A Glove Shop In Vienna

A Little Disagreement

Because I have been married with great content (and to the same woman) for twenty years, I am often asked questions. Questions which imply that there is some formula for married happiness; a recipe for success. And when this happens and I am forced into an answer, I tell the questioner a story. The story of Tante Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer and her husband Uncle Ferdi, in Vienna, before the war.

And I begin at the end. With Tante Wilhelmina’s death-bed, to be exact, which took place on a Tuesday evening during that socially grey period when the Opera Ball is over for another year, the holy statues wear their Lenten shrouds and a wind straight from the plains of Hungary bites eastward into the city.

On a dull, cold Tuesday in early March, then, Tante Wilhelmina (who actually was no relation to me at all; I was the housekeeper’s son and still a child) clutched her heart, shrieked, turned purple — and sent for the hairdresser.

In life, Tante Wilhelmina, prematurely retired from the chorus of the Opera, took little interest in her appearance. Death, however, was a different matter. Now, as she lay gasping on her pillows in a nightdress of lilac crepe de Chine, she nevertheless managed to give precise instructions to Herr Kugelheim.

‘You will, of course, make absolutely certain that I am dead. You know how to do this?’

Herr Kugelheim, ancient, bandy-legged and servile, clutched his curling-tongs and muttered something about mirrors.

‘Then two low curls on the forehead. Low, and a plaited chignon in the nape. Have you got that?’

I, meanwhile, had been sent to fetch the cats. Wotan and

Parsifal presented no problems. Huge, neutered tom-cats, they were perfectly prepared to finish their cream at the foot of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed. Siegfried, however, was another matter. Siegfried’s operation had not been a success and he was absent on the tiles.

By the time I had returned from an unsuccessful search, most of the relatives sent for by my mother had arrived, and in hushed whispers were assembling in the bedroom. It is naturally with hindsight that I see the grouping as having the weight and dignity of a Delacroix or Titian. In the centre, of course, lay Tante Wilhelmina, the lamp falling on her ravaged features and heaving breast. Behind her, the hairdresser; across her feet, the cats. At the back of the room, in shadow, a respectfully doleful row of servants. Leaning against the wardrobe, a creaking cousin, male, from Plotz…

Kneeling by the bed itself, hiccuping with grief, was Tante Wilhelmina’s adopted daughter, Steffi; a blonde, kind, silly woman, her trusting sea-cow eyes brimming with tears. By the window Steffi’s husband, Victor Goldmann, a Jewish violinist from the Philharmonic, surveyed the scene like a flayed, El Greco martyr.

Tante Wilhelmina stirred and groaned. Silence fell. A waiting silence.

As though on a cue that only she could hear, my mother now stepped forward.

‘Gnadige Frau,’ she said, leaning over Tante Wilhelmina, ‘if you will forgive the impertinence, I think the Herr Professor should be sent for. I think your husband should be here.’

Then: ‘If you… insist,’ said Tante Wilhelmina, speaking with great difficulty. ‘I… don’t wish it… personally. But if… you insist.’

A sigh of relief seemed to pass round the room. Tante Wilhelmina stretched out a failing arm and reached for the note-pad on her bedside table. ‘I AM DYING,’ she wrote in indelible pencil and underlined each word.

My mother tore off the paper and handed the message to me. At a nod from her, I ran downstairs and knocked on the door of Uncle Ferdi’s study.

Uncle Ferdi had been sitting there quietly, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight. Now he peered at the note through gold pince-nez, blew softly through his moustache, sighed, nodded — and followed me upstairs…

And if all this seems a little odd, the explanation is very simple. Tante Wilhelmina and Uncle Ferdi had been married for thirty years. And for twenty-nine of these, they had not exchanged a single word.

No one knew what Uncle Ferdi had done, only that it was very, very bad. That somehow he had hurt and humiliated Tante Wilhelmina to such an extent that she had never been able to forgive him. There had been no scandal, no break-up. They lived under the same roof and when she wanted anything she sent him notes, first through Steffi (adopted from an orphanage mainly for the purpose), later through me. But from that day to this no word had passed between them.

And now, with Uncle Ferdi sitting sadly in the big carved chair which had been placed in readiness for him, the deathbed could begin.

I was ten years old and very nervous. A bit ghoulish, too, as I leant against my mother’s skirts. What would happen? Would she scream or gasp or… rattle? Would there be blood?

Well, what happened was that Tante Wilhelmina forgave people.

She forgave everybody. She forgave the maids for not dusting behind the piano and she forgave the creaky cousin for doing her out of a barrel of rollmops during the First World War. She forgave her sister-in-law for filching her recipe for lungenbeuschel and she forgave my mother for not appreciating Wagner. She even (and this took some time) forgave me.

After that came Steffi.

What she forgave Steffi for was not marrying a Jew, for in those days Hitler was just a faint, foul cloud on the horizon. What she forgave Steffi for was getting it all so wrong. And it is true that the intricacies of Jewish orthodoxy seemed to be quite beyond poor Steffi, who cooked gefilte fish on days of strictest fasting and was once seen trying to remove her husband’s hat on the way to synagogue.

And then Tante Wilhelmina turned and fixed her suffering, other-worldly eyes on Uncle Ferdi.

With a superhuman effort, the dying woman struggled up from her pillows. My mother on one side, Steffi on the other managed to support her heaving, swaying form into an upright position. An arm in lilac crepe de Chine crept out towards her mournful, waiting husband.

It was going to be all right. She was going to forgive him. The great wrong he had done her almost thirty years ago was now expiated. In death they would be reconciled.

‘F… Fer…’ Gasping, choking, Tante Wilhelmina tried to say her husband’s name. Then with an unutterably awful cry she fell backwards on to the pillows.

A choking rattle followed. Silence.

Uncle Ferdi, grief-stricken, huddled back in his chair. The hairdresser stepped forward tentatively, a mirror in his hand…

And jumped back like a scalded cat as Tante Wilhelmina, exhausted by her labours, gave vent to yet another enormous and room-shattering snore.

‘You mean she often does it?’ I said to my mother a few days later. ‘Often has a death-bed?’

My mother was folding table linen, her square deft hands flicking the damask. Now she looked up at me and sighed. ‘Fairly often. About twice a year. You were too young before; I always sent you away.’

‘But why?’ I said. ‘Why?’

My mother frowned. ‘I think… I don’t know really… but I think perhaps she wants very much to forgive him. To make up the quarrel. Only her pride won’t let her. The death-beds are a way of… forcing her own hand. But then in the end, she can’t quite make it.’

I only partly understood. But: ‘Poor Tante Wilhelmina,’ I said, and my mother smiled and touched my hair as though I had said something to please her.

It was then that I plucked up courage to ask something I had wanted to ask for years. ‘What was the quarrel about? What was it that Uncle Ferdi did to her?’

The smile left my mother’s face. ‘Never ask me that, Karl,’ she said, turning back to the linen.

During the next few years the death-beds came thick and fast. By the time I was twelve, I could have organised one almost as well as my mother. Long before Herr Kugelheim arrived with his curling tongs, I’d have caught Wotan and Parsifal, arranged the big chair for Uncle Ferdi, helped to round up the maids, the cousins and Steffi… Always Tante Wilhelmina forgave the rest of us and always, just before she could forgive her husband, she fell back, apparently lifeless, on the pillows. ‘I SEEM TO HAVE BEEN SPARED’ she would write to him next day. And everything would go on exactly as before.

Then, when I was about thirteen, came a death-bed which I shall never forget because what happened there set the pattern for the rest of my life.

I wish I could think of better and less hackneyed words to use, but I cannot. So I only state that I fell — and it really was a falling — in love.

I knew, of course, that Steffi and Victor Goldmann had a daughter. But while I normally had the freedom of the house, when visitors or relations came my mother kept me strictly in the servants’ quarters. So it was not until she was old enough to attend her first death-bed that I saw Ruth.

It was an autumn death-bed, I remember. The chestnuts in the square outside were dropping golden fingers on to the Archduke somebody-or-other who rode out there for ever. I remember this because Ruth’s hair was the colour of those leaves and so were her eyes — her father’s wise, El Greco eyes — but hair and eyes, both, were lightened, gold-flecked, because of silly, blonde, incurably Aryan Steffi.

I don’t think anything happened, except that I had an overwhelming longing to cross the room and stand beside her on the other side of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed, but didn’t because she was ‘family’ and I was the housekeeper’s son. But after that we met secretly after school wherever and whenever we could; in the Volksgarten, on the steps of the Karls Kirche, by the Mozart memorial… And if I say I was happier then than I have ever been, I don’t want to imply some childish mock-romantic idyll. It was with absolute seriousness that Ruth and I, trailing our satchels through the streets of Vienna, discussed our future life together, planning everything from the kind of dog we would breed on our farm near Salzburg to the portion of our income we would donate to the poor.

And then came the last death-bed. The one at which death, which had been mocked so long, was mocked no longer.

It began exactly like the others. The hairdresser came, the cats were caught. Even Siegfried, temporarily sated, was present for once — and Ruth had a blue ribbon in her hair.

Tante Wilhelmina forgave the maids, the rollmops cousin, Steffi, me…

And finally struggled into a sitting position to stare, her arm extended, at Uncle Ferdi.

Uncle Ferdi had aged a lot recently. His eyes behind the gold pince-nez had lost their piercing blue; his moustache drooped; even his bald head no longer shone bravely in the lamplight and I remember praying that this time it really would happen. That this time, at last, she really would forgive him.

‘F… Fer…’ began Tante Wilhelmina. And then suddenly, her whole face crumpled into a look of agony and disbelief.

While slowly, very slowly, Uncle Ferdi slipped from his chair on to the floor and lay there, very peaceful looking and quite, quite still.

What I remember most vividly is not Tante Wilhelmina’s racking sobs, nor even Ruth Goldmann’s gold-flecked eyes as they widened to take in the shock and pain, but the baffled, bewildered look on old Kugelheim’s face as he stepped forward, clutching his curling-tongs, and stood looking down at Uncle Ferdi’s totally bald head…

After Uncle Ferdi’s death, Tante Wilhelmina went to pieces. She grieved as though their marriage had been the most fantastic idyll. She lost two stones in weight, dressed totally in black, saw no one.

I was shocked by what seemed to me to be the most appalling hypocrisy, ‘Why does she carry on like that?’ I said to my mother. ‘She can’t have loved him.’

My mother didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Later, people often looked at me as though they envied me my youth, but that day I saw my youth profoundly pitied.

It was Steffi, adopted on a whim from an orphanage, silly, undervalued Steffi who now took charge of Tante Wilhelmina, carrying the broken old woman off to Berlin where Victor had a new job in the Conservatoire, comforting her, caring. The house was sold; my mother went to work in a shop; we moved to a little flat in the suburbs. There were no more death-beds. And no more Ruth.

As though Uncle Ferdi, sitting sadly in his study, had kept the old world together, his death seemed to unleash chaos. Chaos in the outside world as Hitler seized power in Germany and the conflict and cruelty began to seep across the border to smug and sleepy Austria. Chaos within as the loss of Ruth unleashed in me all the squalor and confusion of adolescence.

Politically, my mother and I were almost simpletons. So that when a year later Ruth Goldmann wrote to me from England, I wasn’t relieved for her safety, I was appalled. England, that grey and foggy land of horsemen and ham-and-eggs; what was Ruth doing there? How would I ever get to her again?

‘It is good here,’ Ruth wrote, ‘because no one minds that Father is a Jew and they don’t spit at us in the street. When we arrived, Mother said the prayer of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the tribes of Israel, but Father said it was the prayer to make married people have children…’

It was a long letter and it ended: ‘I would like it very much if you remembered me.’

Well, I remembered her. I remembered her through the Anschluss and the war in which, by then, I was old enough to fight. I remembered her through three years of imprisonment by the Russians and I remembered her when, sick and verminous and sullen, I was released.

But by then the continent was adrift in chaos and I lost her. Physically. Literally. No letters reached her in England, none came to me.

All the same, within a year of the war’s end, I managed to get myself to London on a language course. I went, of course, to look for Ruth. Anyone less naive would have known how hopeless it was. Each evening, when I finished at the language school, I rang up another couple of dozen Goldmanns, trudged round the refugee organisations, the Emigration Office… Nothing…

And yet in the end, quite by chance, I did find someone.

I was walking, on a warm evening in May, from Swiss Cottage tube station towards the room in which I lodged. My way led through streets of large Victorian terrace houses, many of them knocked together to make a hostel or hotel.

In front of one of these I used to linger and eavesdrop. It was a kind of old people’s home — though a pretty classy one — run by a Viennese woman and filled with the elderly relatives of refugees whose matriarchal ‘Momma’ or embarrassingly proletarian ‘Poppa’ had not fitted into the new prosperity of the house in Golders Green or Finchley. From this hotel the smell of good Austrian cooking used to drift out, plus plaintive comments in German or Polish or broken English.

‘No,’ I heard on this particular day. ‘I go absolutely not to the death-bed of that old schickse. I am sensitive, me, and my nerves cannot hold out such nonsense.’

A pleading murmur, softer, in English. A resigned: ‘Once more, then; once more only, I go,’ from an old gentleman.

And an arm in a white overall, scooping up a huge, reluctant cat…

‘Excuse me, but do you have anyone staying here by the name of Ziegelmayer? Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer?’

The flustered maid looked at me with relief. ‘Oh yes, we were expecting one of the relatives. I’ll take you up.’

I followed her upstairs, opened the door.

On the pillows, in a nightdress of the austerest post-war cotton, lay Tante Wilhelmina. Where Herr Kugelheim had stood with his curling-tongs sat the matron, looking resigned and holding in a vice-like grip a large and displeased cat. And in a circle round the bed, creaking with visible reluctance, sat an assortment of elderly ladies and gentlemen.

Tante Wilhelmina was forgiving them. She forgave Frau Feldmann for taking the last of the sauerkraut at luncheon; she forgave Madame Kollinsky for always hogging the best armchair in the lounge. She forgave Herr Doktor Zellman for the extraordinarily unappetising way he left the bathroom.

And then Tante Wilhelmina saw me.

Really, I mean, saw me. She broke off, struggled up on her pillows, stretched out a hand. A spasm shook her and then over her silly, self-indulgent face there came a look that I had never seen on it before: a look of pure and unmistakable happiness.

‘Ferdi,’ she said, loud and clear, ‘Ferdi! I forgive you, Ferdi; I forgive you everything?

Then she fell back on the pillows. Her breathing changed. Behind me I heard light footsteps, a door opening; someone begin softly to weep. It was only then that I realised that Tante Wilhelmina had made it at last, that she was dead. And I turned round and there was Ruth…

‘I’m so glad,’ said Ruth later. ‘Oh, God, I’m so glad she had the chance to forgive him.’

I don’t know where we were then. Hampstead Heath, perhaps. We had walked about for hours, holding each other’s hands like greedy children, and now it was quiet and green.

‘I’m glad, too. But I don’t understand, really. Why did she think I was Uncle Ferdi suddenly? She seemed quite sane.’

Ruth turned to me, surprised. ‘I forgot you didn’t know,’ she said. Then she opened her handbag, took out a mirror and held it up to me.

I looked at myself. Blue eyes; fair hair; shrapnel scar on the temple. Just a face.

Try a moustache,’ said Ruth. ‘And gold pince-nez.’

‘No,’ I said. Wo.’

Ruth nodded. ‘He was very lonely. And your mother was a sweet woman. You’re very like him.’

‘Good God! So that was the sin Tante Wilhelmina couldn’t forgive him! An affair with the housekeeper. To be made a fool of in her own house!’

Ruth smiled, but her gold-flecked eyes were sad. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was a big thing and it was years after. Tante Wilhelmina was awfully good about it. You know what a pet she made of you.’

‘But what, then? What had he done?’

So then Ruth lay back in the grass and I took her in my arms and she told me.

And if our marriage is exceptionally happy, if really we don’t seem to quarrel over trifles, perhaps it is because we both remember an old woman — locked in loneliness and silence because thirty years earlier, her new young husband, in a careless moment, had told her that her fresh-baked apfelstrudel tasted like a boot…