of the past as a museum piece made it more alien than it really was, a static recreation that marked it firmly as part of an age that was dead. A point was being made, an axe loudly ground.
He moved on, overtaking Elspeth, to a display of magazine covers and handbills, interspersed with posters and over-enlarged photographs. He cursed himself mildly, as he had occasionally before, for choosing Greek instead of German at school, simply because the Classical language was harder and less popular. Then again, there was some entertainment in inferring sense from context. The leaflets bore the stamp of propaganda, with their bold headlines and short paragraphs, the naïve exhortation betrayed by frequent exclamation marks, the whole headed by complex emblems and mirthless cartoons. There was a hint of real history here, in the associations of pre-war dictatorship; yet even in this the impression of age was less enhanced than dominated by that of foreignness, for it was the provenance of the material, not its period, that was remote.
And there was nothing more foreign than a foreign past. No English cartoonist had ever given birth to such blackened grotesques as these symbolic caricatures of Italy, communism and Jewry, with the heavy brushed shadows more substantial than the leaden figures that cast them. Neither had any English magazine ever borne the clean, elongated lettering found here. For some reason a language packed with long words had not generated longer street signs or wider pages. Instead the streamlined type-faces that had replaced the gothic had embraced the false economy of upward growth, like skyscrapers on a booming island.
Mickey wandered on round the corner, glancing only very briefly at the photographs on the way. Scenes of street violence were timeless and universal, and portraits of politicians, whether ancient or modern, held no interest for him. But the next item on the tour, though still tainted with the breathless pride of the school project, was at least surprising.
It was a representation in hardboard of a building whose imposing size and structure were skilfully implied by the exaggerated proportions of its model. The conflict of curves and right angles seemed less to evoke the architecture than the science fiction of its period, involving a gratuitous waste of space. Through the bottom of the façade was cut an enormous low curved arch topped with a decorative keystone, its massive presence emphasized by the little doors and windows placed at noticeable distance from its sides, in response to the structural rectangles within. Another empty curve beyond one of the doorways suggested that the archway was one of a series, above whose tops the windows in groups of three, punctuated by the keystones, formed a straight line, while, rising directly above each keystone, a cubist totem pole, jutting from the wall behind, of double windows flanked by paired balconies added another five floors to the whole. The building was obviously a familiar landmark to the Viennese, and of some historical importance, for its model stood in mute dominance, unexplained. One had simply to walk through the arch.
Now it became clear that the scene-setting was over. The building that had arrested Mickey’s attention for a moment became revealed as the symbol for the beginning of open war, the site of a revolt or a siege, the home of a conspiracy. Beyond the archway the style of the exhibition was maintained, but the photographs had greater prominence, the tableaux were more violent, the propaganda bolder and more strident. Between these were glass cases containing uniforms, rifles, pistols, machine guns. Then came more photographs, of damaged houses, of frightened people nursing the wounded, and formal portraits of men in civilian dress; the dead, the captured, the beaten. It was over.
He hurried on, tiring of the blurred black and white and the pages of German print, and found another surprise, essentially a tent, from whose flimsy ceiling hung staggered rows of white flags, most bearing names, some left blank for the nameless. It was a simple affair of curtain draped over scaffolding, yet it managed to assume the presence of a chapel.
Mickey stood still in the gloom, looking up at the receding rows of names that meant nothing to him, and quietly admitted defeat. The people who had designed this place had obviously intended that it should leave a deeper mark on the visitor than the displays that preceded it. They had tried to make this plain memorial more evocative of the sadness of armed struggle than any number of pictures and rusting weapons, and they had succeeded.
“Mickey! Mickey! There you are. Mickey did you see what was back there?”
“What do you mean?”
“You missed it! Mickey you’ve got to come and look!”
Reluctantly, Mickey followed his wife, back the way he had come. He was fairly sure he knew what the matter was; the possibility of the coincidence had been lurking, almost feared, at the back of his mind all afternoon. Somewhere among all those photographs, in the middle of a crowd, was a striking, black-browed face that might truly be that of his father, and Elspeth had found it.
Lengthening his stride to preserve an appearance of calm, he matched her pace back through the uniforms and guns, and through the symbolic arch to the open space that gave it its dramatic power. On the far side of this Elspeth now stood in heraldic support of a large, board-mounted photograph, beaming as though she had just been called upon to declare it open.
Mickey remembered having passed the picture. It showed a small confrontation between uniformed men and civilians, one of whom was in the act of throwing a stone, while the others yelled and shook their fists. In the centre was a parked white military vehicle, its lines broken only by an observation slit at the front, and a mounted gun. Elspeth touched his arm, and pointed with her other hand to the background of the picture, empty save for the indistinct façade of a public building, a sweep of pavement white with snow, a lamp-post, and a single tall figure.
“There!”
It was his father all right, no question, but it was not the unremarkable record of his presence in the city that Mickey had expected. It was quite plainly something more than that, in the young but distinctive face almost behind the lamp post, in the arm across the chest, the hand pressed to the metal pillar streaked with snow, most of all in the attitude of the legs revealed in the open greatcoat, bent and meeting at the knee. It was a picture of fear.
This, then, was why the old man refused to talk about Vienna. It was, of course, absurd to suppose that never again, in all his bloody career, had he felt the tension and quickening of the heart that came with the likelihood of imminent pain or death. It was in the ability to derive vital energy from these that the courage of the soldier lay. What was pictured here was the hopeless paralysis of the coward, an enfeebling and shameful dread. This might be the first time, and the last, that Herbert Christie had felt that kind of fear, and the force of it was obvious and terrible.
Now Mickey, with a speed and thoroughness that surprised him, found himself revising his knowledge of his father’s life, amending every story and every citation with the footnote ‘This is why. . .’ For it was now clear that his father was haunted, not by the things that had scared him, but by the sensation itself of stifling impotence. To avoid reliving that moment he had run headlong into danger wherever he had found it, to the astonishment of comrades and enemy alike. Suddenly Mickey became aware of the awful potential of the picture, a tiny detail of the city’s history that could assume the power of nemesis.
“Pet, we mustn’t tell him about this.”
“You think it might upset him?”
“Are you kidding? Look at it! He didn’t seem all that keen to come here anyway. We’ve got to make sure he doesn’t. We’ll have to say it’s no good, or something. It’s too horrible.”
“OK. Whatever you say. Do you want to go now?”
“Yes. Do you mind?”
“Sure. Let’s go.”
They walked out the way they had
