by Tim Symonds
As from No. 10, Downing Street.
Dear Sherlock, His Majesty’s Ambassador in Vienna has arranged for you to inspect the records at the Novi-Sad Town Hall. Take with you the credentials contained in this letter. You may well encounter certain difficulties in pursuing your Balkan searches. I sympathise. You would not be the first to come away from those pocket handkerchief states heartsick and humbled. The Balkan States have endured centuries of misrule under Ottoman Absolutist regimes whose functionaries are a byword for injustice and malpractice. It is a constant stimulus for revolutionary activity. The Peninsular may be separated from the rest of Europe solely by the width of the Danube and the narrowness of the Straits of Otranto, but we know as little of it as we do of the industrious navigators digging the canals of Mars.
I suggest a meeting with a Miss Edith Durham could be helpful in your quest. She is an Englishwoman, font of much knowledge of the region. She is staying for a few days at the Vaskrsenja Hristova Monastery near Kać, ostensibly to study local traditions and to make drawings of amphibia. Miss Durham alone is at liberty to tell you the real reason for her presence. It is enough for me to say that England takes its holdings in and around the eastern Mediterranean very seriously.
I have asked Miss Durham to remain at the Monastery until you arrive.
Mycroft.
I then revealed my discovery. ‘Holmes,’ I chided, ‘how is it you didn’t know Lieserl could only apply to a small child?’
‘My dear Watson,’ came the answer. ‘I’d have been quicker off the mark if my Cambridge tutor had been born in Stuttgart rather than in Hanover where they speak High German. Swabian was as alien to him as Broad Yorkshire with its roots in Old Norse is to you and me. He knew one word in the dialect, Präschtlingsgsälz,as unpronounceable to most Germans as Shakespeare’s honorificabilitudinitatibus is to us.’
‘And the Swabian word means?’ I enquired.
‘Strawberry jam.’
Armed with our new knowledge and the impressive document with its multiple seals we set off for the Town Hall, an imposing building on the north side of the central square. The next two days were spent browsing through municipal and census records under the eye of a watchful civil servant. Nowhere was the name ‘Liese’or ‘Lieserl’ mentioned in connection with the Marić family. The evening of the second day approached. The clerk had been assiduous in pulling out ledgers but we had discovered nothing. We showed our appreciation with a thaler and began to walk in despondent mood back to our lodgings. At some distance from the Town Hall we heard the footsteps of someone hurrying to catch up with us. It was the same clerk.
‘You will learn nothing about the Marić family from official records,’ he said. ‘Miloš Marić’s tentacles stretch into every corner. He knows everyone. He has been an official at district courts in Ruma and Vukovar and appointed to the High Court in Zagreb. He owns a great deal of property - three farms in Banja Luka and large homes in Titel, Novi-Sad and Kać. He is still an official in Novi-Sad’s Serbian Reading Room. No civil servant or cleric would spread gossip about Marić or his family for fear of their livelihood.’
‘What do you suggest?’ I asked.
In a near whisper he added, ‘There is someone who might help you with the information you seek. My cousin. Her name’s Jelena. Jelena’s mother-in-law is a friend but not a blood relative of the Marić family, not a porodica,’ he explained. ‘This puts her distant enough not to feel her lips completely sealed yet close enough to have heard any gossip. I can arrange for you to meet her.’
A message was delivered to our hotel later that evening. We were to rendezvous with Jelena at the Queen Elizabeth Café. We entered the café at the arranged hour. A woman with thick grey hair trimmed short beckoned us. She was seated at a tiny marble-topped table set among potted white lilacs. Slavonic grey eyes in an oval-shaped face watched us carefully as we approached. In accented English she acknowledged the Swiss chocolates we placed before her.
‘I heard about your search,’ she commenced.
She produced a tiny white fluted teacup and placed it on the table.
‘This teacup - it’s the one Albert always requests when he comes to my home for tea.’ She added, apropos of nothing, ‘It was Albert who designed the ulaz za mačku - a cat entrance for my Milica.’
My hopes rose. If we were to discover any link to the mysterious Lieserl, surely it would be from such an intimate source as the woman seated before us. ‘What can you tell us about Mileva?’ I asked.
Jelena planted her elbows on the table. ‘The woman is a mathematical genius. Her father Miloš encouraged her to study mathematics for a good reason,’ she added, now looking down at her hands.
‘For what reason?’ I prompted.
‘For the obvious reason she would need a profession,’ the woman snapped. Her tone was spiteful.
‘If Mileva had stayed in Serbia she would have stayed a spinster for ever. In the Vojvodina culture we consider a woman like Mileva completely unmarriageable.’
She gave what sounded like a snort of contempt. ‘She is ugly. Mileva would never have found anyone to marry her. It is a fact,’ she added conclusively.
Her eyes darted up from her hands and fixed on Holmes.
‘Perhaps you can explain to me why this Einstein married her. After all, he is a German and Germans consider Slavs backward. He is a Jew and Jews marry into their own. She’s four years older than her husband. Marrying a woman several years older is a Serbian custom but it is not a German one. ’She added, ‘And she’s a cripple.’
Her cold stare shifted across to me. ‘Why do you think the Jew married her?’ she asked.
I indicated I had no idea.
‘I could tell you,’ she went on.
I took a sovereign from my pocket and pushed it discreetly to her.
‘The reason is simple,’ she retorted, ‘and unarguable.’
She placed the coin carefully in her purse. ‘Because she gave the young Jew presents!’
‘Presents?’ I echoed.
‘Gifts.’
‘What sort of gifts?’ Holmes asked.
‘Shirts.’
I was confounded by this trivial revelation. Was this some Balkan equivalent of a dowry?
‘Shirts?’ I repeated.
In a high-pitched voice she burst out with two lines of a song, and translated them - spitting the words at us: ‘”In Banok and Bjelopavlice - she called to everyone. To everyone she gave a shirt”.’
Heads swung round. Jelena’s grey eyes turned almost black. With an abrupt movement she stood up, the chair scraping away from the table.
She said in a harsh tone, ‘I have work to do. You must excuse me. I have told you everything I wish to. We have a saying zaklela se zemlja raju da se tajne sve saznaju - the Earth pledged to Paradise that all secrets will be revealed. May you have a pleasant stay in my country and a safe return journey to your homeland.’
The meeting had come to an abrupt and disturbing end.
Over dinner at the hotel I looked at Holmes despondently.
‘A shirt,’ I repeated. ‘We don’t seem to be getting anywhere, do we?’
‘There are certainly difficulties,’ Holmes agreed. ‘We are in the Balkans, dear fellow. We must conduct our affairs according to the precept of the Iron Duke- the whole art of war consists of guessing what’s at the other side of the hill. And now, my dear Watson, since the official records reveal nothing, we must look elsewhere.’
I reminded him that Dr. Herdlitzschke had suggested a check of hospital records. An exceptionally virulent Scarlet Fever epidemic had ravaged the region in the summer of 1903. Four hundred of Novi-Sad’s one thousand children died from that cause alone that year. The Doctor had patrolled hospital wards crammed with dead or dying children, their pulses racing, tongues bright strawberry red, throats a deep
crimson.
Another day dawned. We left the hotel and hailed a cab. I showed the cabbie the address of the section for children’s contagious diseases at the Hospital St. László. As I sank back with relief in the familiar cool interior of a Hansom cab, I remarked,
‘What would we do without the Hansom! They say there are 7500 of them in London alone, and many more in Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and New York.’
Holmes grunted. At the St. László two bored-looking hospital receptionists barely raised their heads at our arrival. Thirty seconds passed in silence, forty, then fifty. One minute. Two. Holmes fingered a Maria Theresa thaler. The heavy coin had an electrifying effect. What was it we wished to know? An animated conversation between the women ensued. To no avail. Some of the records had gone up in flames a few days before. We could try elsewhere, for example the Rókus Kórház, the hospital for poor people. It included a children’s wing for contagious diseases. We discovered nothing there either.
Noting our frustration, the staff at the Rókus Kórház suggested our inability to find any information on this Lieserl might mean she was born ‘Stupid’. There was a special place for such luckless creatures, the State asylum Országos Pszichiátria és Neurológia Intézet. Another cab took us to the asylum. The walls of the dim corridors were crumbling, the floors dirty and cracked. Large damp patches threatened to bring down the ceiling. The stench of mildew was overpowering. The production of another thaler led us to the inner sanctum which turned out to be a dank cellar scattered with crates of old case records and a box of photographs.
A listless woman clerk with long black hair and kohl eyeliner pulled out a ledger listing female patients for the last seven years. The book contained thirteen names, date of arrival, condition (mostly ‘stupidity’, ‘severe stupidity’ or ‘mongoloid idiot’), date of departure or, more often, death. But - no mention of a Lieserl. The clerk closed the sad book. She advised us to pursue our quest among the records at the Wolf Valley Cemetery in District X11.
This time we waved down a Fijaker. The black leather top smelt of the cow it had been until recently. At the cemetery an elderly gravedigger told us that if graves were not paid for year by year the remains were exhumed and placed in a nearby charnel house or disposed of in a garbage heap. Yes, he had dug up and thrown a lot of children’s bones on the heap. Were there any headstones with the name Lieserl? He shrugged. Gravestones for children were not the custom in Serbia. Unchristened children were put in a box and buried at the edge of the cemetery. Sometimes there would be small wooden crosses but they disintegrated in one or two severe winters.
‘You might go to see Father Magyar,’ he advised. ‘He is a priest of the Orthodox Church. He has records of adoptions and children with disabilities.’ The grave-digger accepted a coin gratefully and resumed work on an infant’s half-dug grave, already fourth in line of a further two dozen or more marked out.
The visit to Father Magyar proved equally fruitless. We heard then that a long-standing girlfriend of Mileva called Desana Tapavica was now married to a Dr. Emil Bala, Novi-Sad’s mayor. The mayor received us and told us nothing. The wife refused to meet us. I paid for a search through Politika and other Serbian newspapers. More days passed. We were told Lieserl was the name of an infant who had been christened in the ancient Kovilj Monastery situated between Novi-Sad and Titel. To get to the monastery we bumped along dusty, pot-holed roads, among pale ochre houses with lace-curtained windows and brown wooden shutters. Despite spending hours with a monk searching through every record in the archives, we found nothing. In this strange Serbian world we were out of our depth. Holmes became more and more terse. At home in England, among the coiners and smashers and cheque sharps of London’s underworld, my comrade’s every word, his every glance suggested he knew something you didn’t, some secret which would give him the eternal upper hand - but here, in the Balkans...
We had arranged for our post to await collection at the principal Post Office. The sole letter was from the bank robber John Clay. He mockingly signed himself with the initials of his former alias, Vincent Spaulding.
‘Berne. Mission successful. Two regular out-going payments appear on A. Einstein’s accounts, to proprietor of house on Tillierstrasse and to M. Maritsch-Einstein. No further such payments. V.S.’
There was a Postscript: ‘No need to remit fee - the Spar Leihkasse Bank has paid generously on your behalf.’
The Tillierstrasse payments were presumably the rent. Housekeeping costs would account for the payments to Albert Einstein’s wife. We left the Post Office and returned to the hotel.
‘Watson,’ Holmes mused, ‘we find a world of strange anomalies and questionable clues. We reach. We grasp. What is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. The more we investigate the details and circumstances, the more inexplicable they become. We must work on the supposition this Lieserl is a child and that she is connected in some way to Einstein. Despite all our efforts we have been unable to discover anything about her - no legal papers, no family papers such as a baptismal certificate, no death certificate, no other customary civic record. How can this be? Every detail of every Serb from birth to death is minutely recorded and stored - in doctors’ offices, town halls, churches, monasteries, synagogues, yet not one document concerning a Lieserl exists. Why the lack even of a birth certificate?’
With frustration in his voice he continued. ‘In a world so filled with officials and paper - do we assume there never was a Lieserl?’
I remained silent. I knew from lengthy experience Holmes was in no way asking my opinion on the matter.
‘Or is someone a step ahead of us at every turn. If so - why?’
He stood up with a clouded brow and went to the window. The lights were coming on in Novi-Sad.
‘The word ‘Titel’ brought us to Serbia to make a search for Lieserl,’ he mused. ‘We are in a town in a land in a region where rumour-mongering is a way of life, yet whenever we enquire about Lieserl every door slams, every voice abruptly stills. So far we have been offered three theories. Dr. Herdlitzschke suggested Lieserl might have died inthe1903 epidemic of scarlet fever. Death certificates exist for every one of four hundred child victims but not for a Lieserl. The Rókus Kórház hinted without any evidence that the infant might have been sent to another village for adoption. The monk at the Kovilj monastery told us he had never heard of anyone with that name and suggested she might have been packed off to an institution for imbecilic infants. Yet from Clay’s inspection of Einstein’s bank account there is no evidence he makes more than the two regular payments, not to an adoptive family nor a home for mongoloid children.’
Holmes turned back from the window. ‘All we can say is that if there is a connection between Einstein and Lieserl, every effort has been made - by public officials, priests, monks, friends, relatives and relatives by marriage - to seek out and destroy every document with the child’s name on it. The question is - why?’
He paused. ‘Either we go on striving like the Old Man in Alice, to “madly squeeze a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe”, or - ’
In gloomy silence we ate a dinner of soup made from carrots, chicken, rice, lemon and vinegar, followed by thin rolled pancakes filled with ground meat, topped with sour cream and a bright red relish made from red bell peppers. On the way to our rooms the hotel proprietor handed us an envelope which had been left at the desk. Our names were inscribed on the envelope in the same handwriting and same red ink as the mysterious notes. The envelope held two tickets for the evening performance of Zorka’s Magical Marionette Show.
Chapter VIII
Zorka’s Magical Marionette Show
It was the day of the performance. As evening drew in, we set off on foot for Zorka’s Magical Marionette Show. We went on foot through an artisan quarter of wagon-makers, carpenters, rope-makers, tailors and coppersmiths. The women wore their hair plaited, woven with flowers and other adornments
, tied back with long oval hair-pins. Their glass bead necklaces, metal belts, bracelets and blouses decorated with silk tassels reminded me of Bulgaria. A gunsmith sat in front of his store filling cartridges, a commodity clearly in great demand.
We came to a patch of open ground on which a large tent had been erected. At the entrance a man with a dancing bear and an assistant with a tambourine were drumming up custom for the marionette show, the tambourine in competition with an opportunist little street orchestra of viola, two drums, a flute and a triangle. A girl hardly more than twelve years of age inspected our tickets. She showed us to seats reserved in our name. On a stage backdrop large snakes rose from the ground and swept across fields. Among the serpents a group of crudely-painted gravity-defying peasants danced the rondo in quick time.
A Gipsy musical ensemble in velveteen coats with glittering buckles on their clogs sat at one side of the stage, scraping at fiddles. Puppeteers and seamstresses lit by oil-lamps lifted marionettes from a great carved chest painted pea-green and picked out with scarlet and gold. The dolls were about two feet tall, made from hand-carved poplar. Two or three of the female marionettes wore white tulle dresses over pink silk slips, hair arranged à la grecque. Other girl-marionettes lay crumpled in a small heap, some with wide kilted skirts and velvet or satin aprons embroidered with posies of red roses and pansies. The male marionettes were dressed as village dandies in frilled white shirts, velvet waistcoats and high boots, with a bright flower behind an ear. A girl reached deep into the chest and pulled out a witch marionette with bandaged feet and a black cat gripping hard to her shoulder.
With a mouthful of pins, a seamstress worked rapidly to turn up the hem of a fierce-looking marionette. A large, bristly handlebar moustache dangled loosely to its chin. A shako on his head showed a military background. Fifteen minutes later, the Gipsy musicians jumped to their feet and struck up in earnest, singing in loud, forced voices. The audience hushed. The marionettes sprang into life as palmists, sorcerers, or fortune tellers turning over a deck of Tarot cards. They joined hands and began to dance a kolo, turning in a ring, hands on each other’s shoulders and waists, first a few steps to the right, then a few steps to the left, or backwards and forwards.