Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  I did, too. I went to the Burgtheater in the afternoon when rehearsals were under way, just so I could look at the mural Klimt had painted with his brother in the grand lobby. I went to the art history museum, where I spent a long time studying the Egyptian women they’d painted above the central staircase. When I finally went to the Secession and saw his Pallas Athene—a ferocious goddess behind a golden mask—I was certain Klimt was capable of painting a woman who was both beautiful and powerful. With the light streaming through the glass ceiling, I felt that I was becoming invincible. And I knew that I was ready for Klimt.

  “Frau Bloch-Bauer,” someone called to me as I was walking down the steps outside the gallery. The street was noisy, and at first I couldn’t tell where the sound came from. The voice called again, and there was a giggle.

  “Frau Lederer,” I said. Serena was wearing a yellow hat that framed her face, and she was with her little girl and the nursemaid. To my surprise, she looked the perfect picture of motherhood and grace.

  “Did you enjoy the Zuckerkandls’ salon?” I asked. Her little girl stood right at her side, holding a parasol over her pretty head.

  “The professor was erudite, but a bit dull,” Serena said. “Even Herr Klimt was dull, and he’s never dull.”

  There was something in the way she looked at me that made me want to squirm.

  “I hope Gustl does answer the critics with a shock, don’t you?” she asked, using the painter’s familiar name. “We need as much excitement in our art and in our lives as we can manage in good taste.” Then she giggled again.

  I took the trolley and went to Klimt’s studio that afternoon, as planned. It was late spring in Vienna: horses and carriages were everywhere, cutting across the tram tracks and racing in front of pedestrians who had to scurry to get out of the way. The Volksgarten was in bloom, the orchestra was practicing in the Opera House with the doors flung wide open, and university students were spilling out of coffeehouses shouting about the poetry of Rilke and Hofmannsthal.

  Klimt was waiting, as we’d arranged by post, and he opened the door before I knocked. He was wearing his brown robe and thick sandals, and smelled of shaving cream and turpentine. When I saw his bare feet, I was surprised at how pale and vulnerable they looked.

  “You’re here,” he said.

  “And so are you,” I said with a nervous laugh. He was as magnetic as he’d been the first night, as if he’d rested all week since I’d seen him last. His color was back, too. He took my coat and remarked on the new dress.

  “Emilie Flöge made it for me,” I said, watching to see if his face changed when I mentioned her name.

  “No one else is making dresses like that,” he said. If I knew how to judge a man’s voice, I would say that he sounded proud of his friend. “I’m sure she’ll have you to thank when all the fashionable women are rushing to her shop next month.”

  A quick glance around the studio told me that Klimt’s redhead had been back. There was a series of sketches of Mimi—or at least I thought it was Mimi—curled on her side. Her back was to him, and her red hair was swimming across the page as if she were underwater. On a soft corkboard, he’d tacked up another series of a woman with her bare bottom filling a good portion of the paper. It was exactly as he’d described at the salon.

  “My goodness,” I said. “Your Mimi is bold.”

  Outside the large window, the shrubbery where I’d hidden in March had blossomed into thick rhododendrons hung with huge purple flowers. The courtyard garden was full of tall lupine and wild orange irises.

  “Mimi’s the one who brings me news from Lueger’s church meetings, and the one who brought me the early copy of the Volksblatt.”

  “Then she’s useful to you,” I said. I’m not sure why I said it, or what I meant by it. Except that I felt somehow jealous of her, as if we were in a competition.

  “Mimi is the mother of my son,” he said. “And we understand one another.”

  I almost told him that Ferdinand wanted a son more than he wanted anything, but bit my tongue. I poured myself some water from a silver pitcher, and Klimt shuffled through a pile of drawings. There I was—my face drawn in four lines, a full mouth, large eyes.

  “You know the story of Judith and Holofernes,” Klimt said. It wasn’t a question. Of course I knew. “So you know what the painting has to be, don’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  “There has to be triumph and power. And there has to be seduction.”

  I understood triumph and power. But seduction was something I’d never fully understood. With Ferdinand I had been the pursued, and had yielded as expected.

  “Seduction and gold?” I asked.

  I found the velvet pouch and slipped out the choker. Klimt opened his hand, and I poured the necklace into it. It was like heat moving between our palms, like a thousand gold coins.

  His fingers were flecked with yellow, red, blue, and white. Something sparkled under his thumbnail.

  “Put it on,” he said. “Let me see it in the daylight.”

  I had to have help with the clasp. There was no way I could do it myself. I lifted the loose pieces of hair off of my neck, and turned my back to him. From where I stood, I had a perfect view of the sketches of the redhead, her naked spine curling in an S from head to bottom; her torso slinking across the page as if she were crawling toward us; a face that was only a smile and a tongue between her lips.

  Klimt put a hand on my neck, and I shivered at his touch. The neckline of my dress was loose, and the tops of my shoulders were bare. The window that had been closed on that first cold day in March was open. I could smell hayfields in the distance, and the swollen lupine below the window.

  “Here,” he said, in a voice that had a gruff catch in it. “Lean your head forward.”

  I did as he said. I felt him very close behind me as he put the necklace around my neck. I suspected that he was wearing nothing underneath his robe. Without a corset, my garters and the tops of my stockings were the only thing that covered the skin beneath my dress and silk slip. If he moved forward or I moved back, we would be touching.

  “Is that good?” he asked. His breath was right in my ear. My body spoke for me. A sigh escaped my lips, and I said, “Yes.”

  “My fingers are used to working with metals,” he said.

  His words whispered around my neck, they coiled with the gold. The necklace was close around my throat, he was closing the clasp; his hands were sure and warm. I felt the hook meet the latch and sink in. Snap. And then the next, Snap. And the one below that. All four, set in place. Snap, snap. My heart was pounding.

  “There,” he said. “Now let me see.”

  I turned. I was almost in his arms, and his lips were almost on my face. I could smell the fresh air on him, and cool, deep lake water. If a person could be a color, Klimt was deep turquoise.

  “You’re transformed,” he said. He was very close to me, but he didn’t speak softly. He spoke in a sure voice, only a decibel less than if we’d been seated across the table from one another.

  I closed my eyes and tipped my face.

  He licked my lips, light and tiny touches. His tongue was soft and warm, and it pushed into my mouth like a diver breaking the surface of a lake. He wrapped his hands around my shoulders, and took a step closer. His body was against mine and I could feel him beneath his robes.

  “I can’t,” I said. My eyes flew open.

  His eyebrows were crazy, the hairs went in all directions. His two front teeth were crooked, and one was chipped. He was as close as that, and yet I hadn’t quite looked at him full on.

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  He let go of my shoulders.

  I pulled back an inch.

  “Can we do what I came here to do?” I was shaking, not with fear but with desire. I didn’t know I could feel that in my body.

  “Of course.”

  He reached for his pad, and I reached for the stool behind me. It was the same high stool that I�
��d seen Mimi sitting on that first day.

  “Can you stand tall, please?” he asked. “Can you look at me, just as you are now, just as you feel right now?”

  I blinked, and was blinded for an instant. Was it sunlight? Was it happiness? Was it longing? Was it the shivering between my legs, where I knew that if could only rub my thighs more tightly together beneath my dress I could have friction and then more, and more, and more again?

  “You’re so young, Adele,” he said. It was the first thing he said when he stopped drawing. “I sometimes forget how young you are.”

  “I’m almost twenty,” I said, but he seemed not to hear.

  He shuffled through the sketches. I was hardly recognizable—my eyes were closed or half-closed, my mouth was a round O, my neck was arched back, there were fragments of arms, hands, and my dress falling in loose layers.

  “This is enough to get me started.” He gathered the sketches in a neat pile. If he’d been turquoise water an hour ago, now he was brown trees, distant and solid.

  “I’m going to Paris next week,” he said. “And then it will be summer. But we’ve started, and that’s the most important thing.”

  He walked me out into the garden. An oppressive heat was coming. I felt it in a trickle of perspiration between my breasts, and a wet slide between my thighs. The cats were climbing in the bushes, swatting at yellow butterflies and bees. Somewhere up the street, a girl was singing a nursery rhyme about Magdeburg Bridge falling down. We listened together. Klimt knew the words, and when she came around to the refrain he sang along in a sweet, surprising voice, “. . . the goldsmith, the goldsmith, with his daughter.”

  I’m sure it was only my imagination, but he looked shy for a moment. He smiled as if he’d just realized something about me that he didn’t know before.

  “What?” I asked.

  The girl was still singing.

  “Nothing,” he said. He leaned in, quickly, and kissed my cheek. “I’ll need you to come again. You’ll come, won’t you?”

  Klimt’s Philosophy mural reaches the Paris Exposition in April 1900, where it thrills the judges with its graphic representation of human misery and ambiguous morality.

  In June the painting is awarded a coveted Gold Medal and Klimt travels to Paris to accept the prize. Scholars and the emperor’s ministers have scorned him in Vienna, but in France he is well received. Parisians dance to African music at the reception party, and a pretty redhead watches him with bright eyes. She is wearing a boa hat with a silver feather, and he opens his arms and smiles as if he knows her.

  By evening she’s lying in his hotel bed and he is drawing the sharp line of her chin, the purplish blush under her eyes, her moist orange lips. She’s a maid and a model—not nearly as complex or proud as Adele Bloch-Bauer—and for relief from that Viennese dance of wealth and desire, Klimt is very glad.

  Adele offers him the trifecta of affection, protection, and inspiration. But the muse must be fed, and Klimt finds his sustenance in the redhead’s arms.

  MARIA

  1938

  The morning after Fritz’s arrest I set out for the Hotel Metropole, where the Nazis had set up their police headquarters. The word Gestapo was new to me, but I’d seen it on the front page of the paper, and heard it whispered from friend to friend: the Gestapo came for my husband, the Gestapo took our car, the Gestapo shot my brother when he tried to burn a stack of legal papers.

  “Do you know Hitler was born in Austria?” a familiar woman asked while I waited for the tram. I’d been at parties with her; I couldn’t remember her name, but I knew she had two small children.

  I pulled my kerchief tight under my chin.

  “He grew up near Linz, and lived in Vienna was he was a young man.” She kept her voice low. “This is where he learned to hate us.”

  I told her where I was going. I had Adele’s letter opener at the bottom of my purse, and I was wearing my mother’s black gloves with the diamond sewn into the seam.

  “Don’t do it,” the woman said, her eyes darting from side to side. “I’m serious, no one in his right mind is going into Gestapo headquarters unless he’s dragged there.”

  “I have to,” I told her. “It’s the only place to go if you want to get answers.”

  “Answers?” The tram screeched to a stop in front of us. “There are no answers, Maria.”

  Four huge Nazi banners hung from the Metropole rooftop, sweeping almost down to the sidewalks. A line of official black cars stood along the riverfront, and red swastika flags flapped in the wind. The streets were swarming with soldiers and men in black coats, and when I stopped to summon my courage, a black car screeched to a stop across the street. Two men in brown shirts pulled a cowering couple from the backseat. I gripped my handbag tightly, and pressed my lips together so I wouldn’t scream.

  The woman was crying and dragging her feet. The man had lost a shoe, and his pants had a dark stain at the back.

  “You smell like shit,” one of the Brownshirts shouted as he shoved them up the steps.

  It seemed impossible that I’d celebrated my thirteenth birthday in that very building with my uncle Ferdinand only nine years ago. On that clear winter day the Metropole steps had been swept free of snow, my boots had been black patent leather, and my uncle’s car had come to stop at the very curb where I now stood trembling.

  Then, the hotel lobby had smelled of winter lilies and pine boughs. A parade of red and white canna lilies in tall urns had led to a dining room filled with glamorous ladies dressed in flapper finery. There was short hair, beaded dresses, and harp music floating in from another room. Snow was falling onto the glass dome above the dining room, and beside my chair my uncle had deposited a huge box wrapped in silver paper with live ferns tucked into purple ribbons.

  The ferns seemed to shiver whenever a waiter rushed by, and I giggled each time it happened.

  “I can’t sing worth a darn,” my uncle said when the waiter carried out the chocolate cake with thirteen candles. The candles danced in front of me as the entire waitstaff sang “Happy Birthday” in English. I closed my eyes, made a wish, and blew out the candles in one breath.

  “Do you want to know what I wished for?” I asked.

  “You can’t tell me your wish,” Uncle Ferdinand said with a smile. “Or else it will never come true.”

  I was quite sure that my wishes would come true whether I told them or not. Everything I’d ever wanted had come to me without asking. It was 1929, I was thirteen years old, and I thought everyone in the world was as rich and happy as I.

  “I won’t tell you my wish,” I said, glancing at the pretty box, “but I bet you already know.”

  Inside, I’d found the navy blue bouclé coat with dark mink collar that I’d been admiring in Gerngross’s department store window for a month. My uncle sent the rest of my cake up to the lobby for the hotel staff to share, and I’d walked out of the restaurant on his arm feeling like a lady for the first time.

  Now the wind picked up, and the air outside the hotel snapped with energy. I took a breath and tried not to hang my head. I dashed across the street just as a woman—another Jew, alone like me—came out of the revolving door in a hurry. Her coat was hanging open and her face was streaked with tears. She stumbled and spilled her pocketbook, and I stepped around her just as a German shouted, “Clumsy fool!”

  I used my whole body to push against the heavy door.

  Inside, the old floors were polished to a high gloss, just as I remembered. The familiar reception desk was there. The lobby ceiling soared; all that was the same. But there was a strange smell in the air. A line of screaming schoolboys in knickers ran by me, followed by three snapping German shepherds on leashes. The men holding the dogs were laughing.

  “Heil Hitler,” the woman behind the desk said loudly. “Why are you here?”

  I clutched my handbag and stammered out a reply.

  “My husband was arrested. I’ve come to inquire about his release.”

  “Re
lease?” she asked.

  I blinked and nodded. The woman pointed me in the direction the boys and the dogs had gone, and I moved quickly toward the old dining room where I’d blown out my birthday candles.

  Even before I reached the doorway, I could smell the foul stench. I stood at the top of the stairs for a moment and felt like I was about to fall into hell. There must have been more than three hundred people crushed inside the old restaurant. The carpets were gone, and the tables, too. Terrified, desperate men and women holding suitcases and briefcases were standing in tight lines, their faces pinched into bloodless silence, their necks straining as if watching for a train that would never come.

  Someone directed me toward a table for the dispensation and surrender of Jewish assets, and I joined a long line. I looked neither right nor left. A man fell to his knees, and a soldier struck him in the face. I heard dogs barking in the distance, and doors slamming. There was shrieking, and pleading. No one dared look around to see where the sounds came from; no one in line spoke unless it was absolutely necessary.

  It took two hours, and by the time I reached the clerk seated at a long table, I badly needed a restroom.

  “My husband is in Rossauer Prison.” I forced my tongue to move. “If I can send a cable to my brother-in-law in Paris, he’ll give you everything you ask for.”

  The woman behind the desk barely looked at me.

  “I was told to come here—” I said. I fingered the jewels in my glove, wondering if it was the right time to use them, and how I could show them to her quietly.

  “Your papers,” she said. I handed them over and she glanced at them for a second.

  “Jews can’t send cables without special documentation,” she said.

  “That’s why I’m here,” I whispered. “Bernhard Altmann will give you what you need. I just have to reach him.”

  She shrugged. “I can’t help you.”

  “We don’t have the ledgers,” I said in a rush. “We don’t have them—”