The Silent Children

by Amna K. Boheim

  ‘Fräulein Annabel, you mustn’t.’ Maria moves the notebook away and brings Annabel into her arms, hugging her like Eva used to.

  And more tears flow as Annabel’s and Maria’s bodies echo the sadness tolling around them.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Although Vivienne was doing her best to move on from my mother’s death, she continued to mourn in her own way. That evening, back at her home, she put on Verdi’s Messa da Requiem from beginning to end, insisting on listening to ‘Agnus Dei’ three times. Away from the backdrop of my mother’s funeral, in the comfort of Vivienne’s living room, I found it beautiful. Until then, I wasn’t familiar with the piece. I had never really taken to classical music or opera, even though Vivienne had tried her best with me over the years. This movement, however, with the haunting rise and fall of its melody, the lullaby duet of the soprano and mezzo soprano, and the way in which the choir and orchestra floated towards its gentle end, for me at least, removed any sense of God or piety from the prayer, turning it instead into a piece of poetry. And for a while, it drew me away from everything that had happened.

  Vivienne didn’t raise the subject of Young Gerber and the words written inside the book, nor did she talk about what had happened in the attic. She probably wanted to have a few hours without thinking about the break-in and the wrecked state of the house. She skilfully avoided the topic, swiftly introducing another subject when the last one came to an end. As a result, our discussion spanned politics, authors, art and technology. She had bought herself a computer and decided to enrol on a course to learn to navigate the Internet. I admired her determination to constantly challenge herself, to shun the temptation to live in the past. She filled her calendar with social activities and her work at the Albertina, wanting to keep her life and mind active. Perhaps my mother’s passing had reinforced that desire – to continue to seize every opportunity to live, and to push herself, spurred on by the thought that time was never on your side.

  She told me about a tour she was giving for a class of seven-year-olds at the museum the following day. She enjoyed working with the young ones the most, taking care to select works of art that enabled her to tell the most colourful stories and histories.

  ‘You should come along,’ she said.

  I laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘I’m being quite serious. It’ll do you good to get out and about.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ It was as if she wanted to look out for me, like a guardian angel. It wasn’t that she was smothering me. She knew better than that. Perhaps she did sense something unsettling and wanted to stop me from wallowing.

  Later that night I lay in Vivienne’s spare bedroom thinking through everything that had happened thus far. The first night in my mother’s house, the French windows thrown wide open: fact. The slip of shadows, the sensation of someone next to me, the reflection in the window: fiction – the stuff of Hollywood films. The second night in the house, the broken photograph: fact. The cellar, the lights flickering on and off: fact – the aged wiring was no doubt a factor, as attested by the lighting in the hallway. The image of the girl: fiction – a trick of the light, a product of my fatigue. Where I thought I had placed the photograph as opposed to where it ended up: fiction – exhaustion had fogged my mind. What the taxi driver had seen: fiction – doubtful. I really didn’t want to think about how Zoran had played me. The attic, the footsteps, the crying, the image of the child: fiction – my senses were simply heightened, as Vivienne put it. I stopped. It struck me that I was fulfilling some sort of confirmation bias and I wondered whether it made sense to carry on. But then I had no other way to frame my experiences, so I continued.

  I turned to the photograph. The words on the back: fact. That Oskar withheld something: fact – at least I thought so. The book, Young Gerber, and the pages selected to scrawl the message, the same page where I had left off: fact. The words, O kneels, rats die: fact. That the message carried a meaning I could only presume, but what exactly, I had no idea. Whether one of the thieves wrote it … No, that was impossible. They couldn’t have written it, just like they couldn’t have written the message on the back of the photograph. I visualised the handwriting on the reverse of the image. The same. Fact, fact, fact. I wished I had it to hand. In frustration, I kicked back my quilt and got out of bed. Apart from the writing, everything else could be explained away. While I paced my room, I thought back to Oskar and the things he had said. He held the missing link to my own sanity and I needed a way to reach out to him without it appearing like I was haranguing him. My eyes fell on the notebook lying atop my clothes piled at the end of the bed. Maybe it contained something I could share with Oskar.

  I sat back down on the bed and weighed it in my hands, considering the possible contents – the excerpts from my mother’s childhood, the parts that were unknown to me. I wanted it to evoke a different image of my mother. I wanted to see glimmers of the person Vivienne knew and loved. I slid out the news articles and put them on the bedside table. Running my fingers along the notebook’s edge, I opened it up.

  Written in pencil, in careful sloping handwriting, was my mother’s name in full, Annabel Maria Konstantina Albrecht, and the date: 1st January, 1938, followed by the words, A Christmas gift from Papa. A pencil drawing of a boy and a girl graced the first page. Above their heads, also written in pencil, was the inscription, A&O. I smiled to myself. There was an innocence to it, in the childlike lines, the faces, the stretched grins. This had to be a picture of my mother with Oskar. I could certainly show this to him. I flicked through the rest of the notebook. Much of it was intact, although a few pages had been torn out, the serrated edges at the spine the only evidence of their previous existence. I went back to the beginning and started again, more slowly this time. The subjects she had drawn ranged from people and faces to everyday objects – animals, trees and flowers. A melange of images and words peppered single pages, while standalone studies dominated others. On some pages there was just writing. On closer inspection, they were more like sporadic diary entries, short and to the point. Some entries followed in quick succession; others were separated by a gap of several weeks or, in some cases, months. All of them were written in 1938. In one, she made reference to a person called E:

  18th March, 1938.

  I went down to the kitchens. Fritz gave me a piece of cake and told me not to tell Maria. I asked him about E. I had asked him so many times before, but he never answered my questions. This time he told me Papa had found her a position in Salzburg. He said they needed her most urgently. I asked Mama about it too and she said that it was a good job – Papa had arranged it. She said that I should be happy for her. I try to be, but I wish we had said goodbye.

  In another, she had referred to someone I could only assume was Oskar:

  16th April, 1938.

  O left in the middle of the night. I’m very sad. I told Mama that I was feeling quite poorly. She felt my forehead and told Maria to keep me in bed.

  It appeared, then, that she and Oskar had been quite close as children. Had she later forgotten him, just as he had forgotten her?

  Other entries hinted at her early involvement in The Albrecht Trust:

  15th July, 1938.

  Today I went on my weekly trip to the orphanage with Mama. I heard Mama tell Frau Werner that that little moustachioed Nazi would certainly not be shutting down the Trust. Afterwards we bought some cakes at Demel.

  And some were quite amusing:

  28th September, 1938.

  Herr Adler came today. He insisted on embracing me. I told Mama that he smells. She became quite cross and told me that he was leaving too.

  The drawings and diary entries from that first year continued in their haphazard way, the sketches evolving into something that one could apply the term ‘talent’ to. Maturity and confidence transcended her lines, shadings, proportions and angles. Vivienne had referred to this skill of my mother’s, but I’d seen little evidence of it up until now. I studied h
er work, hovering my finger over her pencil and charcoal marks, and her drawings kindled my new-found respect for her.

  After 1938, the diary entries ceased – perhaps my mother grew bored of recording her daily life, maybe she found other distractions, or possibly she simply misplaced the notebook and found it by chance in a forgotten place. Some of her later pictures were dated, others weren’t. What was more notable, however, was the intensity of her sketches. One that stood out was dated 13th February, 1944. She had employed a darker pencil. Vertical and horizontal lines ran along the border of the page. Vicious in their strokes, the pressure of her pencil had penetrated the paper so that in places, rips appeared where she had forced her pencil to a halt. She had drawn a landscape, capturing the sky in a series of dark diagonal lines. A tree stood in the centre, naked without its leaves, its bark gnarled with knots. And beside it, the outline of a girl: a crude image, with the head and body drawn out of proportion. It seemed to rebel against her developing skill. Underneath my mother had written:

  Run.

  Away. Away.

  Quietly now. Quietly.

  Eyes closed. Mouth sealed.

  I examined the picture, juxtaposed with my mother’s words. Leafing through the notebook, I found similar drawings and musings of a girl entering the world of adolescence with all its insecurities, made worse by the hardships of war: smouldering rubble, stick-men soldiers, weeping children, ragged Jews, a star of David with a swastika emblazoned in its centre.

  Directly after this piece were two sketches of the same subject, each filling a single page. I recognised the image she had copied: it was the Schiele that hung in the drawing room. No month or year had been assigned to the first drawing. She had changed the faces of the three individuals and had drawn the child on the left as much older, still perched on her mother’s lap, but with longer hair and wearing a dress, staring directly at the other child. I turned my attention to the picture of the mother: I recognised her as my own grandmother by the slope of her nose, that determined jaw I’d seen in photographs. Her eyes, like the original, were cast down, but looked directly at the infant she cradled. The baby in this drawing differed markedly from the original painting: his eyes were closed, as was his mouth; his head lolled back and his body lay limp in his mother’s arms. Underneath his image was the word, tot – dead. It was quite a crude way for my mother to record the death of her brother, Thaddäus. Apparently he had died before he was six months old. As I understood it, the event had proved too much for my grandmother: it had tipped her into a breakdown from which she never recovered. My grandfather sent her to a sanatorium in Switzerland where she later passed away.

  I then turned to the second rendition of the Schiele. The younger child remained unchanged from the first version. The image of the girl, however, was nothing more than a faint outline – an empty shell – positioned slightly behind and to the side of the matriarch. The mother’s face was also just an outline. But by her feet, my mother had drawn the body of a man, his arms splayed out, one leg curled up under the other and his head contorted, twisting in the direction of the observer. His eyes were stretched wide, revealing nothing but their whites. Underneath his body was the date, 10th July 1944: the day my grandfather passed away. At the bottom of the page, my mother had written:

  Love, anger,

  Shame.

  Be gone.

  I didn’t know what to make of the picture – or the words for that matter. A few moments later, I returned to it, scanning the pages, the sketches. I wanted Vivienne’s perspective of the time my grandfather passed away. All I knew was that he had died of a heart attack. And while I had a vague idea of who Fritz and Maria were, there were other things – like the reference to E – where I drew a blank.

  I placed the notebook on the bedside table, disturbing the newspaper cut-outs. I picked one up. It reported the discovery of a murdered child, Elena Markovic. She was sixteen years old and had been under the care of the orphanage. Some railway workers discovered her body, barely clothed, alongside a disused section of railway. She had been strangled and her hands and feet had been bound. I looked at the number scribbled above her name in the article: 36. I looked at the other two articles. They, too, reported the discovery of murdered children: Josef Frank, aged fifteen, and Christine Hintze, aged twelve. They were also said to have come from the orphanage, both alleged to have run away. A farm labourer came across Christine Hintze’s body in grassland close to the border with Hungary. According to the article, he had been arrested and charged with her murder, but he had hanged himself while in police custody. Josef Frank’s body was found in the woodland neighbouring my mother’s house. I sat up. I had no idea that any of this had happened.

  As I reread the newspaper clippings, I realised there was a pattern to the murders: all three had been strangled; all three were found in the same semi-undressed state; all three had been in the care of The Albrecht Trust. The news stories referenced my grandparents, their sorrow and their offer of a reward to find the culprit. In the article covering Elena Markovic, my grandparents’ photograph shared centre stage with a grainy image of the girl.

  I wondered if Vivienne knew anything about the disappearances, whether the E in my mother’s diary referred to this Elena Markovic, and whether my grandparents had tried to protect their daughter by keeping the story hidden from her. I pictured my mother as a curious girl faced with the whirl of people leaving her life, people that she cared for. I tried to imagine how I would feel. I thought about the people that had left my life: my father, my brother, Chanoo, people that I barely remembered. Did I miss them for long, or did I just carry on with my life? That part was a blur, and I wondered if that was just a child’s way of coping, of attempting to erase the past.

  The following day I called my boss. I was due to travel to New York for a series of meetings. Given the most recent events at the house, I needed to take some time off again.

  He laughed out loud. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I feel like a school kid explaining why I’ve bunked off.’

  ‘The next thing you’ll tell me,’ he said, ‘is that your house burnt down.’ He laughed again. ‘Don’t worry.’ He paused, and I knew what was coming. ‘You’re in line to make partner next year – you know that, don’t you? You’ll be one of the youngest.’

  I’d heard this speech of his before and it had given me a boost. This time he ended it differently.

  ‘So long as you don’t fuck up, it’ll be a shoo-in.’ I should have been happy. But this message of his was more coded than anything else. I didn’t want to let him down anymore.

  I ended my call with him just as Vivienne was rushing out to give her tour to the group of school children. ‘You’re sure you won’t join me?’ she said, pulling on her coat.

  I gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘I think I’ll go for a run instead,’ I said. ‘Somehow, I don’t think the chatter of children will clear my head.’

  ‘You might learn some patience, Max.’

  ‘I’m too young for all that.’ I grinned, watching her shake her head as she closed the door behind her.

  I had told Vivienne over breakfast about the notebook and articles. She was intrigued, and excited about looking through them with me on her return. I knew that if I stayed at home, I would simply brood over the material, so not long after she left, I went out for my run, heading off in the direction of the Schlosspark.

  The sky had a wintry blue about it, with wisps of clouds milling in the distance. The coolness of the wind whipped around me as I jogged down Hietzinger Hauptstrasse, dodging the handful of pedestrians in my path. The quietude of the place displaced thoughts of the notebook. I lengthened my stride and my breathing relaxed as I entered Schlosspark. Whim dictated my route along the park’s geometric paths, taking me around the Versaillesque Schloss Schönbrunn, uphill, downhill around the perimeter, the zoo and towards the cemetery at the south-west corner. From the crest of a hill, I could make out the bob
bles of gravestones and memorials: they reminded me of a miniature army standing uniformly in their lines. I thought I could just make out the part of the graveyard where my mother’s body lay along with the other members of our family.

  The sight of a lone figure wandering through the cemetery caught my eye. A mere matchstick man from my viewpoint, I assumed he was a lone tourist searching out the resting place of Gustav Klimt or Engelbert Dollfuss or some other notable figure. I watched him with voyeuristic curiosity, waiting to see what he would do. Appearing to take his time, he stopped now and again at a few of the plots, spotting, I presumed, a headstone or memorial or vault of interest. I continued to track his movements. After about five minutes he came to a stop by my family’s plot. At first I thought its golden relief of Christ had caught his attention, but he lingered there much longer. He reached out to touch the memorial, as I am sure others did too – that wasn’t altogether unusual. But then he took a step back, bowed his head as if in prayer, and retrieving an object from a bag, crouched down and laid whatever it was at the foot of the memorial. He got up swiftly, looked about him and hurried towards the exit.

  Picturing him as another anonymous admirer of my mother’s, I wondered what he’d placed there. I jogged down to the cemetery, taking a short cut through the woodland lining one side of its perimeter. At the gates I glimpsed a vintage Mercedes R107 convertible pulling out. It looked just like the model of it that I had on my bedroom windowsill – it was silver too – and I experienced a momentary rush of excitement to see a real one in Vienna. Once the car had disappeared from view, I headed into the cemetery, trying to find the most direct route to my family’s plot. After doubling back a couple of times, I arrived at the grave. Amongst some freshly cut flowers – probably left by Vivienne – was a small wooden plaque. I bent down to take a proper look at it.