The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  “This is where the Memorists have been meeting since they formed in late 1809,” Jeremy said as the intercom buzzed and he opened the heavy door. Holding it, he waited for her to precede him but she didn’t make any move to go inside. Shivering, tasting metal, she was aware the buildings on either side of her were becoming translucent.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” She tried to make her voice sound as normal as she could as she fought back the dreads.

  “What’s wrong?”

  With a burst of effort, Meer stepped over the doorstep and into the anteroom. Behind her, the door closed and the loud click echoed in the antechamber. Her legs felt as if they were weighted down and each step was a terrible effort but she followed her father across the black-and-white marble-tiled floor, through the doorway under the middle arch and into the Society’s main room.

  Last night, while she’d been standing on the street, she’d imagined all of this: the elaborate ceiling with its tiny mirrors that appeared to be twinkling, the extravagant decorations, the stone Buddhas.

  Despite a lifetime of trying to remember, despite being hypnotized dozens of times and learning different meditation techniques, she couldn’t grasp how she’d apparently seen across the years to the inside of this building and a time long gone.

  An imposing silver-haired man who walked with a slight limp approached and Jeremy introduced Meer and Fremont Brecht to each other.

  “I’m so sorry for the trouble you’ve had since arriving in Vienna,” Fremont apologized in a cultured, slightly accented voice. Regardless of his girth, he was extremely well groomed and dignified. He indicated a grouping of cordovan leather club chairs and they sat down. “Did you have any time to examine the gaming box before it was taken?” he asked her, not bothering with any small talk.

  “A few minutes.”

  “Was there anything that struck you as unusual in its appearance?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you have a reaction of any kind to it?”

  How many people had her father told about her affinity for the box? Who else besides Sebastian and Fremont? Had they all sat around playing a guessing game about whether or not it would trigger past life memories for her? She looked over at Jeremy but either he couldn’t read the accusation in her eyes or chose not to.

  “Everything happened too quickly,” she said to Fremont.

  He asked her something else but she wasn’t listening. The longer she sat there the worse she felt. Meer couldn’t get enough air in her lungs and she was so cold. Noting her discomfort, he stopped midsentence and apologized. “What’s wrong with me, this has been a trying morning for you, and here I am putting you on the stand and demanding you give me your testimony. Would you like some lunch?”

  “No, thank you—”

  “Coffee or tea?”

  “Tea, yes,” she said. Maybe having something hot to drink would help her stay centered.

  “And for you too, yes, Jeremy?” Fremont asked.

  “You look very troubled,” Jeremy said to Meer after Fremont left for the kitchen.

  Meer laughed sourly. “As if there’s no reason to be troubled? Please stop taking my emotional temperature, Dad.”

  Being here was so disturbing…the room was familiar but at the same time so many things were wrong. Like in Beethoven’s apartment, the lighting here was far too bright. And she couldn’t smell the paraffin or Cassia incense. Worst of all was the sadness and an ineffable longing that overwhelmed her. This was Caspar’s world.

  “Meer, tell me what’s happening.”

  She didn’t know how to explain, so she said nothing.

  “Forget the tea, you need some water right now.”

  Meer put her hand out, about to ask her father not to leave her alone, except she knew that would open her up to more questions and she didn’t have any answers. She let it flutter back into her lap. Whatever was happening, Malachai had taught her how to deal with it. Moving her fingers on an invisible keyboard in her lap she tried to play a complicated section of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” that had no emotional memory for her. Usually this exercise required so much concentration it broke any anxiety surge. But not this afternoon. Meer couldn’t stay with it because the other music demanded her attention and exacerbated her sadness. Old music…familiar music…and just when it seemed as if she might capture it finally…it flitted away, remaining just out of reach.

  “Here’s your tea,” Fremont said, offering her a steaming mug.

  Chapter 35

  Pasohlávky, Czech Republic

  Monday, April 28th—2:00 p.m.

  Finished filling up the rental car with petrol, David locked it and walked into the small store to get coffee. He needed to refuel, too. Stress kept him up most of every night—stress or nightmares—and by midafternoon he was always exhausted. The coffee was hot and bitter and, sitting in the car by the side of the highway, he drank it as if it was medicine. Something else that used to be enjoyable…now meaningless. When was the last time he felt real pleasure? Before the birthday party. Tasting blood, he realized he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.

  After he finished the coffee he opened the knapsack, pulled out the package wrapped in foil imprinted with birthday cakes, put it on the floor of the passenger seat and then slowly and methodically inspected the knapsack.

  He’d been cautious in arranging this buy but terrorist cells were not known for their honorable practices, and Paxton had been too smug. It only took him five minutes to discover a tracking device imbedded under the rubber tab on the end of the zipper like a small and vicious insect.

  Over the years, David had cultivated relationships with criminals, convicts and members of underground extremist networks on all sides of every issue. He’d ferreted out secrets, sharing relevant ones with the world, holding others in abeyance for the right story at the right time. On assignment with fellow reporters over beers in bars when they were all far from home and exhausted, they’d argue the question of whether a free press encouraged or discouraged crimes by making them public. Regardless, their job was to expose the truth and David had done that job well enough to have three Pulitzers to show for it. Getting those stories he’d often been at risk. But never like this.

  At least his arrangements to buy the Semtex were handled anonymously, which meant Paxton and his team at Global weren’t tracking David Yalom, but rather a delivery of Semtex to a man who’d used a false identity. So on one front he might still be safe. But there was still Abdul to consider. Had Hans Wassong told the Palestinian anything or had he been acting on his own with plans to collect the bounty after the act was done? David had expected that he might run into adversity on this journey but so far he might have underestimated who would deliver the most dangerous threats.

  An encroaching storm smudged the line that differentiated the hills from the horizon. The presence of a tracking device in the backpack suggested the absence of anyone in the near vicinity watching him. In such an isolated area, a tail would have been too easy to spot; the electronic trace was smarter.

  Leaving the backpack in the car, David grabbed his empty cup, got out of the car and walked toward a refuse bin. Just as he passed a parked navy sedan that had a map opened on the dashboard, he tripped and the cup went flying, the dregs of the coffee spilling. Bending over, David was hidden from sight for a few seconds. When he stood he was holding the coffee cup, which he pitched into the wire mesh can.

  Two minutes later he turned the key in the ignition on his rental car and pulled out of the lot and back onto the road. As he headed toward Vienna he imagined Paxton’s men glued to a ground-penetrating radar screen watching a blip of light, riveted by the indicator, so pleased with themselves that they had their target in sight.

  For the rest of the drive he checked his rearview mirror often to be certain no one was following him, almost wishing more than once that someone was and that they’d stop him and save him from the black bubbl
e of rage before it made its next appearance.

  Chapter 36

  Vienna, Austria

  Monday, April 28th—4:05 p.m.

  “It’s not an accident that Sigmund Freud coined the phrase ‘death mania’ while living in Vienna,” Jeremy told his daughter as they reached the gates of the Zentralfriedhof cemetery and he paused for a second, taking a deep breath before entering the city of the dead. “The Jewish section is this way.” He pointed into the distance. They’d come directly from the funeral service, which had been well-attended and heartbreaking.

  On both sides, the lane they walked down was bordered with fifteen-foot-tall arborvitae trees standing like feathery pyramids and through them Meer glimpsed the manicured lawns, sculptured monuments and the rising roofs of mausoleums. The air was rich with birdsong and the scent of evergreen. “This is a beautiful place,” she whispered, surprised.

  “Yes, quite different from other cemeteries in other countries, isn’t it? Vienna’s always had a preoccupation with death—dressing it up, writing music to it, commemorating it in art…there’s even a museum devoted to it.”

  “What’s in a museum devoted to death?”

  “Grave-digger tools, coffins, funeral sashes, urns. The art of the undertaker through the ages. One of my favorites is the life-saving bell that’s buried with you. If you find yourself being buried alive you can make sure your mourners hear you.

  “Here we are,” he said as he opened a rusty gate and she followed him into a rundown and overgrown area. Many of these tombstones had collapsed and fallen to rubble. Weeds overwhelmed whatever shrubbery had once been well tended. Compared to the rest of the cemetery, this was a slum.

  “Why is it like this here?”

  “There are several separate cemeteries sharing this one giant central space—Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox and Jewish. All but the Jewish section have received uninterrupted care from the children of the children of the children of the dead.” Jeremy stepped off the path to avoid pieces of a fallen tombstone. “Barely three thousand Austrian Jews even survived the war,” he continued, “and afterward none returned to Vienna. So for more than sixty years, no one’s been here to pay the rent on these graves or take care of them. Recently the government, partly in thanks to the effort Fremont Brecht’s made, has pledged to restore our cemetery. What he’s done for Austrian Jewry is astonishing. Fifteen years ago he was a well-respected public figure from a good Catholic family. And then he published a memoir called Our Secret History about Austria’s deep-seated anti-Semitism and his own hidden Jewish heritage.”

  “How did he hide being Jewish for so long?”

  “He didn’t know until then, until his father died and he found out his birth mother, a Jewess, had died in childbirth and his father had remarried a gentile widow four months later. If not for the second marriage that covered up the past so conveniently, Fremont might have been sent to the camps when he was a boy.”

  “What was the reaction when the book came out?”

  “It was a scandal. Shook a lot of people up. As he’d feared, there was a serious anti-Semitic reaction but it only made him more determined to work for Jewish reform, acceptance and restitution. And he has, tirelessly.”

  “But?”

  He looked at her, questioning.

  “You’re not saying something, Dad. I can hear it in your voice.”

  Jeremy shrugged again. “It’s a bone of contention between us. He believes keeping a contemporary and progressive face on modern Judaism is important in a country still accused of having anti-Semitic leanings.”

  “And you?”

  “I think he’s doing us a disservice. Our mysticism is an important and respected part of our religion.”

  They’d arrived at a cordoned-off plot where a recent grave had been dug but other than the gravediggers standing off to one side, smoking and waiting for the end of a service that had not even begun, no one was there. Jeremy spoke to them while Meer inspected the names and dates on decrepit stone markers nearby.

  “We’re too early,” he said when he came back. “I’m always too early to burials. Afraid to keep the dead waiting, I guess.” He looked around. “Come, we have time for me to show you where the great composers are and sculpture along the way. Maybe even some bird-watching. More than twenty-five species live here.”

  Soon they were out of the shambles and back into the extravagant landscaping. “An artist named André Heller called this place an aphrodisiac for necrophiles. Even for all its macabre attention, I think the way the Viennese deal with death is healthier than the way we deal with it in America,” Jeremy said. “There, they try to sanitize dying. Bury it, no pun intended, as if it’s something so dark and secretive it shouldn’t even be examined. Here in Vienna it’s the opposite. There’s even a term for a beautiful corpse—Schoene Leich. It’s an obsession that goes all the way back to the Hapsburgs and the crazy ideas they had about how to be interred. I’m afraid I’m being too morbid.”

  “You are, but what did the Hapsburgs do?”

  Jeremy gave his daughter a wry smile. “Some call it the divide-and-conquer burial strategy. Their bodies are entombed in the Imperial Crypt in Kapuzinergruft church. Their intestines are in urns in St. Stephens. And their hearts are interred in small silver jars in the Herzgruft.”

  “The heart crypt?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Their mummified hearts are there?”

  “Yes. It’s a tourist destination. Not one of the major ones, but it draws the curious. Did you read about it?”

  “I must have. Why are their intestines and their hearts separated from their bodies?”

  “It started in the early 1600s with an emperor, I think Ferdinand IV, who wanted to lay his heart at the feet of the mother of God—”

  “I’d like to see it,” she interrupted.

  “I might be able to get you in before it opens to the public tomorrow morning but I won’t be able to go with you.”

  “I’ll go by myself, it’s fine. You know, I’m all grown up now and don’t really need a babysitter.”

  “Actually, you do—two people are dead,” he whispered harshly. “Inspector Fiske doesn’t have a single lead. Serious professionals are at work here and they haven’t made any mistakes. At least none that the police have found. You have to promise me you won’t go anywhere alone.”

  Meer’s inclination was to argue, but she didn’t.

  “Maybe Sebastian can go with you. Or maybe I can rearrange the time of my meeting to be there. I’ll ask him. Maybe Malachai will want to go, too. Especially if I can arrange for a private visit.”

  “How many babysitters do I need?” She smiled.

  “No, I was just thinking that he’d like to see it.”

  On either side of them, taller evergreens cast dark, long shadows over them.

  “I didn’t know you spoke German,” Jeremy said after a long pause.

  “What? I don’t.”

  “You did this morning, when the fire alarm went off.”

  She shrugged. “I must have picked it up since I’ve been here.”

  “And on a whole block of buildings you knew exactly which one was the Society.”

  “How could I? I’ve never been here before.”

  “This time.”

  “Dad.” She spoke softly, making an effort to keep the rancor from her voice, not completely succeeding. “Let’s not have this conversation. Not here, not now.”

  “Sweetheart, you can’t keep pretending the—”

  “I’m not pretending. I’ve made a choice about how I want to live my life so we can skip the lecture about the wheel of souls and the angel of forgetfulness and the divine sparks of light and all the other mystical reincarnation theories from the Kabbalah. You and Malachai can talk about it when you see each other and I’m not in the room.” Even though she wasn’t as certain as she usually was, Meer had fallen back on the way she’d always responded to this argument, using half her own wor
ds and half her mother’s. It was the same fight she listened to her parents have when she was supposed to be asleep and they thought she couldn’t hear them. Meer wondered how exactly she’d paraphrased her mother because her father looked so disquieted.

  “Your mother made quite an impression on you, didn’t she?” he said. “I wish I could convince you that great peace comes with believing.”

  She was about to disagree but he stopped her. “No, you’re right. Not now. We should get back for the ceremony. If we take this path I can still show you what I brought you here to see.”

  The sound of their individual footsteps on the walkway marked the physical and emotional distance between them and they continued on in silence for a few hundred meters until they reached a small plot of grass with an iron grill in front of it. Surrounded by conical evergreens, the white obelisk reached skyward, simple and yet majestic. On the frontispiece was a one-word name in gothic black letters. The sorrow stabbed quickly as Meer realized she was looking at Beethoven’s gravestone. Her mouth was dry and so were her eyes, but she felt sad and hollow.

  Her father waited a few minutes and then said, “We should go now.”

  Passing stone markers as they walked back, Jeremy pointed out Johannes Brahms’ and then Franz Schubert’s resting places.

  As they passed the beautiful monuments to lives lived and people lost, Meer noticed the occasional bunch of flowers in front of a grave—usually at the resting place of someone famous. Her mother had once told her that a person never really died as long as someone still loved them.

  “All the great Austrians are buried here. Architects, politicians, artists, writers—quite a few Memorists here too. I think if we stay on this path we might pass…” Her father stopped at a monument of a male angel with beautifully detailed wings. “Yes, here it is.” The grief on the statue’s face was so genuine, Meer was riveted by him and the way his hand rested on the tombstone he guarded, as if it were a living being he loved, not an inanimate object.

  “Whose grave is this?” she asked.