Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  “. . . make it proper,” he said, sounding almost stern. “Within all bounds of decency. Make it like the Mona Lisa, but make her . . .”

  “Queenly,” Klimt said.

  “Yes, precisely. Make my wife a queen.”

  “Queen of Vienna,” Klimt said with a raised glass. “We’ll start after the summer—will that suit your schedule, Frau Bloch-Bauer?”

  “Of course,” I said. Autumn seemed very far away. I hoped my disappointment didn’t show on my face. “Whatever you and Ferdinand have agreed.”

  The city was crowded and busy on the first cool day of autumn. Everyone had packed the summer months away into cedar-lined chests and taken their cloth coats out of storage. There were new black automobiles belching smoke as they chugged along the Ring, and chattering young women in bright, loose dresses. The Triton and Naiad Fountain in Maria-Theresien-Platz was making a million tinny drumbeats as the water splashed and sprayed at our feet.

  “Vienna means everything to me,” I said, slipping my arm through Klimt’s. “But I don’t want to be her queen.”

  “Maybe not,” Klimt said. “But it’s what Ferdinand wants, and so I will give it to him.”

  I’d come to believe with all my heart that Vienna was the most important city the world had ever known—greater than Rome, which had been ruled by conquerors; even greater than Paris, which had so much to offer. When the emperor had demolished the old city wall and built the Ringstrasse atop its footprint, Jews from across the empire had come to Vienna seeking freedom and opportunity. The city had made our very lives—my very life—possible.

  “I mean it,” I said. “The city is a symphony, and I’m only one small musician in a grand orchestra.”

  “Modesty doesn’t suit you,” Klimt said cheerfully.

  He stopped in front of the fountain and tipped my chin to him.

  “You love the city and the city loves you.” His eyes were shining; his hand was warm on my shoulder. I felt as if we were in a tableau, moving through a script that I had imagined and wished for when I was a girl. “Why can’t I make you a queen, if only on canvas?”

  I looked into the fountain, and the sun blinded me for a moment.

  “It has to be done in the finest taste,” I said. “It cannot be gauche or loud. It cannot be anything but exquisite.”

  Inside the museum, Klimt guided me to the coat check window. The girl took my cloak and handed me a wooden disc printed with the number 22: my age, exactly. I took it as a lucky sign, and slipped the disk into my purse before we climbed the staircase.

  At the top, we stopped along the balustrade to look at the frescoes Klimt had painted with his brother. My hand held the same banister I’d held a hundred times, my eyes rose to the same Egyptian women with their smudged eyes and stiff hair I’d seen when I was a girl.

  I knew how much Ernst had meant to Klimt, and he knew how much Karl had meant to me. For a moment we stood together in our shared sorrow.

  “It seems a lifetime ago,” Klimt said, as if reading my thoughts.

  “But that’s in the past, of course.”

  “And we go on,” he said, brushing a finger along my cheek.

  Soon enough he was talking about the symbols he’d used in his early work and the hieroglyphics he’d put in the frieze. At an Egyptian tomb engraved with a goddess holding a circle overhead, Klimt fished a pad and pencil out of his pocket and copied the carved figures while he explained their meaning. “A circle, a glyph, the moon—it’s all about fertility,” he said.

  He was beautiful to watch when he worked. I was still trying to conceive a child, but it didn’t change the way I felt about Klimt. I didn’t think anything ever would.

  “Can we agree on an Egyptian motif?” he asked. “A modern mosaic, with ancient symbols?”

  “Gold and silver, and spare no expense,” I said. “Isn’t that what Ferdinand told you?”

  “My job is to make both of you happy,” he said.

  “I’m happy now,” I told him.

  I felt the longing for him in my breastbone; I felt that happiness quivering in my arms and legs. As we said our good-byes in the courtyard, I put my arms around him and lingered ever so lightly as I kissed the edges of his lips.

  “I’m so glad to have you back,” he breathed into my ermine collar.

  My head was spinning as we parted. My boots crunched along the gravel, and I passed the fountain and the imperial gates. Perspiration trickled between my breasts as I walked through the Volksgarten, past elegant sculptures and the glass walls of the royal greenhouses.

  I turned at the cathedral and went into the DÖbling District, where I soon found myself at Währing Cemetery. My breath felt hot in the cool air, and I kept going until I was on an unfamiliar street that was cluttered with horrid-smelling food stalls.

  Only then did I realize I was lost.

  I made my way toward a newsstand where a ragged man was blowing into his hands to keep them warm. I was about to ask for directions to the Graben, when a fat headline stopped me cold.

  GREEDY JEWS GROW RICHER AT VIENNA’S EXPENSE.

  Beneath the ugly letters was a drawing of two hook-nosed men pulling a frightened child by his hair.

  “This one?” the seller asked.

  It took me a moment to react. I struggled for words.

  “Who would want such trash?” I finally shouted, and spun away.

  “The anti-Semites are everywhere,” I said to the friends who’d crowded into Berta’s parlor.

  Automobiles were idling along with the carriage horses below the Zuckerkandls’ window, and I could smell the driver’s cigar smoke rising from the streets. Musicians were warming up in the Burgtheater—the string instruments sounded like preening women, the trumpets and horns like bellowing men.

  The subject for the evening was the assimilated Jew in Austria, and it had drawn an eager crowd. Instead of a dozen people, Berta’s apartment was crowded with nearly twice that number. Women were pressed together on the sofas, and men sat on stiff-backed chairs crammed in front of the sofas and bookshelves. We were drinking iced Pernod, and I’d already begun to feel its effects when I stood and shakily recounted what I’d seen in the Döbling District.

  “The cartoons are getting uglier,” I said. “I believe we must fight back.”

  Then I put a copy of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist pamphlet on the coffee table.

  “We can’t talk about Herzl’s ideas here,” Berta said quietly. “Emil forbids it.”

  “I’m not saying I support a Jewish State,” I said. “But I think Herzl’s pamphlet is at least worth discussing.”

  “No,” Emil said, catching sight of the book. “Herzl’s ideas aren’t welcome here.”

  Ferdinand also opposed a Jewish State, but for practical rather than political reasons.

  “It’s hot in the Sinai Peninsula,” he said that night, clearly hoping to defuse Emil’s anger with humor. “It’s a desert, Adele—you’d hate it there.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about Zionism”—I was the first in my circle to say the word aloud, and I saw a few of our friends flinch—“but let’s talk about Mayor Lueger’s torchlight rallies and what he’s telling the workers about us.”

  Only the week before, Mayor Lueger—Handsome Karl, they called him—had rallied his supporters to burn an effigy of Albert von Rothschild with a sign around his neck that said FILTHY JEWISH MONEY.

  “Lueger is a very shrewd politician,” Emil said. “He doesn’t believe what he’s saying, he’s just using rhetoric to keep the workers in line.”

  “Do you know what I heard from my bookseller?” I asked.

  There were two hired servants in and out of the room. It was likely that they went to church on Sundays wearing the red carnation of Lueger’s Christian Socialist party pinned to their jackets. It was likely they believed everything Lueger said about the Jews: that we were greedy, that our good fortune was their misfortune, and that we were taking over the city and leadi
ng it to ruin.

  The thought of it made me lose my taste for the Pernod and the salty nuts I’d been nibbling.

  “Edwin Schuster told me that Lueger and his friends show up at the Grand Hotel carrying walking sticks carved with Jewish faces—big noses, ugly ears, some even have devil horns,” I said.

  “For God’s sake,” Emil said. “We’re not Jews, we’re capitalists. We’re society’s engines, and Lueger knows it.”

  A woman who rarely said anything without checking first with her husband put a hand on my arm and said, “Frau Bloch-Bauer, you don’t need to be worried, haven’t you already declared yourself without faith?”

  I turned to reply when one of the other men spoke up at last.

  “You may not think of yourself as a Jew, Emil,” Georg Bergman said. “And I know the rabbis in the city hardly think those of us in this room are worthy of the name.” A few of the men laughed at that. “But we are Jews to Lueger, and if he’s burning an effigy of von Rothschild, he has a certain class of Jew in mind.”

  So there was all of that to worry about. And then there was Klimt.

  I didn’t waver very hard or long. As soon as we were alone in his studio, I went right into his arms. It was easier than ever, as if two weeks had passed instead of more than a year. It was also more dangerous, as we were both aware. I felt Ferdinand’s watchfulness in the mornings, and when I arrived at the studio Carl Moll was often there with his smudged eyeglasses and his coat pockets weighted with things that clanked when he moved. Once I saw him pull out a small measuring tape in a silver case, and another time he fished around until he found a pocketknife that he used to scrape paint off his fingernails.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if Ferdinand had asked Moll to keep track of me and of the progress of the portrait. I suggested as much to Klimt.

  “He’s watching me, there’s no doubt,” Klimt said. “I have four commissions to finish, and he wants me to be working on all of them at once. He says I don’t have time for any indulgences.”

  Klimt knew what he wanted to see in my face, and he coaxed it from me. He told me to cross my legs and smile and then he sketched furiously. He told me to worry about the state of the empire, and his pencil raced across the page. He told me to think of something I wanted more than anything, and then he drew.

  “Think of something that you want, and that you know you can have,” he said, and I imagined myself as the leader of my own salon, with dozens of friends asking me what to read and talk about.

  “That’s good. Now think of something you’re afraid you’ll never have,” he said, and I thought of my child, still to come.

  “Now think of something you know that you can never have,” he said, and I thought of him in my bed every night.

  I wore a golden dress, and walked through his studio pretending I was a queen.

  “A smiling queen,” he said. “Now a bold one. Now a great patroness of the arts. Now Ferdinand’s wife. Now my lover.”

  He drew the way I twisted my hands. He drew me draping a scarf around my neck; he drew me unpinning my hair and letting it fall across my shoulders.

  Sometimes he didn’t touch me. On other days, when he knew Moll was occupied elsewhere, he made love to me and I felt I had been bathed in gold and fire.

  ADELE

  1903

  It was a quiet afternoon in Cafe Central, and the coffee was hot and strong. I had spent three long days posing for Klimt, and was eager to sink into my new journal. I smoothed the paper wrapping from the September issue of Deutsche Arbeit and admired the modern typeface.

  “Have you read Rilke’s new poem?” asked a gentleman in a black suit as he hung his coat on a hook.

  “Not yet.” I smiled.

  Straightaway I scanned the table of contents, and turned to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem. There I found three devastating stanzas, each one taking me farther backward to my youth, to my brother’s bedside, to the sadness I had felt after he was gone.

  I reread one line in particular—and behind the bars, no world—until tears ran down my cheeks.

  “You have so much passion,” Berta said when I showed up at her home, eager to talk about the poem. “You should start your own salon.”

  It had been my dream—the thing I had wished for when Klimt had prompted me to imagine what I desired. But Rilke had caught me by surprise; my vision was blurry from tears, and I felt uncertain.

  “Who will come?” I asked.

  “I will come, of course,” she said. “And so will all the others.”

  I made a list of topics that could not fail to entice: Rilke’s poetry of objects; Klimt’s university murals; Oscar Wilde’s arrest and homosexuality. I invited theater people, musicians, and writers. Berta brought me journalists, and the Mahlers brought me Stefan Zweig, whose brilliant little stories about unhappy suicides were wildly popular.

  How I loved to see Zweig in my home. He was a funny, compact man who had been discovered by Herzl at the Neue Freie Presse and was building a great body of work.

  “If you will indulge me,” Zweig always began, before astonishing us with his newest story.

  Many years and political differences had separated Zweig and Herzl, but he was devastated when Herzl died in the summer of 1904, and he wept openly at the funeral. While bouquets of dead flowers were still piled on Herzl’s grave, my dear Zweig agreed to lead a discussion of the Jewish State at my home that autumn.

  This was turning point for me: what had been denied in Berta’s salon was welcome in my own.

  The evening began with Zweig reading the opening page of Herzl’s pamphlet and was followed by raucous and deeply divided debate. Everyone agreed that the Dreyfus Affair that had spawned Herzl’s idea for the Jewish State was a travesty, but almost no one thought that it was practical or desirable for modern Jews to make a homeland in Israel—or anywhere. I was relieved that no one came to blows that evening, and equally thrilled when my suggestion for the following month—Nietzsche’s Eternal Return—was accepted without a single objection.

  At my childhood dinner table, I had been forbidden to speak of philosophy, but in my home on Schwindgasse that November, we lingered together for hours on the passage that had lingered for years in my mind: “The ring in which you are but a grain of sand will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things—and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon.”

  I was fortunate—so fortunate to have found this moment, this hour of noon, when I was master and mistress of my own days and nights, of my heart and of my mind as well.

  One afternoon after he and I had shared lunch in his studio, Klimt showed me a thick stack of burnished gold and silver leaf. Each sheet was separated by brown paper, the whole stack no more than twelve inches thick.

  He separated a single gold sheet and held it out for me. It quivered as if it were alive.

  “For the portrait?” I asked.

  “I’m practicing on something first. I’d like you to see it.”

  He took me into the room where we’d had our first trysts, and pulled a sheet from a large canvas to reveal a kneeling man and a woman, their bodies diaphanous and ethereal, floating in a blank canvas. The man was kissing the woman’s face. Their features were missing, but the shape of their embrace mirrored the shape of the kiss in the Beethoven Frieze.

  “I’ve managed to keep this a secret—even from Moll,” he said.

  There was a large sketch beside the canvas, where he’d drawn elongated black columns on the man’s robe and round purple and red flowers on the woman’s.

  “Dr. Freud will appreciate your choice of symbols,” I said with a smile.

  “No one will see it if I don’t get it right,” he said.

  “Then get it right, Gustl.”

  He worked slowly, with a Bunsen burner and a pot of glue. First he painted the glue onto a small pat
ch of the canvas, then he melted gold over the flame. When it was just the right liquidity, he applied the gold paint with a flat brush. The man’s body and the woman’s became bound together in a single golden sheath: there was not even a line between them, only the melding symbols and robes floating together into one.

  “You once asked me how I want Vienna to see me,” I said. “This is what I want—this grandeur and richness. This kind of complexity: an endless merging of myself and the city.”

  “This is exactly what I’m going to give you,” he said.

  What we had between us was nothing as simple as longing or sexual desire. It was a hunger for beauty and meaning, and a willingness to search in the world and in ourselves to find it. We had a sense of permanence and the fear of oblivion. We knew, of course, that everything was transient and nothing could last—and yet it didn’t stop us from wishing for something eternally beautiful.

  Winter rages outside the studio as he fills a fat sketchbook with hieroglyphs, symbols, and letters. He designs a ring of gold and white triangles for the neckline of her dress, and draws elongated eyes of Horus until he finds just the right shape and size. He studies his notes on the mosaic at Ravenna, and puts Adele on a gold throne that echoes Empress Theodora’s.

  He paints the jeweled necklace severing her head from her shoulders to show that she’s separate from her fortune and yet bound by it. He paints a diaphanous curtain of an unknown universe floating around her. He paints yearning, intelligence, and beauty. Weeks pass in a chilling sleet and Klimt works in the hazy glow of yellow-gold and dappled metals. He forgets to eat lunch, and goes home at the end of the day cold, hungry, and exhausted. He uses all of his gold and silver leaf, and sends for more.

  He brushes loose pieces of gold from the canvas, collects the fallen flakes, and melts them again. Nothing can be lost. Everything must be used and reclaimed, again and again.

  ADELE

  1906

  Vienna’s newspapers ran cruel cartoons of hook-nosed Jews squeezing the life out of German babies. Anti-Semitic churches flooded with men, women, and children who eagerly believed the angry screeds that rained down from the pulpits. As I hurried past one of those churches on a cool spring afternoon, a slim redhead carrying a large canvas bag came out a side door, followed by a boy in a patched coat. The boy held a flag in one hand and reached into the doorway for a little girl in a red coat and black shoes. It had been years since I’d seen her, but I recognized Mimi’s hair beneath a blue hat, and her lithe body under her dress and cloak. I watched her call to the little girl and smile as the child toddled toward her across the cobblestones.