Stolen Beauty Read online

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Promise me.”

  He coughed, the sound of angry crows in his lungs.

  “You’re the cleverest girl I know,” he said.

  I didn’t think he was going to die. I believed he was going to get better. I prayed and prayed for his fever to break, and fell asleep with my face on his bed, the sheets and blankets wrinkled under my cheek.

  I woke to my mother’s hand on my shoulders, leading me out of the room.

  “Is he better?” I asked. “Is he awake?”

  The room was cold, and my mother was weeping softly.

  Karl’s room was locked, and the servants packed away his books and clothes.

  “His Darwin?” I asked my brother Eugene. “And his anatomy text, too?”

  Eugene nodded sadly, and pressed a slim copy of the Homeric Hymns into my hands the next morning. It had a blue linen cover and Karl’s bookplate with his signature inside. I slid it beneath my pillow, and at night I buried my face between the pages, where I inhaled the pulp and ink that had always been part of my brother and that I’d always believed would be part of me, too.

  I didn’t sit for final exams that year at school. Instead, I sank into my green chair and refused to leave. My brothers threw themselves back into work and studies, and Father spent long days in his offices. Thedy played Moonlight Sonata on the piano in the foyer every afternoon, and I thumbed through art books I’d dragged out of Father’s library. I turned page after page of tinted lithographs, examining saints and goddesses and the way Italian painters depicted heaven among the clouds peopled with winged cherubs. Although I knew heaven was a lie, the pictures comforted me.

  Mother came every morning to ask what I wanted for dinner, and every day I told her the same thing: potatoes mashed with butter, the way Karl liked them. Then I sat at the table, moving the potatoes around on my plate and drying my tears on the edge of my white napkin.

  “You will get better,” Thedy said.

  “You said Karl would get better,” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound cruel, but I knew it did.

  “That’s not very kind.” Thedy’s eyes teared.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “Please, just leave me alone.”

  I read The Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and tried to take some comfort in the idea that somewhere there was an eternal castle of dark and light memory where Karl might be reading his books at the same time, pondering the same words and phrases. God and my brother were both dead, but I wanted to believe in something more powerful than myself, and I read until I’d worn myself out trying.

  Still, my body insisted itself, and every morning my bosom seemed to have grown a tiny bit. When my bleeding came, it was a shock to feel my insides churning and to see the angry red spot on my knickers.

  “It’s here,” I told Thedy. “Just like you said. But you didn’t say I would feel so sick.”

  “That will pass.” Thedy put her cool lips to my forehead. “Just rest for today, and tomorrow you’ll feel better.”

  She let me have her belt and a clean supply of rags, but of course I needed my own, which meant I had to tell Nanny, who told Mother, who came to my room and said it meant that I was a woman.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  I didn’t want to be a woman if Karl wasn’t there to be a man. When he was alive, I’d believed that somehow he would convince Father and Mother to send me to university. With him gone, I felt everything slip away. I was half child, half woman: a sad, thin sprite. I refused to make my debut in the January season—Mother didn’t have the heart to argue—and even the museum, with its silent columns and life-size murals, did not appeal to me.

  “You’ll have suitors anyway,” Thedy said. “You know Mother will make sure of it.”

  “I only want to go to university,” I reminded her, but we both knew that wouldn’t happen. I wasn’t courageous enough. I yearned to study, but I also wanted to have children one day—a boy and a girl who would love one another as I’d loved Karl, and he’d loved me. Without my brother, I could not imagine defying convention and having both.

  By order of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1881, Gustav and Ernst Klimt climb a ladder above the center stairwell in Vienna’s sparkling new Museum of Art History and slide onto the wooden scaffolding that abuts the arcades and spandrels. The black-and-white-tiled floor is at a dizzying distance below. The brothers wear loose white overalls; their pockets are filled with measuring instruments and straightedge blades. Each young man carries a tubular spirit level in which a tiny air bubble floats in a minute amount of oil and rum. The museum is closed. Light streams through the high windows on either side of the new building. The elder brother unrolls the first long canvas while Ernst opens and mixes the pot of glue.

  Their mural is on four pieces of painted canvas, a total of sixteen feet tall and thirty feet wide. The centerpiece is two Egyptian women: one holds a black ankh, the other a raven. The women’s eyes are ringed in heavy black kohl, their costumes are golden and feathered. The painters start at the north end of the spandrel and work slowly, carefully, measuring and attaching the mural to the walls. The mythical figures tower above them, almost dancing across the museum walls.

  MARIA

  1938

  There were footsteps on the staircase: the Nazis were inside my uncle’s palais. I tried to hide by pressing between the silk curtains in my aunt’s sitting room, but in an instant two men in black uniforms filled the doorway.

  I recognized the younger one immediately: he’d been a lackluster suitor of mine when I’d been pining for Fritz. Now he wore a swastika armband.

  “Where is Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” I managed to say.

  “You don’t live here, do you?” I could see he recognized me, and that he didn’t wish me ill.

  “Of course not. I live in the Margareten District.”

  “Then get out of here.” He dismissed me with a snap of his wrist. “Go home where you belong.”

  Before the other soldier could stop me, I was flying down the stairs, past the shelves stacked with my uncle’s precious porcelain, and out the front door into the shrill morning. If my uncle had left anything for me, it had slipped through my hands.

  I didn’t dare turn into Schiller Park. Instead, I went into the Ring and walked toward my parents’ house. People were crowding into the streets waving flags and calling to one another as if they were waiting for a carnival. In the distance, I could hear drumbeats and the thrum of a parade.

  I pulled my scarf tight around my ears and kept my eyes to the ground. Near the Belvedere Castle I passed a skinny old rabbi chained to a bench with a crooked sign around his neck that read Filthy Jew. Yeshiva students were on their hands and knees barking like dogs while soldiers yelled, “Louder, bitches, or we’ll whip you.” A young man shouted, Die, Jews! Hitler is coming, and schoolgirls in white knee socks threw rocks at two old men who cowered on a bench.

  By the time I turned onto Stubenbastei, I was freezing and my face was wet with tears.

  When the maid didn’t answer, I fumbled for my key I found Mama alone in the kitchen, still in her bathrobe. There was a cup of coffee on the table, and the newspaper unopened beside it. The air smelled stale.

  “Uncle Ferdinand is gone.” I blurted it out, even though I knew it would frighten her. “Did you know that?”

  My mother shook her head, and I told her what the cook at Elisabethstrasse had said.

  “I hope he’s safe.” My mother began to cry. “Ferdinand wouldn’t have left us unless he was in terrible danger.”

  I put my arms around her.

  “What about Leopold and the others?” I asked.

  My sister Louise lived in Yugoslavia with her husband and daughters. My brother Robert was an attorney, and Leopold was the head accountant at Uncle Ferdinand’s sugar company. With my uncle gone, Leopold would be his highest-ranking company officer in Vienna. If Uncle Ferry was in danger, then my brothe
r Leopold was in danger, too.

  “Louise is safe where she is. Robert and Leopold should be at home or at their offices,” she said. She wiped away her tears. “No one called, Maria. No one’s been here but you.”

  “And Papa?”

  “He’s hardly said a word since we left the party last night.”

  I found my father in the library cradling his cello. The shades were drawn, and the room was dark.

  “Papa?” I fell to my knees in front of him. He reached a hand toward my face the way a blind man might reach for the sounds of someone’s voice. It was as if he couldn’t see me.

  “You should go home and lock the doors. Stay inside until it’s over,” he said, and then he shut his eyes.

  Back in the kitchen, my mother was threading a needle with a shaking hand. I asked what she was mending, but she lifted a napkin to reveal a small pile of colored jewels.

  “Not mending,” she said. “I’m getting ready.”

  My mother had been raised with dressing maids and cooks. She was one of the most fashionable women in her circle and had two seamstresses in the Graben who made dresses on custom forms to her exact measurements. Yet she put the thread through the needle easily and deftly tied it with a bit of spit. Then she turned a black glove inside out, slit the lining, and tucked two emeralds and a small diamond into the tiny pocket she’d made.

  “My sister was never interested in sewing or cooking,” Mama said. It was true—my aunt’s passion had been for art, books, and what she’d called a ferocious need for freedom and education. “But I learned what I needed to know.”

  My mother handed me a needle, and I threaded the eye as she had done. I watched her sew the glove back up, her neat black stitches disappearing into the seam. I did the same. The needle stuck on the first stitch, but then it moved smoothly. The rhythm of the stitches soothed me, and as we worked I told her about Bernhard’s cable.

  “Yes, Paris will be safe.” Mama nodded as if it had already been decided. “Go to Paris right away. Everyone who can get out is leaving.”

  When she handed me the black gloves, the seams were perfect.

  “Wear these. When you go home, pry the diamonds out of your rings and sew them into your brassiere just like this.”

  “You’ll need the gloves,” I said. “You’re leaving, too. We’ll go together.”

  “You’ve seen your father. He’s too frail to travel.”

  I knew she was right, and yet I argued until finally she spoke the lie that neither of us believed.

  “You and Fritz go first. When your father is stronger, then we’ll find you.”

  The next day Hitler marched into Vienna with hundreds of thousands of German soldiers. While the streets filled with tanks, motorcars, cheering crowds and marching bands, Jews across the city lit bonfires and burned their bankbooks and business files. Fritz and I didn’t leave the house, but we could smell the fire and ash in the wind.

  The following morning my brother Robert was dismissed from his law firm with a single sentence—“you’re a Jew”—and the contents of his desk emptied into the trash while he watched. Robert was tall and ordinarily calm, but he was close to hysterics when he knocked on our apartment door in the middle of the afternoon.

  “Leopold’s gone,” he said. His jacket and tie were askew, as if he’d been out all night. “He’s not at his apartments, and he’s not at the offices. I went to 18 Elisabethstrasse—Uncle Ferry’s place is crawling with Nazis.”

  “What do you mean, Leopold is gone?” I asked.

  “I went to his apartment just before I came here,” Robert said. “A stranger answered, and when I asked her about Leopold, she slammed the door in my face.”

  I felt close to hysterics.

  Robert said, “I’m not going home—Katrine and I are taking the baby to Grinzing with my in-laws. You’ll have to tell Mother and Father for me, Maria.”

  We didn’t know how to say good-bye in those early days. There was too much uncertainty and too much at stake. So we only said, Be careful, take care of the baby, take care of yourself.

  “When you see Leopold, tell him where to find me,” Robert said.

  “And if you see him first, tell him to stay away from Elisabethstrasse,” I said.

  Days passed with no word from Leopold or Uncle Ferdinand.

  “Maybe they’re together,” I told my parents as I sat in their cold kitchen. It seemed important to keep up their spirits. “Maybe they’ve gone to Czechoslovakia and are at Jungfer Brezan right now, sleeping in those delicious, big beds.”

  But our phone calls to the country house were never answered, and no word came.

  A work-stop notice was left at our factory gatehouse that week, and for the first time since we’d been married, the whistle didn’t blow at eight the next morning. Fritz sat in the bedroom, nervously paging through the stack of account books he’d retrieved, adding sums and copying them onto small pieces of paper.

  “We’ll need the records,” he said. “But I have to burn the books.”

  I took apart a diamond bracelet and hid the jewels piece by piece. I tucked the heart-shaped locket my father had given me into a garter belt lining, and used my mother’s needle and thread to sew a few small gold coins into the padded lining of my favorite brassiere.

  It wasn’t enough: our most valuable jewels were in the jewelers’ vaults, where we’d always felt they were safest. We’d even divided my jewels between two jewelers in case one was compromised—as if we had known something bad might happen.

  After I’d washed our lunch plates and wrapped the leftovers in brown paper, I tucked my safety box key inside the top of my girdle and set out for the jewelers. Fritz was going to send a cable to his brother in Paris. He’d decided on a simple phrase—we await instructions—that could give nothing away.

  At the gate, Fritz put his hands on my shoulders and rubbed his nose against mine.

  “Take everything,” he said. “Don’t leave anything in the vault—the jewelers can’t be trusted now.”

  “The best pieces are at Werner’s shop,” I reminded him.

  “That’s right—get your aunt’s necklace and earrings from Werner, too.”

  I studied Fritz’s long nose and heavy brow.

  “Remember to salute when they walk by,” I said.

  “I won’t salute the Germans.” His eyes were blazing. “I may not be much of a fighter, but I won’t surrender everything the first week.”

  We parted ways at the corner of Talgasse and Mariahilferstrasse, and I walked four long blocks more before I saw the crush of patrons outside the jewelers.

  “The Germans are inside,” a woman said. She pointed at a ring of soldiers in long coats with shiny brass buttons. “Those guards bloodied three men who tried to ask a question.”

  I was stunned to see a familiar face among the guards: it was Rupert, the gateman who’d failed to show up that first morning.

  “Get away, filthy Jews!” Rupert shouted. “This store is under German ownership.”

  Old and young women with their errand coats and market bags were pressed together, smelling of onions and coffee and something unfamiliar. I could smell my own fear coming up from inside my coat.

  “He’s going to shoot,” someone cried. The crowd surged forward and back. A shot rang out, and another shot seemed to come from behind us. I felt trapped. A woman screamed, and a man yelled. “She’s been shot. They’ve shot my Elsa!”

  I smelled blood in the air, and all I could think was to get away. I didn’t let myself look at the fallen woman. I inched backward. I ducked under elbows waving in the air and moved past men comforting their wives. I moved blindly, not seeing where I was going, until finally there was nothing but empty space behind me. I almost fell, but at the last second I turned. I made every effort to make myself look carefree. With my light hair and round face, I knew I could pass for a Gentile as long as I didn’t see anyone I knew.

  I reached home to find my apartment door open, and two stra
nge men standing in my living room. One wore a black suit, the other a brown uniform.

  “Felix Landau,” the suited man said. He had dark hair, and a long scar on his cheek. I sought Fritz’s eyes, but they were glazed and unfocused.

  “Frau Altmann, your husband fully understands why we’re here and what is to be done.”

  Again I looked to Fritz, but his expression was blank.

  This Landau had a clipboard and a gold pen, and he waved them in my direction.

  “As I’ve explained to your husband, we’ve cataloged and Aryanized your assets—they belong to the Reich now, not to you. This is in accordance with the new law. Do you have questions for us?”

  My mouth was dry. I shook my head. I’d read everything I needed to know about Aryanization in the morning newspaper. It meant that they could take anything from us, at any time. Any Jew who refused to cooperate would be arrested.

  “You have very nice taste in furnishings, Frau Altmann,” Landau said. He reached for my hand and turned my engagement ring between his thumb and forefinger. I forced myself not to pull away. “This is a very fine diamond, finer than anything I’ve been able to buy for my own wife.”

  My hands were damp, and the ring slid easily off my finger.

  “Of course the Reich has a full list of your jewelry, but I’ll feel so much better if you can give me a full accounting on your own.” He dropped my ring into his coat pocket. “I believe you inherited a number of significant pieces from your aunt, didn’t you?”

  A car horn in the courtyard startled me. Fritz and I jumped at the same instant.

  “The Koloman Moser necklace,” I said. I felt as hollow as a ghost. Fritz made a small noise, but I didn’t look at him. “There’s a very valuable golden choker that belonged to my aunt Adele.”

  “Adele Bloch-Bauer.” Landau nodded. “And matching earrings, I believe.”

  “I’ll phone Hans Werner’s shop, he’ll send everything over.”

  “Of course he will,” Landau said. He produced a paper that looked like a receipt, and told me to sign it. “Your cooperation is noted, Frau Altmann. Now pack your things.”