“Don’t you think it’s time you went back?” Sister Gertrude asked.
“And if the Maiers aren’t there? If someone else is living in that house now, what then?”
“Well, maybe you ask around. Call on their friends or visit the church they attended. If you still come up with nothing, stop in Innsbruck on your return to Lucerne. Go to the address you last had for Frau Maier and her children and inquire. You might not be able to find this family there, true. But you haven’t even tried. And yet you keep writing letters, hoping against hope they will be delivered. I know you pretty well now, and I think you have convinced yourself that you’re happy here. But I’m not sure that you are.”
“I love Lucerne.”
“But I don’t think you loveyouin Lucerne. You’re troubled here.”
“I feel like you’re sending me away.” A strange sadness filled me, though I knew Sister Gertrude was right. I did have unfinished business in Vienna.
“I’m telling you to listen to your heart, Helen. It is restless within you.”
•••
When the war had finally ended and the families of our rescued children began to come for them, I’d worried that Austria would receive the same treatment as vanquished Germany. I had felt tremendous relief that the country had been viewed not as the Reich’s accomplice but rather as the first victim of Nazi aggression. But like Germany, postwar Austria had been parceled into occupied zones, with the French governing the west, the Americans controlling the middle north, the British the middle south, and the Soviets—who’d marched into Austria a month before the Western Allies had—taking everything east, from Linz toFürstenfeld. Vienna, like Berlin, was to be controlled by all four victorious powers, but also like Berlin, it was surrounded on all sides by Communist forces intent on making Austria a Soviet state.
My journey to Vienna would begin with the first morning train headed east from Zurich and across the Austrian border into the French zone. Then a platform and passenger check in the American zone near Kitzbühel, and finally—the stop I was most unsure about—the transition to the Soviet-controlled zone at Linz.
The stops made for a long travel day—and sixteen hours instead of the prewar thirteen—but unexpectedly, it was not a troublesome one. As I progressed through the zones, I wasn’t questioned at length by anyone—not even the Soviets—regarding my reasons for traveling to Vienna. It had been enough to tell the official at each stop that I was merely reconnecting with the family for whom I used to nanny. My American passport apparently made me automatically one of the trusted Allies.
Vienna, being the capital, had been apportioned to the occupiers by districts; only the city center was jointly controlled. Wieden, where the Maiers had lived, was under the authority of the Soviets, as was the nearby main train station in Favoriten.
I arrived at the Hauptbahnhof at a little after ten at night and found a room at a pension one block away. I told the proprietor I might need the room for several nights. He was happy to have guests at all and told me the room was mine for as long as I wanted it.
In the morning light, I was able to finally see the evidence of what I’d seen in the Zurich newspaper following the end of the war. Vienna had been bombed more than fifty times, and tens of thousands of houses and buildings had been flattened. But I knew this was nothing compared to the destruction in Berlin and Dresden and Cologne. As I emerged from the pension and began the short, one-and-a-half-kilometer walk to Rainergasse, there was apervasive sense of not-quite-all-thereness all about me. I passed scaffolding and barricades, and then a bomb crater in the street. All seemed misplaced, like parts of a movie set that needed to be trucked away so that life in Vienna could get back to normal. I couldn’t see the skyline of theinnere Stadtthree kilometers away; the surrounding buildings were too tall. I didn’t know if I’d take the tram—if there was a tram to take, as I’d read four thousand of them had been destroyed—to see for myself the city center I loved. I’d heard the massive and elegant St. Stephen’s Cathedral was still without a roof.
No, perhaps I would not go.
As I walked, I saw that much debris had indeed been cleared away and some of what had fallen was beginning to be replaced. But Vienna was not the city it had been before. It was as if the city were a man who’d always worn a beard, but he’d been suddenly and inexpertly shaved. He was not recognizable as the same man.
I found Rainergasse and turned down it.
As I neared the Maiers’ town house, I was relieved to see it and every other home on the street still standing, and yet as I came to stand on its front step, a feeling came over me that the house was a ruin nonetheless. I could tell in an instant, just by looking at the weed-filled planter boxes at the dirty windows, that Martine and the children had not returned. A light was on in one front window, and on the postbox the name still readmaier, but this was not a house where the Maier family still lived. I rang the bell and waited.
The door opened, and before me stood Johannes. It had only been seven years since I had seen him last, and at this very same place—framed in his doorway—but he appeared twenty years older. His hair had gone silver and worry lines crossed his face. An ill-fitting cardigan hung on him, and his wrinkled trousers looked like they belonged to someone taller and younger. A name tag pinned askew to his chest bore in small letters the companynameeischen hardware. Johannes looked like an old man who had forgotten who he was.
“Hello, Johannes.” I didn’t realize I’d called him by his first name until after I’d said it.
“Fraulein Calvert,” he replied in a voice stronger than his appearance suggested he could muster. “What a surprise. And what brings you back to Vienna?”
His demeanor and the casualness of his greeting first needled and then alarmed me. “Why do you think I came back here?”
He stared at me, apparently waiting for my answer.
“I came to see Martine and the children.”
“I’m sorry to say you’ve come a long way for nothing.” His tone was emotionless. “The children aren’t here. They are not even children anymore, you know.”
“That doesn’t mean that I don’t still care about them. And Martine, too.”
“Martine is not here, either.”
His tone was strange. Wrong. I was instantly afraid that something terrible had happened to Martine and the children and this shattered man in front of me was alone now. “Where is everyone, Johannes?”
He stared at me a moment. “Martine and the children moved with her parents to Salzburg after the war,” he finally said, calmly.
“And why aren’t you in Salzburg?”
