1
They were told Los Angeles would be like the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Sea was a sea of many tales: of Homer and his Cyclops and Sirens and heroes and sheep. Los Angeles had its myths, too, Hollywood myths, and like the villages and cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, it was blazing with bougainvillea and geraniums, with lemon trees and orange trees. But when they saw the sea itself, the Pacific Ocean, they thought it was as unlike the Mediterranean Sea they knew as the Alps were unlike the Sahara dunes. They could spot dolphins leaping and playing from the beaches of Los Angeles just as they could from the rocks of Capri, but the Pacific Ocean was a noisy, industrious sea, working day and night in the manufacture of huge swollen waves, delivering them, one after the other, crashing, to the shore. The water in the Pacific was bone-chilling, nothing like the soft, silent water in which they’d bathed on their Mediterranean holidays. And the sun—the sun was different, too. It was bigger, flatter, paler, brighter than a Mediterranean sun—a flat glaring disc in a sky that was enormous and bleached of color. It was not that the Künstlers were unhappy with their new home, so unlike European shores. No, they were not unhappy, not at all. They were stunned.
* * *
THEY arrived at the brand-new Union Station in Los Angeles. A driver collected them. He’d been sent by the movie studio that had made their escape from Austria possible. Of all the experiences of that long journey by ship and by rail, they would later recount, that first glimpse of Los Angeles from an automobile was what struck them as the strangest. The drive through the city might as well have been skippered by Odysseus, they said. It was that unexpected, that odd.
“Is it an exhibition?” Mr. Künstler asked. Otto Künstler. Some had heard of him. Some not.
“Is it an exhibition?”
Little houses like Swiss chalets, like cottages in the woods, like miniature castles, like Persian mosques, like cabins in Wild West movies.
“Novelty,” said his wife, Ilse. “They like novelty here.” She laughed then. “What have we done?” But she was excited. The only one who spoke even a bit of English, she asked the driver, “All is like this?”
“Like what?”
And they knew then that, yes, it was all like that: uneven, whimsical, nonsensical.
“I like it,” their daughter said. She was eleven years old, named Salomea, known as Mamie. She sat in the backseat, leaning out the window, her mother beside her.
Ilse patted her shoulder. Brave girl, bucking us all up, said the pat.
But Mamie did like it. She had always had a tendency to brood; her father liked to say she was a Romantic, but her mother said no, she was too literal-minded. That was before Los Angeles, however. In Los Angeles, almost immediately, Mamie’s brooding would become lighter, animated, transformed into something fanciful, into daydreaming, while her literal-mindedness revealed itself as something more subtle, something mischievous. Her grandfather, who understood her best, called it irony.
“I was born to be born in Los Angeles,” she would say, all her life.
“Why are their cars so big and their houses so small?” she asked, leaning even farther out of the car window. There were orange groves and oil wells side by side. What could be more decadent? “I don’t see a city. Do you? Where do they buy bread? They do eat bread, don’t they? I have not seen one bakery. The trees have no branches, just hats on top.”
“They’re palm trees. Surely you’ve seen palm trees, Mamie,” her father said.
“In paintings? Photographs? You must have,” her mother said.
“I do not call these trees,” her grandfather said. “They are potted plants. And they have outgrown their pots. Significantly.”
Mamie stared out the window. “Golly,” she said in English, a word she’d learned on the ship coming over.
Her father laughed. “This affectation of naivete is getting on my nerves a bit, darling daughter.”
“The palm trees are quite gauche,” she said to retaliate. She had no idea what gauche meant but she was sure it was apt.
Was her naivete an affectation? She would want you to think so, but in truth Mamie was wonderfully, liberatingly naïve. She wanted to clap her hands like a much younger child. She was delighted with the tall, skinny palm trees. She was fascinated by the landscape, dry and bright, the sky stretched thin, the oil wells lifting their prehistoric heads up and down. There were no shops on the streets, no people, no dogs or cats or cafés or museums or palaces. Just little troll houses, little troll lawns, overgrown potted-plant palm trees and smaller trees flowering above garish troll gardens. It was like a puppet show with no puppets.
* * *
THE Künstlers left Vienna very late, 1939, almost too late. They were lucky to get out. So many of their friends and relatives did not, too dazed by disbelief and the comforts of just a year or two before. It was only with the Anschluss in 1938 that the Künstlers were shaken out of their own complacency. The family had lived in Vienna for a hundred years, prospered for the last fifty, and it took German Nazis invading, troops goose-stepping beneath their windows, to convince the men in the family there was no hope.
Before that, Grandfather Künstler had refused even to consider abandoning the city of his birth. Austria was not like Germany! Vienna was a city of music and love! Of beauty! Then the changes began in earnest. Mamie’s school made her stand in the back of the classroom with no desk, then banned her from school altogether. Otto Künstler was relieved of his teaching duties at the conservatory. He was forbidden to perform in any concert hall. His compositions were banned.
The family left their house as little as possible that year. Mamie missed her long strolls through the city with Grandfather, though she did not argue. One day after the arrival of the Germans, she and her grandfather had been walking along when they saw a crowd of people jeering and laughing. The crowd—a mob, Mamie called it, years later—had circled around an old Jewish woman, forced her down on her hands and knees and made her scrub the filthy pavement. She was breathing hard, her face impassive, bent over the scrub brush. Two-handed. Back and forth. The dirty water stained the skirt of her dress. Back and forth. The sharp outline of her knees showed through the wet cotton. Back and forth went the scrub brush. And all around the old woman on the ground the gentiles—our neighbors! Mamie realized—mocked her. Old Jew whore, they said. Old Jew whore in the dirt where you belong. Scrub scrub. Back and forth. Then a woman kicked her. Then another woman kicked her. Then a man. Old Jew whore.
Mamie was pulled away by her grandfather. They walked home as fast as they could. Neither of them left the house after that day.
To stave off Mamie’s boredom and fear, her grandfather told her stories, which served also to stave off his own boredom and fear. They developed an unspoken, perhaps unconscious, understanding during those months: they would look after each other. And during that time they became friends, even better friends.
The outside world was gone, locked out, but there were also more visitors to the big house than was usual. Men slipping in the back, men in the kitchen where men never went, men in the parlor with Otto and Ilse bent over documents and envelopes, the room heavy with whispers. Mamie watched them come and go, but they barely noticed her.
And then one night, all the rustling papers and hoarse whispers stopped. Mamie was told to pack a bag with what she thought essential. Helga, the cook and bosomy friend whenever Mamie needed comfort, hugged her one last time, both of them crying, only the cook understanding why.
And the Künstler family left the city of Vienna.
They took the train, uneventfully in Mamie’s memory, to the Swiss border. Not for a minute did she believe she would never see her house again. She was frightened when soldiers or train officials boarded the train each time they stopped at a station. She was terrified of men in uniform; but men in uniform had been terrifying in Vienna, too. As soon as the train began again to chug and move rhythmically forward, Mamie dismissed the blustering men in uniform from consciousness. That instant and placid amnesia was not a feeling available to the adults, but Mamie noticed nothing of their feelings. She was on a fast-moving train. There were hills and mountains and pastures full of cows. She could hear the hollow clang of their bells.
When they reached the border, the family got out and presented various papers to various officials. Mamie sat on her little case and ate a roll her mother gave her, waiting. She didn’t mind waiting. The station was busy, and from her low vantage point she watched shoes of all kinds pass by. Stockings with ladders, men’s darned socks. There was such variety. Socks with clocks, argyle patterns; wool stockings, cotton stockings, now and then even silk stockings.
Copyright © 2023 by Cathleen Schine
