Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

‘No, it can’t be right. But what to do about it isn’t always simple.’

‘Anyway, I didn’t become a Communist like he was because they kept on calling each other “Comrade” and then quarrelling, but I joined the Social Democrats and we marched in processions and had fights with the Brown Shirts. It seems childish now — we thought we were so fierce. And, of course, all the time the authorities had me down as a dangerous radical!’

‘So by the time they took you off the student train your parents had gone?’

‘No, they hadn’t actually. I phoned a friend of theirs because they’d cut off our telephone and she said they were off the next day. I knew that if they realized I was still in Austria they wouldn’t go, so I went to stay with our old cook in Grinzing till they left.’

‘That was brave,’ said Quin quietly.

She shrugged. ‘It was very difficult, I must say. The most difficult thing I’ve ever done.’

‘And with luck the most difficult thing you’ll ever have to do.’

She shook her head. ‘I think not.’ The words were almost inaudible. ‘I think that for my people, night has come.’

‘Nonsense.’ He spoke with deliberate briskness. ‘There’ll be a way of helping you. I’ll go to the British Consulate in the morning.’

Again that shake of the head, sending the blonde, absurdly abundant hair swinging on her shoulders. ‘I’ve tried everything. There’s a man called Eichmann who runs something called the Department of Emigration. He’s supposed to help people to leave, but what he really does is make sure they’re stripped of everything they own. You don’t know what it’s like — people weeping and shouting…’

He had risen and begun to walk up and down, needing to think. ‘What a huge place this is!’

She nodded. ‘Twelve rooms. My grandmother had two of them, but she died last year. When I was small I used to ride round and round the corridors on my tricycle.’ She followed him. ‘That’s my father in the uniform of the 14th Uhlans. He was decorated twice for bravery — he couldn’t believe that none of that counted.’

‘Is he completely Jewish?’

‘By birth, yes. I don’t think he ever thought about it. His religion was to do with people… with everyone trying to make themselves into the best sort of person they could be. He believed in a God that belonged to everyone… you had to guard the spark that was in you and make it into a flame. And my mother was brought up as a Catholic so it’s doubly hard for her. She’s only half-Jewish, or maybe a quarter, we’re not quite sure. She had a very Aryan mother — a sort of goat-herding lady.’

‘So that makes you… what? Three-quarters? Five-eighths? It’s hard to believe.’

She smiled. ‘My snub nose, you mean — and being fair? My grandmother came from the country — the goat-herding one. My grandfather really found her tending goats — well, almost. She came from a farm. We used to laugh at her a bit and call her Heidi; she never opened a book in her life, but I’m grateful to her now because I look like her and no one ever molests me.’

They had reached a glassed-in verandah overlooking the courtyard. In the corner beside an oleander in a tub, was a painted cradle adorned with roses and lilies. Over the headboard, painstakingly scrolled, were the words Ruthie’s cradle.

Quin set it rocking with the toe of his shoe. Beside him, Ruth had fallen silent. Down in the courtyard a single tree — a chestnut in full blossom — stretched out its arms. A swing was suspended from one branch; on a washing line strung between two posts hung a row of red-and-white checked tea towels, and a baby’s shirt no bigger than a handkerchief.

‘I used to play down there,’ she said. ‘All through my childhood. It seemed so safe to me. The safest place in the world.’

He had made no sound, yet something made her turn to look at him. She had thought of the Englishman as kind and civilized. Now the crumpled face looked devilish: the mouth twisted, the skin stretched tight over the bones. It lasted only a moment, his transformation into someone to fear. Then he laid a hand lightly on her arm.

‘You’ll see. There will be something we can do.’

Ruth had not exaggerated. There were no words to describe the chaos and despair the Anschluss had caused. He had arrived early at the British Consulate but already there were queues. People begged for pieces of paper — visas, passports, permits — as the starving begged for bread.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do anything about this,’ said the clerk, looking at Ruth’s documents. ‘It’s not the British refusing to let her in, it’s the Austrians refusing to let her out. She’d have to re-apply for emigration and that could take months or years. The quota’s full, as you know.’

‘If I was willing to sponsor her — to guarantee she wouldn’t be a burden on the state? Or get her a domestic work permit? My family would offer her employment.’

‘You’d have to do that from England, sir. Everything’s at sixes and sevens here with Austria no longer being an independent state. The Embassy’s going to close and they’re sending staff home all the time.’

‘Look, the girl’s twenty years old. Her entire family’s in England — she’s alone in the world.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the young man repeated wearily. ‘Believe me, the things I’ve seen here… but there’s nothing that can be done at this end. At least nothing you’d consider.’

‘And what wouldn’t I consider?’

The young man told him.

Oh, bother the girl, thought Quin. He had a sleeper booked on the evening train; the exams began in less than a week. When he took his sabbatical, he’d promised to be back for the end of term. Letting his deputy mark his papers was no part of his plan.

He turned into the Felsengasse and went up to the first floor. The door was wide open. In the hallway, the mirror was smashed, the umbrella stand lay on its side. The word Jude had been smeared in yellow paint across the photograph of the Professor shaking hands with the Kaiser. In the drawing room, pictures had been ripped off the walls; the palm tree, tipped out of its pot, lay sprawled on the carpet. The silver ornaments were missing, the Afghan rug… In the dining room, the doors were torn from the dresser, the Meissen porcelain was gone.

On the verandah, Ruth’s painted cradle had been kicked into splintered wood.

He had forgotten the physical effects of rage. He had to draw several deep breaths before the giddiness passed and he could turn and go downstairs.

This time the concierge was in her box.

‘What happened to Professor Berger’s apartment?’

She looked nervously at the open door, behind which he could see an old man with his legs stretched out, reading a paper.

‘They came… some Brown Shirts… just a gang of thugs. They do that when an apartment is abandoned. It’s not official, but no one stops them.’ She sniffed. ‘I don’t know what to do. The Professor asked me to look after his flat, but how can I? A German diplomat is moving in next week.’

‘And Fräulein Berger? What happened to her?’

‘I don’t know.’ Another uneasy glance through the open door. ‘I can’t tell you anything.’

He was halfway down the street when he heard her cracked old voice calling him — and as he turned she came hurrying up, still in her foulard apron.

‘She gave me this to give you. But you won’t say anything, will you, Herr Doktor? My husband’s been a Nazi for years and he’d never forgive me. I could get into awful trouble.’

She handed him a white envelope from which, when he opened it, there fell two keys.

Ruth had always loved the statue of the Empress Maria Theresia on her marble plinth. Flanked by her generals, a number of horses and some box hedges, she gazed at the strolling Viennese with the self-satisfied look of a good hausfrau who has left her larder full and her cupboards tidy. Every school child knew that it was she who had made Austria great, that the six-year-old Mozart had sat on her knee, that her daughter, Marie Antoinette, had married the King of France and lost her head.

But for Ruth the plump and homely Empress was something more: she was the guardian of the two great museums which flanked the square that bore her name. To the south was the Museum of Art — a gigantic, mock Renaissance palace which housed the famous Titians, the Rembrandts, the finest Brueghels in the world. To the north — its replica down to the last carved pillar and ornamented dome — was the Museum of Natural History. As a child she had loved both museums. The Art Museum belonged to her mother and it was filled with uplift and suffering and love — rather a lot of love. The Madonnas loved their babies, Jesus loved the poor sinners, and St Francis loved the birds.

In the Natural History Museum there wasn’t any love, only sex — but there were stories and imagined journeys — and there was work. This was her father’s world and Ruth, when she went there, was a child set apart. For when she had had her fill of the cassowary on his nest and the elephant seal with his enormous, rearing chest, and the glinting ribbons of the snakes, each in its jar of coloured fluid, she could go through a magic door and enter, like Alice, a secret, labyrinthine world.

For here, behind the gilded, silent galleries with their grey-uniformed attendants, was a warren of preparation rooms and laboratories, of workshops and sculleries and offices. It was here that the real work of the museum was done: here was the nerve centre of scholarship and expertise which reached out to every country in the world. Since she was tiny, Ruth had been allowed to watch and help. Sometimes there was a dinosaur being assembled on a stand; sometimes she was allowed to sprinkle preservative on a stretched-out skin or polish glass slides for a histologist drawing the mauve and scarlet tissues of a cell, and her father’s room was as familiar to her as his study in the Felsengasse.