Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  “Others will write in my defense,” he said. “Your friend Berta, for one. I still have a few friends at the university who will speak for me and my work. I’ve already heard this morning that a scholar wants to present a public response to the critics who are calling the mural ugly.”

  “Please understand, I want to support you however I can.”

  He gazed at me with what seemed to be electric attention, and in that moment I became something like spirit and gold. I felt completely and absolutely lifted out of the world in which we stood.

  “You’re a woman of substantive style, and more influence than you may know. You will come into your own very soon, I think. That can help me, Frau Bloch-Bauer. Your friendship can help me.”

  “Then we will be friends,” I said, the words catching in my throat.

  “And I’ll make a painting for you.”

  What did he see in me that I didn’t see in myself?

  “I’m not a femme fatale,” I said. “If I’m going to pose for you it will be for something new,” I searched for a word. “Something powerful.”

  “Something powerful.” Klimt nodded. He scratched at his pointy beard and drew a few more lines on another sheet of paper: a rough shield, a knife, a breastplate. “A heroine. Like Judith,” he said.

  “A Jewess?” It was one of the only times I used the word to describe myself. I’d endured the jest of girls who thought they were better than me because they were Catholic and I was not. I felt that same teary desire for denial as I’d felt then. “Why a Jewess?”

  “Judith is a heroine.” He stood straighter, and used his whole body to create a victorious pose. “And a seductress. She goes where she’s not invited, and stirs passion in powerful men.”

  I’d seen Hebbel’s play about Judith and Holofernes at the Burgtheater. I’d seen the actress taking off her layered scarves as she seduced the enemy general in his tent. Like everyone in the audience, I’d known the story of Judith slaying the general. I had been prepared for his decapitation—and still it had shocked me, the way sex and death met on the stage.

  “My husband will never pay to have me painted as a bare-breasted Jewess, even if she is a heroine.”

  I remembered Alma, and the way she’d looked when she was talking about Dr. Freud.

  “It won’t be a commission.” Klimt took the sketch from me. His hand brushed mine, and I felt a spark. I hoped I didn’t gasp aloud, but I could not be sure. “The painting will be ours, it will belong to me,” he said. “Your husband will have nothing to do with it.”

  For a rare moment I was speechless. I was also thrilled.

  “And you’ll be a heroine,” he repeated. “Bold and beautiful.”

  So there it was. I was a heroine. I was bold and beautiful. I was a Jewess, and Klimt would paint me that way.

  “Come back to me when you’re ready to begin,” Klimt said.

  I wanted him to touch my neck again, right above the collarbone. But he didn’t. He picked up his sketch pad, and disappeared into his work. It was as if he’d already dismissed me, and I was gone.

  It didn’t matter, though. I had not felt so perfectly alive and fully visible since Karl had taken my hand and traced it over his anatomy drawings many years before.

  I had a secret, and it burned through me all afternoon. Like Judith preparing for Holofernes, I was aware of my face, my hair, the way my body moved through the streets and how I looked in the mirror. I thought I certainly must look different, but no one seemed to notice.

  I dined with Ferdinand, Gustav, Thedy, and my parents at the Hotel Metropole that night. The evening was pleasantly predictable—the dining room was filled with flowers, my mother ordered her favorite cold vichyssoise soup for a first course, and we enjoyed an hour of conversational French over dessert.

  Almost everyone we knew spoke French, and read Voltaire in the original, and my mother liked to practice with us as often as she could. Even Ferdinand did his best to keep up, mentioning Klimt’s mural in passing, and the editorial about Sarajevo, which clearly troubled him.

  “We all support the emperor,” my father said, pacifying Ferdinand as he often did. “The Bosnians and Serbs are nothing to worry about.”

  “On the contrary,” Ferdinand said. “They’ll take every bit of power that they can.”

  “Thedy, did you enjoy the symphony last night?” Mother asked, changing the conversation from politics to music.

  No one asked how I’d spent my day, and I mentioned nothing of my visit to Klimt’s studio.

  Alone in my room at the end of the night, I blew out the candles and slipped between my sheets without bothering with a nightgown. I pulled up the blankets and imagined I was Judith, parting the tent flaps to find Holofernes beside a fire in fur boots and a long robe.

  I was a seductress, Klimt was Holofernes, and in my fantasy I dropped my scarves one by one until I was wearing only a thin white toga, I was opening his hungry lips and plying him with wine and sweets. My head filled with Klimt’s lithe redhead and his fingers weaving through her long hair, her hands between her legs, the look of bold pleasure in her face as she stroked herself.

  Sex with Ferdinand was uneventful, but I had another picture of desire as I slipped my hand between my legs and imagined being taken by the redhead and the painter at once, their limbs swimming through mine, their skin hot against me. I’d heard of such a thing happening to other women, this feeling of excitement at the moment of surrender, but I’d never felt anything like it with Ferdinand—never this surge, never this rocking, never this power as if I was climbing a mountain and ringing a bell, ringing and ringing as I rocked and shook with a crown of pleasure.

  MARIA

  1938

  A Nazi flag was raised at the factory gatehouse, the whistle blew at eight, and our business reopened under German control in the third week of March. Fritz and I watched from our attic rooms as hundreds of workers streamed onto the grounds carrying lunch boxes and paper sacks. They laughed and called to one another in loud voices. Some were our old employees, but they walked by our windows without glancing up.

  “It doesn’t seem right,” I said. I moved away from the window and pulled on a favorite blue sweater.

  “It isn’t right, but what can I do?”

  “You can’t do anything.” I meant it to sound gentle, but Fritz jerked as if I’d slapped him.

  “It’s not like they gave me a choice, Maria.”

  I rushed to say, “That’s not what I meant,” but his face had already shut, and I hadn’t the energy to say more.

  All of us were losing our resilience. Friends and family were leaving the city without a word. Men were being flogged in the streets. My cousins Eva and Dora had disappeared in the night with their parents, and we had no way of knowing if they’d fled or been arrested. My parents and I told one another that Louise and her children were safe in Yugoslavia, and that Robert and his family would be fine in Grinzing. We told ourselves that Leopold had escaped, and that we would hear from him soon. But we couldn’t be sure of anything, and the silence was terrifying.

  Fritz waited that first morning until the workers had stamped their timecards and the machines in the shops were humming. Then he disappeared out the kitchen door without another word.

  I knew where he was going, because every day he did the same thing: he stood on line at the post office, hoping for a letter from Uncle Ferdinand or Bernhard. He went to the bank, where the lines poured into the street and few reached the teller windows before they closed at noon or one o’clock. Then he joined a long line outside the police station, where everyone was trying to get an emigration visa.

  “It’s the same thing everywhere,” Fritz said when he came home that afternoon. He slouched in a kitchen chair, and I knelt in front of him to take off his shoes. “It’s like I’m invisible.”

  “Not to me,” I said. I cradled first one brown wingtip in my hand, and then the other. His socks were damp at the heel. I inhaled the scent of leather and sweat.
I put my head in his lap and waited for him to stroke my hair, but he didn’t raise his hand.

  That evening, as they’d done the prior nights, Felix Landau and his men knocked at the door after we’d eaten our supper. We answered because we had to. The Nazis smelled of beer, and we could hear music playing in our apartment downstairs.

  “Where are the button and thread accounts?” Landau asked, pressing his way into our parlor.

  “I don’t know,” Fritz said. In Landau’s shadow, he looked small and frightened.

  “What are you owed for the wool and satin exports? Where are the account books for the cashmeres?”

  “I don’t know.” Fritz kept his face blank. He had to be polite. “Don’t you think I would give them to you if I could?”

  “No,” Landau said. The scar on his jaw was pulsing. “I think you are lying to me, Herr Altmann.”

  But Fritz wasn’t lying. He didn’t have the account books because he had burned them to ash in the factory’s boiler.

  Fritz finally reached the bank window on a rainy afternoon the last week of March. The teller looked at his bankbook, and put it into the tally machine.

  “Your accounts have been Aryanized,” she said, dismissing him with a single sentence. She stamped the passbook and handed it back to him.

  At home, Fritz fell into the kitchen chair and showed me the deposit book. JUDE. JUDE. JUDE. Three pages, one after the other, stamped in blood red ink: JEW, JEW, JEW.

  “We have nothing left,” he said.

  But we didn’t have nothing; not yet. We still had the rubies and emeralds my mother and I had sewn into the black gloves, and the tiny diamonds I’d hidden in my brassiere. We had silver candlesticks that we’d been given as a wedding gift, and a pewter clock my parents had given me to mark our engagement. We had time, ticking and ticking, marking our days and evenings. We had the gold watch from my gymnasium graduation, and the pearl earrings my mother pressed into my hand.

  I sold them, one by one.

  I tied a plain scarf around my head and crossed the river into Josefstadt, pressed my hands into my coat pockets and filed into a sour-smelling kitchen. I watched the woman weigh my silver and count the coins into my palms. I watched her lick a pencil and make a mark in her dirty notebook. I slipped the money into a hidden pocket, and kept a tissue in my sleeve. When I wept, I blotted my eyes so that no one would see my tears.

  I was reaching for a small package of butter in the market one morning when a woman slipped a blue envelope into my market basket. The woman didn’t look at me, and I barely saw her before she turned out of the aisle.

  My first instinct was to hurry after her, and my next was to snap the purse shut and go directly home.

  I did the latter.

  At home, we saw the enveloped didn’t have a stamp or postage mark; it had come to us hand-after-hand, friend-to-friend, all the way from Paris. Fritz read it carefully.

  “Bernhard says we’re to contact a man at the bookbindery on Heumühlgasse,” he said. “He’ll help us get out.”

  Then he lit a match and burned the letter over the sink.

  That same week, the phone trilled in the middle of the afternoon, and it was Uncle Ferdinand calling from Jungfer Brezan.

  “Thank God—we’ve been worried sick,” I said.

  “I had to leave right after the chancellor’s speech,” my uncle said through the scratchy line. “I had a call from a friend—he said they were coming to arrest me, and I needed to go immediately.”

  I held the receiver away from my ear so Fritz could listen, too.

  “The lines have been down or I would have called sooner,” my uncle said.

  “Is it safe in Czechoslovakia?” I asked.

  “I’m safe here. I’m trying to get Fritz what he needs, but it’s harder than I expected.”

  “We’ve had word from Bernhard,” I said carefully. There could always been someone—a neighbor or a telephone operator—listening to our phone. “But we don’t know what will happen with my parents.”

  “Do whatever you have to do,” my uncle said. “And I’ll keep trying on my end, too.”

  “And what about Leopold?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “We haven’t seen him,” I said.

  “Nor have I.”

  “Then he’s not with you?” I felt suddenly lost and afraid. “Leopold isn’t with you?”

  “I’m alone,” my uncle said, his voice almost as hollow as I felt. “I’ve been alone for a long time.”

  Fritz paid a hefty sum at the bookbindery in exchange for lengthy information that involved roundabout meeting spots and path that would take us out of Vienna at night.

  “At least now we can do something to help ourselves,” I said when he spelled it all out for me. But it wasn’t as if we’d been handed an immediate plan of action. We had to wait, and waiting was terrifying.

  Every day someone we knew was betrayed or caught trying to escape. My parents came home from a walk in the park to find the Nazis had come and taken everything—even Papa’s cello. A friend passed by Bernhard’s palais on Franzensgasse and saw men loading my brother-in-law’s art into a military truck. Someone told me there was a German flag hanging at 18 Elisabethstrasse, and a row of black cars lined outside along Schiller Park. There was no news of my brother, and nothing more from my uncle. But there was never silence, either.

  One of our old foremen came to the kitchen door one morning and told Fritz that Mathilde had been taken into custody along with her husband. I’d never seen Fritz’s old lover, but I’d heard she was a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice.

  “What do you mean?” Fritz asked.

  “I mean the Nazis have her and she’s in trouble,” the man said.

  Fritz turned from the door as if he’d seen a ghost, and locked himself in the room where we’d stored our phonograph and records. I pressed my ear against the door and heard the furniture moving. I heard him scratching around like a mouse in a cupboard, and then I heard the whir of the record player. The needle dropped, a soprano wailed, and Fritz began to sob.

  The woman sang her heart out, and Fritz wept for hours. He wept through lunch, and he wept through dinner. When he finally came out of the room, it was dark. I handed him a piece of toast with butter, and a warm cup of tomato soup. I loved him, and was sorry to see his sadness. What was happening in Vienna was happening to all of us, and I didn’t see any reason to pretend otherwise.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said.

  “Tomorrow or the next day.” Fritz looked tired in the dim kitchen light. “Keep everything close at hand. We have to be ready at a moment’s notice.”

  He’d barely spoken those words when we heard steps in the hallway and then a sharp knock that made me jump. Instinctively I checked for the last diamonds hidden in my brassiere, as if feeling for my own hammering heartbeat. Fritz put a finger to his lips, a warning to reveal nothing. Then he opened the door.

  Felix Landau stepped into our flat followed by two men in brown uniforms. The air in the room stood still, the light changed. I could not take a breath.

  “We’re taking you into custody,” Landau said to Fritz. “We’re done being patient.”

  Fritz went white, and I’m sure I cried out before Landau’s hard glare silenced me.

  “Under what charge?” Fritz asked.

  “You’re withholding assets and account books,” Landau said. His men went to either side of Fritz. I felt as if I might vomit.

  “My brother is in charge of the business,” Fritz said in a weak voice. “I’ve had nothing to do with it for weeks, as you well know.”

  “I know that Bernhard is running everything out of Paris now,” Landau said. “Those are German assets and German accounts—you are stealing from the Führer. Until it stops, Herr Altmann, you will be held accountable.”

  “I need my shoes,” Fritz said quietly. He sat on a kitchen chair and slipped off his house slipp
ers. His sock had a hole in the toe that I’d neglected to mend.

  “Where will you take him?” I managed to ask.

  “Rossauer Lände Prison,” Landau said.

  At least Rossauer was in Vienna. At least we’d heard that it was possible to survive there.

  “Until when?” I whispered.

  Fritz tied his wingtips slowly, as if in a trance.

  “That’s up to Bernhard,” Landau said. “When we have all the assets and books, we’ll let him go.”

  “Hurry up.” One of the storm troopers pulled Fritz up by the sleeve. I jumped at the same time, as if he and I were two marionettes joined at the wrist.

  “Let him take a coat,” I said.

  Fritz shook his head.

  “It’s warm out, Maria.”

  “It will be cold,” I said. My hands began to shake, and I felt tears coming. I pushed his brown cashmere jacket into his arms. “It will be cold in the prison, there’s no heat, Fritz, there’s no hot water.”

  Fritz looked at Landau.

  “Go ahead—kiss your wife.”

  Holding the coat crushed between us, Fritz pressed his lips on mine. Then he was gone.

  The painter slips off his brown robe and hangs it on a hook by the door. He stands naked in the studio, but he’s not cold. Above his bowed legs, his belly is a furnace. He splashes water on his body and washes under his arms. On another hook he finds his white shirt, vest, and pants. He slips them on and snaps the suspenders into place. Tonight is his French lesson, but he doesn’t want to go. French is troublesome, the verbs and conjugations always an impossible task. Emilie will mind, he thinks, but he writes her a postcard—I’m tired, and the French lessons are a dreadful bore—and begs off.

  He drops the card in a box at the corner of Josefstädter Strasse. The mail is quick, the tubes are efficient. He knows the note will reach the Flöge dress shop in less than an hour.