TopCut

Zvi Jagendorf

I opened my fly

Don’t know why 

I opened my fly

I think I’ll die

You have to be younger to open it. Now buttons escape fingers, zips jam. So not really for me at my age now, a fly.

But then. I was interesting to look at for those kids from St. George’s Church of England School who were pressed together outside my window. They had one thing in mind. My widdler. Why mine? 

Why is this widdler different from the others? All other widdlers come to a happy end. Mine doesn’t. It got cut, not the whole of it just a flip off the top. So no happy end. They were staggered. They never saw anything like it. It must have looked like a shy worm quivering in the cold.

Mutti came and took me away.

I am quivering too now, that’s because my caretaker left me standing in the kitchen between the stove and the sink. I will have to plan my way to the door and then work out how to open it without losing balance.

They cut my top end ages ago and I was too young to ask what they were going to do with it. Maybe it was buried in the Prater so we would step on it when the häusmadchen took me for walks.

In a photograph I see Mutti, her brother Walter, his wife Perla and a scratched out figure of a woman behind them at a window. That is me sitting on a step, tiny me.

Why was that woman in the window scratched out?

Mutti was a young woman, in her twenties then but she looked drawn and sickly. She had been ill with TB, so they had to hire a hausmädchen. But why scratch the woman out?

I never had a hausmädchen since those days but I have a caretaker now who wheels me for outings in the park. I promised her I would never scratch out her face. Never. Not till I die. Whatever did she do to them, that hausmädchen?

If I could get all those kids from St George’s Church of England Primary together again what would they do?  The school is gone and the window where I stood bare bottomed is gone . Outside there is still a bus stop for Shrewsbury but no buses. The boys from St George’s  run around aimlessly sweating in the sun  looking for me in my window. They are stll curious. No one ever told them. How could they have known that I went back to where I was born and sat in the Prater as one hausmädchen after another walked by? Some were African or Asian. A hausmädchen sat near me on my bench. The child in her pram was asleep. Her German was not so great but her English was fluent so it took me no time to tell her I was not a tourist but had come back to where I was a baby only a few minutes walk away and I had a hausmädchen like her then, but not from Africa.  What I didn’t tell Adana was that I imagined my topcut was buried in the earth somewhere nearby. Imagine it sending out signals like a slowly dying battery under the ground. Zum zum zumzum zzzzz.  I was young then and she attracted me. We arranged to meet after her work and it developed. Unlike the boys of  St. George’s she did not find my cut comical and I did not have to explain anything. She said her grandmother in Nigeria had a cut but different of course on a woman.  Was that a cruel cut? Was mine?

What makes people do cuts?

I told her that my grandfather had his beard cut in the street right here years ago. Like St. George’s there was a crowd watching but not kids and probably  jeering. So here we were, my topcut her granny’s cut and my grandad’s cut. She couldn’t understand why I made such a fuss about it, that it was a superstition and hardly anyone did it anymore.

When I saw Adana next she had changed her mind and thought it should be illegal or should be done only by agreement so that the person cut could say No, don’t do that. She was studying to be a nurse.

I wondered if my top and my grandad’s beard got cut within whistling distance of each other. We lived close by then  before the war in the immigrants section near the DonauKanal. After my cut the men needed to drink schnapps and eat cake but after grandad’s there was nothing and he disappeared soon after, taken away. He was called Moses and his name is cut on a paving stone in the street where they lived. “Does it say his beard was cut,” she asked, “let’s look”. So we got dressed and walked  along some quiet streets hand in hand till I stopped still. “What’s the matter?”  “I forgot where it is. I know it’s somewhere around here.”

We searched the pavements for what seemed like hours.  It was hard work and a strain on  the eyes. Many stretches were boring, grey stone after grey stone, but some had pretty fanlike patterns and a few were done with cobblestones so you could imagine horses clopping in old Vienna . Adana had to go back to work so she left me alone wondering if I had made it all up, the beard, the stone, the cut, the people laughing. I was very tired not just because of the search but because of Mutti.  Her TB had always weighed on me, even after she died in Shropshire. I lay down to rest in a park, going over it all.

She was sent away to a clinic in the mountains to recuperate and gain weight. TB was not all that uncommon then and her case was not extreme, mostly weight loss but they had to hide  it. It was a secret. Who would marry a girl with even a touch of that disease? So she stayed home a lot, had private teachers for English and correspondence and they kept on with negotiations about an engagement to Siggy Wohl. They knew his parents well and he knew English and was going to be an accountant and a bit of a lawyer.

She probably met him a few times but she never spoke about it. So I had to make him up. I thought of him as trim with a thin moustache and a bit of a swagger. One of those young men who had overcome their parents’ foreignness and made the city their own.  For me he was a bit of a dandy and knew about girls and Karl Kraus but to be respectable he needed a family connection like Mutti’s with some flavours of the old country and money as well. They must have made some formal agreement between the families  and all was set for the next step. But he found out. That was not so surprising because secrets were what everybody talked about. So did he just break off the negotiations.? No, he was a scoundrel  A “gauner” Tante Perla called him. And a “hochshtapler”  That was  a good word because it sounded like a high wire acrobat and  it let me think of him falling  to earth for his crimes. He used the secret of Mutti’s illness to blackmail them and wrote them a letter saying he would spread the word around unless they came up with a pretty sum. They were too scared and embarrassed to challenge his family so they bought him off and Mutti relapsed even though they didn’t tell her everything and that’s how I was born and cut. Siggy ended up in Argentina  and Pops was probably fished out of a reserve of needy young men . The beard the gang cut was his dad’s and his name Moses was cut on a stone on the pavement. But where was it?

A thing I could never do was ask Pops if he knew about her sickness when that marriage was arranged. In their wedding photograph he didn’t look trapped like later on when they were already close to fleeing. Then he looked trapped because how could he get out with a wife and child and no visas? But in the wedding picture he was up and stony holding a shiny top hat tight as if afraid it would slip away before he could return it and she was frozen like icing on a wedding cake.

I wasn’t born for six years and I wondered if she needed to get really well before she could have me and if Pops took a vow of chastity or something. Separate beds were not unusual then. But these are things you cannot talk about and to tell the truth I didn’t understand the gap in years till much later. She was always frail and I can’t imagine her watching me get cut and not fainting. They must have put her in another room to be comforted by the new hausmädchen who was going to look after her and me.

I was falling asleep on the prickly grass of the park but I shook myself awake and set out to look for Moses again. It would be a miracle if I found a grey hair or two wispy and lost crushed between two paving stones. Two grey hairs would be better evidence than the name Moses and only I would know what they meant like a detective at a cold crime scene. Eventually I stumbled upon him, not alone but in a kind of mosaic of names  arranged under  dusty bushes. Moses was there probably alongside some other beards so I didn’t even pretend to look for hairs. But I brought Adana and explained to her that when I was cut he would probably have held me. He didn’t do it but he held me. “Aren’t you angry with him? He  should have protected you. He was an accomplice. Did they use scissors, a knife, a scalpel. How did they stop the bleeding?”

I was at a loss. All I knew was that it happened. A cut was cut. But scissors and scalpels now  terrified me. How could such things be turned on me, a baby? Not even the roughest of the boys of St. George’s could have imagined something like that. A dad might have slapped them in the face or banged their head against a wall or even taken a tooth out, but a cut, there? There was a Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children in Shropshire but not in Leopoldstadt.

Underneath my feet the stone of Moses grew white with the shame I rained  on him. He could never make amends for abdicating  his protection of me and now his name was laid down in the street only a walk away from where my topcut was buried. Imagine a dialogue between them about wounds and shame. He is the victim because of his beard and I am the victim because of my bleeding thing. He wasn’t hurt physically though he was knocked about but it shamed and insulted him. My blood stopped soon enough but I was standing at the window bare bottomed and the shame burdened me many years later.

I dreamed about it when I dreamed of Mutti I even considered searching for school attendance lists from 1942 so I could write to those boys and ask them what they remembered. That did seem perverse and could even get me into trouble with the police. So when it became unbearable I decided to get to Vienna and see if I could lay the shame to rest in the Prater.

I had the photograph with the scratched out hausmädchen in my wallet. One of just a few left over from that time. Did she have something to do with Moses beard? Perhaps they didn’t treat her so well and she felt underpaid. Maybe she had a grudge against them and  was friendly with the gang that cut Moses’ beard. So she both comforted Mutti after my cut and thought Moses had it coming to him.

Not impossible, I thought. So she got scratched.

When I showed the photograph to Adana  she  took sides with the hausmädchen. “It’s a job that makes you hungry for recognition. You give everything and get very little. She was probably poor and had no fine baby linen.”

“You think she had a baby?” “Why not? She needed the work to keep her own child fed and warm. It gets very cold here. I wouldn’t have scratched her.”

You could never unscratch her and they were all dead so I could never find out. It was something else hidden, disfigured cut away from those bad days.

Adana was right

It gets very cold here.