J. Jones: The Silence

Hermine Wittgenstein seemed upset by this at first, but quickly covered her irritation.

‘I will be back shortly, Advokat. And Luki, see if you can help this gentleman track down your wandering brother Hans.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Ludwig said earnestly to her retreating back.

‘You’re an engineer, then,’ Werthen said once the sister was gone.

‘Like my father,’ the boy said. ‘The others play music. I build. Well, that’s not exactly true. Gretl is quite pitiful at the piano. Mother is always telling her how she has no sense of rhythm at all.’

‘No instruments for you, then?’ Werthen took a liking to the boy, obviously intelligent but not obnoxiously precocious.

‘I play around with the violin, but no, not really. Not like Hans or Paul. They have real talent. Hans could play the violin and piano when he was still a toddler. By four he was composing. Me, I could still barely speak when I was four.’

He stated this astounding fact with a real sense of pride.

‘Maybe you did not have anything to say.’

Ludwig smiled brightly. ‘That’s exactly what Mining says. Father calls her a brick. What do you think, Advokat?’

‘Solid as the Parthenon.’

‘Yes.’ The boy affixed one last piece of wood to his model, and then wound up a spring. Soon the contraption was humming along like an actual sewing machine.

‘See. I told you. A working model.’

‘Can you help me at all about your brother?’

Ludwig looked up from his masterpiece and shook his head. ‘I wish I could. I miss him.’ The spring wore down and the machine stopped.

‘Did he ever mention having a room somewhere?’

‘His room is here,’ the young boy said. ‘He was a child prodigy, you know. Another Mozart. All the teachers said so. But Father wants him to go into the business. Father usually gets his way.’

Suddenly the young boy looked intently at Werthen: ‘I do not think Vati will demand my assistance in the company, do you, Advokat Werthen?’ And then, without waiting for an answer, ‘You really must find him. Hans is the best of us. He is special. And different. In many ways.’

Hermine Wittgenstein returned at that moment, reminding Luki it was time for his Latin lesson. The boy rolled his eyes, demonstrated his model for her, and then was off to the schoolroom.

Leaving the boy’s room, Werthen had Fraulein Wittgenstein give him the business address and phone number of brother Kurt, as well as a description of the missing man: about five foot ten inches and one hundred and fifty pounds. Dark hair, brown eyes, clean shaven and close-cropped hair, which had recently become the mode for the artistic types. They descended the main staircase and after much prodding, Hermine went to a sitting room and removed a framed photograph from an end table. It was a recent photograph of Hans, decked out in summer white linen, from a family portrait taken the previous August at their Neuwaldeggergasse villa. Back row, third from the right.

Hans was most definitely not a carbon copy of his bullish father; instead, he had the ascetic look of a monk on his face. He was staring off into the distance as the other members of the family were saying ‘ bitte ’ into the camera.

‘I would like the photograph returned when you are finished,’ Fraulein Wittgenstein said without emotion. Then, as Werthen was about to leave, ‘I suppose you will need it at the city morgue. For identification purposes.’

‘It hasn’t come to that yet,’ he said. A half-lie. ‘It helps to have visual identification when interviewing people. A name means little to people, a face much more.’

Then, after a quick salutation from Fraulein Hermine and an admonition to please find her brother ‘for mother’s sake,’ Werthen was on his way.

Out on the street, it had warmed even more and the snow had almost completely melted, making for a slushy and quite miserable walk. As he picked his way along the sidewalk he thought of the youngest brother, Ludwig, and his final comment about his brother Hans being different in many ways.

It was a strange comment, Werthen thought, and piqued his curiosity about the missing Wittgenstein. After not speaking for the first four years of his life, young Ludwig obviously picked his words carefully.

So Hans was not simply different because of his musical skill and dreams, his desire to be an artist in a family of business people. Different how?

Werthen was unsure of his next move. There were several avenues of investigation open to him. As Fraulein Wittgenstein suggested, he would need to check at the city morgue in the cellar of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, Vienna’s General Hospital, to find a likely candidate for the corpse of Hans Wittgenstein, possible victim of an accident, suicide, or homicide. Or he could pay a visit to the Wittgenstein office on Kolowatring to speak with brother Kurt. A third possibility was a meeting with the director of the Theresianum.

According to Herr Wittgenstein, Hans had fallen into bad company at that exclusive school. If he had made friendships, they would carry on throughout his life, for that was the way of the exclusive Theresianum. Its alumni continued to use the familiar du form with one another, even if one had become a minor bureaucrat and the other a Finance Minister. Though Hans had not graduated, he had spent two years at the place, long enough to forge friendships that lasted. Long enough perhaps to have a friend who might give Hans Wittgenstein a refuge, a home away from home.

As he was only a block or two away from the Theresianum, Werthen decided to start there. He headed down the Alleegasse, away from the center of the city for one block, and then turned on to Taubstummengasse to its intersection with the busy Favoritenstrasse, where he turned right. He walked about a hundred meters along the immense three-story classicist front of the old Favorita to its main entrance. The Favorita was a former imperial summer palace converted in 1746 into a school. Werthen knew that the Jesuits were at first put in charge of the pedagogy, later to be replaced by the other Catholic teaching order, the Piaristen, the Pious Ones. Reforms in the 1850s put the educational system under state control and for the most part replaced clerics with professors, each trained in an area of specialization.

As he entered the portals of the school, a priest in black cassock with a cincture or sash around the waist scurried through the entrance past him, books hugged to his chest. Werthen had not seen him on the street; it was as if the priest had appeared out of nowhere and was headed like the rabbit in Alice’s tale to some mysterious destination. The black cassock always gave Werthen a faint chill, just as did the long payot or side locks of the Hasidic Jews one saw in the Second District. Both so strange to the secular Werthen, bespeaking a life not just foreign, but otherworldly.

Obviously not all the priests had been replaced at the Theresianum.

The weather may have warmed up, but still it was chill enough to necessitate a coat. This priest seemed, however, in too much of a hurry to bother with such earthly necessities as winter apparel. Even his head was bare, his long hair ruffled in the morning breeze.

A sudden sweet smell of water was carried on the breeze, and made Werthen involuntarily smile as he proceeded through the gateway to the inevitable Portier ’s booth. Through the other end of the arched entryway, Werthen saw rolling lawns under a mantle of melting snow and more ochre buildings, all part of the former summer estate. A flagpole in the central lawn bore a flag with a Habsburg eagle hanging at half-mast.

‘You have an appointment, sir?’ the aged Portier asked Werthen, bringing him out of his momentary reverie.