Quotes / Caging Skies

• The gay mood didn't last long. I think it was only the next month, October possibly, that trouble began. It started when a few thousand members of the Catholic youth groups gathered to celebrate a Mass at St Stephen's Cathedral. There were more outside than could fit inside the old stone walls. Afterwards, in front of the cathedral, in the heart of Vienna, they sang religious hymns and patriotic Austrian songs. Their slogan was: 'Christ is our guide' — Führer in German. This demonstration was in response to a call by Cardinal Innitzer.
• The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people's minds. They escape the liar's grip like seeds let loose in the wind, sprouting a life of their own in the least expected places, until one day the liar finds himself contemplating a lonely but nonetheless healthy tree, grown off the side of a barren cliff. It has the capacity to sadden him as much as it does to amaze. How could that tree have got there? How does it manage to live? It is extraordinarily beautiful in its loneliness, built on a barren untruth, yet green and very much alive. Many years have passed since I sowed the lies, and thus lives, of which I am speaking. Yet more than ever, I shall have to sort the branches out carefully, determine which ones stemmed from truth, which from falsehood. Will it be possible to saw off the misleading branches without mutilating the tree beyond hope? Perhaps I should rather uproot the tree, replant it in flat, fertile soil. But the risk is great. My tree has adapted in a hundred and one ways to its untruth, learned to bend with the wind, live with little water. It leans so far it is horizontal, a green enigma halfway up and perpendicular to a tall, lifeless cliff. Yet it is not lying on the ground, its leaves rotting in dew as it would if I replanted it. Curved trunks cannot stand up, any more than I can straighten my posture to return to my twenty-year-old self. A milder environment, after so long a harsh one, would surely prove fatal.
• My father was wrong. That man did concern little boys like me. He, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, had a great mission to confide in us children. Only we, children that we were, could save the future of our race. We were unaware that our race was the rarest, the purest. Not only were we clever, fair, blond, blue-eyed, tall and slender, but even our heads showed a trait superior to all other races: we were 'dolichocephalic' whereas they were 'brachycephalic', meaning the form of our heads was elegantly oval, theirs primitively round. I couldn't wait to get home to show my mother — how she'd be proud of me! My head was something I'd never cared about before, at least not its form, and to think I had such a rare treasure sitting upon my shoulders!
• When I came home there were gaps in our library, leaving me with a vague, uncomfortable feeling, as if the keys of a piano had been pressed down and weren't coming back up. In some places a whole shelf full had collapsed like dominoes to cover up for the missing books. My mother was having trouble carrying a load of laundry upstairs. Trudging back down, she jolted when she saw me. I thought it was because I was black in the face but, going to help her up with the next load, I was shocked to see the basket was chock-full of books. She stumbled over her choice of words, told me it was, um, only in case we didn't have enough newspaper in the winter to start our fires — there was no use burning them now in the hot weather. I was lost for words. All I could think was didn't she know the trouble she could get us into? She told me to take my shoes off, go and have a bath
• After three years of impatience, Kippi, Stefan, Andreas and I were old enough to join the Hitlerjugend. We were euphoric, especially Kippi and I, who dreamt of getting into Adolf Hitler's personal guard when we grew up, ;because we'd heard that the selection was so elitist, a cavity in your tooth was enough to have you rejected. We liked to come up with all the faults that could disqualify us and remedy them. Lack of strength, stamina, divide;courage, certainly, but more often petty reasons such as the tooth decay one, against which we, among the few, would go so far as to brush our teeth in camp. I had an ingrown toenail and Kippi would perform operations on it. No way was I going to have a minor defect mentioned on my medical records. We were supposed to tolerate pain without flinching, but we were not exactly a picture of stoic endurance: we both laughed as soon as I saw the scissors coming. Kippi added to it by making them open and close like achungry beak and the look on my face made him bend over in two. Sometimes he had to wait minutes before he could stop laughing enough to restart
• Kippi asked me afterwards, if I had to kill him for the Führer, could I? I looked at him. His face was so familiar, I knew I wouldn't have been able to. Neither would he have been able to kill me. But we both agreed this wasn't good — we were weak, and would have to work on it. Ideally, a leader told us, we should be able to hit a baby's head against the wall and not feel anything. Feelings were mankind's most dangerous enemy. They above all were what must be killed if we were to make ourselves a better people
• In school that year the crucifixes were replaced by posters of Adolf Hitler. We learned about eugenics and the sterilisation of what the Americans called 'human junk', which had been practised in thirty-something states of the United States as far back as 1907. The mentally retarded, unbalanced and chronically ill were detrimental to society and had to be prevented from bringing more of their kind into the world. Populations of low-life must be sterilised as well, for generation after generation they remained poor and alcoholic. Their dwellings were perpetually shabby. Their daughters were as bad as their mothers and grandmothers, unable to avoid teenage pregnancies that brought about yet another generation of promiscuity. Distinguished professors of leading American universities had proven that the tendency to poverty, alcoholism and low-class lives was genetic. Possessors of these traits were therefore forbidden to multiply and the mandated surgery put into practice in these states helped to limit many undesirable groups of people
• The other two women, Astrid Farrenkopf and Petra Kunkel, had a streak of adolescence in their middle age, which was probably just past thirty. Both war widows, they shared their lunches, cigarettes, perfume, and, if their feet hurt, made a spectacle of themselves pulling off each other's boots, their legs up in the air. They didn't like anyone younger or prettier than themselves, which at least left Godmum and Frau Schmulka safe
• Elsa named the cat Karl but more often called him darling, love, my dearest, my everything. She spent hours indulging him in head-to-tail strokes, admiring his symmetrical face until I caught myself thinking ill of the pet. She got up early to tend to his breakfast, hurried through ours with her leg bobbing up and down, impatient to knot socks into snakes, turn her slipper into a mouse with the help of buttons and broom twigs. She changed the bowl of water on the hour; kept the litter box cleaner than our own bathroom, where I often found her hairs in the basin; scrubbed his dish squeaky clean before she filled it anew — while I had to remind her to keep our soap-dish free of soapy water!
• I had nothing more to sell. Ready cash became a forgotten memory. I had nothing in my pockets, nothing in any account, not even for a badly needed, bottle of beer. I applied for some odd jobs but that actually cost me. Paper, envelopes, carbon paper, postage all added up. I descended to the streets and offered to wash two businessmen's cars for a coin. They accepted my offer. I washed their cars for a coin. Fair enough, a deal was a deal. Old ladies were less willing to accept my services, even for a coin, although I maintained that carrying their groceries or walking their dogs for them, could have been mutually beneficial. Their refusals, clutching their, handbags so their knuckles turned white, were more humiliating than the two businessmen's combined effort to produce a single coin
• She'd asked for the truth. I'd given it to her. No! The truth itself was a lying notion! A man who dreams he's being hunted isn't safe and sound in his bed. A man is where his spirit is. If he lived a base life with one woman but had another woman locked up in his heart the whole while, she was the only one he loved. The only one he really shared his life with. The most secret, powerful gift given to a man isn't life, but the capacity to snip at it in his mind, trim it in his heart, cultivate all the branches that should have been and were given life within the nicks in his will, the cuts of his soul. This is where the tree of life is hidden, grafted in each and every man