The Silence

by Sydney J Jones

  ‘Whatever you can tell me.’

  ‘Has he got himself into trouble then?’

  ‘Not trouble. I am just doing some reference checking.’

  ‘For employment? I assumed he was going – kicking and screaming mind you – into his father’s business.’

  ‘It is complicated,’ Werthen said.

  ‘I have the feeling, Advokat, that you are not being quite honest with me. I am young, but I have developed a sixth sense for artifice. Priests and lawyers. We both deal with the lies of men.’

  Werthen took a liking to the priest and felt that he could trust him.

  ‘You’re right. I was hired by Herr Karl Wittgenstein to find his son. I came here hoping to find out if Hans formed any friendships while a student here, someone with whom he might still be friends.’

  ‘Ergo, someplace that he might be hiding now?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I didn’t think he would be able to last long as a man of business.’ Mickelsburg drank his buttermilk off in one long swallow, and came up for air with a yellowish moustache. Werthen tapped his own upper lip, and the priest dabbed the residue with a napkin.

  ‘Was there such a friend?’

  ‘Hans was a unique young man even when a student here. He can play the piano with extreme felicity. Did Herr Wittgenstein tell you that?’

  ‘I have become aware of the fact. There seems to be a bit of competition for his soul.’

  Father Mickelsburg smiled at this. ‘For his earthly ambitions, perhaps. I am not so sure about his soul. I was an advisor to him here, especially when he began to run into trouble academically. He did not take Greek and Latin quite as seriously as his instructors would have wanted. But he could make you weep with his interpretation of the “Emperor” Concerto. He was a most unique young man.’

  ‘You have said that twice. What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘You will discover that for yourself when you find him.’

  ‘So you do not believe he has done himself harm?’

  ‘Is he capable of suicide, do you mean?’ The priest sniffed at the word as if it were a nasty smell. ‘One never knows, does one? You see our flag outside, I assume.’

  ‘Yes. I was wondering . . .’

  ‘In memory of one of our illustrious alumni. He took his own life rather than face public scandal. One would hardly credit him with such a sense of drama as to end his own life.’

  ‘Are you referring to Councilman Steinwitz?’

  Mickelsburg nodded his head solemnly. ‘Yes. A great tragedy. I of course was not part of the staff at the time, but the councilman was in the original classes of day students, along with our mayor. In fact, I understand from the old-timers that the two were great friends here. Such a friendship continued beyond these walls, as it often does. You yourself pointed that out.’

  It was difficult to get away from the Steinwitz affair. It seemed to follow one everywhere, Werthen thought.

  ‘But that was not your question,’ Mickelsburg continued. ‘I am not sure I can tell you what the young Wittgenstein is or is not capable of. He had a certain high sensitivity and temperament.’

  The priest seemed to blush as he said this.

  ‘Did he have a close friend?’ Werthen again asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. That he did. Another special young man, I should think.’

  ‘Unique?’ Werthen ventured.

  ‘Yes, quite. Very close the two were. His name is Henricus Praetor.’

  ‘Any relation to the surgeon?’ Werthen asked.

  A quick nod. ‘Yes. The son. The only son, I believe. Another day student. I heard the young man became a journalist. Yes, they were very special friends.’

  Werthen had made arrangements to eat lunch at home today. By the time he finished speaking with Father Mickelsburg, it was twenty past eleven, not enough time to follow any other leads this morning but quite enough for a leisurely walk to the Josefstadt.

  He let his mind roam free as he walked, not concentrating on the missing Wittgenstein, but taking in the sights and sounds of this city he loved so. He found that dwelling over-hard on a case produced the same results as when one concentrated too hard on a word that escaped the memory: nothing. Rather, simply take your mind off the problem at hand for a moment, and new avenues open, solutions beckon. Thus by the time he reached his apartment house, Werthen had built up a fine appetite and a real eagerness to see his wife and child again, and more importantly had put the Wittgenstein matter completely out of his mind for a time.

  He was full of expectancy as he put the key in the lock to his flat. The door opened from within at this very moment, and Frau Blatschky was there to greet him, a sour look on her face.

  ‘Mahlzeit,’ he said by way of greeting, but she did not look in the mood for either food or greetings.

  He sighed, came inside, and closed the door behind him.

  ‘What is it?’

  His housekeeper suddenly broke into tears. He had seen her near to tears only once before, the morning before he fought a duel, and to see her openly weeping was disturbing, as if the emperor himself were breaking down in front of him.

  ‘What?’ he said again, and gingerly patted the round little woman on her trembling shoulders.

  ‘Your mother,’ she sobbed. ‘She said she was going to see that you replace me. Called me incompetent.’ Further sobs. ‘Me. Incompetent.’

  ‘What in the world?’

  At that moment Werthen’s mother appeared in the doorway to the dining room.

  ‘You are making rather a fuss out of nothing, Frau Blatky,’ his mother said. He knew she had purposely mispronounced the woman’s name.

  ‘Blatschky, Maman. Frau Blatschky. And what have you been saying to her?’

  He felt himself get hot with anger, and tried to regain control.

  ‘Oh, she should be at the Burgtheater.’ His mother attempted a light tone. ‘Such a thespian.’

  He was growing tired of repeating himself. ‘What did you say?’

  His father came into the hallway. ‘That’s not the tone of voice a young man should be using with his mother.’

  Werthen let out a long sigh. Things had been so much nicer when they were all estranged.

  ‘I merely said that your servant needs to run a tighter household,’ Frau von Werthen said.

  ‘Servant!’ Frau Blatschky all but shrieked.

  ‘My housekeeper, Maman,’ Werthen said, anger seething beneath the surface like a lidded pot on boil.

  ‘Servant, housekeeper, it comes to the same thing. I simply informed the woman that the table linen is not properly folded. At Hohelände we—’

  ‘This is not your house, Maman. This is my apartment and Frau Blatschky works for me.’

  Now his mother began to sob and his father wrapped a consoling arm around her.

  ‘Look what you’ve done now. My lord, is this the manners they teach you at the university?’

  His father was so cut off from reality that it was as if he thought Werthen were still a student. He saw the complete futility of talking to them like rational beings. Instead, he patted Frau Blatschky on the back once more and sent her to the kitchen.

  Then turning to his parents he calmly said, ‘I am sorry for talking sharply. It has been a hectic morning for me. I was looking forward to lunch, not domestic drama.’

  But that merely set both his parents off again, aggrieved that he accused them of being dramatic. The upshot of it was that they left in a huff.

  His father said as he gathered coat and gloves, ‘This is the thanks we get for wanting to be good grandparents. When you can keep a civil tongue in your head, you know where we are staying.’

  He felt a small twinge of guilt as they left, but he could live with that. Of course later he would have to pay for these moments of freedom; would have to go to their hotel with flowers and chocolates and beg pardon for being rude. But for now, peace and bliss, and from the smells emitting from the kitchen, the promised special Gulasch of Frau
Blatschky.

  Entering the dining room, he saw that Berthe and her father, Herr Meisner, were already there. It was naptime for Frieda and so a pleasant lunch together was in the offing.

  ‘Hello,’ Werthen said as he came to his wife to peck her cheek. Only when she stiffened at his kiss did he recognize that the climate in the dining room was no better than it had been in the foyer.

  ‘Your wife is as stubborn as a donkey,’ Herr Meisner grumbled. With that, he got up and stormed out of the room. Herr Meisner, however, would not be going back to his hotel, for he was staying with them. In the past, such visits had been enjoyable. Now, however, it was one more added strain on their domestic calm.

  Herr Meisner and his parents were like oil and water. At first meeting a few days ago, the von Werthens had taken one look at Herr Meisner’s long, almost rabbinical beard, and another at his birth gift – a pair of silver rattles shaped like miniature dreidels – and it was as if they were sea turtles, pulling their necks back into their carapaces.

  Herr Meisner, a successful shoe manufacturer from Linz, was also one of the foremost Talmudic scholars in Austria, while Werthen’s parents, offspring, the both of them, of Jewish merchants and bankers, had hidden their Jewish ancestry away in a tightly locked pantry of family secrets. Baptized Protestants, they even had a ‘von’ to their name, earned in 1876, and which Werthen himself refused to use. He and Berthe both despised the hypocrisies of the Austrian social system and its so-called Dienstadeln, or service nobility, and were also quite indifferent to religious matters.

  At tea the day of Herr Meisner’s arrival, with Berthe holding the gurgling Frieda in her lap, Werthen’s parents queried, almost in a chorus, ‘When is the baptism to be?’

  It was as if somebody had broken wind in the august Musikvereinsaal. Silence reigned for a full minute, and then Werthen’s mother began bubbling on about the guest list.

  ‘We have no such plans,’ Werthen said, hoping to head off what he sensed might quickly become a domestic crisis.

  ‘No plans?’ his father blustered. ‘Why, boy, you can’t raise the little darling as a heathen. Nor can you deny us the great fun of mounting a celebration. That is the prerogative of grandparents.’

  Herr Meisner had cleared his throat at that moment. Werthen hoped for words of wisdom from this wise man who had become a true friend, but the adults just were not doing their job.

  Looking at Berthe, Herr Meisner said, ‘I was rather hoping you might decide to raise Frieda in the faith of your fathers.’

  Berthe rolled her eyes and was about to comment with the biting sarcasm Werthen knew so well, when Herr Meisner, the scholar, the man of rectitude, common sense, and affability, added further oil.

  ‘I know it is what your mother would have wished.’

  Her mother had died when Berthe was ten. She never spoke of it, nor had Werthen ever heard Herr Meisner mention his deceased wife before.

  Lines had been drawn after that. Tension ruled the household.

  Now Werthen sat gingerly as if there were a bomb under his chair. He unfolded his napkin and placed it in his lap.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask?’ Berthe said.

  ‘I imagine you will tell me when you want to. Besides, I have already had my own domestic crisis.’

  ‘He still insists on an Aliya for Frieda.’

  Werthen looked at her blankly.

  ‘A formal naming ceremony and blessing at a temple. He wants her to have a Jewish name, too.’

  ‘Like you,’ Werthen joked.

  ‘But I actually do,’ she said. ‘I just never use it.’

  ‘What is it?’ Werthen asked, wondering for a moment what other things he did not know about his wife.

  ‘Rachel.’

  ‘A nice name. I suppose we could add Sara to Frieda’s name. Or Ruth.’

  ‘It is not the name, darling . . .’

  He nodded. ‘I know. Why can’t our parents behave like adults?’

  Frau Blatschky, her eyes still red, came with the Gulasch and they settled in to the meal, forgetting their troublesome parents for the time. Finally, Werthen mentioned the new case.

  ‘Wittgenstein,’ she said. ‘Impressive clients.’

  ‘One could get lost in their town house.’ He went on to explain how far he had gotten in the investigation.

  ‘So what do you think happened to the young man?’

  ‘I think this Herr Praetor may be able to clarify matters.’

  ‘That name sounds familiar to me. Other than his surgeon father, I mean.’

  ‘The priest at the Theresianum thought he may have gone into journalism.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, putting her spoon down. ‘That’s where I’ve heard the name. He writes for the Arbeiter Zeitung.’

  ‘An interesting place for a former student of the Theresianum to publish his articles.’

  ‘Perhaps he is a displaced socialist, like your wife.’

  Finally, Werthen was beginning to feel they had their life back. It was moments like this with Berthe that he longed for: the small teases, the familiarity, the communal understanding.

  Six

  After lunch, and after finding a few moments to dandle the just awakened Frieda on his knee, Werthen returned to the Wittgenstein affair. He placed a telephone call to the Vienna city morgue and ascertained that there was one unidentified body that might fit the description as well as the time period that Werthen supplied. There was nothing for it but to go there in person and make a preliminary identification. If the body in question looked closely enough like Hans Wittgenstein, then he would have to get a family member to make a conclusive identification. He hoped it would not be so.

  This afternoon he decided he had already had enough exercise and took an Einspänner, a cab drawn by one horse, to the General Hospital, in whose basement the city morgue was located. The snow was gone now, but the temperature was once again dropping. February could be a quarrelsome, unsettled month in Vienna with sudden and unaccountable changes in weather. Werthen enjoyed the three-four time the horse’s hooves kept as he was rattled along the Ringstrasse to Alsergrund.

  Since first coming to the morgue with his colleague and sometime collaborator, Doktor Hanns Gross, in 1898, he had made his own personal connections with the director, the unfortunately named Doktor Starb. Tall and jovial, Starb, whose surname came from the past tense of sterben, to die, hardly looked the part of director of a morgue, dressed as he was nattily in a checked morning coat and butter-yellow tie, but when it came to death, he was all business. He took Werthen personally to the drawers of unclaimed bodies.

  ‘This one was found at the harness racing track at Freudenau,’ Starb explained as they entered the chill of the basement rooms. ‘Poor chap seems to have been despondent about something. Though the track is closed down now for the winter, it could be a symbolic act. Perhaps he’d lost money on the races last fall.’

  Werthen had neglected to ask about the means of death earlier and thus did not know it was a suicide. He hoped it was not a messy one; his stomach for gore was not the strongest.

  Sensing Werthen’s thoughts, Starb added, ‘Shot himself. We’ll examine the good side of the head. Who is it you’re looking for?’

  Werthen shrugged. ‘The family does not wish to make it public.’

  ‘Ahh,’ Starb said. ‘Important, then?’

  ‘Prominent,’ Werthen allowed.

  He took the family photograph out of his pocket as Starb found the proper drawer and pulled it out. The corpse came out feet first, and Werthen saw that the body was about the proper height. He caught a flash of dark hair as the head, turned to one side, came into view. A slight moustache, as well. This was not how he had expected this to end.

  He moved around the body, getting closer to the head and making sure he kept the photograph concealed from Starb, who would surely recognize Karl Wittgenstein in the family grouping.

  Werthen bent over the head, looking closely at the face in profile. But having never me
t Hans Wittgenstein, he was not sure. The photograph he had was of a full face, but obviously the other side of this man’s head had been shattered by the self-inflicted wound.

  Still, he needed to ask. ‘Is there a frontal view?’

  Starb shook his head. ‘Not so you would notice.’

  ‘I’ll need to make a telephone call.’

  ‘Upstairs. I assume you never met the young man.’

  ‘No,’ Werthen said, watching the affable Herr Direktor carefully close drawer number sixty-three, and the corpse, covered in white, slide into the cooler once again. A strong aroma of ammonia accompanied the opening and closing, from the gas the morgue used in its refrigerating vapor compressor.

  Starb discreetly left Werthen alone as the Advokat placed a call to Kurt Wittgenstein at the Kolowatring office. The decision seemed a simple one: he could not ask the father to come for the identification for fear he would be recognized. The other members of the family he had met, brothers Rudi and Ludwig, were not appropriate: Rudi was sick and Ludwig too young. And though the sister, Hermine, was termed a ‘brick’, Werthen did not want to bring a woman for such a job. Kurt Wittgenstein, however, was seemingly a man of business, a man who might be expected to have his wits about him.

  Calling the number he was quickly connected with Kurt, who happily had been apprised of Werthen’s commission by sister Hermine. There was a momentary pause when Werthen explained his request.

  Then, his voice breaking on the first word, Kurt said, ‘I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes.’

  In the event it took twenty. Kurt Wittgenstein looked ashen as he followed Werthen and a white-coated worker – for Starb had maintained his discretion – to drawer sixty-three. White coat looked at Werthen as if asking for permission to begin, but it was Kurt Wittgenstein who answered the silent request with a sharp nod of the head.

  The drawer came out slowly, accompanied again by the burning smell of ammonia.

  Werthen kept his eyes on Kurt Wittgenstein, looking for any sign of recognition as the corpse’s head cleared the drawer frame.

  Kurt looked at the dead man for several seconds, then took a deep breath.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘That is not my brother. Poor man.’