13 September 1971

First schooldays (Part 2)

CLICK. Click. Tick tick tick ...

Consequently, the situation I was now in, standing alone in a freezing basement of an unknown tenement building, was not entirely my fault.

It had been a rough winter so far. It had started snowing in late November and continued all through December and by the time the Christmas holidays came around the snowploughs had trouble finding spots on the streets where they could pile up their loads. It was a great time for us children. We built snow-castles and snow-caves and staged snowball fights and toboggan races, and when we came home after dark our anoraks and lined trousers were soaked and our faces, arms and legs were cold and red and itchy, and my grandmother had warning words about pneumonia and meningitis.

My mother had dropped me off at school an hour earlier today. And after I had given her a kiss, said good-bye, and turned to open the door, I hesitated. Then I turned back again and began to cry, not deliberately, not in a calculating sort of way, but in desperation.

I saw that my mother was worried and annoyed at the same time. Worried about me crying. Annoyed about me crying. Annoyed about herself that she felt more annoyed than worried. Emotions are complicated. She was only twenty-six.

I confessed that I hadn't done my homework for calligraphy class. It was not that I had forgotten, and it was not that I was lazy, which I was. I simply hadn't done my homework because I knew that no matter how hard I tried and how much time I spent on it, my handwriting would always be a terrible scrawl at least into the foreseeable future.

My hope for pity was in vain. Instead my mother insisted that Herr Arbeiter would be very angry with me, and Herr Arbeiter was an angry man on the best of days. I started to sob and leaned over for my mother to comfort me, but she pushed me away and told me to get out of the car.

I wiped the tears from my eyes so that nobody could see that I had cried. Then, slowly, I took the first steps down the cul-de-sac to the school building. It was snowing again, and I felt and heard the snow crunch underneath my boots. Then I heard the unique sound of a Volkswagen beetle driving away in anger.

I thought of Herr Arbeiter and how it certainly didn't help that I was one of the few in my class of thirty-six who hadn't graduated from writing with a pencil to writing with a fountain pen. There are sheep, and there are goat, and I was a goat. And as the Tibetan proverb says: Hit the goat to scare the sheep.

I had almost reached the school's entrance when I slowed down, and slowed down even more, and then completely stopped. I had a realization: I don't have to take any of this. Not the humiliation of being found out. Not the piercing blue eyes of Herr Arbeiter when he asked me to repeat what I had just said. Not the stares from my classmates and giggles from the girls. Not the fear when I walked down the aisle out to the teacher's desk. Not the fear that I might pee my pants when he started shouting. Not the fear that I would pee my pants if he hit me. I didn't have to suffer any of this. And I wouldn't.

So I turned around and began to walk back out of the cul-de-sac. At the intersection where my mother had dropped me, I turned left and continued on the narrow street. I would have taken that street anyway, except four hours later. Obviously, I couldn't show up at my grandmother's that early, but I certainly wouldn't go to school either.

Slowly I meandered through the residential area with its beige three-storey houses that belonged to the Railway Authority and where the railway families lived. Reaching the bus stop I suddenly felt exposed and worried that if I ran into an adult they would send me back to school. I turned around.

The snow fell heavily now which meant that I was better concealed. But I still had no idea of a proper hiding place. When I passed the railway houses again I tried one of the entrance doors, and then another. That one was unlocked, and I stomped the snow off my boots and entered.

It was dark, the weak light from outside falling in only through the frosted glass slits in the entrance door. There was an illuminated red button to the left of the mailboxes, but I didn't dare to press it. Instead I stood quietly on the small landing and listened carefully. Far away I could hear a radio play.

I tiptoed counter-clockwise up the stairs to the mezzanine. There were three doors, one to the right, one in the middle, one to the left. I couldn't tell if anybody was at home, but I noticed that I could hear myself breathe. If caught I could always claim that I was looking for a schoolmate and that in the snowstorm I must have mistaken the house.

On the next floor the peephole in one door had a shiny golden centre. This was the apartment from which the sound of the radio came. It wasn't loud but clearly audible.

I stopped on the landing between the first and the top floor to look out the small window that was rattling from the draught. Gusts of wind were driving the snowflakes in eddies. A corridor is an unsafe place for a fugitive, it's a busy place, and it's easy to get trapped.

CLICK. Click. Tick tick tick ...

Silently I made my way back down. I was about to leave the building when through the frosted glass of the entrance door I saw a figure approach quickly. I turned around and, in a panic, ran down the stairs into the absolute darkness of the basement. Around the corner I tried to press closely against the wall but my satchel was strapped on my back.

Somebody entered the corridor and the light came on and then nothing. I didn't dare to look around the corner. There was some rustling but no footsteps, and all I knew was that whoever was up there was waiting for me.

My heart was pounding in my chest and the lie that I had planned to use came to mind. But I was not a good liar, and I never would be. I will just admit that I was skipping school. I was about to step forward into the view of whoever was waiting for me up there, when I heard the mailboxes being unlocked and opened and the sound of the mailman quickly flinging mail into the mail slots.

I stood in the dark long after the mailman had left. I thought of nothing and then suddenly of spiders. I pressed the light switch and took a step or two into the middle of the small anteroom.

There was a bike rack here with three or four dusty bikes and there were dark wooden doors along the wall that protected small storage compartments that contained who knows what. A musty smell filled the cold air but it had something comforting to it. On the floor in the corners there were small heaps of pink flakes that my grandmother had taught me were rat poison.

Why was I so afraid of spiders? No spider had ever done anything bad to me. In fact, no animal had ever done anything bad to me. Except once at the zoo when one of the Przewalski horses bit me in my upper arm, and I could still see the bite marks the next day. Reluctantly I looked around at the walls. But even upon closer inspection there were no spiders. And even if there were, what was the worst that could happen?

(Years later I would think up the tale of two spiders: Imagine you see two big hairy spiders sitting on your bed. You want them off your bed. Naturally. You want them out of the house. You may even want them dead. Why, you don't know. But as you start shooing them around you notice something. When one is moving ahead the other quickly scurries after it. When one goes to the right or to the left, the other quickly follows it. And you can't help thinking: Hey, these two spiders seem to like each other's company. There is something like love. You cannot possibly hate something that loves, and in fact you start liking the spiders for it.)

Anyway. I smiled, and I was cold, but somehow I wasn't as cold anymore. I'd rather spend my time with spiders than with Herr Arbeiter.

CLICK.

I let the light go out. It was nine o'clock now. Three hours to go. I couldn't wait for the afternoon to come. Just before I had to leave for the weekend Manfred had told me that he found out a secret. He said he would tell me on Monday. I couldn't wait to hear what it was.

I would have a snack at ten o'clock, recess time at school. That's an hour away, or sixty minutes. Six ten-minute intervals or ... twelve five-minute intervals. I could do this by five-minute intervals. Five minutes. Sixty seconds per minute. That's sixty plus sixty equals ... one-hundred-and-twenty.

It took me a while. Five minutes equals three hundred seconds.

One. Two. ...

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First school days

It is a strange thing, memory is.

Present experience creates memory. Memory stews and fades and stews some more. Memory creates past experience.

And if there are no historical records, then there is nothing to confirm or to refute the accuracy of your memory. And since most events are unremarkable when they occur -- you get up in the morning, you have breakfast, go to school, do your work, come home, have dinner, go to bed -- nobody will have bothered to write down the day's experiences. And even if you do your best, past experiences created by your memory will always be deficient.

You don't realize it, of course. How could you?

...

Have you ever been foolish enough to return to a place of your childhood, your youth?

And have you been disappointed to find the characters not as charming, the buildings not as glamorous, the streets not as wide, the trees not as tall, the forests not as dark, the pastures not as green, the mountains not as rugged?

In my younger and more vulnerable years I read a quote by Jean Paul: "Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be expelled." Life is more complicated than this, of course, but memory is a good start.

Anyway, school.

I was alone, and I was cold, and I was shaking. And any moment now the light would go out and I would again be immersed in the complete darkness.

It wasn't a basement I knew. It was the basement of a tenement building, and I was standing in a small anteroom.

I stood close to the middle of the small room. I didn't lean against the wall because I didn't want to touch the wall, because I couldn't, because of the spiders. Worse, I didn't even want to take a close look at the wall, because I didn't know what I would do if I happened to spot one. But I certainly couldn't leave. Not that early.

I could see my breath in the cold air as I stared up at the dim naked light bulb that was affixed to the ceiling and was protected by a steel mesh. Any second now. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Now.

Three. Two. One. Now.

Three. Two.

CLICK.

Darkness. I waited as long as I could, maybe five seconds, maybe ten. Then I pressed the illuminated red button and the light came back on and the timer began ticking again.

I looked at my wristwatch. Almost 8:45. Three-and-a-quarter-hours to go until school is over.

Well, three-and-a-quarter hours until school is over for today. I was not even halfway through Grade Two and there would be many more years to come, many more basements, many more times pressing light switches.

Why did I hate school so much? None of my friends up at the Yellow House hated school. Sure, nobody loved school, except maybe for the Kuchner sisters. But then none of them had had to go to kindergarten just because their mother and their grandmother had a fight.

Kindergarten had really taken the joie de vivre out of me. There were the warders who every day tried to engage us little idiots in mind-numbing clapping games, and mind-numbing board games, and mind-numbing building block projects, and who held us to proper behaviour in the small courtyard when we tried to resuscitate our numb minds by running and screaming, and screaming and screaming.

In retrospect I feel bad for those warders, although not very bad. Spending all day with four- to six-year-olds had left them only with a husk of sanity. How much must they have hated us.

The old English teacher came to mind. She came by once a week and seemed really really old but couldn't have been more than thirty-five. She had a face like a vulture and hair like old straw, and she always wore plaid culottes. All she did was try to make some extra money teaching five-year-olds a second language. Unfortunately, teaching skills she had none, and patience she had even less.

(Standing in the basement I didn't know it, but I would meet the old English teacher again in middle school five years later, still as incompetent, still as nasty.)

Then, of course, there were the awkwardly tiny toilet bowls. It was not that any of us had tiny toilet bowls at home, so why did they have tiny toilet bowls in kindergarten? We had two of those, side by side, separated by a curtain. A curtain! If the idea was to train us to control our bowel movement, I can tell you that it worked for me.

And there was nap-time after lunch, where I failed to fall asleep, not because I wasn't tired, not because I wouldn't have preferred a virtual escape from prison, not because of some precocious intrinsic dissidence. No, the reason for my insomnia was that my cot was positioned so unfortunately that as I was lying I had to look up the warder's skirt. And when I closed my eyes afterimages of her rash-covered thighs began to haunt me.

I should add that there was one person in kindergarten I did like: The old cook. She, unlike the English teacher, truly was old. All of us prisoners liked her in spite of the fact that the warders usually handed out interactions with her as a punishment. I for one always preferred washing the dishes over the skin rash afterimages during naptime.

She saved my life once, the old cook did. Although, the term might be overstretching it. I was hiding underneath a cot when I found a large button. Why I took the old button into my mouth, I don't know. I do know that I accidentally swallowed it and that I started to panic. The warders assembled around me and finally decided to ask the old cook what to do. The cook acted quickly and stuffed some uneaten leftovers down my throat "to catch the button in the intestines". I haven't eaten red cabbage since.

CLICK. Click. Tick tick tick ...

I would like to say something compassionate here about my co-prisoners, but they left no impression on me with two exceptions: The boy whose father always side-vaulted across the gate. And a girl named Petra, I believe, who once accidentally pooped beside one of the tiny toilet bowls. I don't believe I hated my co-prisoners, but by the end of the summer, the first day of real school, I had forgotten about any of them.

It had been a sunny day. I hate sunny days. I don't know why. I like the rain.

I woke up early that morning and it took me no time to realize that the dreaded day, the day when my formal education was about to start, had finally arrived. Without enthusiasm I propped myself on my elbows and looked over at the chair where the night before my mother had prepared the garb that I was to wear. There was the blue-and-white chequered shirt that was reminiscent of the Bavarian flag and of which I also had a red-and-white version that was reminiscent of a picnic tablecloth. There were my flared beige denims, which I did like very much. And there were my brown Clark's desert boots. (My memory omits underpants, which I am sure were laid out too.)

I didn't say much as I sat in the old Volkswagen beetle on our way to my grandmother's house. It was against the law to transport a child in the passenger seat, but my mother always allowed it in spite of the law or because of it. We were fifteen minutes late, which then was nothing unexpected from my mother. My grandmother had already made her way into the parking lot up at the Yellow House. She was all dressed up, and I could see the disapproving look she gave my mother's dress. But she didn't say anything. It was probably too early to start a fight. She also knew that except for the weekends I would live with her, and she would find a way to put me right.

My mother took a picture of me with my school cone, which in Austria your parents give you on your first day of school. If you think it is filled with chocolates, and candy, and comic books, I don't blame you, because that's what I thought. But I was a fool. The school cone is filled with practical things -- pencils, exercise books, slippers, which we had to wear.

Figure: In the parking lot of the Yellow House on my first school day on 13 Sep 1971, holding my school cone. Image: Irmgard Baumann (1971)

It was busy and we had to park at the church and walk the two blocks to school, my mother and I three or four steps ahead of my grandmother.

The great entrance hall was full of people, and I couldn't see much. And when the headmaster started to welcome the parents and the abecedarians I couldn't see him, I could only hear his voice, whose tone didn't inspire much confidence in me.

I felt hands resting on my shoulders, my mother's on the left, my grandmother's on the right. After what seemed an eternity, I felt the slight push, and with it I was released into the world. Slowly I made my way through the great forest of adults who yielded their ground to me so that I could reach the centre of hell.

"Baumann, Michael?" the headmaster repeated.

"He's coming." I heard my mother say from behind the great forest and a lifetime away.

Walking out into the clearing I saw those whose names I had heard called earlier, not many of course because, you know, Baumann starts with a B. Beyond the frightened group, on the third or fourth step of the stairs the headmaster pontificated. He was old, with glasses and white hair, a grey suit, a white shirt, a black tie. His front teeth stayed outside his mouth even when his lips were closed. He looked me over, disapproving of my outfit. Then his eyes returned to the list he had in his hand.

"Baumann, Michael: One cee." he said firmly, which was my class designation.

A little later we were ushered into a classroom and met our class teacher Herr Arbeiter, an old man who would scream into our ears and whose spittle would fly in our faces every time we didn't get up from our chairs fast enough. Obedience training is the latent goal of the education system, and arbitrariness and injustice are its schedule and method. And thus another prison term began.

CLICK. Click. Tick tick tick ...

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