Trudi awoke. It was dark, dark night. She could see nothing, but she could hear. There were footsteps somewhere, not in the room, but outside, approaching the door, too soft almost for her straining ears, but plucking like a plectrum at her straining nerves.
They stopped. The door. Where was the door? She did not know, except that it must be where the footsteps had halted. She had locked it but drew no comfort from a mere key.
Was that the handle being turned, or just the squeak of her mouse-like terror, the crackle of her short-circuiting brain?
It stopped. Silence. Then the steps retreated, fading like a dying man’s pulse, till all was still.
She lay for many minutes, how many she did not know. Slowly she reached for the light switch, could not find it, stretched further. Her fingers touched curtains.
In one convulsive movement she rolled out of bed, seized the curtains and flung them open. No light, nothing, it was as dark as ever, darker than any night could be.
Then, hands and mind arriving at the solution together, her fingers fumbled with the window catch, pulled the hinged frames inward, fumbled again, and then her outstretched palms pushed with all her strength. The shutters burst open and the light of a full moon reflected off a sea of virgin snow dazzled her more than the midday sun.
The snow was almost up to the windows. They had been right to close all the shutters against its wind-driven weight. But now all was still and the great arc of the frost-scoured sky glinted like polished quartz.
She breathed deep, feeling the chill on her skin beneath her borrowed nightgown like a lover’s caress. She was aware now of the light cord within easy reaching distance of the bed, but she made no move to put it on. Just to stand here and breathe the cold air and see the bright champaign was all she desired.
Then there was movement. Away to the left where the forest was thinnest. A man on skis. He flashed across a huge clearing, crouched low, expert, effortless. Then he was among the trees, flickering behind them like an old film for a little while. And now he was gone.
Impossible to make him out at this distance except that his build was broad and solid. Like Jünger’s. Or James Dacre’s.
Or Trent’s.
Her sudden shivering was not due to cold alone, but she closed the window, though not the shutter, and scrambled back into bed.
Her watch told her it was not much after midnight. She had gone to bed early, escaping the frustrations of finding herself an unwilling guest at the clinic. She had rung the hotel in the afternoon, Dacre had not returned, so she left a message explaining her situation. At that point she’d still had hopes of getting away the same evening but when the snow kept on coming and help from the village didn’t, she resigned herself to staying the night.
She had expected James to ring up, but he hadn’t, not before six o’clock anyway, and by then it was discovered that the snow had brought some lines down and the telephones were out of order.
Werner had been as apologetic and attentive as his own frustrations would permit, though whether he was missing an important medical appointment or a night at the opera wasn’t revealed. Klarsfeld she had not seen again and when she asked after him at dinner she was told he was on duty. The other staff members had treated her with friendly courtesy but inevitably they had drifted off into shop-talk after a little while.
So, to bed, early, with a paperback novel borrowed from a bookcase in the staff sitting room, but it still lay open by her pillow at page one for she had found that no imagined world could win her from the mind-aching bewilderments and terrors of her own. Finally sleep, light as mourning crepe, had settled on her soul, to be snatched easily aside by the first real or fancied noise.
She realized now that it was not going to be so easily regained. Her whole being, mind and body alike, felt electric with a craving for action. She considered the possibilities with a coolness which amazed the dormouse which still cowered in its tiny nest at her heart’s deep core. Only one offered any real hope of an advancement of knowledge, and that so small, its reality needed a microscope.
But small hopes are nourishment to a mind starved of understanding.
She rose again and quickly got dressed.
It proved remarkably easy to get to Schiller’s room. Trudi had not been in a hospital since she’d had her appendix out at the age of fifteen, but none of the still dimly remembered National Health Service clatters and clangs and nightly alarums disturbed the midnight peace of the Kahlenberg Klinik.
Her main concern was that there would be a nurse in the outer room but this proved groundless. In fact, the TV monitor was not even switched on and for a second Trudi feared this might mean that Schiller had been moved. But instantly she was reassured by the green points of light tracing out the message that the old man still breathed and functioned in the next room.
Quietly she entered. A dim night-light fell kindly on the ancient face. She went to the bedside and picked up the silver photo-frame.
Her face looked back at her in double, reflected in the glass as she was now and peering through it as she had been then. No reason for anyone else to recognize it. Not even her recent incidental dieting could peel off all those years. But it was her, certainly …
Except that, had she ever had her hair like that? She could not recall it. She studied the photo more closely. It was a close-up, blown up she surmised from a full-length negative, for there was a faint fuzziness which gave the print a rather attractive romantic glow. Background detail was therefore non-existent.
Exasperated, she turned the frame over and twisted the wing screw which held the mounting in place. Now the print slid out to make close examination easier.
There was some writing on the back and a faded photographer’s stamp.
It read, ‘Brüder Schmidt, Wipplingerstrasse, Wien.’
And the writing in a cramped Gothic script said, ‘Fräulein Gertrud Schiller. 17.’
Slowly, necessarily, Trudi sank into the chair which the nurse had occupied.
She turned the print over again to look at the face once more, the face which was hers and yet not hers. Gertrud Schiller. Her face. Her name. His name. This old man who lay dying close by.
Trudi.
So shallow was the breath which bore the word that she was ready to think it was merely the syllabling of her feverish mind.
‘Trudi.’
Only a slight increase of volume, but this time it was undoubtedly the old man who spoke.
‘I’m here,’ she said.
A hand moved on the counterpane. She reached out and took it. It was like a tiny bunch of dry twigs.
She said, ‘Who are you?’
Silence, then the reedy voice echoed, ‘Who are you?’
‘Trudi! I’m Trudi Adamson, Herr Schiller.’
The hand moved, or rather trembled a fraction. But it was a withdrawal. She released it gladly. The contact had not been pleasant.
‘Ah yes. The Jew’s daughter,’ said Schiller, his voice stronger. ‘And yet, Trudi also. Strange.’
‘You mean, my mother?’ said Trudi, taking verbally with slow reluctance the steps her mind had already overleapt.
‘Yes.’
‘You are my grandfather?’
A long pause here.
‘Yes.’
Trudi could not look at him. Her eyes were focused on the photograph before her. The young girl smiled up at her, happy, secure, uncaring. Seventeen. Some time in the thirties. Europe lurching towards war. Hitler peering greedily over the Austrian frontier towards Vienna where some faces smiled welcomingly back at him and others regarded him with the blankness of terror. Her father had spoken to her of these times, though never openly and fully. Always it had been in hints and hesitations which perhaps he imagined were sparing his young daughter the horror of full knowledge, but which in fact had only served to stimulate her fearful imagination.
‘You were a Nazi, Herr Schiller,’ she said.
‘Oh no,’ he denied with an unconcern more convincing than vehemence. ‘Never that. Nazi is political. I was never political.’
‘A Jew-hater then.’
‘That’s so,’ he agreed with an equal insouciance. ‘Some of my best rivals were Jews. Before 1938, I had to deal with them on equal terms. I didn’t like it, but I did it. Business is business, as they say. After 1938, things changed. I cracked the whip then.’
There was a nostalgic satisfaction in his voice which chilled the blood.
‘Good days,’ he sighed. ‘Good days. Perhaps the best. I was legitimate, you understand. A businessman only. It was the war that changed things. Not me. It was crime that changed. When those in charge are willing to pay through the nose for what the law forbids, then crime becomes legitimate! Surely you must understand that, my little Jewess? Hasn’t that been the guiding principle of your race ever since they bribed their way out of Egypt?’
Trudi wanted to leave. Her whole being cried to her to be gone while there was still room to doubt the relationship that was being implied between her and this mummified evil.
But one thing she did know for certain was that there was no longer any warm nest for her to hibernate safely in, and knowing that, she had to know everything.
‘My mother …’ she said.
But the old man was not yet ready for that strand in his life’s coil. He wanted to dwell a little longer on what he saw as his triumphs.
‘After the war, the Americans came. After the pure-blooded Aryans, these mongrels! Latins, Negroes, Anglo-Saxons, Orientals. Jews even. I dealt with them all and you know what, liebchen? They were all the same! The British too. Even the holy, preaching British. My enemies had said, when the Allies come, then we’ll have you, then we’ll see you tried and punished. Fools! All the Allies wanted was to rescue “poor little Austria” from the horrid Hun. A couple of token trials perhaps, but for the rest, an untainted past, a bright future in which all things were possible, wealth, power, respect, even the presidency itself!’
He laughed like the wind in dead leaves.
‘So I made sure I wasn’t a token. I had money. I needed a man. I found him. I’m good at finding men, you should know that, my little Jewess! It was just a precaution, you understand. I’d probably have survived anyway. These new conquerors needed men like me to keep them well fed and comfortable, to pleasure them and make them rich! Normally a job for the Jews, my dear. Only, just then, there weren’t many Jews to do it!’
The door burst open and a nurse came in.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded. ‘Herr Schiller must rest!’
Through the indignation Trudi, whose senses seemed to be drug-sharp tonight, felt fear and guessed that this nurse should have been on station in the ante-room but had gone off on her own business.
‘Get out!’ she snarled. ‘I have permission.’
The nurse hesitated, then left. But she would probably check up.
Trudi said urgently, ‘Tell me about my mother!’
‘Your mother?’ said the old man vaguely.
‘My mother. Your daughter. Trudi!’
She thrust the photograph before his dulling eyes. Slowly the gleam of understanding, or something close to it, returned.
‘Trudi! The Jew had her. His oily skin, his greasy lips, his skinned thing … oh, they have charms and drugs, they have ceremonies … when I found out I thought … but too late … already he had infected her with child!’
He struggled into an upright position.
‘But what’s a child? A Jewish child? A life like a candle flame. Snuff! – and it’s out! And I knew experts … I told her I forgave her. I told her to send him to meet me. And I told my friends too, friends who would receive him like a gift of meat to tigers! But she didn’t trust me! That too he had done. He had entered her mind and taught her not to trust me! He came early and when he saw I had brought my friends, he fled, and she fled with him. Switzerland first, but I could reach them in Switzerland, they were cunning enough to know that. So on they went to England. And there she littered, and there she died, but none of this did I know till later when the new peace gave us leisure to take up old wars. Then I sent out searchers, then I took up the trail …’
The door swung open again.
Klarsfeld’s voice cried, ‘Frau Adamson, what’s going on? Please, you shouldn’t be here. You must leave immediately.’
Ignoring him, Trudi cried, ‘And then? What did you do then?’
But the interruption had done more than interrupt the flow of the old man’s speech, it had broken some vital thread, for once more all animation left his skinny frame and he slid back down beneath the bedclothes like a line of seaweed washed off a harbour wall.
Trudi rose to her feet, not in obedience to the doctor’s repeated command, but because she recognized there was nothing more to be learned here for the time being; perhaps for ever.
Pushing past the nurse, who regarded her with the complacency of one whose own dereliction of duty has been subsumed by another’s greater guilt, she set off back to her room. Halfway down the walkway to the old lodge, she encountered Werner. He halted and looked set to address her reprimandingly, but without breaking her stride she said, ‘I’ve been talking to Schiller’ and left him staring after her with an expression of alarm on his face.
Back in her room, she locked the door and sat at the window, staring out at the pleated snow.
It was strange. A week ago, she would not have claimed to be happy. But looking back now at that time before she knew about Astrid Fischer’s death, and Trent’s betrayal of her with Jan, and her own descent from Herr Schiller, it seemed a golden age.
After a while there was a knock at the door.
Werner’s voice called, ‘Frau Adamson, may I come in please?’
‘No,’ she said flatly.
There was a moment’s silence, then footsteps moved slowly away.
Trudi was still sitting by the window at first light when the distant roar of an engine, then a long plume of regurgitated snow, told her the road from the village was being re-opened.
When she left her room it was still early, but she had screwed up her will to such a point that she was determined to leave the clinic, even if it meant walking back to Vienna.
It proved unnecessary. What she had started to think of as a prison, or at best a trap, became simply a place of work as she made her way downstairs. In the staff room, there was hot coffee, and white-coated acquaintances from the previous night’s meal greeted her with friendly remarks about the weather.
Elvira came forward and said, ‘Would you like some breakfast before you leave, Frau Adamson?’
A smell of fresh baked rolls from the dining room nearly tempted her, but she said, ‘No.’
‘In that case, the car is waiting. Dr Werner sends his apologies, but he is working. He hopes he may see you again before you leave Vienna.’
‘Thank him for his hospitality,’ said Trudi thinly. ‘Tell him, I certainly hope I shall have the chance to pay another visit. I should like in particular to resume my conversation with Herr Schiller.’
Her Parthian shot misfired pathetically. The young woman’s face lengthened with the solemnity of condolence.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but of course, you cannot know. I regret to say that Herr Schiller passed away last night. Quietly. In his sleep. A sad loss; a blessed relief. Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Adamson, Auf Wiedersehen.’