People of the Book (14 page)

“Ach. Franz. Sometimes I wonder what city it is that you live in. The Waidhofen manifesto has been the talk of every coffeehouse in Vienna for weeks. It’s the German nationalist faction’s damnable reaction to the fact that a great number of Jews, both at the university and in the officer corps, have become proficient and dangerous fencers. Well, and so they had to, simply to defend themselves from the increasing provocations. In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honor from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically sub-human and dishonorable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult.”

Franz expelled a long breath. “Good lord.”

“You see?” David laughed, then grimaced, as the muscle in his lacerated cheek protested. “Even you, my wise elder brother, might have taken a scalpel to the fellow.”

The irony was that David Hirschfeldt, unlike Franz, was not a Jew. A year or two after Franz’s mother had died of consumption, their father had become smitten with a Bavarian Catholic. He had converted to her faith in order to woo her. Their son, David, had been raised amid the scent of Sunday incense and fresh-cut Christmas pines. The only Jewish thing about the blond, blue-eyed, half-Bavarian rising star of the Vienna Hausregiment was his name.

“There’s more.”

“What?”

“There are rumors I’m to be bounced from Silesia.”

“David! They couldn’t possibly. You’re their champion, ever since the gymnasium. Is it because of this latest…adventure?”

“No, of course not. Everyone in Silesia has been in an illegal duel at some point. But it seems my Bavarian
Mutti
no longer provides enough pure blood to counteract the taint of our father.”

Franz couldn’t think of anything to say. His brother would be devastated if he were expelled from his fencing club. And it would hurt the club to lose its best competitor. If David was right, and not merely being hypersensitive, then the state of things was much worse than he’d imagined.

Hirschfeldt was distracted as his last patient of the day was shown in. “I’m so sorry to have detained you, Herr Mittl, but there was an emergency….” He looked up then, and noticed Mittl’s gait. At once, the man’s deteriorated condition got his full attention. Mittl lumbered on stiff legs held wide apart until he stood nervously by the examination table, twisting his hat in his hands. His face, a narrow face always, was drawn and gray. There was a stain on his shirt, which was unusual; Hirschfeldt recalled Mittl as being most particular about his grooming. Hirschfeldt spoke to him gently. “Do sit down, Herr Mittl, and tell me how you are.”

“Thank you, Herr Doktor.” He eased himself carefully onto the table. “I’ve not been well. Not well at all.”

Hirschfeldt conducted his examination knowing what he would find: the gummy tumors, palpable around the joints, the optic atrophy, the muscle weakness.

“Are you still managing to work, Herr Mittl? It must be difficult for you.”

There was a flash of fear in the man’s eyes. “Oh yes. I must work. Must work. No choice. Even though they conspire against me. They give the lucrative work to their own, and I get the dregs….” Suddenly Mittl stopped and clapped a hand to his mouth. “I forgot that you—”

Hirschfeldt interrupted, to save them both embarrassment. “How do you manage with the fine work, your eyesight deteriorating as it is?”

“I have my daughter to help me with the sewing. Only one I can trust. The other apprentices are all in league against me, stealing everything, down to my linen thread….”

Hirschfeldt sighed. The paranoid delusions were as much a symptom of tertiary-stage disease as the physical disabilities. He wondered that Mittl was getting any commissions at all, given his impairment. The man must have a very loyal clientele.

Suddenly Mittl fixed him with a lucid gaze. His voice dropped back into its normal pitch. “I think I am losing my mind. Is there nothing you can do for me?”

Hirschfeldt turned away and walked to the window. How much should he tell him? How much could he take in? He was reluctant to mention experimental treatments to patients who could not perhaps grasp the full risks, the very uncertain rewards. And yet these treatments were too drastic to try on anyone who was not late stage and terminal. To do nothing was to condemn poor Mittl to his miserable decline until death overtook him.

“There
is
something,” Hirschfeldt said at last. “A colleague of mine is working on it in Berlin. The results are promising, but the treatments are extensive, painful, and I’m afraid very costly. It requires as many as forty injections over the course of a year. The agent my colleague has developed is very toxic, based on arsenic. His idea is that the compound harms the diseased parts of the body more than it harms the sound parts, which will, in time, recover. But the effects can be severe. Pain at the injection site is very common, as are gastric disorders. But my colleague has documented some dramatic results. He even claims cures, but I must warn you that I think it is too early to make such assertions.”

Mittl’s cloudy eyes had become avid. “You said ‘expensive,’ Herr Doktor. How much?”

Hirschfeldt sighed and named the sum. Mittl buried his head in his hands. “I haven’t got it.” And then, to Hirschfeldt’s deep embarrassment, the man began to sob like a child.

Hirschfeldt did not like the last patient of the day to be a hopeless case. It wasn’t the mood he liked to be in when he left his clinic. He had intended to call upon his mistress, but as he reached the turn to her street, he hesitated and walked on. It wasn’t just Mittl. It had been ten months; Rosalind’s wide-hipped, fleshy beauty was beginning to bore him. Perhaps it was time to look elsewhere…the image of the slender, trembling girl with the cornflower eyes came to him unbidden. He wondered idly how long it would be before the baron was sated with her. Not, he hoped, too long….

It was a delicious late-summer evening, the slant of the low sun warming the cold plaster nudes that cavorted across the entablature of some rather ostentatious new apartments. Who would buy such places, he wondered. The new industrial class, perhaps, wanting some physical proximity to the Hofburg. The only proximity they could hope for. All their wealth would never raise them up to the social plane of the aristocracy.

The warmth had tempted all kinds of people into the streets. Hirschfeldt took comfort in their diversity. There was a family, the wife veiled, the man wearing a fez, who had probably come all the way from Bosnia to see the heart of the empire under whose protection their lands had fallen. There was a Bohemian Gypsy woman, her spangled hem jingling in time to her swayed-hip walk. And a Ukrainian peasant with a red-cheeked boy riding on his shoulders. If the German nationalists wanted to purify this state of foreign influence, they would have many more obvious exotics to weed out before they got to the Jews, much less to a totally assimilated man like his brother, David. Still, a small voice nagged at him. The Bosnians and the Ukrainians weren’t dominant figures in the arts, in industry, in finance. A few colorful tourists—perhaps even the German nationalists could find them appealing, a picturesque element in the urban landscape. What they apparently
did not
find appealing was the prominence of Jews in every field of Austrian endeavor, even, these days, in the officer ranks of the army.

Hirschfeldt had watched the young limes and the sycamore saplings taking root on the malls of the Ringstrasse. Now they had grown high enough to throw slender stripes of shadow across his path. One day they would provide shade. His children, maybe, would live to enjoy it….

He would go home, yes, to his children; that was the thing to do. He would propose to his wife that they go for a family stroll in the Prater, perhaps. He would speak with her about David; she would understand his concerns. But his wife was not at home when he got there, and neither were the children. Frau Hirschfeldt had gone to call on the Hertzls, the maid said. And the nanny had already taken the children for an airing in the park. Franz felt put out, even as he knew that the sentiment was unreasonable, since he so often claimed to be detained at the clinic at this hour. Still, he wanted his wife’s company and he had grown very used to having what he wanted. And what did she see in that vapid wife of Hertzl’s? What did Hertzl see in her, for that matter? But even as his mind framed the question, Franz knew the answer.

Frau Hertzl’s blond beauty and her frivolous painted fingernails were perfect foils for Theodor’s dark, rabbinic gravity. With his Julie on his arm, he appeared less Jewish, and Franz was aware that this was beginning to matter to his literary friend. But the woman had so little to say. Her whole existence seemed framed by fashion. His own thoughtful, educated wife could hardly find her engaging. That Anna should be wasting her time on such an unprofitable friendship, when he wanted her home, was yet another annoyance. He retreated to his bedchamber and threw off the shirt with its bothersome collar. He put on a smoking jacket. Better. He tilted his head from left to right, releasing the tension in his neck. He made for the salon, called for a glass of schnapps, and retreated behind the broadsheets of his daily newspaper.

Anna did not see him as she swept through the door. Her head was down, her hands busy extracting hat pins. She turned to the mirror in the hallway as the wide straw hat came off. Franz saw her face reflected in the glass. She was smiling at some private joke as her fingers fluttered around thick swirls of hair that had come loose with the hat. Franz put down his glass silently and moved behind her, taking one of the twists of hair in his hand and stroking the backs of his fingers along her neck. His wife gave a startled shudder.

“Franz! You frightened me,” she protested. Her face, as she turned to him, was flushed. But that alone would not have been enough to pierce Hirschfeldt with sudden, unwelcome knowledge. Before she turned, he had noted that one of the tiny, muslin-covered buttons on the back of her bodice had been fastened into the wrong buttonhole. Her maid, who was fastidious, would never have allowed such a thing. Such a small thing; a tiny betraying detail of a very great betrayal.

Hirschfeldt took his wife’s face between his hands and stared at her. Was it his imagination, or did her lips have a softened, bruised look? Suddenly he did not want to touch her. He let go of her face and rubbed his hands down the side of his trouser seams, as if wiping off uncleanliness.

“Is it Hertzl?” he hissed.

“Hertzl?” Her eyes scanned his face. “Yes, Franz, I went to see Frau Hertzl, but she was not at home so I—”

“Don’t. Don’t trouble to lie to me. I spend my life among the sexually reckless, the cuckolders, and their trollops.” He pushed his thumb hard across her lips, mashing them against her teeth. “You have been kissed.” He reached behind her neck and pulled hard on the muslin so that the buttons tore from the delicate loops of fabric that held them. “You have been undressed.” He leaned in close. “Someone has fucked you.”

She took a step away from him, trembling.

“I ask you again: was it Hertzl?”

Her brown eyes brimmed. “No,” she whispered. “Not Hertzl. No one you know.”

He found himself repeating what he’d said to his brother not so many hours earlier. “You’d be surprised who I know.” His mind was full of images: the baron’s boil-cratered penis, the yellow pus oozing from a girl’s eroded labia, the gummy tumors eating away at poor demented Mittl. He couldn’t breathe. He needed air. He turned away from his wife and walked out the door, slamming it behind him.

Rosalind, having given up on seeing Hirschfeldt that evening, was dressing for a concert. There was an attractive second violin in the Behrensdorf Quartet who had stared at her across his bow all through a recital at a private salon the previous evening. After the performance, he had sought her out and made a point of telling her that he would be playing at the Musikverein tonight. She had just dabbed scent behind her ears and was contemplating whether to risk the delicate lemon silk of her bodice to the pin of a small sapphire brooch when Hirschfeldt was announced. She felt a slight stab of irritation. Why had he not called at the usual hour? He burst into her boudoir, looking entirely odd in his smoking jacket and with such an expression on his face.

“Franz! How very peculiar! Don’t tell me you wore that in the street?”

He did not answer, simply unbuttoned the frogs on the jacket with impatient fingers and threw it on the bed. Then he strode up to her, slid the strap of her gown off her shoulder, and commenced kissing her with an urgency he hadn’t displayed in months.

Rosalind submitted to, rather than participated in, the untender coupling that followed. After, she raised herself on one elbow and gazed at him. “Would you care to tell me what is going on?”

“Not really.”

She waited a few moments, but when he said nothing more, she rose, picked up her gown where it had fallen on the floor, and commenced to dress again for the Musikverein. If she hurried, she could get there before the first interval.

“You are going out?” He sounded aggrieved.

“Yes, if you are going to lie there with a face like a stone. I am most certainly going out.” She turned to him, angry now herself. “Franz, do you realize it has been a month since you have taken me anywhere, brought me a gift, made me laugh? I think perhaps it is time I took a vacation. I might go to the spa at Baden.”

“Rosalind, please. Not now.” He was chagrined. It was he who should decide when to end the affair, not she.

She picked up the brooch. The sapphires looked well against the lemon, and drew attention to her lively eyes. She jabbed the pin into the delicate fabric. “Then, my friend, you had best give me a reason to stay.”

With that, she stood, swirled a light stole over her creamy shoulders, and left the room.

In the gathering dark of early evening, Florien Mittl clutched at the slender trunk of a lime tree to steady himself as fur-hatted Hassids poured out of their synagogue and filled the street with their uncouth Yiddish babble. His gait was too uncertain to risk trying to make his way against the tide. He would have to wait till they passed. In the upper-Austrian burg where he had been raised, it was the Jews who would make way for a Christian, they who would wait for him to pass. Vienna was too liberal; there was no doubt of it. These Jews had been allowed to forget their place. And was there no end to them? It was not Saturday, so he supposed it must be some Jewish festival or another that brought them out in such numbers, in such strange finery.