He leaned toward me, his familiar scent mixed with something sleepy and unclean.
“Touché,” he whispered. “You haven’t lost one bit of your fire.”
My portrait finally returned from the international exhibition in Venice, and I had it installed in my second-floor parlor room. When the salon gathered in the evenings, my figure seemed to be seated just above us, my own eyes burning across the room the way the ghostly face in Klimt’s Philosophy still burned in my memory.
I saw art, music, and science in the portrait; astronomy, anxiety, and desire. The passion that had been part of its creation became something that seemed to breathe in the house even when everyone was asleep. But I knew this: if I were the queen of Vienna, then my portrait must belong to my beloved city after I was gone.
“Ferdinand and I will give the portrait to the museum someday,” I told Berta.
“And what about the second portrait?” she asked.
The second portrait had been a disappointment to me, as Berta well knew. In stark contrast to the first, I looked old and haggard in the second; instead of the queen of Vienna, I looked like her nursemaid mother wrapped in a pink and green robe.
The painting hung in Ferdinand’s private rooms, between two Kokoschkas that he’d bought almost as a joke, but had come to love.
“That’s Ferdinand’s to choose,” I said. “Although I suppose I would like them all together.”
I remembered what my husband had said long ago, about his porcelain collection, and added, “Together, like a family.”
MARIA
1939
In Liverpool my mother helped me sew beads and lace onto my clothes, and taught me how to use egg whites to make my skin bright. I scrimped and saved so that I could treat myself to a weekly trip to the hairdresser, and rinsed my undergarments with rose-scented water. I wanted to be beautiful for Fritz. I wanted to keep him home with me every night.
I was sitting under an electric dryer in a beauty parlor near Greenbank Drive one morning when I heard someone say the name Felix Salten.
“My sister just came from Paris,” a woman said to her companion. “She saw Salten and some other Viennese—Zuckerkandl and the Kleins, and that wealthy sugar baron whose wife died young.”
“Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer?” I was so excited I jumped up and sent my hair curlers flying. “Is that who you mean?”
It was. The blonde remembered the name of the hotel, and after a few hours of trying, I was able to place a call and reach my uncle in Paris that very afternoon.
“Maria? Is it really you?” he asked when he heard my voice.
“We’re in Liverpool,” I said. “Please come—we’re all here, even Mama.”
“Not yet,” he said. He sounded tired, but there was still a fight in him. “The inventories are under way in Vienna, and I want to see if I can have your aunt’s portrait secured and sent here to me.”
“The most important thing is that you’re safe, Uncle Ferry.”
“Jungfer Brezan’s gone now,” my uncle said. “All the art your aunt loved, everything that made our lives so beautiful—they’ve taken it all.”
“We’ll get your things back, Uncle Ferry, I’m sure of it,” I said. I desperately wanted to keep his hope alive. Too many people were dying or killing themselves. “I know you have it in you.”
“I’m doing my damnedest,” he said. “But they’re ruthless bastards, Maria. Ruthless and cruel.”
In the spring, my mother took a steamer ship to Canada to live with my brothers and their wives. Robert had started a new business there, and had a house with extra room. There were three grandchildren in Vancouver and my mother wanted to be near them.
“You come, too,” she said, but Bernhard’s business was growing, and Fritz wasn’t ready to go.
After my mother left, my life fell into a lonely routine. Fritz stayed overnight when he called on his London customers, and the evenings I spent with Nettie and the children made me long for a child of my own.
Weekends were better. On Saturdays we all took English lessons in an elementary school, and when warm weather arrived Fritz and I began to spend Sundays strolling through Edinburgh Park.
One afternoon, two nannies in starched whites sat on a bench nearby.
“War’s inevitable now,” one said. “Churchill says so. It’s just a matter of time.”
Fritz and I locked eyes.
“That’s a load of nonsense,” the other nanny said. “Hitler’s not given us any more trouble since the peace treaty, and I’ll not send my son to die for a bunch of Krauts and Jews.”
Six months later the Nazis stormed Poland, and within weeks it felt as if there had never been a time when England wasn’t at war.
Liverpool officials began evacuating children just as the school year was about to begin, and every morning I saw parades of boys and girls carrying sad little suitcases toward the boat docks. By October there were no nannies or prams in the streets, no children playing hopscotch or football. Luxuries disappeared from the shelves. Sugar and milk were impossible to find, and coffee was just a memory.
On an overcast morning I stepped onto the crowded tram and asked the driver, in my best English, “Pardon me, sir, but will you be making stops along Boundary Street?”
The driver narrowed his eyes, and I repeated my question, thinking he must not have understood me.
I saw two older women put their heads together and whisper, looking in my direction. With my thick Austrian accent, the people on the tram saw me as the cause of their troubles, the reason their cupboards were empty and their children far away.
Fritz must have sensed my unhappiness, because he took me to London for the holidays that year. I was charmed by the city with its old-fashioned street posts wrapped in tinsel, and store windows packed with puppets and dolls. Big Ben was majestic, Westminster Abbey was decorated with red ribbons, and the famous double-decker buses were packed. Still, the war was never far away, and posters everywhere reminded us of it.
On Saturday evening we met a group of Fritz’s colleagues for dinner at the Criterion. I tried not to show my surprise when the group included women—pretty ones, at that. When one of the pixie brunettes pulled out a cigarette, Fritz offered a light and she blew the smoke out in one long plume.
“Tell me, Maria, what do you think of London?” she asked, as if she were genuinely interested in me. I told her how much we’d been enjoying ourselves in the city, and she asked if Fritz had taken me to “that clever little pub over in Covington Gardens.”
“No,” I said. “He hasn’t even mentioned it.” When I looked at Fritz, he gave me a funny smile that I didn’t like one bit.
At the end of the night I found myself standing next to the brunette, and as she wrapped her scarf around her neck, a shock of shame and nausea rocked through me. Chanel No. 5. Could it be so? I knew what I knew. I had known it, in a way, for months.
By the time Fritz and I got back to the hotel I had a migraine that kept me in bed for the entire next day. I kept seeing the woman’s face and Landau’s face; London and Berlin. Our return to Liverpool couldn’t come soon enough for me. As we rode the train through the snowy countryside, I thought again and again of the pretty women in the Criterion. We were almost home when the lights in the train blinkered off, and plunged us into darkness.
I touched Fritz’s arm.
“Fritz,” I whispered. “I think my aunt Adele took a lover when she was a young woman.”
I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish by that. I only knew that something had to be said, and that was all I could manage.
“How do you know?” he asked. Light slashed across his face, illuminating his features for an instant. “Did someone tell you that?”
“I heard the rumors when I was young,” I said. I remembered the party at Mada Primavesi’s home, the whispers and raised eyebrows I’d pretended not to hear or see. “It was only a rumor, but now I think it must have been true.”
I tried to think of w
hat I really wanted to say to Fritz, and how to say it. Could I say I’d smelled perfume on his clothes again? Could I tell him that I thought he would live a long and good life, that he no longer had to fear for his own death?
“I don’t want you to go to London anymore,” I said. He took my hand and kissed my knuckles.
“I love you, Maria,” he said. “You mean everything to me. I hope you know that.”
“Then be faithful to me, Fritz,” I whispered, without looking at him. “That’s what I’m asking. Be faithful to me. No one will ever love you the way I love you.”
Even in the dark, I could see that he was ashamed and angry. I bit my lip and waited for him to say something in return, but then the lights sparked back on, the conductors came down the aisles and opened the compartment doors, and we’d arrived in Liverpool. I followed Fritz’s footsteps in the snow, knowing I had to find a way to reach him.
When I brought home a leaflet from the Red Keys Pub in Liverpool, Fritz read the advertisement twice through, and put on his best clothes that very afternoon.
“I miss singing,” he said. “You know me so well, Maria.”
There were cheerful white lights strung around the front door of the Red Keys, and a sleek baby grand piano waiting inside.
Fritz slicked a hand over his hair and asked to see the manager.
“I don’t speak too good,” Fritz said in broken English. “But I sing it perfect.”
To prove it, he snapped his fingers and sang the first two verses of a holiday tune I’d heard on the radio dozens of times.
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” he sang with hardly a trace of an accent. “With every Christmas card I write.”
By the time we left, he’d been hired to sing at the pub every Friday and Sunday evening.
I wore my prettiest blouses on the nights he performed, and sat on a stool close to the piano so that I could be the audience that I knew my husband craved.
Soon there was a crowd of regulars: men and women like us, who needed something to relieve the tedium and strain of their days. People danced cheek to cheek, their shoes making funny sucking noises on the sticky pub floor. In the dim white lights, with the music playing and Fritz’s warm voice washing over me, I was able to put some of what had happened out of my mind. I was his girl again, and when we went home on those evenings, we dropped our clothes at the foot the bed and spent the rest of the night in one another’s arms.
On a Friday night in early spring, Bernhard showed up at the Red Keys just as Fritz was starting his second set. It was a cold, wet night but there were plenty of people standing around the piano with their cocktails, and it felt happy and cozy.
“The Brits have declared me an Enemy Alien,” Bernhard said, shaking a cigarette out of his packet. “I’m leaving right now—I’m going tonight.”
His hair was sticking straight up and his jacket was rumpled. Even in the din of the piano bar, he was loud.
“They’re arresting people and sending them to prison,” he said. Fritz ran his hands over the piano keys, but it was clear to everyone that something bad was happening. Bernhard leaned in to say something in Fritz’s ear, and my husband went white.
We’d read about the Enemy Alien act in the newspapers—it said that Germans and Italians were being sent to a detention camp on the Isle of Man, where no one could contact them.
“But we’re not German,” I said. “We’re Austrian.”
“To the Brits we’re all the same,” Bernhard said, crushing his cigarette out in the ashtray.
“But we’re Jews!” I said, surprising myself. “We’re refugees.”
“They’re shutting my factory,” he said. “I’m going to America, and Nettie and the boys will be right behind me. I’ll send for you when I’m settled.”
Bernhard stuffed a wad of money into my hand and watched me push it to the bottom of my pocket book. He was out the door before I’d even finished my glass of soda water. Fritz played until the end of his set, counted up the bills in the tip jar, slumped over the bar and ordered a whiskey.
“We have to be ready to leave, too,” Fritz said. He downed his drink in two quick gulps. “I’m not going to prison again. And it’s better for you to travel now than to wait.”
There was no arguing with what Fritz said. I was a Jew who didn’t practice Judaism, a Viennese banished from Austria, and an enemy alien in Britain. I was frightened, and I was three months pregnant.
In Vienna the doctors used to come to the house when we were sick, but in England I took the bus to West Derby Road, where I saw a doctor in the Liverpool Clinic for Ladies Medicine.
Dr. Edwards was the first man to examine me with my legs in stirrups, and any idea I had to ask about damages or diseases from what Landau had done were quickly forgotten when he shone the light between my legs. I just wanted it to be over, and quickly. The doctor took a long tape measure and spanned the height of my belly. He placed a cold stethoscope against my skin and told me he could hear a faint heartbeat.
“The baby is fine,” he told me after I’d dressed and was seated in his office. “Your skin suggests slight anemia, but it’s nothing cod liver oil and a regular plate of roasted beef won’t cure.”
He handed me a booklet of special ration tickets for milk, meat, and vitamin A and D tablets. I tucked the tickets safely into my purse and took a long breath. His office was filled with posters of smiling, expectant women.
“I want to go to America,” I said. Bernhard had already sent a cable saying there was work for Fritz, and a good, clean hospital where I could give birth.
“You should wait until the child is born,” the doctor said somberly. Everyone was somber when they talked about the child, but I wanted him to be as fat and happy as the babies in the posters. “You’re almost four months along now. An ocean liner is no place for a woman in your condition.”
Liverpool, where there was noise and smog all hours of the day, seemed no place for a woman in my condition, either, I said. And every ocean liner had a medical doctor on board.
“A doctor, yes—but not an obstetrician who would know what to do in the event of complications.”
“If I wait, I’ll be traveling with an infant. Won’t that be even more dangerous?”
“Traveling with a newborn is difficult,” the doctor admitted. “But at least you’d have your strength if you wait.”
“I have my strength now,” I said.
When he saw I was determined, he unlocked his cabinet and handed me an amber bottle that fit into my palm.
“You’ll need this when the seas are rough,” he said.
ADELE
1914
I was having dinner at Hardtmann’s with Ferdinand, in June of my thirty-third year, when the restaurant door burst open and a young man rushed inside.
“Archduke Ferdinand’s been assassinated in Sarajevo,” he shouted. “The archduke and duchess are dead!”
The whole room stopped. A woman dropped a dinner roll onto the floor, and there was the clatter of tableware followed by a loud eruption of voices.
“They’ve killed the heir to the throne,” a woman cried in a shrill voice.
“We should have put down the Bosnians a long time ago,” said a man wearing a pince-nez.
“The emperor will snuff out the rebellion,” Ferdinand said loudly. He covered my hand with his own. “He’ll stop them fast and hard.”
Some of the diners glared at my husband, but no one spoke against him.
“There will be a war,” I said quietly. I knew it, just as I’d known my child would be stillborn. For an instant, I saw a flash of my husband bent and alone while war raged around him. Then the image vanished.
“It won’t come to that.” Ferdinand said. He downed his whiskey. “The emperor will stand up to the Bosnians and the Russians. He’ll restore order.”
Nietzsche said that the will to power brings incarnate forces into collision with one another, just like Zeus and Poseidon throwing thunderbolts and bre
wing earthquakes. And so it was in Europe.
In the last week of July, the empire declared war on Serbia. The German Kaiser quickly took our side and rallied his forces, while France, Belgium, and soon Great Britain took sides with the Russians against us.
“The old order is falling away,” I said when we learned they were drafting men far too old and sick to go into battle. “It’s what Dr. Tandler and the other professors said would happen.”
“The emperor will prevail,” Ferdinand insisted. “We’ll win the war.”
Ferdinand believed in victory, but when battles began to spill into French villages, and cafés in Vienna began to close, he insisted we go to the country.
“We’ll stay at Jungfer Brezan through the spring,” he said. “Have the servants pack a summer wardrobe in case things drag on.”
I must admit that I was relieved.
Richard Ernst, who’d written a monograph about our porcelain collection, was a curator at the Belvedere and a good friend. With his help, I had all of my Klimt paintings sent to the museum for safekeeping.
It was November and I was sorry to say good-bye to my friends and see the house shuttered, but I did my best not to complain. The drive northeast took us through farmlands and country villages that had been emptied by the war. When we stopped for lunch not far from the Czech town where Ferdinand had been born, the village was deathly quiet. The cobbled streets hadn’t been swept in a long time. Pails of garbage had been tipped over, and black crows pecked at the trash.
Our nephews had been spared the draft, but in the countryside the poor boys were all gone.
“Look around, Ferry,” I whispered as a thin waitress showed us to our seats in a small café. “There are no young men in the village—no men at all.”
The war went well for the empire in the beginning, and the news that reached us in the comfort and safety of Jungfer Brezan was always of victory. We weren’t ignorant, but we were in good cheer as the snow piled up and our thick walls kept out wind and cold.
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