The Vienna Melody (51 page)

The old man threw himself into an armchair.
My God, how I beat about the bush!
he thought to himself. Instead of asking the boy straight from the shoulder: Why has she attempted to commit suicide? he continued to blow smoke rings. Logic! he raged; where is there any logic? Veronal and strychnine. All right. That explains the symptoms. In any case the shallow breathing and, hypothetically at least, the paralysis. But why did such an amount not have an instant and lethal effect? And how can she have had a similar attack some weeks ago, as the boy asserts?

He sprang suddenly to his feet and, with a speed amazing in so old a man, rushed to Selma's bed, knelt down beside it, and attempted to convince himself of something that Hans could not fathom. He raised her eyelids and lighted matches in front of them. He took great pains to study her gums. He kept testing her reflexes again and again. Finally he said, “Well, good night. I shall be back early tomorrow morning. Meanwhile I'll send in a nurse.”

“Is it so serious?” Hans asked, beginning to lose his self-control. Scorning his well-worn tricks, the old doctor replied, “It is an acute condition which must reach a crisis. Tomorrow we shall see.''

“Could I ask my cousin to come over?” Hans asked. “If Selma saw a nurse, she would think she was very ill. My cousin visits my father occasionally, and it would be easier to explain.” He did not say that he still believed Christl could help where all others failed.

“Of course,” approved Dr. Herz. “You mean the little Paskiewicz?” He forgot that the little Paskiewicz was middle-aged, but recalled that her father, the colonel, had fooled him for years on end about dying. The memory of that obviously revived him. In this house anything was possible. You gave these people days or even hours to live and they went on for another twenty years!

“Look, I'll write down what the little Paskiewicz is to do,” he said, in a better frame of mind, and filled a prescription page with notes and then left with the words he usually said in severe cases, “Sleep as much as you can. Ask as few questions as possible.”

Sister Agatha came about one o'clock. After she arrived things were not so frightening. She read her instructions and had no difficulty in deciphering the old man's scrawl of Dr. Herz, to which she had been accustomed since her childhood. Under her care the patient seemed to breathe more quietly.

“Christl!” Hans said in despair. To her he dared show all his anguish. She had understood him even at a time when he did not wish to speak. Her nun's habit, to be sure, removed the intimacy of those earlier days, but in her eyes lay the same readiness to help. “Dr. Herz thinks it's very serious, doesn't he?” he asked.

“Dr. Herz has left quite simple instructions,” she replied. “Don't be afraid, Hans.” She still knew him so well that she did not add, “God will help.”

The doorbell rang. Henriette had come down from the fourth floor. “Selma is sick?” she asked her son in the vestibule. “Simmerl tells me Dr. Herz has been twice to see her.” Then she noticed Christine. “You here too? And I'm not told?”

The nun answered, “You have your hands full already. Hans did not want to disturb you. Please come in.”

On the threshold of the bedroom Henriette stopped. Her look fell on the patient and then on the silver cuirass which hung over a chair. The nun followed her look, which suddenly grew disturbed. She knew what Henriette was thinking. One night, in this same house, she had come in costume into a room where it was a question of life and death. Then she had worn a mask, and Christl had looked under her mask.

“Masquerade!” someone had exclaimed reprovingly on that faraway night. Henriette could hear it as though it were today, and she turned cold at the thought. Up on the fourth floor lay Franz, sleepless as on most of the nights these years. She had sat beside him as on most nights, and read to him. Sometimes he looked at her so reproachfully. But here was this nun who was a lifelong reproach. All because of a long-since-expiated tiny scrap of happiness.
It's a wonder people don't go crazy in this house!
thought Henriette. Hans too had noticed his mother's suddenly disturbed expression. “What is wrong with her?” Henriette asked him.

“Dr. Herz says she has taken sleeping tablets.”

“How often have I warned her not to take so many powders,” said Henriette, picking the costume up with the intention of putting it away.

“What kind of powders?” Hans asked.

“For headaches. She kept coming to me for them when her own gave out.”

“To you?”

“She insisted that Algokratin helped her more than anything else.”

“Is there veronal in those powders?”

“I don't know. Why?”

“She is awake now,” the nun said.

Selma's eyes opened slowly. They fell on Henriette, who was still holding the silver costume in her hands. “No!” she murmured fearfully, as though trying to defend herself.

“Please go away,” Hans begged his mother. “She's afraid of you.”

“She is afraid of me,” Henriette repeated. She put the costume down and left the apartment without looking back.

Selma had closed her eyes again. “Hans,” she called distinctly. “I'm just here,” he answered. “You're all well again, aren't you?”

She shook her head quickly. “Not well,” she murmured. A tense expression came over her face. “Listen to me,” she demanded. Then again, “Listen to me.”

“I'm listening,” Hans said, looking to Christl for help. “Don't you hear me?”

“It's just the fever,” the nun told him comfortingly.

“Listen to me, Bastard of France,” repeated the patient. Then she was silent. And then, as though she had found at last what she was searching for, she continued in a hesitant voice, “I will deliver you from fear. I will never take a husband. I am a soldier. I do not care for the things women care for. They—”

She stopped. Her expression grew more and more tense. It was obvious that she believed she was on the stage and could not remember her lines.

“They dream of lover.” Hans, who could hardly speak, helped her along.

“They dream of lovers,” Selma repeated. A trace of her old smile appeared and slowly began to transfigure her face as she went on, “I am a servant of God. My sword is sacred—” She looked for her sword and seemed to find it.

“My heart is full of courage, not of anger,” put in Hans, to whom Christl nodded, indicating mat he should help her.

Selma did not repeat it. She smiled ever more enchandngly.

Hans looked at her transfigured face. “She is better? Isn't she, Christl?” he asked imploringly. “Isn't she, Christl?”

“Yes,” the nun said after a pause. “No one is better now than she is.”

And then, after another pause, Christl, who had helped him as a child, came up behind him and said softly, “Hans. Whom the Lord loves, He makes to suffer. Whom He loves most, He takes to Him.”

An autopsy was held on Selma's body. Old Dr. Herz, who usually was so philosophic and inclined to let things take their course, had insisted upon it with surprising energy, and Hans was too crushed to offer any resistance. With her death coming out of a dear sky (and it had been thanks only to her life that the sky had been clear), everything to him seemed dark.

The autopsy established the fact of poisoning by veronal and strychnine. As there was no basis for any indication of suicide, the word ‘murder' came to the fore. But it was used only tentatively, and naturally appeared first in
Vienna Signals
, called, since Mr. Jarescu had left it to his son,
Vienna Truths
(Mr. Jarescu's son, for his part, now boldly called himself Esk). From thence the news found its way into the daily
Press
. And when the
Neues Wiener Journal
came out with an article entitled “The Murder of a Genius,” making the flat assertion that Selma Rosner-Alt had been murdered, her death became a sensation, and Otto Eberhard's successor felt it incumbent on him to consult his predecessor.

The successor was one of those ‘upstarts' whom Otto Eberhard could not stand. Moreover, the old gentleman found all the public excitement about the suicide of an actress distressing. When a councillor died after a long life of effort and self-denial, having, God knows, contributed far more than a young undisciplined creature of this sort, he was sent to his grave unhonored and unsung. But the Viennese had always made of every actor a being of some higher order instead of a creature of disorder
per se
, Otto Eberhard did not need his decades of experience to tell his successor that undisciplined people are born suicides. No motive for suicide? People like this Selma were constantly out of control; a cold draft was sufficient to make them bellow or howl or commit suicide. To search for causality here was a waste of effort. The retired Public Prosecutor bowed his successor politely out. He regretted that he was unable to give him any advice or clues, either officially or privately. He had known the deceased only fleetingly. All he had been able to establish was that she was a typical actress.

The successor was equally polite in his thanks, and when he returned to the office, where Otto Eberhard had spent half his life, he ordered an investigation, on grounds of murder, into the death of the actress Selma Rosner-Alt.

Every one of the inhabitants of Number 10 was called to testify. Even Hans, when he was able to summon the strength, appeared before the examining magistrate.

“You suffer so from this death,” said the examining magistrate to him, “you should not be so indifferent. On the contrary, shouldn't you have a burning desire to search out the person responsible for destroying your happiness?”

Hans shrugged his shoulders. He had but one desire left.

Only two depositions provided food for thought to Otto Eberhard's successor. One of them came from Johann Simmerl, butler on the fourth floor in 10 Seilerstätte. He testified that Fraulein Martha Monica had copied down a prescription which lay on the medicine table of her invalid father, Herr Franz Alt. To be sure the witness could not identify the prescription. And Martha Monica, also called to testify; did not even recall having copied it. The second remarkable statement was that of the keeper of the stationery shop on the ground floor of the house. (As to this stationer, it was rumored in the house that he was an offspring of the late bachelor Hugo Alt, who had died of some disease not mentioned in polite circles.) He had seen the deceased come home one night in the company of a gentleman who had had to support her. The stationer was of the opinion that she was not sober. As to her companion, all he could say was it had not been Herr Hans Alt but someone of much smaller stature. He was not able to see his face. The deceased and her companion had come through the angel entrance together, had locked the door after them, and he could not recall that the companion left the house that night. He declared under oath that he had listened for him. In answer to the question of what had prompted him to do so, he replied: curiosity.

The depositions of the members of the Burgtheater coincided almost word for word with the opinion of the actor who played the archbishop: Suicide. The ambitious woman, prematurely lauded to the sky, had had enough sense of self-criticism to know that she could never measure up to the over-exaggerated expectations of her future accomplishment.

Rumors, conclusions, and suspicions occupied public opinion until they proved groundless. Then the sensational case was dropped.

When the daily newspaper comments ceased Number 10 breathed more easily. Hans was treated with greatest possible consideration; the house put its best foot forward: the blow to one of them they parried as a whole. Fritz came nearly every evening to discuss one and the same thing with his cousin: Why? To what end? Why did Selma take her life? To what end should one go on living now that she was dead? His father, still the head of the C. Alt Firm, frequently wrote that Hans had done this or that “quite excellently.” His brother Hermann gave proof of an understanding for which Hans was particularly grateful; although he had some time before displaced him in the factory, the younger brother did not hold this against the older one, and even helped him in his free time. And Henriette surrounded her favorite son with a tenderness she had withheld from him since Selma had been in the house. Even Otto Eberhard nodded in a conciliatory manner when he met his obviously misguided nephew on the stairs.

For Hans the hardest to bear were the sleepless nights. He rarely lay down any more; he paced the rooms where traces of her still spoke to him on every hand. Her clothes hung in the wardrobes. The books that she had read lay there. On her desk lay the scrapbook in which she had begun to paste newspaper reports. Ever and again he would say to himself, She is in the next room; and would call, “Selma.” More often he could not grasp the idea of her death.

He was a person who became attached to others only with difficulty. Once he formed an attachment it was for life, even when his choice proved a disillusion. It was the first time in his life that he knew, in Selma, what confirmation and fulfilment were: She was the first to turn his vague concept of happiness into reality. The first person never to disappoint him. The only one who knew him: the extent of his inhibitions, his devotion to the country in which he lived. She had realized that his ardent “patriotism” was not a case of violated pride which made it impossible for him to live in a country defeated to the point of annihilation and humiliated beyond compare, that it was a question of spiritual survival. The words “Austrian incarnate,” which the poet Wildgans had returned to current use, were applicable to Hans as to few others. Selma had never from the first instant doubted that Austria meant more than a country to him; she recognized that to him it was an idea, and she loved him all the more for that.