The Memorist

Chapter 36

Vienna, Austria

Monday, April 28^th-4:05 p.m.

“It’s not an accident that Sigmund Freud coined the phrase ‘death mania’ while living in Vienna,” Jeremy told his daughter as they reached the gates of the Zentralfriedhof cemetery and he paused for a second, taking a deep breath before entering the city of the dead. “The Jewish section is this way.” He pointed into the distance. They’d come directly from the funeral service, which had been well-attended and heartbreaking.

On both sides, the lane they walked down was bordered with fifteen-foot-tall arborvitae trees standing like feathery pyramids and through them Meer glimpsed the manicured lawns, sculptured monuments and the rising roofs of mausoleums. The air was rich with birdsong and the scent of evergreen. “This is a beautiful place,” she whispered, surprised.

“Yes, quite different from other cemeteries in other countries, isn’t it? Vienna’s always had a preoccupation with death-dressing it up, writing music to it, commemorating it in art…there’s even a museum devoted to it.”

“What’s in a museum devoted to death?”

“Grave-digger tools, coffins, funeral sashes, urns. The art of the undertaker through the ages. One of my favorites is the life-saving bell that’s buried with you. If you find yourself being buried alive you can make sure your mourners hear you.

“Here we are,” he said as he opened a rusty gate and she followed him into a rundown and overgrown area. Many of these tombstones had collapsed and fallen to rubble. Weeds overwhelmed whatever shrubbery had once been well tended. Compared to the rest of the cemetery, this was a slum.

“Why is it like this here?”

“There are several separate cemeteries sharing this one giant central space-Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox and Jewish. All but the Jewish section have received uninterrupted care from the children of the children of the children of the dead.” Jeremy stepped off the path to avoid pieces of a fallen tombstone. “Barely three thousand Austrian Jews even survived the war,” he continued, “and afterward none returned to Vienna. So for more than sixty years, no one’s been here to pay the rent on these graves or take care of them. Recently the government, partly in thanks to the effort Fremont Brecht’s made, has pledged to restore our cemetery. What he’s done for Austrian Jewry is astonishing. Fifteen years ago he was a well-respected public figure from a good Catholic family. And then he published a memoir called Our Secret History about Austria’s deep-seated anti-Semitism and his own hidden Jewish heritage.”

“How did he hide being Jewish for so long?”

“He didn’t know until then, until his father died and he found out his birth mother, a Jewess, had died in childbirth and his father had remarried a gentile widow four months later. If not for the second marriage that covered up the past so conveniently, Fremont might have been sent to the camps when he was a boy.”

“What was the reaction when the book came out?”

“It was a scandal. Shook a lot of people up. As he’d feared, there was a serious anti-Semitic reaction but it only made him more determined to work for Jewish reform, acceptance and restitution. And he has, tirelessly.”

“But?”

He looked at her, questioning.

“You’re not saying something, Dad. I can hear it in your voice.”

Jeremy shrugged again. “It’s a bone of contention between us. He believes keeping a contemporary and progressive face on modern Judaism is important in a country still accused of having anti-Semitic leanings.”

“And you?”

“I think he’s doing us a disservice. Our mysticism is an important and respected part of our religion.”

They’d arrived at a cordoned-off plot where a recent grave had been dug but other than the gravediggers standing off to one side, smoking and waiting for the end of a service that had not even begun, no one was there. Jeremy spoke to them while Meer inspected the names and dates on decrepit stone markers nearby.

“We’re too early,” he said when he came back. “I’m always too early to burials. Afraid to keep the dead waiting, I guess.” He looked around. “Come, we have time for me to show you where the great composers are and sculpture along the way. Maybe even some bird-watching. More than twenty-five species live here.”

Soon they were out of the shambles and back into the extravagant landscaping. “An artist named André Heller called this place an aphrodisiac for necrophiles. Even for all its macabre attention, I think the way the Viennese deal with death is healthier than the way we deal with it in America,” Jeremy said. “There, they try to sanitize dying. Bury it, no pun intended, as if it’s something so dark and secretive it shouldn’t even be examined. Here in Vienna it’s the opposite. There’s even a term for a beautiful corpse-Schoene Leich. It’s an obsession that goes all the way back to the Hapsburgs and the crazy ideas they had about how to be interred. I’m afraid I’m being too morbid.”

“You are, but what did the Hapsburgs do?”

Jeremy gave his daughter a wry smile. “Some call it the divide-and-conquer burial strategy. Their bodies are entombed in the Imperial Crypt in Kapuzinergruft church. Their intestines are in urns in St. Stephens. And their hearts are interred in small silver jars in the Herzgruft.”

“The heart crypt?”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Their mummified hearts are there?”

“Yes. It’s a tourist destination. Not one of the major ones, but it draws the curious. Did you read about it?”

“I must have. Why are their intestines and their hearts separated from their bodies?”

“It started in the early 1600s with an emperor, I think Ferdinand IV, who wanted to lay his heart at the feet of the mother of God-”

“I’d like to see it,” she interrupted.

“I might be able to get you in before it opens to the public tomorrow morning but I won’t be able to go with you.”

“I’ll go by myself, it’s fine. You know, I’m all grown up now and don’t really need a babysitter.”

“Actually, you do-two people are dead,” he whispered harshly. “Inspector Fiske doesn’t have a single lead. Serious professionals are at work here and they haven’t made any mistakes. At least none that the police have found. You have to promise me you won’t go anywhere alone.”

Meer’s inclination was to argue, but she didn’t.

“Maybe Sebastian can go with you. Or maybe I can rearrange the time of my meeting to be there. I’ll ask him. Maybe Malachai will want to go, too. Especially if I can arrange for a private visit.”

“How many babysitters do I need?” She smiled.

“No, I was just thinking that he’d like to see it.”

On either side of them, taller evergreens cast dark, long shadows over them.

“I didn’t know you spoke German,” Jeremy said after a long pause.

“What? I don’t.”

“You did this morning, when the fire alarm went off.”

She shrugged. “I must have picked it up since I’ve been here.”

“And on a whole block of buildings you knew exactly which one was the Society.”

“How could I? I’ve never been here before.”

“This time.”

“Dad.” She spoke softly, making an effort to keep the rancor from her voice, not completely succeeding. “Let’s not have this conversation. Not here, not now.”

“Sweetheart, you can’t keep pretending the-”

“I’m not pretending. I’ve made a choice about how I want to live my life so we can skip the lecture about the wheel of souls and the angel of forgetfulness and the divine sparks of light and all the other mystical reincarnation theories from the Kabbalah. You and Malachai can talk about it when you see each other and I’m not in the room.” Even though she wasn’t as certain as she usually was, Meer had fallen back on the way she’d always responded to this argument, using half her own words and half her mother’s. It was the same fight she listened to her parents have when she was supposed to be asleep and they thought she couldn’t hear them. Meer wondered how exactly she’d paraphrased her mother because her father looked so disquieted.

“Your mother made quite an impression on you, didn’t she?” he said. “I wish I could convince you that great peace comes with believing.”

She was about to disagree but he stopped her. “No, you’re right. Not now. We should get back for the ceremony. If we take this path I can still show you what I brought you here to see.”

The sound of their individual footsteps on the walkway marked the physical and emotional distance between them and they continued on in silence for a few hundred meters until they reached a small plot of grass with an iron grill in front of it. Surrounded by conical evergreens, the white obelisk reached skyward, simple and yet majestic. On the frontispiece was a one-word name in gothic black letters. The sorrow stabbed quickly as Meer realized she was looking at Beethoven’s gravestone. Her mouth was dry and so were her eyes, but she felt sad and hollow.

Her father waited a few minutes and then said, “We should go now.”

Passing stone markers as they walked back, Jeremy pointed out Johannes Brahms’ and then Franz Schubert’s resting places.

As they passed the beautiful monuments to lives lived and people lost, Meer noticed the occasional bunch of flowers in front of a grave-usually at the resting place of someone famous. Her mother had once told her that a person never really died as long as someone still loved them.

“All the great Austrians are buried here. Architects, politicians, artists, writers-quite a few Memorists here too. I think if we stay on this path we might pass…” Her father stopped at a monument of a male angel with beautifully detailed wings. “Yes, here it is.” The grief on the statue’s face was so genuine, Meer was riveted by him and the way his hand rested on the tombstone he guarded, as if it were a living being he loved, not an inanimate object.

“Whose grave is this?” she asked.

“The wife of the Society’s most important founder,” he said, then read the inscription on the tombstone. “Margaux Neidermier, 1779-1814. A world of memory will forever sound in this one mournful, golden chord.”