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  THE PAINTING ON AUERPERG’S WALL

  Copyright © 2018 Erika Rummel

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  The Painting on Auerperg’s Wall is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Rummel, Erika, 1942-, author

  The painting on Auerberg’s wall / Erika Rummel.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-489-1 (softcover).— ISBN 978-1-77133-490-7 (epub).—

  ISBN 978-1-77133-491-4 (Kindle).— ISBN 978-1-77133-492-1 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8635.U56P35 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901523-3

  C2018-901524-1

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  THE PAINTING ON AUERPERG’S WALL

  a novel

  ERIKA RUMMEL

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prelude

  I. David

  II. Laura

  III. Nancy

  IV. Cereta

  V. Zoltan

  VI. All Together Now

  PRELUDE

  DAVID OPENED THE BOOK to the first page and read the title: The Rescue. The slim volume looked frail. He was afraid of cracking the spine and loosening the pages. It had been a mistake to remove the book. He should have read it right there, in Nancy’s bedroom. You don’t disturb the graveyard of memories. Picking up the book was like moving a dead man’s bones. Even running his eyes down the page felt like an intrusion.

  THE RESCUE

  I was born in Vienna on May 20, 1939, the son of Samuel Wassermann, a manufacturer of mining equipment, and his wife Irene. The Ahnenpass1 identified my mother as a descendant of Jews to the fourth generation. On my father’s side, there was a mixture of gentiles and Jews, including an Aryan grandmother and a set of Aryan great-grandparents. But that wasn’t good enough for the Nazis. An Ahnenpass with a preponderance of Jews was a death sentence.

  My uncle, Josef Wassermann, a lawyer, was married to a gentile — which made Eva Wassermann a Judenhure2 in the eyes of the Nazis. In July 1938, a decree was passed in the Reichstag, requiring Aryans to divorce their Jewish spouses. My aunt complied with the law. Josef moved in with my parents. Eva visited whenever possible, maintaining a clandestine relationship with her husband.

  In June of 1939, the Gestapo arrested my father on trumped-up charges of embezzlement. Friends advised my mother to leave the country immediately. The consensus was that the Gestapo would come back and detain her and Josef Wassermann as well.

  My mother was reluctant to leave. She needed to stand by her husband, she said.

  “Be reasonable, Irene,” her brother-in-law said. “Think of the baby. Any risk you take involves the child as well. We must get you a visa for England. And I’ll look after affairs here and do what I can for Samuel.”

  “And what if the Nazis come after you, Josef?”

  “They won’t touch me,” he said. “They wouldn’t dare. I have friends in the diplomatic corps. That’s my safety net. But you must go.”

  My mother gave in to his pleas and started clearing out the apartment. She moved all her personal belongings to Eva’s flat and discreetly sold her valuables. She needed money to start over in England. The large principal rooms of the apartment turned into echo chambers. The festive gatherings, the laughter, the animated conversations were still swirling in her memory, but the rooms themselves had become barren. The glass vitrines holding the family’s crystal and silver platters were empty, the Sorgenthal porcelain sold. The fine Tabriz and Nain carpets were rolled up, ready to be put into storage. A trusted employee was to pick them up at night and drive them to the warehouse in a company van. The oil paintings and baroque mirrors that had hung on the walls had been sold at bargain prices. One or two paintings proved impossible to sell because they were the work of Jewish painters. Irene didn’t know what to do about them.

  Josef was impatient.

  “You are wasting precious time,” he said to her. “If you need cash, I’ll lend it to you. Samuel can pay me back when this nightmare is over.”

  “No, I can’t take money from you,” she said. “What if you need it to get Sam out of the country? And I can’t just up and leave. I must put things in order first.” The truth was she couldn’t bring herself to leave Vienna while Samuel was in prison. And so, while she dawdled and Josef thought he was untouchable, the trap closed on her and Josef.

  In September of 1939, the Gestapo showed up at the Wassermann apartment in the Herrengasse and arrested them both. My aunt, who happened to be at the flat, held me close and pretended I was her child.

  She told me the story so often, it turned into a prayer. She handed it down to me as a relic of the past, and I offer it here in the same spirit: Eva’s story, in her words.

  “Keep your hands off the baby,” she said to the officer in command of the squad. “Ich bin eine deutsche Mutter.”3

  “So what is a deutsche Mutter doing here, visiting Jews?” the Kommandant asked. “And where is the father of the child?”

  “Is this an interrogation?” Eva shot back. “My husband has been drafted. He is doing his duty, fighting for the fatherland. I am here to get my jewellery back. I divorced this Judenschwein4 three years ago.” She pointed at Josef, who was being handcuffed. “When he moved out, he took my jewellery. A pearl necklace and a diamond ring. He says it belongs to him because he paid for it. I say it was a wedding present and mine to keep. That’s why I came here, to get my property back. But no luck.”

  “Let me get this story straight,” the Kommandant said, tapping a short riding crop against his thigh. “You divorced this Judenschwein three years ago and remarried? And now you hate your ex?”

  “I hate his guts.”

  “Is that so? Let’s see you spit into his face.”

  That is how my aunt parted from her husband. That is how they were forced to say goodbye: she spat into his face.

  “Das haben Sie schön gemacht,”5 the Kommandant said to Eva, grinning broadly.

  Josef had turned ashen.

  “Now, where is the jewellery the lady is talking about?” the Kommandant said to him.

  Josef said nothing. He brought his hand up to his face and awkwardly wiped his cheek.

  The Kommandant pointed to the suitcase Josef had been permitted to pack. I
t was sitting on the floor between them.

  “So what have you got in there?” the Kommandant said, nudging the bag with the toe of his boot.

  One of his goons kicked open the suitcase and rifled through it, throwing clothes and toiletries on the tiled floor of the hall. There was no jewellery.

  My mother came forward and quietly put things back into the suitcase. There was silence as the men watched her bending over the clothes, gathering up and refolding the pieces.

  The Kommandant made an impatient gesture. “Enough,” he said. “Move your breiten Judenarsch.6 He won’t need those clothes where he is going. He’ll be issued a potato sack.”

  The squad laughed appreciatively. They formed a cordon around Irene and Josef, waiting for the order to decamp, but the officer was in no hurry.

  “I bet he sold the jewellery,” he said to my aunt. “Those two were getting ready to skedaddle. The apartment is half-empty. Another day or two, and they would have flown the coop.” He gave Irene the evil eye. She was wearing a pair of emerald earrings. She still didn’t understand how precarious her situation was. The Kommandant raised his crop and with the tip of the cane touched the emerald on her left ear, making the pendant sway.

  Irene flinched.

  “Take them off,” he said to her, “and give them to the lady here as compensation for the jewellery she lost.”

  Irene fiddled with the clasps of her earrings.

  “Need any help?” the Kommandant said and nodded to one of his men. “Help the lady, why don’t you?”

  The man stepped forward and ripped the pendants from Irene’s ears with two brutal jags that made her head snap sideways. She cried out, and immediately pressed her lips together to stifle the sound. She didn’t want to give the men the satisfaction of hearing her cry. Blood was dripping from her earlobes. She kept her head down.

  The Kommandant chucked her under the chin and made her look into his eyes. He stood close to her, like a lover saying adieu to his sweetheart. “Come on,” he said, his voice silky, “be a sport. Tell the lady that the earrings are a present, to remember you by.”

  Irene freed herself from his caressing hand. There was a smear of blood on her cheek. She looked across to Eva who held the emerald pendants in her cupped hand.

  “It’s a present, to remember me by,” she said quietly. Her face had gone rigid.

  “I’ll remember you,” my aunt said with a toss of her head. She knew she had to give a flawless performance to carry off the show.

  “There you are,” the Kommandant said smoothly. “Everything in order now?”

  Eva nodded, and tucked away the earrings.

  “It looks that way at any rate,” he said, “but we can’t be sure until we have checked out the whole story, right, sweetheart? How many children do you have?”

  On cue, the baby started fussing, and Eva buried her face in the blanket and nuzzled him. “Shush, darling,” she said, trying desperately to maintain her composure. “Only this one,” she said to the Kommandant. “I won’t be a candidate for the Mutterkreuz,7 I know, but I’m doing what I can for the fatherland. You have a problem with that?”

  He grinned. “No problem, sweetheart.”

  He turned to go but stopped when he heard someone coming up the stairs.

  A gentleman in a tailored grey coat and black homburg appeared on the landing with a boy in tow — the Wassermanns’ neighbour, Leo von Auerperg and his son Max. The boy stopped on the last step and stared, but the father took his arm, leading him toward the door of their suite. He knew better than to show an interest in the activities of the Gestapo. You don’t tangle with the secret police. He was pulling out his keys when the Kommandant called to him.

  “You are a neighbour of the Wassermanns?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This woman,” the Kommandant said, pointing to my aunt, “claims the baby is hers. Is that correct?”

  Von Auerperg took a step toward my aunt as if he wanted to get a better look at her in the gloomy halflight of the corridor. The tension was palpable, the seconds stretching into minutes, or so it seemed to Eva as she waited for Auerperg’s reply.

  “I’ve seen them before,” Auerperg said. “Her and the baby. But that’s all I can tell you, I’m afraid. I’m not on familiar terms with the Wassermanns.”

  The Kommandant turned to Max.

  “How old are you, son?”

  “Ten, sir.”

  “In the HJ?”8

  The boy shot out his arm in a precise military salute. “Jawohl, Herr Kommandant.”

  “Good. You know the Wassermanns?”

  “No, sir. I don’t associate with Jews, sir.”

  “Very commendable,” the Kommandant said and clapped him on the shoulder. “Your father can be proud of you.”

  He turned to his men. “Forwärts. Marsch,” he barked, and the men snapped to attention and escorted Irene and Josef downstairs.

  The Kommandant cast a look back at my aunt. “I still think I should check you out, sweetheart,” he said. “Maybe we can do something together for the fatherland.”

  Eva listened to the dull thud of the retreating boots.

  Von Auerperg was lingering in the corridor.

  “Go on in, Max,” he said to the boy. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  When the door had closed on the boy, Auerperg leaned over the banister and scanned the foyer below. Satisfied that they were alone, he said to Eva:

  “You’d better get out of Vienna — you and the child.”

  “I don’t have enough money to get out,” she said.

  “Let’s talk,” he said. “Maybe I can help you. Meet me inside St. Peter’s Church in half an hour.”

  Eva nodded and walked stiffly downstairs. The baby had started fussing again. She went into a small café at the corner, sat down in one of the booths, and ordered café au lait. When it came, she poured a little milk and sugar into the saucer, dipped the pacifier into the mixture and managed to calm the baby. After a while she paid, crossed the Graben and entered St. Peter’s.

  If I had read this earlier, David thought, would it have made a difference? Not really. He still had a lot of questions that needed answers.

  1The document required by the Nazis to establish Aryan lineage.

  2Whore of the Jews.

  3“I am a German mother.” Motherhood, Aryan that is, was a Nazi shibboleth.

  4“Jewish pig,” an expletive widely used by the Nazis.

  5“You did that very nicely.”

  6“Your big Jewish arse.”

  7The Iron Cross for mothers, an honour instituted in December of 1938 to encourage Aryan population growth; it was awarded to mothers of four or more children.

  8Hitler Jugend (Youth for Hitler), a paramilitary youth organization. Membership was not obligatory, but those who refused to join were shunned.

  I. DAVID

  THE CRISIS CAME IN THE SUMMER of 2001. The breakup with Elaine had a castrating effect on him. There wasn’t the slightest increase in his pulse rate at the thought of sex, in whatever position, leg over, ass first, or Kama Sutra knot. There was no swelling in his groin area, none.

  The uncertainty, the lack of definition in his crotch, started with Elaine bitching about the house. It was too shabby. She wanted something that was more in tune with her executive mind and her executive salary, something that spelled success.

  “Let’s move to Brentwood,” she said, scanning the real estate ads in the LA Times. “Or Pacific Palisades.”

  “I thought you wanted to live here, in Santa Monica. You said you liked the funky shops, the cafés, the beach. Suddenly you don’t?”

  “The neighbourhood is fine. It’s the house that bothers me, David. If you don’t want to move, let’s talk to an architect about renovating, putting in an extra bathroom, and extending the back of the h
ouse. We need space to entertain.”

  “The space we have is perfectly good for entertaining. I don’t see why we have to change anything.”

  She threw the Real Estate section at him. “Christ! David!” she said. “What’s wrong with you? You’re turning into a vegetable.”

  True. Arguing with Elaine left him limp, in a subhuman state. It was a winter of raised voices and bitter accusations. The incongruity of their lives became obvious. How could he have failed to notice it before? It was fundamental. He was incompatible with women of Elaine’s type: the cool intellectual, the long-legged blonde with endless energy and a knack for closing deals. Elaine knew how to network, how to put herself on the promotional track. A woman like that is a daily challenge. Match her wit, match her high- powered moves, match her minimum sleep requirements. David needed a solid eight hours of sleep. Four hours were enough to recharge Elaine.

  When Elaine moved out, she packed two suitcases with personal belongings. She was in a hurry to get away. She had no use for the furniture, the dishes, the linens, the stuff that marked their common past. She was keen on leaving everything behind and starting over. She took only a dozen books and cherry-picked a few collectibles: an etching, a small rug, some knick-knacks they had brought back from vacations. It was no more than she could load into her Infiniti, but the place looked raided nevertheless. There were empty spaces where familiar things had been. It all added to David’s confusion and uncertainty. He put his hand on the spot that had once held a jade Buddha. He stood before the plucked bookshelves, put his fingers into the gaps, and felt hollow around the heart.

  The TV offered no escape, no mindless entertainment. Every show was about bickering couples. All love affairs ended in crimes of passion or lingering deaths. David watched the evening news with a heightened sense of alarm. The violence kept piling up. It may have started with Elaine going away, but it continued with train derailments, gang rapes, drive-by shootings, and the attack on the World Trade Center. The images of the planes crashing into the towers, the billowing smoke, the toxic cloud, the howling sirens trailed in David’s head for months. Things continued to go terribly wrong, at home and abroad. Nothing but disasters of biblical proportions:tsunamis, earthquakes, war, famine, epidemics. So it came as no surprise to David that the foundations of his house began to shake, as the excavator ripped into the bungalow nextdoor, a leftover from the thirties, a teardown in real estate parlance.