I’d had another miscarriage the year prior, and Mimi and her children reminded me of all that I’d lost. They made me tremble with envy. I turned my face from them, and hurried past.
“I saw Mimi and the boy,” I told Klimt.
“The boy?”
I was sitting on a stiff chair with my elbows propped on a table. He was drawing my hands, the left twisted around the right, the good protecting the injured, and I had to keep them perfectly still.
“Your son,” I said. “It looks like he has a sister, too. Is she yours?”
For a moment it looked as if he was going to shrug. In that instant I hated him a little bit.
“They were coming out of a church in the Third District,” I said. “Your son was waving a little German flag, and he was chanting.”
Klimt was hardly listening.
“Don’t move your hands, Adele. Just hold still a little longer,” he said.
“Does Mimi know your patrons are mostly Jews?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because your son was mimicking Lueger’s speeches, that’s why. He was saying, ‘Jews, everywhere you go—Jews, Jew, Jews.’ ”
“He’s a little boy.” Klimt touched the stack of gold bracelets on my wrist, and turned one so it caught the light. “I don’t think of my friends that way. And I know Mimi doesn’t, either.”
“Mimi thinks of us?” I snapped.
“That’s enough for today,” Klimt said, as if he could sense how far my mind had wandered.
“I think you should tell her your patrons are of the Jewish lineage,” I said as stood to leave. “I think you should let her know that you don’t feel that way about us. Do you?”
“Adele, Mimi doesn’t hate anyone,” he said. “But if it will make you happy, I’ll talk to her and the boy.”
“Yes,” I said. “That would be a very good idea.”
He pulled me to him before I left.
“Don’t leave angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry,” I said, although of course I was. “It’s just that everything is taking a very long time.”
With Klimt I’d used sheepskin condoms and rinsed with a vinegar douche at night. With Ferdinand, I kept trying to conceive. The doctors told me that pregnancy was best achieved with a woman’s legs in the air after sex, and that coupling should be done two weeks after the menstrual cycle was complete. And so I was diligent with Ferdinand, bringing him to my bedroom every month and putting my legs in the air as soon as he was finished.
“Hand me a cigarette,” I’d say with my legs resting against the wall. Soon he began to take one out of the case even before I asked, striking the match and bringing me an ashtray as well.
After those nights, he was always most attentive.
“Klimt said you can see the work,” I told Ferdinand at breakfast one morning after he’d shared my bed.
“Is it finished?” Ferdinand asked.
“Almost,” I said. “When he gets close to the end, he doesn’t want anyone to see it.”
“Then you won’t have to go there anymore,” Ferdinand said, looking up from the stock market pages. “You’ll be free to go about your days as before.”
I tried not to look at him too closely; I tried not to reveal any sense of sorrow. Ferdinand had been elevated to president of the empire’s unified sugar industry, and there was talk of regulating the prices so that there would be no market collapse as there had been twenty years earlier. I knew he was busy with negotiations in Budapest and also in Moravia.
“Maybe I’ll stop by the studio,” he said. “I’d like to see how the portrait is coming along.”
Besides Moll and myself, Ferdinand would be the first to see the portrait—at least that’s what Klimt had told me—and I was eager to share it with him. But in the end Ferdinand was called away on business, as was so often the case, and I went alone.
Even unfinished, my face was far lovelier on the canvas than it was in life—my eyes wider, my lips fuller. I looked regal and intelligent. I looked proud.
“You’re making me too pretty,” I said. The words felt strange on my tongue.
“This is how I see you,” Klimt said. “This is who you are to me.”
Did he know how I wished to be seen? Or was it that under his gaze I became what I wished to be?
“And what will go here?” I waved across an empty expanse of beige gouache and yellow paint.
“Silence,” he said. “And the things we’ve spoken of that have no name.”
He showed me stacks of gold and silver leaf, and told me there would be letters and symbols, and the eyes of Horus that I’d asked for.
“When you start the gold, I’ll have no reason to see you again,” I told him. “No excuses to come here.”
He touched my cheek.
“You don’t need an excuse, Adele. You’re always welcome here—I hope you will come when it’s done.”
I left knowing that I would not return for some time. My bleeding had stopped; my breasts were swollen and tender.
I arranged to see a new doctor. Dr. Julius Tandler was a well-known Socialist at the forefront of medicine and social reforms. He was known to speak to women with kindly intelligence. I knew that he would tell me that I was pregnant, and he did.
“After two miscarriages, you have to be very careful,” Dr. Tandler said. “You have to stay in bed. I know it’s hard, but you must.”
I stayed in bed with my legs propped up on pillows, and watched the winter rage outside my window. Ferdinand doted on me: he had fresh juice sent up to my room every evening, and bought me violet-scented soaps and creams imported from London.
“We’ll have a son,” he said. I smiled and let him hope for a boy.
I’d read books on childbirth, which sounded painful and horrifying; and on childcare, which seemed as if it would be exhausting without the help of round-the-clock nannies.
As the weeks stretched on, I wrote an advertisement for the perfect nanny, and put it in my bed-stand drawer where I kept my bookplates, letter opener, and stationery. I reread all of Jane Austen’s novels, and decided if I had a girl, I would name her Emma. I imagined her walking proudly beside me through museums and galleries as she grew. I pictured her at the gymnasium, then the Lyceum, and finally at university. I knew I would give her every opportunity and encouragement that I had never been offered.
I sent for a sketch pad and colored pencils, and tried my hand at images of bounty: harvest wheat, golden apples, juicy pomegranates, and ripe figs. Everything was alive, exactly as Franz Cizek had taught me to see even the most inanimate objects. Soon I was drawing prams, pregnant bellies, and colored blankets. I pored over advertisements for baby furniture and made a scrapbook of the things I liked most. The German buggies were the best, and I had Ferdinand order one to be delivered in early spring.
I waited for the baby to kick and when she finally did, Dr. Tandler let me get up.
Early hyacinths were poking through the hard ground when I showed up at Klimt’s studio in the late morning. My pregnant body was well concealed beneath my loose dress. I knocked, called Klimt’s name and then went inside.
“I’d like to see it now,” I called.
In many ways I had changed, yet in others I had not. I still wasn’t patient, and when I wanted something, I would not be deterred.
“Adele? I wasn’t expecting you,” he said. It was good to see his familiar brown robe and thick feet in leather sandals and socks. But he looked as if he’d been up through the night, and the studio smelled of an acrid burning.
“Did you send a note?” he asked, rubbing a hand over his bald spot. It seemed he’d lost more hair since I’d last seen him. “Do we have an appointment?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m here now. The show is only a few months away—I’m sure you’re almost finished.”
I saw the portrait behind him on a low easel, turned away from the door.
“It’s not finished,” Klimt said, putting himself sq
uarely in front of me. “It needs one final breath of life.”
“You have to let me see it today.” I put a hand on his neck, surprised to feel a small lump there. I didn’t ask about the boil. I didn’t want to know.
“Why this urgency?” he asked. “I said you were welcome, and you stayed away for months.”
“Show me—then I’ll tell you.”
Klimt waved a weary hand—no—across his face.
“Really, don’t make me beg,” I said. “Please. We’ve already given each other so much.”
“All right,” he relented. “But will you close your eyes for me, please?”
How many times had he asked me just that when we were naked? Open your eyes, close your eyes, open your mouth, open your legs.
I closed my eyes and he guided me across the room with a hand at the small of my back.
“Now,” he said. “You can look.”
The painting was astonishing. Shocking. The gold and silver glowed. My face was luminous, floating like the moon over a glittering nightscape. My eyes were brimming with raw desire and need, and yet I seemed to be a goddess lording over a brilliant universe decorated with stars and lights.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed. “I love it.”
He beamed.
“I came to tell you something, Gustl,” I said. His eyes went to my draped midsection, as if he already knew what I was going to say. “I’m having a child. I’m five and a half months along.”
“Five months?” I saw him calculating the cycles of the moon. “You haven’t been here since Decemb—”
“Of course it’s not yours,” I said quickly. “We’ve always used the sheepskins. The child is Ferdinand’s.”
He put a hand to my cheek.
“I know this is what you’ve wanted. Are you happy?”
“I’m frightened,” I whispered. “I’ve lost two pregnancies already, and I want this child so badly.”
“Then you’ll have a child,” he said. “I’m sure this will be your time.”
I’d always known that he understood my vulnerability. He’d seen it from the start—that first day, when I’d seen his mural.
“Do you remember what you said about the Sistine Chapel and the moment of creation? You said Michelangelo painted God handing life to Adam—not a breath, but a touch.” I spoke in a rush, not waiting for answers. “That’s what you said, I remember and I believed you. And that’s what I need from you now.”
His eyes lingered on me. I knew enough to be quiet, and I knew how to be still. It was something every woman in my world had learned to do: sit quietly, and wait.
He rummaged through a clutter of pigments and mixed his colors. He used a slide rule to carefully measure out and paint first one, then two deep red squares level with my face. He stepped back and studied the effect, twisting the ruler one way and another, tipping the right angle first up, then down, and then toward my face. He added three more squares.
“The ka is a symbol for the soul,” he said as he painted one final three-sided square. “Egyptians believed there was a piece of a living soul in every work of art—something eternal that animates the inanimate. I’ve turned the opening toward your face, here”—he touched my cheek, and then dipped a single drop of red onto the same place on the canvas—“and here.”
I listened and I watched, waiting to see the moment when the life sprung from his hands into the work. I’d spent hours with him in silence as he seized on something invisible and intangible and rendered it as color and form in his work. But even as I watched and waited, it seemed to happen in a mysterious way that I could not see. I blinked, and it was there. It appeared in silence, without movement or sound.
That silence is in my portrait; that waiting is in my expression; that mystery is in the eyes of Horus and the ka and all the symbols in silver and gold that he carved into my dress.
“I see it now,” I said.
“Now it’s finished,” Klimt said.
He kissed me tenderly. It was good-bye, and we both knew it.
After that day I felt a powerful inner awareness that came slowly, as a plant grows imperceptibly to the human eye.
Within a month, I knew I was carrying a boy.
When my birth pains began, I knew he would not survive.
Unlike the miscarriages, which had been private affairs, everyone knew I was expecting a child, and everyone knew when the baby was stillborn that spring. And unlike the moment of creation, when rich silence is everywhere, my sorrow felt like a howl and a scream that went on and on into the dark void at the center of myself.
Ferdinand was crushed, and my mother came at once offering comfort, but the doctors were unflinching. Even Dr. Tandler. He was kind, but held my hand and told me with no uncertainty that another pregnancy would kill me. I could not try again.
“What will I do?” I asked in a hollow voice.
Dr. Tandler put me in mind of the wise, old doctor who’d come to my room in Paris. He took a seat beside my bed, and ran a hand along the books on my shelf. He looked at the art on my walls.
“You have a good mind and a good heart,” Tandler said. I felt almost that we were friends, or that we would be, after this. “There are so many places and people in Vienna who need someone like you.”
I was devastated and exhausted.
“When you’re ready, you can start your salons again. And we can talk about ways to help the city that are meaningful to you.”
“I want you to call the maid in to wash your hair and help you get dressed,” Thedy said. “Or I’ll do it myself.”
I had not looked out the window for more than a month. I hadn’t even opened the blue curtains.
“You can’t help me, not five months pregnant,” I told her. “And there’s nothing I want to do and no place I want to go.”
“You have your art,” Thedy said. “I know how much the portrait and your friendship with Klimt means to you.”
My sister already had three children. She’d carried each one easily, and we had no doubt that in a few months she would have another child in the nursery and another nanny in the servants’ quarters.
“Not enough,” I whispered.
She glanced at the newspapers fanned on my coffee table.
“Everyone is talking about the Kunstschau,” she said, picking up the Neue Freie Presse. “Your portrait is going to be star of the show, Adele.”
The 1908 Kunstschau would mark the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph’s rule, and Klimt was the spirit and master of the show. As my sister read the description of the grand white buildings that were being built in an empty field in the center of Vienna, I closed my eyes and imagined the crowds standing before my portrait, imagining they knew me, then turning away and calling me—what? Beautiful. I felt sure they would call me beautiful.
“They say Klimt is showing two large golden paintings,” Thedy said. “Did he paint you twice, Adele?”
“No. The other work isn’t a portrait. It’s called The Kiss.”
She looked at me strangely, as if she were going to ask a question and then thought better of it.
“I haven’t seen it finished,” I added.
“But you will see it soon,” Thedy said. “We’ll go to the Kunstschau together, it will be gay and lovely.”
My sister cared little for modern art. She said it for me, and I loved her for that.
Peering into a communal mirror in the damp rooming house, a hungry seventeen-year-old carefully trims his toothbrush mustache, draws an old razor across his face, and slicks back his hair.
As church bells chime eight o’clock, he arrives at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and follows the guard into the building. In the admissions office, he gives his information to a seated clerk.
“Hitler, Adolf,” he says. “Application date May 10.”
The clerk pokes his glasses onto the bridge of his nose, and finds a card on top of a thick pile.
“Application unsatisfactory,” he says. He riffles through
a bin, and hands the young man a folder.
Adolf’s face burns. He makes his way past green fields where the white Kunstschau buildings glimmer in the distance, sits alone under a tree, and opens his folder. It is his second rejection from the Academy, and he’s sure there has to be some mistake. Some kind of conspiracy. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
MARIA
1938
The first thing I did every morning was put on the kettle and run down to fetch the newspaper. While the tea steeped and Fritz got dressed, I snapped on the radio and practiced my English. There was no decent coffee to be had in the Liverpool markets, but I added chicory to the tea and waited until it turned black, then poured out a can of condensed milk and pretended it tasted like home.
Every day after Fritz left for work, I tried to do at least one thing to make our little home welcoming and inviting. I labored over the newspaper advertisements, carefully converting the prices from pounds to reichsmarks and keeping my budget in a black and white notebook. I whipped cream with powdered sugar and baked apple strudel. I found a sausage shop where they stuffed every bit of the cow and pig into lamb casings, and a market that sold spiced kraut and red potatoes. I bought a piece of red-and-white-checkered cloth and used my mother’s needle and thread to sew a cheerful curtain for our kitchen.
But something was still missing in our evenings together. Fritz didn’t say he was sad or homesick, but I could see that he was unhappy, and sometimes he turned away from me in bed and pulled the blankets over his head, saying he needed to sleep.
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