I bit and scratched my way through my three months there. Then one morning I found my employers’ newspaper and in it an advertisement for a seamstress in the teeming textile quarter north of the Hohermarkt.
I worked for Jasha Jacobson for three years. He came from Russian Poland and ran a typical sweat shop — overcrowded, noisy, ill-ventilated. I knew nothing about Jews: their religion, their habits — being there was as strange to me as if I’d gone to work in an Arabian souk. We worked unbelievably long hours and my pay was low, but I’ve never ceased to be grateful for my time there. I learnt everything there was to know about tailoring: choosing the cloth, cutting, repairing the ancient, rattling machines. At first I was a freak — a schickse set down in the midst of this close knit immigrant community — but gradually, I became a kind of mascot. People passing smiled and waved at the blonde girl sitting in the window beside the cross-legged men sewing their button holes. And I was never molested — I might have been a girl of their own faith by the care they took of me.
When Jasha realized that I was serious about wanting my own shop, he began to take me about with him. I met an old Tunisian who did goldwork and his crippled wife who showed me how to handle sequins and beads. Lacemakers, leatherworkers, pedlars from Flanders and Normandy… I got to know them all and know them still.
After three years I asked Jasha for a reference and left. There were tears in his eyes when we said goodbye, but he was glad to see me go because his nephew, Izzy, his heir and the apple of his eye, wanted to marry me. Izzy had been rotted by education and lent me books by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky which I fell asleep over after a twelve-hour day. Jasha knew I had no intention of accepting the boy but it hurt him to have a member of his family who would consider marrying out of the faith.
With the reference Jasha wrote for me I got a job in a fashionable dress shop in the Herrengasse. I started in the sewing room, but soon I was modelling and helping with the designs, and at the end of two years the proprietress hinted at the possibility of a partnership, for she was getting on in years. Some of the customers befriended me and they had brothers, cousins — even fathers — who were very willing to take me out. I began to go to the theatre, to the opera; to meet writers and painters. Listening to their talk in the cafés, I became almost educated. And I learnt how to behave like a beautiful woman, which is not the same as — but more important than — being beautiful.
By this time I was sharing a flat with Alice: three rooms and a kitchen in a pretty, arcaded courtyard behind the Votiv Church. We’d met at Yvonne’s, both staring at the same hat: a green straw with parrot tulips and a navy-blue ribbon which we both decided not to buy! We got on well from the start — I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much as I did with Alice, nor seen so many operettas!
So within five years of leaving the House of Refuge, a penniless girl without a future, I had an excellent job, a home, a circle of friends.
I don’t know when I stopped daydreaming and decided to act. But one day at breakfast I said:
‘Alice, I’m going to get her back. I’m going to find my daughter. Can she come here?’
And Alice, who alone in the world knew my secret, jumped up and put her arms round me and said, ‘Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes!’
At four a.m. the doctor’s carriage was still outside the Schumachers’ house and the windows blazed with light.
Oh, let it go well for her, I prayed — she’s so tired, poor Helene — and let that pompous husband be good to her whatever the outcome.
Should it take so long, a seventh child?
It was one thing to decide to bring my daughter home, another to find her.
The sister who had been in charge at the House of Refuge had been transferred; the other nuns would tell me nothing. The deed was done, the child had a good home. As I beseeched and pleaded, they suggested I go to confession and purge myself of impure desires.
I went to the Ministry of Home Affairs and was transferred from room to room. At last I found the place where the adoption records were kept — and was met with a blank refusal. The files were confidential; there was no question of my seeing them.
‘I’m afraid it’s impossible, Gnädige Frau. It’s the regulations. There’s nothing we can do.’
They went on doing nothing, a thing that Austrian civil servants are very good at, for week after week. I kept going to see if a different clerk might be on duty; I implored, I wept — and still, implacably, they answered ‘no’.
And yet I didn’t lose hope. Now when I drove out with one of my escorts, I looked at Vienna with new eyes, noting fountains which would amuse her, alleys where she could bowl her hoop. I found myself staring at a poster of the Danube Steamship Company, searching the timetable for river trips which would not keep her from her bed too late. Once, quite by myself, I went to the Prater. Sometimes I think that of all the days of my life, that’s the one that I’d most like to have back: the day I tested the dappled horses of the carousels, travelled the magic Grottenbahn, sailed high over the city on the ferris wheel with my imagined daughter.
And I began to dress a doll. There has never, I do assure you, been a doll like the one I dressed for my daughter. Alice made her hats, but the rest — the evening gowns of faille and lace, the sailor suit, the nightgowns and bed jackets and capes, I stitched in the evening. The doll was my flag nailed to the mast. While I dressed her, I still had faith.
Then one day in July my luck turned. Going yet again to the records office I found a new clerk: an unattractive young man, spotty, with a big Adam’s apple, too much hair cream.
I began again, pleading, asking to see this one entry — the one referring to the adoption of a daughter born to Susanna Weber on the seventh of April 1893.
He listened, looked round to make sure that we were not overheard, asked what I would be prepared to give.
All the money I had, I said, also whispering. Everything I possessed — and I almost tore from my throat, then and there, the necklace that I wore.
But of course that wasn’t what he wanted.
It was a long night, the night I spent with him in a cheap hotel behind the Graben — oh Lord, it was long. But he played fair. The next day he brought me a copy of the entry I had asked for. A baby girl born on the seventh of April 1893 to Susanna Weber, spinster, had been adopted on April the twenty-third by Erich and Sidonie Toller of 3, Nussbaumgasse, Hintersdorf, Salzburg. Herr Toller’s occupation was given as ‘water engineer’ and I remember being cross about that. Surely they could have done better for my daughter than a water engineer?
So now I was ready. I had been saving up my annual holiday, and on a perfect late summer’s day, with the doll packed in a special box, I set off for Salzburg.
Everyone knows what Salzburg is like. Very pretty, a little absurd. The Mirabelle Gardens, the Fischer von Erlach churches, the castle high on its hill. And Mozart of course. Mozart whom the inhabitants ignored and who now brings the tourists flocking.
But if you drive round behind the castle you come to a green and pleasant landscape which has nothing to do with the fashionable shops and the crowds. Here there are fields of clover, little streams and prosperous villages in which people who work in the town have built pretty villas with well-kept gardens.
Hintersdorf was one of these. There was a main street, a few quiet side streets running out towards the fields.