I thought I’d feel sad to see the house gone, but I didn’t. Now I knew for sure that the garden was the perfect way to seal in the past. I left Vivienne and Frederik and walked over to the far corner of the garden where a small wrought-iron fence framed Eva’s resting place. Just beneath the wall stood a small granite statue of an angel resting on a plinth. Engraved on the front were the words:
Our children,
Once silenced,
Forever in our memories.
Crouching down, I laid the white rose I had brought with me and paused for a moment, thinking back to the house and what had come to pass. Mostly I thought about childhood, how it came and went. Oskar’s hadn’t ended when he left Austria – he had been stripped of it the day he found Eva; my grandfather stole my mother’s away; and as for my own – it probably ended the day my mother ran out to me demanding to know who it was I was talking to.
I now had a better understanding of her, the way she had been. There were things that would forever remain an enigma, but now I knew she had her reasons. I still wished for a better outcome – for the ability to go back in time, to make amends with her – but that, of course, was impossible.
Fate. I didn’t really believe in it; Vivienne did. For her, things always happened for a reason. Perhaps one day I’d become more accepting of her perspective – that a map of our life exists and we always arrive at the same end point no matter what path we choose.
I suspect Oskar played a role in guiding me through the twists and turns of that period in my life. I wished I’d paid more attention to him as a person rather than as a clue to solving the riddle my mother set. I wondered, then, what he would make of our memorial. I closed my eyes, picturing him again in the snow-filled garden when we had first arrived on that fatal visit, his face quite jubilant as he relived memories of happier times.
THE NATIONAL PSYCHOSIS UNIT, BETHLEM ROYAL HOSPITAL, LONDON. TEN YEARS LATER.
The nurse locks Max’s door with a resolute click. Max feels the two pills he’s just swallowed buffet their way down his throat. The doctor’s reduced his dosage, but even so, it still feels like his mind’s encased in polystyrene. They’d talked about switching medication – a breakthrough, according to the doctor. But right now, after this last session with her, he doesn’t want to change his prescription. The tremors have returned. So too has the darkness.
Over the last few weeks Max has lifted the shroud of his mother’s death and its aftermath. He’s omitted nothing, telling the doctor his story without embellishment. But when she’d asked him, during that afternoon’s session, to talk about his wife Lana, he’d faltered. His mouth had turned to sand. He’d felt the torment seep into his body. But still the doctor had waited, tap-tapping her pencil on her notepad.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember. He could play out the events, minute by minute. But this part of the story lay on an altogether different plane from the experiences he’d recounted to the doctor so far. How he wished that he and Lana had visited The Brosel-Anakan Gardens in the summer or spring as they usually did. He hadn’t seen Eva since the fire at his mother’s house and he really believed that her spirit had been put to rest. But when they went there, on the eighteenth of December, a little over a year ago, there was something different. It wasn’t the frost dusting the grass, or the wintry bare bones of the Gardens. It was the creeping silence, a stillness he had never forgotten, that enclosed him.
‘I should have known,’ Max had told the doctor and that had been all he could manage.
‘Why not write her a letter,’ the doctor had suggested gently. ‘Put it down on paper. Explaining how you feel may help.’
And that’s what he sits down to do now. He grips the blunt pencil and stares at the blank sheet of paper.
Dear Lana … he begins. Even that seems inadequate. He scores it out and begins again.
Dearest Lana,
Your name is engraved on my heart. I can’t believe you’re gone – the fact that you’re no longer here with me is my fault alone. You should never have married me – and I should never have taken you to that place.
He stops writing. This guilt, it’s been a constant for so long now. The pencil slips from his fingers. Images of his wife flicker in his mind – strands of her hair caught in the sunlight, the spray of freckles on a flushed cheek.
As she’d climbed up to the viewing platform to take in the city, one hand on her swollen belly, she’d seemed oblivious to the strangled quiet in the Gardens. But Max had recognised it. And then he’d glimpsed Eva lingering by the statue of the angel. Fear had clamped down on him; he’d tried to call out to Lana, to tell her to leave – that was all he wanted – but it was too late.
Lana’s scream had splintered the silence. It was a sound that would never leave him. Nor would the sight of the platform suddenly collapsing, his wife and unborn child plunging down with it. He can’t put into words how he’d felt as he and others scrambled to recover her lifeless body, as he’d held her in his arms.
His Lana. Her heart was his heart. That day in the Gardens, his had stopped beating. The guilt, carried by his mother for most of her life, shouldered by Oskar Edelstein, had reared up once more and become his own burden to bear.
Max picks up the pencil and writes two more words.
Forgive me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This story has been almost three years in the making and I wouldn’t have been able to get to the finish line without a host of people. First and foremost, my editor, Averill Buchanan: your adept touch and critique helped me hone a novel that was 70% there to 100% complete. You were effectively my creative writing tutor. Thanks also to Victoria Woodside for cutting your teeth on my final draft. My fellow Faber Academy classmates: your feedback was brutal but honest. The Literary Consultancy and their reader, Ashely Stokes, whose manuscript assessment gave me the encouragement to keep going. My Better Half: thank you for introducing me to Vienna. Little did you know I’d end up dragging you around the city multiple times. You enabled me to fulfil my ambition to write a novel, even though it meant losing me to a set of troublesome characters who kept me up at night. Lastly – Dad, you inspired me to put pen to paper. One day – I promise – I will read War and Peace.
FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & INFORMATION
The lullaby which Annabel Albrecht’s former nanny sings is a Yiddish folk song – Your Kitten is Hungry – by Mordecai Gebirtig. Gebirtig was born in 1877 in Krakow, Poland. He had three daughters, for whom he wrote and performed his poems. The words were set to improvised melodies, and most of his songs resemble entries in a diary. Many of Gebirtig’s poems contain themes of eastern European Jewish life in the 1920s and 1930s. Your Kitten is Hungry dates from the early 1920s. The lyrics, addressed to a hungry child, evoke the themes of hunger and deprivation.
Mother with Two Children III by Egon Schiele currently hangs in the Belvedere in Vienna.
In some of his work, Schiele explored the theme of motherhood and the relationship between mother and child. He had a difficult relationship with his mother and he wove this conflict into his images, playing with ideas of motherhood in ways which were counter opposite to the classical paintings depicting this theme. For Schiele, motherhood was perhaps more about sacrifice and subordination than joy and happiness. Despair, melancholy and bitterness shrouded his paintings, and in a series of earlier pictures he juxtaposed motherhood and death.
Mother with Two Children III is slightly different from those and other versions of this painting: perhaps he was slowly coming to terms with his own conflict with his mother. Yet even though the matriarch in this picture is more ‘alive’, she appears withdrawn and glassy-eyed. There are innumerable ways to interpret it, but for me, this painting (and Schiele more generally) inspired my novel. Given one of the themes running through my story, I wanted to give this picture a ‘cameo role’. Of course, I’ve exercised my creative licence and placed it in a fictional setting — in this case, in somebody’s own home, and I’ve remo
ved the roman numeral, III from its title.
I’d like to thank Bernhard Brandstaetter at Sotheby’s, London, for being a helpful source of additional information on the works of Egon Schiele.
BIOGRAPHY
Amna K. Boheim worked in investment banking before turning her hand to writing. She has embarked on two Faber Academy writing courses, including the six-month Faber Academy Writing a Novel (online) course. She authors a blog under the title, Djinn Mamu … & Other Strange Stories.
The Silent Children is her debut novel.
For more information please visit her website www.akboheim.com or via Facebook/akboheim. Feel free to follow Amna on Twitter @AmnaKBoheim and she will follow back.
To receive updates and her latest blog posts, please contact Amna via [email protected]
I will be donating 50% of the royalties from The Silent Children to the charity, Borne (registered charity number 1067412-7) to support their research into preventing death and disability in childbirth.
Borne aims to prevent disability and death in childbirth and create lifelong health for mothers and babies. It was created in response to a real need:
•
In the UK alone, more than 1 in 10 babies are born too soon – that’s nearly 80,000 every year.
•
Premature birth is responsible for 70% of disability and death in newborn babies
Borne was set up by the maternity team at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, the hospital’s charity, CW+, and a group of parents – our Founding Donors. So far they have already raised over £3 million, which has enabled them to:
1.
Identify possible treatments which should reduce the risk of preterm labour in high-risk pregnancies from 35% to 10% or less.
2.
Train medical teams to deal with obstetric emergencies in resource poor countries.
3.
Conduct a study highlighting the link between maternal diet and a baby’s brain development.
Going forward, if they succeed in raising a further £3 million, they will:
1.
Identify ways to reduce the risk and complications of preterm birth
2.
Develop ways to prevent pre-eclampsia, a life threatening pregnancy condition.
3.
Investigate how to prevent necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), a bowel condition which is the second most common cause of death in neonatal intensive care units in the developed world.
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