A Death in Vienna Read online

  “He’s a friend of yours, Eli Lavon?”

  “Yes, he is. A very close friend. We work together. I live in Jerusalem.”

  “Jerusalem,” she repeated, as though she liked the sound of the word. “I would like to visit Jerusalem sometime. My friends think I’m crazy. You know, the suicide bombers, all the other things . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I still want to go.”

  “You should,” Gabriel said. “It’s a wonderful place.”

  She touched his arm a second time. “Your friend’s injuries are severe.” Her tone was tender, tinged with sorrow. “He’s going to have a very tough time of it.”

  “Is he going to live?”

  “I’m not allowed to answer questions like that. Only the doctors can offer a prognosis. But if you want my opinion, spend some time with him. Tell him things. You never know, he might be able to hear you.”

  HE STAYED FOR another hour, staring at Eli’s motionless figure through the glass. The nurse returned. She spent a few minutes checking Eli’s vital signs, then motioned for Gabriel to come inside the room. “It’s against the rules,” she said conspiratorially. “I’ll stand watch at the door.”

  Gabriel didn’t speak to Eli, just held his bruised and swollen hand. There were no words to convey the pain he felt at seeing another loved one lying in a Viennese hospital bed. After five minutes, the nurse came back, laid her hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, and told him it was time to leave. Outside, in the corridor, she said her name was Marguerite. “I’m working tomorrow night,” she said. “I’ll see you then, I hope.”

  Zvi had left; a new team of guards had come on duty. Gabriel rode the elevator down to the lobby and went outside. The night had turned bitterly cold. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and quickened his pace. He was about to head down the escalator into the U-Bahn station when he felt a hand on his arm. He turned around, expecting to see Marguerite, but instead found himself face to face with the old man who’d been talking to himself in the lobby when Gabriel arrived.

  “I heard you speaking Hebrew to that man from the embassy.” His Viennese German was frantically paced, his eyes wide and damp. “You’re Israeli, yes? A friend of Eli Lavon’s?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My name is Max Klein, and this is all my fault. Please, you must believe me. This is all my fault.”

  5

  VIENNA

  M AX KLEIN LIVED a streetcar ride away, in a graceful old district just beyond the Ringstrasse. His was a fine old Biedermeier apartment building with a passageway leading to a big interior courtyard. The courtyard was dark, lit only by the soft glow of lights burning in the apartments overhead. A second passageway gave onto a small, neat foyer. Gabriel glanced at the tenant list. Halfway down he saw the words: M. KLEIN—3B. There was no elevator. Klein clung to the wood banister as he climbed stubbornly upward, his feet heavy on the well-trodden runner. On the third-floor landing were two wooden doors with peepholes. Gravitating toward the one on the right, Klein removed a set of keys from his coat pocket. His hand shook so badly the keys jingled like a percussion instrument.

  He opened the door and went inside. Gabriel hesitated just beyond the threshold. It had occurred to him, sitting next to Klein on the streetcar, that he had no business meeting with anyone under circumstances such as these. Experience and hard lessons had taught him that even an obviously Jewish octogenarian had to be regarded as a potential threat. Any anxiety Gabriel was feeling quickly evaporated, however, as he watched Klein turn on practically every light in the apartment. It was not the action of a man laying a trap, he thought. Max Klein was frightened.

  Gabriel followed him into the apartment and closed the door. In the bright light, he finally got a good look at him. Klein’s red, rheumy eyes were magnified by a pair of thick black spectacles. His beard, wispy and white, no longer concealed the dark liver spots on his cheeks. Gabriel knew, even before Klein told him, that he was a survivor. Starvation, like bullets and fire, leaves scars. Gabriel had seen different versions of the face in his farming town in the Jezreel Valley. He had seen it on his parents.

  “I’ll make tea,” Klein announced before disappearing through a pair of double doors into the kitchen.

  Tea at midnight, thought Gabriel. It was going to be a long evening. He went to the window and parted the blinds. The snow had stopped for now, and the street was empty. He sat down. The room reminded him of Eli’s office: the high Biedermeier ceiling, the haphazard way in which the books lay on the shelves. Elegant, intellectual clutter.

  Klein returned and placed a silver tea service on a low table. He sat down opposite Gabriel and regarded him silently for a moment. “You speak German very well,” he said finally. “In fact, you speak it like a Berliner.”

  “My mother was from Berlin,” Gabriel said truthfully, “but I was born in Israel.”

  Klein studied him carefully, as if he too were looking for the scars of survival. Then he lifted his palms quizzically, an invitation to fill in the blanks. Where was she? How did she survive? Was she in a camp or did she get out before the madness?

  “They stayed in Berlin and were eventually deported to the camps,” Gabriel said. “My grandfather was a rather well-known painter. He never believed that the Germans, a people he believed were among the most civilized on earth, would go as far as they did.”

  “What was your grandfather’s name?”

  “Frankel,” Gabriel said, again veering toward the truth. “Viktor Frankel.”

  Klein nodded slowly in recognition of the name. “I’ve seen his work. He was a disciple of Max Beckmann, was he not? Extremely talented.”

  “Yes, that’s right. His work was declared degenerate by the Nazis early on and much of it was destroyed. He also lost his job at the art institute where he was teaching in Berlin.”

  “But he stayed.” Klein shook his head. “No one believed it could happen.” He paused a moment, his thoughts elsewhere. “So what happened to them?”

  “They were deported to Auschwitz. My mother was sent to the women’s camp at Birkenau and managed to survive for more than two years before she was liberated.”

  “And your grandparents?”

  “Gassed on arrival.”

  “Do you remember the date?”

  “I believe it was January 1943,” Gabriel said.

  Klein covered his eyes.

  “Is there something significant about that date, Herr Klein?”

  “Yes,” Klein said absently. “I was there the night those Berlin transports arrived. I remember it very well. You see, Mr. Argov, I was a violinist in the Auschwitz camp orchestra. I played music for devils in an orchestra of the damned. I serenaded the condemned as they trudged slowly toward the gas.”

  Gabriel’s face remained placid. Max Klein was clearly a man suffering from enormous guilt. He believed he bore some responsibility for the deaths of those who had filed past him on the way to the gas chambers. It was madness, of course. He was no more guilty than any of the Jews who had toiled in the slave labor factories or in the fields of Auschwitz in order to survive one more day.

  “But that’s not the reason you stopped me tonight at the hospital. You wanted to tell me something about the bombing at Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”

  Klein nodded. “As I said, this is all my doing. I’m the one responsible for the deaths of those two beautiful girls. I’m the reason your friend Eli Lavon is lying in that hospital bed near death.”

  “Are you telling me you planted the bomb?” Gabriel’s tone was intentionally heavy with incredulity. The question was meant to sound preposterous.

  “Of course not!” Klein snapped. “But I’m afraid I set in motion the events that led others to place it there.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me everything you know, Herr Klein? Let me judge who’s guilty.”

  “Only God can judge,” Klein said.

  “Perhaps, but sometimes even God needs a little help.”

  Klein smiled and poured tea. Then he told the story from the
beginning. Gabriel bided his time and didn’t rush the proceedings along. Eli Lavon would have played it the same way. “For the old ones, memory is like a stack of china,” Lavon always said. “If you try to pull a plate from the middle, the whole thing comes crashing down.”

  THE APARTMENT HAD belonged to his father. Before the war, Klein had lived there along with his parents and two younger sisters. His father, Solomon, was a successful textile merchant, and the Kleins lived a charmed upper-middle-class existence: afternoon strudels at the finest Vienna coffeehouses, evenings at the theater or the opera, summers at the modest family villa in the south. Young Max Klein was a promising violinist—Not quite ready for the symphony or the opera, mind you, Mr. Argov, but good enough to find work in smaller Viennese chamber orchestras.

  “My father, even when he was tired from working all day, rarely missed a performance.” Klein smiled for the first time at the memory of his father watching him play. “The fact that his son was a Viennese musician made him extremely proud.”

  Their idyllic world had come to an abrupt end on March 12, 1938. It was a Saturday, Klein remembered, and for the overwhelming majority of Austrians, the sight of Wehrmacht troops marching through the streets of Vienna had been a cause for celebration. For the Jews, Mr. Argov . . . for us, only dread. The worst fears of the community were quickly realized. In Germany, the assault on the Jews had been a gradual undertaking. In Austria, it was instantaneous and savage. Within days, all Jewish-owned businesses were marked with red paint. Any non-Jew who entered was assaulted by Brownshirts and SS. Many were forced to wear placards that declared: I, Aryan swine, have bought in a Jewish shop. Jews were forbidden to own property, to hold a job in any profession or to employ someone else, to enter a restaurant or a coffeehouse, to set foot in Vienna’s public parks. Jews were forbidden to possess typewriters or radios, because those could facilitate communication with the outside world. Jews were dragged from their homes and their synagogues and beaten on the streets.

  “On March 14, the Gestapo broke down the door of this very apartment and stole our most prized possessions: our rugs, our silver, our paintings, even our Shabbat candlesticks. My father and I were taken briefly into custody and forced to scrub sidewalks with boiling water and a toothbrush. The rabbi from our synagogue was hurled into the street and his beard torn from his face while a crowd of Austrians looked on and jeered. I tried to stop them, and I was nearly beaten to death. I couldn’t be taken to a hospital, of course. That was forbidden by the new anti-Jewish laws.”

  In less than a week, the Jewish community of Austria, one of the most vital and influential in all of Europe, was in tatters: community centers and Jewish societies shut down, leaders in jail, synagogues closed, prayer books burned on bonfires. On April 1, a hundred prominent public figures and businessmen were deported to Dachau. Within a month, five hundred Jews had chosen to kill themselves rather than face another day of torment, including a family of four who lived next door to the Kleins. “They shot themselves, one at a time,” Klein said. “I lay in my bed and listened to the whole thing. A shot, followed by sobs. Another shot, more sobs. After the fourth shot, there was no one left to cry, no one but me.”

  More than half the community decided to leave Austria and emigrate to other lands. Max Klein was among them. He obtained a visa to Holland and traveled there in 1939. In less than a year, he would find himself under the Nazi jackboot once more. “My father decided to remain in Vienna,” Klein said. “He believed in the law, you see. He thought that if he just adhered to the law, things would be fine, and the storm would eventually pass. It got worse, of course, and when he finally decided to leave, it was too late.”

  Klein tried to pour himself another cup of tea, but his hand was shaking violently. Gabriel poured it for him and gently asked what had become of his parents and two sisters.

  “In the autumn of 1941, they were deported to Poland and confined in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. In January 1942, they were deported one final time, to the Chelmno extermination camp.”

  “And you?”

  Klein’s head fell to one side—And me? Same fate, different ending. Arrested in Amsterdam in June 1942, detained in the Westerbork transit camp, then sent east, to Auschwitz. On the rail platform, half-dead from thirst and hunger, a voice. A man in prison clothing is asking whether there are any musicians on the arriving train. Klein latches onto the voice, a drowning man seizing a lifeline. I’m a violinist, he tells the man in stripes. Do you have an instrument? He holds up a battered case, the only thing he had brought from Westerbork. Come with me. This is your lucky day.

  “My lucky day,” Klein repeated absently. “For the next two and a half years, while more than a million go up in smoke, my colleagues and I play music. We play on the selection ramp to help the Nazis create the illusion that the new arrivals have come to a pleasant place. We play as the walking dead file into the disrobing chambers. We play in the yard during the endless roll calls. In the morning, we play as the slaves file out to work, and in the afternoon, when they stagger back to their barracks with death in their eyes, we are playing. We even play before executions. On Sundays, we play for the Kommandant and his staff. Suicide continuously thins our ranks. Soon I’m the one working the crowd on the ramp, looking for musicians to fill the empty chairs.”

  One Sunday afternoon—It is sometime in the summer of 1942, but I’m sorry, Mr. Argov, I cannot recall the exact date—Klein is walking back to his barracks after a Sunday concert. An SS officer comes up from behind and knocks him to the ground. Klein gets to his feet and stands at attention, avoiding the SS man’s gaze. Still, he sees enough of the face to realize that he has met the man once before. It was in Vienna, at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, but on that day he’d been wearing a fine gray suit and standing at the side of none other than Adolf Eichmann.

  “The Sturmbannführer told me that he would like to conduct an experiment,” Klein said. “He orders me to play Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in G Major. I take my violin from its case and begin to play. An inmate walks past. The Sturmbannführer asks him to please name the piece I am playing. The inmate says he does not know. The Sturmbannführer draws his sidearm and shoots the inmate through the head. He finds another inmate and poses the same question. What piece is this fine violinist playing? And on it goes for the next hour. Those who can answer the question correctly are spared. Those who can’t, he shoots through the head. By the time he’s finished, fifteen bodies are lying at my feet. When his thirst for Jewish blood is quenched, the man in black smiles and walks away. I lay down with the dead and said mourner’s Kaddish for them.”

  KLEIN LAPSED INTO a long silence. A car hissed past in the street. Klein lifted his head and began to speak again. He was not quite ready to make the connection between the atrocity at Auschwitz and the bombing of Wartime Claims and Inquiries, though by now Gabriel had a clear sense of where the story was headed. He continued chronologically, one china plate at a time, as Lavon would have said. Survival at Auschwitz. Liberation. His return to Vienna . . .

  The community had numbered 185,000 before the war, he said. Sixty-five thousand had perished in the Holocaust. Seventeen hundred broken souls stumbled back into Vienna in 1945, only to be greeted by open hostility and a new wave of anti-Semitism. Those who’d emigrated at the point of a German gun were discouraged from returning. Demands for financial restitution were met by silence or were sneeringly referred to Berlin. Klein, returning to his home in the Second District, found an Austrian family living in the flat. When he asked them to leave, they refused. It took a decade to finally pry them loose. As for his father’s textile business, it was gone for good, and no restitution ever made. Friends encouraged him to go to Israel or America. Klein refused. He vowed to stay on in Vienna, a living, breathing, walking memorial to those who had been driven out or murdered in the death camps. He left his violin behind at Auschwitz and never played again. He earned his living as a clerk in a dry-goods store, and later
as an insurance salesman. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, the government agreed to pay surviving Austrian Jews approximately six thousand dollars each. Klein showed Gabriel the check. It had never been cashed.

  “I didn’t want their money,” he said. “Six thousand dollars? For what? My mother and father? My two sisters? My home? My possessions?”

  He tossed the check onto the table. Gabriel sneaked a glance at his wristwatch and saw it was two-thirty in the morning. Klein was closing in, circling his target. Gabriel resisted the impulse to give him a nudge, fearing that the old man, in his precarious state, might stumble and never regain his footing.

  “Two months ago, I stop for coffee at the Café Central. I’m given a lovely table next to a pillar. I order a Pharisäer.” He paused and raised his eyebrows. “Do you know a Pharisäer, Mr. Argov? Coffee with whipped cream, served with a small glass of rum.” He apologized for the liquor. “It was the late afternoon, you see, and cold.”

  A man enters the café, tall, well-dressed, a few years older than Klein. An Austrian of the old school, if you know what I mean, Mr. Argov. There’s an arrogance in his walk that causes Klein to lower his newspaper. The waiter rushes across the floor to greet him. The waiter is wringing his hands, hopping from foot to foot like a schoolboy who needs to piss. Good evening, Herr Vogel. I was beginning to think we wouldn’t see you today. Your usual table? Let me guess: an Einspänner? And how about a sweet? I’m told the Sachertorte is lovely today, Herr Vogel . . .

  And then the old man speaks a few words, and Max Klein feels his spine turn to ice. It is the same voice that ordered him to play Brahms at Auschwitz, the same voice that calmly asked Klein’s fellow inmates to identify the piece or face the consequences. And here was the murderer, prosperous and healthy, ordering an Einspänner and a Sachertorte at the Central.

  “I felt as though I was going to be sick,” Klein said. “I threw money on the table and stumbled into the street. I looked once through the window and saw the monster named Herr Vogel reading his newspaper. It was as if the encounter never happened at all.”