The flames, p.10
The Flames, page 10
She looks up, startled. A giraffe is beside her, outside its enclosure, its long legs bending in unnatural ways, its graceful neck reaching down, its big velvet lips brushing her cheek. She raises a hand and holds it there, relishing the warmth of its skin. When she peers up, the giraffe is gone. Adele looks all around her, but there’s no trace of the elegant, exotic animal. She runs through the park, her mind flashing, pain pulsing in her abdomen, a thickening ache moving up from the base of her spine to her skull. She has lost her lace-trimmed hat, is without a coat, and doesn’t trust herself to open her mouth, for she fears she might start screaming again and never stop. There are images in her mind that she wants to banish. A soldier and horsehair blankets, his rifle propped in the corner of the room; the letter she received – was it just this morning, or last week? – calling her for an initial assessment with doctors, invoked by her mother. The maze of underworld corridors she passed through earlier, the bright lights and the sterile smell that had swept away her baby. It is gone, it is all gone. She cannot bear any of it. She falls to her knees, clutching at the grass with her fingers.
The word ‘sister’ floats into her mind.
Edith. Yes, she’s the one person Adele needs right now.
But in the next flash, she hears an echo of Hanna’s words. Edith chose this. She betrayed her. These thoughts have been trapped in her mind for a long time – more than three years – like a butterfly in a jar, batting against the edges, finding no release.
Edith orchestrated all of this. She stole Adele’s life. It is Edith’s fault this is happening. It’s her sister’s fault Adele carries nothing but bruises on the outside and a ghost on the inside. She retraces the steps that she knows will lead to the apartment Edith shares with the artist. She must tell what she knows, this knowledge of her betrayal that has scorched Adele, left the wound infested. And she will tell Edith about the betrayals she has orchestrated. That her husband is in love with her, Adele, that he invited her to outings without Edith’s knowledge, that he gave her gifts, all those cherished afternoons slipping by easily between them as he painted, as easily as the material fell from her shoulders to the floor. She will tell her sister about this baby. It exists, she knows it does. It will be hers alone, something she can love.
She bangs at the door of Edith’s home. Egon answers, but as soon as he sees Adele, he pulls the door closed behind him and joins her on the street.
‘Adele! What happened? You’re covered in … what is that … blood?’
‘I’m going to tell Edith everything,’ she announces.
‘But there’s nothing to tell her.’
‘The baby. Our baby.’
‘You’re not any making sense. Adele, please.’ He holds her face, looks into her wild eyes. ‘You’re scaring me. I’m sorry, it’s a lot to bear, everything you’ve been through. But you need help. Professional help. Let me walk with you to the doctor. Let’s not disturb Edith, she’s trying to get some rest.’
But Adele won’t be moved.
‘I’m here to see my sister.’
‘She’s sleeping,’ Egon insists. ‘She doesn’t want to see you.’
‘I won’t leave before I’ve seen Edith. She needs to hear this.’
‘Adele, you need to leave. Please, it’s for your own good.’
The final piece of her snaps. Adele barges past Egon into the hallway. Edith, wrapped in warm clothes, six months pregnant, is walking down the corridor, disturbed by the commotion.
‘Adele?’ Edith says, surprised. ‘What are you doing here?’
There’s wariness in her face and, yes, fear.
Don’t do this, you’ll regret it for the rest of your days, a voice Adele doesn’t recognize whispers in her head. But she cannot hold back any longer. Everything that once made sense has fallen away. And she intends to release, finally, all that she has bottled up over the years. She takes a step closer to her sister, and all her rage rushes out.
The next thing Adele knows, she’s on the banks of the Danube. She has no idea what has happened, or what she has done.
What has she done?
Her skirts are ripped, and covered with mud and dried blood. There’s something firm and round beneath the material. She pulls it out: an orange. She doesn’t know where it came from. She hasn’t seen one for many months during this war. It glistens like the gems she once admired. It is so vibrant, she weeps. She sits by the river and scratches its bright skin again and again with her thumbnail, the citrus oils bursting into the air around her. Hours later, she throws the shredded remains into the dark waters, and wishes she had the energy to follow.
She returns to Edith’s apartment, dazed and exhausted after hours of walking, when it is dark, the dazzling moon lost behind clouds. It’s late, so she knows her sister should be sleeping but, even so, she knocks. Adele doesn’t want any more trouble. She knocks again. She just wants to apologize. She bangs her fist against the door. She knows she needs help. She is sorry, truly sorry. But no matter how hard she tries, there is no answer.
Interlude
Vienna, 9 May 1968
‘Comfortable now …?’ the doctor asks, not looking up as he inspects Adele’s charts. Adele refuses to look in his direction. She does not want to be here. She’d rather be scrubbing toilets on her hands and knees than be trapped against her will in this stale ward. No medication in the world, certainly nothing administered by this pipsqueak of a man, can dull the ache in her bones or ease the guilt she has carried for half a century. Adele should be out there, searching for the precious ring she has lost. What annihilating pain, to put her hand to her neck and realize the ring was no longer there, nestled close to her heart. She knows she had it only seconds before she was manhandled into the ambulance. Then, yesterday, after a battery of tests, a nurse had proffered a bag containing everything Adele had been wearing or had with her on the day of the accident – not much, and nothing that couldn’t be sent straight to the incinerator, but no ring. Adele hasn’t been without it for a moment, not a single heartbeat, in fifty years.
She stares at the needle that has been inserted into her hand. The nurse had had to navigate between the crags of her arthritic knuckles and swollen thumb, but had eventually found a vein. Adele scorns her current cleanliness – white arcs are visible under each nail. Her new clothes are modern, synthetic and scratch against her skin. A comb has been pulled through her hair. She is practically presentable. She strokes a thumb across the back of her hand and notes with a certain swell of pride that a constellation of liver spots and badly healed burn marks remain. Yes, some things can never be glossed over.
It’s a small mercy that Adele has been placed in a bed by the window, furthest from the entrance to the geriatric ward. She looks at her fellow inmates, and takes in vases of flowers next to each bed, with gaudy petals destined to fall. Adele’s table holds nothing but a jug of water and she prefers it that way.
‘I can call the sister if there’s anything you need. Are you thirsty?’ the doctor says, following her eyes. He pours a glass of water without being asked. Adele nestles her chin into her shoulder to show her defiance. He sighs at her stubbornness and places it on the table. Well! She’ll not touch, let alone drink, this water now that he has told her to, even if it means she must dry out entirely.
‘You won’t keep me here another night,’ she warns.
The doctor offers Adele a wry smile. ‘We need to run through a few more details, I’m afraid, Frau Harms, and complete more tests. Your cooperation is essential. It’s important that we get the facts straight, so we understand you better.’ He looks once more at his notes. ‘It says here you were born in Vienna in 1890. That makes you – what, seventy-eight now? Is that correct?’
Adele prickles. She’s from a different century, another world. This man, existing as he does at the forefront of the present, cannot fathom how life was in Austria’s capital all those years ago. The opulence, the splendour, the spectacle. All gone. He can’t imagine who she once was, that ravishing young woman, those high cheekbones, the heart-stoppingly plump lips. Staring back at her, reflected in the window, is a wild-haired witch with a black eye and stitches holding her ripped skin together. Adele shudders at the sight.
‘Our records are incomplete,’ the doctor continues. ‘We have your year of birth and the names of your parents, Johann and Josefa Harms. There’s also a record of your treatment at the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. Can you tell me why you were sent there?’
Is that pity Adele sees in the doctor’s disappointingly dull eyes?
‘Please, enough of that!’ she interjects. She’ll put her fingers in her ears and scream this place down if she has to – anything to stop this man telling her the story of herself.
‘I’m sorry if this is difficult. I’m only trying to help. There’s so little by way of history in your file. Is there anybody we can contact to let them know you’re safe? Family? Friends? Anybody who might be worried about you?’
Adele fusses with the bandage and pulls the needle from the back of her hand. Blood pools from the open vein. She flinches, then moves her legs from the bed, her tough old soles touching the linoleum floor.
‘Can I ask what you’re doing? Leaving is simply not an option,’ the doctor insists. ‘Not in your condition. Not if you’ll only return to the streets. Earlier, you couldn’t say when you last ate a proper meal. We’ve an obligation to keep you safe.’
‘There’s somewhere I need to be,’ Adele states flatly.
That face the other day, before the accident. It’s her last chance. Adele needs to know, before it’s too late, that everything she remembers, everything she once felt, isn’t a figment of her disintegrating mind.
But the doctor has other plans. He gives her a stern look, then, with a flick of his wrist, indicates that a nurse should reinsert the needle and clear up the mess. Adele harnesses her anger, swearing under her breath, but then the fear kicks in, and she almost chokes on it.
Once again, she is trapped. The same awful itching runs up and down her arms.
Suddenly she is a young woman, back in that bare-bulbed room at Steinhof, clawing at the sheets. ‘You’re mad! You’ll never leave here. It’s for your own good.’ She hears their taunts as the key turns with a clank in its lock and the bolt is drawn across the door. Her thighs are wet and the smell of urine is bitter. A headache spreads to her teeth and she can feel saliva on her chin. ‘I can’t remember my name,’ she repeats. Her finger, with its torn nails, traces indistinct letters in the air. And even in those void moments, certain images surface through the blackness of her mind: his crooked smile, his thick-lashed eyes, his elegant, pale hands.
‘Egon,’ she hears that young woman whispering to the wall, having wedged herself beneath the bed frame. ‘I was beautiful and he painted me. I was rich, and we danced.’
‘Somebody needs to be cured of her overactive imagination!’ she hears those old psychiatric nurses trill as they attach electrodes and watch her thrash. ‘You know that your mind can’t be trusted. This is where you belong.’
But, of course, there was never any cure for matters of the heart. Month after month, jolt after jolt, Egon remained. From the depths of her deadening insignificance, Adele recalled the feeling of being captured and held by him, the glory of the artist turning her, Adele, into something eternal.
Then she is back in the present, in this sterile, modern hospital ward, with its bright lights, a jolly nurse in her starched uniform, short cap and white oxford lace-ups, whistling as she wheels a trolley lined with cups of pills around the ward.
Was any of it real? The artist, her sister, Edith, the life she once knew? And if those things are real, then perhaps other memories – horrible, incomplete recollections that have filled Adele with shame and anguish – are they real as well?
Adele whimpers. Suddenly, it is utterly unbearable. ‘Please. I’ll do anything. Rid me of this pain,’ she begs. The nurse smiles with something like understanding, and the intravenous drip flows with beautiful, numbing morphine, offering oblivion. Adele is ready to lose herself in a wave of it. But when she closes her eyes, a trace of her sister’s haunted face remains.
When she awakes, a young woman is standing at the front of her bed.
‘Your granddaughter is here to see you, Frau Harms,’ a nurse says, helping Adele sit up on the bed, plumping a pillow.
‘Did you say my …?’ Adele asks, knocking a beaker to the floor. ‘But that’s impossible.’ The nurse bends to mop the spill and indicates, with a raised eyebrow, the girl who is waiting. ‘But that can’t be …’ The old woman squints. ‘There’s not a soul left on earth who’d want to see me.’ The nurse offers a sympathetic smile and moves on to the next patient.
The woman approaches, with hesitant steps, flowers behind her back.
‘Good Lord! It’s you!’ Adele says. ‘The bicycle bandit! But what have you done? Your hair! It’s as if someone has hacked it off with a blunt knife.’
The woman touches the stubby ends. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘You look terrible! Worse than the last time I saw you.’
‘You don’t look too peachy yourself.’
Adele raises a lip. ‘And whose fault is that?’
‘That’s why I’m here. To apologize,’ says the young woman. ‘I felt bad for everything that happened. I tried all the hospitals in Vienna. You weren’t easy to find. Nobody admitted that day matched your description. And I didn’t know your name. I’m Eva, by the way.’
‘You really shouldn’t have gone to all that bother, you know. I presume your bicycle fared little better than I did.’
‘I doubt it’ll ever be the same. But you’re on the mend, I hope?’
‘I’ll live, though not for long, I expect, if these doctors have anything to do with it,’ Adele says with a jut of her chin, a flash of mischief in her eyes.
‘Anyway, I’m sorry that you’re in this place because of me.’ Eva pushes her hair behind her ear. ‘And I believe this is yours.’ She reaches into her pocket. ‘I found it that day on the street. It clearly means something to you and I thought you’d want it back.’
Adele’s heart lurches.
‘I’m so pleased to return it to its rightful owner,’ Eva adds. ‘I also wanted to ask: the woman on the poster. Why was she so important to you?’
‘You saw her?’ Adele mutters. ‘I thought it was my mind playing tricks again.’
‘She was right there, in front of us. I can’t forget the look in her eyes. I went back the next day to see her once more and look for a name,’ Eva continues. ‘But all I could find was the name of the artist. Egon Schiele. Have you heard of him?’
Adele’s face flushes suddenly, and her nostrils flare.
‘Please, I’m tired now. Take your flowers and leave.’
Eva stands, confused by this sudden turn of mood. ‘I’m sorry. I only mentioned it because I thought you’d want to know there’s an exhibition of Schiele’s work at the Albertina. If I’m not mistaken, today’s the final day.’
Adele sits bolt upright. ‘But I must go,’ she says, grabbing the young woman’s hands. ‘Only, I can’t make it there on my own.’ Adele looks panic-stricken, trapped as she is in this bed, this hospital. Her eyes search Eva’s with hope and desperation.
‘What about your medication?’ Eva asks, looking at the bruising, the charts above the bed, the machines surrounding Adele. ‘Aren’t you in a lot of pain?’
‘Don’t let me die here, alone. I need answers.’
‘But what am I supposed to do? Sneak you out of here, past the nurses who are looking after you, and the doctors who say you shouldn’t be going anywhere?’
Adele brightens. ‘Exactly. They’ll hardly notice I’m gone. Please, you owe me this, wouldn’t you say?’
Eva looks at the older woman’s knuckles, still scuffed from the collision, remembers the pain in her eyes as she stood transfixed in front of the haunting image on the poster.
It is a daring thought. She asks herself what she has to lose.
The taxi pulls away, having brought Eva and Adele to the Albertina gallery. Their escape from the hospital was hurried and unauthorized, and was probably the most fun Eva has had in a long while.
Tourists mill around the entrance to the imposing museum, consulting guidebooks and maps. The air is thick with the sugar scent of caramelized almonds and there’s the jolly, wheezing sound of an accordion. A little girl performs a cartwheel across their path, the shadow of her feet falling across Adele’s body as they join the queue of people waiting to enter the grand foyer that leads to the exhibition of Schiele’s artworks.
Eva takes a thin cigarette from a packet in her bag.
‘They calm my nerves,’ she says, offering the pack in Adele’s direction.
‘They’re no good for you,’ the old woman retorts, but readily accepts. She smells the length of the rolled tobacco, then leans to the proffered flame.
Adele let go of this habit years ago. But now, the familiar lull of the nicotine stirs her. She recalls the stifling days when she worked for the Strasser family in Vienna, between the wars, after she’d been released from the psychiatric hospital. She’d steal cigarettes from a silver case in her mistress’s handbag, linger over them on errands.
‘Come here, you insolent girl,’ the master would say, his belt held high.
After that first war ended, the privileged upbringing Adele had enjoyed became a curse. The Harms family’s savings were gone, all their investments wiped out. Adele was unmarried, and past her prime. She had to find work. And, of course, she had no skills – no aptitude for cooking, no experience of cleaning, and no tolerance for children. But she’d been forced to learn.
The hardest lesson had been to forget her pride.
The words Who do you think you are? would ring in Adele’s ears each time she refused to scrub the flagstones or wipe a child’s bottom. She was beaten into submission until she was able to lower her eyes and bite her tongue, until she forgot how to say her name with dignity – until she was nobody at all. There was nothing to live for. The people she had loved most were gone from her life. She doesn’t know how she survived, but the cruel days added up to months, years, decades, a lifetime.
