Chapter Two #2
Johanna recalled spending the night in one of the crude mountain huts, its tiny windows heaped with snow drifts; she had cooked sausages over a fire and stayed up late, chatting and laughing with some of the girls in the club.
There had been a boy—a man, really, a few years older than her—who had smiled at her when she’d been strapping on her skis.
Later, after she’d bumbled down a hill, he’d skied up next to her and offered to carry her skis up for another run.
Disconcerted, she had declined, and he hadn’t offered again.
And yet still the memory had the power to make Johanna’s heart beat a little faster.
But Naturfreunde, along with all of Austria’s other clubs and societies, had been disbanded two years ago, with the inception of the St?ndestaat, the one-party system of the Federal State of Austria.
Her father soberly claimed it had been a necessary step to keep Austria strong enough to resist Nazi aggression, but Johanna missed the treks in the mountains, the hope of something more.
“It isn’t just that,” she told her mother, determined to persevere despite Hedwig’s stony expression. “It is… life, Mama! I don’t want to spend all of it in your kitchen.”
Her mother jerked back, her weathered face crumpling in hurt before she stood up, briskly collecting their cups and saucers, even though Johanna had not yet finished her coffee.
“I did not realize it was such a torment,” she said in a voice stiff with affront. The cups and saucers rattled in her hands as she put them in the sink with more force than she would normally use with her precious porcelain.
“It’s not a torment,” Johanna said, fighting a sense of both despair and anger. “But I want my own home one day, my own kitchen.” My own life, she thought. “If I have some skills…” She tried for a different tack. “Women will need to work, you know, if there’s going to be a war.”
“Going to be a war!” Hedwig whirled around, her expression turning thunderous. “Johanna, there is not going to be a war.”
Unlike her mother, Johanna read the newspapers, both the Salzburger Volksblatt and the Wiener Neueste Nachrichten from Vienna.
She read about how many Austrians wanted to be part of Deutschland, the Greater Germany; she also read how Germany had marched into the Rhineland unimpeded in March, to begin to make that ill wish a reality.
Hitler was rearming unabashedly, even if people pretended not to notice.
And the gangs of brown-shirted boys that roamed Salzburg had grown in both size and number, their direct stares far more challenging than they’d been just two years ago.
Johanna had sometimes eyed those young men with covert curiosity; there was something invigorating and even exciting about their brash swaggering, their blond confidence.
She knew her father despised Hitler and all his slavish followers, but Johanna thought there was nothing slavish about the way those young men strode down a street as if they owned it.
“Why would you talk of war?” Hedwig grumbled as she began to bang pots about in preparation for their evening meal. “It has not been so long since the last one.”
“Almost twenty years.”
“And look what happened.” Hedwig flung an arm out to encompass the house, the city, the world. “Everything fell apart. Everything!”
Johanna’s father often lamented the loss of the world he’d grown up in, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire had stretched from Switzerland to Russia, and had encompassed fifty million people, encouraging freedom of movement, thought, and belief.
Now the Federal State of Austria was, according to Manfred Eder, no more than a basket of scraps, the parts of the empire that no one else had wanted cobbled together to form a country, and run with an iron hand to keep it intact.
“Where is our identity as a nation, our culture as a people?” he would sometimes ask, when he gathered his friends in their front sitting room, an informal salon of Christian Social Party members and war veterans who talked of politics and religion, and longed to change the world.
To Johanna they were just a bunch of disillusioned old men, lamenting a world that no longer existed over their brandy and cigars.
All she’d known was this—a small country, not an empire, a provincial town that tried to be a cosmopolitan city every summer during the festival. And the kitchen. Always the kitchen.
She sighed, knowing she needed to placate her mother if she wanted the smallest hope of achieving her own modest aim.
“Even if there isn’t a war… the world is changing, Mama, in many ways.
I only want to learn useful skills.” Hedwig did not reply and Johanna added, unable to keep a belligerent note from her voice, “If Lotte can study music, why can I not learn how to type?”
Hedwig made a dismissive sound, her back to Johanna, rigid and unyielding. From downstairs the bell jangled as someone came into the shop, and she heard her father’s cheerful tone as he greeted the prospective customer.
Oh, this life, Johanna thought, it never changes. Day in and day out, always the same—cooking, cleaning, stitching, sewing. She would live and die in this kitchen, and nothing would ever happen to her.
“You haven’t given me a real reason why not,” she declared, and Hedwig whirled around, bringing her hands down hard on the table, the loud sound reverberating through the room.
“What reason must I give? You are needed here, and there is no money for more schooling. Da Gscheidere gibt noch!” The smarter one gives in: a command to stop being so stubborn.
Johanna looked away, fighting the urge to snap something back. It would do her no good, and yet she couldn’t give up. Not yet. “I could pay the fees back,” she finally said, hating that her voice had turned wheedling. Weak. “After I’d found a job.”
“A job, a job!” Hedwig threw her hands up in the air. “You have a job. Here.” She gestured to the table, and then heaved a heavy sack of dirty potatoes onto it, giving Johanna a pointed look. “They need to be peeled.”
Silently Johanna rose from her seat and grabbed a knife. Hedwig turned back to her pots as she began to peel the potatoes, the only sound the angry scritch scritch of the knife against the peel that came away in long, dirt-speckled curls. Both women bristled with hostility.
From downstairs came a burst of laughter, then the jangle and clang of the door shutting on another satisfied customer. The air in the kitchen felt thick and heavy with ill feeling. Scritch scritch.