I was sure of the painter’s hands reaching for Adele.
I was sure of Landau’s hand brushing my breasts in the dark.
“Zieh dich aus, Maria,” Landau had said. “Strip for me.”
And I’d done it. I’d done what he’d asked.
My memory was a castle of light and darkness, but that hotel room in Berlin was a locked cell. It was a room of unforgivable surrender where I could not remain for one more second.
But that night, I saw a way out. I saw that Judith had done the same thing I had done, and that she was a heroine.
“Good morning,” Fritz said. Fresh from the shower, he was handsome in the crisp white shirt I had laundered and starched for him. “Did you have trouble sleeping?”
“I want to tell you something, Fritz,” I said.
I’d spread the books around myself like guardians. There was the book from the Belvedere; there was a book by Nietzsche that my aunt had loved (although I can’t imagine why). There was a book I’d found in our library about Judith and Holofernes, and there was the picture that had run in the magazine that had shamed me so long ago: French women with their shaved heads because they’d consorted with the Germans.
“Please sit down,” I said.
“I’ve got a meeting up in Ventura this morning,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I can’t stay long.”
“That’s fine.” I poured him some coffee, and took out the milk. “It won’t take long.”
He took a sip of his coffee, and I stood at the counter with my back to the sink.
“What are you so serious about this morning, Maria?”
“A long time ago, a man took something from me,” I said. “Now I want it back.”
“You mean the painting,” he said.
“No, Fritz. I don’t mean the painting.”
I think he knew, even before I told him. Maybe it was the look on my face, or maybe part of him had always known.
Fritz was good in his soul, as I’d always known he was. And he loved me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He reached for my hand and pulled me to him, and then pressed his face against my belly. “I’m sorry he did that to you, Maria. I’m sorry you did that for me.”
“I did it for us, and I’m not sorry, Fritz.” I stroked the back of his head. “We have a good life together. But now I want something in return.”
“What do you want?”
I waited until he looked up into my face.
“I want to be proud instead of ashamed. I want to feel brave instead of dirty. And Fritz, I want you to be faithful to me.”
Ten months later I opened my dress shop in Brentwood, and in the many decades that followed I never saw another lipstick smudge on Fritz’s collar or found a card from a stranger in his pockets.
Finally, I’d put what had happened in Austria and in Germany behind me.
MARIA
1998
If you’re lucky, life teaches you to survive. The California sky is blue, you wake up, you make coffee, you fry eggs, and you don’t look back. You don’t think about the freckled maid who served smoked meats and pickled asparagus when you were a girl. You don’t think about yesterday or what’s been lost. Even when you hear the dead whispering, you go on.
I had my nice little dress shop in Brentwood for twenty years. The ladies who came were often immigrants, like me. We spoke in German or English and we ate miniature Linzer tortes, drank dark coffee, and thumbed through crisp new magazines. We talked about fashions and children, hairstyles, and the movie business.
Hemlines went up and I raised them. They went down and I lengthened them. I volunteered at the art museum, went to synagogue on high holy days, and wore lace to my children’s weddings.
When the actor from California was still in the White House, my Fritz cried out for me in the middle of the night.
I sat up in bed, and saw his face was ghostly white.
He groped for my hand and said, “Thank you, Maria.” Then he started to moan.
By the time we reached the hospital, his heart had stopped.
It had been a good heart, and we’d had many happy years together. I mourned and missed him, but I was lucky, too. Because I’d already learned to be strong on my own.
A Mahler symphony was playing on my kitchen radio when the phone call came from Austria. I was eighty-two years old by then—far too old for surprises.
“Maria? It’s your cousin Eva.”
“Is something wrong?” I asked. My cousin was frugal, and her phone calls were limited to news of sickness and death.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m reading the newspaper and there’s a story about your uncle’s painting—the portrait of your aunt,” she said, pausing. “You know the one I mean?”
I had not gone one week of my life without thinking about that painting.
“This reporter says the portrait rightfully belongs to you,” Eva said slowly.
“Of course it belongs to me,” I said. “But we tried, and they refused to give it back.”
“It looks like you can try again,” Eva said.
“I’m old now,” I said. My sister and brothers were gone, too. “And I’m alone.”
“I don’t think you’re alone, Maria,” my cousin said. “I think you have a righteous history on your side now.”
When we hung up, I slid open a desk drawer in a corner of my TV room and found the yellowed envelope from the end of the Second World War. I took the letter into my kitchen, and put it on a clean place mat.
I opened the old envelope carefully. The glue had long given up its hold, and the Swiss stamp was beginning to crumble away. The Hotel du Lac stationery had gone from creamy to beige, and the black ink was fading. But the date was legible, and my uncle’s words were still clear. Save the portrait. Fight for her dignity.
I turned my coffee cup round and round, replaying my cousin’s words and writing the reporter’s name, Hubertus Czernin, over and over until it looked like nothing but squiggled lines on the page.
“Slowly one grasps the extent of the Nazi art thievery,” Hubertus Czernin writes in 1998. “Sixty years after the Anschluss, Austrian officials are slowly and tentatively beginning to open the book to this chapter in the nation’s history. Stating a desire to correct ‘immoral decisions’ made after World War II, Minister of Education and Art Elisabeth Gehrer has formed a commission to shed light on Nazi art robbery.”
When Czernin’s story runs in ArtNews magazine, four Gustav Klimt paintings still hanging in the Belvedere Gallery are listed as gifts from Gustav Ucicky, “in honor of his father.” The Adele Bloch-Bauer I, also in the Belvedere, is listed as a “Gift from Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer,” and is noted as entering the collection in 1936.
These attributions and dates are false, of course. The painting was stolen from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, and his heirs are the rightful owners of Adele’s golden portrait.
MARIA
1998
It took me just a few hours to think of my dear friend Trudy’s grandson.
Randy Schoenberg was almost family—I’d watched him grow up, I’d been at his bar mitzvah and at his wedding, too. His paternal grandfather had been the composer Arnold Schoenberg, a friend of mine and of my parents’. When he was a teenager, Randy had gone with Trudy to Austria, and seen my aunt’s portrait in person. He’d stood in my living room and looked at the poster with tears in his eyes, but he hadn’t said a word. He’d seemed to understand that it was something I couldn’t talk about.
Trudy, Eric, and Arnold were all gone, too. But I had Randy’s telephone number, and I called him that afternoon.
“The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” he said. “Of course I know the one you mean.”
Randy came right from work that same evening. He was a passionate young attorney, not long out of law school. He had a freckled face, a thinning hairline, a pretty new wife, and two small children. I could see that he carried his grandparents’ history heavily on his own shoulders, but the ghosts did
n’t seem to cow him; they seemed to cheer him on.
“My grandparents had to start over, like you,” he said. He was sitting on my red couch, wolfing down a piece of pie with cream. “It would be an honor to help you get your uncle’s painting back.”
Austria’s new law allowed for the heirs of dispossessed Jewish families to file new claims on their stolen property, Randy told me. There was better access to old files and hidden records, and it was clear that Austria would have to let some of the paintings go.
“Do you think I have a chance?” I asked.
“Yes, I do. And you’re not going to be alone,” he said. “Hitler stole hundreds of thousands of paintings and sculptures. All those families are going to be fighting for what’s theirs, too.”
I told him about the lawyer my brothers had hired after the war, and how little good it had done us.
“And we signed an agreement saying that we’d never make any more claims against Austria,” I said.
“Those agreements are being challenged.” Randy said. “That’s what the new law is all about. Hundreds of people are filing claims in Austria right now.”
Randy stood to stretch. It was almost nine thirty, and I knew he wanted to get home to his wife.
“Your aunt’s portrait is the acknowledged masterpiece of her time,” he said. “I’ll file our first claims right away, this week. We’ll let the Austrians know that you’re coming to fight for what’s yours.”
MARIA
1999
I didn’t want to go back and wake the sleeping ghosts. I didn’t want to see the streets I’d fled, or the city that had betrayed us.
But Randy urged me to go to Vienna for the symposium on stolen art.
“It will be a very good thing, Maria, to show your face in Austria now,” he said. And so, I did.
I scanned the faces at the airport and when someone called my name—“Maria, here!”—I spotted Eva’s face right away, and hugged her so tightly that I frightened myself.
“Look at you,” we said to each other, again and again. “Just look at you, alive and standing here in front of me.”
A camera flashed, and someone called my name.
“Frau Altmann, please look here.” I squinted in the flash, and another followed.
“Who are these people?” I asked Eva.
“You’re famous,” my cousin said. “Everyone knows you’ve come back to fight for the portrait. You’re famous here, thanks to Hubertus.”
A tall, thin man with round glasses and wild, wispy hair put a hand out to greet me and spoke in the courtly, formal German of my childhood.
“Welcome to Austria, Frau Altmann,” Hubertus Czernin said. His glasses nearly eclipsed his huge brown eyes. His hands were warm. “I’ll be covering your visit for the Standard. I hope we’ll get to know one another very well.”
He gave me directions to the Museum of Art History as if I’d never lived in Vienna, and handed me a folder with information about the program.
“This is my first return to Austria after more than sixty years,” I told him.
“And how do you feel?” he asked.
I took a deep breath, as I’d learned to do in my yoga classes.
“After so many years of being helpless in the face of what was done to my family, I feel hopeful,” I said.
The ghosts were awake that night. They whispered in my dreams; they were there in the morning; they rode with Eva and me in the taxicab to the museum; they sat on my shoulders as we turned onto the Ringstrasse and a maze of trolley cars crisscrossed the tracks.
On that beautiful spring day, Vienna was full of people on bicycles, people on foot, and tourists in groups following guides. The fountain in front of the Museum of Art History was dancing. I was relieved when there were no journalists waiting at the museum door; only Hubertus Czernin, stubbing out a cigarette and folding his narrow notebook open.
“Are you ready?” he asked
“As ready as I can be.”
I was given a plastic name tag and ushered into a room with a small table and three rows of folding chairs in the museum basement. There was a coffee urn and pastries, and without thinking, I gobbled down two cream tortes.
Eva introduced me to the women who’d organized the symposium, and two ladies from the Austrian cultural ministry, who were courteous and welcoming. There were only about three dozen people in all; most of them Jews like Eva, who’d hidden in Austria during the occupation.
Before we began, Hubertus showed me a fat binder that he’d filled with an extensive index of items and provenance histories.
“This is everything that was in 18 Elisabethstrasse when the estate was seized,” he said, turning the pages slowly. “The Nazis kept careful records. That’s lucky for us.”
Studying the thumbnail photographs, I recognized some of the things that had been in my uncle’s home: the framed photograph of Klimt holding a cat, my uncle’s cigar box, the porcelain pieces he’d treasured, the locked desk I’d tried to open the day the Nazis came.
“A lot of people are angry about the symposium,” Czernin said quietly. “I don’t want you to be surprised at that.”
“Who is angry?” I asked, looking around. Everyone I saw seemed mild-mannered, even happy.
“Museums, art collectors, curators,” he said. “The symposium was organized to help Holocaust survivors and their heirs successfully petition for the restitution of stolen property. No one wants to give up what they have in Austria.”
“I’m not the kind of woman to make waves or put up a fuss,” I said. I meant that genuinely. “I have letters from my uncle, begging for the portrait to be returned, and I have a copy of his final will from 1945. I think it’s very clear that the portrait belongs to my family.”
“You might find that people are angry, and that they’ll make you angry, too,” he insisted.
“I’ve always found that it’s better to go after things with charm than with venom. But I am prepared,” I said.
I was able to keep a low profile while legal experts spoke about the changing restitution laws and the paper maze that survivors and families had to navigate. People asked smart questions, and I soon realized that many of the others had never been wealthy. They’d been children during the war, and did not know how glorious Vienna had been, or the life that they had lost before they could even see it clearly. They’d inherited promises and lies instead of a palais, or old photographs instead of summers at their family’s country estate. I was one of the oldest in the room, and my Bloch-Bauer name truly meant something to them. By the time it was my turn to speak, I knew that I had a special responsibility to speak for my uncle and my aunt, and to give everyone hope for what was ahead.
“We tried to be satisfied with the few things we were allowed to have after the war,” I said. “But now I know that it all rightfully belongs to us. I will not give up until my aunt’s portrait is returned to me.”
I looked out at their faces and told them there were good people in Austria who wanted our paintings returned to us, and that recovering them was the best way to honor our parents and lost families.
“Adele Bloch-Bauer’s name and face are famous here in Vienna,” I said at the close of my remarks. “And I’m going to use her name to fight for justice for every one of us.”
When I stepped down, people came to their feet and clapped. If I’d said those things just to please myself, I could not have felt proud. But I’d done it for all of them. I’d been fierce, just as my aunt had urged me to be. I couldn’t wait to see her portrait at the Belvedere, knowing that I was worthy of her at last.
Walter Frodl, the director of the Belvedere museum, introduced himself to me at the reception following the symposium. He was a short, middle-aged man with a soft handshake and an Austrian flag pin on his lapel.
“That was a very emotional presentation you made,” Frodl said. I thought his tone sounded a bit spiteful. “Well done.”
I thanked him, and we exchanged a few pleasantries about
the mild autumn weather and the new repairs to the Triton and Naiad Fountain. I could have gone on forever asking about the buildings in the Museum Quarter and the new visitors’ trolley that made its way around the central Ring. But after a while, he cleared his throat and got down to business.
“Now that we know each other better, Frau Altmann, I propose we talk about our Adele,” he said.
I glanced around for Eva or Hubertus, but they were both engaged in other conversations.
“I think we’d be more comfortable in the café upstairs,” Frodl said. “Have you been up in the museum yet today?” The man’s manner was formal and gracious, as if he’d stepped right out of my childhood. “There’s a beautiful view from the café. And we’ll we pass right beneath one of Klimt’s first murals on the way up.”
We took the elevator from the basement to the second floor, and paused at the balustrade to look up at Klimt’s frescos. From where we stood, we could barely make out the images above the staircase. But I’d studied Klimt’s early paintings in books at home, and knew this one well.
“It’s wonderful to know that Klimt took the Egyptian motif for Aunt Adele’s portrait from some of his earliest work,” I said.
“I see you’re a fan of Klimt’s oeuvre,” Frodl said.
“Not a fan, Herr Frodl, an admirer. Like my aunt, I’ve made it my business to study Klimt’s work and understand his ideas.”
Frodl found us a window-side table in the café, and held a chair for me. Outside, the Ringstrasse buildings were dazzling against the blue sky. The fountain was sparkling and splashing in the sun, and just before I sat I had the strange sensation that I was about to fall into a moment from the past, as if I could be in two places at once, hearing voices that had spoken a hundred years ago running just above the hum of voices in the café.
“Now that we’re alone, let’s say what’s in our hearts,” Frodl said after we’d settled and ordered cups of tea. He leaned forward as if we were old friends. “I heard your speech downstairs. I recognize your attachment to the painting. But the portrait of Adele is a national treasure, and it’s beloved here in Vienna. It belongs here.”
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