At the Nude Beach in Vienna
The current swept her below the beach, behind the coffeehouses at the river’s edge.
Christl said she developed late, a year or more after her schoolmates had grown breasts, discovered boys, and bled. But by the time she reached 16, men grew silent when she walked into a room. By 17, she had silky hair and eyes that made color melt; her elegance caused women to sit upright, and her form made men forget to breathe. She gave off an ease and happiness that made everyone think, “I want to be part of that.” She was mountain air, high meadows, and brilliant sun.
It was more complicated than this. When she walked into a room full of men, she deliberately added a sway to her step, her own excitement preceded theirs, and the tide rose on both beaches. She hated the way men undressed her with their eyes, and it bothered her that she sought it. Boys annoyed her, but she longed to spend long hours in a lover’s arms.
At Catholic school, her life had been anchored in images of the Virgin Mary, icon of innocence and purity, the mere girl who gave birth to the Savior of the World.
Yet from years in the great museums, Christl saw that, in a different light, the pure Virgin was also The Great Mother, the Mother of God, the creator herself of this perplexing universe — and The Devourer who ended it, source of life and death, loving and terrible — who nurtured each individual soul but could be cruelly indifferent to its fate.
In the gallery, Christl returned to the sensuous exuberance of Rubens’ nudes, and to the way Rembrandt saw right through you, but accepted you as you are.
Somewhere in the background, the Greek gods and the Norse heroes lived in her, absorbed from the vivid pages of the D’Aulaires’ retellings. They were as complicated and violent as her parents in an quarrel, as erratic as the opera of her emotions. These gods churned and fought and fucked at every opportunity and led awestruck humans to destruction or immortality. The world was held together by mysterious forces, and at any minute the gods could fight or love or, on a whim, make everything change into something else.
The world we saw was only the surface. Shimmering behind it roiled forces that lured or loved us, memorialized in hundreds of little shrines on the roadsides, pathways, and high Alpine trails — shrines now directed to the Virgin and her saints, but shrines that went back hundreds, thousands of years, when they were pleading to local spirits for protection from things like blizzards and avalanches that this world could do to you.
This was the landscape a girl walked into as she entered adulthood, but in it Christl for the rest of her life held onto the value of innocence, the way a baby’s touch transformed the world, the way a thought could change everything, the power and beauty of simply being the person you are.
Near her mother’s apartment in Vienna, a stretch of the river channel was set aside as a beach where people could swim without clothing, and, with that Austrian love of nudity and sunshine, Christl joined her teenage friends there on summer afternoons.
It was a place they could be naked and free. Shielded by fences from the amaze of strangers, these friends on the shore of girlhood could surge and swing with arm-spreading swirls — joyful, giggling, and whole.
One such day, one of them evoked the perils of the wide, swift channel that flowed deeply past them and dared anyone to swim across and back. No one accepted till Christl, a strong swimmer, announced “I can do that” and swam straight for the other side. Near it, she went under, and her friends sat up, worried. One stood. Christl burst up at the far bank smiling, waving both arms in triumph, then floated and made leisurely backstrokes back toward her friends.
Rising at the bank, as the dripping water freed her eyelids, she found that the current had swept her far outside the swimming area, near the place where, 60 years later, her family would scatter her ashes and watch the swift current carry them away. Climbing out below the coffeehouses that lined the bank, she realized that the current was too strong for her to swim upstream: She would have to walk back.
She emerged alone, naked, with nothing to cover her, and no easy way to return. With characteristic decisiveness, she thought, “Here I am. This is happening. I’m going to do this” — then glanced up the lane and began the long walk back.
On the opening pages of one of her sketchbooks I later found where Christl had copied a quote that is Thomas Aquinas’ positive restatement of the Commandment against lying:
“As a matter of honor, one person owes it to another to manifest the truth.”
Christl set out on that walk, and through all of life, to manifest her truth.
As she began to walk past table after table where men sat, a wake of silence opened behind her. One stopped stirring his demitasse and stared. Giving his order to the waiter, another lapsed entirely out of language. A younger man, in mid laugh, hushed into awe.
As if alone in the Alpine air, high meadows, and brilliant sun, Christl made the trek past outdoor cafés and coffeehouses and little shops enshrined with collectables, serenely walking back to the beach, back to her friends, back to the concealment of her clothing, a girl walking into womanhood — luminously naked and glistening with wet.
It was happiness and hugs all around when she reached her friends. The girls chattered, dressed, and shared the last snacks. As they began to leave this protected place where they could be naked and free, did they glimpse how fast that current would sweep them into life?
After a marriage that filled 42 years with life, Christl Kaserer Grow died Feb. 15, 2021, three weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 76. This account by her husband is based on stories Christl told about herself as a girl. Read more about Christl in “Home Birth, Home Death” and “Christl’s Resume as a Mom,” “Christl and the Icon Panties,” “A Myth that Guided Christl’s Life.”
