by Jody Sheilds
His Christmas gift to Erszébet this year is a fur-lined velvet cloak, a fourrure de ville, elaborately embroidered and made in Paris. She wraps it around herself, twirling in front of him in the bedroom. Why, it weighs nothing, she exclaims. Imagine the fur against bare skin, she teases, and he spontaneously embraces her.
She loves the cloak and wears it constantly, sometimes leaving it unbuttoned, so it hangs off her shoulders like two heavy wings. His pleasure in it is secretly enhanced by his memory of Frau Zellenka in a similar garment, and lessened by the image of the dirty cloak abandoned in the Volksgarten.
During the Christian holidays, Erszébet practices sexual abstinence. A child conceived on Christmas Eve is considered unlucky and will later resent his parents for their unholy transgression, their wild lack of control and piety. The child may be deformed with a harelip or be cursed with the ears and head of a wolf. Or the infant may be born a werewolf, a csordásfarkas.
When Egon opens the door, he’s so surprised to see her that he stands there without saying a word. She interrupted him in the darkroom, and a chemical smell clings to his bare hands and his leather apron. The woman asks if she can enter.
Certainly. I won’t be a moment, he says and disappears into the darkroom to fix a print. Inside the studio, wan sun leaks in from the skylight, patchily blocked by the black curtains. Nervously pulling at her gloves, she walks over to study the photographs on the wall, portraits of actresses and an opera singer, a street scene and a landscape, a view of the Volksgarten near the statue of Kaiserin Elizabeth.
When he comes back in the room, Rosza is removing her veil and hat.
“I want you to take my picture.” She’s abrupt, as if she’s in a hurry.
“I usually ask people to make an appointment, but since you’re here, I’ll make an exception,” he says, trying to joke with her. “May I take your coat?”
“Thank you.”
“Have you played tarok recently?”
She shakes her head, doesn’t look at him. No connection. She’s cold, acting as if they’ve never met. He’s used to dealing with difficult women. Children are easier subjects for a portrait. She’s made him self-conscious, and he shoves his hands under his apron to hide the odor of the photographic chemicals.
“I see. So you want a straightforward photograph? A portrait?”
He mentions a price for his work. She agrees. He again retreats into the darkroom. By the red light of a lantern, he uncaps jars of chemicals and measures the lightning powders.
When he emerges from the darkroom, she’s already changing behind a screen. He adjusts the camera, cranking the tripod higher, readying the plate holder. From the sharp crease in a folded paper, he sprinkles a line of magnesium powder onto a metal trough. He checks that the string with the loop for his finger — the remote trigger — is tightly wound. Although this is all routine work, his hands are jittery.
“Which background would you like for your photograph? I have a pretty one with a ruined temple.”
“I don’t want any backdrop. Just make it black behind me.”
He shrugs his shoulders in exasperation, then tacks a length of dark-colored muslin up on the wall. To direct the artificial light, he maneuvers a thin white canvas panel — like a blank painting, about five feet high — at an angle to the camera.
He ducks behind the camera, pulling the black cloth over his head. Seemingly blindly, his hands adjust the instrument.
“Fräulein? I’m ready now.”
“Close your eyes.”
“But I won’t be able to work the camera,” he says patiently.
“Just do as I say. I will pay you.”
He’s intrigued, wondering what is her strange game. Obedient, he closes his eyes. Soft footsteps cross the floor and stop in front of him.
“Are you near the camera?”
“Yes.”
“May I open my eyes?”
His blinking eye fills the camera lens, one curve fitted to another. First he notices her shawl has fallen around her feet, a bright pool of color. Then he sees the outline of her nude body, and his eye goes up to the black veil over her face, the smooth, bald place between her legs, the discolored scars over her abdomen. He’s shocked, as if the camera created this image without his participation, stealing it unerringly from his memory and making it flesh. His finger automatically pulls the trigger, and there’s an explosion of light. His eye is white-blind from the flash. He claws the cloth off his head while she’s still screaming.
She’s kneeling on the floor, sobbing. He watches her for a moment, the black cloth dangling helplessly in his hands. Then he gently drapes it over her shoulders. He lifts the veil from her face.
When she’s quiet, he helps her into a chair. Without the artificial light, the studio is almost dark.
There’s no noise but her ragged breath.
He finds his voice.
“You’ve been here before. You’re the woman in the photographs.”
She’s still in shock, her body shaking.
“It’s the fire you’re afraid of, isn’t it?”
“I thought . . . I thought I could make you sorry.”
The room goes dark around them.
CHAPTER 13
The inspector has cataloged Erszébet’s emotional state, her anger and unexplained brooding silences, lack of appetite, the stormy expression on her face, which darkens when she catches him watching. He’s the audience when she loses her temper. More than once, he’s found her staring down the maid. No loud words, just Erszébet’s thick silence and an angry gesture as she grabs the mending or the half-scrubbed pot away from the startled woman’s hands.
Erszébet avoids activities that require thoughtful attention, painting and needlepoint. Instead, she continues to physically tire herself in the kitchen.
She’s lost in cooking. He counts the various paprika dishes she serves. Gulyás, an intensely onion-flavored pörkölt with thick gravy, paprikás, and tokány, made with veal and parsley roots. She prepares sült libamáj, roast goose liver. An entire wild goose is cut up and simmered with onions, peppers, and bacon. Everything is cooked with fresh pork fat. Desserts are heavy, cradled with cream: vargabéles of curd cheese and raisins, and strudels, including Mohn and Nussboutizze.
She feeds him lavishly but gives him only a thread of her affection. Why is he compelled to do this, make these observations? Does this mean she will leave him, these are his last memories of her?
Erszébet is wholly directed by the spell of her magical purpose. She senses her husband is unhappy, but she can only react to him distantly, as if he wobbles outside her orbit. She moves in a different climate, the ráböjtölés. It will soon be over. She can only swim if she forgets how to float.
On New Year’s Eve, “Sylvester evening,” Erszébet sticks an evergreen sprig in a shallow bowl of water on the kitchen table. Left there overnight, the needles will remain green, or turn spotted, or black, which indicates health, sickness, or death in the coming year.
She doesn’t sleep well that night. In the dark hour before sunrise, she creeps downstairs and stands outside the kitchen, hugging herself to stay warm. The stove has gone out. She waits there, afraid to come closer, afraid to see the color of the evergreen sprig. After a time she enters the room, keeping the bowl on the periphery of her vision as she begins her morning routine, preparing kávé, slicing bread, lighting the sparherd.
Later, when her husband looked around the kitchen, he couldn’t find the bit of evergreen or the bowl that held it. I threw it away, she told him, smiling. But the sprig was a deep green, thank God. It means luck. We’ll have good fortune this year, that’s certain.
He was surprised by his sense of relief. It only momentarily lightens his mood.
Fasching begins late in December and continues until Ash Wednesday. Balls are held all over Vienna during the pre-Lenten season, sometimes fifty in a single night. The city is in a state of exhilarated obliviousness at this time, intractable as insomnia. D
uring the war of 1866, the Viennese danced at their balls even though the advancing Prussians were only a two-hour march away.
Last year, Wally was startled by party-goers stumbling into the cafés for coffee in the early hours of the morning. As she walked the children to school, two bedraggled women in masks and costumes, strangely tall in their powdered wigs, staggered in the snow on the pavement in front of them. The children were enchanted.
The Inspector usually dreads Fasching and its frenetic social activities, since the seasonal merriment is accompanied by an increase in reports of robberies, assaults, and public drunkeness. Some nights, he has raced to the scene of a crime from a ball, still wearing his top hat and tailcoat. Once, to soothe a crying child, he gave her his carnation boutonniere. Often he’s found the hysterical behavior of the victims similar to that of the guests at the party he just left. He relishes his ability to slip between these two worlds.
Erszébet is still remote, possessed by an eerie confidence. He’s afraid she will refuse to accompany him to the round of parties he is officially expected to attend. Traditionally, they are honored guests at the Concordia ball at the Sophien-Saal, given by the Press Club. He hasn’t discussed the event with her. Two nights before the ball, he notices she’s laid her costume out on the bed, a low-cut blouse and a lampshade-shaped skirt over pantaloons. And a black mask for her eyes.
On the way to the Sophien-Saal, the traffic is backed up, and it takes them longer than usual to cross the city. As far as they can see, Einspänners, fiakers, and motor cabs block the street. They’re directly behind a stalled omnibus. The driver shrugs when the Inspector politely asks how much longer they’ll be waiting. It will be a while.
The Inspector removes his top hat and sets it on the seat. The light from the streetlamp paints a wavering line on the hat’s silk surface, so it looks as if it were made of metal.
“We’re going to miss the performance,” he says.
She puts on her mask. In the shadowy carriage, her eyes are inscrutable, liquid dots behind a black band. Her mouth appears larger.
“There are other ways to pass the time.” She folds his gloved hand in hers.
It is close to midnight when they finally arrive at the ball. The music of the orchestra ushers them out of the fiaker. A crowd of revelers in costumes or evening dress — like the entire cast and audience of an opera — moves slowly up the stairs into the building. Erszébet picks out fancy shepherdesses modeled after Marie Antoinette, caped knights bearing swords and their kingly attendants, men in white wigs and breeches, women in tiaras and plumed crowns, their arms daringly bare. The throng parts for an astonishing young woman — who must be an actress — hair down to her waist and a jeweled asp coiled around her torso. A few boisterous couples — men with men and women with women — waltz drunkenly on the pavement.
The Inspector whispers his name to a uniformed man at the door. He escorts the Inspector and his wife down the room between a double row of members of the press. The line of faces, the noise and the heat are overwhelming. Erszébet slips away. Her husband’s name and title are announced; he mounts a platform and bows to the audience and then to the Altar of Fame behind him. Cheers shake the room.
Erszébet finds him afterward, and they lift their glasses to his Apostolic Majesty, to each other and their mutual happiness.
The orchestra surprises them with a fast ragtime tune, something from Chicago. As they dance, he closes his eyes. Erszébet’s back is so warm he imagines she is naked beneath his hands. The odor of her body reaches him, a familiar perfume of ripe peaches and tobacco.
They are separated by other unrecognizable partners, who lead them into a frantic Ländler. They dance with several strangers before they join each other again. His shirt is damp, and her hair has floated loose from its pins. She puts it up again, unself-conscious about this intimate gesture and the dark ovals of perspiration under her arms.
While her arms are still raised to her head, a man grabs her around the waist and waltzes her away. The Inspector watches her face, unfamiliar behind its mask, as she whirls across the room.
The man she’s dancing with is also masked, dressed in a green military uniform with scarlet trim, tight white breeches, and high boots. She guesses he may be a gentleman. His eyes are fixed on her face, but she won’t look at him or speak, not wanting to be distracted from her body’s response to the music. The band begins a fast csardás. Voices whoop around them; the floor shakes with the pattern of footsteps. Although his hands press down on her shoulders, he is lost to her. He is something to use, a bridge to an intimate place. She’s dimly conscious of his frustration.
When the music stops, she moves back from him, gasping for breath, laughing up at his face. He grasps her arm, and his lips touch her ear. Would she care to step outside with him? She shakes her head, still smiling. He doesn’t release her, but unbuttons his collar and thrusts her hand inside his jacket, against his bare neck. She can’t move, too many people are wedged around her. When she finally pulls away, her fingers shine with his sweat.
She waits until they’re inside the fiaker to tell her husband about the incident. He’s sleepy and nestles his head deeper into the fur cloak over her lap. She doesn’t believe he understood what she said. She strokes his hair. Did you hear me?
“Once I arrested a man who had a strange compulsion,” he mumbles, his voice muffled by the cloak. “A saliromaniac. He threw ink on women’s dresses. On the street, right in front of everyone.”
Two days later, Franz has worked his way through another seven pages of the burned diary without success. The brittle pages crumble when pressed to the gummed paper. None of the writing is legible. He resents this tedious work, since it takes him away from his pursuit of Rosza.
One of the governesses he’d contacted in the Volksgarten came to see him at the police station. The woman, a ruddy blonde from Silesia, was enormously pleased to tell him she’d seen Rosza the day before at Wiener Molkerei, on the Schottenring. She draws out the sketchy details. Rosza was accompanied by two little boys and carried an umbrella, a description that fits nearly every fräulein of a certain age.
Franz drops his pen. “Doesn’t she have any distinguishing features? No limp? No crippled hand?” He couldn’t stop himself.
The governess is offended by his sarcasm. Rosza is very pretty, she says stiffly. I have heard certain rumors about her that are unflattering.
Franz recovers. “You’ve been very helpful. I can’t express my gratitude, gnädige Frau.” He kisses her hand. Most people, he’s beginning to realize, are afflicted with a visual illiteracy.
The governess gave him one interesting lead. You should visit the Queen Victoria Jubilee Home for British Governesses, she told him. You might find someone there who knows Rosza.
Franz asks the Inspector for advice on methods of recognition.
“All the women in the street are beginning to look alike to me,” he mutters. “I’m losing my skill.”
“Seems you’ve lost your sense of humor, too.” The Inspector grins. “Focus on a specific portion of the face. A person is usually recognizable by the space between the lower half of the forehead and the bridge of the nose. You’ve noticed this is the part of the face covered by a domino. When a mask is worn and the hair on the head is covered, identification is nearly impossible.”
Franz looks up “Recognition of Criminals from their Photographs” in Kriminalistik and finds that identification in broad daylight can be exactly measured.
Persons whom one knows very well can be recognized at a distance of 45 to 80 meters; in exceptional cases up to 150 meters.
Persons one does not know well and has not often seen are recognizable from 25 to 30 meters.
People one has only seen once can be identified at 14 meters.
As soon as he can excuse himself from the laboratory, Franz makes his way to the Queen Victoria Jubilee Home for British Governesses, impressively situated on the Graben.
From outside, the hom
e is dimly lit. Inside, the rooms visible from where he stands in the foyer are in deep shadow, tunnels into the building’s deeper gloom. There is a faint stale smell of dust, permanently colonized in the upholstery and carpeting. An unseen clock ticks dryly.
Slow footsteps announce the appearance of a prim elderly woman. Her hair and long gray dress are of the style of twenty years ago, reminding Franz of the implacable governess who ruled his childhood nursery. She inserts the black circle of her monocle into one eye and regards him sternly. His confidence evaporates.
I’m here on police business, he sputters, producing his official letter. Without taking her eyes off him, she extends her hand for it. Franz tries not to fidget while she reads. He looks around, growing accustomed to the dimness, and notices a group of old women in armchairs in the side room, silently watching him.
“I’m Miss Revelstok. This way please.”
He follows her into the room where the ladies are seated, and his letter flits from hand to hand as they excitedly chatter in English. He explains he is looking for Rosza, who worked as a governess for a Viennese family. She left her employers last winter or early in the spring. This was her address. Franz is thankful the light in the room is subdued, for he can feel the red heat of embarrassment flame up over his face. He can’t catch the women’s words, their sharp language is too quick for him, but he can read their reactions. None of them is acquainted with Rosza.
Frowns and puzzled looks. The matron touches his arm.
“Let me ask upstairs.”
She vanishes, leaving him to stand awkwardly in the circle of women. He smiles uncertainly, trying to revive the few words of English he knows, something about the weather, about rain. Yes, he’d like tea, he says in answer to one of the ladies’ invitation.