The Flames, page 15
Mother breaks off more bread and butters it, taking a deliberate bite and chewing for more time than is necessary. In just a few days, they will leave their station home. Mother spends all her time picking through their belongings and packing. She wraps items in newspaper, placing them in wooden crates, marking any of value so they can settle their bills in Tulln.
Father slams his palms down on the table and the spoon clatters to the floor.
‘Go to your room!’ he shouts at Gertrude. ‘You hear me! Get out of here!’
Father snorts, then spits over his shoulder. Melanie makes a noise as if to protest, for she was on her knees scrubbing those flagstones only hours before, but Mother shuts her down with a small but violent jerk of her neck.
Gertrude straightens the cutlery to show that she’s ready to leave the table. But Father starts bellowing again before she can move.
‘Jörg, man. Welcome. Sit. You’re here to discuss the station handover.’ He gestures from the door behind Gertrude to the empty place where Egon would normally sit. Gertrude had not heard anyone climb the stairs. She turns, but the doorway is empty.
Surprise sweeps Mother’s face as she also takes in the vacant frame.
‘Adolf,’ she begins, edging her words out. ‘Is Jörg expected to visit this evening?’ She dabs her mouth with a napkin. ‘I can set another place.’
‘He’s right there, woman! Are you blind?’
‘Don’t you speak to Mother that way!’ Melanie says sharply.
‘You’re eighteen, Melanie, time you were married.’
‘She’ll marry when she’s ready, Adolf,’ Mother says.
‘Well, pull your weight, if you’re not the marrying type. I can’t be the only one making ends meet while you all slacken off like old rope. Isn’t that right, Jörg?’
‘You won’t be working from now on, Adolf,’ Mother reminds him.
‘If I have to work, then Egon should as well!’ Melanie adds.
‘That boy’s days of playing around are numbered, mark my words. Now. Eat!’
Mother puts her hands in her lap. Melanie inspects her soup, which has gone cold.
Father picks up the chair and positions it so his guest can take a seat at the table.
‘Excuse the mess,’ he says to thin air. ‘The children are worse than wild animals, and my wife is little more than a peasant.’ Father returns to his seat. Mother and Melanie exchange frowns. Father pauses, an ear cocked. ‘Yes, yes,’ he responds. His tone changes.
‘Food, woman!’ He snaps his fingers in Mother’s face.
‘If you insist, husband dearest.’ Mother stands, moves to the stove, places the pan on the heat. She warms the rest of the soup, adding water, then ladles it out into a clean bowl, wiping her apron around the rim. She places it on the table next to Egon’s seat. Father whips it away.
‘Where are your manners?’ He turns to the empty seat. ‘Do excuse my wife.’ Father returns with a jug of cream, which Mother rations, and pours it over the soup in a lavish ribbon. ‘Now, let’s eat, man!’
‘Do pass the salt, Gerti,’ Mother says, squeezing her daughter’s leg under the table.
Father looks at them, a warning in his eyes. ‘Finish up!’
They take mouthfuls of cold soup, each one harder to swallow than the last. Father eventually folds his napkin, stretches his fingers, then laughs, as if responding to a joke.
Mother and Melanie sit in silence. Gertrude fidgets.
‘May I leave the table?’ she asks, collecting the empty bowls for Melanie to wash.
‘Give your father a kiss before you go to your room,’ he says, gesturing to her with a wide-open sweep of his arms. ‘Come, Elvira, dear. You always were my favourite.’
‘Elvira …’ she stutters. ‘But Elvira is dead.’
Mother gasps, then jumps up to take the bowls from her daughter. ‘Leave those,’ she says.
But the stack slips. The bowls fall from Gertrude’s hands, bounce off the edge of the table and smash into a hundred pieces. Gertrude holds her breath, waiting for punishment. But Father only laughs, his deep voice breaking into overblown hooting.
Mother drops to her knees. ‘My bowls! My precious bowls,’ she wails. She holds the shards, cradling them as if they were pieces of her own flesh. ‘Adolf, these were a wedding present from my parents. I’ve had them for twenty-five years. Now look!’ Mother takes a shuddering breath and positions random pieces against each other. She looks forlornly at each of them. ‘There are things in this life that can never be replaced,’ she cries.
10
December 1904
From a deep sleep, Gertrude senses the heat and light of a glorious summer morning. Her brother is home for the end of the year and to help with the move. She’s dreaming that she and Egon have escaped, peeling away from their home in secret as early as they can. They scramble along the tracks, skirt the Danube, dipping in and out of the low sun’s glare. They find a hidden spot, take off their clothes and swim in the shallows of the cold river, splashing and dunking each other beneath the surface. They skim stone after stone and count the passing clouds. Egon lies in the long grass and observes her.
The warmth of this promising day draws Gertrude fully from her sleep. Then she hears the crackling.
There’s an angry burst, splintering wood. She sits up and feels the heat rising, the swell of it through the cold, dark air. She smells the tarry tang of burning rubber, smouldering earth. The wall by Egon’s bed is illuminated, a ricocheting pattern of light and shadow playing across the smooth surface.
Gertrude follows the commotion, walking out of the bedroom – full of packed cases and dismantled furniture – crossing the dark apartment to the living room, drawn relentlessly, horribly, towards the window. The windowpane is hot to the touch. Outside, an intense blaze tunnels into the sky, flecks of burning debris blast upwards before falling to earth with the blackened beauty of snow. Gertrude’s lungs are filled with it. She swallows, tasting soot. The flaming mass below fights the space around it, greedy for size and strength. It consumes the tracks, turning sleepers to ash and, as Gertrude watches, it is creeping closer and closer to the platform, and their home.
Gertrude runs to the bedroom and tries to drag Egon from his bed. He pushes back, his eyes shuttered with sleep, and kicks against the urgency of her. She perseveres, fighting him to consciousness.
‘Egon! Quick! Fire!’
Melanie stirs, pulling a pillow over her head, uncharacteristically groggy.
Gertrude pulls Egon to his feet and pushes him to the window overlooking the train tracks.
‘But someone’s down there!’ Egon shouts, looking out at the inferno.
‘Are they trying to put it out?’ Gertrude leans forward to get a better look.
Beside the fire there’s the outline of a figure, stooped as if in pain, recoiling from the blast. The intense light masks the person’s features. But that’s not a pail of water they are holding. Instead, every second or two, they stretch forward to feed the flames.
‘My drawings!’ Egon’s words rise above the noise of the conflagration.
The sound of his cry triggers a reaction in their parents’ bedroom. Something clatters to the floor and, after a moment, Gertrude hears quick steps crossing the room. Urgent knocks on the window startle the silhouette. The person raises their head and lifts their right hand, the one that has been feeding the papers to the flames, as if in greeting. Then they bend to pick up something by the side of the tracks. With surprising speed, the arm pulls back and thrusts forward in an arc. An object smashes against the outside wall, between the windows, and bounces gracelessly on to the platform. The figure repeats the motion and a second, heavier, missile reaches its target, crashing through the window of their parents’ bedroom. Mother lets out a howl.
Melanie, Egon and Gertrude all rush to the door of their parents’ bedroom, jostling each other forward. Gertrude is terrified about what they’ll find on the other side. Melanie is the one to push it open, revealing their mother’s crumpled frame on the floor, her forehead bleeding. Melanie runs over and pulls her into an embrace, ignoring the shards of glass that dust her mother’s shoulders and hair.
At the contact, Mother pulls a long ribbon of air into her lungs, then projects a wail that stretches right across the house and into the darkness.
‘Why must he punish me, why must he punish me so?’ she moans.
Egon has rushed downstairs and is pounding on the door, the one that leads to the platform. Gertrude leaves Melanie and Mother and joins him. ‘We must get out there,’ her brother shouts. He fumbles, drops the key and has to pick it up from the cold floor before he can get it into the lock. He twists it twice, then opens the door. A wall of heat hits them; to Gertrude it feels as if they are right inside one of the roaring steam engines.
The man before them is glowing. His sleeve is on fire, his facial hair already singed.
‘Father!’ Egon shouts. He jumps over the platform edge on to the tracks.
Father turns. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he says.
There’s not a shred of recognition in his eyes. The heat is intolerable, even from where Gertrude is standing, barefoot, close to the house. Egon grabs the fabric at Father’s chest, trying to pull him away, but he fights his son off, taking him by the scruff of the neck.
Sparks rain down on Egon. They blaze in his hair, singe holes into his nightshirt. Father rams her brother to the ground. The pair are dangerously close to the fire.
‘Leave him!’ Gertrude screams, running to the platform edge and reaching out an arm.
In that moment, she wishes her father were dead.
Egon continues to punch and pull. Father exerts all his strength to hold her brother down. His eyes are bursting from their sockets. Egon grabs a smouldering handful of coal and hurls it against his father’s cheek, leaving a bloody, blackened streak from his eye to his chin. Father releases his grip and puts the fingers of both hands to his face. Egon manages to roll away. His hand is already blistering.
‘Water,’ Gertrude says, running to fetch a bucket for Egon to immerse his hands in.
Neighbours from the closest cottages have now arrived at the platform, alerted by the noise and intense blaze. They are carrying buckets of sand and earth to dampen the flames. One man takes Father by the shoulders and mutely he allows himself to be pulled away. The man sits him down, away from the fire. Father is charred, a cutlet of meat, the hairs scorched off, his skin weeping. A wet rag is pressed to his cheek.
Stuffed into the pocket of his nightshirt, beneath his bedjacket, are three sheets of paper that have managed to escape the inferno. They’re covered in soot, but are clearly embossed, stamped with official markings in crimson wax.
‘Take these to Melanie,’ Egon says, grabbing them. ‘Maybe she’ll know what they are and why Father has burned them.’ She detects his relief that it wasn’t his drawings that have been destroyed.
Upstairs, Melanie is still comforting Mother, soothing her, rocking her. Gertrude takes a step into the room and holds out the certificates.
Mother opens her eyes, then crumples again.
‘The shares!’ she sobs. ‘I knew it!’
Egon enters, his hands wrapped in wet rags, and Mother looks up with new doggedness and clenches her free hand into a fist. ‘That bastard! Your father! I will kill him with my own bare hands. Our life savings, burned to ashes.’
‘What’s going to happen to us, Mother?’ Gertrude whimpers.
Mother continues, but it’s as if she is talking only to herself. ‘We’re practically homeless as it is, thanks to his recklessness. And he’s been hell-bent on punishing me. For what, I’ll never know. But to do this? To annihilate his family? I never believed he’d be so cruel. He has taken away the single thing that could have protected us.’ She turns to her children. ‘We have nothing left. Your future was safeguarded by those shares. Your father has destroyed us all.’
11
December 1904
The grandfather clock ticks heavily in the hallway. It’s less than an hour until midnight. Gertrude peers into her parents’ bedroom – no longer the one in their station home in Tulln, but in a new, smaller apartment in Klosterneuburg. She can hear her father’s juddering breath as he sleeps. Mother has been knitting in the same room, set up in her rocking chair by the window, a glass of amber-coloured liquid on the table at her side. Melanie is seated next to Father’s bed, holding his hand, sponging water on to his lips.
‘Come on, children, time for bed,’ Mother says when she spots Egon and Gertrude in the doorway.
‘But it’s New Year’s Eve,’ Egon says. ‘We usually stay up.’
‘Your father’s very ill. A doctor is on his way.’
They’ve been in their new home for less than two weeks and it hasn’t yet taken on familiar dimensions. Their belongings seem untethered in this space. Gertrude notices anew the wilting fern in the hallway by the front door; the colours in the framed landscapes seem less muted in their new position on the wall; and Mother’s black-edged mirror, which had been in their bedroom in Tulln, is propped in the front room, too large to fit anywhere else.
They hear a loud knock on the front door and their mother rises to greet the local doctor, an elderly man with a moustache that looks as if it could cut bread. Gertrude and Egon slip out of sight, but remain close enough to listen in.
‘I’d hoped not to disturb you on the final day of the year,’ Mother says.
‘It’s my pleasure to be able to offer assistance,’ he replies formally.
‘What’s happening?’ Gertrude whispers, taking her brother’s hand. He flinches at her touch. The blisters on his palm still haven’t healed from the night of the bonfire on the tracks.
‘Father’s taken a turn for the worse. He’s not been the same since the fire.’
The doctor follows their mother into the bedroom, leaving the door slightly ajar. From the obscurity of the hallway, Gertrude and her brother watch.
Mother offers the doctor a drink of the amber liquid and he accepts, making a gesture that it should be a small one. After he removes his hat and coat, he places his fingers on Father’s neck, then takes a brown bottle from his satchel. He pours some liquid on to a spoon, then feeds it to Father, whose lips part at the touch of the metal, but whose eyes don’t open. The doctor then produces a flame and burns something he has placed in the well of another spoon. He holds it under Father’s nose and Father, in response, coughs weakly and spits into a waiting handkerchief. When it is taken away, it is speckled with blood. Father’s lips are grey. The sores and burns on his body have worsened, and the smell that has lingered around him for the past ten days is rotten. His frame is thinner than ever, and the burn mark Egon inflicted on his cheek is still a gaping wound.
‘He’s been this way all day,’ Mother warns. ‘Struggling to breathe, blood when he coughs, unresponsive. In Tulln, his blank periods were limited to an hour or so, a day at most, but this has been much more prolonged. Isn’t that right, Melanie?’
Melanie looks up. ‘There’s nothing we can do to rouse him, doctor,’ she agrees.
‘If I may observe him for a while? Carry on as you were.’
Mother settles back in the rocking chair. She pulls a shawl around her shoulders, then works her way back into her knitting.
The grandfather clock chimes a quarter to midnight. Egon and Gertrude are playing cards in the hallway, Melanie is reading her novel, and Mother is still knitting. The doctor completes another round of tests and observations, then takes a seat for a moment to sip his drink. A few minutes later, he stands abruptly, takes Father’s wrist and presses two fingers against the skin there. He picks up a metal instrument, the ends of which he inserts into his ears, then, unbuttoning the top of his patient’s nightshirt, he places the other end against Father’s chest. He listens, wriggles his nose and runs a thumb across his lower lip.
‘Frau Schiele?’
Mother looks up, as if surprised to find the doctor still there.
‘It is with regret,’ he says, ‘that I must inform you that Herr Schiele has, only a few moments ago, passed away.’
A vivid sound of alarm escapes Melanie’s mouth. Egon stiffens at Gertrude’s side.
Mother glances at the clock. The hand is close to midnight.
The doctor licks the nib of his pencil, poised to write something in an official-looking notebook that he takes from his briefcase. Gertrude’s eyes shoot to Father’s body. His fingers are curled into his palms. His nails seem ink-dipped.
Mother blinks. ‘Now? But I don’t believe it.’ She peers closer. ‘Isn’t that his chest rising?’ Gertrude, too, thinks she can hear the sound of his breathing now that Mother’s long needles have stopped. ‘You are sure, doctor?’ She places the ball of dark wool on the floor.
‘Quite certain,’ the doctor says, checking his watch. ‘I pronounce death as having occurred at twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes on Saturday, the thirty-first of December, 1904,’ he says solemnly.
‘Oh, but it’s not yet midnight,’ Mother says, checking her own timepiece.
‘I don’t see what that has to do with it.’ He gathers his things from the table.
Mother walks over to her husband’s body and leans over, as if searching for something on his skin. ‘But he’s still breathing, doctor, I can see it.’
‘Frau Schiele,’ the doctor says. ‘Herr Schiele is no longer of this world.’ He lowers his chin and raises an eyebrow. ‘It appears he has passed away. Quite peacefully, as you’ll have gathered.’
Mother slaps her husband, gently, on the cheek. ‘There! He opened his eyes.’
‘I must say! Please refrain from disrespecting the body at this sacred hour. It is not befitting of you to …’ Mother places her palms upon Father’s chest. His body is limp, the arms flailing. ‘Frau Schiele!’ The doctor grabs Mother. ‘I must ask that you desist. Immediately!’
