Hirschfeldt had taken care to make a note of her address in his private diary. Perhaps, after a decent interval, when there could be no question of breaching the doctor-patient relationship, he might arrange an encounter. One could, in this city, do a great deal worse.
The baron’s rumbling, bluff baritone finally vibrated the wire, replacing the twittering of the fräuleins. Hirschfeldt, however, watched his words. The fräuleins were notorious eavesdroppers.
“Baron, good day. I just wanted to let you know at the earliest opportunity that the plant we were trying to identify is very likely, almost certainly, not the invasive weed you were concerned about.”
Down the line, he heard the baron exhale.
“Hirschfeldt, thank you. Thank you for letting me know so promptly. It is a very great relief to me.”
“Don’t mention it, Excellency. But that plant still requires some cultivation”—the boil should be lanced—“and we need to attend to it.”
“I will see you as soon as I return to the city. And thank you, as ever, for your discretion.”
Hirschfeldt put down the phone. Discretion. That was what they paid him for. All the aristocrats, their kid gloves covering the rashes on their palms. All the so-respectable bourgeoisie terrified by the canker sores pulsing in their pantaloons. He knew very well that many of them would not have a Jew defile their drawing room, or even keep him company over a coffee. But they were only too pleased to entrust to him the care of their private parts and the confidences of their private lives. Hirschfeldt had been the first in town to advertise the availability of a “sequestered” waiting room, for the use of those with “secret diseases.” But that was when he had first raised his shingle. It was many years since he had needed to advertise.
Discretion: a valuable commodity in this city, capital of carnality, where scandal and gossip were the fuels that stoked the social engine. And so much to gossip about. Six years since the crown prince and his paramour had done away with themselves in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, and still one never tired of new rumors regarding that tragedy, or farce, depending on one’s degree of romanticism or cynicism. Of course, the royal family’s determination to hush up the affair had only fanned the blaze of gossip, as such attempts ever will. The Hapsburgs may have had the power to haul off Mary Vetsera’s corpse in the middle of the night with a broom handle shoved up her back to disguise the fact that she was forty hours dead. But while they could erase her name from the Austrian press, they could not keep foreign newspapers from finding their way across the border and under the seats of Vienna’s cabs, where the cabbie would, for a stiff fee, deliver them to the avid eyes of his passengers.
Hirschfeldt, who trained under the royal physician, had known the crown prince, Rudolf. He had liked him. They were the same age, and of a similar liberal bent. In their few meetings, he had sensed how thwarted the prince was, how frustrated by a role that was never more than ceremonial. It was no life for a grown man, being kept out of the counsels of state, required only as a dress dummy at banquets and balls. Waiting for a destiny that shimmered and retreated each time he attempted to approach it. And yet Hirschfeldt could not condone the ridiculous suicide pact. What was it Dante wrote, about the pope who abdicated his throne to become a contemplative and yet is condemned to one of the lowest circles of hell? Something about being punished for having turned his back on a great opportunity to do good in the world…. And ever since the prince’s shocking death, Vienna had been in almost imperceptible decline—a decline of mood rather than matter. But with no liberal face left in the Hofburg to stare them down, the Judenfressers grew louder year by year.
Who would have thought that a single suicide—or a double suicide, more properly—could put an entire city in a sour temper? Vienna valued its suicides, especially those that were dramatic, conducted with some flourish—like the young woman who had decked herself in full bridal regalia before flinging herself from a speeding train, or the circus artist who, in the midst of his performance, had cast away his pole and leaped from the high wire to his death. The audience had applauded, because he jumped with such verve that all believed it was part of his act. It was only as the blood began to pool under his shattered body that the cheers turned to gasps and the women turned their faces away, understanding that this man had added another digit to a suicide rate already the highest in Europe.
Suicide and sexual diseases. Two great killers of the Viennese, from the highest born to the lowest.
Hirschfeldt finished his notes on the baron’s case and called on his secretary to send in the next patient. He glanced at his daybook. Ah yes. Herr Mittl, the bookbinder. Poor fellow.
“Herr Doktor, Kapitän Hirschfeldt is here to see you. Should I send him in first?”
Hirschfeldt uttered an almost inaudible groan of irritation. Why was David bothering him at the clinic? He hoped his self-absorbed brother had had tact enough to stay clear of the sequestered waiting room. Herr Mittl was a nervous, highly proper little man who had paid a high price for some momentary indiscretion in his distant youth. He felt the shame of his condition deeply and as a result had been reluctant to seek treatment in the early stages of his disease, when there might have been some hope. He, of all people, would be mortified to encounter an officer of the Hoch-und Deutschmeister.
“No, give the captain my compliments but ask him to wait. Herr Mittl has troubled to make an appointment. He must have precedence.”
“Very well, Herr Doktor, but…”
“But what?” Hirschfeldt ran his finger under his collar, which was even more stiffly starched than usual.
“He is bleeding.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Show him in.”
How typical, he thought, as his half brother, a foot taller but a full thirteen years younger, strode into the surgery clutching a piece of red-stained silk to the side of his sculpted jaw. Little ruby orbs of blood glinted among the blond hairs of his wide mustache.
“David, what in the name of God have you done now? Another duel? You’re not a youth anymore. Why on earth can’t you learn to control your temper? Who, this time?”
Hirschfeldt had risen from behind his desk to lead his brother toward the examining table. Then he remembered he had not had the nurse in to change the sheet. Better safe than sorry. He propelled him instead to a chair by the window and then carefully lifted the saturated silk—a fine cravat, ruined—away from the gash.
“David.” His voice was heavy with reproof. He ran a finger over an old, white cicatrix that inscribed an arc above his brother’s right eyebrow. “One dueling scar is, I suppose, excusable, even perhaps, in your circles, desirable. But two. Two is positively excessive.” He applied alcohol to the new wound as his brother winced. There would be a scar, no doubt. The rapier cut was short but quite deep. Hirschfeldt judged it would heal without stitches if the sides of the wound were taped together and bandaged firmly. But would his vain brother leave the bandage in place? Probably not. He turned to reach for a suture.
“Are you going to tell me? Who?”
“No one you’d know.”
“Oh? You would be surprised whom I know. Syphilis is no respecter of army rank.”
“It wasn’t an officer.”
Hirschfeldt paused, the bright point of the suture needle poised above his brother’s flesh. He turned his brother’s face toward his own. A pair of sleepy eyes, the same dark blue as the young captain’s well-cut jacket, gazed back at him insouciantly.
“A civilian? David. You go too far. This could be disastrous.”
“I don’t think so. In any case, I couldn’t abide the way he said my name.”
“Your name?”
“Oh, come on, Franz. You know very well how some people pronounce Jewish names. How they can make each syllable into a little one-act farce of derisiveness.”
“David, you are oversensitive. You see slights everywhere.”
“You weren’t there, Franz. You can’t stand in judgment on me in this matt
er.”
“No, I wasn’t there, this time. But I’ve seen it all before.”
“Well, even if I was oversensitive, even if I was mistaken in the matter of the name, what happened next proved otherwise. When I called him out, he proclaimed that I was in no position to demand satisfaction, being a Jew.”
“Whatever did he mean?”
“He was referring, of course, to the Waidhofen manifesto.”
“The what?”
“Ach. Franz. Sometimes I wonder what city it is that you live in. The Waidhofen manifesto has been the talk of every coffeehouse in Vienna for weeks. It’s the German nationalist faction’s damnable reaction to the fact that a great number of Jews, both at the university and in the officer corps, have become proficient and dangerous fencers. Well, and so they had to, simply to defend themselves from the increasing provocations. In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honor from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically sub-human and dishonorable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult.”
Franz expelled a long breath. “Good lord.”
“You see?” David laughed, then grimaced, as the muscle in his lacerated cheek protested. “Even you, my wise elder brother, might have taken a scalpel to the fellow.”
The irony was that David Hirschfeldt, unlike Franz, was not a Jew. A year or two after Franz’s mother had died of consumption, their father had become smitten with a Bavarian Catholic. He had converted to her faith in order to woo her. Their son, David, had been raised amid the scent of Sunday incense and fresh-cut Christmas pines. The only Jewish thing about the blond, blue-eyed, half-Bavarian rising star of the Vienna Hausregiment was his name.
“There’s more.”
“What?”
“There are rumors I’m to be bounced from Silesia.”
“David! They couldn’t possibly. You’re their champion, ever since the gymnasium. Is it because of this latest…adventure?”
“No, of course not. Everyone in Silesia has been in an illegal duel at some point. But it seems my Bavarian Mutti no longer provides enough pure blood to counteract the taint of our father.”
Franz couldn’t think of anything to say. His brother would be devastated if he were expelled from his fencing club. And it would hurt the club to lose its best competitor. If David was right, and not merely being hypersensitive, then the state of things was much worse than he’d imagined.
Hirschfeldt was distracted as his last patient of the day was shown in. “I’m so sorry to have detained you, Herr Mittl, but there was an emergency….” He looked up then, and noticed Mittl’s gait. At once, the man’s deteriorated condition got his full attention. Mittl lumbered on stiff legs held wide apart until he stood nervously by the examination table, twisting his hat in his hands. His face, a narrow face always, was drawn and gray. There was a stain on his shirt, which was unusual; Hirschfeldt recalled Mittl as being most particular about his grooming. Hirschfeldt spoke to him gently. “Do sit down, Herr Mittl, and tell me how you are.”
“Thank you, Herr Doktor.” He eased himself carefully onto the table. “I’ve not been well. Not well at all.”
Hirschfeldt conducted his examination knowing what he would find: the gummy tumors, palpable around the joints, the optic atrophy, the muscle weakness.
“Are you still managing to work, Herr Mittl? It must be difficult for you.”
There was a flash of fear in the man’s eyes. “Oh yes. I must work. Must work. No choice. Even though they conspire against me. They give the lucrative work to their own, and I get the dregs….” Suddenly Mittl stopped and clapped a hand to his mouth. “I forgot that you—”
Hirschfeldt interrupted, to save them both embarrassment. “How do you manage with the fine work, your eyesight deteriorating as it is?”
“I have my daughter to help me with the sewing. Only one I can trust. The other apprentices are all in league against me, stealing everything, down to my linen thread….”
Hirschfeldt sighed. The paranoid delusions were as much a symptom of tertiary-stage disease as the physical disabilities. He wondered that Mittl was getting any commissions at all, given his impairment. The man must have a very loyal clientele.
Suddenly Mittl fixed him with a lucid gaze. His voice dropped back into its normal pitch. “I think I am losing my mind. Is there nothing you can do for me?”
Hirschfeldt turned away and walked to the window. How much should he tell him? How much could he take in? He was reluctant to mention experimental treatments to patients who could not perhaps grasp the full risks, the very uncertain rewards. And yet these treatments were too drastic to try on anyone who was not late stage and terminal. To do nothing was to condemn poor Mittl to his miserable decline until death overtook him.
“There is something,” Hirschfeldt said at last. “A colleague of mine is working on it in Berlin. The results are promising, but the treatments are extensive, painful, and I’m afraid very costly. It requires as many as forty injections over the course of a year. The agent my colleague has developed is very toxic, based on arsenic. His idea is that the compound harms the diseased parts of the body more than it harms the sound parts, which will, in time, recover. But the effects can be severe. Pain at the injection site is very common, as are gastric disorders. But my colleague has documented some dramatic results. He even claims cures, but I must warn you that I think it is too early to make such assertions.”
Mittl’s cloudy eyes had become avid. “You said ‘expensive,’ Herr Doktor. How much?”
Hirschfeldt sighed and named the sum. Mittl buried his head in his hands. “I haven’t got it.” And then, to Hirschfeldt’s deep embarrassment, the man began to sob like a child.
Hirschfeldt did not like the last patient of the day to be a hopeless case. It wasn’t the mood he liked to be in when he left his clinic. He had intended to call upon his mistress, but as he reached the turn to her street, he hesitated and walked on. It wasn’t just Mittl. It had been ten months; Rosalind’s wide-hipped, fleshy beauty was beginning to bore him. Perhaps it was time to look elsewhere…the image of the slender, trembling girl with the cornflower eyes came to him unbidden. He wondered idly how long it would be before the baron was sated with her. Not, he hoped, too long….
It was a delicious late-summer evening, the slant of the low sun warming the cold plaster nudes that cavorted across the entablature of some rather ostentatious new apartments. Who would buy such places, he wondered. The new industrial class, perhaps, wanting some physical proximity to the Hofburg. The only proximity they could hope for. All their wealth would never raise them up to the social plane of the aristocracy.
The warmth had tempted all kinds of people into the streets. Hirschfeldt took comfort in their diversity. There was a family, the wife veiled, the man wearing a fez, who had probably come all the way from Bosnia to see the heart of the empire under whose protection their lands had fallen. There was a Bohemian Gypsy woman, her spangled hem jingling in time to her swayed-hip walk. And a Ukrainian peasant with a red-cheeked boy riding on his shoulders. If the German nationalists wanted to purify this state of foreign influence, they would have many more obvious exotics to weed out before they got to the Jews, much less to a totally assimilated man like his brother, David. Still, a small voice nagged at him. The Bosnians and the Ukrainians weren’t dominant figures in the arts, in industry, in finance. A few colorful tourists—perhaps even the German nationalists could find them appealing, a picturesque element in the urban landscape. What they apparently did not find appealing was the prominence of Jews in every field of Austrian endeavor, even, these days, in the officer ranks of the army.
Hirschfeldt had watched the young limes and the sycamore saplings taking root on the malls of the Ringstrasse. Now they had grown high enough to throw slender stripes of shadow across his path. One day they would provide shade. His children, m
aybe, would live to enjoy it….
He would go home, yes, to his children; that was the thing to do. He would propose to his wife that they go for a family stroll in the Prater, perhaps. He would speak with her about David; she would understand his concerns. But his wife was not at home when he got there, and neither were the children. Frau Hirschfeldt had gone to call on the Hertzls, the maid said. And the nanny had already taken the children for an airing in the park. Franz felt put out, even as he knew that the sentiment was unreasonable, since he so often claimed to be detained at the clinic at this hour. Still, he wanted his wife’s company and he had grown very used to having what he wanted. And what did she see in that vapid wife of Hertzl’s? What did Hertzl see in her, for that matter? But even as his mind framed the question, Franz knew the answer.
Frau Hertzl’s blond beauty and her frivolous painted fingernails were perfect foils for Theodor’s dark, rabbinic gravity. With his Julie on his arm, he appeared less Jewish, and Franz was aware that this was beginning to matter to his literary friend. But the woman had so little to say. Her whole existence seemed framed by fashion. His own thoughtful, educated wife could hardly find her engaging. That Anna should be wasting her time on such an unprofitable friendship, when he wanted her home, was yet another annoyance. He retreated to his bedchamber and threw off the shirt with its bothersome collar. He put on a smoking jacket. Better. He tilted his head from left to right, releasing the tension in his neck. He made for the salon, called for a glass of schnapps, and retreated behind the broadsheets of his daily newspaper.
People of the Book Page 12