The Lost Prince (44 page)

Franz Jodl was an erect and formal man in his early sixties, carefully dressed and restrained in his posture and movements.

They stood together on the chilly station platform at Lustenau for some time, the discomfort of unfamiliarity evident in both. From this point in the Rhine Valley they could see the Alps rising on both sides, and they were aware of the change just having crossed the border, the train station showing signs of neglect, paint peeling, a few windows cracked, a look of deprivation in the eyes of the railroad personnel around them. What a contrast, she thought of saying to Standish beside her, just one large river separating the two worlds, one neutral and the other fully in the grip of war.

“We will be attended to in a moment,” the former Viennese policeman said, keeping a respectful distance.

After the awkward silence had fallen between the new colleagues, an Austrian official emerged from the station office and asked everyone to form a line. A number of similarly shabbily dressed officials came and joined him and sat at tables where they intended to interview each of the travelers.

Soldiers obviously new to their jobs, recently released from war, it turned out, stood awkwardly by as the customs officers opened suitcases and trunks and examined goods. Eleanor’s papers from the Swiss embassy were supposed to explain the unusually full trunk, but Jodl’s authoritative style interceded to prevent the guards from riffling through the contents.

Finally, aware of the stern authoritative attention of Herr Jodl, the border guards sealed the trunks and allowed them to pass and board the trains.

The change from Swiss to Austrian trains was a rude shock. It did not take long to see in the difference what had happened to the once-grand empire. The guards had dogs which barked loudly but, like their masters, looked thin and unfed. The train cars themselves were in ill repair: leather seats slashed and crudely repaired, window shades that didn’t work, windows cracked or broken. Some of the cars smelled of iodine from only recently having carried the wounded back from the front. Eleanor suppressed a shudder as she did her best not to imagine the bloody scene.

“This, like all of Austria, is not the same as you remember perhaps, Frau Burden,” Jodl said, “but it will take us to Vienna. Quite a difference from your previous visit, which Herr Jung has explained to me. There is not much left of the empire and its splendor.”

“It is quite all right, Herr Jodl,” she said, sitting upright in her train seat, pulling young Standish close. “You will not need to keep reminding me. I am quite capable of adjusting to existing conditions.”

CITY OF GHOSTS

V
ienna was almost unrecognizable. Of course, the tall, elegant marble façades of the grand buildings of the Ringstrasse for which Vienna at the end of the century had been renowned were unchanged, and the coffeehouses were still open, but all liveliness and vitality were gone. Nowhere to be seen on the wide Ringstrasse was the elegance she remembered: the handsome men in dark coats and top hats, the finely adorned women in long dresses with tightly corseted waists and well-defined
poitrines,
or the workers hurrying off carrying lunch boxes. And if there were military officers on the scene, their uniforms seemed frayed and worn and without medals and embellishments. Rather than loitering on display, soldiers hurried past without wishing to be noticed. Those who were out wandered the broad streets of the Ring as if in a daze. “There is almost nothing left of the old gaiety and bustle of our fabled city,” Jodl had said, repeating his theme. “It is a great sadness.” Eleanor felt like a visitor among ghosts.

The city that she entered was now struggling for its very survival, now fully aware that the war had been a disaster and the exuberance for it a cruel folly. In the summer of 1914, only four years before, as Arnauld had written, the city was still electric, overflowing with the power and energy of empire, the thrill of going to war. Then, in almost no time, Arnauld wrote, almost as soon as the bodies started coming back from the Russian front, it all began coming apart.

The fall of the great city and the dissolution of the empire, like the
war’s end, had come with a great suddenness. After the old emperor died in 1916, as the war was dragging on, suddenly, with the armistice in 1918, the empire disbanded and the economy collapsed. The new emperor, the scantily prepared grandnephew of Franz Joseph and younger nephew of the assassinated Franz Ferdinand, had decreed that Austria-Hungary would become a loose confederation of republics. But none of those—not the Czechs, Slavs, Hungarians, Poles, Croatians, Slovenians, or Italians—paid him much attention. They simply ceased their homage to the empire and went their separate ways, taking their life-sustaining natural resources with them. Within weeks of the end of hostilities in the fall of 1918, each of the separate states simply stopped saluting the imperial flag, and Vienna was left without access to the essential imports of fresh produce, meat, coal, and firewood that had fueled the capital city’s magnificence for hundreds of years.

In the formerly grand city coal and gas were in desperately short supply; citizens burned wood they had torn from park benches and local trees. The stream of railroad cars from the mines in Bohemia and Moravia ceased to appear. The four hundred trains that had come daily to the city only a few years ago were now reduced to four. Electricity was absent most of the time. Hungary stopped sending the flour, pork, fat, poultry, eggs, vegetables, and meat that Vienna had relied on for generations.

“It is a pity, Frau Burden,” said Franz Jodl, her new guide. “The Viennese are becoming accustomed to eating horse sausages, dried fruits and vegetables, synthetic meat made in part with the pulverized bark of birch trees, along with beet jam, and vile-tasting make-believe chocolate.”

Chemically produced saccharine had replaced sugar. Cooking and frying was done with fat derived from petroleum residues and plants. Bread was made mostly of cornmeal and more questionable ingredients. Chicory and ground beets were boiled to yield a beverage that served as a very unappealing coffee substitute. Textiles were woven with yarns of nettle fibers and paper. Shoe soles were hydraulically pressed cardboard and sawdust bonded with tar. Some wartime industrialists made fortunes turning out such ersatz products.

Only the wealthy and profiteers were still able to eat in the old manner, but they had to pay in silver coins or currency from other countries. The once-elegant streets were now populated with throngs of haggard soldiers and ruffians in stolen and ragged uniforms without insignias.

Eleanor had written her former landlady Fräulein Tatlock of her arrival. The pension had been reduced to subsistence, and the fräulein had aged more in appearance than the twenty years since Eleanor had last seen her. The old pension owner met Eleanor and her young son at the door, her eyes filled with tears, and she knelt down after embracing Eleanor to embrace young Standish. “Oh, how he resembles you, Frau Burden,” she exclaimed. “How marvelously!”

Eleanor was given her old room at the top of the stairs and suddenly found herself back in the scene of the great loss of her life. She had asked that Standish join her on a small cot, so that neither of them would sleep alone in this strange place, what was for her now a city of ghosts. Still, from the very first moment upon entering her old boardinghouse, Eleanor seemed at first somehow invigorated rather than intimidated by the starkness of the new Vienna. From the start she found herself clearly a New England woman rolling up her sleeves and taking on the tasks of restoration. After settling in upstairs, she had the one heavy trunk moved into the kitchen and asked Fräulein Tatlock to watch as she opened it.

Upon viewing the contents, eyes wide with amazement at the provisions from Switzerland that only months before would have been considered essential staples for a well-stocked boardinghouse such as hers, Fräulein Tatlock was speechless. When Eleanor came to the small bag of roasted coffee beans, she handed it to her host, who held it up and buried her nose in it, inhaling deeply. “Oh my,” was all she said.

“We shall set up a modest kitchen,” Eleanor said. “We may invite guests.”

And when she had unpacked, she came downstairs with Standish and said, “Now, I would like to go out and reestablish my bearings.” She walked with young Standish out to the Ringstrasse, as she had done so many times before, twenty years ago. “We will circle the city,” she said to her son, and he smiled up at her, having no idea what a commitment to walking his mother had just made for both of them. “I want you to see the magnificent Ringstrasse.”

Detouring to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, she approached the formidable edifice holding her son’s hand. “This is the biggest and grandest building you have ever seen,” she said to him.

As they entered the vast medieval structure, Standish Burden let out a whoop. “Oh, Mother,” he said loudly. “This is the biggest and grandest!” They stayed inside for almost two hours, examining each bank of stained glass and each statue. Standish seemed inexhaustible in his energy and enthusiasm for the building’s splendor.

“Look,” said his mother. “There is Joseph in his dungeon, and then telling his dreams to the pharaoh.” Standish had loved being read Bible stories by Eleanor and his older sisters.

“I see,” the boy said with relish. “And where is the Red Sea parting?”

“I think it is that one,” his mother said. And she pointed out other stories with which he was familiar.

“Let’s come back,” he said as they were leaving.

She arranged for Franz Jodl to meet her at Fräulein Tatlock’s the first morning. “Please dine with us, if you wish,” she said to him, knowing from her preparation that he was a widower whose two sons were lost in the war.

“That would be possible,” he said without apology or apparent gratitude, intent on his business. He laid out before her in the sitting room all his notes and papers, going through them all with meticulous care, showing exactly how he had found the witnesses and how each had described the scene in which Arnauld Esterhazy had died. He repeated his findings that Arnauld had attained a position of leadership on the Isonzo River and had witnessed a number of the battles there. After the decisive struggle at Caporetto, when the Italians had been routed, he had been assigned a number of captured Italian officers and along with another younger officer, a Czech he had befriended, Arnauld had been moving them to a railroad yard, where they had received a direct hit from a mistakenly fired Austrian artillery shell.

“The group was torn apart, Frau Burden,” he said with a look of respectful concern. “There is no way any of them could have survived.” He paused to look into her eyes to see that she understood, then, for her benefit, retreated slightly, as he had promised Jung he would. “At least that is how it appeared,” he added.

Then, as before and afterward, Eleanor stared back at him, signaling her steely ability to hear such realism. “I understand the details, Herr Jodl. You do not need to worry that I do not understand the details.”

“Shrapnel, Frau Burden,” he said solemnly. “That is what those not familiar with this war do not understand.” And then he stopped, wishing to spare her anything further.

She knew from confrontation of the facts earlier that the explosion of an artillery shell in this war sent dinner-plate-size fragments of metal flying in all directions, severing limbs and heads where they flew. A direct hit would have been a scene of utter carnage. “There were many witnesses,” Jodl said apologetically, as if to finalize the point. “The outcome was unavoidable. There is absolutely no doubt.”

Eleanor did not flinch. She paused a moment before speaking. “And yet you know my mission here,” Eleanor said, drawing herself upright to signal a change of mood.

“I do, Frau Burden.” He did not hesitate.

“And you will assist me, in spite of the apparent outcome you describe?”

“We search for the living,” Jodl said. “I will not be the first to abandon that search. You can be assured of that.”

“I am grateful,” she said, and the subject of uncertainty never came up again.