She smiled shyly and at last spoke: “It’s … it’s that I’ve seen you every time there’s been a concert in the Wallenstein gardens.” She hesitated, then continued haltingly, “Do you … do you have a season ticket?”
He laughed and said yes, he did, but she was already going on: “It’s … Well, I saw you always alone and I realized that after the concert you would walk the streets and … Forgive me … I never know what to do after the concert and I thought … you seem so … so immersed in the music, and I…”
“You thought that…”
“Yes. Yes, that maybe if I walked the streets too, like you…”
“The music might be prolonged a little?”
“Yes, that too. And…”
“And we could walk together?”
She blushed and smiled and timidly extended her hand.
“Hanna. Hanna Werner.”
“Franz Jellinek. Would you like me to walk you home?”
“No, please, that would be too much trouble. I’m going to the other side, to the old city.”
“That’s where I live too.”
The Karlsbrücke is long and beautiful. In the summer night its lamps are less luminous than the sky and succeed only in creating shadows from the columns of clouds and cherubim, the great baroque dance of sultans with scimitars, of dogs and horses and monks and souls from purgatory stirring behind a spiked fence guarded by pagans. St. George, St. Anthony, and St. Francis gaze upon the golden crowns of the Virgin and the Holy Child. Gold on black. St. Sigismund and St. Wenceslaus and the Patriarch Norbert observe the crowned skeleton that lies on a cushion and holds a metal scepter.
They walked on, slowly.
“What do you study, Hanna?”
“Music. Composition. And you?”
“Some day I want to be an architect.”
“Good! Now we have something to talk about.”
She laughed and with both hands caressed her black shining hair. The bridge seemed to float on the summer mist. Out of the mist rose Mary and her Child with a kneeling monk. Happy cherubim climbed the cross, converting its seriousness into graceful gaiety. Which, Franz reflected, was the very soul of the baroque. Now lives of the saints in black and the central statues of the Crucifixion and the Pietà, facing each other. Franz and Hanna looked over the balustrade. Fishermen, as always, the younger men standing in boats, the older sitting bundled up on the green barges.
They said goodbye to each other under the arch of the bridge tower. Hanna took a deep breath and looked toward an avenue of fragile trees.
“Will you be at the concert next Friday?”
“Yes, but I’d like to see you sooner than that.”
“I take my lessons in Professor Maher’s studio. We passed by it. Write it down. Loretanzka 12.”
“Thank you. I’ll come one afternoon.”
“Yes, I’ll be so happy … I mean, I’ll be very pleased to … Goodbye.”
She ran down the passageway and went on running past the arcades and the National Theater.
* * *
Δ Here’s something for you, Elizabeth. Something ripe. Yesterday fourteen women in their sixties wearing fashionable hats of felt and velvet and fur-trimmed winter coats sat in a Munich courtroom in the leather chairs provided for the accused and awaited the court’s verdict. Fourteen middle-aged ladies with red noses, bifocals, and scarves. Between 1942 and 1945 they were employed as nurses in the insane asylum at Obrawalde and the charge is that during that time they murdered some eight hundred persons who were neither inmates of the asylum nor patients but had been sent there precisely to be murdered. There’s a picture of the asylum, too. Very handsome. Large buildings, a surrounding park. Each patient was examined when he arrived. The sturdier ones were dispatched to Department 19, the forced labor camp. Those who were feebler went to Department 20 to be liquidated. The method was simple and direct: a massive intravenous injection of barbiturate. For the children something a bit more humane: spoonfuls of jelly with the drug mixed into it. Those who resisted were tubed, orally or anally. They were all defectives: retarded mentally or physically deformed. At Obrawalde alone, eight thousand of them were murdered in the program of euthanasian extermination decreed by the Third Reich. The secret was known: a group of children peeked through a keyhole and saw and told the asylum dentist. But it went no further, for the dentist knew that, after all, the good nurses were merely carrying out orders, and orders are orders. Several of the ladies had balls of yarn in their laps and knitted as they awaited the verdict. One of them testified that she administered the children’s little spoonfuls lovingly, and the children always smiled at her. “If it wasn’t legal,” protested another, “why didn’t the police come and forbid it?” The judge set them free. “They were mere automatons,” he pronounced. “They were simple-minded women incapable of understanding what they were doing.” By way of celebration, the fourteen ladies went from the courtroom to a teahouse around the corner and there ordered coffee, chocolate, and slices of pie topped with whipped cream.