The Quiet Twin

by Dan Vyleta

  What the picture in question shows is the squalid facade of such a Hinterhaus. One Therese Bittermann lived here in May 1937 with her husband, Franz, and his mother. Franz had read a story in the papers of a man ridding himself of his spouse by pushing her out of the window. The idea stuck. Nobody saw him do it, but many heard Therese’s scream. When Franz approached her broken body in the courtyard, he did so without betraying any emotion. All he said was ‘She’s already dead.’

  Franz Bittermann was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted. In 1943, when the Nazi government transferred him from prison to the Mauthausen concentration camp, he fulfilled the intentions of the original verdict by hanging himself by the neck. There is a picture of Franz looking out of the apartment window shoulder-to-shoulder with the investigative judge: he is pointing down into the yard and explaining his deed. He has thick brown hair that he wears combed back from his forehead—a handsome man in a dark suit. I have no image of his wife.

  There were three other pictures that caught my attention. The corpse of an old crone, lying prone on her back, her throat slit underneath a bloom of flowers that make up the pattern of her wallpaper. The image of a big marital bed, its silk sheets soaked with blood. And, worst yet, the naked body of a woman floating face down in the murky water of her bathtub. Her leg has been cut, at the knee, so it bends back at an acute angle. Her skin is pale and slick. Only one buttock breaks the surface of the water.

  I sent all four of these images to my publisher, myself not quite knowing why, but sensing dimly that, between them, they evoked the claustrophobic sense of threat that also permeates my novel. My editor wrote back to say that these pictures were ‘interesting’. Two months passed, and I received the cover. Therese and Franz Bittermann’s backyard had been rearranged for it, the photographic angle had been changed. For all that, I knew at once where I was, and I knew, too, that this one was right for the novel. Everybody who had read the book agreed. We never considered asking the designer for another cover concept.

  I did not choose the cover of The Quiet Twin, but I instantly recognised it as belonging to my book.

  Read on

  Viennese Love Letter

  ‘WIEN IST ANDERS’: Vienna is different. So say the Viennese. It is the official slogan of the Viennese municipal administration. Different from what one might expect, that is. What one expects, I suppose, are coffee houses and the opera, horse carriages and Kultur: the final bastion of the haute bourgeoisie, now that Paris has gone to the dogs (or so the Parisians complain). Vienna, an Italian friend once told me, in the days when PETA activists liked to wield spray cans on Europe’s streets, is where the Milanese go to wear their furs. The truth is, if you travel to Vienna as a tourist, you might find exactly what you expect: young men in Mozart suits soliciting concertgoers outside the cathedral; tuxedoed waiters serving up eight-dollar coffees in draughty rooms whose twelve-foot ceilings prove impervious to heating; dazzlingly white Lipizzaner horses trotting on the spot in the equine equivalent of the goose-step. Vienna is different, but on the Graben and the Kärtnerstrasse, those twin thoroughfares that mark the epicentre of the inner city, tourists have been taking the same photo year in, year out, virtually from the day the camera was invented. Vienna is different yet unchanging, a carefully preserved shrine to an empire now defunct.

  Unless, that is, you care to delve beyond the postcard Vienna and step beyond the confines of the inner city, which, for all its attractions, is a curiously sterile space, sanitised and dripping in money and not always fun. Cross the Ringstrasse—the great circular street that bounds the inner city and was built with the intent of impressing the might and splendour of the capital on visiting yokels from the far reaches of the Habsburg Empire—and you will discover a city that is not entirely stuck in the memory of former greatness and begin to appreciate what great fortune it remains to be born a Viennese.

  The buildings in the districts immediately beyond the Ringstrasse are no less beautiful than those of the inner city, but they tend to house restaurants and bars rather than jewellers and luxury shops. The sheer density of eating and drinking establishments encountered here can be overwhelming to the visitor. Eating out is a national pastime for Austrians, who reserve the right to take an hour’s break over lunch and chase their meal with a Seidel (0.3 litres) or a Krügel (0.5 litres) of beer, secure in the knowledge that one little pint has never yet harmed their afternoon business. Strewn in amongst the restaurants and taverns are bakeries and flower vendors, toy stores and photographers’ shops, stationers, milliners, furriers, clothes boutiques. In Vienna, with the exception of the countrified peripheries, there is no such thing as a residential or commercial district: one lives, works, shops all in the same streets, a system facilitated by the great nineteenth-century apartment blocks that dominate much of the city’s architecture and provide a high density of family housing in the upper storeys and generous commercial spaces on the street level.

  One side effect of this intersection of commercial and private life is that Vienna’s streets are always packed: not just in the so-called centre but virtually anywhere you care to venture, you will find yourself literally rubbing shoulders with the Viennese. And they are an interesting people, at once jovial and grumpy, quick to bemoan the dysfunctions of their city and yet all too aware that one would be a fool to wish to live anywhere else. Viennese interactions are governed by a quaint formality in which academic titles routinely replace last names. It is not unusual to overhear the owner of the local Tabak—Central Europe’s version of the corner store, specialising in cigarettes and magazines—greet a customer as Frau Diplomkauffrau (Mrs Higher Diploma in Business Administration), or as Herr Magister (Mr Masters of Arts). And yet, despite this formality and the status-consciousness it implies, the Viennese have retained a knack for talking to one another, citizen to citizen, with a familiarity unknown to more northerly, more Protestant, parts of Europe. One talks, over a beer, or coffee, or else over a cigarette. In a Europe where even the Irish and the Italians have embraced anti-smoking laws, Vienna is still puffing away, ubiquitously, unapologetically, in bars, restaurants and offices, as likely as not complaining about health problems whose details locals like to share with little compunction. Thus, the vagaries of digestion are a popular topic. In Vienna one is not ashamed of the body, nor of any of its functions.

  It is, after all, Sigmund Freud’s native city. Prostitution is legal, pornography laws lax, public nudity considered non-threatening. When I was living in Vienna, the brothel that operated right across from my local subway stop liked to place seasonal decorations in their shop windows: painted eggs for Easter, knee-high, careworn Santas for Christmas, little Styrofoam pumpkins for that North American import, Halloween. In the subway station itself, an anti-AIDS poster campaign featured a shaven-headed man kneeling in front of another, the back of his head obscuring his companion’s crotch, both of them dressed in dark leathers. And outside the Leopold Museum, which houses some of Egon Schiele’s most provocative nudes, there used to operate a little bar that was housed in a magnified, anatomically correct copy of the final inches of the human intestine.

  You are better off, however, taking your coffee elsewhere: at a bakery, if all you want is a fine cup of Melange and a freshly made Golatsche to keep it company, or in one of the grand coffee houses, if you care to sit where Wittgenstein sat, or Mahler, or Schnitzler. The latter course is not without vagaries. For one thing, you will have to endure the scorn of the waiter, who will pull a face if you insist on a menu (a true Viennese knows her order) and doubt your ability to conform to longstanding rules of etiquette (‘Tourists,’ one of them declared in a recent interview, ‘do not know how to tip’). For friendlier service, and an even more quintessentially Viennese experience, head for the Naschmarkt, Vienna’s spectacular open-air food market, where the full ethnic diversity of modern Vienna is on display alongside the best fruit, veg and street food the city has to offer. Vienna is different: all at once it will seem true. />
  Hell, if you like, you can even wear your furs.

  Originally published in The Afterword,

  National Post

  Acknowledgements

  This book has benefited immeasurably from the support, advice and expertise of a great number of people. Professor Gerhard Botz fed me schnitzel while fielding a hundred questions of mine until deep into the night. His answers were humbling in the depth of their historical insight; the book’s remaining mistakes are a symptom of my inability to formulate the right questions, rather than his inability to answer any of them. I heartily thank him for his friendship and guidance. Martin Herles and žofia Mrázová not only gave me food, wine and shelter when I was staying in Vienna, but also helped track down some very Viennese facts, as did Petra and Carolus Stigler. David Pasek counselled me on matters architectural; David Svoboda graciously provided me with some insight into neurological and psychiatric disorders; Michal Vyleta advised me on general medical matters; Ivan Crozier helped me when it came to reimagining medicine as it was practised at the end of the 1930s; Andrew Hamilton-Wright enlightened me on questions of acoustics. Boyd White was the first to hear me describe the opening chapter of the book and gave me an early thumbs-up; he and Richard Lapidus read drafts of the novel and shared their perceptions. I am very grateful to all of you.

  I would also like to thank Helen Garnons-Williams and the team at Bloomsbury, whose enthusiasm carried me through the process of writing; Alex Schultz at HarperCollins Canada for his diligence, sensitivity and tact; and my agent, Simon Lipskar, who has never faltered in his support of the Czech-German-Canadian oddball whose first manuscript he pulled out of the slush pile.

  Above all, I wish to thank my wife, Chantal, The Quiet Twin’s first reader. Writing a novel is an act of faith; mine was rooted in her love.

  About the Author

  DAN VYLETA is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He now calls Canada his home. His debut novel, Pavel & I, has been published in thirteen countries and translated into eight languages. He wrote The Quiet Twin, his second novel, while living in Sackville, New Brunswick. Visit the author’s website at www.danvyleta.com.

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  And I will take a further secret to the grave: that I once observed Mother, how she secretly went into the cellar larder, cut herself a thick slice of ham and ate it downstairs, standing up, with her hands, hurriedly, it didn’t even look repulsive, just surprising, I was more touched than appalled. […] Curiously enough, I like those of whose kind I am: human beings.

  Heinrich Böll, A Clown’s Perspectives

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Pavel & I

  Author’s Note

  Writing a book of fiction that is set in the past means entering into an awkward and often rather dysfunctional dialogue: between what was and what might have been; between the demands of veracity and the lure of drama; between the representative and the remarkable; between the grind of research and frenzied inspiration. For all the inaccuracies that litter the book, it was motivated by an earnest attempt to understand what it meant to live in the period and place I was writing about, and it is to this, the experience of my cast of ‘ordinary Austrians’, rather than to any specific body of facts that I attempted to be faithful. I can make no claim that I understand National Socialism. That would mean that I understand how a society could have produced camps designed to exterminate those who used to be neighbours, colleagues, teachers, doctors, plumbers, violinists. It seems important, however, to struggle towards understanding, which for me began with picturing a block of flats, filled with neighbours, colleagues, teachers, doctors, plumbers, violinists.

  The story of The Quiet Twin is set in October and early November 1939. The book does not attempt to provide a precise account of these weeks and months. I have taken certain liberties with the weather, have ignored some key events such as the commencement of deportations of Jewish men, and introduced a spree of killings that has no precise equivalent in fact (even though a number of sensational murders did take place between April and September of that year). There are inaccuracies and slight anachronisms in my allusions to the procedures and pace of Austrian mobilisation. Thomas Mann’s attendance of a ‘spiritistic’ seance took place some six or seven years prior to the point indicated in the novel (and not in Vienna), though other details are correct. The italicised sections that separate the various chapters are, with minor exceptions, accurate in their details. Some things, as the saying goes, are too strange to have been made up.

  The secret murder of psychiatric patients and the physically handicapped known under the Nazi cypher ‘T4’ did not commence in earnest until the spring of 1940. It might be argued, therefore, that some of Anton Beer’s and Otto Frei’s worries are not only premature but anachronistic. The chief point, however, is that nothing was known for certain, least of all the timetable of mass murder. Beer, working in a psychiatric ward where the spirit of ‘National Socialist medicine’ was gaining ground, and Otto, witnessing the aggressive circulation of propaganda that sought to prejudice the population against the sick, might be forgiven for anticipating the implementation of the regime’s homicidal policies. Forced sterilisations had long been taking place throughout the Reich.

  The part of Vienna where the book is set has undergone significant architectural changes since the Second World War; the group of buildings I describe does not exist in this precise constellation. Even in the 1930s, courtyard workshops like Pollak’s auto-repair shop were more typical of the second district, where they can be found to this day. The inhabitants of Vienna’s apartment buildings often did display a startling sociological diversity; rich and (working) poor often lived in a proximity that would be highly unusual in modern-day Britain, the USA, or Canada, though somewhat less so in the cities of Central Europe. Windows that opened to the main street rather than the yard typically indicated more desirable living spaces.

  One aspect of the specifically Austrian experience of National Socialism that the book fails to explore is the ‘Austrofascist’ regime that ruled the country in the years immediately prior to Austria’s annexation by the German Reich. Some oblique reference to this fact is made by Teuben who indicates that some of Speckstein’s authority derives from the fact that his membership of the Party dates from the years when it was declared illegal by the Austrofascist regime. I am hoping to address this theme in a future book.

  All characters in this book are free inventions, which is to say an amalgam of figures I have met in my research and in real life, reimagined into the context of the story I was telling. Many of them are perfectly ordinary figures, though I have tried to resist the temptation to make them so ordinary as to reduce them to types: neither Beer, nor Zuzka, nor the drunken, nameless janitor are meant to represent anyone but themselves. If I have eschewed depicting the spiritual life of a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi ideologue, this should not be taken to imply that such people did not exist in 1930s Austria. My primary interest in this book belonged with the army of opportunists whose crimes were at times as grave in their consequences as those perpetrated by the true believers. Sixty-five years after the Second World War it is easy for most of us to convince ourselves that we could never have belonged amongst those who would have held wrong-headed beliefs; it is a more nagging question to wonder what one might have done in order to secure some modicum of social and material success.

  As both Beer and Teuben remark, Speckstein is an unusual figure, and bears a somewhat unusual name. The question of how he, the disgraced Professor with aristocratic pretensions and Hapsburg nostalgia, a person, in short, who might as easily have been found amongst the (conservative, Christian, Austrofascist or Monarchistic) enemies of National Socialism as amongst its ranks, ended up as a low-level functionary within the Party, will have to remain the subject of a separate narrative; it is not, however, a story that is any less plausible than any number of biogr
aphies of actual Party members who achieved a much higher rank than my fictional Zellenwart. It remains unclear to me whether the past is better explored through ‘representative’ figures or through those whose choices and fate surprise.

  Physicians, a number of whom I count amongst my friends and family, will complain that Beer’s mode of examination and therapeutic approach are unorthodox in some regards, and be dismayed at certain professional oversights (though they may allow me to remind them that surprising, at times inexplicable, oversights on the side of – tired, overworked, out-of-their-depth – physicians are a common enough occurrence). Anton Beer’s understanding of the physics of sound is also not without flaws; like many others he has learned in school an inaccurate explanation for why the rhythm of soldiers’ boots may destroy a bridge. In short, not all mistakes and inaccuracies that are to be found in this book are the direct result of my ignorance. For those that are, I am heartily sorry.

  Copyright

  The Quiet Twin

  Copyright © 2011 by Dan Vyleta.

  P.S. section © 2012 by Dan Vyleta.

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