In the lonely days that followed, I did everything for myself. I did my laundry in a yellow basin in the bathtub. I baked potatoes for breakfast and boiled the peels with an onion for my evening meal. I sold my silver pieces one at a time, and checked in on my mother. I trained myself not to cry about what happened in Berlin, and if I dreamt about it, I washed until my skin was raw. Whenever I saw Landau, I held my chin high and asked him about Fritz.
He always told me the same thing. “Trust me, Frau Altmann. I am a man of my word.”
“I hope that’s true,” I always said.
Fritz had been gone almost a month when I heard a scratching at the apartment door—a cat or a maybe a rodent, I thought. Rats were suddenly plentiful in Vienna, and I kicked my foot against the door and hissed. The scratching turned to a knock and a voice said, “Open.”
When I did, Fritz tumbled in.
His eyes were hollow and his clothes threadbare. A strange sound came from my throat, like an animal that can finally make a noise after being breathless for a long time.
I bolted the door and fell beside him on the floor.
“They said it was thanks to you,” Fritz said in a whisper. “How did you do it? Tell me the truth—”
The shame was almost more than I could stand. The air whistled down my throat, a sound of sadness and relief.
“The truth is that I didn’t think I could live another day without you,” I said, rocking him in my arms.
“Tell me what happened.” His breath was rank. There were sores around his mouth and all over his scalp. “I stayed alive for you and I’ll go mad if you don’t tell me.”
“They made me go to Berlin,” I said. “Bernhard was there. He signed everything away—”
Fritz whimpered.
“—and he was glad to do it,” I said, taking his chin in my hands. “He did it for you. And thank God they kept their word and sent you home.”
I helped Fritz into the bathroom, and pulled off his shoes and pants. There were lice in his pubic hair—I’d never seen lice except on the public health flyers, but the scuttling bugs and red welt bites were unmistakable.
I used a scissor and then a razor. I shaved off what was left of the hair between his legs, and dabbed the skin with kerosene to kill the bugs.
I ran my hands across the bristle of his shaved head and the patchy stubble of his beard. I soothed him. I filled the bathtub with steaming water and he slipped into it, soaking until the tub was gray.
“They burn the dead,” Fritz whispered when I’d gotten him into bed. The window was open, and there was the smell of summer in the evening air. He made me pull the shade and darken the room. His body was stark and narrow against the clean white sheets, like a Schiele painting I had seen a long time ago.
“I was with the workers,” he said in a strangled voice. “On the other side of the camp was a hospital. I heard screaming all night long.”
Of course there was no lovemaking. He was too weak, and so was I. It seemed a lifetime ago that we’d been in Turnergasse Synagogue signing the ketubah and exchanging our vows. We’d promised to love and protect one another in sickness and in health, but I had never expected so much sorrow and pain. I lay beside him in the dark and tried to imagine how I would forget what I’d done with Landau.
From the moment of Fritz’s return we were under house arrest. A guard was stationed at our door day and night, and I had to ask permission each time I needed something from the market.
With Nazis everywhere, the streets were dangerous and unpredictable. Jews were pulled out of their homes, dragged into the streets, and beaten. Friends were dying and children were starving.
We opened the newspaper one morning to a full-page photograph of the Nazi Hermann Goering and his wife Emmy at a gala in Vienna.
“Look at her,” I said. Fritz leaned over me. His eyes had been weakened in prison, and he used a fat magnifying glass.
“The necklace is familiar.” Fritz leaned closer to the table. “I’ve seen it before.”
Adele’s golden choker was one of kind. It was unmistakable. My uncle had given it to her on their wedding day, and he’d given it to me when I married Fritz.
“A keepsake from your aunt,” my uncle had said so tenderly.
The Koloman Moser necklace had been mine until Landau took it. Now it belonged to a Nazi’s wife.
I looked through the magnifier.
“The earrings, too,” I said. They glittered on Frau Goering’s ears like cruel stars, one more thing that Landau had taken from me and destroyed.
All I had left from 18 Elisabethstrasse was my aunt’s silver letter opener. Sometimes when I was alone, I held it up to the light and imagined it was a weapon. I imagined walking downstairs and putting it through Landau’s heart.
I was boiling the last of our eggs for lunch when a man in a uniform came up the rear fire escape and knocked on our kitchen door. My instinct was to hide, but I’d been seen through the window, and had no choice but to go to the door.
“It’s me, Frau Altmann.” I recognized our old factory guard, Otto, beneath his black cap. “I’m here as a friend,” he whispered. “I don’t have much time.”
He waved a sealed envelope at the window, and my hand shook at the lock.
“Bernhard sent this from Paris,” he said. He was gone before I could thank him.
Bernhard’s letter contained careful instructions for our escape. The plan called for us to go through Germany and Holland, to follow secret messengers like breadcrumbs through a dark forest and tiny villages, to wait in farms and barns for a man he called Cousin Paul, who would guide us to safety by moonlight.
I thought it sounded far too dangerous, but Fritz was buoyed. It was the first spark of life I’d seen since his release.
“We don’t have any other options,” he said.
“What about Mama?”
Fritz took my hand.
“You can bring her if you want to. But it’s going to be dangerous and we don’t know what we’ll find in Germany. If there are only two of us, we’ll have a much better chance of making it.”
He was right. I knew he was right. The journey would be hard, and we’d have to move quickly.
“We’ll send for her as soon as we can,” he said. “I love your mother, Maria. I won’t leave her behind, I promise you that.”
We memorized the instructions. That week, when Landau stopped me on the stairs with a hand on my arm, I forced myself to stop.
“Maria.” He dared to speak my intimate name. “Maria, you don’t look well. Are you ill?”
“It’s Fritz,” I said. “He’s been weak since he came home, and now he’s up half the night moaning with a toothache. You know how much that can hurt.”
“Then it’s nothing,” Landau said, turning away with a sniff. “It’s nothing for me to worry about.”
“But he’ll have to see a dentist, Herr Landau,” I called after him. “Can you do that small thing for me?”
On a cool September morning I went to my mother’s house with two apple cakes that I’d baked with the last of our butter and sugar.
“I want you to leave, like we planned from the beginning,” Mama said. “It’s the only way. Fritz is right—you go together and then send for me. If your uncle sends for me first, I’ll go to Czechoslovakia. If it’s Bernhard, I’ll come to you,” she said.
She was firm and strong, and I was strong for her. It was only after I’d hugged her good-bye and walked that I broke into a trembling sweat that lasted all afternoon.
The next morning I screwed up my courage and knocked on the door of our old apartment. A fat Gestapo officer answered.
“My husband needs a dentist now,” I said. “It’s an emergency.”
The man belched. I pushed back my shoulders, and tried to speak firmly.
“I’m sure Herr Landau told you about it. There’s a Jewish dentist in the Bristol Hotel, we need to see him as soon as possible.”
His gaze fell from my face to the neck
line of my dress.
“May I take him, please?” I asked.
I felt sick. Since I’d been to Berlin with Landau I’d heard countless stories of women wrested in doorways, women bent over desks, broken garters and torn stockings and lean young legs wrapped around the enemy’s thick thighs. It may be hard to believe, but it was cold comfort to me, by which I mean it was a comfort, if not a balm.
“We need to get Landau’s approval,” the officer said.
“There’s a telephone,” I said. “Perhaps you can make the call, please?”
The man grinned and relented. An hour later, Fritz and I were walking on the Kärtner Ring, chaperoned by that same officer in his wrinkled black shirt. Fritz was wearing a long coat and a hat, his jaw clenched above his collar. He hadn’t been on the streets very much since his return, but he did his best to hide his nerves.
Just outside the hotel, Fritz paused in front of a colossal portrait of Hitler. The Führer’s face was everywhere, watching everything we did. Fritz looked dazed; I took his elbow and guided his hand to the revolving door, pushing hard.
In the lobby the carpets were the color of blood.
“Make it quick,” our escort said, but his eyes were already watching a pretty girl walking across the red rug.
“Dr. Holstein is on the second floor,” I told him. “We’ll be down as soon as we can. You can always come up,” I said, taking another chance. Fritz squeezed my hand, but said nothing.
The Nazi smirked as another girl, this one wearing a severe suit and black-seamed stockings, slipped past. Landau had given me a pair of stockings exactly like them, but I’d shredded them into rags and braided them into a rope, and then I’d hidden that rope in a bottom dresser drawer along with the letter opener. They were dagger and noose to me: weapons I might need one day. The rope was back in the apartment, but the letter opener was at the bottom of my purse, reminding me to be fierce.
“I’ll wait here,” our guard said.
We moved toward the elevators. Fritz pressed the button and we watched the dial spin backward from the ninth floor, eighth floor, seventh floor. Our guard was out of sight. Fritz tugged my arm and we stepped into the restaurant behind the elevator bank.
It was almost lunchtime, and the mirrored room was set with flowers, pressed linens, and silver. There was a table full of Nazis in a corner, speaking softly.
“Don’t look their way,” Fritz murmured, pressing his lips to my ear. “Just keep going, nice and slow.”
I’d never been in the Bristol Hotel, but Fritz knew it well. He guided me through a rear door and out onto Mahlerstrasse, where the sun fell on the sidewalk in broken patches. The bellhop blew his whistle and a taxi slid to a stop.
“To the airport, please,” Fritz spoke smoothly.
The driver glanced at us in the rearview mirror.
“No luggage?”
My heart skipped. I imagined Landau walking up the narrow staircase, knocking on the apartment door, calling my name.
“We’re in a bit of a hurry,” Fritz said, waving a fat stack of bills. “Our bags are there already.”
We were going to Germany, the most dangerous place I could imagine. We had no idea what to expect, and yet we had to act as if everything was calm and easy. Under the bright airport lights, we forced ourselves to link arms and pretend to laugh like new lovers. Our reservations for Cologne were retrieved at the ticket desk, and we were given our passage under assumed names.
“Thank you, Mr. Burgess,” the pretty girl at the desk said as she handed Fritz the tickets. She smiled at him, and I saw something of his old sparkle come back.
The airplane was cramped and small, and every seat was filled with Germans. We sat back as the engine began to roar. A little girl behind me started to cry, and I shut my eyes.
“Frau Burgess, let me help you.”
My eyes bolted open. A flight steward was kneeling beside my seat, collecting items that had spilled from my purse.
“Please don’t trouble yourself,” I said. I snatched up my false documents, the wallet with my true identification, the letter opener carved with initials that were not my own.
I kept my eyes open for the rest of the flight, watching clouds pass before the window, watching the pretty stewards in their trim blue skirts and jackets offering snacks and drinks and, to the little girl behind me, a bag for her vomit. Soon my own stomach was heaving.
“Steady now,” Fritz said as we stepped off the steep black steps onto German soil. “Remember, you’re Frau Burgess and we’re meeting our cousin in the square. We’re having dinner at Aunt Hilda’s tonight.”
“Yes, I remember,” I said, pressing a kerchief to my forehead. “I remember, don’t worry.”
From the airport we took a taxi to the Cologne Cathedral. The square was filled with soldiers, swastikas, and Nazi banners. When a man Landau’s weight and height walked by in a black jacket, I felt sure it was him, and that he’d come to arrest me.
“You’ll feel better if you eat something,” Fritz said. He bought two salty pretzels from a street vendor, and we sat on a bench to wait.
“Cousin Paul,” Fritz said, using the quiet singsong voice we’d used when we’d rehearsed our plans.
“Cousin Paul and Aunt Hilda,” I said, reciting the names we’d memorized.
“Aunt Hilda, who lives in Aachen,” he said. “Where we’ll sleep tonight.”
The pretzels were finished, and my throat was dry.
Cousin Paul was thirty minutes late.
“Is there anything else we can do?” I asked.
He shook his head, no.
An hour later, Cousin Paul still had not shown.
“Stop checking your watch,” I said softly.
Evening was falling, businessmen were leaving for home, and the square was filling with shopgirls and officers calling to one another and hurrying off in every direction. Fritz stood abruptly and pulled me to my feet. I followed blindly, moving deeper into Germany with every step.
ADELE
1901
Dr. Frank was a small man with clean white hands and impeccable round spectacles that reflected my face in his. He put a stethoscope to my abdomen, and asked the stiff-faced nurse to hold a clean white towel across my waist. I couldn’t see him insert the cold instrument between my legs, but I felt it—and it hurt.
“This will only take a few minutes,” he said. I gritted my teeth, and when he was finished, he told me what I already knew.
“You’re expecting a child.” He wiped his hands on the white towel. “You’ll need to be very quiet for the next month, just to be sure everything goes well.”
The nurse showed me how to put a pillow under my knees and an extra one at the small of my back when I sat up in bed.
“She’s anemic,” the doctor said to Ferdinand before he left. “She needs creamed spinach and rest.”
“And something for my migraine,” I called after him.
“Not in your condition,” the doctor said.
“My head feels like it’s splitting open.”
“Turn off the lights and close your eyes.”
After he’d gone, Ferdinand kissed my cheeks. He was positively radiant.
“A son,” he said fiercely and then, more gently. “A son.”
He was forty years old, and wanted an heir.
“Or a daughter,” I said. “Girl or boy, Ferdinand, I want our child to have every advantage, and to study everything there is to learn.”
Then I sent him out of the bedroom and had the lights turned out.
I sent two notes to Klimt—I’m sorry I can’t come today . . . and then . . . I’m sorry, I’m still under the weather, but to reveal more seemed indecent, especially through the post.
My head pounded, and morning sickness stretched from dawn until after teatime. I was too exhausted to do more than read a book or sit by the window while Thedy tried to teach me how to needlepoint a bib for the baby. The threads were tiny strings of color, the needles pricked my fingers,
and the hoop to hold the cloth kept pinching my palms.
“Try to be patient,” Thedy said, her head bent over the pillowcase she was working on. Her stitches were a neat row of abstract flowers and a blue waterfall in the Japanese style, and I could see how much pleasure it gave her. But for me, needlepoint was misery.
One afternoon, after Thedy had gone, the maid handed me a postcard of the Prater gardens. There was a single sentence scrawled across the back: Judith is almost finished and will be on her way to Munich soon.
“Help me get dressed,” I said. I threw off the blankets and swung my feet to the ground.
“Madame,” the poor maid cried. “My job is to keep you resting.”
“Do as I say,” I insisted.
She looked wildly about for someone to call, but Ferdinand was out and I was already stripping off my white housedress. Fresh undergarments went on, and then a loose blue dress. I pinned up my hair and washed my face, put on my winter boots and started down the stairs.
“I’m going out,” I said. “Have the carriage ready.”
I got as far as the front step when I was overcome with nausea and dizziness and had to be helped back to my bed.
“I don’t feel very strong,” I told Dr. Frank. “And there was blood this morning.”
He produced the despicable instrument, and I didn’t accept the discomfort gracefully. I demanded a cigarette as soon he’d stepped away from the bed.
“The foundation is weak,” the doctor said. He busied himself in his black bag.
“I’m not a house or a museum,” I said. I was feeling cross and frightened. I took a long drag on my cigarette. “Please say what you mean.”
“I mean that you’re miscarrying.”
His coldness took away my breath. I tried to formulate a question, but within seconds he’d covered my mouth and nose with a chloroformed rag.
“Easier this way . . .” I heard him say. “Breathe normally, don’t struggle against it.”
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