for the city, tender with beech trees, studded with flower-filled meadows, it had everything: viewpoints and castle ruins; rivulets and roe deer and, in the taverns, a wild, green wine…

My Tante Helene’s picnics were famous. Seldom fewer than three carriages as well as unbelievable quantities of food set out from Hitzing. On this particular Sunday there was Tante Helene herself, a tenor resting from the Opera on account of nodules on his larynx, a string quartet from Buda-Pest, my Uncle Max, his articled clerk — and of course, Cousin Lily.

The party disembarked. The food baskets were carried to a forest clearing and with nature-loving cries, the party plunged joyfully into the woods. Only Cousin Lily remained, half-concealed by the lid of an enormous hamper, her button boots pointing skywards, her milk teeth necklace paled by the September sunshine as she patiently buttered rolls, sliced salami, spread topfen cheese upon the pumpernickl…

For a while, only the sound of distant bird-song threaded the air. Then, from the depths of the forest, came a loud and triumphant shriek.

‘Herrenpilze!’ screamed my Tante Helene and plunged thunderously into a thicket from which the yellow, shining caps of the edible boletus beckoned.

The tenor with nodules followed. So did the string quartet, although their shoes were thin. Uncle Max joined them.

It is difficult to convey the wild, primeval excitement which, even to this day, the sight of edible fungi arouses in the bosom of the Austrian middle class. Perhaps it is the last expression of a blood-lust which the English, possessing such things as a coastline and moors full of grouse and partridge, are able to express in other ways.

The party, at all events, went wild. They gathered herrenpilze, they gathered steinpilze. They gathered baehrenpatzen and chanterelles and all the other slimy horrors which the Viennese eat and which even now, forty years later, can bring the bile to my throat as I remember them.

Over one toadstool, however, there was argument.

‘No, Helenchen, not that one!’ admonished Uncle Max.

‘But yes, Maxerl, don’t fuss. We always ate that one as children in the Dorflital.’

‘Please, Helene, don’t let Bettinka put that one in the soup,’ begged Cousin Lily later that evening, as they returned triumphantly to Hitzing.

But it went into the soup. The maids wouldn’t eat it. Uncle Max and Cousin Lily, with unaccustomed firmness, declined it also. But Helene ate every mouthful.

Twenty-four hours later, she was dead.

Uncle Max was shattered. He suffered. He blamed himself. Long after the black horses with their fearful, nodding plumes had carried his Rhinemaiden to her last resting place, my Uncle Max crept desolately between his villa in Hitzing and his office in the Wipplinger Strasse. It was left to Cousin Lily, from whose dusty black pockets crumpled mauve handkerchiefs protruded like terrible boils, to manage the household and offer — between bouts of weeping — to return to Graz.

My Uncle Max did not visit his Susie for over a month after the funeral. When he did they made love in muted undertones, embarrassed by their unquenchable compatibility. After a few weeks, however, there occurred to Uncle Max the thought which would have occurred a great deal sooner to somebody less nice.

He was free! Free to drive his Susie in a carriage through the Prater, free of Herr Finkelstein from Linz, free to visit her whenever he wished with the shutters open to the sky!

No, idiot that he was, what was he thinking of? Free to marry her!

‘Susie, Putzchen, Liebchenl,’ my Uncle Max must have cried when next he saw her, throwing his hat joyfully on to the squirrel. ‘Don’t you understand, my little schatz? No more secrecy, no more pretending and hiding away!’

Susie, who had grasped this within three seconds of hearing of Tante Helene’s death, looked shyly up at him.

‘Oh, Maxi, I know. Isn’t it wonderful?’

‘Wonderful,’ echoed Uncle Max. He began to pull the pins out of her hair, a thing which gave him the same intense, uncomplicated pleasure he had experienced when picking wild strawberries as a child.

This time however he faltered, stopped. Susie, too, drew away a little.

‘It will seem so strange,’ said Susie presently, ‘not having to call you “Herr Finkelstein”. Not ever again.’

‘But nice? You’ll like it?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Susie hastily. ‘Very nice. I shall like it very much.’

‘I can hardly believe it myself,’ said Uncle Max. ‘Just getting into a fiacre and giving your address. In broad daylight!’

‘You’ll enjoy it, though?’

‘But of course,’ said Uncle Max. ‘Of course I shall enjoy it. I shall enjoy it very much. It will all be so… simple.’

And they stood and looked at each other, subdued and a trifle silent as they contemplated the undoubted and perpetual bliss which faced them. Contemplated it so long and so solemnly that in the end Uncle Max left without taking advantage of her unpinned hair. It was the first time he had ever done so: a foretaste of their future life together: unhurried, respectable but not, of course, even remotely dull.

Helene had died in the autumn. Max and Susie’s wedding was fixed for the following spring. A very quiet wedding, needless to say. All the same, one likes to think of Susie scuttling up and down the Karntner Strasse buying material for the wedding dress. Not white, exactly, for she was a tactful girl, but pink, I daresay, or pale blue — and somewhere, one imagines, rosebuds.

And then, less than a month before the wedding, Tante Helene’s will was read.

There had been a delay in the settling of her affairs, for etiquette forbade that she should trust her estate to her own husband, and the lawyer she had chosen had caught typhus shortly after the matter of the toadstools and was only now recovered.

The will was straightforward. She left a small legacy to her Cousin Lily. The rest of her property went unconditionally to her ‘beloved Max.’

There was, however, a letter.

‘I need not inform a colleague of your eminence,’ the lawyer now said to Uncle Max, ‘that this letter is in no way binding by law. Nevertheless, it was your wife’s most earnest wish that you should consider the contents as… a kind of testament.’

And overcome by embarrassment, he fell to polishing his pince-nez. After which, in silence, he handed a large, sealed envelope to Uncle Max.

The next part hardly bears thinking of. My Uncle Max running up the stairs of the little apartment… Susie on the sofa, perhaps sewing a muslin flounce on to her wedding dress. And Uncle Max, ashen-faced, holding out the letter in a shaking hand.

‘Oh, Maxerl! Oh, my darling, my Liebchen! Oh no, you can’t do it! She can’t ask it of you!’

Together they clung, rocking in agony, while the crumpled wedding dress fell unheeded to the floor.

‘Cousin Lily!’ wailed Susie. ‘Oh no, no, no, no!’

‘She is alone in the world, you see,’ explained Uncle Max, brokenly kissing his Susie behind the ear.

‘So dreadful for you!’

‘Not dreadful, really,’ said Uncle Max bravely. ‘She runs the house. And she wouldn’t expect… Only on the Kaiser’s birthday, perhaps. But it’s you, Susie, don’t you see?’

‘You mean we would have to be so secret again? To pretend, to hide away from the world?’

Max nodded, sorrow making him speechless. Clinging together, they faced it in all its tragedy: the brief and stolen hours, the secret bed behind closed shutters, Herr Finkelstein from Linz…

‘Susie, this is a terrible blow. It is the most terrible blow we have ever faced together,’ said my Uncle Max. ‘But we can face it. We can conquer it!’

‘Oh, yes, Maxi!’ cried Susie, illumined by sacrifice. ‘We can. Together we can conquer everything.’

And because time was short, and always would be short, because their plight was really very desperate, it was Susie herself who pulled the hairpins from her long and golden hair.

And here ends — freely interpreted by me — the official version of my Uncle Max’s ill-starred and lifelong love for Susie Siebermann. He married Cousin Lily and in exchange for a single sacrifice on her part (the replacement of her milk teeth necklace by a string of garnets he bought for her), he gave her security, consideration, even affection. Cousin Lily, as is the way of frail, pale, unassuming women, lived an extraordinarily long time. By the time she died, my Uncle Max himself was close on eighty and Susie herself had only a year to live. Throughout his life, however, he visited her on Tuesday evening and on Saturday afternoon. The last time he went to see her she apologised for being no longer any ‘use’ to him, and then she died.

‘It’s monstrous,’ I had said to my mother, years and years later. Just a week ago, in fact, before I took this flight. ‘All his life he loved her and never once could they be openly together.’

My mother had followed me to England and settled in Oxford, first to be near me as a student, later, when I began to roam again, for choice. Now, thirty-odd years away from her native city, she made a gesture which was still infinitely, unmistakably Viennese.

‘Rubbish!’ she said. (Only what she said was ‘Schmarrn’.)

‘That old cow, Helene,’ I went on. ‘Leaving a letter like that. Emotional blackmail of the crudest sort.’

My mother sighed and quoted Schiller. ‘ “With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain” ‘ she said. ‘You, my poor boy, are an idiot.’ She paused, her head on one side. ‘Although one must admit you never saw the squirrel.’

I stared at her. Mere senility is always too much to hope for in my mother.

‘I went to Susie’s apartment once or twice before she died,’

she went on. ‘Such a clean, fresh, pretty place! And then that awful squirrel. Someone had to have given it to her. Someone she respected too much to throw the thing away.’

‘Well?’

‘Who collected stuffed animals? Who adored the smelly things? Who filled her house with them?’ demanded my mother, twitching at her shawl.

‘Helene? Helene knew Susie? You must be mad!’

My mother raised her eyebrows. In old age and exile she had taken on a patrician, Habsburg haughtiness which went down like a bomb in North Oxford, but not with me.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted my mother. ‘But taken in conjunction with the gloves…’

‘All right,’ I said, defeated. ‘Go on about the gloves.’

‘When I was a very small girl they took me to see Aunt Helene in Hitzing. You know how bored children get. When she was out of the room I started playing around with the sofa cushions and I found her sewing basket pushed out of sight. There was a pair of men’s grey gloves in it and a pair of scissors. The gloves had been cut, deliberately.’

I stared at her. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Why not? I liked Helene. It’s not so funny, after all, to fall off a steel cable. If she couldn’t make Max happy in that way, I think she might well have found a nice, friendly girl and seen to it that he met her.’

‘It’s impossible,’ I said. And then: ‘No, it’s just possible. But if she knew all about it and wished Susie well, why did she mess it all up for them? Why did she leave that note about Cousin Lily?’

My mother looked at me and shook her head. ‘My poor boy,’ she said. ‘How many doctorates have they given you? Even you,’ she went on, ‘must see what Helene gave to those two.’

I was silent for a moment, thinking of my Uncle Max as I had last seen him: small and bandy and very, very old — and of the legend which encircled him.

‘A Great Love?’ I said.

‘Oh, as for that,’ said my mother, pulling her shawl closer, ‘I don’t know. That was extra, I think. A bonus…’

And that’s all really. A period piece — something from the safely distant past. We manage things better now; more honestly.

Only just for one moment, as the plane came in to land, I wished we didn’t. So that one day, perhaps, I might go into a glove shop in the Karntner Strasse… If there still are glove shops in the Karntner Strasse…

If I wore gloves…