Funeral in Blue - Anne Perry [125]
The maid returned and said that Mr. and Mrs. Jakob would see them both, if they would follow her.
Going into the parlor, Monk had a sudden and sharp awareness of being in a different culture. This was not Austria as he had seen it; it was something intimate and far older. He glanced at Ferdi and saw the same look in his face, surprise and slight discomfort. It was a timeless room for family, not strangers. There were two beautiful, tall candles burning. Herr Jakob was a slender man with dark, shining eyes, a black cap on the crown of his head.
With a jolt of embarrassment, scraps of memory came back to Monk, and he realized why his visit had occasioned such surprise. This was Friday evening, near sundown, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. He could hardly have chosen a worse time to interrupt a family meal—and a religious celebration. It was an act of the greatest courtesy that they had received him at all.
“I’m sorry . . .” he said awkwardly. “I have been traveling and I forgot what day it is. I am sorry, Frau Jakob. This is an intrusion. I can return tomorrow . . . or . . . or is that even worse?” How could he explain to them his urgency without prejudicing anything they might tell him?
Herr Jakob looked at him very directly, his eyes unflinching, but his deep emotion was impossible to miss. “You said that you are here on behalf of a friend of my daughter, Hanna. If that is true, Herr Monk, then you are welcome at any time, even on Shabbat.” He had replied in English, heavily accented but easily understandable. Monk need not have brought Ferdi after all.
Monk framed his answer carefully. “It is true, sir.” Only afterwards did he even realize he had deferred to this man by using the word sir. It had come naturally. “I am a friend of Kristian Beck, who is at present in serious difficulty, and I am in Vienna to see if I can be of some help to him. It is urgent, or I would more willingly delay disturbing you.”
“I am sorry to hear he is in difficulties,” Herr Jakob replied. “He is a brave man who was willing to risk all for his beliefs, which is the most any of us can do.”
“But his beliefs were different from yours?” Monk said quickly, then wondered why he had.
“No,” Herr Jakob replied with a faint smile. “Politically at least, they were the same.”
Monk did not need to ask about the other side of ethical values. He had met Josef and Magda Beck, and seen the depth and fervor of their Catholicism. He had also seen that, for whatever reason, they countenanced in their house friends who were profoundly anti-Jewish. Whatever their beliefs, their words tipped over from discrimination into persecution. The first allowed the second, and therefore was party to it, even if only by silence. A sudden memory flashed into his mind, sharp as spring sunlight in the rectory front room, the vicar himself standing quoting John Milton to a twelve-year-old Monk, teaching him great English literature. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” But now it came differently to his mind: “They also sin who only stand and watch.”
He came back to the present candlelit room in Vienna with the daylight fading rapidly beyond the windows, and this quiet couple waiting for him to say something to make sense of his visit here, and their courtesy in receiving both him and Ferdi, and welcoming them on this of all days. Anything but the truth would insult them all, he as much as they, and perhaps Kristian and Hanna as well.
“Did you know Elissa von Leibnitz?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jakob answered. There was profound feeling in his face and in the timbre of his voice, but Monk was unable to read it. Had they resented her, known that their daughter had been picked for the errand that cost her life, rather than Elissa, because Elissa, the Aryan Catholic, was valued more, her life held more important than that of Hanna, the Jewess? Immeasurably worse than that, did they know