The Twelfth

My grandfather Anton Kasparek was nineteen and worked as a stoker on the Vienna Stadtbahn when the first shots were fired in Linz on the morning of the twelfth of February 1934, because the police were searching the Hotel Schiff for weapons belonging to the Republican Schutzbund and the Schutzbund refused to hand them over, and the news reached Vienna before noon even though no train carried it, my father always stressed that part, it was faster than any train, it ran through the rail yards like a rumour that already knew it was true.

Anton was standing in the Hernals engine shed at half past ten, shovelling coal for the midday runs, when the foreman, a man named Sedlacek of whom I know nothing else, not even that much really, came in and said a single sentence, Linz is burning, and left again, and my grandfather said later that to this day he didn't know whether Linz had actually burned that day or whether Sedlacek only meant the cannons being aimed at the Karl-Marx-Hof, he was never quite sure, but the sentence was enough.

At two in the afternoon the general strike was called, and at the depot office the men were told to keep the trains running, the population had to be supplied, that was the phrase, supplied, as if speaking of livestock, and half the stokers at Hernals left anyway, set down their shovels and walked out the door, and Anton stayed, not because he was against the strike but because he was nineteen and afraid of what the depot might do to him if he went, he never dressed that up, my father said he never once dressed it up, that mattered to him.

Around five, already dark, an early dark for February, a man climbed into the cab just before the run out to Heiligenstadt, a man in a coat too thin for the weather, with a wound on his left arm hidden under it, and he didn't ask, he only said, I need to get to Nussdorf, and Anton told it later that in that moment he wasn't thinking about politics or the Schutzbund or the government, he only saw the wound and thought, he's bleeding, and said, get in, back by the coal bunker, and gave the man his own coat because the man was shaking with cold.

At the checkpoint by the Nussdorf bridge two Heimwehr men stopped the train, both young, younger than Anton later admitted to himself, barely older than he was, and one climbed into the cab and asked whether he was carrying passengers, and Anton said no, only coal, and kept shovelling as he said it, kept working as if nothing were happening, because he understood that a man with something to hide stops working and a man with nothing to hide keeps shovelling, that was the only calculation he made in that whole moment, no larger one, just that, shovel, keep shovelling, and the young Heimwehr man shone his light briefly into the tender, over the coal pile where a man had made himself as small as he could under an old tarpaulin, and then switched the light off again and said, drive on, it's cold.

My grandfather told this story, as far as I know, exactly twice, once to my father when my father was already grown, and once, much later, to a journalist collecting testimonies for a commemorative volume on the fiftieth anniversary, and in both versions the name of the man he carried to Nussdorf is missing, because Anton never asked it, he never dressed that up either, he said, you didn't go asking for names that winter, a name was a burden for whoever knew it, and he let the man off at Nussdorf, by the bridge, still wearing his coat, and never saw him again and never learned whether he survived the days that followed, when the government put down the uprising with artillery against its own municipal housing blocks, with several hundred dead in four days, a number you don't learn precisely in school and which my father nonetheless knew by heart.

I have been driving on the same rails for thirty-eight years, or rails that carry the same names, Heiligenstadt, Nussdorf, the bridge is still there, in a different form, and for all those years I never quite understood why my grandfather considered this one story, out of a long life, worth telling, until my father told me shortly before his own death that he told it because it was the one night of his life in which he knew exactly what he was doing and why, and every other night, my father said, was easier, but that one was true, and I think I understand now what he meant, because I too have had thirty-eight years of nights, quiet, orderly, with timetables that worked out, and not one of them ever gave me the feeling of having known something as clearly as my grandfather knew it that night, at nineteen, in the coal bunker, with a stranger and a shovel that never stopped moving.

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