Other People’s Houses Read Online Free

was in the armchair with a book; my grandmother was laying out a game of solitaire. They were watching me do a new dance I had invented and laughing at the silly song my mother was playing. As I came waltzing around, I saw my father in the doorway, so tall he had to duck his head. I thought, That’s the endof all the fun, and was horror-struck to be thinking so. My father was making the mock-sentimental face he always put on when he found my mother at the piano. He turned his eyes up and said, “La-la, la-la, la-laaaa. Very pretty.”
    “Igo! I didn’t see you come in.” My mother closed the keyboard and stood up. “Sit down. What is happening in Vienna?”
    My father told us that Tante Trude and Onkel Hanswere leaving for England. They had money abroad. He said there were lines outside the foreign consulates. Everyone was panicking because of the anti-Jewish articles in Der Stürmer .
    Then my mother took me off to bed.
    Next day at lunch, which we ate in the storeroom behind the shop so that my grandfather could keep his eye on the door, my father told me to take my elbows off the table. (The threelessons I recall my father contributing to my early discipline were that one must not slouch at table by leaning on an elbow, that one must never eat sausage without a piece of bread to go with it, and that one must always wash one’s hands after playing with an animal.)
    My father then turned to my grandfather and proposed his plan of sinking his considerable severance pay into my grandfather’sbusiness and becoming my grandfather’s partner.
    “ Ja so, ” said my grandfather and scratched his little Hitler-type mustache, the only distinctive feature on his little person. He said, “That way we could pay off arrears in good order and put the shop on its feet.”
    My grandmother had put down her fork and sat looking from her son-in-law to her husband, with her handsome black eyes opened to theirlarge fullness. “You are going to put the shop on its feet, Joszi, so it can walk right out of your hands into the pockets of the Nazis!” my grandmother said in a thick Hungarian accent. She and my grandfather had both come to Vienna as children. My grandmother had mastered German perfectly, but she imitated my grandfather’s accent and odd grammar so cleverly that he smiled. Paul and my motherlaughed. My father put on his mock-amused face. He turned up the corners of his lips and said, “Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-haaaa. Very funny.”
    My mother stopped laughing and said, “Igo, please …”
    “Maybe you haven’t looked outside today,” my grandmother said. Overnight, there had appeared in the street, outside the entrance of the shop, letters tall as a man, painted in white on the macadam: KAUFT NICHTBEIM JUDEN (“Don’t buy from the Jews”).
    “The local boys,” my father said.
    “Franzi, your husband is almost as silly as mine,” said my grandmother.
    “Please! Mutti …” my mother said.
    “Franzi, your mother knows almost as much about everything as your brother Paul,” said my father.
    My mother had begun to cry. My mother always cried when my grandmother and my father were being rude to one another,though it had happened, throughout my childhood, whenever they met.
    The other way my father had of making my mother unhappy was by getting ill, which he always did when I least expected it and always, it seemed to me, when there was some excitement my mother and I had planned, a birthday party or a Christmas visit to Fischamend. My mother would meet me at the door as I came home from school andsay, “Now you must be my friend, Lorle; they have taken Daddy away to the hospital.” And we would go down into the blue dusk and bitter-cold street and take a tram across Vienna to see my father, laid out flat in a white hospital bed without even a pillow, his pale, peaked nose pointing at the white ceiling.
    “When is he going to come home?” I would ask my mother, seeing her pale, shrunken face,in which her eyes