Count Luna

by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

  In June, 1944, Jessiersky learned that Luna had been transferred to the camp at Ebensee. There, salt was mined in a manner which was extremely uncomfortable for those who were mining it, and the casualties among the forced laborers were high. But why should salt be mined in a more comfortable way when everything else in the hard-pressed Reich had become as uncomfortable as possible?

  Jessiersky decided to leave Vienna and its growing discomforts. Relying on his directors to see that the freight cars of the company, which were being hit more and more frequently by dive-bombers, were kept rolling within the steadily shrinking sphere of German world domination, he slipped off to Zinkeneck with his family. In Zinkeneck, he used enough of the tactical talent inherited from his father to keep from having to bear arms. He took up arms only to the extent of walking in the valley with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, scanning the high ravines through his field glasses for chamois, whose complete indifference to historical events he thus tried to emulate. In January, 1945, he buried his mother who died as insignificantly as she had lived. In March, he got his wife pregnant with yet another child, although this time he began to feel slightly overwhelmed by all this childbearing.

  Meanwhile, the armies on all fronts had been practically routed, so that at the end of April, and the beginning of May there was a veritable invasion of Zinkeneck by generals, members of the general staff, and officers of the quartermasters’ corps. These were the remnants of no less than four army divisions, and when there was no longer an army of any sort, they came pouring into the few valleys the world empire had been reduced to. In comradely fashion, each of the generals tried to get the so-called castle entirely for himself. They argued so long over this weighty matter that in the end no one moved in, and all of them had to pull off their riding boots in mad haste and put on requisitioned hobnail shoes to flee into the mountains. They were soon brought back, however, to take up quarters behind barbed wire. Alexander Jessiersky bitterly regretted that his father who, had he still been alive, would undoubtedly have been advanced to the rank of general, was not among them.

  Immediately after the collapse, Jessiersky began to make inquiries as to whether Luna had come out alive. But although he expended a great deal of time and effort, he was unable to get any information. It was impossible to discover anything about him. He was definitely not among the living, but neither was he among the dead, at least according to the records. Jessiersky then wrote from Zinkeneck to all the military hospitals in the vicinity of Ebensee to ask whether Luna might have been brought into one of them. But he was not to be found among all the living skeletons that had been admitted. It could only be concluded, therefore, that, in the general confusion of the last weeks of war, he had died of hunger or had been murdered and that his body had been burned, or buried in some unknown place.

  Jessiersky did hear, however, that the Millemoths had recovered from their fright (which was no slight matter, since in the end they had been even more terrified of their liberators than of their oppressors) and had denounced him for having Luna on his conscience. But since Zinkeneck was in the American Zone, their denunciations were of no avail. By the time the charge was brought in, the American troops had long since turned their entire attention to the female domestic servants in the zone and other ladies of this sort. Even the American commanders were already beginning to turn their attention from the political quarrels within the country to their own extrapolitical conflicts.

  They were, of course, quite ignorant of Continental conditions. But with the complete assurance of sleepwalkers, they fished out the so-called Fascist elements of the population which they had just been fighting, and cast suspicion on the so-called non-Fascist. Supported in their activities, commercial and otherwise, by the so-called Fascists, without whom, in fact, they would have been unable to carry out this policy, they began to build up a barricade against their former so-called ally in the east. Viewed from the standpoint of this policy of theirs, the war against the Third Reich had been only a minor conflict whose importance had been greatly exaggerated. Even the death of the thirty-five million people, which the Third Reich had on its conscience, had been an episode of greatly overestimated significance. In other words, the loss of those multitudes had been no more than an episode which it was perfectly all right to forget and which, in fact, was forgotten in no time at all. For actually figures mean nothing or almost nothing. When, for example, there were only two men in the world, Cain and Abel (for Adam did not really count any more), Abel’s death should have mattered much more than now the loss of one and one-half percent of the world’s population. But it turned out that Abel’s death did not matter a bit. For Cain propagated, and the present population of the earth will propagate with or without that one and one-half percent. . . .

  Although Alexander Jessiersky had not been a Fascist or anything resembling a Fascist — nor, to be sure, the opposite of one — he remained in Zinkeneck, to be on the safe side, for two more years, for he had no desire to fall victim to any political stupidities. Finally, however, he returned to Vienna. There, very much against his will, he was forced to attend to so many things that he forgot Luna who, until then, had still occupied his thoughts from time to time. Had Luna reappeared he would undoubtedly have repaid Jessiersky for all that had been done to him — even without American help, even against the opposition of his own now so conciliatory Rightist circles. Luna, however, was still among the missing.

  But about 1949 certain things occurred that led Jessiersky to conclude that Luna was still alive.

  Chapter 4

  At this time Jessiersky was still busy with the restoration of the Strattmann Palace which, having come through the bombing without being completely demolished, had been what was described as “moderately plundered” during the liberation of the city.

  Practically everyone had had a hand in the looting, not only the military but also the civilian population. Reportedly even certain people belonging to the best circles, or what still passed for such, had availed themselves of this opportunity to make provision for the hard days of peace ahead.

  In order to replace a painting which had fallen prey either to an infantryman of artistic tastes, or to the foraging of a certain high-placed civil servant who shortly thereafter had betaken himself to Linz, Alexander Jessiersky had started negotiations for the purchase of a large portrait. Its subject was an unknown periwigged gentleman wearing a cuirass and a silk sash, and displaying the Cross of the Teutonic Order. This was not the first likeness of a stranger that Jessiersky had purchased; but he always felt rather foolish when he bought one; for months afterward, it seemed to look disparagingly down at him from the wall.

  One afternoon, in an effort to discover the identity of the man in the cuirass and wig — whom, without the flicker of an eyelash, his father would have passed off as an ancestor — Jessiersky was leafing through certain volumes in the Strattmann library which contained engravings of generals and other celebrities, together with ample explanatory notes. His children had gathered about him and were looking over his shoulder. One of them, a girl, the one who had been conceived in the late winter of 1945 and who by now was no longer the youngest, but the next youngest, suddenly pointed her finger at one of the pictures and exclaimed: “That’s he!”

  “Who?” asked Jessiersky and looked more closely at the engraving. It was not the man with the periwig and the Cross of the Teutonic Order, but it resembled someone else, someone who seemed vaguely familiar. For a moment he could not remember who it was. Then suddenly he knew. It reminded him of Luna. “Who?” repeated Jessiersky. “Who is that? What do you mean? How could you know him, you silly child!”

  “But that’s the man we saw out walking!” said the girl.

  “Out walking where?”

  “In the Volksgarten.”

  Jessiersky stared at the child and then back again at the page. The man in the engraving was actually a Dutchman, General Knobelsdorff de Nijenh
uis, but he reminded him very much of Luna.

  “What do you mean in the Volksgarten?” cried Jessiersky.

  According to the little girl, the children, who regularly took a walk in that public park with their French governess, had been spoken to several times by a man who resembled the man in the picture. The other children also confirmed this. Only he was dressed differently. He had given sweets to the children, or rather to the next youngest, whom he called his little friend — always to the next youngest, although the others had also begged him for some.

  To the children’s astonishment, their father became extremely excited. “Mademoiselle!” he shouted. “Have Mademoiselle come at once!”

  At the sound of his angry voice, Mademoiselle came running and so did Elisabeth Jessiersky.

  “How could you allow the children to be fed by a perfectly strange man, not once, but several times?” he asked the governess, his agitation increasing. “Who knows what kind of filthy stuff he may have given them to eat! What did he look like? Like the man in this picture?” And he thrust General Knobelsdorff under her nose.

  “Please!” exclaimed Elisabeth Jessiersky, who was utterly bewildered by all this, for he did not ordinarily take such an interest in the children’s affairs. “Don’t get so excited! Whatever is the matter?”

  “Be quiet!” cried Jessiersky, and Mademoiselle, who was looking at the picture, stammered that yes, he might have looked something like that, the dispenser of the sweetmeats, a charming man and very kind to the children, particularly to the next youngest whom he called his little . . .

  “Do you know what you are?” Jessiersky interrupted her. “You are a stupid cow!” But he shouted this in French, and as in French “vaches” is also a name for the police, Mademoiselle took it that she was supposed to have called the police.

  No, she hadn’t called the police, she faltered, there had been no necessity for that. . . .

  Really, it would have been better for Alexander Jessiersky if he had learned some colloquial French from his late father who had been so good at it. “Tomorrow,” he shouted, “you’ll go to the Volksgarten with the children and I’ll follow behind and look at the fellow myself!”

  “But certainly!” stammered Mademoiselle, “certainly, sir!”

  Elisabeth Jessiersky shook her head. “You simply can’t afford to get so wrought up over every little thing!” she exclaimed.

  Jessiersky did not reply. During dinner he spoke scarcely a word and simply stared into space. Later that evening, he made no move to lay the foundation for a new child, nor did he do so on any of the following evenings.

  For when he went the next day to the Volksgarten, walking quite inconspicuously behind the children, the man who looked like General Knobelsdorff did not appear. Nor was there any sign of him on the days following, although Jessiersky slipped in with the utmost caution, a great distance behind the little group. Then it rained for a few days, and afterward the children kept having to go again and again to the Volksgarten until they became bored and begged to be allowed to go to the Stadtpark. But the man who was the image of General Knobelsdorff did not show himself again, and his obstinate failure to appear so obsessed Jessiersky that he could think of nothing else, and all consideration for his wife’s amorous desires passed from his mind completely.

  Then the whole family went off to Zinkeneck and stayed there until autumn and all that time Jessiersky thought about Knobelsdorff. Only after they had returned to Vienna did he come to believe that the materialization of Knobelsdorff had been pure coincidence, and he began to forget him. He was just on the point of turning his attention once more to his wife when something occurred which, in a most painful way, brought back the memory of Knobelsdorff and with it that of Luna.

  The next youngest fell ill and, although a great deal of time had elapsed since her encounter with the man in the park, Jessiersky leaped to the conclusion that the illness was a result of the sweets. All along he had been secretly afraid of something like that!

  This man who was the image of Knobelsdorff, he decided, must have been Luna, after all. But he was not sure whether he should worry most about the child, about the other children — who might also fall ill, each in turn — about his wife, or about himself. What he could not understand was why Luna had given the candy only to the next youngest and not to the other children as well.

  Perhaps the man had conceived the diabolical plan of killing the children not all at once, but one by one. It would be like Luna to do something like that. He had not simply appeared and said: “Here I am and I demand the punishment of all those who are to blame for my misfortune.” From the outset, and probably quite justifiably, he had not relied on any of the authorities to track down the guilty people. Instead, after hiding out for a long time, God knew where and why, he had taken it into his own hands to mete out the punishment! From out of the darkness into which he had been forced and in which he may have decided to continue to dwell, from out of the realm of the living dead he had been banished to, from out of an invisible, incomprehensible region, he began to take revenge! And to make it as frightful as possible, he had waited for months, for years, himself inaccessible, inexorable; now he would strike not only the guilty, but also the innocent, and thereby once again the guilty, the one guilty man, exacting vengeance doubly, triply, a hundredfold. . . .

  But when Jessiersky reached this point in his thinking, or rather when his terrified imaginings had brought him to these confused conclusions, he told himself that it was too soon to give way to panic. Luna, after all, had not only to plan, but also to carry out that horrible scheme. His first attempt had met with a crucial setback when Jessiersky had discovered that he still existed! By sheer chance he had discovered it, but he had discovered it nonetheless. The fact of his survival had been revealed, and now if Luna chose to make trouble, the trouble could be traced to its source, and it would be possible to put a stop to his activities — which, otherwise, would not have been the case.

  “I shall simply have to tell the bastard what a mistake he is making,” muttered Jessiersky to himself. “I must find the opportunity to make it clear to him that I am not to blame for his misfortune. I must force him to meet me! As far as I am concerned, he can pay back those scoundrels of directors and he can mete out punishment to them. But he is not going to persecute me and my family. And he shall have back his damned property, tax free, cost free, at once!”

  With these thoughts milling about in his mind, he hurried over to call on the Millemoths. For who but the Millemoths should know where Luna might be found?

  The feelings of the Millemoths had undergone yet another transformation in that they had long since regretted having denounced Jessiersky as the author of Luna’s misfortune. From the fact that the denunciation had produced no result whatsoever, they had concluded — and probably correctly — that the political weathercock, having swung around once, had now veered back again, and was pointing in the same direction as before. And when they saw Jessiersky appearing, they experienced the same terror that had assailed them when he had called on them the first time.

  This time Frau Millemoth did not merely make an attempt, as she had ten years earlier, to put Luna’s picture away. While her husband talked to the visitor in the foyer, she actually managed to get it out of the way. The picture, however, was no longer in Luna’s room, which had been sublet. It was in the Millemoths’ own room.

  “We are not quite so well off as we were when you gave us the pleasure of your first visit, Herr Jessiersky,” said Millemoth with as much amiability as he could muster. “This time we shall have to receive you in our bedroom. My wife is just putting it in order. We had to rent the room of our unfortunate . . . that is, of our poor . . . I mean, of our cousin . . . where we received you before. The situation, alas, and not only economically, has very much changed since we had the honor of making your acquaintance. It has, in fact, become quite intolerable.”
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br />   “You think so?” said Jessiersky, wondering how he could get any information about Luna’s whereabouts out of this coward.

  “I should say so!” exclaimed Millemoth. “Utterly intolerable! It’s true right down the line, from the biggest things to the smallest. You have no idea what difficulties we have had, for example, with this business of renting the room.”

  “You had?” inquired Jessiersky. “What kind of difficulties?”

  “Troubles with our tenant.”

  “You’ve had trouble with him?”

  “Nothing but trouble, Herr Jessiersky.”

  “In what way?”

  “He won’t move out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he maintains that he has lived in it now for more than a half year, and nowadays it is illegal to put anyone out of a room that he has occupied for over six months. You can’t for the life of you get rid of a fellow like that.”