SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, I took a train from Manhattan’s Penn Station to Massapequa, on the coast of Long Island, to spend a day with Sandra Seiler, granddaughter of Emil Lindenfeld.
It was less than an hour on the Long Island Rail Road. Sandra waited at the train station, sitting in her car, blond, black sunglasses. She invited me to lunch by the sea, a seafood restaurant. After lunch, we drove to her home, and I met her husband and a daughter. Emil’s photograph albums were there, ready to be examined. She pulled out the volume that held the images of Rita. We wanted dates.
The photographs were small, stuck close and hard to the album’s dark pages, just as Sandra said, as firm as the day they were fixed to the pages. We peeled one off as carefully as possible, not wanting to cause damage. I hoped the photographs had been taken in the mid-1930s, before Rita and Leon were married. That would be simpler.
The first four photographs—including the one of Malke alongside Rita—came off the pages to reveal no date. Then the second set, the “garden quartet,” as Sandra called them. Even more careful, not wanting to damage the backs, I peeled each of the four photographs from its page.
The back of each photograph bore the mark of a studio, Foto-Kutschera, in Vienna’s 4th District. On the back there was only a barely discernible pencil mark, in the top right-hand corner, four numbers: 1941.
Within a few weeks, I had found the address where Emil Lindenfeld lived in 1941, a prosperous address at the center of Vienna, outside the Jewish area, a location where Emil could not have been living as a Jew. The address was 4 Brahmsplatz, a magnificent building, constructed in the late nineteenth century, a few houses down from a home once owned by the Wittgensteins.
I visited. To the side of No. 4 was a large garden, a bench, grass, like the scene in the four photographs. Might this be the garden where Rita and Emil were photographed in 1941? I remembered how relaxed they appeared, an air of intimacy that transcended the photograph.
Emil Lindenfeld and Rita were together in 1941, maybe in this very garden. No month was given, but Rita left in October, and the garden photographs offered the appearance of spring. I plumped for April 1941. Did Rita stay in Vienna to be with Emil? It was impossible to know, and maybe it didn’t matter. By November, she had left Vienna.
Leon had left precipitously in January 1939, alone. A few months later, he sent for his daughter, benefiting from the assistance of Miss Tilney. Rita remained in Vienna. Why Leon would have left his daughter behind, and why he then sent for her, I did not know. But the new photographs suggested that Leon’s departure had something to do with Emil Lindenfeld.