Complete Vienna Dolorosa will be up soon...
44. Riding Jews
WHAT HAD BEEN a sudden burst of activity – troops in the street, vehicles parked on sidewalks, orders shouted, feet obeying – had just as suddenly ebbed away as the soldiers took their places, melded into doorways, patrolled corner streets, and watched from eaved rooftops.
One lone vehicle, its swastika banners limp in the afternoon calm, remained before the hotel. Except for a sporadic echo of cheers from the nearby Ring, it seemed an almost typical Viennese day: a few hurried passersby, a dog urinating, a boy on his bicycle, coffee cups clattering in a corner cafe filled with Nazi officers.
Gusthausen surveyed the windows of the Imperial Hotel, then moved his binoculars over the city skyline. Dotted along adjacent rooftops, marksmen stood poised; some at the ready with their rifles pitted under their arms, others lolling but alert against chimneys, smoking and talking amongst themselves.
On the taller Ringstrasse buildings the guards stood precariously close to the roof edge, looking over the crowds, each soldier studying a particular quadrant in his view, alerting the next soldier if some suspicious individual of activity in the crowd moved out of his milieu and stepped into the other's.
With his binoculars Gusthausen looked over some more building rooftops and windows. Suddenly he snapped and focused on a gap between two buildings and what looked like construction scaffolding beyond them. But it was the oddest-looking scaffolding he had ever seen, rising in hilly bends and turns and peaks as if constructed to gird a giant puff-cake, trailing and falling to each delectable and tasty sweet morsel.
He remembered; Yes, yes, there is one just like it in the Tiergarten in Berlin: a roller-coaster! And he smiled to himself. Suddenly, from one high end of the scaffolding a train of coaster-cars shot down and careened down the scaffolding, disappeared from Gusthausen's view, then looped around a few low bends and shot upwards to disappear once more.
He waited. The cars shot out, and he was right. They were people – elderly, strapped and slumped in their seats, their beards flailing in the wind, their matron-wigs blown off in the chaotic speed, and most probably unconscious or dead from the maddening ride. He turned to the talkative Viennese official. “How long has that been going on?”
Thr Austrian blushed but also squinted at the gap between the buildings and saw the black blur of coaster-cars careen and loop and disappear. “Jews in the Prater,” he shrugged. “They were put on last night. The control mechanisms were faulty. There's no way to get them off.” He lit a cigarette and shrugged again. “We're just going to wait until it breaks, I guess.”
Gusthausen studied the Austrian and once more looked at the scaffolding, then handed the field glasses to him.
Gusthausen walked across the roof and looked back at the Imperial Hotel. “Look over there,” he said, pointing toward the Vienna Woods west of the city.
A low-flying convoy of four airplanes swept down from the knobby hills and steered toward the city, flying over the rooftops and church spires, a tangling tail of chaotic exhaust streaming behind each plane.
The two men joined Krumpf, and he angriy snatched the binoculars from the Viennese official. No, it can't be exhaust.
He focused; the gases did not die out in the air but spun down to the rooftops and streets, covering a wide line of the city in what appeared to be round leaflets and bits of paper. The planes approached the Ringstrasse and turned in formation above the arcing boulevard.
Krumpf lowered the binoculars as the planed flew over the hotel. Black and blunted, their roar was deafening, and the sound was immediately re-echoed by the roar of the crowds on the Ringstrasse below. The cascade of exhaust followed: Krumpf smiled.
Thousands of small, hand-sized cut-out paper swastikas streamed from the planes, their four bent points rotating in the air, falling, each one alike, as though finally disproving the theory of a snowflake's uniqueness and individuality. Krumpf looked after the planes and raised am arm to protect himself from a falling clump of stuck swastikas. The planes crossed the Danube canal and moved over the Leopoldstadt, the swastika-snowfall seemingly increasing in volume over the Jewish quarter. Krumpf plucked a swastika stuck in his jacket buttons and glanced over the swastika-littered rooftop. The planes circled the perimeters of the city and continued toward the eastern flatlands.
Krumpf looked at Gusthausen and the Viennese police officer, also flicking off swastikas from the front of their jackets and shoulders. “Irritating little things, eh?” Krumpf laughed, catching a swastika and twirling it away.
He looked over the cluttered rooftop. “Clean this up,” he snapped at some soldiers catching handfuls of swastikas, one soldier actually squeezing together a rolled-up ball of paper swastikas and tossing it as a chimney: the swastika-snowball ricocheted off the edge of the chimney and puffed out slightly, then dropped over the side of the roof.
Krumpf brushed himself off again and glanced up at the sky; a few lingering swastika-flakes still floated downwards. “What's that church over there?” he asked, gesturing to a tall spire above a blue and white zigzag-patterned roof.
“St. Stephen's,” chirped the talkative Austrian. “Finished in 1340, it was from there that the funeral cortege of Mozart set out to carry him to his final resting place in immortality.”
“I thought they simply dumped him in a potter's field,” interjected Gusthausen. Krumpf erupted in laughter.
“Times were different then,” the Austrian glared at the two Germans smirking at each other.
“Times are always different,” Krumpf shrugged and quickly turned to the pounding steps coming up the rooftop stairway. A winded soldier pounced out of the doorway, stared at the swastika-covered roof, then snapped to attention and marched up to Krumpf.
“Sir! he saluted, raising his arm. “We have two men downstairs who claim to be a rich German and a Jew.”
Krumpf frowned, and studied the soldier. “Now what?” he asked, rubbing his chin and turning to Gusthausen. “A rich German and a Jew, eh? Funny how the two always go together. Or the other way around?”
He turned to the soldier. “Let's go,” Krumpf said, kicking at a tangle of swastikas. “Let's have a look at these rich Jews and rich Germans.”
He saw the soldier's face and neck redden and he looked once more across the city skyline, winking at Gusthausen. “I always get the two confused. Rich Jews or rich Germans? A poor Jew, a poor German. How the hell do I know?”
The
Viennese police official pocketed a paper swastika and looked toward
the Prater; the roller coaster ride went on. He followed the two
Nazis downstairs.
