When I got out of bed the next morning it was as if I had not slept at all. Perhaps I had not.

My sleep had been punctuated by nightmares populated by wolves hunting me. In most of them, I was in a strange ancient forest with tall trees with wide branches that kept the sunlight from penetrating to the ground with only intermittent beams breaking through the canopy. I would be running, sweat running down my face, clothes in tatters and I could hear the baying of the pack in the distance. When I could run no longer I’d hide behind trees until I caught my breath and then run some more with the howling growing ever nearer. Finally, I would make it to my destination. A wide dark river, that miraculously had a small punt on its shore. I would run to the boat and push into the black water and only notice after jumping in the boat the large wolf, teeth bared and growling, standing in the stern of the little boat.

Mama knew when I did not sleep well and was always gentle with on those mornings. Today was not difference, she told me to go down the hall to the communal bathrooms to clean up and when I came back, she would have a special breakfast for me this morning. When I returned, she had set up our little table several pieces of rough brown bread, a cup of black tea and the miracle, a small container of honey. How she managed to get this precious thing I did not think to ask as just looking at it made my mouth drool. I must have looked like a baby shark with its first kill attacking that food because Mama chuckled with joy and kissed me on my head.

When I had finished and was licking the last of the golden syrupy off my finger tips Mama said. “Hugi, today you must do an errand for me. You must take the ties to Winters.”

Perhaps I should explain. Mama was trained to be a seamstress at the Orphans Home in Vienna. No, she was not an orphan. Exactly. It is complicated.  She was born in Sopron, Hungary and her father had died when she was three. Her mother, Lilly,  was  my grandfather Mordecai’s third wife and in addition to the three children she had with him there were ten other children. It was decided, I don’t know how, to send Mama to live with Lilly’s sister, Pepi and her husband Sigmund.in Fahrafeld in Lower Austria. It is was a wonderful place for a little girl to grow up.  I know because during the summer Mama would send me to live with Pepi and it was there amongst the streams, meadows and hills that I learned the skills of a Kiowa warrior. (Or at least I imagined I did especially after reading one of Karl May’s books.). Sigmund, was a master tailor. All the local gentry, including Duke Leopold, came to him to have their clothing made. Mama used to help him and showed an aptitude for needlework. When he died when Mama was 13, it was decided that it would be best if she were placed in a Jewish Orphanage that specialized in teaching children tailoring.

When I small child I could sit and watch Mama sew for hours. Whether it was on the small pedal driven sewing machine that occupied a small corner of our apartment or doing hand stitching. It all seemed so effortless for her. The most amazing part of it all is that she could do all these things with a needle and thread while having complete conversations with other people and never missed a stitch. Perhaps that is how she and her friends got into the business of making ties. A friend would come to our apartment to kibbitz and Mama would be sewing away and they would join in. Or perhaps it happened some other way. No matter how it began, every morning, after their husbands left for work these ladies would gather in our apartment and make ties. One of them, I do not know who, arranged to have these ties sold to Winter’s Department store. Once a week or so, one of the ladies would take the ties to the stores, and collect the money owed to them.

Then, shortly after Kristallnacht, one of the ladies was beaten and robbed by a group of  brown shirts on hew way home from Winter’s. Since then one of the husbands was given the job of delivering the ties to Winters. And when that was not possible I became the chosen one. It was not a difficult job and usually Mama would give me a few Krone for my troubles. But it was not safe either. There had been more than once when some local tuffs had decided that my young jewish body was not tender enough and it needed a beating and I had been forced to run for it.

 I must have groaned a little because she said “Hugi, we need the money for our journey. It won’t be so bad. Why don’t you ask Tad to come with you. Maybe he would enjoy visiting with his Uncle.” Tad’s Uncle Anton was an impressive man. A decorated officer in the Great War, he had commanded the Crown Guard of Hungary before retiring in Vienna. A former colleague had offered him the General Manager’s job at Winters. Bored with a life leisure he had accepted. Tad adored his Uncle, and the stories he would tell of the War and the intrigue that went on within the Hungarian court.( I have to admit that his stories were fantastic but sometimes I thought them so fantastic that I thought there was a chance that he was just making up stories for our ears.) Regardless, whenever Mama tasked me with going to Winter’s to deliver her ties Tad was happy to tag along in the hopes that we get a chance to see his Uncle.

That afternoon, I was waiting for Tad in the Park by his school. I had drawn the wolfs paw mark symbol in chalk on sidewalk outside the school knowing he would see it and come to our meeting place on the playground. But not before I was spotted by Fritz Bauer, the son of the superintendent of our building. The Bauers, father, mother and son had been amongst the cheering crowd at Anschluss. They taunted, insulted and spat at the Jewish families in the building at every opportunity. On Krystallnacht, as the storm troopers wrestled Papa out of the building Mr. Bauer brutally punched my father in the face, spat on him and called him a Jewish cur.

Fritz, who was a year younger than me, had picked up his parents habits. Whenever he saw me on the street, and I was alone, he would do what I could do to ignore him. What could I do? If I punched him or roughed him about like he deserve, he would no doubt go running to his parents and they to the police and my parents would be arrested. So, I took it. Or did most of the time. And today I was in no mood for him. I had too many things on my mind between Mama and Papa’s plan to move to Poland, the Tomahawk,  and my planned escape down the Danube and the  conflict between the two of them. Consequently, when he said to me “Hey there Jew boy. What you have hidden in that bag…your horns.” I lost it. I walked up to him and as I was a few centimetres taller than him, bent over and said in my most menacing voice “Don’t leave your apartment after dark. We are everywhere. If we see you, we will take you to our secret temple and perform the ancient ritual of circumcision, implant horns onto your heads, and make you a Jew just like us.” His face turned white and a look of sheer terror overtook him and he ran away. How stupid of me. I should not be making trouble but sometimes you can’t help it.

Just then Tad showed up. Pointing at the fleeing Fritz he said “What is that all about?”

“Nothing. Just a Kiowa warrior letting pale face know what happens when you venture to far from your tribe.”

Tad laughed “ So good. It is good to know that you still have something dangling between your legs…” Then noticing the bag said “Winters?”

“Yes. We need to deliver ties for Mama. She thought you would like to come along and see your Uncle.”

“Why not. I don’t have anything else to do if we are not working on Tomahawk. Do you want to try the Tram.”

Normally, I would have said “yes” even though we were not allowed but the Fritz confrontation has shaken me. I did not want to risk another.” No lets walk. We can spend the time making a list of the things we need to complete on Tomahawk.

We arrived at Winter’s just before 16:00 and made our way around to the merchants entrance in the back of the store. Milling around the entrance were a half dozen stubble face, roughly dressed young men hoping that Winter’s might need an extra hand or two unloading trucks and failing that finding a little trouble that would allow them to feel a little better about themselves. They gave Tad and me a hard time as we walked by shoving us along and warning us what they would do to us if we took their opportunity away. One of them, I guess the leader, kept flicking open and then closing a gravity knife to intimidate us. It worked.

We hurried into the store and made our way past the loading docks and the racks of suits and dresses on trolley’s waited to be moved to storerooms to a small booth just inside the service entrance. There, a stern looking man with a toothbrush moustache, just like Herr Hitlers, demanded to know why we were here despite the fact he asked me the same question many times before. I told him that I had a delivery for Herr Gruber, the tie buyer at Winters. He scowled at us but reluctantly called upstairs and within fairly short order Herr Gruber arrived and escorted us into a small room directly adjacent to the guard’s booth.

Herr Gruber was a tall, very slim, and elegantly dressed man. I had never seen him with anything about his person out of place, not even a hair. He was also very formal with a ramrod posture and a pair of Pince Nez glasses that seemed perfectly at home on his nose. He never engaged in niceties such as asking after our health or for that matter even speculating about weather and always got right down to business. Today, though, something was different. He would not meet my eye and seemed furtive as if he was about to give me an unpleasant surprise.

He said “How many ties have you brought me today, Hugi.”

I put the paper satchel I had been carrying and placed on the table and replied “I have a 100 ties.”

He turned the bag on it side and began to pull each tie of the bag individually and inspecting carefully to make sure the stitching was immaculate and up to his standards. This took some time and Tad and impatiently squirmed in our chairs.”

He gave us his version of a smile, a minor upturn of the corner of the mouth, as if anything beyond that would be painful and said “As usual, the workmanship is beautiful. How much have we agreed to pay for the ties?”

This was an odd question and immediately put me on alert as the price had been the same for as long as I had been delivering ties for Mama.  “Herr Gruber, respectfully sir but you know the price has always been the same two deutschmarks per tie.”

He bowed his slightly and removing his glasses from his nose looked at me as what he was about to say to me was personally painful to him. “I am sorry Hugi but we can no longer pay you that amount. We have been told that we need to reduce what we are paying our Jewish merchants. I am only authorized to pay one point five deutschmarks per tie.”

I protested “But that is unfair. Mama and her friends made these ties under the promise that you pay two.” And making it up added “ 1.5 is barely enough to cover the cost of the cost of the fabric.”

“Hugi, I wish I could pay you more, but I cannot. You can either accept our offer or you are free to go and sell the ties to someone else. What do you want to do? “

What do I do? It was so unfair. Mama and her friends were counting on the money that the ties made them. They needed this money for food, for rent. They were barely getting by as it is. We needed the money too. Mama and Pappa were going off to Poland to start a new life. They needed every deutschmark they could find. Everyone would yell at me for not getting more money and call me a lazy ignorant boy who should have been able to negotiate more.

Just as I was about to throw in the towel Tad, who had been sitting silently next to me, said “Herr Gruber, would you mind if we spoke to my Uncle, Herr Steyr. Perhaps he can help explain better why the price you are paying for ties has changed.”

I could of kissed Tad. It got me out of my predicament. No matter what happened I could tell Papa and the others that we had called the store manager. Herr Gruber was less pleased with Tad’s utterance. His normally pinched face got more so, like he just sucked a whole lemon. He replied primly “Your Uncle is Herr Steyr? Very good. I will call him, but I doubt that he can change things. Our order are coming directly from the government.”  

Herr Gruber excused himself and went in search of Tad’s Uncle. I leaned over to him and whispered “That was a smart move Shatterhand. Call in Calvary.” Tad looked smug, as he often did when I praised him and replied “It was nothing, Winnetou. You will see. My Uncle will make sure you are treated well.”

Fifteen minutes later, and just as I was beginning to squirm, Herr Gruber returned looking, chastened, and if possible, even more pinched than before. Behind him strode Tad’s Uncle. Tall, with a long narrow face accented with a Ronald Colman moustache he had an erect bearing and command presence that befit his military background. His gaze fell on me and then switched over to Tad and said “Well, nephew what do you have to say for yourself. Herr Gruber, tells me that you are making all sorts of trouble….as usual.”

“Uncle, I was not trying to be troublesome. But didn’t you always tell me that we are supposed to try to do the right thing. That is what I was trying to do. The store promised Hugi’s Mom two deutschemarks per tie and Herr Gruber told us that he can only pay them one and half because of some new regulation. That is not fair. Isn’t Winter’s promises good anymore.”

Tad surprised me. A lawyer could not have argued our case any better. As silly and fanciful as he could be when it was needed he knew how to rise to the occasion.

Herr Steyr nodded and turned his gaze on Herr Gruber who responded without being asked “Herren, you know the new regulations about dealing with Jewish businesses. I was only trying to follow my instructions.”

“ Ah so. I understand.  You were trying to accomplish but isn’t Winter’s Department store’s reputation important too. Aren’t we supposed to live up to our word. What if became known that we tried to cheat our vendors?  We would not have a business anymore. Yes. What is the difference between what we promised and what you know want to pay them.”

“Fifty Deutschemarks.”

“Well don’t you think that is a small price to pay for our reputation?” Obsequiously, Herr Gruber nodded. “So go and get Herr Floessel his money. I will sign the chit so you if there are any problems, I will be responsible.”

When Gruber had left the room, Tad’s Uncle demeanour completely changed. His erect bearing became a little less stiff and the stern look on his face morphed into the happy smile of a benevolent and loving Uncle. He waggled his finger at Tad and said “One day young man, you are going to get us both into a pickle that I won’t be able to get us out of.” For years afterward, I wondered whether this was mere conversation or prophecy.

He added “If you boys can wait here for another 30 minutes. I will be happy to drive you home. Probably, safer for you Hugi with all those Deutschemarks in your pocket.”

45 minutes were driving down Kartner Strasse in Uncle Anton’s pale yellow 1938 Skoda Rapid Saloon. I knew the car instantly because even though I had rarely driven in a private car I was totally besotted with them. How wonderful it would be to own a car and not have to wait for a tram or go wherever you wanted to go whenever you want to go there. I particularly like the Rapid. It had such a modern look with with a large chrome front grill that swept back into a long hood. Its large black fenders were streamlined and gave the car a sense of speed even when it was standing at the curve. And this car could go fast. I read somewhere it could reach 100 km/hr. How must that feel? The interior was just as modern as the exterior with large dials, impressive looking toggle switches. It even had a radio.

Both Tad and I were sitting in the front seat. I was closer to the door and Tad sitting next to his Uncle. Tad seemed as interested in the Skoda as I was but for different reasons for me it was the novelty of driving in a car but for Tad it was because the car was new to him. He asked “Uncle is this a new car? Didn’t you used to have  and have a BMW?”

Anton paused for a second before answering as if he was weighing how to answer this simple question. He looked at me before he answered and said “A friend of mine was immigrating to Shanghai and he needed to sell his car and gave me a very good price.” I, of course, knew what he meant although I am not sure Tad did. A lot of Jews were leaving in Vienna and going to Shanghai. Not only did it seem far away from the war but the only real restriction to going was the money for the steamer. And, of course, how to get your money out of Austria. It meant that those leaving had to sell everything they owned almost always for much less than their value. Then they would take the money and convert to items that could be hidden in their luggage on their person. This was dangerous. If you were caught trying to smuggle items out of Austria your exit visa would be revoked and you would be arrested and sent to a concentration camp. But what choice did they have. Getting to Shanghai with no money meant starvation or worse.

Uncle Anton changed the subject quickly. He asked Tad “Did you see that the car has a radio? Now I can drive and listen to music as I drive. Why don’t you turn it on and see if you can find us some nice music. Radio Salzburg usually has a concert at this hour.” Tad did not have to be asked twice. He turned on the radio and then after the glow of the tubes had steadied he adjusted the dial producing a lot of annoying static before finding the right frequency.” The car filled with dramatic music and the rich sounds of a choir in full exalted voice.

“Do you know this boys.” And as if sensing the shaking of our heads he answered his own question “It is the “Gloria” from Liszt’s Hungarian Coronation Mass.” The music seemed to take him to a different place and time and for a short  while there was only sounds in the car were that of the music and that of the tires against the pavement.

The silence made me uncomfortable. Remembering that Herr Skoda had once been the commander of the Crown Guard, (how could I forget. Tad was immensely proud of his Uncle.and whenever he was given a chance would start a sentence with “My uncle was the commander of the Crown Guard and he says” Or, “My Uncle was the commander of the Crown Guard he thinks.” It was annoying. I decided that I would get my revenge. “Herr Skoda, Tad tells me you once the Commander of Crown Guard. I never quite understood what they did? Why does a crown need its own guard?”

Tad shot me a look but Uncle Anton took the bait and asked “What do you know about the crown of St. Stephen? “

“It is the crown for the Hungarian King?’” I replied tentatively.

“It is far more than that. For 1000 years, since the Pope bestowed it on King Stephen, it has crowned every Hungarian King. No King is legitimate without it. But it is even more than that. It is said, that Hungary must have a King who is worthy of the crown that is worthy of the crown. Not the other way around. It is the symbol of all tha is special about Hungary. Then looking at me he said “One of my predecessors said “the Holy Crown is to Hungary what the Holy Ark is for the Jewish people.”

“The Crown Guard is different than other units in the army. Most swear to uphold the orders of the superiors and of the government. We, of the Crown Guard, swear with our lives to protect the Crown from anyone who seeks to usurp it’s power. For example, should the Nazi’s decide to replace the regent, Admiral Horthy, like they did with Schuschnigg, then it is certain that the Crown Guard would act and spirit The Crown and the Holy retinue out of Hungary and somewhere for safekeeping. This has happened many times in the past. King Bela IV escaping from Ghengis Khan, King Wenceslaus escaped with her to prague and it lay under thousands of corpses after the battle of Mohacs.”

He pauses and says “Can I trust you boys with a secret.” Tad and I both nod and tell him “of course.” And he adds. “No I am serious. No matter what happens to you or what the circumstance you must swear never to reveal what I am about to tell you. Raise your hands swear.” We, of course, said we would. We felt grown up being taken into Uncle Anton’s confidence.

For the next ten minutes Uncle Anton explained, in some detail, the plan that was in place to protect the Crown should it be threatened. There was a group of three Wardens who were appointed by Crown Regent Horthy whose sole charge was to ensure the safety of St. Stephen’s Crown. Should they determine it in danger, they would order the Holy Crown to be taken from its crypt by the Crown Guard, placed in specially created trunks that were secured with three unique keys and taken west, most likely a destination in Austria where it was to be hidden.

Tad and I were spell bound. It was as if we were pot of one of the cheap spy novels we would find discarded on trams or buy from a news agent when he had few extra coins in our pockets.

I asked “But what happens if your plot is discovered. Or the men are captured and forced to talk.” I said, shivering a little, thinking of the stories I had heard of Gestapo interrogation techniques.

“Hubi, we Hungarians are very clever. The Crown is too precious to the fate of our homeland and to those who want to use it to wield power to damage it. No one would dare damage the trunks that are carrying it. And there is no way into them without the keys. So, the keys will be distributed to three trustworthy men. The plan is that none of the other men who has the other keys. And of course that is what they will be told but it won’t be true. It would be too dangerous. One man will know the location of all three keys. Someone trusted. Someone whose loyalty cannot be questioned but is no longer actively in charge of protecting The Holy Crown. Someone who would not be suspected. Hmmm. Who could that be….” And then he looked over at both of us and winked.

That night I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come I thought about that conversation. The story of the Crown was so fantastic. But it confused me. Why would Tad’s uncle tell both of us this story. It was pretty hot stuff for two thirteen year old boys to be trusted especially if one was Jewish and had no connection to the crown. It could be ego. Letting us know how important he was but I did not get the sense that he was the time of man who needed to brag to feel important. No, there was a reason he told us. I just couldn’t figure it out.

And,  while over time it was a mystery that I would wonder about often right then it didn’t seem worth my while. I had much bigger problems that needed to be solved.

 

Mama and Papa began to prepare themselves for the journey east. We owned a little of value. Our entire furniture consisted of a large bed in which they slept and a small bed for me, a couch with broken springs, a marble washstand with a cracked pitcher, two wardrobes filled with very old clothing, and Mama’s sewing machine. That is what they had seem able to gather during the many hard years for their life. All of it fitted into one small room and one small kitchen. The secondhand furniture dealer that came to the apartment, smiled apologetically and offered them a few marks for the lot. It would cost more than its worth to move it away. Mama, despite the tears it cost her , sold a few gold trinkets she owned. Papa was concerned about the harsh polish winter, and he said that he wanted to make sure we had sound shoes and some warm clothing. With money from Mama’s earrings and a pearl pin she inherited from her mother many years ago, he was able to buy a used pair of jack boots for himself and to have good soles put on them. Mama traded a few meters of wool cloth , she had been saving, with a neighbor for an old but warm overcoat. Uncle Sigi gave me a short cloth coat with a moth-eaten sheepskin collar. It smelled bad and I didn’t like it at all but I didn’t tell anyone, not even Mama.

Besides trying to get some decent clothing together, there were all kinds of bureaucratic formalities that had to be taken care of, Certificates had to be obtained from the tax office , the police station, the housing office, and the rationing board. Mama and Papa spent waiting in the corridors of city offices.
The tug of war between the preparations for the trip that were taking place all around me and my planned last minute desertion were hard to bear. I usually loved getting ready for trips or excursions of any kind but now I didn’t know which way to turn. Could I get really involved with what my parents were doing when I carried the secret of Tomahawk in my heart. It was difficult for me to keep my course amidst the eddies of conflicting feelings – enthusiasm , sentiment , and anxiety ; hot , cold , excited and depressed. I became moody and tried to withdraw from Mama and Papa’s efforts to get ready for Poland. As a consequence we began to snap at each other frequently and argued over petty, inconsequential detail.

“Forgive me for saying it,” I heard Mama complain to Rosa Querbaum, “it is as if the trip to Poland is putting bitter pill in everything we taste.”

Meanwhile , Tad was searching , without much success, for the equipment that we needed to complete Tomahawk. A pump was required so that we could force water out of the dive tanks when we wanted to surface. My plans also called for a second set of bicycle pedals and sprocket wheels to operate the pump and to turn the propeller. Tad owned an old bicycle and its mechanism and frame was ready to be fitted into Tomahawk. But we planned to work the pumps and the propeller with two sets of pedals so that we could tread , simultaneously , while sitting side by side on the diving bench of the boat. Tad looked everywhere , junk shops, scrap yards ,and the attics and cellars of relatives but nothing suitable turned up.

On all Saint’s Day , Tad arrived in a wild state of excitement at our apartment. He had been scavenging in a backroom of his uncle’s automobile repair shop in Doebling. Amidst piles of car parts and metal junk , Tad had found a treasure hoard : two hydraulic cylinders that might serve as pumps , several bearings, and a long steel shaft that we might use to mount a propeller. He had dragged the pieces one by one , back to his apartment house and hid them in the coal cellar.

It was raining heavily when Tad arrived to make his triumphant announcement but I instantly put on my jacket. We raced each other to Tad’s house through streets that were now slick with rain.

“Perfect” I said , still panting ,”You are a genius. These cylinders are just right for the blowing process.” I stroked the greasy metal lovingly with my fingers.

“They are in very good condition. Perfect.”

“Agreed! Excellent! Let’s get them down to the hut right away.”

“I am not going near that hut,” I replied quickly. “With all this rain, the mud would  ground leave a trail that even a blind Indian could read. The police will see the trail and begin to patrol the road.”

“You made that stupid remark before!” Tad was peeved. The problem had not occurred to Tad and that stung his pride. He sat down heavily on the stairs and stared into the gloom. Outside the low cellar window, the rain intensified. It looked as if it would storm deep into the night. Tomorrow the ground would be a quagmire.

“I guess we will have to wait until have to wait until things dry out. .” The thought made me sick. It might rain for days. And then the snows would come. We might have to stay away from Tomahawk for the rest for months. What would happen then? In my heart I knew that if Tomahawk was not close to finished when my parents were ready to leave for Poland with them like a good little boy. We did not months. We may not even have weeks. Suddenly, I felt terribly blue and alone. My body seemed paper-thin and I sighed deeply as if my soul had sprung a leak.

“Wait,” said Tad. “I have an idea.” He need not have said anything. The glow in his face was clearly visible even in the deep gloom. “Since my uncle went back to his army unit from his leave , there is no one at the garage his part-time helper, Gusti. He’d let us work there. He isn’t dumb but he doesn’t have much imagination.”

That was a very interesting thought. “Hey,” I said, “do you really think we could get in there ? That garage would be perfect with all those tools.” Fitting that shaft to the driving mechanism and modifying the hydraulic cylinders was no easy job and I had worried about weather I would really be able to handle it Gusti might be a lot of help.

On the other hand , Gusti, whose full name was August Aloysius Huber , might ask a lot of questions about what we are trying to do. My nose itched. It was hard to know when to be bold and when to be careful.

A new thought about Gusti , suddenly occurred to me. “what do you think Tad?” I asked, showing my nose in profile to Tad . “Do I look very Jewish?”

Tad was obviously becoming more excited about the garage in Doebling becoming our winter substitute for the fisherman’s hut.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I can tell Gusti almost anything and he’d believe me . Word of honour, I can do it, I’ll tell him you are one of my schoolmates. You were until a while ago, you know. And I’ll spin a story about wanting to build a diver’s outfit, He’d laugh and kid us a little but , he’d let us do what we want. Just as long as we don’t get in his way. He might even help if we could find a little bottle of Schnapps for him.”

This was the way tad had contrived to have us more into the snug and warm automobile repair shop in Doebling. The weather turned cold and snow fell nearly everyday. Inside the garage ,a generously stoked coal stove kept us comfortable. The shop had been classified as important to the war economy and so they got more of the rationed coal than was really needed. It smelled of motor oil and coal smokes and the potatoes that Gusti roasted on top of the round bellied stove.

We began rebuilding the hydraulic cylinders so that they could be used as pumps. Tad had been right about Gustl. A bottle of Kuemmel , (Gustl claimed eased digestion due to its caraway and fennel flavoring)  stolen by Tad from his mother’s store , turned the mechanic into a jolly, benevolent elf. He patiently listened to Tad’s diving suit story and laughed and kidded us about it a little. After watching my clumsy efforts to build the pump, he became interested, and started to help. I’m not sure whether it was the Kuemmel or just love of tinkering. The grease – blackened fingers of the old mechanic performed wonders. The more he succeeded, the more involved he became. Gusti salvaged a drive mechanism from a rusted old bicycle , cleaned it and adjusted it until it purred when turned. He machined a gear for us to move the hydraulic cylinders and fitted it with a take-off gear to which the propeller drive shaft could be attached.

“You wont find a gear like this just any place, “ Gusti aid proudly and took another swig of Kuemmel , “you see here it has a regular gear wheel for the shaft , and then you push this lever out the sprocket wheel drives a Geneva mechanism. I got the idea fro a movie projector I repaired once. The Geneva gadget converts circular motion of the bicycle sprocket wheel into the back and forth movements of the pump’s piston. You have to have tippled on a Viennese mother’s milk to think of something like this.”

Due to the rain the  blackout had been suspended for over  a week. I sat by the apartment window and stared through the rain splashed panes at the black glistening patches of sidewalk were emerging from the frozen snow. With luck, we would be able to get back to the hut soon and could start installing the driver gear and the pumps.

A gust of wind threw a cascade of water across the panes. This is the way it looks through the port hole , I thought. Green water will be everywhere. We will be floating through green water aglow with sunlight filtering down from the surface. Tomahawk will glide through a forest of water plants bending in the current. Blow the tanks! I could hear the sharp click of the lever engaging the pumps, and the whir of the drive gear. Slowly our submarine tilts upwards and rises to the surface shedding silvery streams of water. Just ahead is an island , its shores seamed with high grass and black bamboo. A crane bends to catch a  fish , and a beaver races away Tomahawk , trailing a quivering tongue of water. My command is “Half-speed,” “I see movement in the reeds. A deer! We will have to roast venison for lunch.”

The noise of the opening apartment door startled me out of my revery. Papa must be coming home from visiting Uncle Sigi. I heard Mama giving him the usual fluttering welcome in the kitchen. Somehow she managed to be able to be at the hall door when ever he came home to take his coat and hat and look him over as if to make sure that everything had been returned in good order. Nearly always , she found some small speck of foreign matter, a raindrop or a stray snow flake on his forehead or shoulder and brush it off. Mama does this even if Papa had only gone out to buy a few cigarettes. She acts as if he had been on some trying mission . The city streets were a hostile , foreign place to her. Her husband was returning to her sheltering cove. I will miss them.

They came into the room arm in arm and I rose from my window seat to kiss Papa who had sat down on the couch to take off his shoes. He looked up at me and smiled. “Well,” he said, “at least I have some definite news about our departure. The Cohens were at the Jewish Community agency this morning. The transport schedule has been posted. We will leave , with god’s will on December 1.

“The 1^st ?” asked Mama, “Its definite then?”

“Yes ,” said Papa, “this is somewhat later than I thought it would be. But, I suppose there are always problems in a project of this kind, Sigi says that he has heard that people in our group will be given the job of building house accommodations for the following transports. I guess this means we have to prepare ourselves to make do with temporary accommodations when we get to Poland.. We might,” he said turning to me with a small smile,” we might have to sleep in tents at first.

This maybe a little rough if the Polish winter is still as I remember it . But you always like the idea of living in a tent , didn’t you?”

I tried very hard to imagine what this Polish tent encampment would be like but my recent green and silver vision of the delta kept getting in the way. Nevertheless there was something about the definiteness of the departure date and about the trip that touched my imagination and disturbed me.

I drew a chair to my father . “You said that 1^st is earlier than you expected, didn’t you?”

Papa frowned. “Yes , but I told you that I am not surprised. The winters in Poland are very tough. The functionaries who are in charge of the project probably want us there as soon as possible. Apparently, we need to build accommodations for those to follow and they want to get on it right away.. It requires a lot of preparation to accommodate so many people. There are probably few good buildings that are fit for families. That’s why they need us now .To get started.? I am sure that people in charge will give us all we need when we get there. .”

“Oh , I can understand that , Papa. I am not complaining, I am just surprised at home quickly this is devleoping ?” I touched my father’s arm.

“Tell me Papa, are there many deer in Poland? Do they still have wild wolves.”

“Well I am sure that there are a few left in the forests.”

“Do you imagine that we will be allowed to hunt them”

“For heaven’s sake ,” growled Papa , “your head is always full of wild ideas. I can’t bother myself with your nonsense questions. I have had a long day and I’m going to bed. Who in their right mind want to go wolf hunting ?”

I was already opening my mouth to ask him about deer, but then I saw the scowl in his face and I changed mind.

My face was resting on my hand as I awoke and the sharp metallic smell of solder flux on my fingers stung my nose. My bed, tucked into the corner of our flat that was our “kitchen”,  felt lumpy. I stretched and squinted at the gray wall next to my head. Perhaps I ought to skip school today. What a pleasant thought! Go down to the hut again. Out into the open beside the river. Away from this gloomy apartment house, away from the smell of old clothes and worry and where hope still resided.  There was a loot to do on tomahawk’s diving pipes. The thought of our boat waiting for us done at the river sent a rush of prickly warmth to my legs. Then I remembered last night. Papa’s shy, proud smile. Poland ! We ere going to Poland. Everything crumpled within. What was I to do?

My body felt weak all over and I sank back in the bed, rolled over onto my side, and pulled the blanket over my head . For years I had a scary dream. It was nearly the same. It was autumn and my parents and I would be walking through a deep forest. The leaves were falling and covering the ground with somber browns and pale yellows. We would reach fork in the path, and Mama and Papa, hand in hand, would turn down one side while I had to walk the other. As I continued down my path, my parents would walked down theirs. The woods were dense and after a few steps I could no longer see them but could hear their feet shuffling through the dry dead leaves that lined the path. And then nothing as they faded from my hearing.  I would awaken in a start, sweaty and tingling with terror.

Now it seemed my dream was becoming real. I felt my forehead now. It was cold and wet.

If I could only talk to Tad. But he was in school. Aryans still went to school regularly, Tad had been complaining. I feel humiliated because they are not letting me attend the Realgymnasium but he complains because he has to go. Uncle Leo once told me, “You can lie naked in a snowdrift and someone will envy you.” That was the day after Uncle Leo’s unemployment pay ran out and his family was being fed by relatives.

I tried to visualize Tad sitting in one of the worn oaken chairs at the old Realgymnasium. Right now, he was probably listening to that pot-bellied Nazi prig, Professor Braunshcweig, lecturing about the ablative absolute. I thought I have to talk to Tad. We need to move far more quickly than we had planned.

Mama surprised me by how readily she agreed to having me stay home from school. I was just beginning to describe my stomachache, when she said yes. Without looking back at me, she left the room. Not like her at all.

I moped about the house all morning, waiting for school to close, sitting at the window, shutting out the apartment behind me, and trying to keep out of my parents’ way, bending over strips of scrap metal that I was filing into brackets from Tomahawk which I had told Papa was a project for school. When the Mt. Cavalry church bull chimed two, I was waiting in the small park that face the Realgymnasium. From my place on a bench, partially hidden by a large, barren brush, I had a clear view of the main gate of the school across the road. It seemed at first that flakes of mica in the cobblestones were glistening in the weak afternoon sun but then I realized, with sinking heart, that my eyes were filling with tears. Damn it ! It was all so confusing, and I didn’t wasn’t to cry. Going with my parents was the simplest thing to do. Maybe I should just pack up and go quietly with them. It would give me away from this dreary, vexing town. Away from a disaster. It was so appealingly neat and orderly. Mama and Papa and me going together to a new beginning somewhere else. All was arranged.

But there was Tad and Tomahawk! The dream of the green waters and to be free of this bloody war. The Danube carrying us to the delta and to the sea. We would seek new freedom – alone, exciting and unrestrained. Leaving Mama and Papa was hard but Poland was, in my mind, the land of nighmares with wolves always biting your heals. Mama and Papa want to be safe. To be free.  All that could be mended later when the war was over, and the Allies had won.

The problem was so big and so obvious. I understood it so clearly it hurt. Shelter! Tomahawk was not ready yet. What would become of me alone in Vienna to launch Tomahawk?

Should I tell my parents about our plan? Perhaps I could stay with a relative. No, this could never, never work. I could see Papa’s face flushing with anger .Papa would not see the reason. We would have a disastrous row and I would end up going to Poland.

From the interior of the school came the muffled buzz of the final class bell. Two fifteen ! I hope Tad is alone when he comes through the gate and not with that shaven-headed Hitler youth oaf Walter Heider. I could always step back behind the bush and then follow at a distance until he was alone. I felt edgy and did not want complications.

The school gates burst open and a swarm of shouting boys spilled into the street. I hoped he would see the stick figure wolfs paw with a line through the first claw I had scrawled on the lamppost outside the gate of the school. It was a symbol we had created to leave messages for each other. It meant I (paw one) was looking for him. Tad was taller than most of his group and I picked out of his bobbing dark shock of hair quickly. He separated form the crowd and strode purposefully to the park. He had seen it! He was alone. When I gave him our special owl whistle, his face lit up and quickly move towards me.

“Well” said Tad, as we walked out of the park together, “what news have you in the matter of Tomahawk? I tried to come down yesterday but Uncle Franz came home on leave from the army and I  had to go to his apartment right after school. It was fantastic. He brought me a Polish cavalry hat. Took it right off a man he killed. The pole was trying to attack his tank. Uncle Franz is a tanker , you know. Saw lots of action. He was awarded the Iron Cross, second class. I held it right in my hand.”

Here I was ready to tell Tad about my problems, but this shut me up. It was as if Tad’s story had tightened a rope around my neck. I pressed my lips together and walked silently beside him. That same puzzling, two-sided feeling was throttling me. I hated anything that bore the loathsome swastika, including the German Army. Yet here I walk at Tad’s side and listen to his stupid stories about Uncle Franz, the tanker in the death-black uniform. With all my troubles, I want to hear about their better adventures. What are they to mw? They think I am a rotten Jew.

It upset me that I was such an ass but after a while I regained my composure. I touched Tad’s arm to stop him from talking. “Listen Tad, I’m in real trouble. My old man got a job cleaning war rubble in Poland. We are all supposed to go with him. What in the world am I going to do ? They are not going to let me stay here while we get Tomahawk ready.”

“Thunderation”, Tad’s face became very serious, “this calls for an immediate palaver. Our opponents shall know our cunning to their regret.”

But I knew it was no use telling Tad to be serious. He was in a playful mood and wanted to pretend as if we had been attacked by Kiowa while planning in the sandbox in the park. Let him talk! He will soon grow tired of being Old Shatterhand, and we will have a proper conversation. I was in no mood for frivolity. This game had suddenly become very serious.

For two blocks, Tad recapitulated several of Old Shatterhand’s major speeches. He irritated me intensely, but despite of this I began to listen with increasing admiration. Tad Saegerer was actually better than Karl May.

Suddenly Tad stopped and turned to look at me fully. A triumphant grin spread over his face.

“I have it ! The perfect solution, Hugi! I will put you up in my uncle’s cottage in the Lobau. Nobody goes there in the winter and Aunt Hertha usually doesn’t open the house until the first of May. This is perfect. Its near Tomahawk , no more than a couple of kilometers and its safe. Of course, its up to you. But if I were you I would stay behind Vienna. Your parents might get angry but they will get over it after a while. You got to stay. I’ll hide you at the cottage.”

I remembered the garden house Tad was talking about. It was in a group of similar toy houses, each with a tiny garden. People like trolley conductors and storekeepers cultivated stamp-sized plots of cucumbers there and espaliered miniature pear trees along the walks. Small Viennese people worked very hard all summer to keep these Lilliputian villas in beautiful shape. They would certainly be more comfortable tan the fisherman’s hut. It was true. No one would look for him there. Neither police nor hobbos were likely to barge into one of these frilly garden houses.

“And by  May,” added Tad triumphantly, “we will be in Rumania.”

“Yes,” I said , “eating strawberries.”

“You have a nasty tongue.”

“Sure a nasty tongue! How will I get anything to eat in your Aunt Hertha’s dwarf cottage?”

We walked for a whole block through the narrow street without saying one word. Our footsteps rang loud on the cobblestones and the gray silent houses stared at us malevolently.

“I wouldn’t have any food ration stamps if my parents went to Poland without me. Even if I had ration stamps, where could I buy food in the deserted Lobau in the winter? And what would I buy food with? Sell your aunt’s and uncle’s cottage furniture? I will starve to death in that place.”

Tad waved me to a stop and smiled slyly.

“No problem, no problem,” he said. “You can rely on me. I will keep you supplied. You won’t be hungry, leave it to me. The great hunter of the plains had spoken.

“There will be smoked venison and buffalo steak. And roasted bear paw with dried blueberries. When spring comes and the ice in the river breaks, you be as fat as the bull elk in the oak forest.”

“Yeah,” said I “and my head, antler and all, will be mounted on the Gauleiter Burekel’s office wall.”

The smell of winter was in the air. As we wandered through the twilight streets, mysteriously, with each step, it all fell into place. Tad found words to reassure me and I gathered them close to my heart.

When we stopped in front of Tad’s grocery shop , it was almost dark. People were beginning to pull down their black-out shades and the lamps in a thousand apartments were being lit. we shook hands. My mind was made up. Tad was right. I will try to make it alone. The garden cottage was safe and Tad would probably be able to take care of me. By spring everything would be ready and we would start our journey down the river.

A sharp wind from the Northwind swept fiercely down the long street. I shivered. If it was this cold in October the winter was going to be bitter.  I pulled my jacket tight around my neck and started home.

 

 

Mama noticed my muddy shoes right away when I came home but she didn’t say anything. She probably thought that I had been in a park somewhere with Dita Roseman. After all I would be fourteen before long. It probably amused Mama a little to think I was growing into a man.

Maybe she just wanted to avoid stirring up trouble by asking, because Papa had just come home with some news. Whatever he said must have worried her or perhaps she was both confused and worried. Mama was preparing our supper in such an uncertain, nervous way,- rattling the pot, burning her finger, dropping a spoon on the floor . Usually she was so calm. The routine with which Mama brought the evening meal to the table was usually she same each day. She must be really worried. Mama worried was easily because she had led a hard life. Worry constantly gnawed at her bones but sometime were worse than others.

We sat down quietly at the table. Mama had been able to get a little chopped meat that morning at Mr. Wimmer’s butcher shop at the corner. Mixed with some stale rolls , it was enough to make three small patties. Mama and Papa ate their meal slowly while I wolfed mine down in a few bites. Now I wished I had more. It must have shown on my face because Mama, claimed she could not eat, and gave me what remained of her portion.

I could barely stay awake after we finished eating, crouching over Tomahawk’s plumbing all day had cramped my joints because I had been staring into the flame of the blow torch for so long I saw a pale halo of flickering blue flame around everything. But I forced myself to stay awake since I was curious about the news that Papa had brought home .

“So Papa,” I said through a broad yawn, “what did Dr. Lowestein have to say?” Papa was obviously pleased that I had asked because he lit a cigarette. The brief silence irritated me.

“What else did Lowenstein say?”

“Well,” said Papa “the Germans are setting up Jewish communities in Poland. We are supposed to be left in peace there and will be given work so we can live decently. The work cleaning up the rubble that has been left by the fighting. It’s all out in the country and some of these former city gentlemen are going to find the going rough. But it won’t bother me . Didn’t I spend seven years of my life in a Siberian prisoner of war camp. Every day of my life I have bent my back and used my hands to make money.”

He sucked one final wisp of smoke out of the last of the cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Listen, I know Poland. I was born in Galicia…I couldn’t wait to leave but maybe it is a good place for us now…what with the war.” I knew what he meant. He didn’t really mean the war. He meant the Nazi’s and the daily indignities he had been forced to endure. He never talked about them. But Cousin Walter had told me of the time he had turned the corner on his street and saw Papa cleaning the sidewalk with a toothbrush with a couple of brown shirts standing over him while passerby’s spit on him. Walter had turned around and walked in the other direction because, as he told me, he didn’t want to embarrass his Uncle Benno but I think he walked away because he did not want to suffer the same fate.

Papa did not say any more about the war there although I know he could have. His regiment advanced and retreated in the battle of Galicia. He was finally wounded in a bayonet charge, captured and sent to Siberia. He never said much about the camp except that it was cold and often all he had to eat was onions. It must have been very difficult for him, he claimed his rheumatism came from him time there and he would leave a room where onions were being prepared. But he was mostly silent on those long seven years spent in the gulag except in odd moments, often when he had a little to drink, where he would tell me about the typhus epidemics and the lice crawling up the seams of his clothes.

Once, when he was particularly soused he told me, about the cattle cars he and the other prisoners of war had to endure for the three week trip to Siberia. No toilets except for a single pot in the corner for 100 men. No food except for what you could buy with what ever you could trade or pay for through the slats of the car. I still have nightmares about cattle cars.

Somehow he had survived. What I don’t think I could ever understand is what it felt like to be free again after so long in prison. Of that he never spoke. But one day, when Mama and Papa were out and I was exploring their drawers for secrets I came across some postcards he had bought of the Suez Canal when returning home by ship from Siberia. I always thought those color washed cards represented his freedom to  him which is why he kept buried deep in his things because he knew no matter how hard he explained things we would never fully understand.

“They are putting the final list for the first transport together now,” papa continued “Lowenstein told me we should settle our affairs quickly and be ready to leave in about four weeks.”

I looked up, startled.

“We are we all going?”

Papa looked at me a little puzzled, and then smiled.

“Oh yes, yes,” he said,” I should have  told you the most important news first. We will all be going together.” There was a glow of satisfaction in his eyes.

“A tremendous load has been taken off my mind. It looks like we can go as a family. What a relief this is! We will know the when and the where and all other details soon. The Jewish agency is going to announce everything next week.”

You can imagine that this just shook me up. I was not prepared for this at all. Just two hours ago I was working on Tomahawk. Everything seemed settled. Tad and I were going to finish Tomahawk and then we were running away from home. The only uncertainty was where we could get all the equipment we needed. Then we would start down the Danube and go until we reached the delta and the Black Sea. From there I would send my parents a letter. Dear Mama and Papa, I would write. Don’t worry ! I am safe.

Perhaps I did not think about our situation carefully enough. Building our submarine ready, safely and secretly, had diverted my attention and had sheltered me. It had kept me from really thinking about what I was doing. Running away from home, running away from Vienna was easy to understand, I knew all about it. Everybody knows about running away from home. You read about and you joke about stuff like that. But running away when your parents were leaving home at the same time was new and it frightened me.

For the first time in my life, something that I had dreamt and thought about had come real. We built Tomahawk with our own hands. It was sitting down there tonight in the dark. We could actually touch the boat and it smelled of tat. Only the other day I told Tad that I felt cheerier now than at any other time since the Germans had marched to Austria. Perhaps cheerier even before. Now, my father’s words were buzzing in my head like a swarm of angry wasps.

Dr. Lowenstein had given only a short interview and Papa had not asked any questions because he felt very uncomfortable in that presence of the smoothly talking official. Lowenstein told Papa that he and his family were on the accepted list for the first transport. We would leave in about a month but we were allowed to bring only hand baggage. At the end of the interview , Lowenstein shook papa’s hand and congratulated him of having the opportunity to be a pioneer.

“Flossel, you are among those who have been given the honorable duty,” Dr. Lowenstein had said,” of creating a fresh opportunity for the Jewish people in a new order.” Papa got most of the other information from the other Jewish men who were milling out in the foyer of the Jewish community office. They spoke about the clean-up work that they believed were waiting for them .

Hectares of rubble-strewn fields – – the remnants of bombed cities. There was even a rumor  that the Germans would create a Jewish state in Poland.

“The Germans believe that the Jews can learn to be good farmers in Poland,” one of the man had said. “There is always need for good farmers, particularly in wartime.” Papa seemed to be very encouraged by what he had heard but he was upset y one dark incident. The SS guard who always stood in the foyer had amused himself by making the older orthodox men take off their hats and then acting surprised when he found a yarmulke under the street hat.

“Another animal lover who is keeping his lice warm with a little cap,” the SS man had mocked. The SS man’s malicious playfulness cast an ice cold shadow over the hopeful, buzzing crowd in the foyer and it had worried Papa.

“Luckily” he said, ”the SS man was called away by one of his officers. He was getting very nasty and it could have gotten worse. Those devils are using this kind of shenanigan to drive us away from here.”

It was hard for me to fall asleep afterward. Part of that was the hushed argument Mama and Papa were having in bed. It was not rare for them to fight, Papa had a temper, but it was very odd for them to argue in bed. What was stranger still is that it was Mama that was angry. I wished I could hear what they were saying.

Beyond Mama and Papa’s argument I was confused as what I was going to do.  If my parents remained in Vienna , the trip done the Danube would fall neatly into place, just as we had planned it. Tad and I taking fate into our own hands. I would be a boy running away from home with my best friend. Thatt was the right thing to do under the circumstances. But now it seemed all different and wrong. Am I deserting them? I felt terribly confused and uncertain. How I wished Tad was here so I could talk to him. Tad would know what to say. Lying in my bed in the dark bedroom, I heard my parents’ quite breathing. The argument silent for now.  I felt alone and helpless, For the first time in a month, I pressed my cupped palm on the crown of my head as it were a yarmulke , and I said the Shema Ysrael, the prayer I had been taught in religion class. As always I ended it by saying , “Dear God, protect my parents and me , and bring us that which will make us happy and safe. Amen!”

I hear the river whispering about the delta in the hiss of my blow torch.Tad loved to talk about the endless, mysterious plain of reed and water. He sounded more believable about this than about any of his other raves. He called it the great empire of the wild.

“ We will go, ” he said,”to the domain of the sea eagle. The deer and the bear stride through the green canyons of the delta  Our friend, the otter, gambols  I swear!   in the clear swift waters while white clouds of egrets and storks swarm over our heads. In the wilderness of the delta, the whisper of freedom in our ears will be louder than the wind and the Danube waves.”

How did Tad find out so much about that far-off place where the Danube flows into the Black Sea? He spoke so beautifully about the delta as if he were reading from an invisible book. We would sit by the window in the Saegerer apartment during the late afternoon when the light was dying and look out into the gray cobbled street. Tad would tell delta stories and I listened happily. In our imagination, we would glide in slender skiffs through hidden green channels, hunting, fishing, and camping on secret islands. We smoked young eels over elderwood and cut juicy hunks of venison from the flanks of a young buck roasting on a spit. Tad would speak about how the silver morning haze, drifting over the river, brought with it the scent of water roses.

I really thought I could smell them even though I never even seen one. “In one of the books, it said that we will be reading the half-remembered ciphers of our own origins in the untamed landscape of the delta.   Weird, but unforgettable!” said Tad. “Agreed” said I, “weird, but unforgettable!”

The marvelous images of the delta that Tad described drew much of their power from contrast with the mean stone wasteland that surrounded us. Vienna may seem like culture, music, and Sachertorte to you, but to us it was a bitter place. Our horizons were hemmed with hard cobblestones littered with dog shit. The narrow streets were scraped by dirty winds. Smoke­ blackened factory chimneys and gas plants overshadowed walls patched with peeling posters. In workers’ districts such as mine, crowded apartment buildings coughed out hordes of workers every workday morning and every evening the caverns sucked them in again. Even the pathetic patches of green in the parks were fenced and marked with “Keep Off” signs. And the air of the city, the air that I needed to sustain my life and growth was poisoned by the brown Nazi hatred for those of my faith. My fellow inmates hate their prison, I thought, but in their rage they beat us up. I don’t really know who the jailers are whom everybody ought to hate but I would feel much better if they laid off the weakest fellow prisoners, including me!

In the delta, I would be free from all this! The  only boundaries in our life would be the sky and the sea.  When Tad spoke of the delta, he made it sound as if it were the original garden of Eden. Not the sating lushness of the biblical paradise, but instead he described a wonderful place, a raw, pulsing cradle of natural life, where muscles, sinews, and wild glands had the meaning of their creation.

After Tad had the inspiration about the submarine we began to talk about how to build one. At first it was sort of empty talk. Al1 the things you could do with a submarine. Tricks, surprises, that sort of thing. We worried about waterproofing but that about as technical as we got. Then it slowly came to me that I did not know how a submarine worked. When I told this to Tad, he really was impatient with me. He disliked being bothered with such small detail. For him our slick boat was all but done, all that was left was moving down the river.

But, to Tad’s annoyance, I decided that I needed to read books about submarines. That posed a little problem because I, as a Jew, was forbidden to use public libraries. When they made the library rule about the time of the Krystalnachtpogrom, the newspapers Der Stuermer had said that it was unsanitary and un­ German to read books that Jews had stained with their filthy fingers. The consequence of the filty finger law was kind of funny because now I made Tad go. Tad grumbled a lot about my determination to find out how submarines worked, but I finally turned him into a regular library mule and he brought bundles of thick engineering books back to me. Reading these books was an amazing experience because I had never read anything like this in my life. I mean we read a lot but we concentrated on high adventure. The factual books we read were mainly personal recollections of travelers and explorers and perhaps books on natural history. Like I was the First European to Traverse the Valley of the Moon Maidens or Two Years at the Court of the Imam of the Golden Sword or maybe Zorka, King of the Yukon Wolf Packs. Books about physics, mechanics, and naval architecture? School was taking its revenge on me. How I suffered at first! But I slowly got to like them, even though there was a lot of stuff I could not fully figure out. The books were thick and heavy. I would build little book castles around me, stacks that would be six, seven books high, and read with fascination about Fulton’s submarine, Brun’s plongeur, and Holland’s submersible vessel. I particularly liked Bushnell’s submarine of the American War of Independence. It was described in one of my books as resembling two tortoise shells of equal size joined together. What really appealed to me, because I’m no fool, was that the cutaway picture of Bushnell’s boat looked kind of primitive. It looked like we might be able to handle building something like that by ourselves.

The ship that finally provided the model for Tomahawk was Goubet ‘s two-man torpedo boat. It was about the right size. Five and a half meters long, about two meters high, and about one and a half meters wide. But the size, and the wood, and the nails was the easy part. The main problem, the problem that now kept me going through these stacks of very hard books like a hungry (and dusty) ferret, was how to make Tomahawk, dive and rise again, how to propel it, steer it, and how to keep the water out, in other words how to make it behave like a submarine.

“Isn’t that neat? ” I asked, holding a sketch under Tad’s nose. “I drew it all in perspective. Here are the dive tanks fastened to the side of the boat.  We have a valve inside and when we open it, water goes into the tank and we dive.  Then if we want to surface, we release the air line, and let it float up- – we can make that out of a garden hose with cork floats tied  to the intake. I didn’t get the perspective quite right on the air line but you can imagine how that would go. And this part  here is a pump. We sit on a bench and work these bicycle pedals. The air gets sucked in on the surface, comes down this air hose, and forces the water out of this tank. This is how we make the boat come back up again after a dive.”

Tad wrinkled his nose and pushed the sketch aside. In Joern Farrow’s submarine, they blew the water out with compressed air.”

“Well, that’s what we’ll be doing.·”

“No, you don’t understand. They used real compressed  air  out of a tank.  You know?”  I couldn’t do anything except sigh.  I knew. There was sometimes a sliver of truth hidden in Tad’s wrongheadedness, but it usually was hard to find.

Eventually, Tad conceded that we needed to find dive tanks and air lines and tubes and valves. He actually began to be quite pleased with the thought.

 “I know where we can get a lot of plumbing ! ” he cooed, and he winked at me as if he owned the town.

Scattered throughout the vast inundation area and around the nearby Danube backwaters were hundreds of clubhouses built on stilts. They were the social centers for the colonies of tents that sprouted around them during the summer season. The houses were full of plumbing. Now, in late October, the inundation area was deserted. Once or twice a day, a pair of policemen, usually on bicycles, patrolled the silent footpaths and from time to time a hardy fishermen wandered through. Otherwise the empty silence was broken only by the wind rustling in the dry brown grass. burglars.

It was an ideal setting for apprentice burglars.

Our approaches were flawless from the start. Tad organized everything. Years of practice in stalking the campfires of the Kiowa and Shoshone paid off. We slipped through the high grass with very few sounds and without much revealing ourselves to the eyes of watchers, if there had been any. The locks of the clubhouses would have been easy to force with a crowbar. But, Tad insisted, that was entirely too crude. Raffles or Tom Shark, the great penny paperback detective, would never lower     themselves to do anything so simple. I wasn’t too sure about that, but it did make pretty good sense not to leave obvious signs of a break-in. It was dangerous to have our ventures noticed before we had gotten all the supplies we needed. We tried three times without luck to jimmy windows open. That was useful. I developed courage and it convinced me that Tad was right. I was going to be Raffles and so I made several picks in school out of strips flat spring stall.

Our first successful entry was during a driving rainstorm on a Saturday afternoon. The stilted house contained nothing we wanted except for six flashlight batteries that had been left behind in a drawer. Tad was quick to point out what cunning braves we were. Flashlight batteries were tightly rationed.

We broke into four more house that afternoon. In the last of these, our luck finally changed. This house, unlike the others had running eater , drawn from a holding tank on the roof. The men’s and women’s dressing rooms was each equipped with a shower stall. Two enameled heating tanks supplied hot water. The two cylinders , which were identical and just the right size to turn Tomahawk into a drive boat, were just what we had been looking for.

Tad immediately knelt down and tapped at the brackets that held the tanks to the wall. I walked to the window. A steady rain was soaking the brown ground. “Forget it,” I said. “If we took those things now and dragged them through the mud we’ leave a trail that even a blind Flatfoot Indian could follow.” “We’ll wait until tomorrow,” he said and shrugged his shoulders.

It rained for five days. just like Noah’s big water in the Bible, that the Germans like to call the Sin Flood. The inundation area turned to mud. Impatiently, we decided to explore further despite the drizzle that was falling steadily from the fray skies. We walked single file, like an Indian raiding party, leaving only one set of water filled footprints behind. About two hundred meters from the fisherman’s hut, our cunning approach pays off . A lone A-frame shack stood above the reeds. It looked in far better shape than some of the other huts we had seen with double doors with a white sign above proclaiming für Mitglieder”, members only. We ignored the sign and my pick worked like magic. I think inside the shack were two mangy- looking sofas and several chairs with scarred , peeling skins. Nothing worthwhile until we saw a long wooden locker. On seeing this Tad’s face lights up again. Grinning, he pulled out a small crowbar, from under his shirt. He now pried with great flourish and a few grunts the padlock from the locker door.

“Look at that”, he crackled , “this little piece of iron works even faster than your pick. We really struck pay dirt.”

Wiping away some cobwebs he peered into the box and exclaimed “Shit. The only thing in here are three shabby Kapok life vests a couple of old canvas sails.”

I was about to tell Tad that he was a diddle-headed. What kind of break in with this when all we walked away from it was a giant bowl of nothing when inspiration struck. There was something about the way the canvas lay there. I kneeled own on top of it and tugged at the spilled pile of sails and stroked the rough cloth with my hands. My face suddenly felt as hot as if I had a fever. It all came together for me at once. Even now, I keep thinking that I heard a pop in my ear when I saw the answer.

“Holy Shit , Tad!”, I said , “We got it! We made it ! I knew this would be a lucky day because I stepped on dog shit this morning ! Don’t you see what this means ? The canvas ! The canvas ! We found a waterproof skin from Tomahawk!”And so at the last light of that day, we dragged the heavy sails along the stone river apron to our hat. We had found a skin for Tomahawk.

Originally I thought that we could water proof the boat with pitch . I had read that Irish sailors in olden times caulked their boats with that stuff. The woods in Austria ooze pitch . The foresters cut gutters into the bark of pine trees and then nail little pails at the bottom to catch the drippings. The stuff smells real good but it’s a mess when you get it in you your hair, We figured it would be easy to waltz off with these pails but then we gave up the idea. We needed a lot of pitch. How would we collect all these pails? Then I thought of road tar.

“All we have to do now , is to wrap layers of canvas around the boat and cover each layer with tar . We could give it three or four layers. That ought to keep the river out!”

“Agreed!” said Tad. “Excellent ! Good idea!” He got that look in his eye. They one where you know that before too long there would be a bit of mischief afoot. “You know he added “There are a couple of drums of tar at the road construction site near the tram stop at the Reichsbruecke. That is so close, we could just roll them down hill.”

I remembered coming down to the hut two days later and finding five drums of tar neatly staked in one corner. Tad , the cunning brave had scored again. I built a small fire under the porch of the hut , grateful for the continuing rains because it hid the smoke. A stone tripod supported a drum of tar over the fire. When Tad arrived we painted the tar on the outside of the joined boats and on the decked forward section. Then we fitted wide strips of the sail canvas on the wood and patted them down with our hands. The strips lapped over each other. It worked perfectly . The pliant canvas fitted itself beautifully to the shape of the boat. When we had covered it entirely, we repeated the procedure two more times until we had made a thick skin for Tomahawk out of three layers of tar and canvas. Despite the tar, the original patterns of the striped sails were still faintly visible. Tad thought that Tomahawk now looked like a striped whale.

“I think , “ said Tad , “itself a cross between a blue and white whale , with a little bit of gray whale thrown in.”

I remember patting the still warm sides of our animal with satisfaction and asking him what he thought the Nueremberg laws would have to say about that mixture , this Rassenschande , this shameful miscegenation of the deep.

The autumn rains stopped , but the loam of the river plain drained poorly. Mud was everywhere . It still did not seem safe to raid the house that held the needed dive tanks and the delay tried our patience. Finally, shortly after St.Jude Day ( I remembered because even I, knew he was the patron of lost causes) in late October the temperatures fell sharply below freezing during the night. That brought Tad ,early the next morning to our apartment door. Finally, a break we could move the tanks without being mired in the mud. But as we were dashing down the stairs. Tad grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Maybe we better wait another day to make sure the cart won’t break through”. We don’t know how hard the frozen crust of the mud will be.”

“The cart?”

Tad smiled mysteriously . “Yes , I borrowed my Aunt Hertha’s pull car and brought it to the hut the day before yesterday. Aunt Hertha doesn’t know it yet, but we won’t need it long.”

I was usually the one that slowed us down, not Tad , but that morning I didn’t want to hear of than another wait in getting things going. The long delay that the rain  had forced on us had made me edgy.

“Tomorrow will be either colder or warmer than today,” I said , feeling a little uncomfortable in the unaccustomed role of the instigator. “If its colder tomorrow, we will be worse off than we are now . I am for going down there today and trying. “

Tad hesitated for only a a second , startled by my unusual reversal. Then he grabbed me by the elbow.

“Let’s go, Raffles” he said. And we were underway.

No Sioux hunter nor any Kiowa brave testing his prowess had ever crept through the prairie with an arm-long plumber’s wrench stuck in his belt. Tad insisted the stealthy approach was necessary but even he found it rough going. The Kiowa brave had never crawled sideways before but that is what he ha to do because he was carrying a hacksaw, a screwdriver , a crowbar ,  and a very large ball of knotted rope under his shirt. I was right behind him and I heard him mutter about the sons of dogs and how he would nail their tongues on his teepee pole. I had tried to tell him a couple of times that we ought to just quietly walk up to the club house but he didn’t listen.

“Who ever heard of Indians just walking into an enemy camp when they were stealing horses , its just not done .” Tad hissed at me, as contemptuous as if I had asked him to beg an Apache for mercy.

But I was too impatient, and I finally got up and walked past crawling Tad t the door of the clubhouse. “These are water tanks, “ I said ,”they don’t neigh,” and I began to work on the lock. Soon we were standing in the shower room admiring its plumbing. The water tanks had been drained at the end of the summer and we were able to disconnect them quickly. The two cylinders were lighter than I had expected and we carried them to the cart without any difficulty.

Working on Tomahawk in the quiet afternoon , with only the hiss of the blow torch to keep me company , I smiled to myself as I remembered the frenzy that followed. We were resting by the cart in the high grass outside the hut . There seemed to be no other human being besides Tad and me on the whole wide river plain. The houses of Vienna swam in haze far away across the Danube. We sniffed the moist wind from the river like animals. Then we looked at each other and giggled. A high, joyous frenzy swept over us simultaneously. We ran back to the clubhouse, bucking like young goat. Without a word to each other we attacked the copper pipes that carried water from the roof tank to the heating units, and tore at the weave of horizontal pipes that connected showers, sinks, and toilets. What didn’t yield easily to the plumber’s wrench, we pried out with crowbars or cut with the saw.

The noises of tearing metal fed our frenzy. Tad, who had insisted that he wear gloves because the gentleman jewel thief Raffles always wore them for his Monte Carlo heists , now threw his to the floor. Entering the clubhouse, he had substituted a Riviera of destruction swept the Riviera scene and with it caution from his mind. The time is NOW!

“This is absolutely ripping” he said , using the English word and proving that detective storied and Realgymnasium language lessons sometimes can lend each other a helping hand. “The water lilies of their club have a great surprise in store. I almost wish I could see their faces when they open their doors in May.” I was kneeling on the floor next to him, tying bundles of pipe together, but I hardly paid attention to Tad’s malice . In my imagination I was already trying various spatial responsibilities for the shiny pipe sections on the floor in front of me. Just like a big copper erector set , I thought , and I could almost hear the rush of frothing green river water in the maze of pipes that I was assembling in my mind.

The song of the delta is beautiful , To fully appreciate it , one hast to have an ear for the obligato of resignation(Thank you , Professor Rohacek, for those nice music classes) that quivers in small apartments. To be fully charmed by dreams of the delta you have smelled  the rusty stink of a crushed bedbug on your pillow. I press my nose against the smug glass of the window. Beyond are other words that I cannot reach. I feel lonely and lost, circumcised and helpless, rejected , tossed about in the brown hurricane of hatred. To one like me the song of green waves is clean and sweet.

The blow torch hissed. It was getting dark outside but I kept working , below the dive tanks , in the flickering blue haze of the torch flame. Tad was supposed to come down with a pump that he found in his uncle’s mechanics shop in Doebling. It was time to leave.

Walking along the deserted dirt road to the bridge, I remembered the creased brown post card that Papa had shown me on the way to the Inner City this morning and my heart grew heavy with apprehension.

 

 

The path that led to the fisherman’s hut was a maze of high brown grass, reeds, and small dunes.  It was damp and cold, a hard, blustery wind was blowing from the north, from the Czechoslovak Reichs Protectorate. I tried to walk close to the sheltering fringe of reeds, but I was still freezing. My knees were purple. I wished I had. a pair of long pants but Papa says it is not proper for a boy to wear long pants until he becomes a bar mitzvah.

The hut was just around the next bend in the path. This is where I usually worry the most. Everything down here hangs on a thin string. Someone might have found ·the hut and discovered Tomahawk. One tramp looking for a place to sleep could wipe out everything.

At last ! Beyond the sheltering bare tangles of the willows, stood our wooden hut, quiet and serene in the thin light of the December morning. Tad’s alarm signal, the net pole leaning against the porch door, was undisturbed. Everything was alright!

I untied the hinged panel in the reed screen below the pore on the riverside, and stopped to adjust my eyes to the darkness. Good old Tad! He had camouflaged Tomahawk nicely last night. A jumble of planks was piled in a heap in the center of the chamber. A casual intruder would never guess what these planks hid and disguised.

Satisfied that everything was in order, I went back outside and climbed one of the stilts to the narrow porch. I was really eager now. The fever had grabbed me. I quickly opened the padlock to enter the hut, put on a pair of dirty mechanics overalls that Tad had stolen somehow, and then lowered myself through the trap door into the space below the floor. I had to wait to get used to the dim light . Then I began to remove the planks, one by one, from Tad’s artfully confused pile, and stacked them neatly on one side next to the reed mat screen.

Someone stumbling in here would think that our silent raider of the deep was a pretty strange boat. Imagine a flat-bottomed, box-nosed punt lying upside-down on a large deep-keeled rowboat. The two boats fitted together like the two halves of a walnut shell except that the rowboat was longer then the punt by about three meters. The front section of the rowboat that stuck forward had been planked by us to form a deck. A barrel-shaped conning tower fitted with four small glass-covered port holes, my pride and joy, stuck up from the middle of the punt’s hull. The two boats, joined together, were almost completely covered by tightly fitting layers of dark gray canvas. In the weak light, the canvas made Tomahawk appear like looked like a young whale, wrinkled skin and all. Fastened to each side of our strange whale were narrow metal cylinders, the kind used in gas hot water heaters. How we got those is another story that I will tell you later.

I didn’t waste too much time admiring Tomahawk, but it was impossible for me to look at it without feeling impressed with Tad’s and my accomplishment. After all it is not every day that schoolboys build a submarine. .Under one of the water tanks stood cousin Walter’s brown briefcase. I unpacked the blowtorch and the soldering supplies and got to work soldering copper tubing to the metal cylinder. Mr.Wintermann, , who runs the locksmith shop at the agency school, would have been surprised to find out just how careful and diligent I could be if I really wanted to be.

I cannot explain this. Whenever, I do something that requires me to focus on something physical my mind tends to drift. It is as if the monotony of doing a single act is hypnotic allowing my body to do one thing while mind wanders off in another direction. As the blue white flame of the torch melted the flux onto the copper tubing I began to think of when Tad and I first fantasized of building a submarine to travel down the Danube to the delta?

It probably all started in the Saegerer apartment behind their small grocery store. Tad’s father had been fond of books and their front room was lined with shelves crammed with them. Tad’s mother, whose favorite topic of conversation was the faulty character and other flaws of her absent husband, often made cracks about these books. She was a stout red-faced woman, who wore wire-rimmed grandmama glasses, but who was as tough as nails and liked to rule over her coffee and cheese empire. When she spoke about Tad’s fugitive father, her face became pinched and white. “He always had his mind on books, and on politics!” she said. “Instead of caring about his family. If he had listened to me and spent less time with these heathen books, he wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble.” The trouble, Tad explained, was that his father had been an organizer for the Social Democratic party and had to flee to Czechoslovakia in 1934 just one step ahead of the Dolfuss police. I mean that’s what Tad says but I heard some different stories about Alfred Saegerer’s disappearance trick. My Aunt Tina, who is a walking newspaper,  told Mama, that a hat shop assistant, a girl named Inge, also disappeared with Mr. Saegerer. “She was a girl of  easy virtue,” Aunt Tina said, but I couldn’t figure out what she meant by that.

Maria Saegerer had thrown out every book that had anything to do with politics, “Even Red Riding Hoood” Tad had said. But there was lots of good stuff left. Not Kary May, or Max Brand or even Edgar Wallace Brand, or Edgar Wallace, but stories about Greek gods and heroes, Nordic mythology, regular history books, the Travels of Sven  Hedin, and, very important for this story, Huckleberry Finn. That story about a boys trip down the Mississippi to escape injustice and persecution made opened our imagination to a trip down the Danube. Tad had even exclaimed after he had read the book at my urging “Lets make a raft and drift down the Danube.  other, read the Mark Twain book.

But   when I think back about it now, the Mark Twain book didn’t really give us the idea. It gave us encouragement. We had been looking for a way out. Vienna was a dull stone jail and we wanted to leave.  Tad had his reasons and I had mine. Mine  were mostly in brown shirts and liked invoking the name of their leader constantly. Tad’s reasons he kept close to his chest and had not even shared with me his best pal so I knew there was a secret he was afraid anyone.  Drifting down the river  to the delta in a raft was the way to go.

The idea caught fire instantly.  A raft would be easy  to make and we spent many afternoons in Tad’s front room talking about our raft trip and planning  the fishing, and the hunting, and the stealing. At night, in the dark close room, listening to my father snore, I lulled myself to sleep by outfitting the raft  in for the long journey to the Black Sea. I thought of everything: candles, needles, fishing hooks, blankets, and tinned corned beef, a shot gun, even a jar of pickles and, of course, the collected works of Karl May.

I don’t really know how we changed our mind.  Maybe something whispered to us about the power of invisibility as we sat in the dark below the fishing hut and spied on the green river through the slits in the reed screen.  A raft would leave us exposed to hostile eyes along the banks and to the wind-driven waves that would wash over the deck. Tad called many “palavers” in which he did most of the talking. We would sit on the floor in his apartment and he’d recite in beautifully complicated campfire language the dangers of rafting down a long, hostile river. Most of the dangers were just awful-police, gypsies, Serbian irredgulars, and Bulgarian smugglers with connections to the Arabian slave trade. He would always add “we wouldn’t be so bad off because of his uncanny instincts.” Undoubtedly he had inherited these from his Bohemian grandmother.

We never seriously attempted to build a raft for travel. Once we fastened a few planks together with cast iron staples stolen from a construction site. But we never moved more than a few meters out into the river abandoning the trip as soon as it became clear that the raft would not stay afloat. Soon after we abandoned the idea of the raft trip altogether.

A colossal piece of luck aided the birth of Tomahawk. A flood in the early fall washed some lumber on the bank just downstream from the hut. I remember the day vividly. It had been raining hard for a week. Then the sun reappeared,  bright and warm, and summer seed floated in, like the white hair of the fall Old Women waters. Splintered planks with strips of grass wrapped around them floated by. Tad called them anacondas and pythons. Once , he swore he saw the bloated corpse of a murdered man. I marveled at what Tad was able to see (or imagine)  but spent most of the morning  fishing for posts andplanks. I thought they might be useful, but I wasn’t sure for what.

We must have gotten tired of watching the flooded river by early afternoon, because we started playing Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. We were sneaking along the muddy banks, tracking the dread Shoshone, when Tad spotted them. About a hundred meters downstream, were two half submerged boats in a small backwater. He instantly recognized them as the hidden war canoes of a Shoshone raiding party.

“Approach with maximum stealth,” whispered Tad. “No noise at all. Silent as the long night of the panther ! ” I did not know what that meant, but the moment we reached the backwater, we both knew instantly that the river had granted us a real coup. The Shoshone war canoes were a punt and a rowboat stranded side by side. They were half-filled with brown water and mud, but otherwise in very good shape.

 

” Let us spread the buffalo robe and pallaver,” said Tad Shatterhand. As the wise Wnnetou I advised that we better cut the crap this time because if we did not get the two boats to the hut before night fall, someone else would claim them and take them away.

“Long will they sing at the campfires of the Sioux,” panted Tad, as we ran back to the hut to get some cans for bailing.  “They shall sing of our river conquests in the summer of the Old Wives of 1939.” He doesn’t give up easily and  he went  on babbling about war canoes even after we, stripped down to our undershorts and shirts, stood chest-deep in the mud-greasy river trying to bail. Even in the backwater, the current was strong and we had to hold onto the grounded boats to keep from being swept away. I was particularly impressed by the rowboat  because  it had a deep bellied, lapstrake hull, that could easily hold eight men and lots of gear. We managed to get enough water out of the boats so that they were just afloat and then pushed them to the shore. There, squatting in the dank-smelling boats, we finished bailing them dry. Dragging the boats, against the hard current, upstream to the hut, was the next chore. It was ridiculously hard work.  I pulled from shore with a rope, while Tad in the boat, used a pole to keep it from slamming into the sharp stones of the bank. We finally managed to tie them to the porch stilts and then we collapsed, exhausted, on the floor of the hut, gasping  for breath. Wrapped with every rag we could find for warmth, we flopped onto the mattress and sprawled there without moving.

I remember that the sun was just beginning to set and as we lay there in the fading light, we began to argue whether we should try to drag the boats under the hut that evening or wait until the next day. Clearly we had to get our prizes out of  sight as soon as possible. Tad was for finishing the job that evening although I noticed that he didn’t even sit up to tell me that.  But I managed to argue him out of it by telling him that it would take us hours and hours to drag these monsters ten meters uphill. I think that convinced Tad. What had me worried was that we would miss the last streetcar and would have to spend the night down at the Danube.

We had made a sound, practical decision that evening. We anchored and hid the boats as best we could and made our way to the Tram stop. This decision, to hide the boats before we got to the hut was was partly fear and partly tenderness. Mama and Papa would go wild with worry, but they would be afraid to contact the police although that would have been their first inclination in normal times. Tad’s mother, tough as she was, would probably have felt the same way. I thought she knew enough about her adventure-hungry son to realize that contacting the police might have made things worse for him. It came to me while I was soldering, that the decision to go home that night was the last decision of this kind that Tad and I ever made. Our work on Tomahawk changed everything afterward. Neither fear nor tender heartedness about my parents or about Tad’s mother ever got into our way again.

Another chance event helped to create Tomahawk. The day after we found the two boats, we returned to the hut early in the morning. Luckily, Tad had raided his Aunt Hertha’s purse on the previous week. While she was helping his mother make apple strudel in the kitchen, he managed to snatch twenty marks from her bag. She had been a frequent victim of his stealth and she never seemed to notice that anything was  missing.

“A young brave”, said Tad, “knows how to raid his enemies  camp and steal to stay alive.”Who could disagree with that, or fail to admire Tad’s skill as a brave, because if we did not have money for the tram ride, we would have to walk to the Danube at 7 A.M. that morning.   Tad also told me that morning, and I am not sure I know why, that he was a great admirer of the young Spartan who died when a stolen fox, hidden under his tunic, ate the boys intestines. Maybe it was because live foxes were not allowed on Viennese trolleys. The conductor would have a fit.

When we reached the hut, we collected enough round posts to roll the rowboat out of the water. I saw that being done in a movie once with a Viking ship. The Vikings had a crew to help them with their efforts. We had only each other and realized that we would likely need some help. Tad proposed  that we ask Fritz Diller to help, a surly, simple boy who lived in the  same  apartment house as he did. The thought of that idiot blabbing his head off about a Jew boy in a secret hut at the river, made my hair stand  on end. We abandoned the idea of getting others to help us and found ourselves heaving and hoeing on our own. Tad bitterly complained about my decision not to enlist help and in turn I reminded Tad of the  Spartan boys’ silence. It took us two exceedingly long, very hard hours to cradle the boat on its rollers under the hut.

The great inspiration for Tomahawk came after we carried the punt up from the river. It was much shallower and lighter than the row boat and  it only took a few minutes to bring it under the hut. To save space, I proposed that we stack the punt upside down on the upright rowboat. When we dropped it  in position, the punt was exactly as wide as the row boat at the gunwales. The punt resting upside-down  on top of  the  boat formed a cabin-like space which could be entered from the front  of the row boat. Tad saw the shape of the submarine first. He stepped back dramatically, wiped his unruly brown hair from his forehead a few times until he was sure he had my attention, then he spread  his arms wide apart, and trumpeted,  “Hugi, I  have found the way. My uncanny instincts have come to the rescue again. We can get out of Vienna and I can get you away from the Nazis!’

He lowered his voice to a hoarse conspiratorial whisper, “The simple answer has come to me in a flash. We will build a submarine. Look,” he pointed at the two boats joined together like a walnut shell, “we have all it takes to make a perfect river submarine.”

I was sitting on the floor, still panting from moving the boats. Tad’s inspiration did not grab me right away. “Sure,” I said, “of course we will! And before we leave, we’ll torpedo the side wheel steamer that brings all the Strength-through-Joy tourists through here.”

Perhaps Commander Prien inspired Tad. Only a few days before, Commander Prien had slipped through the antisubmarine nets into Scapa Flow and torpedoed the Ark Royal. The recent stories in the newspapers about the successes of German submarines may have started Tad’s visions about the silent journey through the Danube’s deep. But I think Tad’s real inspiration was blue and green, the lurid cover illustrations of a cheap thriller series, The Adventures of Joern Farrow. Joern Farrow was the young son of a German submarine captain, who refused to surrender his boat at the end of World War I and roamed the seas, an outlaw sailor fighting evil wherever it was found near a coast line, despite the nasty Englishers who were still trying to collect hisdad’s boat. My first nasty and sceptical torpedo was fired at Commander Prien. But it was really Joern Farrow who, together with two water-logged wooden boats· that were nearly the same width, begot Tomahawk in the Old Wives’ Summer of 1939.

It would be years before I learned that in the United States the term of Old Wives Summer was Indian Summer.  The perfect time for a Tomahawk.

 

In the evening, Cousin Walter came to our apartment pick up his briefcase. He is Aunt Tina’s youngest so twenty-two years old and fat. His mother, Mama’s sister, is held in high regard in our family because she married a court clerk. Being the wife of a government official is pretty important as you can imagine. Of course, Uncle Sigi doesn’t have his job now because they dismissed all Jews from government service right after the Anschluss.

 

Walter had been a university student until the Nazis came along and banned all Jews from University and because he was “educated” he was sort of stuck-up in a harmless way. He was not very fond of visiting his poor relations,- of tramping up the smelly stairs of our proletarian apartment house. Aunt Tina made him do it. He probably thought of it as one of the miseries brought on by Hitler. Walter sat upright and awkwardly amidst the clutter of our room, primly holding a large parcel on his lap as if he were trying to avoid touching it and himself against our furniture. He probably was afraid of  catching the disease of poverty hanging around us or maybe he was just embarrassed by the family argument that was now brewing.

Papa scowled at me, and then said apologetically to Walter, “How could someone in his right mind forget an expensive item like a good briefcase in a school locker room? Something borrowed, that didn’t even belong to him! ” I began fingering a small hexagonal washer that I just discovered in my trouser pocket. It was time to maneuver myself into a safe sofa corner that would protect my rear. Too bad that washer in my pocket wasn’t my lucky Turkish coin.

Fortunately, Mama saw that the first thunderclap was only a few heartbeats away. She put down the socks she was darning and left her chair to put a restraining hand on Papa’s elbow.

“Please, Uncle Benno, there is no harm done,” said Walter. His German was deliberately free of every trace of Viennese dialect. I bet he was pained by Papa’s outburst, so very lower-class Jewish accent.

“Uncle Benno, he can get the bag tomorrow. I don’t want anything to spoil my good mood. I’ve got fine news that you should know about. My mother asked me to tell you”  Walter paused. He liked to be dramatic and be center of attention and then went on. “Basically the news is that there are now possibilities for Jewish resettlement in Poland. They need us to build the country up again. I was fortunate to be among the first to be selected for the Polish reconstruction project. Mother thought that you would like to know about it because you might find it advantageous to apply. They surely will need workers of all kind as well as administrators…like me.”

“That brat has to learn to take care of other peoples’ property. I can’t afford to buy you another briefcase if it got lost through his sloppiness.”

“Benno, please!” pleaded Mama. “Let’s sit down. Let’s have peace so that Walter can tell us about the reconstruction project. With his education he will undoubtedly have an important job in one of the  offices. Let him tell us about his good fortune!

Papa was searching through his pocket for the small can in which he kept half-smoked cigarettes. That was usually  a sign that  he was calming  down. I thought I better make the most of it and move the conversation along. So I asked Walter about  the  parcel the was carrying.

Walter was obviously glad I asked. With a conspiratorial smile, he reached into the large paper bag and pulled out a pair of high black rubber boots. They were brand new.

“What do you think of these, Hugi?” he asked. “You have no idea how muddy it gets in Poland in the spring.” He handed me the boots. They smelled of new rubber. Shiny as black Japanese armor! Magnificent! All the way to the knees.  I  stroked their smooth sides and I  held them to my cheek.

Then Walter told us about the Polish  reconstruction projects. The Germans had at last shown some good will toward the Jews and arranged for their participation in the reconstruction of Poland. There was even talk of a possible Jewish autonomous region. Several transports were scheduled to leave Vienna in the near future. Walter had managed to get himself assigned as transport secretary for the first train to the Polish project. He expected to leave in two or three weeks. Someone that he knew in the Jewish Community Organization had managed to place him in the first group.

The boots were beautiful!  Walter was a lucky dog.  I wanted the boots so badly that I was afraid to say anything for fear of showing my envy. The boots had a thin red stripe around the tops. Marvelous!

Boots of any kind were hard to get. Shoes were rationed. Hitlter had traded his grandfather’s gold watch for the boots. He thought it a fine bargain and I agreed completely. Even Papa seemed impressed, although it was not clear whether it was by the boots or because of Walter’s luck in getting on a transport to Poland.

“Of course you are an educated person, and those are needed to get a project started. But I wish they would give me a break. Querbaum, my neighbor had told me about Poland. These fine gentlemen at the Jewish Center don’t care that I know Poland from the Galician campaigns during the last war. To them a working man always comes last” said Papa through clenched teeth. “It makes me terribly angry. But what can one do?”

Everyone agreed, but I said nothing.

Before falling asleep that night, I imagined myself going to Poland, warm in an immense turtleneck sweater and wearing a pair of new, black boots with a red stripe on top. It was great to be so well equipped when embarking on an adventure.

When I opened my eyes in the morning, I felt like a traitor. How could I have been tempted by Poland! Tad and I had other plans. Tomahawk was down in the fisherman’s hut waiting for me. No school this morning. I’d be able to get down there today. There was a lot of work to do, a lot of work before Tomahawk was ready to carry us down the river to the delta.

Still half-sleep,  I thought  of the delta. Gulls screamed and I heard the wind rustle in a sea of reeds. Tad always talks about the delta as if it were a warm, tropical place. Wouldn’t a shaggy turtleneck sweater be completely useless there? Or should I take one along just in case? If I only had one!

Papa was in the kitchen dressed in his good suit. “Where are you going, Papa?”

“I am going down to the Jewish Community Center in the First District. Your mother thought it was a good thing to do!” The First District was the inner city of Vienna, the remnant of the wailed medieval town that stood by the side of the Danube but now touches only the Danube canal. I had to go in the same direction to reach the inundation area but I didn’t want to say anything. I had to think of a believable excuse that did not involve Tomahawk.

“Papa, I’ll ride along with you. We’ll take the same tram! I’m going to Dita’s house. She lives in the Leopoldstadt. She promised me some of the books that they have to leave behind. The one they are not taking to Shanghai with them.” I could not resist repeating, “Did you hear they are going to Shanghai!” Papa would take it as an accusation. And I was right. The expected frown passed over Papa’s face.

” It would be nice to have you come along, Hugi.  But we cannot take a street car. It is not allowed. We will have a nice walk together. In forty minutes, we’ll be down there.”

Naturally I tried to argue with him about the streetcar. Told him that I rode the tram a lot and that no one has ever bothered me. But I knew it was hopeless. He had no sense of adventure at all. No doubt beaten out of him as a prisoner of War in Siberia. “They’d recognize me as a Jew right away!” he said, and that was that.

We walked  the  first  few minutes  in silence. I remember it was just in front of the General Hopsital that Papa turned to  me  and  said,  “I’m going to the Community Center to check on my application.”

“What application?”

Papa was always clumsy at explaining details whether they were about things or whether they were about how he felt. His tongue worked best for him when he was angry. But I knew this, and I listened as patiently as I was able. And you can imagine that this is not very easy for me. It came down to this. Papa wanted  me to know that he, Benno Flossel, father of Hugi Flossel,  was capable of gaining some control over our fate, that he saw some possibility of tranquility and comfort for us, and that he was capable of pursuing it. Papa thought he recognized  a small hope for improvement and he was going for it. I mean he· didn’t exactly say that but that’s what he meant. As we talked on the way to the inner city, I could tell that Papa hated his slow, awkward tongue and I felt sorry for him.

We stopped outside a park to rest.  There was a large black and yellow sign that announced that the use of the benches by Jews and by whores was forbidden. I said that it didn’t say “strictly” forbidden but he brushed away my little joke as if were a pesky fly.

In his  tired, smoke-hoarse voice, he told me that he and Ignaz Querbaum had also applied at the Community Center for work in Poland. What Walter had told us last night had not been new to him. But he did not want to say anything about it before because he was not certain that there was much chance for success. This morning, a postcard had arrived in  the  mail, saying  that  his  application was classified IK. He was not sure what that meant but it seemed a hopeful sign. Papa fished out of his overcoat pocket a creased postcard and handed it to me. The small piece of cardboard stirred up a confusing nest of conflicting feelings in me.

“If they  accept you when would you . when would you have to go?” I finally asked.

“Perhaps in three weeks. Perhaps in three months. Who knows? I am hoping to see Herr Dr. Lowenstein today. He may be able to tell me. He is a bigwig in the organization. Ignaz Querbaum’s brother-in-law knows him. Maybe he will tell me about dates for the transport.”

Papa paused for a long time. “Perhaps he is also able to tell me when I would be able to send for you and your mother.”

We crossed the broad tree-lined roadway of theRingstrasse where the walls of the fortified old city once stood. From the right stared the long row of windows of a former Austrian ministry building. A dead stone chameleon. First Habsburg yellow and black, then Republican red, white and red, now the black, white and red swastika flags snapped in the morning breeze over the building. A small column of armored cars in camouflage paint stood in front of the ministry building. German soldiers leaned idly against their machines,smoking.

The sight of the soldier-minded me of my first contact with them during the week after the Anschluss. One of these armored scout cars and a motorcycle with a side car had passed me on the street and then stopped suddenly with a screech of brakes. A young lieutenant had leaned out of the side car and had asked me in clipped Berliner speech  where the Ottakringer police station was.

Surprised, I told him. I think I even clicked my heels before I gave them the directions. As soon as the vehicles had rolled on, I regretted it. Why did I give the German officer the right direction? What a schmuck  I was. Why didn’t I send them the other way? Send them to the city dump or the Wagner-Jauregg Institute, the psychiatric clinic. Even now as I was walking with Papa through the inner city, the memory made me twinge and brought a warm flush to my face. Damn!

I looked at Papa. A sweet small man in a shabby overcoat! Graying at the temples with an unkempt toothbrush moustache. What would living in Poland be like ? Probably alright. It was far away and strange and smelled of adventure. The thought of Papa working for the German soldiers bothered me. I felt strangely confused about those steel helmets and gray uniforms. Revulsion and fear mixed with fascination! The kind of fascination that I knew standing at the windows of a gunsmith’s shop, looking at the efficient hardness of automatic pistols and revolvers behind the glass. The soldiers had such fine boots and I was their enemy. I wonder whether in Poland, the German soldiers would think me as one of theirs. After all I spoke their language and I speak it in the dialect of common working folks. Looking over my shoulder, back up the Ringstrasse, towards the columns of armored turrets, I felt strongly attracted to the sleek steel and the guns and then was immediately ashamed of my feelings.

I touched my father’s arm softly to draw his attention. On the right was the street Papa had to take to go to the Jewish Community  Center. As soon as he was out of sight, I would hop a tram. My destination was much further–beyond the Inner City, beyond the canal, and beyond the bridge. It was on the other bank of the great river and it cheered me immensely to think about it. I was going to work on Tomahawk today. To work on what Tad likes to call the swift and silent scourge of the Danube.

I like the smell of locksmith shops. That is how I  picked my course at the Jewish Apprentice Institute. That may seem crazy to most people. But that’s another story. Now at seven in the morning, I wasn’t so excited about locksmith school myself. It was dark and freezing cold at the tram stop. I seem to spend a lot of time suffering at tram stops. But today is Wednesday, I had to get across town to go to school. I’m supposed to be learning how to make keys and how to open locks.

You see I’m not at the Realgymnasium any more. Us Jews are not allowed to go school beyond the compulsory age. Instead I am in the Jewish Relief Agencies’ vocational school, at the old Riegelhaupt warehouse in Simmering, three days of the week. Tad is jealous as can be. Because he is a gentile, a pure Aryan, he still has to struggle with Latin declensions under the pure Aryan gaze of Professor Braunschweig, the arch Nazi. Brown Braunschweig Not me! I am learning to make keys and to open locks. Papa thinks this is a skill that will get me a job once we emigrate but with father, the chance of that ever leaving this place is pretty damn small. So perhaps I can make my fortune being a world class cat burglar.

 

What I can’t tell Tad, because he would tease me too much, and won’t tell Papa because he thinks education is worthless and the only work worth doing is with your hands, is I wish I was back in school. To me, the  world is a great puzzle and school helped me unlock that puzzle. Which may be the other reason I picked locksmith school. At least with the skills I learn here I can unlock things.

 

Takin the Tram to school is always a little dicey. You see Jews are not supposed to ride the trolley. The secret is to get on the rear platform of the last car.  That way if someone you know gets on the trolley, you can get off right away. Jews aren’t supposed to ride the trolleys either and I could get into a lot of  trouble  if somebody reported me. They thought all this up in Nuremberg or maybe it was Berlin. I mean the trolley stuff is shit.  The same as how they decided that Jewish children were not fit to learn in the same schools as gentile children.

The car was crowded. laborers and store clerks with gray pinched faces. They look crabby and mean. Are they all looking at me for my handsome Jewish features or at me because the  elegant brown briefcase my cousin Walter lent to me that is clearly out of place in my hands? They carry their lunches mostly in rumpled paper packages. My cheese sandwich lay in the huge leather bag secured by buckled straps. I am carrying the briefcase because I need it for the caper Tad and I have planned. We need a blow torch to solder the tube connections on the Tomahawk. Walter’s briefcase was the place to stash the blow torch. We had  drawn the plan up yesterday.  No one would ever look for a stolen blow torch in a briefcase, Tad had said. In Vienna, only Students and “wheels” carry a briefcase. That is how Tad convinced me to borrow Walter’s briefcase. A student carrying a briefcase would not be noticed and it was  big enough to hold the blow torch. Now I just needed the courage to execute the plan.

 

I wish that Mama had given me more for breakfast. My stomach feels decidedly funny. The same worms were in my stomach the day they reopened school the German took over Austria. That day, it felt like every worm that ever lived in the Vienna Woods had taken up residence in my gut.  In the weeks leading up to the reopening of the school I became convinced that as the only Jewish kid in my class someone was sure to mock, or spit on me, or may be try to beat me up. But nothing much happened!  I mean the Latin teacher did give a sleazy speech. Dr. Braunschweig showed up that day with the Nazi party button in his lapel and proudly revealed that he had been an underground Nazi all along. Illegal though it may have been but he had been loyal to the German ideal. He gave a long pompous lecture about the coming glories of the national socialist state, dedication, duty, German hearts, and the strength of the brown battalions. Soon the school would cleanse itself of those “who wander through the world engaged in sleazy trade.” Who? Me? I felt every eye in the classroom focused on me. I had wanted to shrink into a crack in the floor but I had managed to sit straight and keep my head pointed straight ahead. But, I had a better breakfast on that day.  I remember it clearly now. Mama had given me hot cocoa and  a fresh, crunchy roll.

The tram rumbled down a hill and screeched to a halt. The little church square. School stop! The clock hands in the tower stood at ten minutes before eight. Only a short walk. Narrow, cobbled streets. Overcrowded apartment houses with mouse-gray facades and peeling window frames. Just like the streets around my old school, the Realgymnasium on the Kalvarienberggasse.

 

I remember the street in which it finally happened. The moment I worried about during that whole first week before schools reopened. Walking home from school on that first Nazi school day, two guys blocked the sidewalk. I did not know who they were. Probably from the secondary school down the block. They both had pieces of black rubber hose in their fists. One waved it under my nose and asked for my money. Which was pretty funny considering that I never had any. Which is how I tried to fast talk my way out of t.  It embarrasses me to remember how I turned my pockets inside out so that they could see how empty they were, all the while calculating my chance for breaking away to the park across the street where they could not hem me in.

 

Then Tad appeared. He was in top form that day. He stood toe to toe with him but that was not a big deal. In a tough workers’ district in Vienna, like where I live, we do that all the time or get run off the street. But he was very cool. Growled at them that he was a Christian like they were. Funny! We didn’t know the word Aryan  in those  early days. “Go,”  he said.   “Go pick  on one of the rich kids in one of the fancy districts ! If you want to pick on him, you’11 have  to take me too!”.

 

The two thugs with their rubber hoses backed off, real quick. That surprised me. Tad isn’t that big or that tough looking. But they went with just a few goddamns. I was lucky most bully’s those days, especially around Jews didn’t back down so quickly. Further down the street, one of them had turned, and hollered that they’d get us later. Tad did his victorious turkey war dance and then walked home with me. It made me smile even now when I remember Tad, raising his right hand like a wooden Indian chief, saying, “I am Christian. You are Jewish.  The color of our mother’s wigwams does not matter. You and me, we are war trail companions.” Then he did another thing with his hand as if he were giving a midget a hair cut. I dont know what book he got that wigwmam speech from but he and I were both big fans of Karl May a German who wrote wonderful stories about the old West in the United States featuring two unlikely friends a cowboy, Old Shatterhand, and an Indian named Winnetou.

So even though the speech was a little annoying his act of bravery and kindness in stepping up to those bullies cemented our friendship. .We were friends before but that afternoon made it more special.

Not a soul in sight when I walked through the old warehouse gate. The class bell must have rung already. I hurried to the locker room and put the briefcase away. I don’t want to drag that monster into class and draw attention to it.

Herr Birnbaum had already taken attendance and was lecturing on the properties of soft iron as a key-making material when I got to my seat. Poor stodgy Birnbaum! He had been a physics professorat a fancy garden suburb Realgymnasium. Now he teaching apprentice plumbers and locksmiths like me.

Birnbaum was droning on about measures of hardness. I mean I’m supposed to be learning to open locks, not to be a physicist. As usual , I flashed him my “Everyone of your words  is like a pearl to me” devotional stare. The trick  is to try to bore a  hole in the middle of their forehead with your eyes. That keeps them happy  and that usually brought on with Birnbaum’s lectures  a nice drowsiness that covered you like a tent. It didn’t come today, no matter how hard I tried. Hansl Lichtblau whispered something about hardness and his neighbors began to titter. Somewhere out on the street a car horn honked and a dog began to yelp. The church bell rang twice. And I kept worrying about whether that blow torch would make a big bulge in that stupid brown briefcase when I carried it down the hall. That probably didn’t matter anyhow. This adventure — Tad called it Operation Blowtorch, — could go wrong in so many ways. I touched the Turkish coin that Mr. Novotny had given me before the Latin test a couple of years ago for luck.  Maybe it still worked if I rubbed it real hard. This caper was important. Tomahawk  was beginning to assume the shape that we had wanted it to be.  For three months it had grown, hidden under the skirts of the fisherman’s hut in the inundation area. Now we needed a blowtorch to get on with our work down there.

Birnbaum was fading out. The oil-smeared benches of the warehouse were receding a little. I could afford the luxury of thinking about warmer, happier days: about the day when we first found the hut. Tad and I had been roaming through the Ueberschwemmungsgebiet, the inundation area. In case you don’t know what that is, it is a largish flat field where the Danube water is supposed to go when there is to much water in the Danube. Any encyclopedia will tell you that its a broad flood plain, on the left bank of the Danube that had been   established in the 19th century to regulate the river. This is the place where Viennese who don’t have much money go during the summer to enjoy themselves. They go down there by the thousands on weekends — workers and small shopkeepers, packed in the street cars like Norwegian sardines. The smell of garlic sausage and cucumber salad is heavenly. My stomach ached as I think back about it. What a scene it was down there. By the side of the broad glistening river, everyone peeled off their clothes and stretched every which way on the sparse summer grass or on the gravelly stream bank, to expose their pale bodies to the sun. I think that this is the way they tried to forget the stale air of their small, overcrowded apartments.  Some  had  wooden club houses that were built on stilts and those pitched small tents in clusters around them. On a July or August evening, the laughter and the singing in the flood plain carried all the way across the broad whispering river to the hot cobblestoned streets of the city. They say that in the good old days before Austria lost the war and turned from a big empire into a puny little country-­ before the Central Bank crashed and everybody lost their job-­ that the inundation area wasn’t so popular then. But now it was the paradise of the Viennese poor. Smelling the river on a  summer night filled everyone’s heart with yearnings.

 

Tad and I roamed around the flood plain even during the school year. That’s how we discovered the fisherman’s  hut two years ago. We were playing Wild West. Tad has always been very strong on Indians. Usually his inspiration came from Karl May.  Roaming around  in our riverside prairie, we could imagine we were anything we wanted and that we could do anything. If you live in a musty room without even a corner that was really all yours, if you had to climb four stories of sooty tenement  brick to get to it, it was great to feel the prairie wind in your face. When you were kind of hungry, playing that you were roasting bear paws over a campfire filled our mouths with saliva.

I think the day we found the hut, I was Winnetou, the noble and cunning Indian chief. Tad was Old Shatterhand, his clean- cut, invincible Teutonic friend. At least that’s how I remember it now. We would always argue who was going to be Winnetou. It was two years ago on a late October Sunday. I Winnetou, was tracking a rogue party of Sioux along the sloping stone bank of the river. Old Shatterhand spotted a half-submerged log and instantly recognized it as a skillfully hidden war canoe of the Sioux. There  were no German soldiers then. In the fall of 1937 we thought up enemies out of the debris the summer had left behind.

Stalking the raiders who had hidden the canoe, we found the hut. It stood on stilts almost completely hidden between a weedy knoll and a clump of barren willows. Rush mats had been hung around the stilts, completely enclosing the space beneath the hut and forming a kind of room. This dark space, which you could  enter by pushing a mat aside, was a perfect hiding place from which to spy on the fierce Sioux. It protected us from the brisk October winds, and we could watch the river through the narrow slits between the mats.

Birnbaum was talking about clogged files or may be it was about filing soft metal. I was thinking about how during our  first visit to the hut, we discovered the trapdoor that opened into the hut from the space underneath. Tad stood on a wooden soda box and boosted me through the hinged door. I got a snootful of dust. The shack had not been used  for  a long time.  Dead flies littered the floor. Thick dust and cobwebs everywhere. The small room had a window on all four sides and a door towards the river. Outside the door was a narrow porch.  An A-frame, rigged  to hold a net pole, was mounted  on the railing.  The pole was gone and the ladder that once led from the steep river bank  to the porch had lost most of its rungs.  The only furnishings were  a tiny cast iron stove with a broken leg and a kitchen table covered with a peeling piece of blue oil cloth. Tad said to me that it was perfect!

It took us a while before I really began to think of the shack as our own. True, we played at the shack often and Tad had said that a gypsy woman who visited his mother at the shop had told him that a secret place would be given to him — a nexus to stength, she had called it. Each time we rode the trolley to the inundation area, I sweated that someone had come during our absence and had reclaimed our secret hidaway. After a while I began to believe Tad. I mean not really  but I was encouraged. Each time we went down we found the hidden hut just as we had  left it.

Tad said that the nexus to strength was going to be our Danube outpost. That meant we had to clean the hut. We also dragged in an old mattress and a chair that we found along the river. Tad stole some candles from his mother’s grocery store

and we stocked some bottles of drinking water. Our outpost was useful in our battles with the unruly Sioux and with other sworn enemies and a fine place to play.

Just a few weeks ago, I had argued with Tad about how things had changed during the two years since we had found our hut. We were still doing Old Shatterhand and  Winnetou  roaming the Sioux-infested plains. But there seemed  to be new enemies now. The policemen changed their uniforms from Austrian  pine green to the pale green of the German Schutzpolizei. Wehrmacht troops were practicing infantry tactics on the Danube bank. I  told Tad that the posters on the city walls, the newspapers, the crowds laughing at Jews scrubbing the sidewalks were telling me that I was not of the same tribe as he was. For me, fantasies about enemies were getting fleshed out. Dangers were getting pretty close to  real.  Tad, stubborn as ever, kept pretending that nothing had really changed at all. He never seemed to pay attention when I talked to him about stormtroopers or about some of the trouble my father had with them. It was all another big Wild West show to him and it kindled his imagination as a wild west scene. The Indians or, depending on what we were doing that day, the cowboys, had just changed into brown uniforms. What really got our argument going that day was when he said: “Me Old Shatterhand, You Winnetou, Me Aryan and you Jew. We make many coups! ” Idiot!

There are so many wonderful  things going on in Tad’s mind. But he never listens when his imagination gets into high gear.His headis full of ringing bells.

It woke  me up. Real bellswere ringing outside the classroom window. The tower clock  at the little church down the street chimed eleven times. One more hour. “We will strike at noon” Tad had said, “Exactly at noon! Agreed?”

 

Most of the students at the Jewish Relief Agency school ate lunch in the downstairs hall. It served as a commons room where we could talk, play chess, or swap rumors about emigration. The caretaker’s wife sold rolls and soup and, if available, cheap candy. The muffled chatter of the lunch eaters drifted up the corridor that led to the plumbing  shop. Not a sound from the other side of the closed door. No shadows moving behind the flashed glass windows. The shop must be empty.  Just  as we calculated. Cool and swift, Tad had said. Four quick steps to the first long shop table and the shiniest, most effective looking blow torch was out of sight under my  smock. Stop! Listen! Still no one! Big coup for Winnetou in the greasy apprentice’s coat. Two rolls of soldering wire and a can of flux followed the blow torch swiftly and then I was back on my way to the door.  Count steps, Tad  had said.   It will keep you calm.  It was 86 steps downstairs to the locker room. All clear! At my locker, I quickly wrapped the loot in a dirty towel and stuck it in the briefcase. At the last moment I remembered the cheese sandwich and fumbled to get it out. Now came the critical part. Another 61 steps down the hall to the landing where the window was, the bulging briefcase in my left hand. The Turkish coin.

must have worked. No one was in the hall. I reached up to open the window and, without looking, dropped the briefcase to the ground two flights below. A soft thud! I hope Tad is there, waiting and ready.

My heart was beating fast when I entered the common room clutching my cheese sandwich. I mean stealing wasn’t exactly new for me. I had been slipping small tools in my pockets for weeks. But this was important. We needed that blowtorch badly. I hope  Tad was on the way to the hut with it right now.

The cheese sandwich tasted dry. I leaned back against the cold wall and chewed  very slowly.  It was  a good thing it had not snowed this morning. The danger of leaving tracks behind on the path to the hut was clear to any old Indian fighter. Snow would have killed our plan for getting the blow torch today. The work on Tomahawk had to proceed at full speed. Then it hit me like a small locomotive. It wouldn’t work for me to skip out right after lunch. I couldn’t get down to the hut today. I was stuck. Swiping those other tools must surely have been noticed.  Tools for Jews in war time were in short supply. A serious matter. No doubt they were alert and in wait, ready to pounce if there was another theft. There could be personal searches if the blow torch were missed right away. Trapped! I had to listen  to Birnbaum the rest of the day.

The school closed at three and I left with the quickly dispersing crowd. Students did not hang around the gates of the Jew school.   It tempted fate to linger too long. Knobby-kneed would-be  plumbers,  locksmiths, and carpenters disappeared into the gray city streets like water cast on hot stones.

It was annoying. If I had used my head, I would not be in this stampede but down at the Danube working on Tomahawk.  Stupid! The most obvious blunder. I should have seen it right away. Tad had arranged the blowtorch caper along the lines of a Cagney-Raft prison plot. Bust out of the big house. Smuggle the shiv out of the prison shop! And I listened like a damn fool and that left me high and dry. A Viennese worker’s child should have figured this out right away.  Tad said, skip out of school at one o’clock. Meet me at our nexus to strength. But they had noticed right after lunch that a blow torch was missing

The plumbing teacher and the principal, with serious expressions, on their faces had gone from room to room. It was obvious that they were looking for the torch. I had been right. This was no afternoon for leaving school early. They would have become suspicious of me right away.  So, I had to stay until the bitter end of the school day, first listening some more to Birnbaum and then filing keys. Of course, this never would have occurred to Tad. His father may have been a socialist but then his father  had been gone for a long time. His mother owned a grocery store, he was a shopkeeper’s child, and lived in the more genteel world where shopkeepers lived. Tad just didn’t have the instincts that one developed in a workers’ district like Hernals.  And so, like an ass, I was stuck at school till the last bell. Now, it was too late to join Tad at the fisherman’s hut.  Soon it would be dark.

I wondered if Tad really got the torch?

I bet young Dita Rosenman is still puzzled why I told  her to get lost. I was walking away from the school and in no mood to hear about her forthcoming trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Shanghai. I mean she just wanted to walk with me. And I always sort of liked her because she was growing a cute and had quite the figure for a 14 year old.

Editor’s note: My story “The Journey” will return in a few days. In the meantime, I am sharing with you a story that was written by my father that I am currently adding to. Some may consider this presumptuous but as the story was originally told to my brother and I to get us to sleep I am just adding my imaginations that he inspired.” 

We learned in school that millions of years ago, the Vienna Woods, now stand was the shore of a vast ocean. The scene must have been fantastic, with monster waves crashing into the hills, and huge fish cruising the depths where I am standing now. On the shore, dinosaurs, hunting and grazing in jungles of gigantic conifers, ferns and palms. But a new ice age made the Ocean levels drop and the shores moved towards the East, leaving only fossils from all the weird animals that had been swimming in it. The Danube, a byproduct of the glacial age, ate a hole in the hills that used to be the shore and started flowing eastward, as if searching  for  the ancient mother sea that had given it life . Eventually came the time of the great wanderings and the place where the river spilled out into the great plain    became  a crossroads of cultures and civilization.  Celtic salt  traders stopped  here. The Tenth Roman  Legion and  the Gemini, marched   through. The  Emperor Marcus Aurelius    died in   Vindobona of Malaria. The Amber Road passed through the plain with long blonde haired Germanic Theones  peddling the fossilized remnant of the ancient jungle to the Romans. The hight cheek boned, fur clad, Asiatic warriors came next. Bow legged and reeking from a diet rich in mare’s milk the Alans, Penchenegs, and Hun camped in the delta their ponies drinking from the Danube. s. Dr. Braunschweiger said they were bow-legged and constantly stank of fermented mare’s milk. Norman knights came through here on the way to the Holy Land, pillaging, and killing, and maybe raping. My history teacher in the Realgymnasium didn’t say much about that, but he was a very devout Catholic. You probably know about all this anyway, and of course you know about the centuries when Christian and Turkish armies were chasing each other around here, killing and bleeding.

It must have been terrific, the silk tents, the horse hair standards, the battle trumpets. Then I guess the Habsburgs must have run out of steam. They started building a lot of palaces. The Viennese got fat, and although they listened to operas a lot ,and told jokes, and were crazy for waltzing, they were also getting nastier to each other. They built those long concrete walls below here to tame the old river. But the river doesn’t care. It keeps right on going past those filthy stone tenements, leaves them far behind. and rushes out, free and happy, into the great, open plain. Mrs. Leitameck, the coal woman, said that the Danube hums at night about the fate of all the people who ever lived along the river, and that the waves carry the songs of all those lives with them to the dark waters of the Black Sea.

 

I tell you this because now that the war has started, there is very little music in Vienna. A new Army has come to ravage the Danube although this one came by invitation and since then there is little Music left in this city of music. Really! On the first of December, less than a week ago, they closed up all the ball rooms. They said it was mainly to conserve coal and promised to reopen them in the spring. I could not care less. First    , because dancing doesn’t interest me very much. Second even if I were old enough  to dance they don’t let Jews into ball rooms. Most importantly, with any luck at all, I will be leaving Vienna before very long.

 

And, anyhow, who cares about ballrooms when your toes are freezing. My friend Tad Saegerer and I were standing at the end of the bridge that crossed the Danube in trolley stand waiting for the next tram.  It was not doing a great job protecting us from the wind and to keep warm we kept stamping our feet and burying our hands under our arms. But the cold was the least of my worries at that moment. I was worrying about how to explain being so late. What am I going to say to Papa? I wished desperately that the trolley would come.

 

The blackout was still on but a big, pale moon was racing through the sludgy clouds. It revealed a deserted bridge. Not another human figure was in sight from where Tad and I were standing, This was not unusual for this time of year. The inundation plain behind us was a very popular bathing place in the summer but the wintry cold had emptied it of all 1ife. Outlined in the moonlight, way in the distance across the bridge, were the bulky dark masses of crowded workers’ tenements. But, except for Tad and me, no one was crazy enough to be on this side of the river at night at this season of the year. Nothing  moved, except  maybe the  icy gray waters of the river way below the gray steel of the bridge. The water was moving. It was flowing to Slovakia, to the new Tiso Slovak state.

 

“Holy Crap” Tad exclaimed and pointed towards the sky. I had heard a faint drone in the distance, but now, outlined by the moon we could see a bomber formation cutting across the moonlit sky. “Luftwaffe” he said, bending his tall, skinny frame backward for a better look, “Heinkels! Must be coming home from Poland. Come home to get their laurels. Make the Austrian girls happy!” Tad followed the planes with his eyes as the dark wedge floated away from us toward the south.”Setzen sie sich and fich it.” whispered Tad. He knew the expression amused me ever since he first used it in a Latin class last year when he was having trouble with conjugations.. “Suppose those had been British planes. That would wake this town up. Can you just imagine it? Sirens wailing, big lights searching the sky, flak, everything! What a circus? Agreed? Hugi? Agreed? ”

 

Tad had a way of being persistent when he got enthusiastic about something which was pretty often. This me thinking about the British bombers and perhaps they could help us out of this mess and that cheered me up a bit but it didn’t last long. My immediate problem was not how to end the war it was what to say to Papa when I got home. It  was nearly 8:30 p.m. now. By the time the tram got us across Vienna, and I got home it would be nearly 10 o’clock. What could I say about being so late? I obviously could not tell him about Tomahawk. That would only make more trouble. It would be dangerous to my hide specifically my back hide and it would surely wreck Tad’s and my fabulous plan.

 

I  could imagine my old man pacing through the small apartment.. Like a tiger pacing in a cage., Not like one of those well cared for and fancy circus cats but a pale worn out local carnival beast in a small cage worn out by  too many shows. He’d mutter something about a worthless son, then he’d say, “My God, thirteen years old and a bum already”. Then the  questions will come at me hurled like spears. “Where have you been?” “What trouble have you stirred up now?” And  after every third sentence we will say, just to twist the blade a little, ,  he  will add sting to the burning wounds by adding: “And in times likes these !”

 

He would not understand about the Tomahawk. . Papa does not have the stomach for real adventure. He’d panic. That’s what he would do. , For sure, he would panic and do something stupid that would wreck all of  our work.  I  needed an exceptionally good story! The ones I had thought of so far were much too complicated, Papa would never believe them. If only Tad Saegerer would stop sounding off   about  those  damn  airplanes and think up something for me to say. Tad when he would focuse, had an outrageous imagination.  Better than anyones He had a reputation for the best source for lies, fabrications and excuses in the third form of Realgymnasium XVII, but he    gets very wild sometimes. Most of the time! I must be more desperate about this than I thought.

 

“Leave it to me,” said Tad, as we were settling back on  the    wooden  seats  in  the  dimly  lit,blacked-out  trolley. He ran  his  hands, one  after  the     other , through  his    lanky  black  hair. He  always  did this to let  people  know  he was  about to think very hard. Before he could say a word, I said .”No  lame    fairy stories,   Tad”

 

He replied, primly, as a professor would an ill prepared student ” We must recognize that Tomahawk is at stake. Only my best will do.” He looked confidently down at me. I am nearly a head shorter than him but I’m catching up. ” I know! You were grabbed by some Nazi storm troopers. They made you polish their boots, That’s why your hands are so dirty.”

 

Then before I had time to even consider the storm trooper story he said “No. No. We were walking to  Klosterneuburg  to  visit my mother’s cousin, you know,  the baker at the monastery.              That’s a long, long hike! Crazy in December! Why? To get some extra flour. What did we do with it? “I took it home. No that won’t do….I have it.. We  were force to use it to bribe a policeman  who recognized you were Jewish and hassled you. Agreed, Hugi?”

 

“Are you crazy! No never! My parents will go beserk. They will never let me out of the apartment again for fear that I will do some crazy stunt and not even end with the flour. Come on. Think we have to have a good story before I get home or that is the end of the Tomahawk.  Tad was not in go

The soft ping of the dripping communal faucet was the only sound in the hall. I stood in the narrow landing outside the apartment and stared at the cracked tile floor, trying to build up my courage to open the door. How this place had begun to depress me lately. Age and neglect gaped at me from every tile. The dim yellow light of the hallway made me feel sick and poor. And the constant fear that the caretaker’s wife would emerge from her apartment and yell things like “Jewish swine. I can’t wait until they come and take you all away…filthy beasts.” Standing outside the door I take a deep breath and finally make up my mind. . I’ll tell them that I had heard they were giving out visa numbers at the Liberian consulate. Waiting numbers for visa applications that they were issuing next week. And that just before they got to me they gave out the last one and I had to walk home as I didn’t have any money for the tram.

 

As I unlocked the hall door, I had just about convinced myself that they might believe that story. But I knew enough from past experiences to enter cautiously. I was entering the tigers cage. Slowly I turned the knob  and entered our apartment.  A miserable worker’s district, stained greasy flat. And, there was Papa’s hobbled feline face staring at me from the circle of light around the table. The sight was enough to make my empty stomach twist and turn.  I have had a lot of experience with old Papa. I realized in an instant that I ought to hold onto my Liberia story until the last possible moment. It wasn’t that good a story and Papa’s face was dark red. I walked into the room carefully, keeping my back towards the wall. Then I stopped, my behind close against the wardrobe door, and looked down at the floor, waiting for the inevitable.  My knees stuck  out from under my short pants. They were blue with the cold of the street.

Sound precautions. There was a moment of silence and then Papa’s chair clattered over backward, and he charged across the room at me.  In a second,  he stood  speechless with rage over me. His face was now chalky white. When Papa worried about me or about anyone else  he loved, he grew angry easily.  Knowing the loving didn’t help much now as I knew that his anger often meant that violence was not far bar and I tensed myself for his callused hand whizzing down at me.

Mama rose to my rescue just in time.

“Look how tired the boy looks,” she said quickly and pushed herself between Papa and me.

“Please Benno!” she pleaded, “it’s ten o’clock and  he hasn’t eaten.” She waited for Papa to retreat a little, and then pulled me to the table, keeping herself in front of me like

 

shield until I was able to sit down.

 

Saved for the moment! Mama brought a small pot of stew from the stove and ladled it unto my plate. She fluttered around me nervously like a hen, cutting a thin slice from the small remnant of a loaf of bread, bringing me salt, discovering that my hands were dirty and wiping them with a washrag. It was reassuring to have her large shapeless warmth near me. I kept my face over the magically secure bright disk of the plate. Papa paced in the shadows beyond the table and waited. I think Mama had intimidated him a little. He did not speak until I had finished chewing on my last bite and had swallowed my last drop of water. You can bet I took my time about it. Finally it came.

 

“I suppose that you have been chasing around the streets with your unclean crony. Hugi, you are thirteen years old. Thirteen years old, and you play Indians until ten o’clock at night in a blacked-out city. Your mother and I are dying of worry. A  Jewish  boy, running around the    streets, playing stupid games  and in times like these. You you idiot, you bum! ” Papa  was not  good with words. When  he  ran out of things the frustration of not being able to say what he want brought on the only way he knew how to be articulate. With his muscles. I managed to duck just in time. . His  hard, work-worn  hand    swept over the top of my head.

 

“Benno Flossel” said Mama, “I beg of you. please calm yourself. What are the Roelichs going to think about you shouting again at this time of night?”The Roelichs occupied the apartment on one side of us. The walls were thin. Bad news. Frau Roelich was a crabby woman who was an anti-Semite to ·boot. Gentiles of the right! Herr Roelich had  been  one  of  the  few  workers  at  the   Municpal Gasworks who was not a Social Democrat. He had never been very cordial, even before Hitler’s arrival. Mama did not worry about the Querbaum’s who live in the adjacent apartment on the other side because Rosa Querbaum knew all about Mama’s troubles. They often talked to each other about them. As a matter of fact, I don’t think they talked about anything else. Papa lost his temper easily with his only child, me. Fortunately, he calmed down quickly. I once heard Hrs. Querbaum say to Mama, “You will have your hands full,  Hannah, the worse things will get, the less patience Benno will have with his son.” She had been right. The worse the Nazi troubles got for the Jews, the more often Papa would lose his temper with me. The afternoon the storm troopers forced Papa to scrub the sidewalk in front of a tavern with lye, he beat me so hard with a carpet beater that my thighs and arms were covered with deep blue welts. And just because I had left my shoes on the floor in the middle of the room

 

When I had entered the apartment I had been ravenous. After all we had been down in the inundation area all day with no chance to eat.  Now that I had some food in my stomach I felt a little more secure. My father’s swing at me had also riled me up. “Listen Papa, I try my best to do something that will get us out of this rotten country. My words rose like hot phlegm in my throat. “And what do I get? You slap me around.”I was beginning to feel very self-righteous and I noted with some satisfaction that tears were welling up in my eyes. Just indignation!   “I spent  the  whole  day standing  in line at the Liberian consulate  ”

“What the hell did you do that for?”

“They were passing out waiting numbers,” I said almost as primly as if it had been true. ” Next week they are going to  hand out 200 visa applications. With a visa to Liberia we could get out of here.”Although it suddenly occurred to me that I had nothing to show for my visit to the consulate, I stared at my father without blinking.

 

Papa raised his huge calloused paw again. Then he changed his mind, and turned to Mama. “Hannah, have we raised a complete idiot?” he asked bitterly. “I am a poor worker. I tear my fingers to shreds to make brushes that are too expensive for me to buy. He stared at his hand as if it were suddenly turning gangrenous. That hard hand, much to large for Papa’s slight  body, stared back at Papa. “They want 10,000 in American dollars for a visa to Liberia. I don’t know how we are going to eat next week, and my demented son is already packing his bags. Hannah, what have we done to deserve this?”

My father walked over to the small coal stove and lit a cigarette, while I followed his movements wearily with my eyes. For some reason, his little speech about the money made me angry enough to shout. “Every time I give you an idea about how to get

 

 

out of this place, you call me an idiot. I’m only thirteen years old but I know better. I am not so dumb that I can’t see we have to leave. You just don’t have the gumption it takes to get us out of here.”

As soon as I said it, I wish I hadn’t. Now I wouldn’t be able to keep from crying.

Papa looked at me silently for a long moment. He never was one that would try to impress us with stories about how clever he had been and how he had neatly done this or that. Instead he was proud of being honest, of being a man of his word. Tad had once said contemptuously that the poor  think  that clean conscience and dignity is the same thing.  The silence worried  me, and I drew closer to Mama for protection, just in case he came at me again • Bu t looking up , I was surprise to see a glimmer  of moisture in my father’s eyes.

 

Papa spoke softly, turning to mother and me.”You know I tried every way I could think of but I had no luck. We have Uncle Max in the United States but with so few slots we cannot count him….One hardly knows where  to  turn next. Other people have many close  relatives  who live abroad.We  have  no one else. I always made my living with my hands. Who wants a simple worker?   One needs money or relatives to get out. Shanghai wants money. Liberia wants money. Bolivia wants money. All I’ve got is these!”

 

He lowered his hands to his knees and stared at them as if he were ashamed of their nakedness.

A small brightness suddenly passed over Papa’s face”Listen, there may be something for us yet. I talked to Ignaz Querbaum today. He says they are making jobs for Jews so they can support themselves with honest work”.

 

Mother looked up quickly. “What kind of work is this, Benno?”

 

“Reconstruction! Poland is all in ruins, as you  can imagine, and they need to clean up the mess. From what Querbaum says, they are giving the work to Jews because the Germans are all in the army. They need the help. The pay is fair and people will be allowed to send for their families just as soon as living accommodations become available. They owe me for the years I suffered for them in Siberia”

 

Mama’s face softened. She got up from the sagging sofa, walked to Papa and put her hand on his shoulder.” You take good care of us. We know how hard you are trying. Perhaps Poland will work out…I hope this is good news at last, Benno” she whispered. My father slowly looked up at her. It moved me. Mama’s worn face glowed with gentle love.

 

“Hannah, I would not be honest if I told you it was clean, easy work. But from what Ignaz has heard, the pay will be decent, they will leave us alone, and we will be able to get along. take

Some of those coffee house cavaliers may not be able to it. But I have been used to hard work all my life. .Cleaning up rubble in Poland isn’t going to bother me.”

As I lay in bed, waiting to fall asleep, I began to have visions of Poland. Endless steppes, dark forest, the tall reeds of marshes combed by a silver wind. Packs of wolves howling in the night. Horses. I always felt powerfully attracted to strange and new places. May be that  was because  we had alwaysbeen so poor and we could never go any place. Stuck in these bedbug-infested, crowded apartment houses that always smelled of stale cooking. I have hardly been out of Vienna, except for a few excursions into the Vienna woods and, once, four and one half weeks at that sissy place that the Jewish Childcare Agency ran  in lower Austria. Oh yes, there was also the ten days visiting Uncle Heinrich in the Burgenland near the Hungarian border. But that was five years ago and I had been pretty young then.

 

Poland is not a place where tropical winds are whispering in the Banyan trees. Equatorial winds would be very nice. But even Poland whispered of romance. Poland! Horses’ hoofs pounding over vast steppes that stretched from Poland to Samarkand and the high Himalayas. I definitely felt a small tug of temptation.Then I saw Tomahawk before me. I was half-asleep but the thought woke me completely. Tomahawk was the real door to adventure, to the world that my friend Tad and I were dreaming about. Tomahawk would take Tad and me away from the Nazis, and out of this grubby grayness. It would carry us, the boy adventurer, Hugi Flossel, and his faithful friend, Tad Saegerer, down the green waters of the Danube to the high reed jungles of the delta, and beyond it, to the glistening waves of the Black Sea. I fell asleep dreaming of glistening waves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The room was suddenly crowded. Richard and his two sons were joined by my brother in law Mark and his 8-year-old son Oliver who quickly launched himself into my arms. He is the spitting image of my Dad. Like the rest of us he is uniformed in khakis, white shirt and blazer. Unlike the rest of us, instead of wearing a tie he is sporting a bow tie. I ask him “Are you wearing that because Grandpa did?” He nods. I point to a lapel pin I am wearing and ask “Do you know what this is? He looks at the small burgundy and gold shield on my left lapel with  the motto “Haec Manus Ob Patrium”, these hands for your country.”

“No”

“That is a pin from Grandpa’s Army Uniform. It is for his unit. The 913^th Field Artillery. We are both honoring Poppa today. Perhaps it is because we both look like him.”

He gives me one of his patented gigantic hugs that one day will crush me but today only delights and runs off to join his father who is deep in conversation with Rich. I look out the window. On the deck, which my parents built to overlook the backyard of stately oaks, flower beds and lawn and was one of Pops favorite places to contemplate the world, guests are gathering. Some communities you move into. Others you adopt, like those collections of people a spouse or friend have gathered around them. This was my community. A group of friends whom I had embraced in the first half century of my life. All of them knew parts of my journey. All had tales to tell of my life separately but today they would be joined in a single tale in this place of countless memories. I turned my face to the window so that this group of men gathered in the room with me would not see the tears running down my cheeks.

It was a cold, grey morning in November as I fought a north wind that was funneling down 6^th Avenue. The decision to be on this journey might have been pre-ordained. At the very least, I had known that I would take this particular trip for several months although I had not known exactly when and where it would take me.  That it would take me here, to the diamond district was highly likely although my particular destination was somewhat improbable.

When Dad had died in July Elaine had not been physically with me, but she had been there in spirit. It was a difficult time for me. Not only had I lost a father, hero and friend but I had lost a part of my life that provided meaning for me. Taking care of my dad was more than just his physical care but giving back to him who had given me all in life. It provided value and a sense of purpose. With his passing that sense of purpose had evaporated leaving me feeling hollow and alone.

There was also another feeling at play. Anger. Long ago I had read Dr. Kubler-Ross’s on Death and Dying and knew intellectually that it was one of the phases of grief. The difference between reading a book and going through something is that what you feel seems perfectly rational and reasonable. With my Dad’s death I had a tremendous amount of anger with my brother who had participated rarely and lightly to my Dads care, had not visited him on his death bed and with Pop’s passing thought he should be the leader of the family. To be fair to me, some of these feelings of resentment and rage were perfectly reasonable for me to feel. But the depth of emotion I felt, the chest thumping, object throwing, color my world red fury I felt was not justified by David’s narcissism and selfish behavior.

Elaine was my balm, my comfort and solace.  We talked by Skype or phone multiple times a day. We summarized our days in long, thoughtful and often introspective emails. She managed the difficult if not impossible. While always having my back and supporting me, she held a mirror up to my emotions and behavior. If I had been unreasonable, unjust or rude she would let me know but gently and in such a way where, instead of resisting her suggestions I embraced them.  Her sage words, kindness and sagacity provided safe passage and snug harbor during the most difficult time of my life. I had been in love with Elaine since our third date on the Costa Pacifica. Now I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

I had every reason to believe that Elaine felt the same way. While we had never directly discussed the subject of getting married, we had danced around it a number of times. Elaine had suggested, but had not outright said, that should I ask her to marry me she would say yes. We had even discussed, theoretically, if I were to ask the question what type of ring she would like. She was extremely specific with her response. So I was reasonably confident that the mission that I was on this morning was not a fool’s errand.

The building I was looking for turned out to be the same one that housed the set and offices of the Today Show. As a consequence, I was all but x-rayed and asked to give a blood sample before being allowed into the building. When I proved not to be a threat to Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira or Al Roker I was allowed in the building and proceeded to the office of Jay Laird, Jewelers. The reception area for this private jeweler was not large. Just a few chairs along the periphery, with pictures of gems on the wall and a plexiglass window at one end where a receptionist served as a gate keeper to the inner sanctum. I let her know that I was here to see Mr. Laird and she asked me to have a seat.

While waiting, I amused myself with the irony of the situation. There are a host of tropes, jokes, and apocryphal stories about Jewish men in search of jewelry at a reasonable price being told by their friends that they have an uncle, a cousin, a friend of a friend who is in the business and can help them find a well-priced piece. When I had asked my Jewish friends, none had any relatives in the business or even knew any jewelers or for that matter knew of someone who knew someone in the business. I completely struck out until I had asked my friend Francis Xavier Farrell whether he knew of anyone who could help me find the perfect engagement ring for Elaine. He recommended Jay Laird. He told me he was a mensch. Which made me laugh in the same way as I laugh when Elaine curses in English. The juxtaposition of 6’4’’ inch man of Irish descent from Pittsford, MA using Yiddish to describe a non-Jewish person…comedy gold.

It turned out that Fran was right.  Jay Laird was a mensch. He treated me as if I were a member of his family. After asking what I was looking for ( a diamond and sapphire ring…not to big because as Elaine had told me, she had small fingers and a big ring would not fit well on her hand) and my budget (like I would tell you) he brought me a selection of absolutely gorgeous rings. And I didn’t love any of them. Some were too much diamond and not enough sapphire. Others had enough sapphire, but the diamonds could have been used as a stylus on a turntable. Still others looked too clunky. And there were a couple that would have cost more than a new SUV. Jay listened to my thoughts and asked me to give him a second so he could fetch from his safe a ring that he thought would be ideal for me. When he returned, he placed on a slate colored velvet pillow a platinum ring with a nicely sized oval sapphire at its center with two hexagonal diamonds on either side. It was exactly what I was looking for and when I asked Jay the price, he told me that he would give me a “mishpokah” discount. I laughed at this very waspy man using Yiddish but suddenly stopped laughing when I realized the discount, he was giving me. I really was a member of the family.

Over the course of the last several months I had spent a lot of time with my mother. She had, as she put it, gone from her father’s house to my father’s house and was not used to being alone. To help her through this transition my sister and I had spent whatever spare time we could with her not only socializing but helping her wade through Dad’s belongings. Finding items that were memories to her and news to Marissa and I had drawn us closer than we had ever been. Then came Super Storm Sandy. Marissa and I had been adamant about evacuating her from her house in Summit. While she had a generator and would be fine from an electricity point of view there was no telling what the wind, falling tree limbs and flying objects would do. She, being stubborn, refused to leave until I showed up hours before the storm and told her to get into the car she was coming with me. We spent the next three days in my 650 sq ft apartment on the UWS watching the metropolitan area be devastated by the storm while our lights did not even blink once.

During that time together we had talked a lot. She told me how different I seemed since I met Elaine. Happier. Lighter. I shared with her that Elaine made me feel complete. That the love I had for her was entirely different than any other love I had felt before. I told her that my intention was to ask her to marry me and she had heartily endorsed that idea. Naturally, after I had purchased the ring I wanted to show off my purchase and gain reassurance that I had, in fact, purchased a ring worthy of Elaine’s finger. When I visited her that weekend, I brought Jay Laird’s masterpiece and showed it to her asking “What do you think.”

Her response was instantaneous “I love it. It is simply perfect.” And then followed up with when are you going to give it to her. I explained that the plan was on the day after Christmas I would fly to Rio so that Elaine and I could have our own Christmas together and celebrate the New Year on the beach in Rio.

Despite our Jewish faith,  Christmas had always been an important holiday for our family. Mom, who grew up in the most reform of Reform Judaism had always celebrated the holiday as a universal time of good will towards man. In fact, her parents Christmas open house party had been an Upper East Side Tradition for years. My father whose relationship with Judaism was complicated always bah humbugged the holiday while secretly enjoying the pleasure of giving and receiving gifts. Every year on Christmas eve we would gather in the living room and in front of an open hearth open up our gifts. On Christmas morning, over Stollen and coffee (cocoa when we were younger) we would open up enormous woolen stockings stuffed with all the useful items that would populate your desk drawers for years to come along with other bits that Mom thought fit your personality and the occasional special gift hidden added for special delight. All gifts were wrapped in tissue paper which no doubt took my mother days if not weeks.

Stockings were and still are my favorite part of the Christmas gift giving ritual. Which was one of the reasons I was so surprised when Elaine told me that “stockings” had never been a part of the Brazilian Christmas experience even though they had copied so many other northern hemisphere holiday icon’s like Christmas trees and a Papa Noel that wore fur. But it made sense in a Brazilian sort of way. Why have stockings when everyone wears Havianna’s ?

Which is why when Mom asked when me how I planned on proposing to Elaine there was no hesitation. I planned on giving her, her first Christmas stocking. I would seek out and buy all of the silly, impractical, vaguely amusing and marginally useful items that I could find and then after wrapping them I would place them with care within a custom made exceptionally large stocking. The ring, in a box and wrapped, would be placed in the toe as I wanted it to be the last gift opened. This was only marginally to torment her. She knew I was going to propose. She just did not know when. Mostly, it was about making sure that the last gift given was the best gift of the day which I had high hopes the ring would be.

In the weeks that followed, I shopped every paper store, curiosity shop and obscure listing on Amazon finding fun items in which to stuff the stockings. I took this very seriously. I wanted Elaine to have the full stocking experience before getting to the ring. Then I carefully wrapped each one of these tiny presents which considering my fingers resemble Vienna sausages was no easy task. Finally, I stuffed the stocking carefully making sure that there was a proper “build” to the ring in the toe.

On the evening of December 26^th I flew to Rio with a very well prepared stocking carefully packaged within my rollaboard. It was a nerve-wracking flight. Not because I was worried about the outcome of the proposal, I was pretty sure that was a layup. My nerves were frayed because it suddenly occurred to me that if the customs officers asked to inspect my bag, not only would they ask me to unwrap each of the two dozen or so presents crammed within the stocking but it would be likely that I would have to pay duty on Elaine’s soon to be engagement ring. Fortunately for me the guardians of Brazils borders were far more interested in the Brazilians returning from the United States with suitcases larger than my first apartment in NYC.

It was full on summer in Rio with humidity that bordered on liquid and temperatures in the high 90’s.  Not at all Christmasy for a gringo. But it was because of the heat and the fact that Elaine’s home, like most Brazilian domiciles, had no central air conditioning we retired to the bedroom to exchanged gifts. I am embarrassed to say that I have no clue what presents Elaine gave me that year. I was far to focused on giving her her first stocking.

Finally, the time had come, and I pulled this one-meter long stocking from my suitcase and placed it on the bed in front of Elaine like a burnt offering in front of a goddess. Which is when the axiom “Man plans, and god laughs” came into play. I was so excited that I was giving Elaine her first stocking, that incidentally contained a marriage proposal at the end, that I completely forgot that Elaine had never opened a stocking before. She did not realize that protocol was  to take each individual gift out of the stocking, open it, and then move on to the next.  Instead, she relied on common sense. Turning the stocking upside down, she dumped its contents on the bed. This meant that the present I wanted her to open up last was now on top of the pile of gifts laying before her.

Before Elaine could reach for the small, well wrapped gift that now crowned a pile of gifts laying  before her I snatched it away saying “No. No. We are going to save that for last.”

Have I mentioned that no one enjoys gifts quite as much as Elaine. She unwraps each gift as if tearing a piece of paper or not removing each piece of scotch tape carefully is a mortal sin. Then each gift needs to be admired, examined from every angle and cooed about until no adjectives were left in describing what the gift meant to her. On most days this is endearing. It is rewarding to know how appreciated your gifts are but, on this day,, it was maddening and there was no way in which to speed her along without ruining the surprise.

At long last she reached the bottom of the pile. I handed her the last gift and watched as she gently removed the ribbon. I gazed at her as she removed the four pieces of tape that held the wrapping paper in place. I looked on as she removed the cardboard sleeve that protected the velveteen box. Finally, she flipped open the hinged box to reveal the beautiful ring I had purchased in the hopes that it would overwhelm her in joy and accept my heartfelt desire to marry her.

Her reaction was not what I expected. Instead of tears of joy and screams of happiness she said “Oh my darling, it is beautiful.”

Incredulous, stunned and gob smacked it took me a moment or two before I could utter “Do you know what that is.”

She looked at me as if I had lost my mind “Of course I do. It is an engagement ring.”

“And?”

“Well of course my love. I will marry you.”

There was a knock at the door. My sister popped her head into the room and said “Its time.”