The Silent Children

by Amna K. Boheim

  ‘He startled me when he wandered into the house.’ I said, recalling how I had been too mystified by the attic door to hear Zoran slipping into the hall downstairs.

  ‘I guess that would explain it.’ He coughed, then said, ‘What’s strange, though, is the stuff written in that book of yours. We analysed the thieves’ and Zoran’s handwriting but got nothing.’ He broke off, barking orders to someone. ‘Oh – and notwithstanding the fact that they’re borderline illiterates – none of their fingerprints were on it either. We should’ve spotted that in the first instance.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘One hundred per cent.’

  His verdict on the writing was bittersweet. I had hoped one of them had defaced those pages with that senseless message, disproving my theory about the matching handwriting. But the police findings vindicated my initial belief: that someone else had inscribed the message in the book, the same person who wrote You knew on the back of the photograph. It was this corroboration that needled me. These two samples of handwriting, with their spiking consonants and vowels, conveyed something quite malign, something all at once intangible, but nonetheless real.

  ‘Odd message,’ Schmidt said. ‘O kneels, rats die,’ he mumbled slowly to himself.

  ‘Perhaps someone wrote it long ago.’ I pictured my mother as an adolescent, trying to convince myself as much as Schmidt of my fabricated theory. ‘Maybe someone wrote it in a fit of teenage rage.’

  He laughed and joked about his own teenage daughter, wishing those were the only things she got up to. ‘It would make life easier – for her and her mother.’ Schmidt rounded off the conversation by insisting he would drop off the book. He said he was at the local station in Hietzing and that he could easily call in.

  When he arrived at Vivienne’s home he declined my invitation to step inside, not wanting to disturb us. But though he didn’t venture in, his short visit felt intrusive. It was the way he stood on the doorstep – his over-casual air, leaning against the wall, chewing gum – that annoyed me. He glanced over my shoulder, his eyes surveying the hall before he fixed them on me, appearing to analyse every move of my facial muscles and my body language as he handed over the novel. And I should have known better than to open up the book to those two pages while he was still standing there.

  He cleared his throat. ‘It’s probably just me,’ he said, scratching his nose, ‘but you seem … Have you seen … do you recognise the handwriting?’

  ‘I think it could be my mother’s after all,’ I said, doing my best to maintain eye contact with him.

  Schmidt pressed his fist against his lips, giving me a hint of a nod.

  ‘The Serbs – the two that were in the house – other than the shock of a few broken bones, it seems that something else got to them.’ He checked for my response. ‘But they’re never going to be forthcoming, are they?’

  I didn’t offer a response.

  ‘Couldn’t tell us what made them abandon the robbery like that. There’s always one who gives in the end, but in this instance, they clammed up. Funny, really.’

  ‘What’s so funny? They broke into my house.’ It was the first time I had referred to the house as mine.

  ‘No, I mean it’s like they got a fright.’ He laughed. ‘I’m trying to picture it: two youths, built like bears with the customary tattoos, reduced to shivering shits.’ He let out a splutter of laughter, then fixed his eyes on mine. ‘Mind you, they’d ingested the usual chemicals. They probably caught sight of their own reflections and ran.’

  His words triggered thoughts of the scare I’d given myself in the drawing room that first night. I forced a smile.

  ‘But that message in the book,’ he continued, ‘got us all thinking.’

  Not knowing whether to believe him, I told him it had also kept Vivienne awake at night. ‘It probably doesn’t mean anything,’ I said.

  Schmidt blinked twice in quick succession. Then he nudged up his jacket sleeve to look at his watch. ‘I’d best be off.’ He jogged down the steps. ‘If you need anything, just give me a shout,’ he said, closing the gate behind him.

  As I shut the front door, Vivienne called out from the living room to ask who it was. ‘Oh, you should’ve asked him to check the dates of those murders,’ she said, after I relayed my discussion with Schmidt.

  I gave her the novel so she could see the message for herself. She paled when she read the words. I felt like protecting her and I glossed over it with my theory of the writing being my mother’s doing, just as I’d done with Thomas Schmidt. Vivienne knitted her brow, then put the book down, swapping it for the notebook that I had left on the coffee table. She opened it up to one of the pages where my mother’s pencil had clawed at the paper. ‘She had that streak. This seems to suggest it at least.’

  She got up and I followed her into the kitchen where she started preparing dinner. ‘It’ll keep bothering me though,’ she said, stopping in the middle of the room with two plates in her hands. Apart from the odd muttered phrase, she remained quiet as she cooked. No doubt, she was trying to work out the puzzle, and I did my best to steer Vivienne away from her prolonged attempts to solve it. It wasn’t just the handwriting that unsettled me; the message did too. For me, it wasn’t such an innocent thing, and I didn’t want Vivienne or Schmidt – or anybody else for that matter – to decipher it.

  I ended up spending a further four days in Vienna. I didn’t have to. The police didn’t really need me for their investigation. My reasons for staying veered between my wanting to see the house put back in order and wanting to spend more time with Vivienne. Aside from my daily news intake from the Financial Times, which, to my surprise, I found in the Tabak around the corner, I also bought the Krone, the Kurier and Die Presse. I buried myself in domestic Viennese news, observing the growing column inches devoted to the story of the robberies, their arrests, their links to one of the largest Serbian mafia factions, which led, in turn, to further arrests. It was indeed a coup for Schmidt and his men.

  I managed to keep out of the spotlight until the news surge faded and the reporters, together with the odd member of the public lingering at the gates of the house, also tailed away. The house was left to its own devices again, no longer regarded as an object of curiosity for its role in a bungled theft.

  With the house back in my possession, we were able to press on with returning it to its original state. In reality, it was Frederik who pressed on with everything. While I dealt with the insurance, he fulfilled his promise to oversee its clean-up. Yet he kept his distance from me. The warmth and concern he had shown at the time of the robbery had been replaced by a clipped business-as-usual attitude when we spoke on the telephone. It seemed like an imposition yoked around his neck, and there were a couple of instances when I detected his impatience. Perhaps he regretted his offer to help. In his place, maybe I would have felt the same. But when I suggested that he should charge for his efforts his response bordered on anger.

  ‘Do you really think I would do such a thing?’ he said.

  I backtracked, fumbling with an apology for my mistake. He huffed down the telephone, then mentioned he needed to get to a meeting. The click of the receiver sounded before I could say goodbye, leaving my thanks hanging in the static of the phone line.

  I didn’t go by the house to check on the progress of the clean-up, although there were times when I wavered. I got into a habit, on my now daily runs, of continuing up to the church of St. Vitus, and then where I should have turned on to Himmelhofgasse, I stopped, the should I, shouldn’t I oscillating in my head. Each time, I turned around and jogged back to Vivienne’s house. It wasn’t fear as such, but rather something akin to a misgiving, the discomfort of finding something else that would trigger more questions and underscore my unease.

  So I eventually left for London without returning to the house. It was a wilful gesture on my part. I wanted to go back to it on my own terms: my next planned visit was scheduled for early December when I would meet Matthi
as Ropach, the architect. In the meantime, he intended to visit the house on his own and would collect the keys from Frederik’s office. The timing of the architect’s visit, given the break-in, was lucky to say the least. Vivienne offered to show the architect around the house, but I persuaded her not to, assuring her that Matthias would manage just fine on his own.

  I wondered whether the house gave Vivienne the same sensation, whether it bore down on her like it bore down on me in its on–off way. I wondered if she had really heard sounds emanating from the attic, or whether she had simply chosen to placate me. Before I left, there were a couple of times when I caught her studying me, watching my countenance, as if she was weighing the possibilities of a madness stirring inside me. She still hadn’t mentioned the episode in the attic and I didn’t volunteer to discuss it either. It was probably one of the few things she preferred to sweep under the carpet. I ensured that it stayed that way by maintaining a modicum of good humour, only speaking of my mother and the notebook in the most positive light, which I hoped would, in turn, draw her attention away from the message in the Torberg novel. What I wanted most was to forget about the whole thing, to throw the novel and the photograph – my entire family history for that matter – into the Danube or the Thames and watch the water suck them down.

  OBER ST. VEIT, VIENNA, 1944

  Mama’s and Maria’s whispers float into Annabel’s room. Although Annabel has long since mastered the art of listening to hushed conversations, she can barely discern a word. Mama’s been acting strangely of late, muttering to herself, walking around with barely a stain of rouge on her cheeks or lipstick on her lips. And now that Papa’s gone away on some business or other, she’s taken to sleeping on the second floor with them.

  Annabel opens her door a little as quietly as she can, suppressing a shiver from the January chill that’s seeped into the house. She’s been caught too often recently, sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to check if Thaddäus is quite all right in his white curtained crib. The last time Maria saw Annabel, she threatened to lock her in her room if she did it again. Annabel can’t help it; if she could, she’d happily sleep in Thaddäus’s room, and while Mama thinks it’s ever so sweet that she would want to do such a thing, Maria decries Annabel’s unhealthy obsession with her younger brother. The frustration wells in Annabel again and spurs her on to open the door a little wider with the gentle touch of a thief.

  A small paraffin light stands on the chest of drawers, casting Mama and Maria as gilded silhouettes in Thaddäus’s room. Yet it’s clear enough what Annabel sees and it confuses her. While Mama’s wearing her dressing gown, tied tight around her too thin body, Maria looks as though she’s going out for a walk. Maria then embraces Mama, a thing that Annabel’s never seen her do before, and the only explanation that Annabel can think of is that Maria is leaving. But what of Thaddäus? What of Mama? Annabel clenches her jaw to quell her cry. Through her tears she sees Mama take Thaddäus. Despite the twilight hour, he’s wide awake, gurgling a melody of mellow highs and lows and stuffing his tiny fist into his soft mouth. He snuggles against Mama as she kisses his forehead and strokes his cheek before she hands him to Maria. The nanny cradles the six-month-old as if she’s unwilling to let go and the muted light catches the sheen of Maria’s tears, like snail tracks tracing down her cheeks. Mama looks as if she’s weeping too; although her back’s turned, Annabel can see her body shaking as if a jolt’s running through it.

  Mama removes something from her dressing-gown pocket. The rustle of paper seems to echo around the room. ‘Here’s your letter,’ she says, her face shadowed by the lamp. It’s a scene that Annabel can’t take anymore and she runs to her bed, burying her face in the pillow to muffle her despair.

  The next morning Annabel hears Maria’s voice. Jumping out of bed, she runs into Thaddäus’s room. Maria smiles at her, her face brighter than it’s been in a long while, the melancholy from the previous night erased. Annabel’s so happy to see that Maria didn’t go away after all and Annabel can’t help but hug her, almost toppling her over. And Maria laughs and Annabel laughs with her.

  Annabel turns to the crib, filled with her usual longing to see her baby brother. ‘Where’s Thaddäus?’ she asks.

  Before Maria can answer, there’s a commotion downstairs – her father shouting orders.

  ‘Go back to your room,’ whispers Maria, leading her charge to her bedroom. But Annabel won’t be shooed away.

  A torrent of footsteps sound before Mama rushes into the room, half dressed in a tweed jacket and skirt, but without shoes, without make-up, her hair uncombed, tangled and knotted like a woman gone mad.

  ‘Sebastian,’ she hisses, her face the pallor of a corpse’s.

  Annabel cannot stem the sickness mingling with the whirl of confusion in her stomach as she looks from Mama to Maria, their expressions mirroring each other’s.

  Mama just shakes her head, and mutters a constant no-no-no-no. Annabel shrinks back against the wall, watching in part wonder, part horror, as Maria takes hold of Mama by the shoulders and mouths words that only Mama seems to understand.

  ‘I killed him,’ Mama says.

  The words fail to register with Annabel and she presses her temples because she can’t bear what she has just heard. And it’s her turn to deny, to ring out the word, No! Just moments before, Maria’s face had sparkled, exuding nothing but goodness, pure goodness, like those of the saint and the angel downstairs in the hall. And now this. It doesn’t make sense. Annabel cannot believe it. She mustn’t.

  ‘I killed him,’ Mama says again and now she’s looking directly at Maria. There’s no waver of uncertainty on her face, no denial threatening to appear in her eyes or on her lips.

  Then Mama turns to Annabel. Her jaw and mouth have hardened and she’s not Mama anymore, but more like one of those SS officers Annabel has spied Papa with, bereft of a soul, devoid of clemency and in no mood to be crossed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I had been back in London for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t even December, yet it felt that November had been nudged away by the Christmas lights and shop window decorations, which in only a matter of days had lost their sheen. Their cheerlessness made me long for the proper Christmas build-up of Vienna or Munich, with their winter markets and the accompanying aroma of Glühwein and cinnamon. I missed the ice-blue skies and biting cold – the cold that you could wrap up against, that invigorated you and put a smile on your face. Better than the inclement weather that arrived, uninvited, to England’s shores, seeping through your clothes and leaving you feeling damp and miserable. This England I knew was a far cry from Blake’s ‘mountains green’ and I craved a bit of sunshine.

  The buzz of the office provided some respite. We were extremely busy, doing our best to keep pace with the accelerating treadmill of work. From time to time, I struggled to concentrate. My mind would wander back to the house, the message, the notebook, my mother. My only response was to dive further into work, or to exercise. While I knew I would be returning to the house with the architect, I felt that if I could hide everything away, I would be all right.

  I even went on a few dates with Lana. Her law firm had transferred her back to London. After I had passed out on her the last time we’d been drunk together, I was sure she’d want to forget about me, but when I returned from Vienna, we saw more of each other. As a lawyer, she often worked long hours, and we took the view that we’d, in her words, go with the flow. There was something about her that distinguished her from other girls. Lana never took herself seriously. Her intelligence was a given; she was definitely more quick-witted than me. And then there were the freckles scattered across her face, adding to her English rose prettiness, something I never thought I’d be attracted to. The relationship, if I could call it that, felt uncomplicated and fuss free. Yet there were times when I sensed she wanted to know more about me – Vienna, the mystery of my mother – and each time I withdrew. I just didn’t want to touch her with that part of my life.
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  Just as I was beginning to settle back into the everyday of my normal world, Oskar Edelstein called me. I was having brunch with Lana and a couple of friends who were in town for the weekend. I had taken them to a newly opened restaurant on the Marylebone High Street. It offered a refreshing change from the usual places, and its collection of Aussie and Kiwi staff filled the place with a breezy atmosphere. The general hubbub, clatter of crockery and music drowned out most things and it was only as we were leaving, when I checked my phone, that I discovered I’d missed two calls from Oskar.

  I didn’t manage to call him back until much later that day. While his tone was warm over the phone – how I imagined an elderly uncle might speak to his young niece or nephew – his voice seemed quieter, more conciliatory.

  ‘I’ve something I’d like to show you,’ he said. ‘I really hope you don’t mind,’ he continued, ‘I know you must be awfully busy, but I’d like it if we could meet again … soon.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Would tomorrow be all right?’ It was as if he was unsure of himself, weaker even – quite unlike our first conversation.

  ‘Is everything okay, Oskar?’

  ‘I’m quite all right. But you’ll come again? Tomorrow? I know it’s an imposition, but it’s quite important that we meet.’

  To me, his urgency hinted at a quiet restlessness and something stopped me from insisting we meet at a time that suited me, not him. For all my wishes to distance myself from my mother’s past, from the house as I knew it, the curiosity I’d felt when I first came across the photograph and my mother’s notebook fidgeted at the back of my mind. So I found myself agreeing.

  ‘There’s something I’d like to show you too,’ I said. The offer of the notebook was my quid pro quo.