Goodnight, Vienna by Marius Gabriel

Author:Marius Gabriel [Gabriel, Marius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2022-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Katya put Gretchen in a hot bath as soon as they got home. It wasn’t just that she wanted to wash her clean – she felt as if she wanted Gretchen to be able to wash off the horror of her experience.

Gretchen lay in the bath, too exhausted to move. She looked down at her own pale body in the water. Lately, it was changing. It was not the same as last month, or even last week. The familiar lines were fading, and in their place was something purposeful and alive. What had been gaunt and hollow was now filling. The peaks that the bones had made in her skin were harder to see now. She had once floated in this huge bath like a little leaf. Now she was like a fruit, heavier, more solid, containing something new. She was no longer all ribs and knees and elbows. Yet another Gretchen was coming, a new Gretchen, who looked not like a skinny child, but like a young woman. The changes were taking place without her permission, beyond her control.

Katya sat with her head in her hands. What was she going to do now? Her mind was a blank. There was still no word from Thor. She had no idea where he was, or what was being done to him; and although she had Gretchen, there was no telling whether Dr Asperger would change his mind and send for her again. Even if he didn’t, what if some Nazi authority decided that Gretchen should be sent to Berlin after all?

She had to get Gretchen out of Vienna. But how? She couldn’t very well abandon Thor to an unknown fate.

But she was completely alone. There was nobody she could trust. Katya now felt that she daren’t ask anyone they knew for help.

She went restlessly into the library, where the radio was kept. On the glass disc set into the mahogany, the stations were printed in capital letters: BERLIN, PARIS, LONDON, MOSCOW. She turned the dial to London, and listened to the crackling voice fade in, its tone portentous: ‘. . . the shadow of the goose-step has fallen over Austria. The eagle and the swastika wave in the breeze. The Gestapo are sweeping across Vienna. Already, thousands of arrests have been made. Thousands have already been sent to Dachau, and thousands more are desperately trying to leave Austria—’

She turned the radio off. She didn’t need to hear it. She was living it.

She was going to have to leave Austria. And she was going to take Gretchen with her. She needed to get to the British embassy as soon as possible.

The British embassy, technically a legation, was a nineteenth-century faux-Rococo palace on Metternichgasse, beside the Anglican church. Lorenz had driven them. As Katya and Gretchen arrived, she saw that there was a long line of people snaking all around the block and stretching down Strohgasse as far as the eye could see. Lorenz peered out of the window. ‘You will have to queue for hours, Fräulein Katya,’ he said.

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