FALL 2005 SHORT FICTION CONTEST

FIRST PLACE WINNER

Viennese Waltz

by Leah Bassoff

My mother was rarely at ease.  It was only when she did the Viennese waltz – when she turned young before my eyes.  On the rare days that she didn’t come home too tired from being on her feet all day at the bakery, she would take off her apron, her hair dusted with sugar, her hands smelling like strudel, and she and my father would waltz.  My mother would hold her skirt out at an angle, with her face tilted to the side, and, for a moment, the house would be filled with music and my mother’s shining face.

My room and my parents’ room was separated by only a thin wall, and I could hear my mother, her voice shrill in the room next to me.

“Soldiers,” my mother would screech.

“No, Gerte.  We’re in America.”  My father was always calm.  He would coo to her until she fell asleep.  “Schlafen, Gerte.” 

When I asked my father about it, he said my mother suffered from night terrors.  “Nothing more,” he explained. 

I knew my mother’s secret, though.  I knew her shame.  She listened for the Nazi soldiers, the ones that had invaded Austria and captured her and my father before they had managed to escape and flee to America.

Like my mother, I, too, often sat up in bed and listened for the imaginary sound of the soldiers’ goose-stepping marches outside my window.  

During the morning, tired from our sleepless nights, my fights with my mother would begin.  I hated to go to school, and I would plead with my mother to let me stay home.

“You must go to school to survive,” was my mother’s definitive, unyielding response. 

One week my teacher sent me home with a note pinned to my jacket to give to my parents.   They had given me a test in school, and I was too embarrassed to tell my teachers that I didn’t speak English.  Usually I didn’t speak at all in class.

My mother read the note sent home with my teacher and squinted at it.  “What does this word mean, ‘retarded’?” she asked me accusingly.  “They want to put you in a special class,” she said. 

“I don’t know, Mama, but the kids make fun of me at school,” I tried to explain.   

We were the refugee kids.  The other kids called our clothes “immigrant clothes.”  They would call our food “immigrant food.” 

Another day I came home and told my mother we needed to bring in honey for the soldiers to school.  “Honey?  But where are we going to find it?  The stores are almost closing.” 

“Please, Mama,” I pleaded.  “They told us to bring it in if we were good Americans.”  My father, who never complained, drove to three different stores, until we finally found a small jar.  The next day I walked into class, proudly proffering my jar of honey, as my classmates broke into jeers. 

“Honey!  She brought in honey!”   

My teacher was trying to be kind, but I could tell she was impatient.  “Money, for the soldiers, not honey,” she said.  “What on earth would soldiers do with honey?” she asked me. 

My mother’s advice was always simple:  “Don’t talk back to authority.  If the teacher says something, you just keep saying, ‘Yes’,” she said.

Instead, I simply kept my mouth shut at all times.  I was too afraid to raise my hand to go to the bathroom, so as soon as school was over, I would run home as fast as I could.  Sometimes I didn’t make it home in time, and I would run home with an immense sense of shame, urine dripping down my legs, pooling in my shoes, making my tights stiff and cold.

I knew my mother’s shame.  I knew her secrets.  I knew that I would have had a baby brother or sister, but that my mother had the baby taken out of her.  Back in Austria, she went to a doctor who blindfolded her.  “Abortions are illegal for Jews,” the doctor had told her.  Afterwards, she had to be carried out.  She could not walk.  For days afterwards, blood dripped down her thighs. 

I shared her shame as I ran toward home every day, pee running down my legs, pooling in my long socks.

My mother told me that her beauty saved her from the concentration camp.  After she and my father were arrested, my mother became friends with the jail guard.  “He let me free, for a small price,” she told me.  She told me she had paid him by “giving him a piece of her beauty.”

My mother’s secret indulgence was to stay thin.  “I always had a beautiful figure,” she told me, “and I still do.” It was true.  When my mother waltzed, she glided, tall and slim, across the dance floor.  Though my mother luxuriated in her beauty, she also knew the dangers of being thin.  Back during the holocaust, being thin or weak meant sure death.  It was the strong who survived. 

My mother reconciled this dilemma by staying thin while insisting that I eat. At first she tried to tempt me with food, bringing pastries home from the bakery, slipping sugar cubes into my pockets, trying to pour frosting in my mouth, but I hated sugar and despised food.  Later, our fights over food became more violent.  My mother would force me to eat beef stroganoff bathed in cream, or chicken glistening with fat; she would stand over me, clumps of meat stuck to the fork that she would wave in front of my face.  She herself would not touch her food, but she stood over me until I finished everything on my plate.  “You must eat,” she would cry hoarsely.  “Otherwise you will not make the selection.”  She began to feed me anything she could get her hands on, and it didn’t stop at food.

One day my mother went to the hospital.  “No more children for me,” she announced.  “In the hospital, they are going to scoop me out like a melon.”  She was proud of this fact.  “They will take out my insides you know.  That way I will never have to go through the pain again.  “The pain” referred to my mother’s illegal abortion, which she had, blindfolded in some dirty back room. 

When my mother returned from having her hysterectomy done, she was supposed to take some medication.  Instead she fed the pills to me.  “But Mama,” I pleaded.  “I’m not sick.  I don’t need any medication.”

“There are dangers,” she told me.  “You will be safe if you eat these pills.”  Later, when the relatives figured out that I had eaten all of Mama’s hysterectomy pills, they shook their heads and whispered that because of Mama, I might never be able to have children of my own. 

***

As I grew older, I learned English and developed a new language, one that didn’t involve the traditions or ways of the old country.  Similarly, my mother too developed her own language, one that covered up the dark times of the past.  Just as she referred to her abortion as “her pain,” she invented other terminology.  The holocaust was “the horror.”  “The Pain” and “The horror” were events that were never to be mentioned.  Ironically, as my parents grew old, it was my even-tempered father, and not my mother, who had a breakdown and began to talk about “the horror” for the first time since it happened.  My father suffered from a stroke, and he began to imagine that he was back in Austria.

“They’re killing Jews,” he would tell me, fear in his voice, fear not only from the event itself, but fear that I wouldn’t believe that such a thing could happen.”

My mother learned to hide her past.  To me, the holocaust became something you study in history books, something to teach my children about.  Still, to this day, I sometimes sit up and listen for soldiers.  I wonder if my mother does as well.

Yet there were times of beauty:  my mother brushing her hair in the mirror, twisting it between her two fingers like the fingers of dough she’d turn into rolls, and there were those times when my father would offer my mother his arm, and they would begin to waltz, gliding across the floor as if their feet were somehow no longer connected to the ground.