Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

“I thought you liked children.”

“I’m past the age where you pretend. The old are always pressing pictures of their descendants on me. Or they wave a postcard as though it were a revelation from God! They are pathetic. Take Gladys. Her son, as she tells it, is a combination of Superman and Dean Martin. Why do you think she is all primped up? Not to attract another old wreck, whatever she might say. She is making herself ready for a visit that is constantly being put off. Better not to have kids than to suffer their ingratitude!”

“My mother, Rachel, claims that parenthood is a form of Stockholm syndrome. In spite of themselves, the parents develop an attachment to the children who are holding their life hostage.”

“She has an unusual sense of humor.”

“I’m not entirely sure it was meant as a joke.”

“You should be more forbearing! You are fortunate to have a family.”

Anna smiled; forbearance was her worst fault. She had renounced the benefits of a good adolescent crisis, wanting not to envenom further an already toxic divorce. In adulthood she did not allow herself to hate her parents as she would have liked. She loved them as she wanted to be loved herself: with constancy and without asking for ransom. She had persuaded herself that they were saving their demonstrations of affection for old age. As their departure from this world approached, they would surely feel an irrepressible urge to touch her. They always turned up late for things.

“One’s family can also be a poison.”

“Especially among your people.”

Anna stiffened. The allusion to her Jewish roots set off all her internal alarms.

“I cannot talk about your family without being taken for a Nazi?”

“I’m bothered by your prejudices.”

“This is not a prejudice. Jewish families are somewhat suffocating. I had many Jewish friends. Most of the Princeton community were fleeing the war in Europe.”

Anna twirled a strand of hair around her finger; she almost carried it to her mouth but her mother’s admonition, deeply anchored in her subconscious, stopped her: “Don’t chew on your hair! You look like a retard.”

“Are you embarrassed? You mustn’t be! I’m no fool, the question has been buzzing in your head since the beginning. I can read your thoughts: That Gödel woman, if you scratch a little, has the not very nice makings of a good Austrian Catholic. Am I not right?”

Leaving her hair alone, the young woman worried her lower lip. The story of the Jews in Europe, never discussed, had haunted her childhood.

“A member of your family died in the camps?” Adele pursued.

Anna repressed a painful feeling of nostalgia, remembering Grandmother Josepha and her gallery of photos of the beloved dead, the silver frames bordered in black. Her “Wailing Wall,” as her son teasingly called it. Dust on books in stacked piles; heat; the triple-locked door; apple strudel; the scraping of violin lessons; nursery rhymes in German: her memories formed an indigestible porridge.

“On my father’s side. Two of his uncles didn’t manage to leave Germany in time. And lots of others, but not as close.”

Adele made a gesture of helplessness. Anna, who had been ready to listen if not to forgive, felt the old woman’s casual acceptance as a slap in the face. This was her family’s history.

“In Vienna, in 1938, you didn’t see it coming? You didn’t find the whole thing revolting?”

“I had my own problems to deal with at the time.”

“How could you not do anything? There were mass arrests and people being massacred.”

“Is it excuses you want to hear? Shame? I can’t go back in time. I will not repudiate the person I was and still am. I wasn’t courageous. I saved my husband. I saved my own life. That was all.”

Anna struggled with herself not to make any response. She needed Adele to be a person she could admire, a person of superior wisdom, formed by a fate beyond the usual. No one escapes the bell, the Gaussian curse. The all too mediocre truth was staring right at her. She would have preferred to hate the woman.

“Don’t judge me. You don’t know how you would act if it was your back against the wall. Maybe you would be a heroine. Maybe not.”

“I’ve heard that line before. It doesn’t work for me.”

“I lost people close to me in the war also.”

It was no excuse to Anna, especially an excuse of this kind.

“Why should I be more to blame than Kurt? He acted no differently! Did his intelligence give him license to be blind?”

“You’re hiding behind him.”

“If you read his correspondence, you would understand just how blind he was. It made his friend Morgenstern smile. Probably to keep from shuddering. Kurt was preoccupied only with himself.”

“Your husband was a coward?”

“No! He simply had a great capacity to ignore things. He couldn’t stand any kind of conflict. Even if I had wanted to respond, if I had been able to get past my education, my fear, I could never have made him look squarely at life. All he had to do was raise the specter of Purkersdorf.”

“He used his depression as an excuse?”

“As a rampart against reality. Sometimes.”

“And you went along with it?”

“You want me to be both stupider and more lucid than he was! To be everything that he was not.”

“I’m not demanding anything from you.”

“You are looking for a nice old lady, maybe a little crazy, who says wise things while she sips her sherry. I am not that person, dear girl. Like you, I am a woman who has given up. You don’t recognize yourself in me because your resignation is recent. It’s a kind of lightness that only weighs on you with time.”

“You’re wrong on my score. ‘Light’ is the last word to describe me. And if I had given up, I wouldn’t be here.”

Adele grabbed her wrist, and Anna didn’t have the heart to pull away. She felt the life still pulsing through the big, liver-spotted hand. She hesitated a moment, but she did not lean in to kiss the old lady. She had no forgiveness to give. And no desire or right to give forgiveness. Their precarious friendship wouldn’t survive such a parody of absolution. Adele seemed to be drifting off already, or to be pretending to in order to avoid saying goodbye. Anna tucked her in carefully.

Before she left, she pulled the blinds down and turned off the lights. In the hall she came across a couple that was clearly under stress: the man was carrying a sleeping child whose mouth was smeared with candy. In the woman’s pinched face could be read all the reproaches that she planned to address to the rearview mirror. The lobby was garishly festooned with garlands and the night nurse looked sour. No need to summon any special Halloween ghosts — everyone walks around with his own escort.

Do you endorse the reunification of Austria with the German Reich, decreed on 13 March, 1938, and do you cast your vote for the party of our leader, Adolf Hitler?

— Austrian referendum ballot, April 10, 1938

The predawn sky, when I opened the windows, was as gray as on every other morning. I could hear the grape pickers calling in the distance. I lit the stove, humming a little song, made his breakfast — a cup of tea and a slice of dark bread — aligned the knife and fork according to his specifications. Everything had to be perfect. I took the liberty of drawing a horizontal figure eight with the plum jam. Hoping he wouldn’t take exception to it. I was exaggerating my happiness a little: it was my wedding day, the focus of many years of yearning. I poured myself some tea to settle my nausea. I shined his shoes, ironed his clothes carefully and laid them all out on a chair, attentive to the creases. My man’s clothes were sometimes more expressive when he was somewhere else.