A Death in Vienna

“I heard you speaking Hebrew to that man from the embassy.” His Viennese German was frantically paced, his eyes wide and damp. “You’re Israeli, yes? A friend of Eli Lavon’s?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My name is Max Klein, and this is all my fault. Please, you must believe me. This is all my fault.”

5 VIENNA

MAX KLEIN LIVED a streetcar ride away, in a graceful old district just beyond the Ringstrasse. His was a fine old Biedermeier apartment building with a passageway leading to a big interior courtyard. The courtyard was dark, lit only by the soft glow of lights burning in the apartments overhead. A second passageway gave onto a small, neat foyer. Gabriel glanced at the tenant list. Halfway down he saw the words: M.KLEIN-3B. There was no elevator. Klein clung to the wood banister as he climbed stubbornly upward, his feet heavy on the well-trodden runner. On the third-floor landing were two wooden doors with peepholes. Gravitating toward the one on the right, Klein removed a set of keys from his coat pocket. His hand shook so badly the keys jingled like a percussion instrument.

He opened the door and went inside. Gabriel hesitated just beyond the threshold. It had occurred to him, sitting next to Klein on the streetcar, that he had no business meeting with anyone under circumstances such as these. Experience and hard lessons had taught him that even an obviously Jewish octogenarian had to be regarded as a potential threat. Any anxiety Gabriel was feeling quickly evaporated, however, as he watched Klein turn on practically every light in the apartment. It was not the action of a man laying a trap, he thought. Max Klein was frightened.

Gabriel followed him into the apartment and closed the door. In the bright light, he finally got a good look at him. Klein’s red, rheumy eyes were magnified by a pair of thick black spectacles. His beard, wispy and white, no longer concealed the dark liver spots on his cheeks. Gabriel knew, even before Klein told him, that he was a survivor. Starvation, like bullets and fire, leaves scars. Gabriel had seen different versions of the face in his farming town in the Jezreel Valley. He had seen it on his parents.

“I’ll make tea,” Klein announced before disappearing through a pair of double doors into the kitchen.

Tea at midnight, thought Gabriel. It was going to be a long evening. He went to the window and parted the blinds. The snow had stopped for now, and the street was empty. He sat down. The room reminded him of Eli’s office: the high Biedermeier ceiling, the haphazard way in which the books lay on the shelves. Elegant, intellectual clutter.

Klein returned and placed a silver tea service on a low table. He sat down opposite Gabriel and regarded him silently for a moment. “You speak German very well,” he said finally. “In fact, you speak it like a Berliner.”

“My mother was from Berlin,” Gabriel said truthfully, “but I was born in Israel.”

Klein studied him carefully, as if he too were looking for the scars of survival. Then he lifted his palms quizzically, an invitation to fill in the blanks. Where was she? How did she survive? Was she in a camp or did she get out before the madness?

“They stayed in Berlin and were eventually deported to the camps,” Gabriel said. “My grandfather was a rather well-known painter. He never believed that the Germans, a people he believed were among the most civilized on earth, would go as far as they did.”

“What was your grandfather’s name?”

“Frankel,” Gabriel said, again veering toward the truth. “Viktor Frankel.”

Klein nodded slowly in recognition of the name. “I’ve seen his work. He was a disciple of Max Beckmann, was he not? Extremely talented.”

“Yes, that’s right. His work was declared degenerate by the Nazis early on and much of it was destroyed. He also lost his job at the art institute where he was teaching in Berlin.”

“But he stayed.” Klein shook his head. “No one believed it could happen.” He paused a moment, his thoughts elsewhere. “So what happened to them?”

“They were deported to Auschwitz. My mother was sent to the women’s camp at Birkenau and managed to survive for more than two years before she was liberated.”

“And your grandparents?”

“Gassed on arrival.”

“Do you remember the date?”

“I believe it was January 1943,” Gabriel said.

Klein covered his eyes.

“Is there something significant about that date, Herr Klein?”

“Yes,” Klein said absently. “I was there the night those Berlin transports arrived. I remember it very well. You see, Mr. Argov, I was a violinist in the Auschwitz camp orchestra. I played music for devils in an orchestra of the damned. I serenaded the condemned as they trudged slowly toward the gas.”

Gabriel’s face remained placid. Max Klein was clearly a man suffering from enormous guilt. He believed he bore some responsibility for the deaths of those who had filed past him on the way to the gas chambers. It was madness, of course. He was no more guilty than any of the Jews who had toiled in the slave labor factories or in the fields of Auschwitz in order to survive one more day.

“But that’s not the reason you stopped me tonight at the hospital. You wanted to tell me something about the bombing at Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”

Klein nodded. “As I said, this is all my doing. I’m the one responsible for the deaths of those two beautiful girls. I’m the reason your friend Eli Lavon is lying in that hospital bed near death.”

“Are you telling me you planted the bomb?” Gabriel’s tone was intentionally heavy with incredulity. The question was meant to sound preposterous.

“Of course not!” Klein snapped. “But I’m afraid I set in motion the events that led others to place it there.”

“Why don’t you just tell me everything you know, Herr Klein? Let me judge who’s guilty.”

“Only God can judge,” Klein said.

“Perhaps, but sometimes even God needs a little help.”

Klein smiled and poured tea. Then he told the story from the beginning. Gabriel bided his time and didn’t rush the proceedings along. Eli Lavon would have played it the same way. “For the old ones, memory is like a stack of china,” Lavon always said. “If you try to pull a plate from the middle, the whole thing comes crashing down.”

THE APARTMENT HAD belonged to his father. Before the war, Klein had lived there along with his parents and two younger sisters. His father, Solomon, was a successful textile merchant, and the Kleins lived a charmed upper-middle-class existence: afternoon strudels at the finest Vienna coffeehouses, evenings at the theater or the opera, summers at the modest family villa in the south. Young Max Klein was a promising violinist-Not quite ready for the symphony or the opera, mind you, Mr. Argov, but good enough to find work in smaller Viennese chamber orchestras.

“My father, even when he was tired from working all day, rarely missed a performance.” Klein smiled for the first time at the memory of his father watching him play. “The fact that his son was a Viennese musician made him extremely proud.”

Their idyllic world had come to an abrupt end on March 12, 1938. It was a Saturday, Klein remembered, and for the overwhelming majority of Austrians, the sight of Wehrmacht troops marching through the streets of Vienna had been a cause for celebration. For the Jews, Mr. Argov… for us, only dread. The worst fears of the community were quickly realized. In Germany, the assault on the Jews had been a gradual undertaking. In Austria, it was instantaneous and savage. Within days, all Jewish-owned businesses were marked with red paint. Any non-Jew who entered was assaulted by Brownshirts and SS. Many were forced to wear placards that declared: I, Aryan swine, have bought in a Jewish shop. Jews were forbidden to own property, to hold a job in any profession or to employ someone else, to enter a restaurant or a coffeehouse, to set foot in Vienna ’s public parks. Jews were forbidden to possess typewriters or radios, because those could facilitate communication with the outside world. Jews were dragged from their homes and their synagogues and beaten on the streets.