People of the Book

Feathers and a Rose Vienna, 1894

“FRÄULEIN OPERATOR in Gloggnitz? May I have the honor to wish you a splendid good afternoon? I trust that your day has passed pleasantly so far. The party at this end of the wire, Herr Doktor Franz Hirschfeldt, presents his compliments and would like to extend to you a most grateful kiss on the hand for the favor of completing this connection.”

“And a very fine afternoon to you, my dear Fräulein Operator in Vienna. Thank you for your good wishes, and please accept in return my most sincere felicitations. I am happy to reply to your kind inquiry by remarking that my day has been very agreeable and I hope that you and your party are likewise enjoying the very delightful summer weather. As the humble representative of my party, may I venture to say that His Excellency the baron looks forward to the opportunity to add his good wishes and…”

Franz Hirschfeldt held the telephone away from his ear and tapped a pencil against his desk. He had no patience for this time-wasting stream of pleasantries. The words going through his mind were by no means so polite. He longed to cut in, to tell the women to shut up and make the damned connection. He tapped the pencil so hard against the desk’s nickel edge that a portion of it snapped, flew off, crossed the surgery, and landed on the white-sheeted examination table. Didn’t these women know there was a ten-minute time limit on calls out of the city? Sometimes, it seemed to Hirschfeldt as if the entire allotment was squandered before he even got his party on the line. But the last time he’d been short with an operator she’d dropped the connection entirely, so he held his peace.

It was just another small irritation, like the rub of the shirt collar that the laundress would overstarch, despite his express instructions. There were too many such annoyances in this city: the tedious obsequiousness, the fashion for strangulating collars. It provoked him that he had to be so constantly provoked. He was thirty-six years old, father of two attractive children, married to a woman he still admired, discreetly entertained by a series of mistresses who amused him. He was professionally successful, even prosperous. All this, and he lived in Vienna, which was undoubtedly one of the greatest cities of the world.

Hirschfeldt lifted his gaze from the desk and let it travel beyond the corniced window as the fräuleins continued to drape their compliments over the length of the telegraph wires. The city had been confident enough to raze its own medieval fortress walls and replace them with the welcoming new sweep of the Ringstrasse; pragmatic enough to embrace the industrialization that dusted the horizon with the haze of prosperity.

Here was his city, in all her magnificence, capital of an empire that stretched from the Tyrolean Alps, across the Bohemian Massif and the Great Hungarian Plain, to the Dalmatian coast and the wide golden lands of the Ukraine; a cultural hub that attracted the best intellects and the most creative artists—only last night his wife, Anna, had dragged him out to hear that man Mahler’s latest, very strange composition, and wasn’t he from Bohemia or somewhere of that sort? And the exhibition of paintings by Klimt that they’d looked in on—that was something different. Artistic license, he supposed one called it, but the man had a very odd conception of the female anatomy.

It wasn’t as if nothing moved in Vienna. On the contrary, the city pulsed with the frantic energy of its own great invention, the waltz. And yet…

And yet seven centuries of Hapsburg monarchy had encrusted the imperial capital with an excess of its own grandeur, buried it under twirls of plaster, mired it in swirls of thick cream, weighed it down with curlicues of gold braid (even the dustmen had epaulets!), and stupefied it by this stream—no—this cataract, of unctuous courtesies….

“…if it is still convenient for Herr Doktor Hirschfeldt to entertain the connection, His Excellency the baron would be only too pleased…”

Well, he would be pleased, thought Hirschfeldt. The fräulein was right about that. The baron would be very pleased. Pleased to hear that he had an inconveniently located boil and not a raging case of syphilis. No need for the near-toxic dose of mercury or the visit to the malaria ward to contract a fever torrid enough to burn out the worse infection. With any luck, the baron hadn’t yet made any foolish, guilty confessions to the baroness. The doctor had counseled him to take his weeping member away, alone, to his mountain lodge, until Hirschfeldt had a chance to examine his paramour.

The baron’s lover had turned out to be a naive girl whose young flesh was sound and whose story held up to Hirschfeldt’s tactful and astute interrogation. She had just left the surgery, her cornflower eyes red from a little cry. They always had a little cry; the infected from despair, the healthy from relief. But this girl had wept from humiliation. The sheet on the examination table still held the impression of her slender body. She’d been as pale as the sheet, and trembling, when Hirschfeldt had required her to spread her thighs. No hardened courtesan, this one. Hirschfeldt had felt her shame and handled her with delicacy. Sometimes, when prying into the details of a patient’s intimate life, one had to play the bully to get to the truth. But not with this delicate creature, who had been only too willing to recount the short history of her seductions, the first by a literary gentleman, who as it happened was also a patient of Hirschfeldt’s and known to him as a man with a jealous regard for his physical soundness. After no very lengthy affair, he had passed her on to the attentions of the baron.

Hirschfeldt had taken care to make a note of her address in his private diary. Perhaps, after a decent interval, when there could be no question of breaching the doctor-patient relationship, he might arrange an encounter. One could, in this city, do a great deal worse.

The baron’s rumbling, bluff baritone finally vibrated the wire, replacing the twittering of the fräuleins. Hirschfeldt, however, watched his words. The fräuleins were notorious eavesdroppers.

“Baron, good day. I just wanted to let you know at the earliest opportunity that the plant we were trying to identify is very likely, almost certainly, not the invasive weed you were concerned about.”

Down the line, he heard the baron exhale.

“Hirschfeldt, thank you. Thank you for letting me know so promptly. It is a very great relief to me.”

“Don’t mention it, Excellency. But that plant still requires some cultivation”—the boil should be lanced—“and we need to attend to it.”

“I will see you as soon as I return to the city. And thank you, as ever, for your discretion.”

Hirschfeldt put down the phone. Discretion. That was what they paid him for. All the aristocrats, their kid gloves covering the rashes on their palms. All the so-respectable bourgeoisie terrified by the canker sores pulsing in their pantaloons. He knew very well that many of them would not have a Jew defile their drawing room, or even keep him company over a coffee. But they were only too pleased to entrust to him the care of their private parts and the confidences of their private lives. Hirschfeldt had been the first in town to advertise the availability of a “sequestered” waiting room, for the use of those with “secret diseases.” But that was when he had first raised his shingle. It was many years since he had needed to advertise.

Discretion: a valuable commodity in this city, capital of carnality, where scandal and gossip were the fuels that stoked the social engine. And so much to gossip about. Six years since the crown prince and his paramour had done away with themselves in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, and still one never tired of new rumors regarding that tragedy, or farce, depending on one’s degree of romanticism or cynicism. Of course, the royal family’s determination to hush up the affair had only fanned the blaze of gossip, as such attempts ever will. The Hapsburgs may have had the power to haul off Mary Vetsera’s corpse in the middle of the night with a broom handle shoved up her back to disguise the fact that she was forty hours dead. But while they could erase her name from the Austrian press, they could not keep foreign newspapers from finding their way across the border and under the seats of Vienna’s cabs, where the cabbie would, for a stiff fee, deliver them to the avid eyes of his passengers.

Hirschfeldt, who trained under the royal physician, had known the crown prince, Rudolf. He had liked him. They were the same age, and of a similar liberal bent. In their few meetings, he had sensed how thwarted the prince was, how frustrated by a role that was never more than ceremonial. It was no life for a grown man, being kept out of the counsels of state, required only as a dress dummy at banquets and balls. Waiting for a destiny that shimmered and retreated each time he attempted to approach it. And yet Hirschfeldt could not condone the ridiculous suicide pact. What was it Dante wrote, about the pope who abdicated his throne to become a contemplative and yet is condemned to one of the lowest circles of hell? Something about being punished for having turned his back on a great opportunity to do good in the world…. And ever since the prince’s shocking death, Vienna had been in almost imperceptible decline—a decline of mood rather than matter. But with no liberal face left in the Hofburg to stare them down, the Judenfressers grew louder year by year.

Who would have thought that a single suicide—or a double suicide, more properly—could put an entire city in a sour temper? Vienna valued its suicides, especially those that were dramatic, conducted with some flourish—like the young woman who had decked herself in full bridal regalia before flinging herself from a speeding train, or the circus artist who, in the midst of his performance, had cast away his pole and leaped from the high wire to his death. The audience had applauded, because he jumped with such verve that all believed it was part of his act. It was only as the blood began to pool under his shattered body that the cheers turned to gasps and the women turned their faces away, understanding that this man had added another digit to a suicide rate already the highest in Europe.

Suicide and sexual diseases. Two great killers of the Viennese, from the highest born to the lowest.

Hirschfeldt finished his notes on the baron’s case and called on his secretary to send in the next patient. He glanced at his daybook. Ah yes. Herr Mittl, the bookbinder. Poor fellow.

“Herr Doktor, Kapitän Hirschfeldt is here to see you. Should I send him in first?”

Hirschfeldt uttered an almost inaudible groan of irritation. Why was David bothering him at the clinic? He hoped his self-absorbed brother had had tact enough to stay clear of the sequestered waiting room. Herr Mittl was a nervous, highly proper little man who had paid a high price for some momentary indiscretion in his distant youth. He felt the shame of his condition deeply and as a result had been reluctant to seek treatment in the early stages of his disease, when there might have been some hope. He, of all people, would be mortified to encounter an officer of the Hoch-und Deutschmeister.

“No, give the captain my compliments but ask him to wait. Herr Mittl has troubled to make an appointment. He must have precedence.”

“Very well, Herr Doktor, but…”

“But what?” Hirschfeldt ran his finger under his collar, which was even more stiffly starched than usual.

“He is bleeding.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Show him in.”

How typical, he thought, as his half brother, a foot taller but a full thirteen years younger, strode into the surgery clutching a piece of red-stained silk to the side of his sculpted jaw. Little ruby orbs of blood glinted among the blond hairs of his wide mustache.

“David, what in the name of God have you done now? Another duel? You’re not a youth anymore. Why on earth can’t you learn to control your temper? Who, this time?”

Hirschfeldt had risen from behind his desk to lead his brother toward the examining table. Then he remembered he had not had the nurse in to change the sheet. Better safe than sorry. He propelled him instead to a chair by the window and then carefully lifted the saturated silk—a fine cravat, ruined—away from the gash.

“David.” His voice was heavy with reproof. He ran a finger over an old, white cicatrix that inscribed an arc above his brother’s right eyebrow. “One dueling scar is, I suppose, excusable, even perhaps, in your circles, desirable. But two. Two is positively excessive.” He applied alcohol to the new wound as his brother winced. There would be a scar, no doubt. The rapier cut was short but quite deep. Hirschfeldt judged it would heal without stitches if the sides of the wound were taped together and bandaged firmly. But would his vain brother leave the bandage in place? Probably not. He turned to reach for a suture.

“Are you going to tell me? Who?”

“No one you’d know.”

“Oh? You would be surprised whom I know. Syphilis is no respecter of army rank.”

“It wasn’t an officer.”

Hirschfeldt paused, the bright point of the suture needle poised above his brother’s flesh. He turned his brother’s face toward his own. A pair of sleepy eyes, the same dark blue as the young captain’s well-cut jacket, gazed back at him insouciantly.

“A civilian? David. You go too far. This could be disastrous.”

“I don’t think so. In any case, I couldn’t abide the way he said my name.”

“Your name?”

“Oh, come on, Franz. You know very well how some people pronounce Jewish names. How they can make each syllable into a little one-act farce of derisiveness.”

“David, you are oversensitive. You see slights everywhere.”

“You weren’t there, Franz. You can’t stand in judgment on me in this matter.”

“No, I wasn’t there, this time. But I’ve seen it all before.”

“Well, even if I was oversensitive, even if I was mistaken in the matter of the name, what happened next proved otherwise. When I called him out, he proclaimed that I was in no position to demand satisfaction, being a Jew.”

“Whatever did he mean?”

“He was referring, of course, to the Waidhofen manifesto.”

“The what?”

“Ach. Franz. Sometimes I wonder what city it is that you live in. The Waidhofen manifesto has been the talk of every coffeehouse in Vienna for weeks. It’s the German nationalist faction’s damnable reaction to the fact that a great number of Jews, both at the university and in the officer corps, have become proficient and dangerous fencers. Well, and so they had to, simply to defend themselves from the increasing provocations. In any case, the manifesto states that a Jew is without honor from the day of his birth. That he cannot differentiate between what is dirty and what is clean. That he is ethically sub-human and dishonorable. It is therefore impossible to insult a Jew and from this it follows that a Jew cannot demand satisfaction for any insult.”

Franz expelled a long breath. “Good lord.”

“You see?” David laughed, then grimaced, as the muscle in his lacerated cheek protested. “Even you, my wise elder brother, might have taken a scalpel to the fellow.”

The irony was that David Hirschfeldt, unlike Franz, was not a Jew. A year or two after Franz’s mother had died of consumption, their father had become smitten with a Bavarian Catholic. He had converted to her faith in order to woo her. Their son, David, had been raised amid the scent of Sunday incense and fresh-cut Christmas pines. The only Jewish thing about the blond, blue-eyed, half-Bavarian rising star of the Vienna Hausregiment was his name.

“There’s more.”

“What?”

“There are rumors I’m to be bounced from Silesia.”

“David! They couldn’t possibly. You’re their champion, ever since the gymnasium. Is it because of this latest…adventure?”

“No, of course not. Everyone in Silesia has been in an illegal duel at some point. But it seems my Bavarian Mutti no longer provides enough pure blood to counteract the taint of our father.”

Franz couldn’t think of anything to say. His brother would be devastated if he were expelled from his fencing club. And it would hurt the club to lose its best competitor. If David was right, and not merely being hypersensitive, then the state of things was much worse than he’d imagined.

Hirschfeldt was distracted as his last patient of the day was shown in. “I’m so sorry to have detained you, Herr Mittl, but there was an emergency….” He looked up then, and noticed Mittl’s gait. At once, the man’s deteriorated condition got his full attention. Mittl lumbered on stiff legs held wide apart until he stood nervously by the examination table, twisting his hat in his hands. His face, a narrow face always, was drawn and gray. There was a stain on his shirt, which was unusual; Hirschfeldt recalled Mittl as being most particular about his grooming. Hirschfeldt spoke to him gently. “Do sit down, Herr Mittl, and tell me how you are.”

“Thank you, Herr Doktor.” He eased himself carefully onto the table. “I’ve not been well. Not well at all.”

Hirschfeldt conducted his examination knowing what he would find: the gummy tumors, palpable around the joints, the optic atrophy, the muscle weakness.

“Are you still managing to work, Herr Mittl? It must be difficult for you.”

There was a flash of fear in the man’s eyes. “Oh yes. I must work. Must work. No choice. Even though they conspire against me. They give the lucrative work to their own, and I get the dregs….” Suddenly Mittl stopped and clapped a hand to his mouth. “I forgot that you—”

Hirschfeldt interrupted, to save them both embarrassment. “How do you manage with the fine work, your eyesight deteriorating as it is?”

“I have my daughter to help me with the sewing. Only one I can trust. The other apprentices are all in league against me, stealing everything, down to my linen thread….”

Hirschfeldt sighed. The paranoid delusions were as much a symptom of tertiary-stage disease as the physical disabilities. He wondered that Mittl was getting any commissions at all, given his impairment. The man must have a very loyal clientele.

Suddenly Mittl fixed him with a lucid gaze. His voice dropped back into its normal pitch. “I think I am losing my mind. Is there nothing you can do for me?”

Hirschfeldt turned away and walked to the window. How much should he tell him? How much could he take in? He was reluctant to mention experimental treatments to patients who could not perhaps grasp the full risks, the very uncertain rewards. And yet these treatments were too drastic to try on anyone who was not late stage and terminal. To do nothing was to condemn poor Mittl to his miserable decline until death overtook him.

“There is something,” Hirschfeldt said at last. “A colleague of mine is working on it in Berlin. The results are promising, but the treatments are extensive, painful, and I’m afraid very costly. It requires as many as forty injections over the course of a year. The agent my colleague has developed is very toxic, based on arsenic. His idea is that the compound harms the diseased parts of the body more than it harms the sound parts, which will, in time, recover. But the effects can be severe. Pain at the injection site is very common, as are gastric disorders. But my colleague has documented some dramatic results. He even claims cures, but I must warn you that I think it is too early to make such assertions.”

Mittl’s cloudy eyes had become avid. “You said ‘expensive,’ Herr Doktor. How much?”

Hirschfeldt sighed and named the sum. Mittl buried his head in his hands. “I haven’t got it.” And then, to Hirschfeldt’s deep embarrassment, the man began to sob like a child.

Hirschfeldt did not like the last patient of the day to be a hopeless case. It wasn’t the mood he liked to be in when he left his clinic. He had intended to call upon his mistress, but as he reached the turn to her street, he hesitated and walked on. It wasn’t just Mittl. It had been ten months; Rosalind’s wide-hipped, fleshy beauty was beginning to bore him. Perhaps it was time to look elsewhere…the image of the slender, trembling girl with the cornflower eyes came to him unbidden. He wondered idly how long it would be before the baron was sated with her. Not, he hoped, too long….

It was a delicious late-summer evening, the slant of the low sun warming the cold plaster nudes that cavorted across the entablature of some rather ostentatious new apartments. Who would buy such places, he wondered. The new industrial class, perhaps, wanting some physical proximity to the Hofburg. The only proximity they could hope for. All their wealth would never raise them up to the social plane of the aristocracy.

The warmth had tempted all kinds of people into the streets. Hirschfeldt took comfort in their diversity. There was a family, the wife veiled, the man wearing a fez, who had probably come all the way from Bosnia to see the heart of the empire under whose protection their lands had fallen. There was a Bohemian Gypsy woman, her spangled hem jingling in time to her swayed-hip walk. And a Ukrainian peasant with a red-cheeked boy riding on his shoulders. If the German nationalists wanted to purify this state of foreign influence, they would have many more obvious exotics to weed out before they got to the Jews, much less to a totally assimilated man like his brother, David. Still, a small voice nagged at him. The Bosnians and the Ukrainians weren’t dominant figures in the arts, in industry, in finance. A few colorful tourists—perhaps even the German nationalists could find them appealing, a picturesque element in the urban landscape. What they apparently did not find appealing was the prominence of Jews in every field of Austrian endeavor, even, these days, in the officer ranks of the army.

Hirschfeldt had watched the young limes and the sycamore saplings taking root on the malls of the Ringstrasse. Now they had grown high enough to throw slender stripes of shadow across his path. One day they would provide shade. His children, maybe, would live to enjoy it….

He would go home, yes, to his children; that was the thing to do. He would propose to his wife that they go for a family stroll in the Prater, perhaps. He would speak with her about David; she would understand his concerns. But his wife was not at home when he got there, and neither were the children. Frau Hirschfeldt had gone to call on the Hertzls, the maid said. And the nanny had already taken the children for an airing in the park. Franz felt put out, even as he knew that the sentiment was unreasonable, since he so often claimed to be detained at the clinic at this hour. Still, he wanted his wife’s company and he had grown very used to having what he wanted. And what did she see in that vapid wife of Hertzl’s? What did Hertzl see in her, for that matter? But even as his mind framed the question, Franz knew the answer.

Frau Hertzl’s blond beauty and her frivolous painted fingernails were perfect foils for Theodor’s dark, rabbinic gravity. With his Julie on his arm, he appeared less Jewish, and Franz was aware that this was beginning to matter to his literary friend. But the woman had so little to say. Her whole existence seemed framed by fashion. His own thoughtful, educated wife could hardly find her engaging. That Anna should be wasting her time on such an unprofitable friendship, when he wanted her home, was yet another annoyance. He retreated to his bedchamber and threw off the shirt with its bothersome collar. He put on a smoking jacket. Better. He tilted his head from left to right, releasing the tension in his neck. He made for the salon, called for a glass of schnapps, and retreated behind the broadsheets of his daily newspaper.

Anna did not see him as she swept through the door. Her head was down, her hands busy extracting hat pins. She turned to the mirror in the hallway as the wide straw hat came off. Franz saw her face reflected in the glass. She was smiling at some private joke as her fingers fluttered around thick swirls of hair that had come loose with the hat. Franz put down his glass silently and moved behind her, taking one of the twists of hair in his hand and stroking the backs of his fingers along her neck. His wife gave a startled shudder.

“Franz! You frightened me,” she protested. Her face, as she turned to him, was flushed. But that alone would not have been enough to pierce Hirschfeldt with sudden, unwelcome knowledge. Before she turned, he had noted that one of the tiny, muslin-covered buttons on the back of her bodice had been fastened into the wrong buttonhole. Her maid, who was fastidious, would never have allowed such a thing. Such a small thing; a tiny betraying detail of a very great betrayal.

Hirschfeldt took his wife’s face between his hands and stared at her. Was it his imagination, or did her lips have a softened, bruised look? Suddenly he did not want to touch her. He let go of her face and rubbed his hands down the side of his trouser seams, as if wiping off uncleanliness.

“Is it Hertzl?” he hissed.

“Hertzl?” Her eyes scanned his face. “Yes, Franz, I went to see Frau Hertzl, but she was not at home so I—”

“Don’t. Don’t trouble to lie to me. I spend my life among the sexually reckless, the cuckolders, and their trollops.” He pushed his thumb hard across her lips, mashing them against her teeth. “You have been kissed.” He reached behind her neck and pulled hard on the muslin so that the buttons tore from the delicate loops of fabric that held them. “You have been undressed.” He leaned in close. “Someone has fucked you.”

She took a step away from him, trembling.

“I ask you again: was it Hertzl?”

Her brown eyes brimmed. “No,” she whispered. “Not Hertzl. No one you know.”

He found himself repeating what he’d said to his brother not so many hours earlier. “You’d be surprised who I know.” His mind was full of images: the baron’s boil-cratered penis, the yellow pus oozing from a girl’s eroded labia, the gummy tumors eating away at poor demented Mittl. He couldn’t breathe. He needed air. He turned away from his wife and walked out the door, slamming it behind him.

Rosalind, having given up on seeing Hirschfeldt that evening, was dressing for a concert. There was an attractive second violin in the Behrensdorf Quartet who had stared at her across his bow all through a recital at a private salon the previous evening. After the performance, he had sought her out and made a point of telling her that he would be playing at the Musikverein tonight. She had just dabbed scent behind her ears and was contemplating whether to risk the delicate lemon silk of her bodice to the pin of a small sapphire brooch when Hirschfeldt was announced. She felt a slight stab of irritation. Why had he not called at the usual hour? He burst into her boudoir, looking entirely odd in his smoking jacket and with such an expression on his face.

“Franz! How very peculiar! Don’t tell me you wore that in the street?”

He did not answer, simply unbuttoned the frogs on the jacket with impatient fingers and threw it on the bed. Then he strode up to her, slid the strap of her gown off her shoulder, and commenced kissing her with an urgency he hadn’t displayed in months.

Rosalind submitted to, rather than participated in, the untender coupling that followed. After, she raised herself on one elbow and gazed at him. “Would you care to tell me what is going on?”

“Not really.”

She waited a few moments, but when he said nothing more, she rose, picked up her gown where it had fallen on the floor, and commenced to dress again for the Musikverein. If she hurried, she could get there before the first interval.

“You are going out?” He sounded aggrieved.

“Yes, if you are going to lie there with a face like a stone. I am most certainly going out.” She turned to him, angry now herself. “Franz, do you realize it has been a month since you have taken me anywhere, brought me a gift, made me laugh? I think perhaps it is time I took a vacation. I might go to the spa at Baden.”

“Rosalind, please. Not now.” He was chagrined. It was he who should decide when to end the affair, not she.

She picked up the brooch. The sapphires looked well against the lemon, and drew attention to her lively eyes. She jabbed the pin into the delicate fabric. “Then, my friend, you had best give me a reason to stay.”

With that, she stood, swirled a light stole over her creamy shoulders, and left the room.

In the gathering dark of early evening, Florien Mittl clutched at the slender trunk of a lime tree to steady himself as fur-hatted Hassids poured out of their synagogue and filled the street with their uncouth Yiddish babble. His gait was too uncertain to risk trying to make his way against the tide. He would have to wait till they passed. In the upper-Austrian burg where he had been raised, it was the Jews who would make way for a Christian, they who would wait for him to pass. Vienna was too liberal; there was no doubt of it. These Jews had been allowed to forget their place. And was there no end to them? It was not Saturday, so he supposed it must be some Jewish festival or another that brought them out in such numbers, in such strange finery.

Perhaps it was the very festival commemorated in the book he had been given to rebind. He didn’t know. Nor did he care. He was glad to have the work, even if it was a Jewish book. Typical that they would give him a Jewish book, destined for the obscurity of a provincial museum. He, who once had been entrusted with the gems of the imperial collection, the finest psalters, the most beautiful Books of Hours…. Well, it was months since the museum had sent anything at all his way, so it was no use dwelling on the past. He would do his best. He’d started on the boards for the new binding, cut them, grooved them for the clasps. The book must have had a remarkable binding once, judging by those clasps. They were as finely wrought as anything in the imperial collection. Four hundred years ago, and some Jew was already rich. Always knew how to get money, them. Why not he? Bring the binding back to that standard, that was what he must strive for. Impress the museum director. Prove he wasn’t ready for the scrap heap. Get more work. He must get more work. Scrape together the funds for the Jew doctor’s cure. Of course, the doctor probably lied about the cost. He wouldn’t charge another Jew such a usurious rate, Mittl would wager on it. Bloodsuckers, all of them, growing fat on Christian suffering.

Bitter, frightened, in pain, Mittl made his way along the street, dreading the moment he would have to turn into the platz. The small square might as well be the wastes of the Sahara, so difficult to make the crossing. He hugged the periphery of the square, staying close to the walls of the buildings, grateful for fence railings to grasp against a sudden gust of wind that might topple him. At last he arrived at his own building. He did battle with the heavy door, and then leaned, exhausted, against the newel post at the foot of the stairs. He rested there for a long moment, gathering his wind and his will, before the slow ascent. He feared the stairs. He saw himself dead at the base of them, his head pulped, a broken leg twisted grotesquely. He clutched at the banister, pulling himself up hand over hand like an alpinist.

The apartment was dark, and smelled bad. The usual scents of leather and size were overlaid with ranker aromas of unwashed clothes and rancid meat. He lit a single gas lamp—all he could afford—and unwrapped the slice of mutton his daughter had left for him, oh, several days ago. Why did the girl neglect him so? She was all he had, since her mother…since Lise…

With the thought of his wife, guilty regret swept over him. What a wedding present he had given her. Did his daughter know? He couldn’t bear it if his daughter knew. But perhaps that’s why she had grown distant, helping him only as far as mean duty demanded. Probably he disgusted her. Certainly he disgusted himself. Like the meat. Rotten. Rotting inside. The mutton had a greenish tinge, and was slimy to the touch. He ate it anyway. There was nothing else.

He had intended to start again on the work. He wiped his hands on a piece of rag and turned toward his workbench, where the book in its damaged binding lay waiting for his attentions. Years, centuries, since anyone had repaired it. A chance for him to show his skill. Do it quickly, impress them, so that they might send him more commissions. Dazzle them. That was what he must do. But the light was so poor, and the pains traveled up and down his arms without respite. He sat down, and pulled the lamp close. He picked up the knife, and then placed it down again. What was it he was supposed to do? What was the first thing? Remove the boards? Release the quires? Prepare the size? He had rebound hundreds of books—valuable, rare books. But suddenly he couldn’t recall a sequence of steps that had been as natural to him as breathing.

He put his face in his hands. Yesterday, he hadn’t been able to remember how to make the tea. Such a simple thing. A thing he’d done without thinking, several times a day, most of the days of his life. But yesterday it had loomed at him like the frightening staircase, too many steps. He had put the tea leaves into the cup, and the sugar into the teapot, and scalded himself with the water.

If only the Jew doctor could be persuaded to give him the cure. He had to save what was left of his mind, what was left of himself. There must be something other than money he could offer him. No. Nothing. Jews were only interested in money. There must be something he could sell. His wife’s wedding ring. But his daughter had that; hard to ask her for it back. Only a drop in the ocean anyway. Not such a very fine ring. She deserved better, poor Lise. Poor dead Lise.

How could he think, how could he work, with this worry constantly gnawing him? He would lie down, perhaps, for just a little while, and then he would be better. Then he would remember, and be able to go on.

Florien Mittl woke, fully dressed, when the light of late morning finally won its struggle with the grime that coated his window. He lay there, blinking, trying to collect his scattered thoughts. He remembered the book. Then he remembered the dread of the evening before. How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could a man misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go? His thoughts were like an army in retreat, ceding ever more territory to the enemy, his illness. No, not a retreat. Not lately. More like a rout. He turned his head stiffly. A beam of sunlight lay like a stripe of yellow ribbon across the workbench. It hit the sad, tattered, untouched cover of the book. And then it flared on the freshly polished silver of the clasps.

Hirschfeldt did not fast on the Day of Atonement. Racial solidarity was one thing; he had made a dutiful appearance at the synagogue, nodded to those to whom he needed to nod, and slipped out at the first seemly moment. But unhealthy dietary practices were something else. He thought such customs superstitions from a bygone, primitive age. Generally, Anna agreed with him. But this year she had fasted, creeping around the flat as the day wore on with a hand pressed to her temple. Dehydration headache was Hirschfeldt’s silent diagnosis.

As the light faded, the children huddled together on the balcony, waiting for the glimmer of the third evening star, which signaled the end of the fast. The two of them had gone without sustenance only the short hour since nursery tea, but they loved the semblance of ritual. There were several squeals, several false alarms, before the moment when the silver trays laden with good things—poppy-seed cakes and sweet crescent pastries—officially became permitted fare.

Hirschfeldt placed a small square of torte, Anna’s favorite, on a plate. He poured some cool water from the silver ewer into a crystal glass and carried these things to his wife. His rage at her had subsided quite suddenly. So suddenly that he had surprised himself, giving himself immense plaudits for his magnanimity, his maturity, his sophistication. He had not thought of himself as quite such a man of the world. That he had returned home the morning after his discovery to find her tearful, penitent, and full of pleadings, this had surely helped. But the odd thing was that the idea of her, desired by another, had rekindled his own passion. The erotic appetite was a fascinating thing, he mused, as he kissed a sweet crumb from the corner of her hungry lips. That man Freud, whose rooms were so close to his own, he must get to know him better. Some of his writings were full of insight. He had barely thought of Rosalind, away in Baden, or the girl with cornflower eyes.

“I don’t know, Herr Mittl. I’ve never taken a payment like this before….”

“Please, Herr Doktor. I have removed them from the Mittl family Bible, you must see they are very fine….”

“Very fine, Herr Mittl. Lovely. Not that I know anything about silversmithy, but anyone can appreciate the detail in this…work of a real craftsman…an artist, indeed.”

“They are pure silver, Herr Doktor, not plate.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it, Herr Mittl. That’s not the issue. It’s just that I…we…Jews in general, we don’t have family Bibles. Our Torah is kept in the synagogue, and in any case, it is a scroll….”

Mittl frowned. He wanted to blurt out that the clasps had come off a Jewish book, but he could hardly reveal that fact without exposing himself as a thief. Was it a measure of his madness, or of his desperation, that he had persuaded himself no one from the museum would miss the pair of clasps? If they did, he had determined to assert that the clasps had never come to him. He would throw suspicion on the foreign scholars instead.

But this negotiation was not going well. He squirmed in his seat. He had been convinced that the doctor, in his avarice, would fall on the bright metal as instinctively as a bowerbird.

“Even you Jews must have some kind of…of prayer book?”

“Yes, of course we do. I, for example, have a siddur, for services, and we have a haggadah, for Passover, but I really don’t think either of them is equal to silver clasps. Pedestrian editions, I’m afraid. Contemporary bindings. One should have better, I suppose. I’ve often meant to—”

Hirshfeldt stopped himself in midsentence. Damn it. The little man was going to cry again. A woman’s tears were one thing. He was used to them; he did not mind them. They could even be charming, in a way. One enjoyed consoling a woman. But a man’s tears. Hirschfeldt cringed. The first time he had seen a man really weep was his father, the night his mother died. It had been harrowing. He had believed his father impregnable. For him, it had been a night of double loss. His father’s uncontained grief had turned his own childish tears into a howling, heaving fit of hysteria. He and his father had never treated each other quite the same way, after that night.

And this, too, was harrowing. Hirshfeldt had unconsciously wrapped his hands around his ears, trying to shut out the sound of it. Horrible. How desperate Mittl must be, to weep like this. How desperate, to have vandalized his own family Bible.

And then, quite suddenly, Hirschfedlt stepped out from behind the wall that years of training and experience had erected. He allowed himself to be exposed to the broken, sobbing figure in front of him, and to be moved, not as a doctor is moved by a patient, to a safe and serviceable sympathy, but as a human being who allows himself full empathy with the suffering of another.

“Please, Herr Mittl. There is no need for this. I will send to Dr. Ehrlich in Berlin and request a course of his serum for you. We can begin the treatments early next week. I can’t promise you results, but we can hope….”

“Hope?” Florien Mittl looked up and took the handkerchief the doctor held out to him. Hope. That was enough. That was everything.

“You mean it? You will?”

“Yes, Herr Mittl.” As he saw the transfiguration of Mittl’s narrow, rodent face, Hirschfeldt felt an even greater surge of magnanimity. He took the clasps in his hand and stood. He walked around his desk to where Mittl sat, breathing raggedly, dabbing at his eyes. He was about to hand the clasps back, to tell him to restore them to their rightful place.

But then the light gleamed on the silver. Such delicate roses. Rosalind. He needed a farewell gift for her when she returned from Baden. One must begin and end an affair with some panache, even if one hasn’t behaved impeccably throughout. He shifted the clasps in his hand and studied them more closely. Yes, a skilled jeweler—he knew just the man—could make a pair of earrings from the roses, a perfect pair of fine studs. Rosalind, whose beauty was of a large and overstated variety, preferred such subtle, smaller pieces for her jewels.

What did he owe to the Mittl family Bible, after all? At least it existed. Not like the mountains of Talmuds and other Jewish books consigned to flames over centuries by order of Herr Mittl’s church. What did it matter if it had no clasps? Ehrlich charged an exorbitant sum for his serum. Earrings for Rosalind were only a partial recompense for what he would have to spend. He looked again at the clasps. He noted that the feathers, made to enclose the roses, had a curve that suggested an enfolding wing. It would be a shame if one did not use those, too. The jeweler could make a second pair of earrings, perhaps. For an instant, he thought of delicate, birdlike limbs, and cornflower eyes….

No. Not for her. Not yet. Perhaps never. For the first time in years, he felt no urgency for a mistress. He had Anna. He had only to think of her, and imagine a strange hand touching her, to be overcome with desire. He smiled. How very appropriate. A pair of wings, to gleam amid the dark hair of his own Fallen Angel.