The Silence vm-3

by J Sydney Jones

  ‘I told you so,’ Fraulein Wittgenstein said as she closed the door behind them. ‘Hans kept to himself.’ A beat. ‘Keeps to himself,’ she corrected.

  Of the younger brothers, Werthen was only able to speak with Ludwig, for Paul was at a piano lesson with the well-known blind composer and pianist, Joseph Labor. Ludwig, or Luki, was in his room on the same floor — all the children had their own rooms, spacious enough for sleeping and work space. The somewhat chubby youngster was dressed in a navy suit and short pants and was busy at a woodworking table when Werthen and Hermine entered.

  ‘About finished?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the ten-year-old bubbled. ‘And it is going to work, you’ll see.’

  ‘I am sure it will.’ His older sister beamed at him. Then to Werthen, ‘He’s making an exact copy of a Singer sewing machine. In wood.’

  ‘A working copy,’ the boy emphasized.

  There was a tapping at the door. Meier was standing outside the room when Hermine opened the door.

  ‘There you are, Fraulein,’ the servant said, sounding relieved. ‘It’s your mother. She’s been asking for you. I think she needs more drops.’

  Hermine Wittgenstein seemed upset by this at first, but quickly covered her irritation.

  ‘I will be back shortly, Advokat. And Luki, see if you can help this gentleman track down your wandering brother Hans.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ Ludwig said earnestly to her retreating back.

  ‘You’re an engineer, then,’ Werthen said once the sister was gone.

  ‘Like my father,’ the boy said. ‘The others play music. I build. Well, that’s not exactly true. Gretl is quite pitiful at the piano. Mother is always telling her how she has no sense of rhythm at all.’

  ‘No instruments for you, then?’ Werthen took a liking to the boy, obviously intelligent but not obnoxiously precocious.

  ‘I play around with the violin, but no, not really. Not like Hans or Paul. They have real talent. Hans could play the violin and piano when he was still a toddler. By four he was composing. Me, I could still barely speak when I was four.’

  He stated this astounding fact with a real sense of pride.

  ‘Maybe you did not have anything to say.’

  Ludwig smiled brightly. ‘That’s exactly what Mining says. Father calls her a brick. What do you think, Advokat?’

  ‘Solid as the Parthenon.’

  ‘Yes.’ The boy affixed one last piece of wood to his model, and then wound up a spring. Soon the contraption was humming along like an actual sewing machine.

  ‘See. I told you. A working model.’

  ‘Can you help me at all about your brother?’

  Ludwig looked up from his masterpiece and shook his head. ‘I wish I could. I miss him.’ The spring wore down and the machine stopped.

  ‘Did he ever mention having a room somewhere?’

  ‘His room is here,’ the young boy said. ‘He was a child prodigy, you know. Another Mozart. All the teachers said so. But Father wants him to go into the business. Father usually gets his way.’

  Suddenly the young boy looked intently at Werthen: ‘I do not think Vati will demand my assistance in the company, do you, Advokat Werthen?’ And then, without waiting for an answer, ‘You really must find him. Hans is the best of us. He is special. And different. In many ways.’

  Hermine Wittgenstein returned at that moment, reminding Luki it was time for his Latin lesson. The boy rolled his eyes, demonstrated his model for her, and then was off to the schoolroom.

  Leaving the boy’s room, Werthen had Fraulein Wittgenstein give him the business address and phone number of brother Kurt, as well as a description of the missing man: about five foot ten inches and one hundred and fifty pounds. Dark hair, brown eyes, clean shaven and close-cropped hair, which had recently become the mode for the artistic types. They descended the main staircase and after much prodding, Hermine went to a sitting room and removed a framed photograph from an end table. It was a recent photograph of Hans, decked out in summer white linen, from a family portrait taken the previous August at their Neuwaldeggergasse villa. Back row, third from the right.

  Hans was most definitely not a carbon copy of his bullish father; instead, he had the ascetic look of a monk on his face. He was staring off into the distance as the other members of the family were saying ‘bitte’ into the camera.

  ‘I would like the photograph returned when you are finished,’ Fraulein Wittgenstein said without emotion. Then, as Werthen was about to leave, ‘I suppose you will need it at the city morgue. For identification purposes.’

  ‘It hasn’t come to that yet,’ he said. A half-lie. ‘It helps to have visual identification when interviewing people. A name means little to people, a face much more.’

  Then, after a quick salutation from Fraulein Hermine and an admonition to please find her brother ‘for mother’s sake,’ Werthen was on his way.

  Out on the street, it had warmed even more and the snow had almost completely melted, making for a slushy and quite miserable walk. As he picked his way along the sidewalk he thought of the youngest brother, Ludwig, and his final comment about his brother Hans being different in many ways.

  It was a strange comment, Werthen thought, and piqued his curiosity about the missing Wittgenstein. After not speaking for the first four years of his life, young Ludwig obviously picked his words carefully.

  So Hans was not simply different because of his musical skill and dreams, his desire to be an artist in a family of business people. Different how?

  Five

  Werthen was unsure of his next move. There were several avenues of investigation open to him. As Fraulein Wittgenstein suggested, he would need to check at the city morgue in the cellar of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, Vienna’s General Hospital, to find a likely candidate for the corpse of Hans Wittgenstein, possible victim of an accident, suicide, or homicide. Or he could pay a visit to the Wittgenstein office on Kolowatring to speak with brother Kurt. A third possibility was a meeting with the director of the Theresianum.

  According to Herr Wittgenstein, Hans had fallen into bad company at that exclusive school. If he had made friendships, they would carry on throughout his life, for that was the way of the exclusive Theresianum. Its alumni continued to use the familiar du form with one another, even if one had become a minor bureaucrat and the other a Finance Minister. Though Hans had not graduated, he had spent two years at the place, long enough to forge friendships that lasted. Long enough perhaps to have a friend who might give Hans Wittgenstein a refuge, a home away from home.

  As he was only a block or two away from the Theresianum, Werthen decided to start there. He headed down the Alleegasse, away from the center of the city for one block, and then turned on to Taubstummengasse to its intersection with the busy Favoritenstrasse, where he turned right. He walked about a hundred meters along the immense three-story classicist front of the old Favorita to its main entrance. The Favorita was a former imperial summer palace converted in 1746 into a school. Werthen knew that the Jesuits were at first put in charge of the pedagogy, later to be replaced by the other Catholic teaching order, the Piaristen, the Pious Ones. Reforms in the 1850s put the educational system under state control and for the most part replaced clerics with professors, each trained in an area of specialization.

  As he entered the portals of the school, a priest in black cassock with a cincture or sash around the waist scurried through the entrance past him, books hugged to his chest. Werthen had not seen him on the street; it was as if the priest had appeared out of nowhere and was headed like the rabbit in Alice’s tale to some mysterious destination. The black cassock always gave Werthen a faint chill, just as did the long payot or side locks of the Hasidic Jews one saw in the Second District. Both so strange to the secular Werthen, bespeaking a life not just foreign, but otherworldly.

  Obviously not all the priests had been replaced at the Theresianum.

  The weather may have warmed up, but still i
t was chill enough to necessitate a coat. This priest seemed, however, in too much of a hurry to bother with such earthly necessities as winter apparel. Even his head was bare, his long hair ruffled in the morning breeze.

  A sudden sweet smell of water was carried on the breeze, and made Werthen involuntarily smile as he proceeded through the gateway to the inevitable Portier’s booth. Through the other end of the arched entryway, Werthen saw rolling lawns under a mantle of melting snow and more ochre buildings, all part of the former summer estate. A flagpole in the central lawn bore a flag with a Habsburg eagle hanging at half-mast.

  ‘You have an appointment, sir?’ the aged Portier asked Werthen, bringing him out of his momentary reverie.

  Werthen turned toward the old man, looking at a face covered with age spots, at eyes rheumy and squinting.

  ‘I would like to speak with the director.’

  The old man squinted even harder. He was wearing a blue uniform with red piping and brass buttons with a high rough collar. A patch of eczema showed under his Adam’s apple.

  ‘No appointment?’

  ‘No,’ Werthen said, quickly improvising. ‘But I was hoping to make an endowment to the school. You do take endowments, no?’

  This got the fellow hopping. He peered out of his glass cage and saw a young apple-cheeked student hurrying to class.

  ‘You there, Trautman,’ he called out to the blue-uniformed student through his window.

  The boy stopped and turned reluctantly toward the Portier.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Go see the headmaster. Tell him we have a visitor who wishes to make an endowment.’

  ‘But I have Greek seminar now.’

  ‘Do as I say, Trautman. Time for Greek later. An endowment, remember.’

  The boy turned on his heels and headed to a staircase just past the old man’s lodge.

  It took the youth only a few minutes to deliver the message and return in a clatter of footsteps down the stone stairs and over the cobbled entryway.

  ‘Master says to send the gentleman up,’ he said through gasps of breath.

  The Portier nodded at the boy, who did not move for a moment.

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for, boy? Off with you. You’ve got lessons. And don’t be late again.’

  The old man was such an exact replica of the Portier at Werthen’s Gymnasium that it took him back to his own school days. Koller was that man’s name, and as he always reeked of garlic from his favored type of wurst, everyone called him Knoblauch.

  ‘Herr Doktor von Dohani is waiting, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ Werthen said, shaking off the memory. ‘The staircase here, I assume?’

  He indicated the one that the boy Trautman had used.

  ‘Top of the stairs, to your left,’ the Portier said.

  ‘Tell me,’ Werthen said on sudden impulse. ‘Do they have a Spitzname for you?’

  ‘This is the Theresianum, sir. Nicknames are for the other academies.’

  ‘To be sure,’ Werthen said, trying to conjure what the students here might be calling him. ‘Old Spotty’ came to mind, or ‘Weepy,’ perhaps.

  On his way up the stairs Werthen tried to determine how he was going to explain his ruse to the disappointed Herr Doktor von Dohani. In the event, it was not necessary, for the director, a portly man with a halo of ginger hair and nose as purple as a plum, seemed to mistake Werthen for one of his students’ fathers.

  Werthen courteously explained as he sat in a leather club chair rather out of place with the rococo decoration of the office. Von Dohani sat opposite him, a slice of shiny ivory skin showing beneath his gray serge trousers. Werthen introduced himself and his legal profession. ‘It’s about the Wittgenstein boy.’

  ‘Wittgenstein,’ the director repeated, peering up at the gilt work on the white ceiling in an attempt at recollection. ‘I know the name, of course, but I am not aware we have one of the children as a student here.’

  ‘Had,’ Werthen said. ‘I was hoping you might be able to direct me to a prefect who knew him when he was here, about three years ago. Hans Wittgenstein is the name.’

  ‘Well, I am not quite sure I recall that name. I was here three years ago, of course. But we have so many boys.’

  ‘He was a day student.’

  Von Dohani’s lips mouthed a silent ‘Oh,’ as if that explained it all. He nodded his head in understanding. Not a noble student, then.

  ‘That will fall under the purview of Mickelsburg. He makes a special project of the day boys. Not exactly a prefect, mind you, as the day students have no need of one. An advisor of sorts.’

  ‘Might one speak with Herr Mickelsburg?’

  ‘Is there some difficulty? I mean, you are an Advokat after all.’

  Werthen smiled reassuringly. ‘No. No difficulty. Just checking references.’

  Another understanding nod of the head from von Dohani. The director rose from the chair, crossed to his desk and checked a large chart that occupied one corner.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ he said brightly. ‘You’ll find him in the masters’ lounge for his tea.’

  Werthen took the directions to the lounge. As he was leaving, he overheard von Dohani speaking to his male secretary:

  ‘You can send up that chap about the endowment now.’

  Werthen went back down the stairs and out into the central yard quickly, hoping to avoid notice by the Portier. He crossed the yard to a somber little building tucked under a copse of bare horse chestnut trees. This looked to be a former carriage house converted into a lounge for the professors. The door entered directly into one large salon, part library and part dining hall, whose walls were covered in floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases stocked with uniform titles bound in leather. By the tidy looks of the volumes — everything from the works of Herodotus to Kant — none of the tomes had been recently excavated from their positions on the shelves.

  An elderly man sat at a table near the door, professorial-looking if ever Werthen had seen a professor: thickly bearded, rimless glasses, rumpled suit, his concentration fixed upon the print of the thick book spread out before him on the table.

  Werthen approached silently, standing in front of the man for a moment before clearing his throat.

  ‘Herr Professor Mickelsburg?’ he asked in a near whisper.

  The man did not look up immediately, so immersed was he in his reading. Then he suddenly noticed Werthen standing in front of him and put body and question together.

  ‘Mickelsburg? No, heavens no. That’s him over there. And it is Father Mickelsburg, not Professor. Teaches mumbo-jumbo.’

  He was indicating a youngish man seated at a table in the far corner of the room. Werthen was surprised to note it was the priest who had hustled past him at the entryway.

  He thanked the nameless pedant, but the man was already back to his book, and merely grunted in reply. The professor had lifted the book as if to cover his face. It was a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

  This time Werthen was less timid as he addressed the young man in the corner.

  ‘Sorry to bother you during your tea, Father Mickelsburg.’ The priest had a half-eaten piece of Apfelstrudel in front of him next to a large glass of buttermilk. ‘Herr Doktor von Dohani suggested I speak with you.’

  The priest looked up with large, curious eyes. ‘About?’

  ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Please. Forgive my bad manners. I was just eviscerating this bit of pastry.’

  Werthen introduced himself and asked, ‘What can you tell me about Hans Wittgenstein?’

  This seemed to amuse Mickelsburg. ‘The abbreviated or long version?’

  ‘Whatever you can tell me.’

  ‘Has he got himself into trouble then?’

  ‘Not trouble. I am just doing some reference checking.’

  ‘For employment? I assumed he was going — kicking and screaming mind you — into his father’s business.’

  ‘It is complicated,’ Werthen said. />
  ‘I have the feeling, Advokat, that you are not being quite honest with me. I am young, but I have developed a sixth sense for artifice. Priests and lawyers. We both deal with the lies of men.’

  Werthen took a liking to the priest and felt that he could trust him.

  ‘You’re right. I was hired by Herr Karl Wittgenstein to find his son. I came here hoping to find out if Hans formed any friendships while a student here, someone with whom he might still be friends.’

  ‘Ergo, someplace that he might be hiding now?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I didn’t think he would be able to last long as a man of business.’ Mickelsburg drank his buttermilk off in one long swallow, and came up for air with a yellowish moustache. Werthen tapped his own upper lip, and the priest dabbed the residue with a napkin.

  ‘Was there such a friend?’

  ‘Hans was a unique young man even when a student here. He can play the piano with extreme felicity. Did Herr Wittgenstein tell you that?’

  ‘I have become aware of the fact. There seems to be a bit of competition for his soul.’

  Father Mickelsburg smiled at this. ‘For his earthly ambitions, perhaps. I am not so sure about his soul. I was an advisor to him here, especially when he began to run into trouble academically. He did not take Greek and Latin quite as seriously as his instructors would have wanted. But he could make you weep with his interpretation of the “Emperor” Concerto. He was a most unique young man.’

  ‘You have said that twice. What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘You will discover that for yourself when you find him.’

  ‘So you do not believe he has done himself harm?’

  ‘Is he capable of suicide, do you mean?’ The priest sniffed at the word as if it were a nasty smell. ‘One never knows, does one? You see our flag outside, I assume.’

  ‘Yes. I was wondering. .’

  ‘In memory of one of our illustrious alumni. He took his own life rather than face public scandal. One would hardly credit him with such a sense of drama as to end his own life.’