The Morning Gift

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.

2

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.

In earlier times, Ruth might have sought sanctuary in a temple or a church. Now, homeless and desolate, she came to this place.

It was Tuesday, the day the museum was closed to the public. Silently, she opened the side door and made her way up the stairs.

Her father’s room was exactly as he had left it. His lab coat was behind the door; his notes, beside a pile of reprints, were on the desk. On a work bench by the window was the tray of fossil bones he had been sorting before he left. No one yet had unscrewed his name from the door, nor confiscated the two sets of keys, one of which she had left with the concierge.