I reach Westbahnhof from the U3 line on the underground and stand in the entrance hall with other travellers, gazing up at the screens. The 10:52am leaves from platform 8 in an hour. I take the escalators to the upper level to find caffeine and a paper. The station reminds me of an airport: the trails of baggage, the searching expressions in people’s eyes and the hum of announcements – arrivals, departures, rare delays. We pride ourselves on our punctuality. Anything longer than two minutes is deemed late. The escalator is short, bringing me up to a level where I can lean over the glass barrier and watch passengers scurrying across the over-sized, colourless floor tiles. They all enter and exit through sets of double doors labelled Eingang or Ausgang, ants following one another back to their nests, some carrying food, others carrying nothing, none deviating from the path: entrance to platform, exit to road. I look up at the clock. The black flecks where the numbers should be frustrate me when I’m tired or on the move. They look like lost ants that have congregated around a morsel of food, fixed until they’re free to leave. Instead, the hands turn almost invisibly, minutes overtaking hours and slipping into the past.

  The café is empty. Posters of unrecognisable jazz musicians plastered across brick walls are torn and peeled, rebelliously refusing to stick. The light above me flickers as the rain strikes the roof. I hear thunder rolling across the sky, lightning flashes against the glass panels high up on the side walls. I order an espresso and a strudel. I have a long night ahead of me, unless I sleep. The aroma of coffee is comforting. A ruffled pile of papers lies sprawled across the counter. I sift through them until I reach a Der Standard, then tuck it under my arm and dig out some coins. I find a table in the back corner and drop the backpack on the chair next to me. It feels too light for the size, but I haven’t packed it full, only enough for a few days. The front page of the paper doesn’t hold my interest but I catch a glimpse of a face on page ten, the body, Herr Schneider’s brother. His face is instantly recognisable. I skim the words, but they don’t register. Then, I discover that he had a sister. I squint at the black ink in the dull light in the café until the words align. I see a face. It’s Maria. Why didn’t she tell me she had two brothers? I stole a brooch from the body of one. The other is threatening me with charges of manslaughter. She knows all of this. Maybe she’s unaware of any siblings.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss?’ The waitress puts an espresso down on the table. ‘You look pale. Sugar?’

  ‘No. I’m fine. No sugar.’ I wave away the sugar pot and turn my face back towards the headlines. She returns to reloading the croissants onto the display counter, glancing at me a few times before disappearing. I stare at the plait resting on the nape of Maria’s neck and wonder how her brother was killed. There were no marks on the body that I could identify. The word ‘drunk’ sounds so terse when I think about it, cruel and devoid of emotion. Maybe he was sober. Maybe he wasn’t a drunk. Nobody seems to know anything about the man. Even his own brother had no words to share. It’s as though he never existed.

  I read past the headline to the paragraph describing Maria and Herr Schneider as his siblings. It says that their parents died and I wonder if that’s what fractured their relationships, and if it might be the reason why Herr Schneider spoke about the body with such disdain, but I’m sure there’s more. Maria talked about her parents but never mentioned siblings.

  I take a sip of the coffee. It burns. The waitress returns with a steaming slice of strudel and a generous helping of cream. I cut into the flesh of the apple with a cake fork, cream runs down over the pastry. I lift the fork to my mouth and close my eyes. This is the first food I’ve eaten in almost twenty-four hours. I check my pocket for a lighter and leave half a pack of cigarettes on the table for later. The waitress watches me. She empties the shelves of torte and croissants which I imagine are now dried at the edges, and replaces them with fresher ones. Everything will have been out since the early hours.

  I read the rest of the article. It says that they were estranged from each other, but doesn’t give a reason. I think back to Herr Schneider’s disinterest when we discussed the body. And Maria? How was it that on the many occasions that we discussed both brothers, she revealed nothing of her connection with either of them? They weren’t among the family photographs on her shelf, only her parents and grandparents. She told me that she was an only child. It was a lie.

  I put the paper down, place the cup of coffee on top, then remove the cup in case I need the evidence. I pull a cigarette out of the pack, flip the lighter, draw in the nicotine and feel my nerves settle. The waitress is pouring herself a coffee. I imagine it’s been a long shift and she’s glad the café is empty of customers and clatter.

  I pick up the paper and slip through the pages until I reach an article on the art stored in Berlin and Munich. Images of Monets, Cezannes and Mondrians are splashed across a double page. The article says something about the injustice of the looting and that experts in America and Israel are in talks with the collectors and the owners as they try to relocate the art and get the pieces back to the families. This, against my own operations, feels like a huge feat. It’s difficult to imagine how it will all be returned. I still believe that museums have no superior right over an individual to art, especially not if it’s stolen. Omama always told me that my words were harsh, but it’s honesty. You can cover up theft and call it movement of property but it’s still misappropriation in its worst form. I shudder to think of the works I’ve moved for Albert, or whoever is sending the letters. Theft: that’s what it is. I am a thief. Now, I have to bring some form of restoration by returning the most unlawful of losses. The Jewish art that was plundered is unforgivable. This could be a war crime.

  “It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth.” According to the article, the words of the Führer had been plastered across walls. He didn’t like the way that men and women were represented by artists like Picasso, Kokoschka or Kandinsky. I wonder how strong he really felt, and whether his anger, in fact, stemmed from a lack of strength. I know that my hard-headed approach to life comes from a vulnerability that no one sees. There’s a dragon in all our hearts. Some are able to tame it or turn it away and welcome a lighter animal – an eagle, perhaps, or a dove – while others destroy everything around them, quenching the very fire of life.

  People criticise these monsters but history repeats itself through other wars, in other lands, ricocheting from one place to another. Anger, and the search for domination and ethnic purity are dressed up as righteousness and justification, but it’s an arrogance that doesn’t understand that we are similar creatures. We all crave safety, identity and purpose. We all want to lay down our heads at night knowing that we’ll wake to stability, that our loved ones are not at risk of harm, that we can go about our day with freedom of choice.

  The article in the paper cites the words painted across the walls of the ‘Degenerate art exhibition’ in Munich in November of 1937: 20,000 people a day came to see 650 works of art confiscated from German museums. An insult to German womanhood, reads one slogan. Deliberate sabotage of national defence, says another. My stomach turns. I stub out the cigarette in an ashtray, place the coffee back on the table, take a gulp of water and breathe out as though exorcising evil. Madness becomes method is the last line I read before closing the paper. I want to throw it into the bin by the door but, with the article about Maria and her siblings, I decide against discarding the information.

  Chapter 27

  The station clock reaches 10:35am. I stub out the rest of the cigarette and go to the counter with ten euros. The waitress watches me leave. Without waiting for the change, I make my way down to platform eight. The train is resting almost against the buffers and I climb into a carriage towards the end. The seats are reasonably empty. It’s not a popular time to travel. I pull out a bottle of water and a book, and set the rucksack down and allow myself the luxury of an extra seat. An elderly man is sitting adjacent to me across the aisle, looking out of the window at other trains waiting at the station, watching passengers scurrying up and down the platform with wheeled suitcases and travel backpacks like mine. He looks sad or hopeful. I can’t tell which of the two. His forehead is furrowed, eyebrows lowered, sheltering his eyes from the sunlight, or from life. He has what looks like a picnic hamper on the floor by his seat with a flask pushing through at the top, its silver coating dulled with age to a weary grey. His body and belongings use an economy of space I cannot imitate. He looks at his watch and up at the station clock hoping, I assume, that they will match up. The latter tells him that the train will depart in two minutes.

  Only his eyes swivel up and back down and rest on a woman who is taking off her cardigan and stuffing it into a bag. Her shoulders are toned and bronzed. He is still watching her as she walks towards the back of the train and I wonder if he has a wife or if he is alone and on his way to meet someone. I imagine his life, all neatly folded away into cupboards and his kitchen, dark and filled with an assortment of teas and china cups with roses and gold leaf and a biscuit tin just out of reach. He looks about Maria’s age, maybe younger, but his expression is fixed by years of pain, his eyes dark and marred by disappointment. I feel these things when I look at people, flashes of a life lived with loss or regret. Sometimes the eyes are bright and hopeful. He doesn’t look hopeful, his mouth turning down at the corners. He soothes himself by stroking a few fingers across each hand in a repetitive motion that I have seen in small children and trauma survivors.

  The station master shouts an order and the doors close. I fail to hear the sentences, the endings swallowed up in the bell of the tannoy. The words roll through the metal, morphing into something completely unrecognisable, as though we are submerged under water. Others, I notice, ignore them too, preferring to trust their instincts, or to look at a clock or a timetable. It seems pointless to stand there and shout something no one attends to except maybe the driver. If he is the only person who needs to know, then the job is done. We pick up speed as the train rolls into the open, leaving a latent orange haze of station lights, and the din of train announcements, plunging us into the blackness of the Vienna night. I pick up my book and run my fingers over the front cover. A lone woman walking up a rock-covered hill towards a small, concrete house, is overlaid by large brown lettering: The Keeper of Books by J.A. Cooper. The author is unknown to me, but I bought it under the auspices of her being a prize-winning travel journalist who works in Human Rights. The scent of the paper is comforting. I bought it at the second hand bookshop, the inside front pages scrawled with notes and a message, To Susanne with love from Bernard. You will always be my muse. The price is pencilled in at the top right hand corner. I bought it for a mere eighty-five cents. I can’t imagine being anyone’s muse. The thought feels stifling. The scent of old paper is pungent, the lignin releasing itself like campfire smoke.

  I sink into the seat and read the back cover. It’s non-fiction about a journalist working in Kabul. As I read on, it’s more poetic than much of the recent fiction I’ve read. There’s little time to read, so I savour these hours ahead where nothing else pulls at me. She plants us into a scene with immediate tension; the father is considering taking another wife and the children are afraid of his anger. The wife is silent and I fear for her safety. Without knowing anything about her life, or even her name, I already want to protect her from him, from his words and his hands. The skill of a good writer lies in the ability to put you into a scene and hold you there, playing with your emotions until they decide to release you and move you into another scene, a cat teasing a mouse before going in for the kill. The tension ebbs and flows through the first chapter and I pause to drink some water and scan the view, but outside is black. We’re heading north from the centre and there are no towns or villages to light our way. The man on the seat across from me is asleep with an empty paper bag beside him and an open flask. I can smell chicken soup and home-made bread. His hands are rough and calloused.

  I draw my knees up to my chest and wrap a fleece across my legs. The windows are open a chink and the night air is cold. I could close them, but then I’d feel suffocated. The faint scent of pickled gherkins will only become stronger until we disembark at Mannheim. A mature stilton or a pickled vegetable, neither should be left open for longer than is necessary.

  Cooper writes about the matchbox houses crammed into the landscape, telegraph wires stretching up over the mountain like ski lifts. She describes the craggy mountainside and the turquoise domes of mosques rising through mists. Bazaars bustle with children and market-sellers. She draws us back to the husband, who is still speaking, but she does not mention the wife for a few pages. I wonder if this is deliberate; the unseen member of the family. The children are afraid. The other woman walks. She is a villager. They recognise her immediately and she’s a good deal younger than their mother. I close the book and pull out a cigarette and a lighter. The tension on the pages is too much. There’s enough tension in my own life. I don’t need to be drawn into anyone else’s. I walk to the end of the carriage, taking my purse and house keys. The window is ajar and I pull it wide open. The lighter fails to ignite. A man passes me in the corridor, takes the lighter and ignites it with one deft thumb movement. I nod to thank him, but he’s already walked into the next carriage where my rucksack lies on the seat and the man is sleeping with his basket and flask. For a second, I feel uncomfortable, a chill at my back, and I peer through the window. He is no longer visible. His manner was strange, forceful. I don’t remember anyone offering to light a cigarette for me. In fact it wasn’t an offer, more an assumption.

  I watch the lights from distant towns flicker and vanish. The blackness of the sky is at last lifted by dull moonlight. The only sound is the train’s wheels against the tracks. My body judders as the carriages pull against each other. I think about Maria’s words and wonder why she’s led me to Herr Knaus, and whether this is a decoy. I’ve trusted her so far, but the terrain keeps shifting, sand dunes moved by the wind. Schneider, Albert and Hans have all changed and become three siblings. There are two bodies and various pieces of stolen art to understand. I hope that this Peter Knaus is an honest man. I need someone to tell me the truth.

  I remember watching Opa painting and Omama walking into the room with an ashen face and eyes wide open. I didn’t know then that I would never see Mother and Father again. I don’t remember much beyond their eyes meeting and him leaving the room as she spoke. I remember the smell of the oil paints and the half empty canvas with its streaks of background colour. I remember sitting on the wooden floor boards holding my doll. Her name was Anna. She went everywhere with me and was the only constant in my life that I could remember. Her hair was made of red wool, and she wore a brown patterned dress. Her eyes were blue and remained fixed in a startled expression. The fabric was soft and smelled of Mother. They were the only scents I could remember for a long time: the smell of Omama’s perfume and Opa’s oils.

  The cigarette glows, the stub shortened to my fingertips. I throw it onto the tracks and return to my carriage where the lights are lowered to a nighttime glow. The other passenger remains asleep as I take my place next to the window and pick up the book, flipping to the last page. Hans once told me he always reads the last sentence before starting a new book. We’d argued about it spoiling the story. I’m not planning to finish it this evening so reading the ending will do no harm. I turn to the last page, skim the acknowledgements and the list of the other books by the same publisher, until I reach the empty pages and the last page of the story. I decide against reading the last line and go back to the beginning. Why would anyone want to know the ending? I want to feel the characters and the city. I want to smell the fires and the dust. I need to be in the shoes of the character or the narrator who, in this instance, is the youngest daughter. She’s fearful of her father arranging a marriage with a boy in the next town. I can identify with her sense of fear of the unknown. It’s why we read, to find ourselves. The mother has left the home to find firewood and the father is looking longingly at the new woman. My stomach twists. The eldest daughter is already married and living nearby. She makes tea. All eyes are on him, a man whose every whim is catered for by the women in the house.

  I close the book, knowing that my mind should be open to different cultures and ways of doing things, but the treatment of the women in this book, as commodities to be owned and traded, disgusts me. I don’t care to indulge in any further details, convinced I’ve already read enough. I finish the water and look over at the sleeping man. His head has dropped onto his left shoulder, threatening to pull him over to the next seat where he would crush only the empty paper bag.

  Chapter 28

  I wake somewhere towards Mannheim and go in search of a coffee. My fellow passenger has left the carriage leaving behind his paper, tired and curled at the edges, which is how I now feel. I pick it up on the way to the restaurant car. I can smell fruit tea and hope they sell caffeinated drinks. The carriage is filled with smoke. It’s too much, even for me. I pay for a black coffee and leave quickly, noticing the train’s emptiness. We wait a while before the train pulls out of the station. A man who boarded the train at Mannheim is walking towards me from the next carriage. He stares at me through the glass and I look down, knowing in the pit of my stomach that he is here for me. I hear the handle turn, take a sip of coffee and open the paper. I avoid the temptation to hide my face behind the papers and look straight at him as he walks towards me. He’s wearing dark glasses and the lower part of his face is wrapped in a scarf. Both are out of place on the train: it’s too dark for sunglasses and too warm in the carriages for a scarf. I think of my gloved hands when I am on the job, and of my training to notice out of place objects and items of clothing. I feel sick. His face reveals nothing as he passes and reaches with one hand towards me. I don’t move or look up. A letter lands between the paper and my body. He doesn’t speak or stop. I turn and lean into the aisle. He is gone. The door at the end of the carriage slams as if shutting me out, telling me not to follow.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17