Inside Outside (6 page)

They were ridiculous and risible. London's cultural life was, at the time, probably the finest in Europe—more varied and of a higher standard than that of Vienna, Budapest, Prague or even Berlin before the war. But these sad and grotesque old ladies, reciting litanies which had probably lost all but their incantatory significance, were giving expression to their deep sense of loss. They were mourning a dead life. The ‘cultural desert' of London was no more than a convenient counter to identify their sense of displacement, their longing for a past which could never be recovered. Seen from this perspective, London was as much a cultural desert as the most remote corner of Australia.

The tragedy of such lives is that an inevitable and natural nostalgia, an ever-present clog at the exile's heels, is invariably expressed in terms of comparisons and judgments which are made without much pertinence or justification. In a most important sense, such people have ceased to live; they are the living dead. What is different seems to them, naturally enough, inferior. A new environment, with its real or imagined disadvantages, is often blamed for the simple fact that people have been wrenched from the old. The agony of loss and longing casts a sentimental glow around what has been lost; it is always inclined to denigrate the new. We do not know how to recognise the benefits of a new world because the old has placed a template over our eyes—we perceive nothing except what those apertures allow us to see. Our lives are dissipated in longing and in the suffering of loss, even though what we have lost is only a country of the mind, a memory, or even a pure invention.

As we approached our cousin's house near a bushland reserve on Middle Harbour on that February day in 1947, the process I have been describing had already commenced. We were making comparisons between our old life and the new. And because we did not know how to make such comparisons, or on what to base our discriminations, we had begun in our arrogance and ignorance to judge harshly. To understand the source and the implications of those hastily achieved judgments—which I am still prone to make, long after I have come to realise that they are often partial and false—I must record what I can remember of our life before the moment of our arrival at the end of the rainbow, a moment which marked the cutting of our last ties with the past. Although my parents and I could have no way of knowing at the time, the instant we caught sight of those streetlights on a dark headland, our former life entered the realm of legend.

Memory does not go back very far in a family like mine. Our story is a commonplace tale; it has been told many times. The broad chart of our particular fortunes nevertheless reveals something important about the perplexity of those people whose familiar existence was disrupted by the great upheavals of the middle of the twentieth century, who were obliged to remake their lives in circumstances that produced confusion, anguish and, for some, a debilitating sense of loss.

I know something about my grandparents, a little about my maternal great-grandparents, but beyond them there is nothing. Or rather, what came before must have been those inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian world who were at one time Austrian, at another Hungarian, who may have lived in Bohemia, or in Moravia, or even outside the actual political confines of the Empire, perhaps in places like the Russian segments of Poland. In other words, though these people lived in and were no doubt citizens of the Dual Monarchy—the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Empire, to give it its most pompous title—they did not belong exclusively to any one of the various groups constituting that cumbersome, polyglot realm. They were neither Magyar nor Slav, neither Galician nor Ruthenian. If anything, they saw themselves as vaguely Austrian (even though in my father's family Hungarian was the first language), no doubt as a consequence of some sort of cultural osmosis of ‘Austrianness' through the walls of one of the many ethnic, social or professional ghettoes which flourished in that complicated world. For all of them German was a
lingua franca,
establishing social, cultural and professional links, and providing for many of them the medium of their intellectual life. My father studied in Germany; my mother's family were primarily German-speaking—or, better to say, they spoke the outlandish dialect of a district known as Burgenland.

There had never been anyone famous in our family. On my father's side there was a half-hearted myth that we were somehow related to the Dr Riemer who was for a time secretary and factotum to the great Goethe—Thomas Mann depicts him as an unctuous, slimy pedant in
Lotte in Weimar
—but there is not, as far as I know, any shred of evidence to support this. Nevertheless, the fact that they entertained such a fantasy, even though in a half-serious, almost jesting fashion, reveals something important about their aspirations and their image of themselves. For such people, even a spurious connection with a ‘famous' intellectual (in reality probably nothing other than an ill-paid and abused hack) provided quite a feather in the family's cap.

My father's people were thoroughly bourgeois, respecting rather than leading the life of the intellect. They had lived in Budapest for several generations. The men were usually engineers or held fairly important positions in various large companies. They made good marriages, often to quite wealthy women from a slightly higher stratum of society. My grandfather, for instance, was a sales executive for a firm of textile manufacturers. I do not think that he ever went from tailor to tailor hawking the company's goods, at least not by the time of his marriage, yet my grandmother always felt that she had married beneath her proper station.

I know next to nothing about her family except that her maiden name was Schillinger, and that she had a large number of sisters or female cousins who were either widowed or unmarried, and spent most of their time gossiping or lamenting the cruelty of life. My grandmother was a great cemetery-goer. According to my father, she would never miss a funeral, even of someone only vaguely connected by ties of blood or acquaintance. The anniversaries of the deaths of the more important members of her family and circle were observed meticulously by ceremonial visits to various burial grounds. She gave birth to three children, a daughter and two sons, of whom my father was the youngest. Her life was not happy.

She was beyond any shadow of a doubt my favourite grandmother—largely because, unlike my maternal grandmother, she did not live with us. I remember her as a white-haired lady who always wore black dresses with white dots (except when in
grand deuil)
and lace-up boots. She had a wonderful china-cabinet filled with Dresden figurines, which I was never allowed to touch, and a collection of small silver objects—windmills, boats, cottages—with which I was allowed to play whenever we visited her. My mother used to say that her mother-in-law and my father's sister had initially resented her, the provincial upstart, but by the time of my earliest memories these resentments seemed largely to have vanished.

My grandfather died just before my parents' wedding. He had been separated from my grandmother for many years, living with ‘a woman in Prague' (the phrase assumed mythic proportions in the family) whom he left once a year in order to accompany his wife and children on their annual holiday at a lakeside resort. These apparently were the conditions set by my grandmother before she agreed to a separation. Keeping up appearances was a quality about which my father cared little, but my mother instinctively understood its importance. For that reason perhaps, my grandmother and to a lesser extent my aunt came eventually to drop their early hostility towards her. Just before my parents were married, my grandfather returned to the bosom of his family to die.

My father had not made a ‘good' marriage. Not that his family had any moral misgivings about my mother (at least as far as I know) but she suffered from serious disadvantages: she came from outside their circle, and she was practically a pauper. This sounds a harsh and calculating attitude, and no doubt it was so to some extent. But behind its precepts lay decades of bourgeois prudence: keep within the known and trusted circle, do not neglect the necessities of life—if the man is capable of earning good money, his wife must bring some property to the marriage in order, as it were, to balance the books. Since the women in these families were relieved almost entirely of all responsibilities other than the supervision of housework, the concept of unpaid work as a contribution to a marriage, so often invoked by modern feminist theory, had little relevance for them. Such prudence is probably to be encountered in any propertied society, but in prewar Europe its practice had been refined into an art-form of elaborate conventions and rules of decorum. The first volume of Proust contains an account—at a much higher social and cultural level than my parents' world—of this ritual, which was conducted from one end of Europe to the other, and had spread throughout the spectrum of castes that constituted the bourgeoisie.

From the perspective of her in-laws, my mother was deficient in at least three important respects: she was provincial, she was an orphan (her father had died when she was very young) and she was very poor. Whereas my father's family had been city people for several generations, my mother was born in a village on the shores of a large, shallow lake that now forms part of the border between Austria and Hungary. The nearby town, where my mother grew up, was generally known as Oedenburg until 1921. After the Treaty of Versailles, a rather suspect plebiscite (in which the dead were said to have voted enthusiastically) decided that the town should be absorbed into the newly independent state of Hungary, and that it should be known exclusively by its Hungarian name, Sopron. As a means of rewarding the gallant (and largely German-speaking) citizens of Sopron for their courageously patriotic act, the Hungarian government decided to endow it with the title
Urbs Fidelissima
.

My mother was the daughter of a village schoolmaster who died from meningitis when she was a toddler. My grandmother—a widow of twenty-two—left the schoolhouse and went back to live with her parents. My great-grandfather, whom I remember distinctly, was a little, compactly-built man with pronounced Slavic cheekbones, despite the fact that his name was David Weiss. He was something of a grandee in the village. The caste-obsessed Habsburg world extended its influence to the most obscure recesses of its domains. He was involved in the dispatch by train of milk from the estates of the great Eszterházy family to the two capital cities—Vienna and Budapest. I do not know what my great-grandfather's function was—I think it may have been entrepreneurial. I do not think he was an employee of the railways. I say this because this side of my family, though conscious of its humble origins, habitually thought of itself as a cut above the local peasantry and rural
canaille
. In earlier times they may well have been servants of the Eszterházys or of their retainers, for the one shred of mythology in that part of the family concerned my great-grandfather's grandfather, who was supposed to have ‘known' Haydn during his years as Kapellmeister at Eszterháza.

My great-grandfather saw himself as a person of some importance; he took pride in the orderly flow of milk to the great capitals. He considered himself, albeit in a small way, an important part of the machinery that ensured the smooth operation of that vast, benevolent Empire which was joined by an unbroken chain extending all the way from the Kaiser und König in Vienna to the humblest peasant on its eastern extremity. He had a uniform and a braided cap to denote his station along that chain. He has been given an immortality he hardly warranted in an anecdote in David Malouf's
Harland's Half Acre
. How mistaken he was in his faith in the stability of the Habsburg world was proved to him a few years after the birth of his first grandchild, my mother, who was born in 1912.

Around the time of my mother's birth, when her mother, the widow Neubauer, moved back to her parents' house after her pitifully short marriage to the village schoolmaster, this world seemed stable, comforting, eternal. Franz-Josef, the benevolent, avuncular monarch, still mourning (according to popular mythology) his assassinated Empress (even though they had, in fact, loathed each other), ruled over his people from the big city, Vienna, seventy or so kilometres to the west. For my mother's family Vienna was ‘their' city. What you could not get done in nearby Oedenburg you could accomplish in Vienna, a short train journey away. When my grandfather began developing the symptoms of the meningitis which was to take his life, the doctors of Oedenburg decided that he must be taken to Vienna, where he died. My grandmother often spoke about his funeral in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. She remembered her father in his splendid uniform and black armband, and how my great-grandmother had discarded for the occasion the black kerchief she wore every day of her life, replacing it with an ancient, heavily-veiled black hat. But this orderly life, with its dependence on the kindly monarch and the great city, commemorated in Robert Musil's wry masterpiece
The Man Without Qualities,
was not to last. It was shattered not so much by the Great War as by its aftermath.

After the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, various provinces in Austria and Hungary were shaken by socialist, anarchist or bolshevist uprisings (the epithet varied from place to place). One of these forced my great-grandfather and his family (every one of them exploiters and toadies, of course) to take refuge in their cellar. My mother, who must have been six or seven at the time, recalled those days of terror more vividly and referred to them more frequently during her years in Australia than she was to speak about those later times, in the forties, when she was forced once again to seek shelter underground. They lost everything. According to my mother and grandmother, who saw all their woes as stemming from that time, the revolutionaries made off with considerable wealth: all their worldly possessions, furniture, clothes, sacks of produce, and most damagingly several bags of gold coins which had been carefully hidden in cunning places all around the house. Only one small satchel survived the attention of the raiders. A hitherto prosperous family was ruined. They were taken in by my grandmother's cousins who lived in Oedenburg (soon to become Hungarian and Sopron). Throughout my mother's childhood and adolescence these cousins took exquisite delight in reminding their impoverished relatives of their extraordinary kindness.