THE CARP FICTION Maya

Mahony

In the chilly flagstone kitchen, my grandfather bent over the sink. In which, resplendent and furious, thrashed the object of his fascination: a carp. But would it be The Carp? The Magical Carp, lauded in legend? The Carp, for which Opa had compelled me to rise at dawn every morning of that godforsaken autumn. The two of us donning frankly hideous woolen coats and struggling up and down the Danube Canal and the Wienfluss River in a rickety old rowboat called The Isabella, after my grandmother, who would have disapproved of such endeavors?

“Open wide,” Opa admonished the carp, and proceeded to, dare I say, fish around, in the creature’s gaping maw. Soon enough, he withdrew his hand, avoiding the gnashing teeth, and, with a heavy sigh, said, to me this time, “No golden ring.”

Suppressing an oath (much of the work of middle-class young women in Vienna involved suppressing oaths), I unclasped the little leather-bound ledger, uncapped my pen, and wrote in my best handwriting on a blank page: November 13, 1935. Caught a carp in the Wienfluss near the Schonbrunn. The fish is about thirty centimeters long and ten centimeters wide, rainbow scales, wriggling quite vigorously. No golden ring. Not The Carp.

Back when he was a dentist, my grandfather had used the ledger to record appointment times and patient notes. These days, it contained a log of our fruitless searches, recorded by me, since Opa’s hands shook too much to write well.

Opa slopped the carp back into its bucket and went outside to return the unfortunate creature to the river. At the beginning of our search, I had cooked all our catches, but at this stage, we were so sick of the taste of carp that we returned them to the water. Now that the huge, thrashing fish had gone, my cowardly kitten, Kugel, rose, stretching, from her place by the stove and wound like a gray scarf around my ankles. I capped the pen, set the ledger on the table, and allowed myself a small sigh. I wondered if Opa would remember my fourteenth birthday.

It was a Saturday, and since there was no school, I had no excuse to leave the apartment. We did not go to synagogue or otherwise observe the Sabbath since Oma Isabella had passed. I worked quietly through my chores for the morning. Kept the stove going. Made the beds. Dusted the bookcases and the radio. Opa claimed he had taken me in to find me a shitach, or marriage-match, in the big city, and one of my sisters had whispered it was to relieve my parents of a mouth to feed; I suspected he just wanted me for the housework. I longed to go out. I wanted to wander around the square with my best friend Karina, chattering away with our arms linked. Karina was exuberant, a little reckless: she had turned my time in Vienna into a grand adventure. Perhaps we would even catch a glimpse of a certain dark-haired young vegetable seller in the market. I had been sighing over him for months. But I started the laundry.

I squatted on the kitchen flagstones, scrubbing one of Opa’s shirts against the washboard in the metal tub, my fingers turning pink in the warm water, and remembered Oma Isabella, expounding over the laundry with a clothespin waggling in her mouth like a man’s cigar. In my childhood visits, her hearty laugh had warmed these rooms. She had been a tall, stout woman, with a blue house dress and a head full of stories: fairy tales, interpretations of Talmud, gossip about the neighbors, and minutely-recollected anecdotes about each of her children and grandchildren. I used to beg her for the story of my own birth (according to her, I had come into the world howling, with a full head of hair, and my little fists clenched), but now I wished I had asked her more about her own girlhood. What had she thought of the world when she was my age? She would have told me, had I asked; Oma Isabella was not one to keep her opinions to herself. But she had coughed herself to death; cancer of the lungs, the doctors said; and now it was too late.

I hung the laundry in the back courtyard to dry. Kugel followed me, practicing her pouncing. She could pounce very bravely as long as the object in question was a shriveled leaf. I tried to perch a clothespin in my mouth but it tasted dull and splintery. I went inside to prepare lunch.

By the time Opa and I had finished eating lunch, the morning’s fog had melted away. The Danube gleamed bright as a wedding band through the kitchen window.

“Opa, may I—”

“One moment, Freeda. Will you just clean the counters before you go?”

I flounced to my feet and started scrubbing the kitchen counters with a vengeance. Karina didn’t have to scrub the kitchen; her family hired a maid. No matter how much I scrubbed, a faint fishy aroma still lingered. Opa sat at the table, examining his hands. I stole resentful glances at him. Opa’s shoulders were bent in their worn blue coat; his square chin sagged slightly with age, his soft white hair puffed out like thistledown from beneath his yarmulke. He dragged me every morning on these hopeless river searches, and for what? The vague promise of wealth, if we did find The Carp? Although I had grown up in a poor, ramshackle farmhouse, and saw clearly the value of money, I thought searching for The Carp was about as smart a way to get it as betting on a lame horse. Besides, I doubted any amount of money could cure Opa of what ailed him. He missed his wife. But would he listen to me? Oh no, I was just a girl, here to silently scrub his kitchen. A knock.

Opa rose stiffly, hobbled to the door, and opened it wide.

Karina stood there, beaming, clutching a small red box, her blonde hair wrapped in braids around her head.

“You’re right on time,” said Opa, smiling at her. I tossed down the cleaning rag. Opa had invited Karina over?

“Happy birthday, Freeda!” sang Karina, pink-cheeked from the cold, careening toward me with the box outstretched. “Open it, open it!”

Inside the red box was a delicate golden bracelet with a heart-shaped charm.

“I thought you could wear it to your dance tonight!”

“It’s perfect! I love it!”

Karina helped fasten the bracelet around my left wrist. The metal was cool against my skin. When I turned my wrist, the charm flashed, catching stove-light.

“Why don’t you come with me tonight?” I begged, taking Karina’s hands. “It would be so much more bearable with you.”

Karina looked down at the kitchen floor. “I told you last time, my father won’t let me.”

“Why not?”

Her hands twitched in mine.

“Freeda,” said Opa, and his voice held a warning. But I didn’t listen. “Why not?”

“Because he doesn’t want me to mingle with Jewish boys,” said Karina, very quietly, her face twisted in shame.

“Oh.” I released her hands. Before I had left home in the country, some neighbor boys had been painting “Dirty Jews” in pig blood on the farmhouse door when my mother ran out, screaming, rolling pin in hand, and scared them away. But I had thought things were better in Vienna.

“Enough of this,” said Opa. “It’s your birthday, Freeda. We’re here to celebrate. Sit, sit, girls.”

We sat. Opa approached the breadbox. He swung open the hinged lid and retrieved, with trembling hands, one of Oma Isabella’s best blue and white porcelain plates, on which perched a small cake. The cake was frosted in glossy dark chocolate, and decorated with yellow spun-sugar roses. Bakery-bought! A luxury.

Opa pressed fourteen candles into the frosting, lit them, and set the whole blazing confection before me on the table.

“Thank you!” I said.

“Wish carefully, Freeda, dear. And remember to close your eyes.”

Something about his tone made me curious. I did not close my eyes completely upon uttering my wish. Instead, I peered out from between the dark lines of my eyelashes. Karina looked a little worried, biting her lip, the candlelight illuminating the fine golden hair frizzing out of her braids. Opa looked afraid, almost desperate.

I thought of my dark-haired vegetable-seller, his shy smile, his kind eyes.

I blew out the candles.

I was fourteen years old.

That night, after the Sabbath had officially ended, there was a dance at the Jewish and Refugee Social Club, of which my grandfather was an active member. Although Vienna had many wealthy Jewish families, the Social Club was held in a large, dim basement, in an unassuming beige building in Leopoldstadt, with an unmarked door. I did not, at that point, fully understand the need for secrecy. I only felt a slight resentment at the dimness, the lack of wallpaper, the smoke that curled up from men’s pipes and lingered by the ceiling. These dances were a monthly ordeal.

I stood alone by the wall like the country bumpkin I was, my long skirt and old-fashioned, much-darned blouse hiding any scant charms my body may have possessed. No boys looked at me or asked me to dance. No girls came up and said, “Oh, is that a new bracelet?” I wished Karina were there.

I didn’t dare leave early, because my mother always demanded a lengthy examination of these dances in my letters home. I lurked by the piano, wishing I knew how to play. At least if you were playing, people might think you were choosing not to dance.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the room, at the round wooden tables where the older people smoked and played cards and debated Midrash and Zionism and politics, Opa tipped his head to the ceiling and laughed a warm, raucous laugh. I was glad to hear him laughing. He hardly laughed at home, not since Oma Isabella died. Still, it was a bit depressing to be less popular than my grandfather.

I edged closer to the older people, straining to hear their conversation over the music and the joyful stomp of dancing shoes.

They were speaking in a mixture of languages: German, Yiddish, Hungarian, French. I even heard some Esperanto. I could only understand snatches.

“There won’t be another war,” said an old man in a felt hat. “It’s called the Great War for a reason. It was the war to end all wars.”

“Don’t be stupid,” snapped a blonde woman in a fur coat. “You all are living in a dream here in Vienna. If you’d come from Germany like us, you’d know. The German people are seething at the treaty. This imbecile they’ve elected—”

“He’s many things but he’s not an imbecile,” someone out of my line of sight said. “He’s an evil genius, that’s what I think. He knows what the people want in times of economic crisis. They want a scapegoat.”

“This is why I’ve been telling you all,” said an earnest, bespectacled man, “we’ve got to emigrate to Palestine. It’s not just Germany. The fascists are in power here. Only when we have our own land will we—”

“Would you give it a rest?” said the man in the felt hat. “We can’t go three minutes without—”

“When I find The Carp,” interrupted Opa, “we will all be safe.” There was laughter again, but this time it had an edge. I could tell it was at Opa’s expense, and, though I had my own doubts about The Carp, I found myself bristling.

“Oh, you and your old wives’ tales, Stefan,” said a man in a fraying jacket. I was working up the nerve to dive into the conversation, defend my Opa’s honor, and also refute the accusation that tales told by old wives were invalid (who among us had not learned from the stories of our grandmothers?), when someone tapped my shoulder. I turned around, back toward the dance floor.

My heart lurched out of my chest.

Standing there, skinny and freckled, with his hands shoved in his trouser pockets, and his Adam’s apple bobbing, was my dark-haired vegetable-seller.

“You’re Jewish?” I said, startled, by means of greeting. He nodded.

“It’s just—I’ve never seen you here before.”

“Haven’t been before.” His accent was entirely Viennese. For some reason, perhaps because he sold vegetables, I had always imagined him speaking in a country accent, like mine.

“Oh.”

I seemed to have forgotten how to speak. There was a terrible, very long, pause. This was it. I would never think of anything to say. I would never dance with a boy. Never fall in love.

Never marry. Never leave my grandfather’s apartment.

Then, at last, inspiration: “I’m Freeda,” I said.

“Mathias,” he said. “Want to dance?”

Thank God.

I carefully raised my left hand and placed it on his shoulder. His white shirt was thin; I could feel the warmth of his skin through it. My right hand, he took in his. His palm was larger than mine, a bit sweaty. Neither of us could dance. We stumbled around, treading on each other’s shoes and giggling nervously. I felt as warm and effervescent as the time Karina and I had stolen a bottle of her father’s wine and drank it on her balcony, singing nonsense songs. Mathias twirled me out and back into his arms. I looked up at him. He was smiling that same bashful smile that made me go jelly-kneed at the market. I wondered if this was all happening because of my birthday wish.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The air was cold and my body buzzed. I missed Mathias’ warm hand in mine. I even missed Karina, though I had seen her that afternoon; I felt I was careening into someplace unknown, while she stayed golden-haired and safe. War. Scapegoat.

Fascists.

Hail fell, rattling against the walls. Soon the river-ice would arrive. First a delicate feathering on the surface of the Danube, then hard, thick, warbled like old window panes, and we would no longer be able to go out in The Isabella, hunting for The Carp.

I turned over so many times that Kugel gave up her usual spot on my quilt and leapt off the bed, meowing her disapproval. I wrapped my quilt around myself and stepped out of my bedroom, into the kitchen. The coal in the stove had burned down to embers like small glowing molars. Kugel gazed at them, her irises dancing orange.

In the dimness, I just barely saw my grandfather. He sat at the table, thumbing through his ledger, though surely he couldn’t read it in this light.

“Opa?”

He startled. “Freeda! What are you doing up?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Sit, sit.”

My chair shrieked against the flagstones. I sat. Opa set down the ledger.

“I saw you dancing tonight,” he said. I felt myself blush. “Is he a nice young man?”

“I think so. I mean, I’ve only just met him.”

“Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“Good, good.” He sounded distracted.

“Opa, The Carp grants three wishes, doesn’t she?”

“Of course.”

“What would you wish for?”

“We will find The Carp together, Freeda. So I will make one wish. You will make one. And the third, we will leave. It does not pay to be greedy. You know the old tale.”

I did know the tale. Oma Isabella used to tell it on winter evenings, whenever she was cooking gefilte fish. Long ago, a poor fisherman caught The Carp in the Danube River. The Carp begged to be freed, and, startled to hear a fish speak, the fisherman released her. In gratitude, The Carp granted the fisherman three wishes. The fisherman returned home and consulted his wife about what to wish for. The wife wanted fine clothing. So they got fine clothing. Then the wife wanted a fine house. So they got a fine house. Then the wife became greedy. She told her husband to ask The Carp for everything. The Carp said she could not give them everything. In fury, the wife took off her golden wedding ring, cast it in the water, and left her husband. The Carp swallowed the wedding ring and swam away. Neither the fisherman nor his wife ever got their third wish.

Having grown up with very little, I had always found the ending of this story highly unsatisfying. It was sad, and abrupt, and what was all this meshugas about the wife being greedy? It was, I thought, a tale crafted to keep the poor content with their lot.

“I’ll get a wish?”

“Of course, Freeda. You didn’t think I’d wake you at dawn for months for nothing?”

I had thought so, but didn’t say as much. “So what will you wish for?”

“Protection,” he said. “For the Jews of Austria. And you?”

“I don’t know. Could she... Could she bring Oma Isabella back?”

Opa was quiet for a bit. Hail sprayed like diamonds against the dark window panes, in which floated our dim and watery reflections.

He cleared his throat. “No, my dear. No magic is that strong.”

In that case, I would wish for the same thing as my grandfather. All these months, I had thought him a stubborn old man, obsessively seeking distraction from his grief. But really, he wanted protection for our people.

I could tell Opa wanted to be alone. I gathered my quilt around me and scraped back my chair.

“Will you come with me tomorrow morning?” said Opa. He had never asked before, only commanded. His voice held a note of pleading. “We’re running out of time.”

Did he mean because of the encroaching river-ice? Or because of what the old folks had talked about at the Social Club?

“I’ll come,” I said.

The morning dawned clear and cold. Hailstones large as babies’ fists glittered in the gutters. I pulled my hood up high and prayed Mathias wasn’t nearby to see me in my ugly woolen coat.

Opa climbed into The Isabella first, and I pushed the boat out, then clambered in. I did the rowing. My arms were strong by now, my hands callused.

The surface of the Danube was calm. My oars skulled ripples through it, making the tree-reflections quake.

Though his hands shook, Opa could still cast a fishing line. It looped out, a thin silver flash against the gray sky, then fell into the water. I rested the oars in their locks, blew on my numb fingers to warm them. On past mornings, I had hummed a little tune, closed my eyes, let my thoughts drift to the things I longed for: a mug of steaming coffee with milk, a day at the Prater funfair with Karina, a visit from my mother, a certain dark-haired boy. This morning I scanned the water, vigilant, searching for a sign: a ripple, an eddy, the flash of a scale.

Opa and I didn’t speak. We waited.

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