“Cemetery of the Nameless? No.”
“Do you have a map of the city?”
“Yes, in the glove compartment. What is the place?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been to Vienna before, remember? I just know we have to go there now. Is it this one?”
He looked at me a long second, then nodded. “What’s going on?”
Without knowing anything about the city or this place we had to visit, I looked at the map for no more than a few seconds before finding the cemetery. “Here it is. I don’t know what’s going on. Do you know how to get here?” I pointed. He took the map and looked at it for a moment.
“It’s out by the airport. Yes, I can find it.”
There was a great deal of traffic, so it took us half an hour to get there. The only time he spoke was to point out certain famous sites—the Hofburg, the Prater, a building where Freud had lived early in his career. It was a clean, orderly city that didn’t strike me as very interesting. There were other places I would much rather have visited before I died. I’d always wanted to go to Bruges; always wanted to see that spectacular view of the sea from Santorini.
We rode for a while beside the Danube Canal. The water was brown and slow. There were no boats on it, not one, which I thought strange. Fishermen stood on the bank with their shirts off; bike riders pedaled by. A high summer day in Vienna. Jesse said they were in the middle of a drought—every day at least ninety degrees and no sign of rain. Trees drooped and the grass near the water was spotted with brown. A news broadcast in English came on the car radio and the commentator went into long details about the terrible war in Yugoslavia. Thousands dead, concentration camps; no one had any idea of how to make peace.
Jesse switched off the radio as soon as the report was finished. “Can you tell me anything about this, or do I have to wait till we get there?”
I ignored his question and kept looking out the window. How could I explain? I hardly understood it myself. I did not understand it.
We were on an autobahn a few minutes, then off and winding over back roads that bordered a giant oil refinery and gray block housing. More back roads. Billboards advertised familiar things in an unfamiliar language. Orange soda lived here, as did panty hose and Bic pens. I wanted to be home, seeing these products advertised in my language. I wanted to be home. Warehouses with trailer trucks parked in front with bold Cyrillic writing on their sides. Russian and Bulgarian license plates.
I said, “This really is the East, isn’t it?”
We slowed, bumped across railroad tracks, and stopped. He took the map from me and checked where we were. “We should be almost there. It must be just up the way a little.”
We drove a bit farther and then I knew before he did that we had arrived. “Here, stop the car on the other side of the circle. It’s up that hill.”
He parked and we got out. On our left was a high warehouse with many broken windows and giant cranes in front that leaned out over a spur of the canal. The top of a black barge peeked over the edge of the pavement.
“There. Go up those stairs.”
He didn’t move. “How do you know, Wyatt?”
“Austria’s a Catholic country. If you’re Catholic and kill yourself, church law prohibits your being buried in consecrated ground. City officials put this cemetery here for two reasons. They needed somewhere to bury their suicides, and when they were building the canal, many of the workers drowned or were killed on the site and they needed a nearby place to put them.”
Instead of asking how I knew these facts, he started up the narrow staircase. At the top was a strange building that looked like a stone beehive. It was the chapel for the burial ground. The light switch was on the outside wall. When you pressed it, you could see behind an ornate locked gate a small but gaudy altar loaded with fresh flowers and one lit candle. Whose job was it to come out here first thing every morning to check on the candle and light it?
Down another short set of steps to a waist-high cement wall with FRIEDHOF DER NAMENLOSEN in thick block letters. On the other side of the wall were perhaps a hundred graves. Almost all had identical black metal crosses at the head of the humps of earth. At the bottom of each cross was a square that looked like a small chalkboard for something to be written, but only a handful had names and dates recorded in white script. The rest were blank. Nevertheless, there were a surprisingly large number of flowers and wreaths on these graves. It touched me to think that people came out here to pay tribute to the anonymous dead. What inspired them to do that? Someone kept the candle burning in the chapel; someone brought fresh bouquets of flowers. Was it someone’s job? Did the city of Vienna pay salaried homage to a few dead no one knew or cared about? Or was it simply the kindness and respect of some good souls? I hoped it was that. A sudden rage in my chest hoped it was that. Here and there stood a few regular stones with names and dates and the causes of death. But they were rare and looked out of place among all the other black crosses.
I walked to one anonymous grave and, putting a hand on the marker, looked at Jesse. “This was a man. His name was Thomas Widhalm. Committed suicide in 1929 by jumping into the Danube. His body washed up, as did a lot of the others, right over there on that hook of land that divides the canal from the river. He was from the town of Oggau but came to Vienna to study medicine. The great pride of his family. But he was gay, which nobody knew of course, and when he found out he had gotten syphilis from sleeping with a fellow student, he killed himself. After the family hadn’t heard from him for two months, they sent his younger brother Friedrich to Vienna to find him. But Friedrich hated Thomas, and after a week of halfhearted searching, he went home and told their mother her favorite boy had run off to Germany. At the end of the war, Friedrich was killed by the Russians when they invaded Austria. They shot him when he tried to keep them from a cache of Nazi bicycles.”
A couple of feet over, I touched the top of the next anonymous cross. “Margarete Ruzicka. She came from Czechoslovakia. From Bohemia.” I closed my eyes and thought a minute until I saw her face clearly and knew everything about her. It was like driving through thick fog into clearness. One moment nothing; the next, a view that went on for miles. She had been hired by a wealthy Viennese family with a villa in Hietzing and a summer residence in Meran to take care of twin baby boys. I saw her packing her cheap suitcase, saying goodbye to her family, riding the train to Vienna with her head pressed to the cold glass window. Trying to see everything at once. She said to herself a hundred times, “I’rn going to Vienna; I have a job in Vienna.” Then her shy dip of the head and curtsey when she was introduced to the master of the house. Her terrible claustrophobia that first week away from home. In her tiny room at night she tried to read the Bible but had no heart for it; she tried chanting “Vienna” to herself as she had on the train, but nothing helped.
Things slowly got better for her, but what she didn’t understand, because she was naive and silly, was why the master, who smelled of würst and ‘4711’ cologne, was around too much of the time, watching her, watching her constantly. Then that night in spring when he came to her room and took her for the first time. She thought, There is nothing I can do now. Nothing I can do about this. I’m not pretty; why does he want me? For the first time in her life she began looking in mirrors whenever she got the chance. Rape had made her vain. He ignored her after that, stopped looking at her altogether, except when he took her. His breath was always bad, his skin always cool. She would look at him, thinking all the time, What will I do if he tells? What will I do if he tells my mother? And then her period didn’t come and another maid who was kind and jealous told her she must run. So she left the house and disappeared into the city.