by Peter Watson
I made no attempt to shake hands—no point in risking a rebuff. Softly, in a voice designed to sound relaxed and patient, I repeated myself. “I suppose you know why I am here.”
This time she did reply, but in a much harsher tone than I had hoped for. “Yes,” she hissed, hardly moving her jaws and in no way relaxing her frame. “You want my husband.”
I let a silence hang between us for a few moments. “No.”
She moved her head, surprised. I had given this exchange some thought.
“I have not the slightest interest in your husband. Or his whereabouts.” Again there was a silence between us, as I pretended to be the patient, unflappable type. I smiled and moved about the room, in another attempt to defrost the atmosphere. “My job is to recover some gold coins.”
I was now standing next to a radio—in those days they were much larger than now—wooden and elaborately carved, as this one was. It occurred to me that it was probably on this set that she listened to the concerts while Rudolf did the same, miles away, wherever he was. There was a photograph of the two of them with Dieter on the top of the radio. I moved my body so that her view of the photograph was blocked.
“I do not know where my husband is. I cannot help you find the coins. I told that to the other men who came.” Her voice was soft, yet deep, a tall person’s voice. The sound was drawn all the way up from her chest—like an actor’s, I thought to myself, remembering her father. It was a tutored voice in which the consonants rang out as clearly as the vowels. Funny that neither Bruno nor Rudolf had commented on her voice, for it was beautiful.
This was what Maurice, with his British taste for understatement, would have called the “tricky” moment. It always was, in any interrogation. The first exchange was over, each side’s position stated. It was unavoidable, but now I had to move things a stage further. Experience had taught me that it helped at this point to talk about other things. One had to be careful. The object was to get the other person to talk, so the subject matter could not be too threatening. It couldn’t be too obviously a complete change, either. That was unrealistic and just as intimidating. The most I could hope for at this early stage was that she should be intrigued by me and have some respect for me. It was, in its way, like a seduction.
I sat down. It was impolite, but it conveyed my intention to stay better than any words could. She looked at me with ill-concealed hatred.
I had not yet lit my pipe, so I took out some cigarettes. Mrs. von Zell might not allow smoking in this room but I knew from the letters that she liked Virginia tobacco, the milder the better, and that is what I had brought with me. I also knew that in Austria, in fact throughout Europe, good cigarettes were in short supply.
I offered her one. She didn’t move. But then she didn’t tell me not to smoke, so it occurred to me that she was more tempted than she let on. I left the pack on a table, open, and started to light my pipe. The blue smoke filled the room.
I knew that I would have to talk and that everything would depend on how successful my little speech was. Patiently, or at least with the semblance of patience, I made sure my pipe was properly on the go before I spoke again.
“I know a little bit about you, Mrs. von Zell, from our files. Not much, you understand, but a bit. And nowhere does it say how beautiful you are. If I had been the author of one of those reports, I would have put it in the first sentence. But I suppose”—I tried to make it a joke—“you would have been visited by many more interrogators, and they would not have sent me. This is my first time in Austria, so I am grateful to you.” I sucked contentedly on my pipe. The sweet smell floated about the room, like the smoke. Sunshine continued to pour in from the open door, behind where she stood.
There was method in what I was saying. She might have no relationship with me, no feeling beyond a general loathing for my uniform, but I was saying I was human, a person, and that I was not indifferent. She was a beautiful woman and I was grateful to her for bringing me to a beautiful country.
“I am German by birth, from Heidelberg. That explains my German. I emigrated from Hamburg to Italy in 1936. Then to America in 1938. Since 1940 I have been a professor of art history in California. So, for me, Austria has always been the country of baroque churches and lovely, lonely monasteries—Melk, Wilhering, St. Florian or Klosterneuburg. I haven’t seen anything yet, but I shall. It feels good to be back.
“I write to my mother—she is in Leipzig, separated from the rest of the family, and I am trying to bring her west—and I say that I am in Austria. ‘Tell me about the churches, Walter,’ she writes, for she is very religious, but so far I have not been able to report anything.”
I was establishing that I was a German, too, a European. It might do some good. Inside my uniform there was an individual, someone with a Christian name, a life outside the Army. I, too, was separated from loved ones and my mother, if not I, was a devout Catholic, like Konstanze.
“Soon, though, I will get a chance to see the monasteries and I shall write to my mother. The world is returning to normal. Most of our work recovering art treasures is complete. You are lucky—oh, I know you are separated from your husband, but you have a child, this home. I have been away now for four years. I have a new set of friends, people I would never have met except for the war. But I have no wife, no children. The war destroyed my marriage, though perhaps it was too fragile to last, war or no war. I had to leave for Europe before we had been married a year. I would no longer feel at home in my house, I am sure. I have not written an academic paper or given a lecture for so long that I am no doubt rusty. I can get cigarettes, the Army feeds me, but I can’t get the books I enjoy.
“Some of the new friends I have made, I have already lost, of course. That’s a curious thing about the war that I hadn’t expected. All the activity is interesting, not least for the fact that it introduces you to many new people. You are always moving around, making new friends—there are more people to care about during a war than there ever are in peacetime. Then a lot of them go off and die. Disappearing acts, as someone said. That’s the cruelest thing about war—not that it kills people, but that, because of the pressures, the unusual hours, the life-style, it produces a hothouse in which you make friends rapidly, in which people develop themselves in extraordinary ways that wouldn’t happen in peacetime, so that their deaths matter even more.”
I wasn’t talking about winners and losers, about Nazis and Allies. I was aligning myself with Konstanze, saying that we were all victims in war, whichever side we were on. That although I was here to interrogate her, maybe I had more problems than she did. She was still standing stiffly, but she was listening.
“The other thing that amazes me is how everyday life goes on. People continue, not just to work, but to have a good time. When I arrived in London in 1942, it was my birthday”—I was cheating shamelessly, making use of what I had found out in the letters—“January 27, the same as Mozart’s. Some friends had arranged a party for me at a club in Soho. I was tired from the flight—sixteen hours via Gander and Shannon—but I was determined to have a good time. Imagine my frustration, then, when for some unaccountable reason I was held up at immigration. At first it didn’t bother me that one official took his time scrutinizing my papers; there was a war on, after all. But he called in his superior. The two of them huddled, inspecting my documents, conferring. I didn’t like that. Then, to my utter astonishment, they called in the superior’s superior. All three of them examined the papers. I was itching to get on. My party was about to start and I was still eight miles from the center of London. However, from the way they all pointed their fingers there seemed to be something wrong with one particular detail in my documents. I had no idea what it could be and the people in line behind me were getting very impatient. Finally, after what seemed a terrible delay, all three officials came over to where I was standing. As you may imagine, I was by now a little angry, though my anger was mixed with nervousness. What was wrong?
“I was totally unpr
epared for what happened next. As one man, they burst out singing ‘Happy birthday, dear Walter, happy birthday to you.…’ They’d spotted my date of birth on my papers. Was I relieved!”
I was by no means certain that Mrs. von Zell found my story as amusing as I meant her to. She had yet to move. I hurried on.
“After the invasion I noticed that life went on normally in France and I expect it was true also of Germany. In fact, I was surprised to be told here that the Salzburg festival has been canceled. I was looking forward to that. I understand that Strauss’s new opera Die Liebe der Danae was in rehearsal in 1944, before the festival was abandoned, and I had rather hoped it might be revived.”
Now, I was cheating very badly. Insofar as I knew anything about music, I hated Strauss, yet here I was pretending to like him. More subtly, by referring to the festival, which was held in the summer, I was implying that I would be around that long, that I was not going away.
Still she said nothing.
“I see you have a music room here, Mrs. von Zell. I envy you. I don’t play, though I did start to learn the oboe when I was a boy. My brother, however, is a really good pianist—Chopin, Schubert, Haydn—he can play beautifully. It’s strange, but music is the only thing he and I have in common. In all other things we are so different. He is three years younger than I and, where I am tall, he is short. I am dark, he is fair. At school I was always interested in art and architecture, the countryside and literature. He was keen on science, math, sports. I was interested in travel, in other countries. He was a German and Germany was his love. I was interested in history but the present and the future were everything to him. Sometimes I think that’s what brothers—families—are for. If I’d been an only child I could have been interested in anything I chose, and, as a result, my personality might have been so vague I would never have chosen a career and just drifted. But with us being so different—and of course we became determined to be different from each other—we came to represent each other’s opposite. When I left Heidelberg I went to study with the great Erwin Panofsky in Hamburg. He was one of the most famous art historians of his time and, for me, it was a great honor. But of course he was Jewish. We could see what was beginning to happen, though never in our wildest dreams did we imagine what would come to pass.
“In ’36, however, Panofsky thought it was too risky for him to go on teaching. I was disturbed but still very young. I asked him what I should do. He asked me if I wanted to stay in Germany and I told him I didn’t care. Within a fortnight he had arranged for me to study with Bernard Berenson in Italy.
“That is how I came to leave Germany. In 1938 things got so bad in Italy that I left for the United States.
“But I was talking about brothers, and whether we become what we are because other people in our families are something else. Who can say? But I do know that after I left Germany to study in Italy, my brother, already a scientist, embraced the present at home by joining the Nazis.
“We have fought this war on opposite sides. Think what that means for my—our—mother. Maybe one son would shoot the other, either wittingly or unwittingly. As it happens, my work has always been in intelligence and I have not fired my gun except on the practice range, but Mother could not know that. For six years I have heard nothing from my brother. And, since my mother lives in the eastern sector of Germany now, I have heard only infrequently and inadequately from her. As I mentioned, I am trying to bring her west but I don’t know if I will succeed.
“But, and this may sound strange after what I’ve said, I miss my brother. It’s true. I would love to have a brother again. With friends, even with husbands and wives, a certain equality must be established, otherwise the relationship can’t last. That equality is by no means easy to achieve and often it is impossible. But with a brother, or a sister for that matter, equality is imposed. My mother never had a favorite, and even though Martin and I are very different, to her we are equals. I would love to see him again.”
I stood up. She remained where she was, but her eyes followed my movements as I walked across the room and stood by the open door looking out. “Why am I telling you this?” I turned and relit my pipe, which had gone out as I talked. “Music, that was it. I don’t really have a favorite composer but I like Bruckner a lot. Mother’s favorite is Schubert. Martin, being a modern, went for Strauss. Very German, he said. What about you, Mrs. von Zell, are you a Strauss fan?”
It was the gamble I had to take at some point. I had talked at length about myself, deliberately, to show that I was a German, that I shared with her the problems of separation, that I had a family life, with its riches and its problems. But I had also tried to make my conversation as interesting as possible. I gambled that, since Rudolf had stopped writing to her, Konstanze had been starved of proper companionship, tucked away as she was with just her son and the housekeeper. In the later letters, the ones she had not posted, only local matters or family affairs were discussed; the old housekeeper could hardly be an emotional or an intellectual equal. I had lied about my brother’s favorite composer; he preferred Beethoven but that wasn’t the point. Konstanze had contact with Strauss; Strauss had been involved at one time with the Nazis. For me to have talked only about music in the abstract would have been too bland. Introducing Strauss brought things back to the present, to the very room we were in. I had established, or tried to establish, a link between myself and Konstanze. What I hoped would be the beginning of a relationship.
She didn’t answer. Maybe Strauss was too direct, too close to her. Too close to the Nazi issue. I tried again.
“You have a piano here, Mrs. von Zell. A music room. I take it you play. Who are your favorite composers?”
She appeared to consider this. I could see her thinking to herself, What kind of interrogation is this? All he wants is what the others wanted, to know Rudolf’s whereabouts. Yet, at the same time, he’s different from the others; none of them took this line.
She examined my question from every angle and decided she was giving nothing away if she answered. That was a mistake. After all, that’s why I had asked the question in the first place; because it wasn’t threatening and carried no risk.
“Schubert, like your mother; Strauss, like your brother; Bruckner, like you; Mozart, like everybody.”
“Why?” I said it softly but quickly to keep her talking.
She shrugged. “It would take too long.” She was telling me to keep away, that I had no right to probe. It was her business. “Let’s just say they made the nights of the war bearable.”
“But why Bruckner?” I wasn’t put off so easily. “I’ve never met anyone before who said that Bruckner was a favorite composer.” Maybe she would notice my use of the word “never” and wonder whether I used it lightly or took it as seriously as she.
“Bruckner was a silly old man, always falling for girls young enough to be his granddaughter, but his organ music is magnificent. Only a man who has never been loved by a woman could write music that is so beautiful and yet so angry, so loud and yet so lonely. I play the organ at the church in the village. I know just how different Bruckner’s music is from anyone else’s.”
Splendid. I was, I thought, doing rather well. This was quite an exchange, considering it was our first encounter and after such a difficult beginning. Perhaps she was feeling guilty for having spat on me.
“I suppose that if Hitler had built a Bruckner center in Linz, as he planned, it is one thing the whole world would have thanked him for.”
Did the look in her eyes take on a more cutting glint? She nodded, but noncommittally. She wasn’t going to approve or disapprove of anything Hitler had done, or not done, not in front of a stranger in an American uniform.
I moved across to the fireplace and reached for the cigarettes I had left on the table. I offered the pack to her again. She refused, but for the first time her gaze left my face and followed my hand as it replaced the cigarettes. I let my hand rest on the pack for a moment, then picked it up again. I held
it out once more, this time taking a step forward so that I was now physically closer to her than before. I remember noticing that her ears were pierced.
“These are very mild,” I said. “Pure Virginia. I hope you like mild cigarettes. Please have one.”
She hesitated, uncertain that such an act of collaboration was not treason. Then, with a quick gesture, she took one from the pack. She insisted on lighting it for herself but this meant she had to move forward, to take the matches from my hand. The door, which she had been holding open, clanged shut behind her, plunging the room into what, by comparison with the sunshine that had gone before, seemed like soupy gloom. The movement, the change in light, and the scraping noise of the match on the box eased the tension between us. Not that she was friendly yet. She was still hostile, but in a different way. It was as if her policy of silence, or utter noncooperation, had been superseded by a determination on her part not to be outwitted in whatever game it was that I was playing. At last I had an opponent.
All of this meant that I was ahead. I had made an impact of sorts on her. It didn’t matter what it was. What mattered was that I had proved myself to be more than a hated figure in a uniform. It was as much as I could reasonably hope for a first meeting. Time to quit. I had noticed, as she lit her cigarette, that some extremely appetizing smells were sliding under the door from the direction of the kitchen. No doubt a few of those big brown eggs were going into an omelet of some sort. I recalled that in the letters omelets had emerged as one of Konstanze’s favorite things. Nothing, just then, could have given me greater pleasure than a fresh omelet eaten in the company of such a beautiful woman. But I wasn’t going to be asked and, in any case, now was the right time to leave. If I left of my own accord, it would be easier to come back again.
